Well, Guild Wars 2.

 

Which is a good game, and there is a free weekend coming up.

 

Skykes, you have a source for that? Just curious because I haven't seen that anywhere.

Edit:Nevermind, didnt realize you were talking about GW2.

 

GW2 isn't WoW-like? I beg to differ, but I'd rather not start an argument. It shares many similarities, at the very least.

All major mmos (that are still running officially) are themeparks designed under WoW's successful strategies, despite them not working for nearly every other company that tries them. The only exception to that statement is EVE, which is basically a massively multiplayer business/espionage sim with tiresome combat mechanics.

If you're looking for something other than the "WOW experience", it can only be found on privately ran UO or SWG servers [I'm only assuming this, I have no first hand experience with either]. Or, in text-based MUDs (though, many of these are also WoW-inspired, so you have to be pretty picky about these, too).

My experience with MUDs recently though, has gotten me convinced the "massive" in MMO is highly overrated. Small communities are easier to design around and ultimately provide a richer experience. For instance, in WoW, because of the scant profession choice, it quickly becomes pointless to try and utilize crafting, because it only becomes profitable for a select few abusers of the game's systems, and highly unprofitable for everyone else. This is mostly because the economy isn't diverse enough, it can't support all the competition in the narrow economic fields. EVE avoids this issue because it can take years to be a proprely trained titan pilot or titan builder, nevermind that you can't possibly do both as a single character in your real life time. But, a smaller community could support basic crafting more effectively... Say, five hundred active players. But once you start getting into the thousands and thousands, you just have too much competition.

Erm, I better shut up. Just another pointless tangent - I'm sure 'Skyrim Online' (the game looks more like Skyrim to me than anything else) is going to have the same kind of crafting system WoW has?

 

Chime from what we know of the crafting system it's going to be more like GW2's crafting system and SWG, also they have decided to cut the global AH, guilds will run private AHs and that will be the only form of AH.

Edit: Source http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/821/feature/7651

 

ESO is going to be subscription based and have an in game cash shop.

 

The best of both greedy, money-grubbing worlds. Brilliant!

But in WoW crafting is nearly always profitable if you collect the mats yourself. If you don't understand that you never really played WoW at all. The point of crafting is self-improvement or monetary gain (and sometimes both) because you can either craft upgrades yourself by obtaining the materials (largely outside of instances) or buy crafted upgrades that other people made.

The enchanting/glyph system was kind of toxic, unless you could be bothered to level one yourself, in which case everything was fine.

 

The Old Republic went free to play in six months.

Twenty bucks says TESO doesn't make it to five.

 

No bet, they need to make it 6 months to at least get two quarters worth of information to hand to their shareholders. Gives them time to explain why this isnt a complete fuck-up by the company.

 

I played WoW ages and ages ago, like, launch month. Maybe it's changed, but when I played it, the margin of profit of crafting was absolutely tiny. The cost to get your craft skill high enough plus the cost to finally make anything was far higher than just buying a finished product from the market. Yes, you could "get your own materials" but that would entail hours upon hours of laborious work for a small markup. You'd make more gold just grinding in one spot than trying to hand-farm all the necesary materials, especially if you needed low-tier cloth or something to get your craft skill up to snuff in the first place.

I really think a strong crafting system is integral to a succesful MMO. Like, if you craft something, it should be unique to you in some manner. What I mean by that is... I think MMOs should strive to have more modular crafting systems. Copper mined from "The Dark Hills" or wherever, differs from copper mined from "The Deep Mines". If your copper is from the dark hills, it's lighter. if your copper is from the deep mines, it's more sturdy. Thus, using that copper to make "Bronze Armor" would have modifiers to it based on the sources of materials collected?

I guess, when I first started WoW, I had no idea what I was getting into. It was my first MMO. I had this silly idea that crafters would be unique and desired, that you could could craft something and people would say on the server, "If you want hammers, you need to buy them from such and such, he makes the best ones." Yet, the reality is, crafting in WoW is "canned crafting" or whatever - everyone makes the same stuff once they reach the same level of skill.

Again, I'm blubbering here, but I'm yearning for a system where players have greater opportunities to define their "role" in an MMO. If you can acquire the right materials from the right place, crafting should yield a different result. Otherwise... it's just kind of phony, there's no way to diversify yourself in the market, and there's always someone who can sell what you're making cheaper, so you're always forced to undercut the competition, instead of stand ahead of it as a leader. Auction Houses also undermine everything, because suddenly any item you want is potentially a click away, it de-emphasizes items too, it makes gold too highly valued. So, I guess I'm glad TESO is taking a slightly different approach. I hope it works out - I agree that sitting around and idling, hoping to sell your junk, is not fun or ideal, but the auction house is a cheap, damaging fix. If mainstream MMOs can move away from it, it's one quality that might tempt me to try and play one in the future.

 

Ironically enough, Chime, it was very much like that in the old Star Wars Galaxies game. Where you harvested your metal from, and how you processed it and whatnot, determined the strength of the product. I was in a guild with a guy who was apparently well known as the best shipwright on the server. He made the best TIE Interceptors.

 

What Ravinus said. SWG in its original form made raw materials variable in quality from place to place. It was wonderful because it gave guilds a purpose other than being a glorified army. The best resources were on the more difficult planets, where player towns were not allowed like Dathomir.

Worst decision in gaming was Sony and Lucasarts not sticking to their guns in terms of the setting, well that and going into certain towns, especially on Naboo, and getting lag ganked trying to get on the marketplace because everyone drew the wildlife into town to kill it.

I miss pre-combat upgrade Galaxies.

 

I tried playing SWG on a private server a while back ('bout a year ago) but they were still getting their shit together. You might want to give it a try, but I dunno the state of it right now - they were still reverse engineering lots of code. I've never played it, but I was always curious.

What I know of its history indicates they "had no chocie" though - they were bleeding subs before the combat update. The update killed the game faster instead of fixing it, but they needed to do some kind of ploy to revive the game.

 

The space combat was the best thing that ever was. Imperial Ace Pilot, right here. The ground combat was bullshit, but holy hell did I ever love space combat. I had a crew of my friends who would go up with me in my gunship and we'd just shoot all the rebels while one guy decorated the interior of the ship. For shiggles.

 

A beta weekend started last night so I got to try this out for a few hours then and a few more this morning.

It obviously needs a lot of work, some textures look pretty bad( but not awful). Animations are fairly terrible right now, casting in first person can look bad. I just ran into a funny bug where my bow has the wrong model and loads some axe when I equip it, but it still fires (invisible) arrows and the character does the bow animations(with an axe).

That said, the gameplay is fun, there's lots of character customization. Crafting is a bit slow to level up, but it works fine and you can level every trade skill. There's no pvp in the game yet as you can only play 1 faction(Ebonheart Pact).

I don't know if it will be worth buying and subbing for as it's too early to tell, the product that ships in a year will be very different. It feels like Elder Scrolls though, the music, environments.

I'll play it some more later and give more specific details if you guys want.

 

Yes, we do. It sounds like an official advertising statement thus far. Generic, noncommittal, completely safe, and not the least bit interesting.

What did they change about the gameplay?

 

Yes plz. Screen shots etc work well too.

I also think you mentioned videos?

 

My email is plastered all over the screen.

Since when?

 

Well, you said it was fun, and TES combat has never been particularly entertaining. It's there and it gets the job done, but it's never been a primary feature. I don't boot up Skyrim, Oblivion, or Morrowind because I just need to go back and kill some people with their awesome fighting system.

Allow me to rephrase the question.

Are you more encouraged to play in first or third person?