Originally posted by: BigPoppa
Originally posted by: Gurck
As far as the OP's question, let me throw a few questions at you:
Do you want a nag screen to buy the latest expansion or company product every time you log in?Single click nag screen. Doesn't even phase me
Do you want in-game advertising for said latest expansion or company product?You still haven't provided me with an example of in-game advertising. The most i've ever EVER seen was a SERVER-MOTD mentioning a new expansion was released. Hardly invasive.
Do you want a plethora of bugs, all of which are ignored? Sort of like the raid-lockout bug that is still f*cking guilds over? Or how about the bug allowing the same character name multiple times on a single server? Or the incessant lag plaguing servers still 4 months past release? How about queues to even play the damn game?
Do you want a horribly inefficient game engine which doesn't like to run on anything less than a 6800, yet only looks marginally better than WoW? The engine isn't inefficient. Its futureproofed a bit. I run the game on "balanced" which is pretty nice eye-candy on a 6600GT
Do you want to be "accidentally" billed twice for the same month, then told that it's your responsibility to stop payment on your credit card despite the goof admittedly being their fault?I don't know a single person who played eq1 or eq2 who got double billed. I played for 4+ years. You do the math. Mistakes happen.
Do you want to be forced to have to find a group to accomplish anything even if you only have a half hour to play?Forced group play builds a healthy community. This is why EQ1's community is/was far better than WoWs will ever be. You just don't get to know people until 60+, either through raids or instance grouping.
Do you want expansions released before major bugs and flaws in the current content have been addressed?I'd rather have more content than a couple of bugs fixed. Name a major bug not fixed before an EQ1 expansion was released
I could go on like the Energizer bunny... These are just a few of the distasteful things Sony does which Blizzard does also.
Simply put, if you don't mind paying to see advertising, you're dense. Further, for a while starting with LoY, they made the nagscreen look just like the EULA screen, randomly switched which side the 'preorder' and 'no thanks' buttons were on, and (for credit card customers) would auto-bill you for it if you clicked 'preorder' without a confirmation screen - and it was a nonrefundable purchase. This way, if you weren't paying attention, it was easy to accidentally order the expansion with no way out when you were just trying to log into the game. They did this, of course, because the expansions were too crappy to entice many people to purchase them of their own volition...
I'd chalk up not seeing broadcast spam to the same apologetic attitude you showed toward not minding a nagscreen. The week or two before the release of an expansion or another SOE game a GM will broadcast (and not just once, but 2-3 times consecutively; ie. spam) about it approximately every half hour.
What's the raid lockout bug? My guild has had no troubles raiding the Molten Core. At any rate, any game will have bugs, this is unavoidable. What seperates Sony games from the pack is the sheer number of bugs, and the apathetic, customer-blaming attitude they show toward even extremely severe bugs. When the quest container bug prevented 90% of all quests from being completed, I asked about it on the official forum. I was summarily told to STFU by the fanboys and that there was no such bug by the forum moderator. Two weeks later they finally admitted it. A month later they finally fixed it :roll: This wasn't a door opening the wrong way, this was a severe bug affecting almost every player.
The game engine is awful. It takes 3x the computer to look 10% better in a technical sense, and still doesn't compare to WoW artistically.
Double billing is a very common SOE practice, they rely on customers being apathetic toward doing anything about it or simply not noticing. The biggest example of it came a few months after the Luclin release, there was a big stink about it on the boards and an addendum to a patch message which read something like "some customers may have been billed twice for this month. It's our fault, but it's your responsibility to stop payment, otherwise we'll gladly take this "accidental" profit
😉" This was the only mention made of it, and put in the patch message instead of the login nag screen because they know most people don't actually read the patch message...
Encouraging grouping/guilding builds a healthy community, such as what WoW has, but forcing it only fosters frustration. WoW perfectly hit the line between encouraging grouping and allowing for the fact that people have real lives. Amazing that, without playing the game, you base how you feel about it on so many false assumptions... EQ1's community, on the other hand, pretty much died after Brad left and Sony botched up the game so badly. The only people left were the idiots and the true addicts, neither of which make very good friends, acquaintances or guildmates. Actually, many of the better people moved on to ... you guessed it ... WoW
🙂
Name a major bug not fixed before an EQ1 expansion was released
PoE ring a bell?
😉
