Salem Crafting MMO GOD NO

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The MMO HMO > Salem Crafting MMO GOD NO

Primaris: Feb 15, 2004; 11 out of 12 physicians agree I have a large penis.

Been browsing games to play at work and started a go at Salem again with a friend.

http://www.salemthegame.com/

It's a crafting MMO, its vicious, it's unforgiving and the game, players and developers hate you. And you will hate yourself for playing but otherwise me and another goon friend are having a go. I'm not interested in some glorious goon city of zerging and pillaging the russian masses which will fail because one of them could wipe out an entire army, if people are that's not on me but a few people would be cool.

edit: it seems like exp gains are faster so whatever the hell that makes a difference to anyone

Primaris fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Jun 11, 2014

# ? May 6, 2014 20:31

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# ? May 4, 2024 01:12

Primaris: Feb 15, 2004; 11 out of 12 physicians agree I have a large penis.

Have a homestead claimed - open for a few people if interested.

# ? May 8, 2014 07:23

Impotence: Nov 8, 2010; Lipstick Apathy

We did this as a group about a year ago and managed to kill the devs. As far as I can tell it's just gotten worse since then.

# ? May 17, 2014 21:28

Riot Bimbo: Dec 28, 2006

I really liked Haven and Hearth, but talk about the most unceremonious death in favor of this piece of poo poo. I literally haven't tried this game out of bitter spite but it seems like there wouldn't be a reason to at this point.

# ? May 17, 2014 22:56

Iseeyouseemeseeyou: Jan 3, 2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31g0YE61PLQ

# ? May 17, 2014 23:53

Delamore: Jan 11, 2008; Monocle Man

None of the games will ever fix the core issues, not Haven, Salem or Haven 2 because the developers designed it that way intentionally.

# ? May 18, 2014 00:49

SweetBro: May 12, 2014; Did you read that sister?
Yes, truly a shitposter's post. I read it, Rem.

^Game is fundamentally broken by design, and the developers sit a positive-feedback loop (IE a circlejerk) with the 20 people bother playing it. It's kind of a shame, the concept was really interesting.

# ? May 18, 2014 03:33

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Last I checked even Darworth, Earl of Asperger's and Randian superhero, quit. That guy was a huge shitlord and even he stopped playing this lovely game.

# ? May 18, 2014 03:37

folgore: Jun 30, 2006; nice tut

What's so bad about this game? Reading about MMO failure is the only thing that gives me joy in life.

I played Haven and Hearth for a little with goons but I don't really remember it.

# ? May 18, 2014 05:25

smg77: Apr 27, 2007

folgore posted:

What's so bad about this game? Reading about MMO failure is the only thing that gives me joy in life.

Did the old Salem thread go to archives? It was a precious jewel.

# ? May 18, 2014 05:37

Broand: Oct 13, 2011

Well it's mostly it's got a lot of grinding, you can't even fight other players without grinding a bunch of skills up. They can still kill you though, with guns, and take your land.

Not that they'd want to, most land with decent quality resources is already taken up. Sure you can try to stake a claim on some godforsaken place but chances are you'll be run out of town by people with better gear than you. Who want you dead simply for being there.

Don't try to join existing poopsockers either. They're all fiercely paranoid as they know that they could be murdered while they sleep. They'll tend to kill on sight and there's no way to fight back. It used to be that we'd have a goon firing squad but they nerfed guns so that existing characters can't be fought fairly. It's quite awful.

# ? May 18, 2014 05:38

Riot Bimbo: Dec 28, 2006

The Salem thread really made it seem like it was Haven And Hearth without anything that made the horse-poo poo in Haven And Hearth bearable, built to be a free2play cash shop even though if Haven And Hearth was any indication, the principles driving the game design don't loving work in a pay2win situation. Haven had serious problems, like permadeath and the fact that the people who played (read: botted) from the start of a world reset were assured to be unstoppable killing machines, while a newbie had less ability to fend for himself than say, a newbie in Eve Online vs. a comparable veteran of that game.

Anyway nobody should play this. Haven And Hearth still exists and is better if you want the Salem experience. You need a custom client to not have a miserable time (ender's client was good if I recall correctly). Haven is pretty dead though, hasn't been seriously developed since Salem was announced, and anyone still playing will absolutely kill you if they find you. The world is big though and you'll probably spawn in a place far enough from any players that you might stand a chance of having a good time playing hard-mode Farmville until you get bored, or an angry russian finds your house and burns it down and murders you.

# ? May 18, 2014 07:28

Delamore: Jan 11, 2008; Monocle Man

Two of the main concepts the developers insist on are perma death and infinite character improvement with no soft/hard caps of any kind.
Any type of limitations they try to put in place just get swept over as players increase stats to crazy numbers, like walls for example are designed to basically be impossible to break without a proper siege effort but once players have 1000s of stats they can bypass this and just break walls themselves.

Also due to how combat was balanced when I played, being 20% better than someone else was enough to absolutely wreck them in a onesided fight. 800 fighting versus 1000? You may aswell have almost none. This means that because at least one insane person will grind nonstop, that if you ever stop grinding you've fallen behind forever and most likely can't ever oppose them, grouping up was also pretty worthless for combat because you'd never hit someone who was much better than you.

After you got past building a village and getting skills unlocked the game turned into an endless grind to improve the quality on your items by slightly improving the quality on your other items and maybe improving your skills. This never stopped and there is never any interesting effects to improving anything as it's just slightly better than before, it wasn't bad for a while but without any limit to how high you could go, and the fact that everyone else was trying to improve theirs higher to kill you meant you could never stop.

If you you decided to attack or raid someone, you better hope you're the ultimate powers that be because otherwise the real powers that be will come and use the evidence of your crime to summon your character while OFFLINE and murder it, so you login to perma death of what could have literally been 1000s of hours for the top players. To avoid this people came up with more and more advanced vaults to store themselves in until it got to the point where there were vaults you literally could not raid so the players inside could do whatever they wanted. To deal with unraidable forts the developers would nuke the site instead of fixing the mechanics.

To hopefully get an idea of what issues the game suffered from and avoid the whitenoise of the public forum, the developers created a private forum and invited what they saw as constructive players who knew what was up. For literally 5 years now the private forum members have posted about the same issues without any real changes, it's gotten to the point that both the developers and players in that forum are almost entirely aggressive towards each other after so long being passive aggressive.

Post from the private forums by a dev, made after 5 years of the same issues and 3 different incarnations of the same game.

I know Jackard or someone has a beautiful image of posts from inside the private forum regarding a camera issue Salem had for ages that the developers INSISTED was not an issue, until they finally relented because it was giving people motion sickness.

This is mostly Haven and Hearth, but Salem may aswell be the same game for all their shared flaws.

Delamore fucked around with this message at 15:51 on May 18, 2014

# ? May 18, 2014 15:43

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

To be honest I thought you were talking about Salem until the end of your post. They're the same game with the same crippling problems.

Anyone is better off playing Don't Starve's multiplayer when it's released even though it doesn't have PvP.

# ? May 18, 2014 16:09

Jackard: Oct 28, 2007; We Have A Bow And We Wish To Use It

Delamore posted:

I know Jackard or someone has a beautiful image of posts from inside the private forum regarding a camera issue Salem had for ages that the developers INSISTED was not an issue, until they finally relented because it was giving people motion sickness.

so it begins

Jackard posted:

also what was with jorb's objection to a better camera based on it making boundaries visible when elevation has the exact same issue? look down the hill from boston, you will see the blackness

referring to:

sabinati posted:

put in a sky :roll:

MagicManICT posted:

Just do a fog effect at dist X. Sure, the trick is 20 years old. (Turok for the N64 anyone?) It's effective, though, and you could use it to good effect outside of the civilized areas. (Someone mentioned this before. Forget who and consider this a 'second' to the suggestion.)

Potjeh posted:

What changes? The camera is still complete and utter poo poo. It sort of works on perfectly flat terrain, even if it is fugly (feels like I'm wearing a cast on my neck), but the tiniest bit of hills and you're blind if you don't zoom out. Do you honestly want your players to play the game zoomed out ALL the time?

sabinati posted:

yeah i played with the default last night. camera sucks. freecam needs to be the only cam.

Onionfighter posted:

Yeah, I really hope that was trolling, because it is something EVERYONE seems to agree: camera sucks.

cobaltjones posted:

Wow. How can you sit there and defend something that is so wholly terrible? Are you that stupid or just stubborn?

the posts below are probably out of chronological order but..

Potjeh posted:

I hate the camera. Since it's 3D and all, could we have a proper shoulder cam please? Nothing else works with all these trees around. Also, compass please. I can't walk in a straight line with this automatic camera rotation.

Jackard posted:

I told them the same thing. Loftar responded that Salem has the same view distance as Haven so there would be clipping issues, to which I replied "yea doesn't really matter if you can actually see what's going on"

The camera suffers the same problem as the one in Neverwinter Nights 2; when you zoom in, the camera focuses on the back of the character's head instead of what is in front of him. Another camera peculiarity Salem shares with NWN2 is that it uses the middle mousebutton for manual rotation instead of the standard right mouse.

With the autorotation, trees obscuring vision and camera angle focused at the ground its no surprise that people get lost so easily.

Potjeh posted:

Is it really so hard to put up some fog to obscure the vision range edge? We can do without it in alpha, though, just give ma a useful camera.
Of course, best would be a first person cam which I can rotate freely, but I'm not gonna be that greedy.

sabinati posted:

[*]The camera really needs some degree of tilt instead of just swivel and zoom as it has currently.

Gauteamus posted:

Frustrations in the beginning*:
* Not able to do/craft/build much
* This importantly includes not being able to build a claim or even effective containers.
* Near total spatial confusion, with no compass, minimap, and non-optimal camera

Lothaudus posted:

So far the core activity appears to be wandering around looking for stuff - hampered by the poor camera and sub-par interface.

DatOneGuy posted:

I didn't get far at all, (maybe 5 minutes before I had to log off), but moving the camera view around was indeed a bit strange. I suppose it's because I'm used to most 3D games using the same mechanics more or less, and these were different. I'll have to go play some more 3D games and compare.

sabinati posted:

sounds good but i still think the most important thing is the camera

Onionfighter posted:

[list][*]Stop camera rotation

sabinati posted:

all the camera stuff i mentioned previously like not having poo poo between camera and character, shouldercam, etc

Potjeh posted:

[size=150]Seriously, camera is by far the worst thing about Salem ATM.[/size] Foraging in forest is an exercise in frustration. Either you zoom out all the way and miss most of the stuff because it's covered by trees, or you zoom in and only see half a metre ahead of you when you're going uphill which is quite common because all forests are on hilly terrain. But even on flat terrain it feels very unnatural, like I got a cast on my neck or something. Why can't we always have something similar to what we see when going downhill? So what if there's no skybox, a bit of blackness is nothing compared to the loss of immersion we get from being unable to view our surroundings when zoomed in. I for one would just love to look at trees from below, but it just can't be done.

Onionfighter posted:

[size=150][color=#BF0000]Yeah, the camera is a big issue. I left it off the list because it is too huge. This is one big thing that needs to get fixed before release.[/color][/size]

Jackard posted:

[size=150]i can't play this for more than a few minutes at a time solely because of the camera. it is that frustrating.[/size]

sabinati posted:

i'm hermitting because i got lost and the only way to get back (no minimap yet) was to stake a claim so i could port to boston :v
not that i could loving stand to play because camera

sabinati posted:

who cares about cabbage when there isn't a decent camera

Potjeh posted:

As long as you're outsourcing stuff, you should outsource the client. Working on it is a waste of Loftar's time, and he obviously doesn't like doing it else we'd have a decent camera by now

Potjeh posted:

I want the old trees back
Seriously, there was no problem with trees, only with camera.

Darki posted:

Add more starter curios what give study stuff at start. I dont want to walk around 1 hour just trying to find chestnuts. Also the new trees are way too small . Change them a bit bigger ,make the branches less annoying and fix the bad camera angle.

burgingham posted:

Those trees man, what did you do to them? I loved them before. It was the camera that sucked, not the trees.

painhertz posted:

Camera issue solve: You can already zoom all the way to the characters back, allow zooming into first person with mouse look. This would make combat WAY more badass looking and we'd actually be able to appreciate the 3D graphics. As it stands, I'm gonna be playing the game full zoomed out looking at the top of my characters head thereby making the 3D aspect of the game completely pointless. (Just as soon make it 2D isometric like Haven.)

EnderWiggin posted:

But camera needs some options for sure. At least option to stop it from auto rotating. And we need to see camera direction (preferably with seen area) on minimap, like in strategy games Or compass at least.

boshaw posted:

the non-default camera is a better choice in my opinion :V, add in some fog if you get annoyed by the black background.
Hopefully it's made an option later on with the default client
A compass would also be nice.

Jackard posted:

yes boshaw tell us more. camera and movement have been holding the alpha back since it began.

bitza posted:

it would be really nice if we had beacons going to boston and/or claim and/or village. with the constantly rotating camera and the large terrains i'm spending 99% of my time with no idea whatsoever where i'm at. maybe you don't want fast travel in this game but we need something by which to navigate. otherwise, emergent gameplay will lead to people leaving up afk alts in boston or their camp for party arrows.

nirvanich posted:

the best thing would be to turn off that smothing moving camera, player can turn around his view by a mouse
then I'll be sure that I am going in the same direction and not by a circle like a stupid noob
let the camera be fixed directly to N and that's all
or make this ability in options
because when this camera view begin to turn left or right by itself...it seems like you're drunk

Onionfighter posted:

This might be a decent standalone idea, but it isn't a good solution to the navigation problem. We need the camera to stop undermining our natural sense of direction, and we need the landscape to be more memorable.

EnderWiggin posted:

Yes, I'm fully support camera behavior changes. And some changes to landscape to make it more memorizable. And minimap click movement too.

painhertz posted:

While I'm holding forth.... I re watched the witchcraft demo last night and losing those big, beautiful trees because of a lovely camera is NOT cool. Fix the camera and put the real trees back in PLX. Anyone with me on this?

Emina posted:

right now what annoyes me the most is:
Seasickness from the camera movement [color=#0000BF](same old issue, im still using default client i might add)[/color]

Jackard posted:

Haven't checked the custom clients yet, but in the default client the camera does not follow you quickly enough when you turn and turning does not change your forward direction until the camera completes its rotation.
So it feels more like strafing. Except strafing isn't supposed to turn the camera. So it's not getting either behavior right.

painhertz posted:

I find that moving from 2-D Isometric to 3-d in Salem added nothing and actually made most things a pain in the rear end (Building houses, fences, the camera, etc etc)

nirvanich posted:

Free first "claim" as leanto would be good too (as someone from devs said once)....because the current camera is totally disorientiring thing and harmful for the new ppl here - they can just quit

Potjeh posted:

- Camera tilt, just so you don't forget. No, we don't need a skybox first.

sabinati posted:

well it's not a commercial game yet and in the meantime it's unplayable (imho) with that loving camera, so until they implement proper camera and minimap radar and inspirational highlighting etc in the main client you should be arsed

Wolfang posted:

There should be a way to DECIDE how the camera turns, like in runescape, since it's the same style of game, and runescape did a good job when it comes to camera movement.

cobaltjones posted:

Ugh there really need to be a way to set waypoints on the map, or at least have a constant arrow marking your homestead/Boston.
I bought some land, wandered around for a couple minutes, and now I'm ultimately lost. In Haven it was a little easier since the terrain is somewhat simple to keep track of, but in Salem the wilderness is a giant maze. Also I've got a couple dew drops and some driftwood so I don't really want to just dump everything to get back.
I like exploring so far but there's something about the disambiguation between the constantly spinning camera and the static minimap or maybe it's just the fact that the minimap is tiny and can't be manipulated at all, but I've really gotten the feeling of getting lost/disoriented extremely easy which kind of frustrates the otherwise interesting early gameplay.

cobaltjones posted:

Obviously putting your fingers in your ears and going "NA NA NA NA NA NA NA" is much easier than addressing the most glaring issue in the entire game.

Oddity posted:

code:
[22:49:22] <Oddity> Why does the camera constantly rotate while I move?
[22:49:27] <Karl> Yeah it's annoying
[22:49:47] <loftar> Because I like it that way. :)
gg loftar doesn't care about the default client being user-friendly.

Kaios posted:

Come on guys Loftar likes it that way so let it be!! It's not like the whole point of this game is to generate some sort of revenue so why should they listen to the potential customers.

staz posted:

Yes it made me want to toss my cookies. Never liked merry-go-rounds as a kid. Avoid them now. Salem is interesting but over complicated in areas it shouldn't be. Communication I think was the most difficult for me though. The rest I could "learn" to live with. The interface for HnH is easier to navigate. Graphics are interesting and I think the game over all has a good chance unlike the view of a few others. Remember folks that's what a beta is it's a test not only on the system but also how customers actually like the game.

Jackard fucked around with this message at 19:35 on May 18, 2014

# ? May 18, 2014 19:29

Jackard: Oct 28, 2007; We Have A Bow And We Wish To Use It

Just a reminder that all of their games suffer from the same issues due to developer stances

Haven reboot will be just as broken as their last two games.

# ? May 18, 2014 19:57

Jackard: Oct 28, 2007; We Have A Bow And We Wish To Use It

Since we are talking terrible crafting MMOs, who here remembers Wake?

# ? May 18, 2014 20:04

Delamore: Jan 11, 2008; Monocle Man

Why is every crafting/construction MMO full of terrible issues lurking beneath the surface and massive developer issues?

# ? May 18, 2014 22:33

Chakron: Mar 11, 2009

I've always thought that it's because construction MMOs don't scale very well (at least the ones we like to play). No competent team would ever try to take on something like that - it's just not worth the time or financial investment. But if it's just you and your three friends and you're etching out 200 grand USD a year between the four of you, hey pretty decent guess we'll keep doing this even thought we're poo poo.

# ? May 18, 2014 22:50

throw to first DAMN IT: Apr 10, 2007; This whole thread has been raging at the people who don't want Saracen invasion to their homes

Perhaps you too should be more accepting of their cultures

Delamore posted:

Why is every crafting/construction MMO full of terrible issues lurking beneath the surface and massive developer issues?

Because only people with crippling autism play crafting games and MMOs are filled with socially stunted manchildren. So in the intersection you have some truly broken people.

Or more likely,

Chakron posted:

I've always thought that it's because construction MMOs don't scale very well (at least the ones we like to play). No competent team would ever try to take on something like that - it's just not worth the time or financial investment. But if it's just you and your three friends and you're etching out 200 grand USD a year between the four of you, hey pretty decent guess we'll keep doing this even thought we're poo poo.

If you make the game so that you can be one man crafting machine who needs no man and does everything himself, what's the point of doing it with others and why is the game MMO then. But if you design it so that you need hordes of people to fill the supply chain needed to make anything worth poo poo, you run into problem that most people in the chain will just feel like they are not accomplishing anything and any new player will be sorta worthless.

Here's to waiting for Factorio multiplayer.

# ? May 18, 2014 23:07

puberty worked me over: May 20, 2013; by Cyrano4747

Puistokemisti posted:

If you make the game so that you can be one man crafting machine who needs no man and does everything himself, what's the point of doing it with others and why is the game MMO then.

The same could be said for the hordes of MMOs where you can solo the vast majority of content.

# ? May 18, 2014 23:32

Sacro: Jul 21, 2008; I was somewhere around the middle of page 86 in the Cognitive Dissonance thread when the drugs began to take hold.

only only only only only ~~only~~

Do not play this game, do not play Haven and Hearth, do not play anything made by this pair of developers. The premise/genre of the game (all of these games are functionally the same exact game) is interesting and rarely done, so you may be sorely tempted to try it out. You might think you can get some kind of enjoyment out of it before the problems set in. You are wrong. You will find no fun here, because the early game is the most tedious and monotonous possible thing and you only stomach it because of the promise of what could be once you get done grinding. But you never stop grinding, because the game is designed to be an infinite grind. There is no pay off. There is only a pair of devs that think Ayn Rand is the coolest philosopher, who think their ideas are untouchable art.

# ? May 19, 2014 01:36

Freedonkeys: Jan 7, 2010

Haven and Hearth is always fun the first few weeks after a server wipe caused by the developers' ineptitude. By that point, all the problems with the system start to manifest themselves, and you're best off waiting until one of them types rm -rf / on the server again.

# ? May 19, 2014 02:29

Dr. VooDoo: May 4, 2006

I remember this game. God it was so bad. If a player got even just slightly ahead there was nothing you could do. I remember one poopsocking Russian that was able to walk into a town, destroy every wall, and just spam a ground stomp AoE and kill twenty people without even dropping below 90% of his health. When people pointed out how stuff like this could complete skew the game so bad people would stop playing the devs plugged their ears and screamed about how it was all working as intended.

Lets not forget that you couldn't do anything at all until you inspected a randomly spawned smooth stone. Hope you joined the game as soon as the server started cause by the third day you literally could not find one near town. So you had to wander off into the wilderness completely alone without any kind of ability at all while roving bands of power leveled players could one shot you. The devs thought this was a good game play features to spread players out

# ? May 19, 2014 02:47

forge: Feb 26, 2006

Yeah, its sad because this game could be so much better. I think I've played it three times around. I just checked the forums and its full of people bitching and jorb and loftar saying dumb poo poo. Lets not forget this game is what 3-4? years old now and there is nothing noticeably different than from 2010, and its still beta.

# ? May 19, 2014 03:07

Snatch Duster: Feb 20, 2007; by FactsAreUseless

Game was so bad, that even Paradox withdrew funding Jorb.

The one fun memory I have is when I tried to steal our neighbor's boat by rowing it down a stream with him riding passenger, asking what I was doing.

# ? May 19, 2014 03:15

Primaris: Feb 15, 2004; 11 out of 12 physicians agree I have a large penis.

Yeah I managed to make it for about 3 days into this game sorry for not checking back on the thread. The good news is this game finally convinced me into getting on Archeage. So thanks for that, Salem.

# ? May 19, 2014 06:55

SweetBro: May 12, 2014; Did you read that sister?
Yes, truly a shitposter's post. I read it, Rem.

My issue with Jobtar is that both of them are pretentious fucks who for the most part ignore any feedback given to them because they believe they're god's gift to game design, or at the very least act like it. Anytime their post contains something other than patchnotes, it's like reading a pseudo-intellectual circle-jerk that borders on the point of unintentional satire. My issues with the developers attitude aside, such behavior from designers can often lead to truly great games as the average consumer rarely has viable insight into proper design; that being said, neither do they. They're basically Peter Moleneux without the actual skill, talent, or experience.

End-game in Salem is utter trite. What you basically have is a bunch of players, who leveled up all their skills, grinding humors since there is no hard limit, so they beat up other people because they're bored and there's nothing better to do.

# ? May 19, 2014 09:22

Jackard: Oct 28, 2007; We Have A Bow And We Wish To Use It

Big news for Salem, the Swedes have loosed their deathgrip on its future:

John Carver posted:

Salemites,
Hello and Welcome! My name is John Carver, Project Lead for Mortal Moments Inc. and newly assigned to Salem.

Who We Are:
Mortal Moments Inc. is a newly formed indie development company with huge ambitions to be involved in a unique niche of computer gaming that we feel isn't currently offered in the marketplace. We come from a background of decades of gaming including but not limited to a careful and keen eye on the development, implementation, and world that is Salem. If you are reading this and have endured the rocky development cycle that has been Salem, odds are it is because you felt something that we too recognized. That something, we boldly define with words such as potential and promise that can only be delivered from a title as unique and mold-breaking as the endeavors and vision from SeaTribe.

A Brief History:
Salem was originally developed by SeaTribe, and Published by Paradox Interactive. Paradox supplied its extremely valuable experience and funding while SeaTribe contributed their creativity and vision to shape Salem from a fledgling PDF document of wild ideas into the a fully functioning MMO with over 25,000 Registered Accounts. Unfortunately, and for reasons that need not be discussed in detail, Salem fell short of the expectations from Paradox. As merely a Publisher, they were limited in their opportunities to guarantee the financial success of the title. As many of you know, Paradox is a big player in the industry with a great reputation and serious background of high profile and successful titles. As such, on June 5th 2013, they announced that they could not longer continue an active role in the publishing process and took a much smaller and limited association with the title. SeaTribe, a team of two developers, then proceeded to continue with the full burden of developing and essentially "finishing" the Salem project. You would be kidding yourselves if you thought that such a task was not daunting for a fully staffed and heavily funded company. In the case of SeaTribe, they invested significant amounts of time and energy giving Salem not only several additional patches but also a complete reboot with major overhauls to its core fundamental systems.

Despite all this. Salem remains today in a stage of "Beta". Unfinished, and therefore, unrealized of its true potential. Some could argue that it has had its day. Some could say that the people have spoken and that the game itself is over, finished, destroyed. But is it? Salem offers the promise of Witches and paranoia but currently delivers neither. Salem tantalizes us with the prospects of creatures in the darkness and all that is the unknown in Colonial America, yet we have only argopelters. Salem entices us with the wealth of possibilities afforded by Animal Husbandry, Alchemy, Wagons & Ships; none of which are in the game yet. We feel the fundamentals of the Salem dream are still here, never realized because they were never finished. One cannot truly evaluate the merits of an unfinished game anymore than a critic can rate the plot of an unfinished movie or play. Recently, Mortal Moments Inc. successfully negotiated the remaining interest in Salem from Paradox, as well as creative control and development responsibilities with SeaTribe. The result is that Mortal Moments Inc. will now be taking over full responsibility for the game with SeaTribe's full consent, approval, and continued guidance. As such, We are here to finish writing that story,finish building this dream, then and only then are we comfortable defining and analyzing the "Success" of Salem.

Our Commitment to you:
So what is different? The Salemites have reason to be skeptical and, as such, my primary focus in this first month will not be to dazzle you with grand promises but impress you with meaningful and positive changes. Mortal Moments Inc. is not here to cannibalize the community or piece out the code. We are not here because we wish to institute pay to win models or PvE servers. Quite the contrary. We have invested hundreds of hours in developer meetings identifying exactly what we feel works and doesn't work for Salem. The veterans here should be happy to know that our list of what works was astronomically larger than what doesn't. That being said, this has not been our baby for half a decade. While we respect everything that SeaTribe has done and all of their continued support in this title, we are not emotionally attached to any one system or mechanic. If something doesn't create an opportunity for a meaningful moment in a player's gaming experience, then we quite frankly are less than enthralled with said activity. In addition, those who found themselves nested comfortably in a status quo they must have known in their hearts was morally bankrupt will quickly find themselves in a brave new world. We LOVE that you can mod the client(which needs work we understand), but this DOES NOT mean we will tolerate botting/spamming/Bug Abuse or otherwise detrimental actions to the game itself. We LOVE forum drama, but will not tolerate RL threats, Racism, Overly Abusive Language, OR the ambiguity of regulation that has led to a segregated moderator and player base. We LOVE that you can kill anybody you want, and that death has meaning. But this does NOT mean you will continue to be capable of doing so without the constant fear of revenge, retribution, and death from those bold enough to leave scents. Above all, we respect and appreciate YOU. The players who understand Salem for not just what it is, but for what it can be. We will pride ourselves on making sure that your posts, thoughts, ideas, and feedback is not just heard, but weighed heavily by the design team and in every effort that we are capable of, responded to. To put it another way, we still love your tears, but don't hate nice things.

# ? Jun 6, 2014 05:38

Marxalot: Dec 24, 2008; Appropriator of
Dan Crenshaw's Eyepatch

SweetBro posted:

My issue with Jobtar is that both of them are pretentious fucks who for the most part ignore any feedback given to them because they believe they're god's gift to game design, or at the very least act like it. Anytime their post contains something other than patchnotes, it's like reading a pseudo-intellectual circle-jerk that borders on the point of unintentional satire. My issues with the developers attitude aside, such behavior from designers can often lead to truly great games as the average consumer rarely has viable insight into proper design; that being said, neither do they. They're basically Peter Moleneux without the actual skill, talent, or experience.

End-game in Salem is utter trite. What you basically have is a bunch of players, who leveled up all their skills, grinding humors since there is no hard limit, so they beat up other people because they're bored and there's nothing better to do.

Don't forget, these are devs who literally have/had a post/sticky on their official forums that was nothing but a hundred or so links to recommended reading about Ayn Rand and Objectivism.

They're so bad it's pretty hilarious. The best thing we ever did for Salem was kill Jorb and make him break the game even worse to stop it from happening again.

e: Oh, what was it that dumb thing that the lead (read: Only) dev spent weeks trying to code again? A webserver? I'm pretty sure he squandered a month or so of game development time to code a goddamned webserver.

Marxalot fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Jun 6, 2014

# ? Jun 6, 2014 08:38

Babe Magnet: Jun 2, 2008

If I recall correctly, it wasn't even that good because he wasn't using established documentation. Just kinda' winging it.

# ? Jun 6, 2014 08:46

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

Delamore posted:

Why is every crafting/construction MMO full of terrible issues lurking beneath the surface and massive developer issues?

Whatever happened to Tale in the Desert?

# ? Jun 6, 2014 09:20

Primaris: Feb 15, 2004; 11 out of 12 physicians agree I have a large penis.

I tried A Tale in the Desert last night I felt retarded as hell. Had no idea what I was doing.

# ? Jun 6, 2014 14:17

Delamore: Jan 11, 2008; Monocle Man

Luigi Thirty posted:

Whatever happened to Tale in the Desert?

It stagnated over a few years and now the main dev has dropped it for some bitcoin pipedream and handed the codebase over to the second in command, there's a thread in MMO HMO actually.
Even before Teppy stopped updating, the game was pretty uninteresting after a while because nothing ever really challenges you and you never really fail big time. Without any form of combat or anything that isn't just more crafting it gets boring pretty fast.

That's not to say it's a bad game though, it has some of the most interesting crafting systems that I've seen. Blacksmithing for example is actually shaping a metal block as close to a desired shape as possible with higher quality tools the closer you get. A few crafts use breeding of some kind too, like breeding bugs to look a certain way or creating super seeds that grow fast or produce alot of plant. The little gem cutting I got to try also really cool, you start off with a rough gem that you have to decide what cut to use on then you slowly remove pieces until you have that cut.

Crafting is actually fun in ATITD but the rest of the game is lackluster, pretty cool considering the other crafting sandbox games normally have really lackluster crafting but the rest can be fun.

Delamore fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Jun 6, 2014

# ? Jun 6, 2014 14:23

Impotence: Nov 8, 2010; Lipstick Apathy

Marxalot posted:

Don't forget, these are devs who literally have/had a post/sticky on their official forums that was nothing but a hundred or so links to recommended reading about Ayn Rand and Objectivism.

They're so bad it's pretty hilarious. The best thing we ever did for Salem was kill Jorb and make him break the game even worse to stop it from happening again.

e: Oh, what was it that dumb thing that the lead (read: Only) dev spent weeks trying to code again? A webserver? I'm pretty sure he squandered a month or so of game development time to code a goddamned webserver.

https://github.com/dolda2000/ashd

# ? Jun 6, 2014 16:10

Delamore: Jan 11, 2008; Monocle Man

Marxalot posted:

Don't forget, these are devs who literally have/had a post/sticky on their official forums that was nothing but a hundred or so links to recommended reading about Ayn Rand and Objectivism.

# ? Jun 6, 2014 16:30

Impotence: Nov 8, 2010; Lipstick Apathy

quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea
I am strongly disappointed that the German wikipedia seems to lack a relevant article on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_monarchy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gummibears
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex

what jorbtar

# ? Jun 7, 2014 17:30

Primaris: Feb 15, 2004; 11 out of 12 physicians agree I have a large penis.

I'm actually playing this again if anyone's interested. Yeah I know hate me for all you want Im just waiting for Archeage beta so I can actually have a farm plot.

# ? Jun 7, 2014 21:28

Rapner: May 7, 2013

Primaris posted:

I'm actually playing this again if anyone's interested. Yeah I know hate me for all you want Im just waiting for Archeage beta so I can actually have a farm plot.

Get out while you still can.

# ? Jun 7, 2014 23:09

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 4, 2024 01:12

Jackard: Oct 28, 2007; We Have A Bow And We Wish To Use It

Primaris posted:

I'm actually playing this again if anyone's interested. Yeah I know hate me for all you want

"The MMO HMO"

Get some help

# ? Jun 7, 2014 23:11

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The MMO HMO > Salem Crafting MMO GOD NO

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