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Aw man. Someone reserved the name i've had since release. Fare thee well, Tombs the obnoxiously dressed occult hipster. You'll be missed.  Also holy loving poo poo, did my character just make a sound? Coughing is progress!
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Jun 24, 2017 16:29
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So if I didn't claim rewards back in TSW like the preorder weapons and such are they still going to transfer?
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Jun 24, 2017 16:56
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Pilchenstein posted:No, you have to claim stuff first. gently caress sakes. It's literally sitting in the shop inventory and is assigned to me. What a stupid way to handle things. I already transferred. Wonder if I can get support to fix that? And apparently I missed a lore segment in the Ground Zero subway mission.
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Jun 24, 2017 17:08
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Awesome. I appreciate the heads up on the lore marker. Still, loving hell. If they can't get the transfer stuff right I don't have much hope for the game going forwards. Pirates of the Burning Sea had the same problem and immediately tanked due to players quitting out of frustration out of losing stuff they'd had for years. Contacted support, hopefully I can get that sorted out.
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Jun 24, 2017 17:24
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theflyingorc posted:All of their MMOs are just bleeding money constantly. Or at the very least, not making anywhere near enough money to justify making any new content. I mean, it's their own fault it's like this. AoC was a shitshow of lies and carefully constructed misdirection to begin with that only had real content for the first 20 or so levels. It says something as well that the funnest parts of it were assassinating people and horse kicking them off of cliffs too. TSW was popular at one point, but constant cutbacks leading to setbacks lead to the interest going down. Couple that with some hideously unpopular updates like the "grind simulation missions like this is a mobile game update" and the Tokyo leveling system effectively resetting your level to 1 due to the lovely AEGIS stuff for the zone did a lot to chase off people. Them slowing down development even further was bad too. Even with that they had a small but steady core of players though. Then they deliberately and knowingly hosed that up to extract a bit more wealth by rebooting the game and dicked over not just the lifetime subbers (thereby losing a consistent source of potential good PR for the game, since lifetime subbers did in fact have to log in to get the rewards still) but players in general to boot by "rebooting" the game into a cash shop nightmare. Both of which pissed people off given that it turned out the reboot wasn't even a reboot at all and it was the same story minus features, your original cosmetic cash shop content from the real version of the game, and generally only barely made things better while tacking on a bunch of really lovely microtransactions. They've consistently chosen greed and cutting corners and as such they've consistently been paying for it in long term viability of their products. Exiles is the exception to the rule, not a change in habit. Heck, if the mod community hadn't taken off for Exiles it would also probably be a barren wasteland since many servers would not have the steady drip of new content they currently have that draws in players. Archonex fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Apr 24, 2022 |
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Apr 24, 2022 14:14
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theflyingorc posted:Yeah, this is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how game development works on multiple levels. Except you need to keep in mind the history of the company when trying to make assessments like this. You're forgetting that Funcom has a bad history with shady practices in securing sales and development overall. Literally, AoC was sold to people with lies. Their pre-release period was filled with wild claims (still waiting for that lich class and advanced/non human classes as a whole!) meant to pad over the fact that the actual gameplay was just not there. Literally, literally, literally this was a massive scandal at the time since when it came out it turned out that everything after not-Tortuga was at best a quarter of the way finished and far more often there simply wasn't content outside of grinding a few mobs for XP there at all. Which forced only the most hardcore players to grind off of certain spawns since after a certain point you'd have a new quest or two maybe every five to seven levels at best. Dungeons were hosed as well. A lot of dungeons didn't even have proper loot drops commensurate to the effort put in them. And that's if they dropped loot that was different from the global/zone pool at all. Also, tuning was completely screwed in some of them. And then there were the hilariously bad bugs. One of the most infamous being that every female PC wasa inherently weaker than a male PC because someone had the bright idea to sync the attack speed up with animations or something like that. Which were slower for women because ???. Which wasn't even found for like a month or so, and required players to yell about it to the devs to get them to acknowledge this very simple thing that a decent internal QA team could have caught fairly easy. And then you had game breaking glitches that would wipe character data or do something similar to that along with all sorts of other crazy bugs in a game that was billed as "hardcore" in the lead up and post release period like it was trying to do an early run of Wildstar. It took them anywhere from half a year to a year to even get some of the issues it had fixed. And some of the issues were literally game breaking, like the gender imbalance. By that point most people had fled to better games. Today they have maybe a pittance of players even though the game made a very brief come back in the Khitan/Asia expansion pack, which was also never followed up on with solid content in a timely manner despite it getting decent reviews. TSW was released feature complete but ended up just getting shafted by all the financial bullshit going on behind the scenes coupled with Funcom's management just being morons. An issue which was exacerbated by the fact that it's design theory required bring in VA's and having actual puzzles and the like beyond the usual hotbar combat MMO's of the time had. And yet, despite that there have been other expensive story/VA based games (SWTOR and FFXIV come to mind.) that pulled it around after a bad release. Couple that with a few bad updates along with their slow release schedule and an ever smaller seeming crop of devs working on the project and you have a recipe for disaster that any experienced MMO developer should have been able to see coming and avoid. Like, we can agree that Funcom made mistakes if that's what you're saying but it's obvious that Funcom hosed up as it has before and the game suffered for it. And I should reiterate that the relative lack of new content in Exiles is ameliorated by the mod community. So it's not like they've learned their lesson. It would be nothing but a dusty relic if you didn't have some of the insane modders it has. Like, at one point someone designed an entire RPG fantasy setting in it like they were working with Neverwinter Nights, complete with an actual magic system, faction system, and other new mechanics. This happens while the game gets massive mod based mechanic updates and even new maps. Meanwhile, Funcom releases paid cultural cosmetic DLC packs (and one expansion isle) while people are doing the same thing for free in game, despite the excellent sales it allegedly had last I checked. Contrast this with Funcom's competition, where Ark has a ridiculous number of maps that were dev made or even sponsored by the developers onto Steam to keep interest in the game high overall and it's obvious there's just a lack of investment in the future of Funcom's games once they're out the door. Which, coupled with the issues a game can have at launch, in a lull, or during development is a recipe for all sorts of things to go wrong over time, leaving the consumer holding the bag. Or as another poster put it: Lawlicaust posted:MMOs need to be an investment post launch to be successful because they will all have a bad launch and be on the verge of collapsing. Wow has a rough loving launch and if Blizzard has pulled support back like Funcom, it would have suffered the same fate. Square saved FFXIV and it’s now massive. LOTRO and TOR are much smaller but continued to have updates and find an audience. I don’t think it will succeed but Amazon is still trying to put content and fixes into New World (or were last time I looked) and that poo poo dropped like an anchor. Archonex fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Apr 25, 2022 |
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Apr 25, 2022 02:49
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macnbc posted:There is some wildly revisionist history here. TSW was never popular enough to turn a profit. It was popular. It just wasn't popular enough to meet the demands of the business, which were wildly out of sync with reality. Lawlicaust, Orcane, and others goes into this much better than I currently can at the moment, so i'd refer to the above posts if you want to try to rebut this point. To be clear, I liked both games. I was playing TSW nearly religiously up until the reboot and even dropped money on a lifetime sub despite knowing at that point that the game was probably going to end up on life support. Likewise, I had a blast playing AoC as a sneaky assassin. But I can't deny that Funcom's operating strategy is partially to blame for everything going wrong in their products over and over again. Lawlicaust posted:The Matrix died for so many reasons other than the sub model. Also, I should add that this is on point and just going into how the Matrix MMO and it's original staff of pre, post release devs, and support staff got screwed over could probably be an essay all on it's own. Suffice to say from what I can remember of it that they had event staff and all sorts of plans and then poo poo went incredibly haywire after release partially through no fault of their own (the rest probably was their fault, sadly), culminating in management of the game getting sold off to SOE to try and recoup the losses from a bad launch. Given how SOE tended to be back then it shouldn't be a surprise that this lead to SOE basically dropping all of the interesting bit of gameplay both present in the game and in future prospective development, firing most of the staff, firing all of the live event staff that was a core part of the game, handing most of the live event content over to people from the community to run, and generally turning it into a way to milk subscribers into a slow death for the game instead of do a rebound. The original game allegedly had a development plan that was going to have vehicles added in expansions, new zones, new weapons and combat types, and even in the long term was the hope of them adding the real world with those flying ships eventually. In a way, it almost seemed like the game was in the long term intended to be a more sandbox type of open world that people were hoping for with the Matrix games, only with a very unique combat system. Unfortunately, when the original devs went so too did the plans they had, with SOE basically turning the game into a way to keep people subbed as long as possible by just focusing on story events centered around a post trilogy Matrix setting as a primary content method. If you've seen the Matrix 4 you've seen a small fraction of the canon events that took place during the MMO. Suffice to say that it got pretty wild and stupid at times. It's entirely accurate to say that a come back couldn't happen like how it did in FFXIV simply because the people who would have done the comeback were removed from the company within the first few months after release. Doubly so since SOE had no intention whatsoever in promoting further large scale development once it became apparent that the player base was relatively small after all the fiascos that went down during the opening months, alongside all the things that happened after they took over. Someone can fill in the blanks there if it's relevant or they want. But yeah, the sub model was very much not the problem with MXO. It had other issues, and those issues tended to stack up on top of old issues over time. Archonex fucked around with this message at 13:08 on Apr 27, 2022 |
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Apr 26, 2022 14:35
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Double post, my bad.
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Apr 26, 2022 14:44
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Ichabod Tane posted:Honestly, lawlicaust pontificating a made up scenario to a person who worked there is the best thing I’ve seen out of secret world in a long time He's not actually wrong to offer constructive criticism though? Hell, even Funcom's upper management seemed to be worried about the game being crappy out the gate to the point that their former CEO basically did the equivalent of a pump and dump scheme using TSW's pre-release hype. https://kotaku.com/funcom-under-investigation-for-trade-violations-1511459402 quote:The charge, which can be read in full at the Oslo Stock Exchange website, calls into question the financial information given the market regarding paranormal MMO The Secret World from August 2011 to two months after the game's July 2012 launch. Økokrim also suspects the company may not have maintained proper financial logs of the period in question. Direct from the economic crime unit posted:ØKOKRIM has imposed a fine of NOK 1.5 million on a listed company that develops computer games for market manipulation and lack of listing. The company has adopted the fine. Basically, upper management knew the game was going to have issues, so FlyingOrc's statements about the devs and lower management trying is true --- but that doesn't mean the executives have always been on board or that he has the full picture. It's also not the first time Funcom has gotten into trouble over shady behavior regarding the company and how they've handled their games. As I mentioned, AoC got raked over the coals for misrepresenting the final product and bilking tons of people out of their money. Hell, we had people on this very forum pissed about it back then, to the point that I remember one poster mentioning that the only satisfying thing in the game was donkey kicking people off of bridges and cliffs...before they patched that out. Incidentally, back when AoC was a thing and people were wondering why it was such a trash fire at release one of the founders (Godarge, who was also the project lead from what I recall) of Funcom basically all but admitted that Funcom basically had for the longest time coasted off of investor cash. Even he didn't know why they keep giving them money outside of a sunk cost fallacy since their games almost never turn a profit. In fact, he said that none of their major products ever had made money as of that interview. Which suggests that they probably didn't have much experience in actually managing costs in relation to profit on release of the product. I mean, when your CEO was literally dumping their stock illegally to save a buck shortly before release without giving advance notice to the stock exchange then I have to say that people at the top end knew TSW was hosed from the word go due to bad management decisions and a lot of what he's saying simply doesn't apply in terms of countering the criticism folks have levied at Funcom. Doesn't mean that anyone is blaming him (Quite the opposite in fact!) but with what has been made public since then there were all sorts of red flags.  Edit: And Funcom blamed GW2 and D3 for detracting from their launch in official press releases/statements. Which was holy poo poo levels of dumb when you consider that TSW was a subscription MMO that you had to buy and then pay a sub for competing with a buy to play MMO and a (at the time) juggernaut of the ARPG genre. I know Funcom has blamed GW2 and D3 for the issues as well but even then this goes back to what people are saying that that is in fact on Funcom itself for doing something very dumb that they should have avoided if at all possible. And that's before you factor in the above stuff regarding the CEO and the stock sale that suggests that people higher up than TheFlyingOrc knew poo poo was going to go south. Which makes this post of his completely irrelevant to the overall issue of defending the actions of Funcom, even setting aside the other responses folks gave: theflyingorc posted:Yeah, this is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how game development works on multiple levels. I called it greed because the former CEO literally cashed out his stocks right before TSW's release specifically in a way that was in defiance of the law. I never said that you or the other devs specifically were the ones doing the greedy bullshit that sabotaged the products and screwed over the employees. Rather, given what came out in the news since then (along with past incidents) that management at the top end around that time appears to have been incredibly lovely and seemed more self involved than looking at the viability of the final product or the company as a whole. Which it seems is something that ultimately caused issues for TSW. Just as it did in Age of Conan. Whether this was Trond himself that was at fault for setting the general direction of how project oversight was handled or someone else I don't know, since i'm not privy to the inner workings of Funcom's decision making process. But other people on here have pointed out that properly managing expected financial results of a product is very much on the company itself and not the market or devs as a whole. Meaning if TSW was being designed in such a way that it had to be a smash hit to recoup it's losses then someone ought to have stepped in and toned down the final costs by looking at what was eating up so much money and scaling things back instead of creating a product that assumed amazing success out the gate to recoup the expenses. That's a requisite of any for profit project and it's long term success, and not people making up elaborate conspiracy theories or whatever like Ichabod said.
Archonex fucked around with this message at 09:10 on May 28, 2022 |
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May 28, 2022 08:02
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FrostyPox posted:While I don't think TSW would've performed notably better if GW2 hadn't launched at the same time, this does remind me of seeing people in the TSW beta and early days insisting that TSW didn't have the holy trinity. Naturally that didn't persist past Kingsmouth. I think it's because TSW didn't have hard classes, combined with them thinking of GW2's marketing. I mean, those people are dumb. The group dungeons literally were usually only workable/not tedious as heck in randoms if you had a healer and someone that could tank damage while the rest DPSed. Don't know about what the high end folks did in premades and if they had a better way but yeah. The freeform nature of it probably muddled things a bit for people not familiar with the genre outside of the cookie cutter MMO's common at the time but it's not like it's the first game to have customization insofar as character powers and blending roles goes.
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May 28, 2022 22:08
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Lawlicaust posted:Once Mycroft ends his Let’s Play, I’ll probably close this thread. There’s really not much left to say about the game that hasn’t been said multiple times and the last new player in the thread was about a year ago. Maybe Len or Drinkfist can make a piss on the grave thread when this finally shuts down. Honestly, i'd keep it open. There's always the extremely slim chance that someone will buy up the license and do a proper rebranding with a real reboot/a proper sequel (probably with a time skip given the Tokyo ending implications) rather than a cash grab that's missing features. Having the thread open until then will at least keep the game visible, similar to what happened with City of Heroes.
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May 31, 2022 02:25
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