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my favorite thing in an MMO was loving with afkers too I used to play Mortal Online and the 'premier' launch clan for it would go to Gaul' Kor (a lawless mining town) and AFK macro mine I didn't even actually kill them. I'd stand in front of them, and shove them once away from the wall, and they'd spend the rest of their AFK time mining the air 
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Jul 30, 2020 04:16
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Groovelord Neato posted:It was because it was so much different/weird compared to the other big names. A friend got me into it and I wish I'd played more. I miss Asheron's Call for its mechanics but at some point, probably in the mid 2000s I realized the game was completely scriptable and wrote my own plugins and extensions off of eltank and lifetank to do everything I needed only requiring human intervention by exception. Really ruined mmorpg gaming for me. I treated this game like a single player game. And I maintained friendships in the game largely in part because I was able to acquire and share more than most could - making me some idol to worship. Really hosed up.
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Jul 30, 2020 05:35
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El Grillo posted:What server(s) do you play? I'm on ALFA: Waterdeep but it's a hardcore RP server lol so not everyone's idea of a good time. The static content and custom AI are mindblowingly good though. I made characters on Arelith and been playing there for the past month or so. I used to be heavy into nwn back in the day so I'm enjoying it very much after a ~15year hiatus. I like Arelith so far because it offers a good balance of hack 'n slash and RP, and there's a ton of players always on which makes it feel lively (even for someone playing from the EU).
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Jul 30, 2020 11:02
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Nice. Maybe you can enlighten me then - how the gently caress does Arelith survive lag-wise with that many players on one server?? On Waterdeep the server literally can't handle more than 6 players in a party engaging in combat with NPCs.. without incredibly bad lag. I'm sure it's mostly due to the insane AI and other scripting, which is amazing but very complex, but still. I don't understand how Arelith survives having 90 players online without everyone drowning in lag 100% of the time.
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Jul 31, 2020 11:08
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I can attest to the fact that there's minimal lag, even though respawn rates are quick as gently caress and encounters are designed for party play (and scale with player lvls), so you get to fight 5-10 enemies each pull. Well, I know gently caress-all about networks and the like, but I do know they have split their content between 4 servers. You can hop from one server to the next when zoning into different areas. One server caters to the Underdark, another to the Surface, a third to the Planes as well as Cordor (the most densely populated human city, effectively the server capital); and a fourth they call Distant Shores where I've never been. There are some minor issues hopping between servers, maily that buffs and debuffs as well as spells/day are memorized separately for each server. Also you can't send cross server tells, and DMs can only be on one server at a time so they need to pick and choose where they'll spend their time. Despite of all that though, it does feel like a coherent world. Also, they use some kind of cloud service and I've read that lag has been reduced by 45% since they implemented that. Another thing is, I m fairly sure they open source all their ingame systems, scripts and poo poo like that, so its possible for the ALFA team to download the Arelith code and check out what they do. Mr. Pickles fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Jul 31, 2020 |
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Jul 31, 2020 16:06
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Nice, that's really helpful thanks man. Maybe I'll come check out Arelith at some point. Though right now I'm taking a break from nwn in general because I got totally hooked during lockdown and I want to have a real life of some kind again.
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Jul 31, 2020 22:55
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I realized what I want a Discworld MMO
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Aug 4, 2020 02:19
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eonwe posted:I realized what I want Finally, an MMO where playing a Bard would be  .
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Aug 4, 2020 08:50
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eonwe posted:I realized what I want I don’t think Discworld would lend itself well to adventuring. There’s multiple books about how that age is over
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Aug 4, 2020 09:20
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eonwe posted:I realized what I want I second this, but there is always Discworld MUD to quench the thirst
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Aug 4, 2020 09:23
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i still think that a huge thing about the wonders, rose tinted glasses, etc of your first ever mmo was discovery and wonder. i'm curious how long until enough people have sufficient bandwidth/processing becomes cheap enough to effectively run stadia or equivalent to all mmo users, so you get a completely closed loop where it's not possible to data mine, where it's not possible to read memory, and everything is streamed in as it comes in MUD-style, making everything a discovery process I honestly hate it when every single patch gets pre-mined, no surprises, everyone runs exactly one (or two) optimised routes in some way, there's a mandatory BIS for anything and people will reject you if you don't match some kind of minimum score, everything becomes down to a specific number and no one bothers with side quests, any form of the 'RP' part of RPG, side skills or professions other than the absolute necessary ones, addons that automatically check if you're wearing BIS whatever and reject if not, a pre-planned guide on how to level and exactly where to go in which order, etc Impotence fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Aug 5, 2020 |
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Aug 5, 2020 00:27
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Albion Online came out of the blue for me, i didnt expect it to be that good. Hopefully its successful and spawns other games like it. I got the same vibes i got when i first started playing EQ or eve online. You dont need to re-invent the wheel, maybe just some tweaks like putting the axe to staticness, so theres a discovery feeling again and not everything can be compiled in a wiki.
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Aug 5, 2020 00:34
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How alive is Albion these days? I had the highest tier founder pack when it first launched, and it was this miserable wreck where every item was just like "Sword 1, Sword 2, Sword 3, Sword 4, ..." in terms of upgrades and no actual creativity in any way, then shortly after beta things started going downhill with paid starter packs and at some point started hiding player numbers.
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Aug 5, 2020 00:39
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Biowarfare posted:I honestly hate it when every single patch gets pre-mined, no surprises, everyone runs exactly one (or two) optimised routes in some way, there's a mandatory BIS for anything and people will reject you if you don't match some kind of minimum score, everything becomes down to a specific number and no one bothers with side quests, any form of the 'RP' part of RPG, side skills or professions other than the absolute necessary ones, addons that automatically check if you're wearing BIS whatever and reject if not, a pre-planned guide on how to level and exactly where to go in which order, etc It really feels like the final chapter of the MMO genre: Diluting the MMO experience to a single spreadsheet of efficiency where there can be no deviation because why would you play sub-optimally? In WoW, there are guilds created around the concept of running people through Heroic and Mythic content for in game and real world currency. There's a large backlash right now with players complaining that the advertisements for these services are filling up the LFG tool and trade chat. Everyone is looking for ways to either remove the services using a filter, or to start banning everyone that recruits for these services. But why do these services even exist? What compels players to spend real world money just to be run through a Heroic raid for gear and a mount? My current opinion on this is that some players are so sick of the meta minmax esport WoW has become that they don't want to deal with the spreadsheets, ilevels, raidsims, ioscores, and dps meters. They just want to log into the game and pay for the content instead of having to deal with the perceived toxicity these tools can create. However, this kind of makes me also wonder why they even play an MMO instead of just relaxing with a game like Assassin's Creed.
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Aug 5, 2020 01:16
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Cardboard Fox posted:However, this kind of makes me also wonder why they even play an MMO instead of just relaxing with a game like Assassin's Creed. MMOs have a built in audience for you to show off the flashy bling you bought. I don't think AC has that. There's a certain element of status that comes with having rare mounts and gear.
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Aug 5, 2020 01:32
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DapperDraculaDeer posted:MMOs have a built in audience for you to show off the flashy bling you bought. I don't think AC has that. There's a certain element of status that comes with having rare mounts and gear. Not really. How often have you seen people say anything in local chat? Much less tell someone how cool their mount is. I don't think I've ever said anything about someone else's gear good or otherwise.
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Aug 5, 2020 02:10
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Biowarfare posted:How alive is Albion these days? I had the highest tier founder pack when it first launched, and it was this miserable wreck where every item was just like "Sword 1, Sword 2, Sword 3, Sword 4, ..." in terms of upgrades and no actual creativity in any way, then shortly after beta things started going downhill with paid starter packs and at some point started hiding player numbers. Theres enough variety to me in between weapon types to satisfy, theres alot of them. Martlock, the town where goons are situated, is always loaded with people.
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Aug 5, 2020 03:41
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LLSix posted:How often have you seen people say anything in local chat? Much less tell someone how cool their mount is. I don't think I've ever said anything about someone else's gear good or otherwise. It depends on the server and how cool you look. If you look good on a RP server you're going to get compliments, questions on where to get the gear (as if anyone is going to type out a guide for you...), and invited to ERP in armor.
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Aug 5, 2020 06:09
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LLSix posted:Not really. it's irrelevant now because everything is instanced and cross-server. Used to be you'd stand around in org and gawk at the elitist jerks in the fancy raid armor, now who gives a poo poo because you'll never see these people again and there's some rear end in a top hat with a brontosaurus covering half the loving zone
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Aug 5, 2020 15:02
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I was doing some digging today and just realized that World of Warcraft's population grew steadily for more than 4 years.  It feels like for the past decade, most new MMOs hit their peak population in the first few weeks and have a lifespan measured in months. What the heck happened? I'm sure this topic has been done to death, but I'd never seen the data presented this way before. I'd love to see breakdowns of other MMO populations on the same time scale.
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Aug 5, 2020 19:46
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LLSix posted:It feels like for the past decade, most new MMOs hit their peak population in the first few weeks and have a lifespan measured in months. What the heck happened? WoW was very much a lightning-in-a-bottle situation that hit at just the right time. Decent Internet connections had become both widespread and affordable enough for mass adoption, and personal computers with the hardware needed to run 3D games were becoming less an anomaly and more a norm. The idea of the Internet as a social space was also something that was still relatively unexplored, barring various disconnected message boards and proto-networking sites like LiveJournal or MySpace, and was a niche that WoW happened to fill better than every other multiplayer game at the time. A megasuccess in the MMO market doesn't happen much these days, both because those same conditions aren't replicable, and because broader consumer tastes have shifted more towards fast-paced action games over time.
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Aug 5, 2020 20:01
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I remember when it was a huge deal when EverQuest hit 500k subscribers.
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Aug 6, 2020 00:13
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Groovelord Neato posted:I remember when it was a huge deal when EverQuest hit 500k subscribers. I remember playing EQ. Was it ever big? I played it when it first came out and I know I switched to WoW the same weekend a college roommate introduced me to WoW. Interestingly, the only number I can find for EQ's population suggests it is still at 500k subscribers (800k subs, 40k daily). Vermain posted:WoW was very much a lightning-in-a-bottle situation that hit at just the right time. Decent Internet connections had become both widespread and affordable enough for mass adoption, and personal computers with the hardware needed to run 3D games were becoming less an anomaly and more a norm. The idea of the Internet as a social space was also something that was still relatively unexplored, barring various disconnected message boards and proto-networking sites like LiveJournal or MySpace, and was a niche that WoW happened to fill better than every other multiplayer game at the time. A megasuccess in the MMO market doesn't happen much these days, both because those same conditions aren't replicable, and because broader consumer tastes have shifted more towards fast-paced action games over time. See, I've heard that before, and believed it at the time. But lightning doesn't last 4 years. Not even in a bottle. WoW grew consistently and without fail through multiple expansions. They were obviously doing a lot right that other people aren't now. Including modern WoW. Activision forced out all of the original Blizzard leadership and are now paying employees so little that their software engineers are organizing to demand better pay. Essentially unionizing. Which, wow, that's a level of failed management for a software company that is hard to articulate. The Blizzard deathwatch thread is wild. LLSix fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Aug 6, 2020 |
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Aug 6, 2020 02:19
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Previous MMOs being popular during their launch and then being obscure by the year's end isn't so shocking when you realize this happens to almost every game ever. Look at how many MOBAs, Battle Royales, Looter Shooters, or even FPSs and Fighting Games are popular for the first month or so and then fall into obscurity. It's very difficult to create a game that holds the interests of a large player base, let alone the mass consumer, for more than a season. The reason why WoW has remained so popular are a few reasons. The first is that its the "genre king". Almost every game genre is represented by typically one or maybe two titles that have the lionshare of popularity and represent the genre. If someone wants to jump into the MOBA genre what game do they play? League of Legends. No other title in the genre comes close. Not even DOTA2. League of Legends represents the MOBA genre and thus if someone was curious about MOBAs they'd immediately jump into League of Legends. This doesn't mean that there weren't other games in the genre that found success but no other title overtook League of Legends as the representative of the genre, so as the genre grew League of Legends grew, as the genre declined League of Legends declined. You can virtually make this same argument with most game genres. World of Warcraft represented the MMO genre. It just wasn't World of Warcraft that grew many years after its release, the entire genre did. During the mid-2000s and early 2010s the MMO genre was redhot with every single publisher not named "Nintendo" trying to get in on the action. But by the end of 2011 it seems that the genre hit its peak and began to decline. Sure WoW was making big money, but not as much everyone else. This is when you stop seeing studios release new AAA MMOs with only The Elder Scrolls Online being the only exception from then until today. This is exactly what you see with WoW's numbers, due to the genre declining, WoW declined as well since it essentially was the genre. The second question you might ask is why has WoW stayed the king of the hill for so long? While WoW is good it's not THAT good. It could be surpassed. Well for that there are two answers. The first is that merely "being better" than the genre king isn't enough to dethrone it. I feel that I don' t even need to explain as I'm sure you can think of plenty of titles in any game genre that are on paper "superior" to the most popular franchise. The main reason why they are still king is because they were often the first to make such a massive impact for the genre and thus became synonymous with it. And all of the players are familiar and comfortable with these titles with other titles as seemingly scary and unfamiliar. You know what you are going to get with WoW and have invested a ton of time into it, can't say the same about this other MMO title. The other answer is that there wasn't really a game that was good enough as WoW to be a true competitor that didn't gently caress up. It really says a lot that the only other relevant MMOs outside of East Asia today are The Elder Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy XIV. With the former suffering from a mediocre launch and the latter being so horrendously bad that they had to literally remake the entire game from basically scratch. Pretty much every other MMO didn't fair much better. Even if the MMO could compete with WoW quality, presentation, and general appeal wise it sorely lacked in content. This is what happened to Star War: The Old Republic which had a pretty good launch but most people dropped it after a year due to there being not enough content to keep people satisfied and player number dwindled so bad that the devs had to drop the subscription model and turn the game into a F2P game with a heavy cash shop. And that's the story of an MMO that's technically a success story, imagine the rest. If you look at say the Battle Royale genre. The "genre king" is constantly changing hands. From PUBG to Fortnite to Apex Legends, with a lot of competition between them all. A major reason for this is because each "successor" game introduces something majorly new to the genre while also makes a lot of the right steps. If SW:TOR launched with plenty of pre-made content to buffer time to hit the ground running on updates, then it's very possible that the game could have been a serious long term competitor. If Final Fantasy XIV launched with A Realm Reborn during its initial release then it maybe could have at least scratched the face of God the same way DOTA 2 has at times to LoL. But unfortunately that's not the world we live in, and WoW will continue to represent the genre for the foreseeable future.
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Aug 6, 2020 04:38
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LLSix posted:I was doing some digging today and just realized that World of Warcraft's population grew steadily for more than 4 years. WoW didnt just hit as broadband was reaching widespread adoption and the average PC was becoming much more capable, it also hit as gaming was starting to seriously enter the mainstream. WoW was able to continue to grow its share of the video gaming pie in part because the pie was rapidly growing during this period. The game roped in a really broad audience that I dont think had been achieved by many games prior to that. I remember during late vanilla being in guild with African immigrants living in Canada, frat boys in Maryland, a few house wives from random states, some dude from Baltimore and lots of other people from backgrounds Id rarely encountered playing Counter-Strike and going to LAN parties. It was pretty crazy and really did feel like something big was happening with gaming.
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Aug 6, 2020 04:57
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I played classic for the first time recently and as far as I can tell the population exclusively consists of people trying to relive those glory days, and their kids being forced to farm materials for the parents.quote:It feels like for the past decade, most new MMOs hit their peak population in the first few weeks and have a lifespan measured in months. What the heck happened? I'm sure this topic has been done to death, but I'd never seen the data presented this way before. I'm curious about hyper-localised examples: MapleStory somehow has survived two decades and is still one of the most popular games in Asia, DFO is apparently one of the most profitable in the world, except the developer's earnings reports routinely say that US/EU are nothing but money losers and provide almost nothing every single year running. 
Impotence fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Aug 6, 2020 |
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Aug 6, 2020 06:28
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Biowarfare posted:I played classic for the first time recently and as far as I can tell the population exclusively consists of people trying to relive those glory days, and their kids being forced to farm materials for the parents. In East Asia MMOs are still popular. It's the "eternal" genre of that region that is always relevant. Similar to FPSs in America or JRPGs in Japan.
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Aug 6, 2020 07:17
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western "mmos" all dropped the massive part and just kept the grind part, so now you can play warframe with up to 3 friends at a time and spend more hours than you spent in mmos to collect all the poo poo.
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Aug 6, 2020 07:47
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Truga posted:western "mmos" all dropped the massive part and just kept the grind part, so now you can play warframe with up to 3 friends at a time and spend more hours than you spent in mmos to collect all the poo poo. This is very true. Online games with continuous updates and in-game shops are still very popular. Destiny is a great example of this. Same with GTA Online. One could even argue games like Fortnite and Warzone.
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Aug 6, 2020 07:59
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There’s even a term for games trying to ape MMOs without the Massively Multiplayer part: games as a service
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Aug 6, 2020 10:55
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thetoughestbean posted:There’s even a term for games trying to ape MMOs without the Massively Multiplayer part: games as a service That's what most modern games took from MMOs. Large publishers didn't need to make MMOs anymore, they just needed their business model. These days you can play an online multiplayer game with RPG elements where you can either stab, shoot, or build something with your friends. There are dozens that come out every year, and publishers have found a way to monetize them indefinitely through DLC and skins.
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Aug 6, 2020 15:13
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thetoughestbean posted:There’s even a term for games trying to ape MMOs without the Massively Multiplayer part: games as a service this is called GaaSlighting
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Aug 6, 2020 15:14
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DapperDraculaDeer posted:WoW didnt just hit as broadband was reaching widespread adoption and the average PC was becoming much more capable, it also hit as gaming was starting to seriously enter the mainstream. WoW was able to continue to grow its share of the video gaming pie in part because the pie was rapidly growing during this period. The game roped in a really broad audience that I dont think had been achieved by many games prior to that. I remember during late vanilla being in guild with African immigrants living in Canada, frat boys in Maryland, a few house wives from random states, some dude from Baltimore and lots of other people from backgrounds Id rarely encountered playing Counter-Strike and going to LAN parties. It was pretty crazy and really did feel like something big was happening with gaming. You could probably write one thesis for why WoW was a perfect storm of circumstances for the Already Games Crowd and an entirely different thesis on why it was a perfect storm of circumstances for the Doesn't Game Crowd. But there's an oft overlooked one I think really did it: 2004 was the year where people started using the internet as a social medium in earnest. Sure, all us nerds used forums and IRC and whatever before that, but 2004 was the year where the floodgates really opened. You had MySpace rapidly becoming a household name, livejournal was still in full swing and somewhere in a dark room illuminated by candles with arcane runes drawn in blood, someone hit the launch button on TheFacebook. Everyone was looking for whatever internet social space they could fit into. It just happens that a shitload of those people chose a video game as their social space.
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Aug 6, 2020 15:17
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I think something ridiculous like 20 percent of Korea's population played the original Lineage at its height.LLSix posted:I remember playing EQ. Was it ever big? I played it when it first came out and I know I switched to WoW the same weekend a college roommate introduced me to WoW. It was big in the sense that 500k was huge for an MMO before WoW hit. WoW didn't come out until I was in college so any of the kids in my high school that played an MMO played EQ. Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Aug 6, 2020 |
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Aug 6, 2020 16:25
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Groovelord Neato posted:I think something ridiculous like 20 percent of Korea's population played the original Lineage at its height. Everyone keeps saying this game is bad.
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Aug 6, 2020 16:34
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punk rebel ecks posted:Everyone keeps saying this game is bad. Yeah but bad games are huge in Korea.
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Aug 6, 2020 18:50
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Defiance Industries posted:Yeah but bad games are huge in Korea. Are you telling me maplestory is bad?
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Aug 6, 2020 19:09
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Biowarfare posted:Are you telling me maplestory is bad? Yes. You can't play with friends until you reach the level cap. Or at least I couldn't when I tried it out.
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Aug 6, 2020 19:47
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Biowarfare posted:Are you telling me maplestory is bad? Everything Nexon touches is bad.
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Aug 6, 2020 19:54
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Was Nexus a Nexon game? I remember wanting to play it but only my friend did and he enjoyed it. But yeah Lineage was poo poo peep a video of it.
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Aug 6, 2020 21:12
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