Age of Conan vs. Warhammer 40k

[Jonathan]

Winner: WoW!

[Jonathan]

On a more serious note, Mythic is adding PvP "battlegrounds" with triggers to WAR. So you fight a battleground set in, say, the outer defense of the city. If the offensive team manages to meet some preset condition (victory points?), then that battleground is closed and a new battleground based on the inner defenses opens up.

They also say that you're going to be able to gain levels and eq via PvP, PvE, or both.

It's like DAOC on super steroids. Definitely far more scripted and less "world"y than Eve, but that's not at all a bad thing. There can be only so many sandbox games.

I might try it if it runs under Cedega and it doesn't get massive hate on launch.

Conan sounds too blah to me. I just doubt their ability to produce a game with any polish.

[Dave]

having played the wow expansion beta, the whole thing has been turned into a grind. Obviously the only real "goal" in mmorpgs is to get better items. In normal wow that meant raiding with 39 other people to get 20-25 items per week per dungeon exactly once a week. The only other way to get better items was to PvP, but due to high competition, limited spots at the top, and honor/rating decay you basically had to PvP 60+ hrs/week to get the top rank and access to the top items.

For the expansion they are removing ranks and decay. So now everyone has access to all the items, and you can accumilate "points" at your own rate. (which was reduced 93% to account for no more decay). Decent change right? Of course all the items available will "suck" compared to the new items only available in their new "arena" ladder ranked system.

The expansion introduces like 15-20 new factions to earn reputation with. In current wow there are only like 3 factions worth obtaining high reputation with, but every single new reputation will have 3-5 "good" rewards at the highest rep.

How do you get rep? Killing mobs.

5-10 rep per mob, 50 for bosses, max 3 bosses per instance, 1-2 hrs per instance.

43,000 to max rep from neutral, 85,000 from lowest rep.

Not sure why I typed this, but reading all the crying going on in the forums right now is kinda funny. I probably won't buy the expansion unless more people I know do. At least in wow you can transfer characters to and from any other servers and accounts.

[Jonathan]

Obviously the only real "goal" in mmorpgs is to get better items.

Well, in some games. Particularly games that are inspired by Everquest, like WoW, because they all follow the same Diku-inspired gameplay and advancement. Grind-ding-gratz.

Not that I ever played, but I understand that your DAOC "goal" could be more realm points, castles sieged, that sort of thing. Still kinda grinding, I guess. In SL (extreme example) or UO (less so), item acquisition is really not that important. I think once you macroed up your UO guy to max skill you pretty much could do whatever you felt like, not grind.

I think what I particularly dislike about EQ-like games is the existence of the "Best" weapon/armor set. Here's the best dodge set, here's the best dual-wield set. Anything where you know what the best skill/item template is for the character you want to play is before you even start is Bad, MMkay.

[Dave]

Of the 3 mmorpgs I played all the "end-games" at the level cap eventually became too boring in slightly different ways. (AC2, FFXI, WoW) In all three games, it was pretty much relegated to itemization based character progression. Sure each game had its own crafting system I made a hack at, but ultimately decided wasn't a grind worth the return. AC2 used a pretty retarded title & extra skill "hero" progression after the level cap which was more or less, just making each skill tree slightly deeper. FFXI progression after the level cap was mostly itemization with whatever the hell merit system where you basically grind more xp to purchase a few stats or class skill here and there. WoW was only itemization, as hero classes are probably in the next expansion.

In AC2 each race had 3 broad trees - melee missile magic and 2 specializations within each tree. I ended up as a human melee specialization. Once you specced down one tree you could only unlearn talents by earning the same amount of xp it took to learn them in the 1st place, which was pretty retarded. There In FFXI each race could be any class and each class was its own specialty, but all starting at level 1 with a main&sub class which was I thought was a great system. In WoW each race had access to a few classes but each class had 3 trees that varied in how well their primary role was defined as and how effective they were at which type of content, solo/group/pve/pvp. ie - the cookie cutter categorization, and the way developers try to counter it by nerfing the cookie cutters.

Example - Since I played a warrior most of my wow time, the 3 trees were for PvE tanking, PvE damage, PvP Damage (since you can't tank in pvp). And only a few cookie cutter specs for each. The "Rage" mechanic Blizzard used was cool, but flawed for warriors. Basically all warrior skills cost rage. You start with 0 rage, but gain rage by either dealing damage or receiving damage. Problem is the better the gear you get the more rage you gain, and thus by the time the expansion was close to release Warriors were the top damage dealing class, so to fix that Blizzard did a flat rage normalization which put us back in line with doing crap damage like we're supposed to. So basically when I got accepted into the expansion beta, i was like "wow this sucks" and figure I should go look for a new job instead, cept I specced in the wrong engineering tree.

[quantus]

Maybe you need to spend more time building guilds and stuff... you know, mmo-business school. If you're really good, you might even want to put it on your resume.

[Jonathan]

All 3 MMORPGS you played have very classic end-games which they inherited directly from Everquest which inherited theirs directly from Diku. They are all based around the fact that it is impossible to design hundreds of hours worth of content. A single player FF game starts to crap out around 70 hours, which is nothing to a MMORPG.

The Diku way around this problem is to make each new level or item better than the last but take more time to earn. So you're always just shy of getting the best, you just have to put in 10, 100, 1000 more mobs in and you get the level or earn the loot.

The UO way around this problem is to make interactions between players the primary focus. Does your guild have the big castle and kills PKs on sight? Are you RPing an orc? The game mechanics let you make your own fun to compensate for the fact that Lord British couldn't think of any.

[Dave]

Yea, "fun" is supposed to be the reason why people keep subscribing to MMOs, but as the Achiever type of mmo player (bartle's categories) was the only real worthwhile aspect of the game since RPing (socializing) wasn't my thing, and Killing was mostly just a means to achieving (realm status as well as gear) while I dont think any MMO can really have any explorers since the world is only so large.

Actually, I take that back. The most fun I had was using the best gear in the game from the hardest dungeons (thus achieving) and grouping with a team of other uber geared player (my guild) and destroying poorly geared and organized horde groups all day long. Thus killing horde, socializing with the rest of the server since the majority of wow content is instanced on ventrilo, and exploring their corpses. (through various emotes and with a big sword).

[Jonathan]

Next game I code I will include corpse humping emotes. /skullfuck should be a command on every system.

Oh noes, not my shiny!
It's gonna take a really long time to hump that corpse. Better get started, men.

I like Yueh & Lee's categories more than Bartle's, but Bartle has the name recognition. Eve has added a bunch of dynamically spawning exploration content (so an explorer will always have new content to explore). People express interest in doing such things, but I doubt they will actually keep doing it for months.

[Jonathan]

Wow just deleted half of the PC inventories in the game, randomly! You have to petition to get your stuff back, and any enchants are gone, permanently.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 1&pageNo=1

[Dave]

Sounds awesome. Same thing happened when I logged onto the beta servers, all my bank slots were gone and everything in them ended up in my own bags cept the stuff that wouldnt fit which was lost. On the real servers I had already wasted all of my account item restorations for various stupid and occasionally retarded reasons.

[Jonathan]

Reading between the NDA lines on LoTR:O, it seems you can be a Monster Player instead of a regular player. How that differs from Alliance vs. Horde remains to be seen. I think it would be awesome if a Monster Player had no exp grind or death penalty whatsoever. Even awesomer would be if your tribe of orcs attacked a player group, and when the one you were controlling dies your control jumps to a different orc, like SimAnt. Also, I would like to be a Balrog in Hobbiton, oh yeah.

[Dave]

Hopefully there won't be such a population imbalance in future mmos. Obviously certain classes/races will be more popular (healers vs damage classes; hawtboobies vs shortstubby) but when it affects actual gameplay it sucks. In wow that mean Horde would never have a queue to play in battlegrounds, while Alliance had to wait 30min-2 hours for a single game. Of course when it came to world pvp, which in WoW is pretty much meaningless, horde would get completely steamrolled.

What would be cool is a relative bonus to roll on the other side. Like a cheaper monthly subscription! lol

[Jonathan]

having played the wow expansion beta, the whole thing has been turned into a grind.

That makes me flaccid and gummy. Talk about a game which I will never ever play.

[George]

Obviously certain classes/races will be more popular (healers vs damage classes; hawtboobies vs shortstubby)

The solution is to give every character boobs.

[Dave]

Actually that diagram isnt really the grind part. That's just the quest diagram to gain access to "locked" content. The grind part is re-running instance after instance to obtain the "reputation" required to enter certain areas and the need to farm gold or harvest herbs to buy/craft consumables needed to defeat bosses. And then doing the same content week after week to get more fake items.

[Jonathan]

It includes getting revered with the appropriate factions. I didn't know you had to grind to get the consumables. Gah.

[Dave]

"Hardcore games" only care about tackling all the "hardest" content in order to post on the official forums and say "OMG WORLD FIRST", and the developers design content at an order of difficulty that requires these consumables to beat. Which leads to burnout. But probably less than if content was super easy and everyone had nothing to do?

I know when I was in OMGHARDCORERAIDING guild, consumables (depending on class) increased your "effectiveness" by between 20-40% while the bonus from the "tiers" of the best gear was roughly 15-25%. Even in WoW the current hardest dungeon has only been "beaten" by a handful of guilds. Last time I checked only ONE horde guild had killed the hardest boss and they got banned lol.

[Jonathan]

Vanguard NDA has been lifted. They have a mechanic called Fellowship which is a bit different from allegiance in AC. Up to 6 players form a Fellowship. No matter which guilds or groups they join, no matter who is offline or online, all six players split the exp they earn equally. So to beat this game, all I have to do is join a fellowship with Dave!

Seriously though, I might have stuck out a little longer in FFXI if they had this fellowship thing. A little.

On Preview: this thread is WAR vs. Conan, but whatever. I can change it to be next-gen MMOGs, cuz I am the Grand Pooh-Bah!

[Jonathan]

And, oh, Vanguard is going to bomb horribly because it's going to launch really soon, but it's not done.