MMORPGs

[Diogo Ribeiro]

Fair enough, sorry.

[metadigital]

S'aright!

[Lord Tingeling]

So, it seems I'll be getting back to WoW soon enough. Yay, I guess.

[EnderAndrew]

Marvel should be suing pencils, because they allow people to draw copyrighted Marvel characters! How dare pencils!

 

From what I've heard, Matrix Online is largely devoid of Neo copy-cats.

[Calax]

ctrl alt del has a great comic about that, i can't find it but its funny. Personally i find that in MMo's i can't really get into them because there are no real personalities and games get to be very static in nature. dum de dum ditty dum hit a button kill somthing. and I'm a very casual rpg mmorpg person so i see people who become like gods and it beg's the question why, why become so powerful in this sort of game? is it a wizzing contest? or do you just want to do everything. right now i have two friends who have 2 level sixty chars on wow each! I just can't see the fun in a static world, no plot just kill slaughter demolish.

[Darth Jebus]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your suggestion, or thinking of something else entirely, but wouldn't that tamper with players who attempted to form groups since there'd be unique instances for every single player?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Not necessarily, no. Have you played Guild Wars? Everything in that game is instanced. Meaning you don't see any other players while traveling throughout the world UNLESS YOU ARE GROUPED.

 

NC Soft has implemented a system that tries to make the player feel unique while still taking into account grouping together with other players, or just questing with your guildies. This is the way to do it, in my opinion. You can mess around with other players while you're in a town or a village or something. But the second you pass through the gates, you're on you're own.

 

So to speak.

[PhantomJedi]

Everyone keeps talking about these games that where created by devs and then put on store shelves for people to buy. What about free games like Rune Scape and AQ.

[GhostofAnakin]

With all these MMORPGs out there, I suppose eventually I should give one a try. But everytime I'm tempted to I stumble across a negative review, or a negative comment from forumers.

[Darth Flatus]

Well if that was your test of quality for everything, you'd nevre try anything

[GhostofAnakin]

Why do you think I've amassed over 4000 posts on here? I never do try anything.

[metadigital]

Try a MMO, you might like it. I didn't, but that was more down to the community of people playing than the game mechanics.

[Darth Flatus]

Thats the big no no for me. The thought of the hardcore wankers who play it 24/7 and so gain a (IMO unfair) advantage due to the fact that they have no lives.

 

Are theer any MMOs that have a solution to this? For example rationing the playing times.

[metadigital]

None known.

 

After all, the dweebs that play 24/7 are the same ones that have their bills paid by direct debit ...

 

I had to laugh at the article in this month's PC Gamer about the exploits of Richard Thurman in Ultima Online. After a friend of his sold his account for c. $1000, he decided to re-enter the world (he had just tossed his account away) and his goal was to make back the money he had spent (his preliminary "research revealed a 4.3 million dollar eBay market in Ultima Online gold." !).

 

Most gold sellers ... use bugs and exploits to magic cash out of thin air. Richard created a broker app to flood the server with useless imaginary crafted objects (that players used to get their gold) in bulk. E.g. buy raw ingredients for ink then sell the bottled goods for pennies. He reverse engineered the client to automatically buy and sell the ingredients and finished products, while he was away from his computer.

 

"The EULA states that no third party applications are allowed. Since I agreed to the EULA, I am the first party, being the paying member for UO, and EA is the second party, being the provider. So if I make/author a utility, it is a first party utility and, in my opinion, anything you make doesn't apply. ..." R. Thurman.

 

Macroing is allowed under the EULA, as long as it is not unattended, so he rigged up UA to trigger an instant message to his MSN Messenger-aware smart phone, thus he was able to talk to GMs that questioned the bot.

 

With his system tested, he went into mass production. New PCs installed with fresh copies of Ultima Online, CD keys and random accounts were all processed en masse via another bot.

 

He offloaded the gold wholesale via a trusted cartel, which he built, as he didn't want to be stung by phantom eBay purchasers who skipped after presenting a rubber cheque. He fixed the prices with the other gold-farmers in the cartel, guaranteeing a minimum profit return.

 

Until a trade war broke out with another gold-farmer.

 

"It was like the wild west out there. Everyone wanted a cut of the action. It was pretty frustrating. To get round [the competition], I began to examine the shift patterns of the UO gamesmasters -- I could only work when they were just coming on or leaving their shifts." ...

... Between 2002 and 2004, Richard 'made' around nine billion gold pieces, which he sold for a profit of approximately $100,000. ...

UK PC Gamer, issue 150, Jul 2005, pp 128-9.

 

[Squidget]

Are theer any MMOs that have a solution to this? For example rationing the playing times.

 

Guild Wars has this pretty well, through a combination of a low level cap and a skill system that allows a lot of increases in versatility.

 

Getting to the level cap in GW is something a casual gamer can do through the course of the story. It caps out at level 20, and it probably doesn't take much longer than the length of an average single player RPG to get up to that point.

 

However, playing after that allows you to earn more skills for your character to use. However, since you can only have 8 skills on any given mission you end up having to make choices, and the skills are balanced with one another. When you get a new skill it might open up a new strategy that makes you more effective, but the skill itself isn't more powerful than the ones you had previously - you're just using it more effectively. There are a lot of skills, so this gives the hardcore players something to do.

 

Difficulty can continue to increase after the level cap for a couple of reasons. For one, maximum party size gradually increases throughout the PvE missions (up to , and likewise there are times when you can get upgrades which only apply to a specific area or monster type. For example, at one point you get your armor 'Infused' to resist a certain type of hex so you can fight some of the more powerful monsters, but Infusion doesn't add to the power of your character except against those particular monsters with that particular hex.

 

Finally, there's the presence of luxury items. Armor and gear that looks nice but doesn't have any inherent stat bonuses. This gives the hardcore something to strive for while the casual player can still remain competitive and not be left in the dirt by someone with no life.

 

Overall the system works pretty well.

[mkreku]

This is one of the reasons I quit playing World of Warcraft: they introduced these Epic armour sets that only the best player killers in the game would be able to get hold of. Naturally, since I love player killing, I thought that was a goal I should set out to aim for. Unfortunately, the system works by giving players "pvp points" not by killing opponents one-on-one, but in large scale battles of 40 vs. 40. In battles of that scale, it does not matter one bit if you have good equipment, good reflexes or a talent for adapting to what you're dealt with. If 30 people bombard you with spells and ranged weapons, even if you're a paladin you WILL die within seconds. Also, the pvp-points system is somewhat secretive, but it quickly dawned for everyone that it was never about player killing skill, only about the amount of time you were willing to spend online. Since you can go on a raid (the WoW word for mass PvP), not do anything, die a few times and still get lots and lots of pvp-points because your team mates did a lot of killing, I quickly lost interest.

[Calax]

the pvp system for WOW (i don't have it but my friends are they power players who try to get the best stuff for each of their 60's) is that if you so much as hit a char you get credit. Also to be the most powerful person you have to get more credit than anybody else. it's a screwy system.