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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 04:41 |
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Have a homestead claimed - open for a few people if interested.
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# ? May 8, 2014 07:23 |
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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.
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# ? May 17, 2014 21:28 |
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.
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# ? May 17, 2014 22:56 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31g0YE61PLQ
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# ? May 17, 2014 23:53 |
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None of the games will ever fix the core issues, not Haven, Salem or Haven 2 because the developers designed it that way intentionally.
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# ? May 18, 2014 00:49 |
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^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.
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# ? May 18, 2014 03:33 |
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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.
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# ? May 18, 2014 03:37 |
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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.
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# ? May 18, 2014 05:25 |
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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.
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# ? May 18, 2014 05:37 |
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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.
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# ? May 18, 2014 05:38 |
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.
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# ? May 18, 2014 07:28 |
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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 |
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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.
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# ? May 18, 2014 16:09 |
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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. 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 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? 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" 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. 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*: 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 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 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. 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 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: 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. 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. 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:
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 |
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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.
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# ? May 18, 2014 19:57 |
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Since we are talking terrible crafting MMOs, who here remembers Wake?
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# ? May 18, 2014 20:04 |
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Why is every crafting/construction MMO full of terrible issues lurking beneath the surface and massive developer issues?
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# ? May 18, 2014 22:33 |
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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.
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# ? May 18, 2014 22:50 |
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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.
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# ? May 18, 2014 23:07 |
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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.
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# ? May 18, 2014 23:32 |
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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.
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# ? May 19, 2014 01:36 |
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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.
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# ? May 19, 2014 02:29 |
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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
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# ? May 19, 2014 02:47 |
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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.
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# ? May 19, 2014 03:07 |
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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.
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# ? May 19, 2014 03:15 |
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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.
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# ? May 19, 2014 06:55 |
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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.
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# ? May 19, 2014 09:22 |
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Big news for Salem, the Swedes have loosed their deathgrip on its future:John Carver posted:Salemites,
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# ? Jun 6, 2014 05:38 |
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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. 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 |
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If I recall correctly, it wasn't even that good because he wasn't using established documentation. Just kinda' winging it.
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# ? Jun 6, 2014 08:46 |
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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?
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# ? Jun 6, 2014 09:20 |
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I tried A Tale in the Desert last night I felt retarded as hell. Had no idea what I was doing.
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# ? Jun 6, 2014 14:17 |
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Luigi Thirty posted:Whatever happened to Tale in the Desert? 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 |
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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. https://github.com/dolda2000/ashd
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# ? Jun 6, 2014 16:10 |
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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. What do the following have in common? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayao_Miyazaki#Films http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_cash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_day_war http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ottoman_Empire and of course http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_den http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_liberalization These are all subjects you should be well versed in if you want to understand the insanity behind Haven and Hearth, Salem and whatever they're doing now. http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7251&sid=972e8a745a57f072f09cf19cb3120430
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# ? Jun 6, 2014 16:30 |
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quote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea what jorbtar
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# ? Jun 7, 2014 17:30 |
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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.
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# ? Jun 7, 2014 21:28 |
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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.
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# ? Jun 7, 2014 23:09 |
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# ? May 4, 2024 04:41 |
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Primaris posted:I'm actually playing this again if anyone's interested. Yeah I know hate me for all you want Get some help
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# ? Jun 7, 2014 23:11 |