MMO's are currently massively disappointing to an old UO player :(

[power_hour]

Talk to me about Eve. Is it free to play or a monthly fee? Sell me on it, sir.

PVP is the end game. Everything in the game is about PVP. Either actual combat or competing in the markets. The name of the game is making money (ISK).

Think of it like a game of Monopoly in space. Not a game I would recommend unless your absolutely bored and want to try something different. Be warned this game is dominated by spreadsheets and certain personalities who take great pleasure in ensuring your stay is short lived.

Indeed its a strange and quirky game but can be rewarding if you get the hang of it.

 

[Cuda1447]

i always find it funny that it seems like the only people who like the permanent death/looting players/hardcore game styles are people who like to grief other players.

basically the people who like being jerks to other people. must have something to do with small penis, no friends, no gfs, etc.

You're missing all the side effects of such a world. Crafting was actually worth a damn, because it was sometimes difficult to get the materials. Meaning they were worth a lot more. Working with others was important. And I'm not talking about just going out to the same place to kill MOBS, I'm talking about organizing a concerted effort to drive a group of PK's from a highly traveled road.

Owning a house was not only fun, but extremely tactical in some cases. If you had a house near a highly traveled area it gave you an advantage in combat, either to protect the innocent, or to kill them. And believe me, there were plenty on both side of the equation. It's not like you had groups of gankers running around killing everyone. You had good vs evil. In fact, there was more good than evil. You learned the way the world worked. Where to go, where to avoid. Where to go in groups. Where to go, but at the first sign of trouble where to run and hide at. How to use the world around you to your advantage, etc. It wasn't just griefers and jerks. Guild combat was just as big as, if not a hell of a lot bigger than your regular mindless killing. Being able to war a single guild that you don't get along with was great fun. You could take each other, anywhere, anytime without consequence. You think hunting mobs is fun? How about hunting an enemy guild!

I guess the best comparison is this. FPS games are mostly online nowadays. Modern Warfare 3 is much better playing against others than single player. MMO's are the same way. I want to compete against other players, instead of constantly battling NPC's or MOBS.

 

[Cuda1447]

PVP is the end game. Everything in the game is about PVP. Either actual combat or competing in the markets. The name of the game is making money (ISK).

Think of it like a game of Monopoly in space. Not a game I would recommend unless your absolutely bored and want to try something different. Be warned this game is dominated by spreadsheets and certain personalities who take great pleasure in ensuring your stay is short lived.

Indeed its a strange and quirky game but can be rewarding if you get the hang of it.

Alright, I downloaded the Eve client and am going to start the 14 day trial. Any recommendations?

 

[Arkadrel]

Alright, I downloaded the Eve client and am going to start the 14 day trial. Any recommendations?

Dont get a big ship to soon, you ll just end up loseing it.
Get a small cheap one, decked out and try pvping vs other players in smaller ships.

Skill points > decked ship gear > player skills

Enjoy fleeing from space pirites, that ll take your ship hostage/ransom, for ISK (pay or get blown up). If your into that sort of stuff, you should join a guild.

And Griefers that like to make you cry, your blown up ship is all the live for. Its fun to have a high Bounty! its One Piece in space! who can be the most notorious space pirite in eve? you can just go around blowing up as many as you can get (live for that kill-list).

Also enjoy hunting Miners, that want rare minerals they can only find in unsafe space (hint, miners ships = weak, go find a dude and random him for some minerals or ISK). ***Warning, they usually either pay a group to use their space (and they dont like pirites, its bad bussiness), or they hire protection to come with them when they mine (or guild members from mineing companies).

Also, not all space is equal in Eve, some spots have better minerals/ores, or strategic value,,... and usually theres some big guys (bands of them) hanging around those places. They ll have buildt fortresses there and have put up all kinds of turrets ect to protect their areas


Because every item in space, is man made, ei the bullets/rockets ect you fire.... demand can reach good heights. You could take up crafting, or buying something thats common in 1 place of space, and then move it to another area where there is less of it, and sell it there for profit.


so money is made by:

1) missions (be they fighting, crafting,mineing/ transporting)
2) crafting/transporting/mineing / just killing random NPC ships that are pirates
3) space piracy, ei takeing people hostage/held at ransom.
4) protection, get hired to fight off space pirates. (ei. follow a miner, payed to find/exicute a pirate).
5) I believe you can buy stock in various NPC bussiness, and try to manipulate the world to your benefit, if you rather try speculation in space

theres probably more ways to make ISK.
I wouldnt be surprised if someone payed you to survey/gather intel in a area, with probs, or if you found some rare minerals in a area not currently occupied, that sort of stuff.

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

Just curious about EVE, do people with the huge ships more often die to being killed by other huge ships, fleets of smaller ships or being betrayed from within their own organizations, lol?

 

[Arkadrel]

@Maniacalpha1-1

I heard there was some guy that took like 4years to infiltrate a big "group", get access to their guild banks, and then he emptied them out and left. Apperntly that was the plan all along... he d always stayed true to the guild he came from, it just took him some time to work his way up the ladder, to be able to betray they other guild.

And yes.... smaller chips are much faster to build, cheaper compaired to the larger ones. And yes, smaller ships can take down the bigger ones.

Like 20 frigates vs a battleship ^-^
Even if you lose alot of the frigates, thats probably still cheaper than that BS was, and you could make a profit killing him and salvageing his parts. Best corse of action would be to force him to pay a ransom though, then if your a nice person, after he pays you let him leave, or your a bastard and you kill him anyways.

 

[Cuda1447]

So it sounds like I would enjoy being a pirate/solo hunter/griefer. I want to pick up the scraps from bigger battles. Hunt small ships. Kill weakened ships etc... possibly be a bit of a mercenary.

I assume that's possible. What route should I go from the start?

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

@Maniacalpha1-1

I heard there was some guy that took like 4years to infiltrate a big "group", get access to their guild banks, and then he emptied them out and left. Apperntly that was the plan all along... he d always stayed true to the guild he came from, it just took him some time to work his way up the ladder, to be able to betray they other guild.

And yes.... smaller chips are much faster to build, cheaper compaired to the larger ones. And yes, smaller ships can take down the bigger ones.

Like 20 frigates vs a battleship ^-^
Even if you lose alot of the frigates, thats probably still cheaper than that BS was, and you could make a profit killing him and salvageing his parts. Best corse of action would be to force him to pay a ransom though, then if your a nice person, after he pays you let him leave, or your a bastard and you kill him anyways.

I read about that story, that's actually why I was wondering how this usually happens. It's a couple years old at least, so in day to day business, do most people leave Battleships alone and just try to rob from within or are you guaranteed to have to fight off fleets all the time?

Battleships aren't multi-crewed, are they?

 

[PingSpike]

I never played UO...my internet connection was awful back then and I didn't want to pay a monthly fee at the time. But the world it created always sounds pretty exciting and dangerous. I really have no interest in current MMOs like WoW though. They all just look like a group grindfest where the only reason to play is to get better gear which you then use to grind more to get better gear to grind more and so on. I just don't feel like there's any draw in just playing for its own sake, they rely on those tiny rewards that ultimately don't amount to anything and punishments that don't matter to keep the player going. It seems like a good business strategy to sell the game but I'm not particular into that play myself.

That said I totally understand why that game didn't appeal to most people. If you just wanted to level up your character then it isn't the game for you and I suspect a large majority of the MMO playing public actually just wants that. It sounds more like the stats and economy of item selling/crafting melded with the adversarial play of a FPS. Its the wild wild west only everyone isn't Clint Eastwood all the time, many times they're the guy he shot in the back.

One thing I really liked the sound of from the descriptions here though is how item usefulness/quality was in a much narrower band. I really like how dying isn't that big of a deal because you can pretty quickly acquire some gear that is at least almost as good as the stuff you lost. And I like how cheaper gear can be a better choice. The item grind exists in most RPGs single or multiplayer and I've come to despise it. There's all these cool armors in a game and most of them you wear for a sum total of 5 minutes before you switch to the next one on the scale. The low end ones are essentially trash and the highend ones make you a god.

 

[Arkadrel]

@PingSpike

blasphemy! think of Diablo II, the itemisation and build variation made that so fun.
Im actually kinda worried guildwars2 wont have enough of it, you need to have a reason to keep doing insanely hard (but fun) and rewarding dungeons, that reason is new gear, which then serves in some way as ei better WvW, or faster farming or something like that.

Without a decent itemisation, a mmo falls apart.

Unless you consider a game like BF3 a mmo, its played online but.... to each their own though.


My favorite of all time MMO is called FFXI, I played that for like 5 years.

You had stats like:

str,dex,vit,int,mnd,chr for your character.
And gears could have like +m.acc/+m.atk, +acc/haste,+fastcast ect ect.

However because you had many stats, you had many Job abilities, that required differnt stats.

that ment you could collect alot of differnt sets of armor, and swap item sets for each job ability you had before you used your job ability. (this ment you where always "blinking" in and out of item sets, but it worked well, and the differnce wasnt huge, but doing so was the differnce between a newbie with a so so armor set, and a elite dude that did more dps/tanked better ect ect)

eksample: tank has a fire elemental resistant set of armors, when he sees a dragon start doing X attack animation, he would swap into that armor, then once it hits him, swap back to his normal high defense armors.

The same thing for DPS, certain skills used certain stats, so youd swap gears, do a weapon skill, swap back. Maybe cast some support spell, and again swap back and forth.

To this day, no other MMO has been as hard or rewarding to play for me. The PvE in it is the best of any MMO ever.



typical macro 1 weapon skill:

/equip head "X" (damage set to do good damage with skill)
/equip body "X"
/equip ring "X"
ect
ect
/ws "spinning back fist of dooooom"
/wait 3 sec
/equip head "y" (acc. peice to high have hit rate)
/equip body "y"
/equip ring "y"
ect
ect





that way you d be jumping in and out of armors, without it bothering you, and you could collect alot more armors and custumise your character alot better. The game was so tough, you where forced to party with others, and not being smart about useing your class ment you ended up pulling the team down.


This enforced the mentality of gathering more armors.... but thats what MMOs are all about.

get best armors -> kill new insane bosses and get best armors -> kill newer bosses.

In ffxi, there was a sense of achievement from some of these fights, they could take like 7hours to kill x boss or something. And be so hard, only few groups on a intire server could teamwork well enough to do them.

Thats what made it fun, unique looking armors, that signaled "im a badass".



instead of WoW where you run in, you kill boss, you leave, and thats that.
Everyone has armors that look more or less the same, and have simular stats, ect.

In wow Items became somewhat meaningless.... there was no sense of acheivement.
Wow = easy kiddy mode gameplay = not fun
ffxi = challengeing gameplay in pve = fun (sense of achievement when you do something most cant)

 

[Jimmah]

EvE 'used' to be good, when Empire wasn't so overcrowded, high-sec ganking was allowed and you could get a good, random fight in by trolling through low-sec for twenty minutes. When I left, it was all about who can tank you just long enough to dump a carrier beside you, or where their buddies will come into system because they've been baiting.

Ugh. I miss the pie/anti-pie wars, pirating around in a phoon and fighting a gang of cruisers at a planet, wardecs on random corps and hunting their newbs all day only to be caught with your pants down by a coordinated group of 2 month olds, stealing ore from miners and having their terribly fitted machariel guard attack and get wasted by a drone/cruise phoon.

It may have changed since I left but when I did the PvP was so endlessly boring and predictable it lost the fun and felt more like a grind. 43m SP wing command claymore/sleipnir gang mod char sitting collecting dust, such a waste.

 

[Merad]

If your going to try EVE, look into eve university or try to find a corp to help you get started and learn the game. If you haven't seen the classic image, it's accurate (worse now, that image was as of 2007 or so).

 

[NikolaeVarius]

i always find it funny that it seems like the only people who like the permanent death/looting players/hardcore game styles are people who like to grief other players.

basically the people who like being jerks to other people. must have something to do with small penis, no friends, no gfs, etc.

No. The reason why we love making people lose everything is that it runs the player driven economy. There is almost NO intervention from the game itself on how the economy operates. Which means, you need some way of draining money from the economy.

You do this by popping a 1billion isk ship some dude took 5 months to save up for and fit and laughing at him while warp disrupting his pod and looting officer mods.

The entire economy based around destruction of player assets is such a powerful game mechanic.

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

Exactly how much firepower is needed to take down a 1 billion ISK ship? If it escapes with heavy damage are repairs expensive?

Also, as you accumulate money, is money completely safe in game-provided banks, if such a thing exists?

 

[NikolaeVarius]

Exactly how much firepower is needed to take down a 1 billion ISK ship? If it escapes with heavy damage are repairs expensive?

It's highly varaible. 1 billion would be a fitted Carrier, which is a capital ship. It could be a Navy Raven, which is a Battleship but more awesome then stock, or,... T3 ships? Not too sure how much they cost nowadays. Repairs are pretty expensive.

But of course, to SOME people 1 billion isk is pocket change. They have hundreds of millions of isk moving through their wallets every day.

Money is safe, no such thing as in game banks. But 1 billion isk ship, you will probably get ransomed.

 

[Merad]

Exactly how much firepower is needed to take down a 1 billion ISK ship? If it escapes with heavy damage are repairs expensive?

A freighter could probably* be taken down by one frigate if it was caught alone without help in the wrong place. A dreadnought or mothership with a fleet supporting it would take significant effort to take down.

*Actually the frigate probably couldn't carry enough ammo.

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

It's highly varaible. 1 billion would be a fitted Carrier, which is a capital ship. It could be a Navy Raven, which is a Battleship but more awesome then stock, or,... T3 ships? Not too sure how much they cost nowadays. Repairs are pretty expensive.

But of course, to SOME people 1 billion isk is pocket change. They have hundreds of millions of isk moving through their wallets every day.

Money is safe, no such thing as in game banks. But 1 billion isk ship, you will probably get ransomed.

I was reading on some Eve wiki or whatever that said "most experienced players have at least one battleship"....

Can other players control ships you own on your behalf or do you control all your own ships? Is this one of the things corporations are for?

 

[NikolaeVarius]

I was reading on some Eve wiki or whatever that said "most experienced players have at least one battleship"....

Can other players control ships you own on your behalf or do you control all your own ships? Is this one of the things corporations are for?

Control all your own ships. Corporations are for safety and money.

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

Control all your own ships. Corporations are for safety and money.

Can you have multiple fleets in different locations and switch between controlling them? Not liking the RTS control system was one reason I didn't go past 2 hours in the trial, lol...

 

[SunnyD]

Go play LinkRealms then.

 

[Aikouka]

Wow = easy kiddy mode gameplay = not fun
ffxi = challengeing gameplay in pve = fun (sense of achievement when you do something most cant)

WoW used to make some of its PVE achievements significantly harder to attain, but I think what you're ignoring is what made them hard to attain. It wasn't true difficulty, but rather the time sink required. For example, back in vanilla WoW, to beat AQ40, you had to have all of your melee and tanks farm a nature resistance set for Princess Huhuran. This set consisted of gear that was crafted, from quests or drops from lower level dungeons (some of the gear with random stats like "of the monkey").

The same thing also occurred with Ragnaros in Molten Core, and it was nothing more than a time sink that proved some odd sense of devotion. Your example of a "7 hour raid boss" is the exact same thing. It's nothing more than a horrendous time sink. While you can argue that these show a sense of dedication or coordination, it's far and beyond what's truly necessary for fun and exciting gameplay.

 

[Veliko]

Far too many people exaggerate to ridiculous degrees with this. The WoW forums were always chock full of people trying outdo each other with how hardcore they were and go on about how easy WoW was and that it provided no challenge.

Yet whenever you looked at their actual progress they were nowhere near completing the harder bosses.

I used to work with someone who played one of the Final Fantasy MMOs on the PC. It just sounded like a horrendous grind fest that required huge amounts of time rather than being a genuine challenge.

 

[imaheadcase]

Have any old MMORPG games been set up around the idea of capturing entire cities/sections of the game world? And once captured, for example, the guards of such city will always recognize the members of the faction/guild/etc that currently holds the city as friendly?


And of course, you could organize massive raids to take over a city, whether simply because it's PvP and that's what you do, or because the owners are not allowing/charging too much to enter.

Dark Age of Camelot was sort of like that, you could capture keeps that turn over to you from other faction. You could defend it when other realm tried to take it back. You could upgrade them for more defenses and the like.

Having them contributed to something for the realm, more gold, more exp, etc. Having so many keeps gave access to dungeons, stuff like that.

Man thanks a lot, now i'm all weepy eyed thinking of how great it was.

I don't know why people would spend a monthly fee not to fight other people instead of pve. Just give me $15 each month and I'll give you a demo of some rpg each month for single player exp!.

 

[Aikouka]

Far too many people exaggerate to ridiculous degrees with this. The WoW forums were always chock full of people trying outdo each other with how hardcore they were and go on about how easy WoW was and that it provided no challenge.

Yet whenever you looked at their actual progress they were nowhere near completing the harder bosses.

I got into a bit of a discussion about something similar on MMO-Champion, and it made me consider something. I think that heroic or "hard mode" bosses may simply be the wrong way to go about it or at least to not do it that way for everything. The reason is that not everyone likes to do the same thing over again but only in a tweaked manner. I mean... how many people beat a game on one difficulty only to restart the game on a higher difficulty? Personally, I almost never do that, because I don't have that much of an interest (unless I found the prior difficulty too easy).

This makes me wonder if hard modes would be better suited to be a performance-based reward style instead of two specific types. WoW has actually already done this before with Hodir in Ulduar. Hodir's hard mode was to defeat him before he destroyed his special cache, which was done on a timer. To do this, you need a certain DPS level, which can be achieved by using the buffs properly, by gear or a mix of both. I think this is an interesting mechanic, because it's essentially a sort of "high score" or ranking system that you see in games like Angry Birds or Cut the Rope.

Personally, I don't have that much interest in actually doing hard modes in Dragon Soul. Although, I think this is mostly because I'm so tired of raiding that place because of how easy LFR makes it to find a group (I end up doing the raid four times a week).

 

[power_hour]

Alright, I downloaded the Eve client and am going to start the 14 day trial. Any recommendations?

Decide what your end goal is. Run some of the beginner tutorials to get a feel for the game, ask lots of questions, becareful of channel trolls who will bait you into stupid discussions. Remember your reputation is your end game. If your a tard and become known as a tard, you will end up playing solo alot and will probably regret that and quit. If you can win the trust of a decent group of players and/or a corporation and build up a relationship with them you will enjoy the experience alot more.

Remember everything is PVP. So trust nobody even your so-called corpmates. Play smart, keep your cards close to your vest and never give out too much information. Lots of emo types in this game so ignore the bullshit and decide if the game mechanics are for you. You will probably need to roll 3 characters on that account (that is the max). Only 1 can be played / skilled at a time. Try out a few races and areas of space. This will give you broader depth.

And lastly, the desclaimer. Some people don't mind the combat, some people hate it. If you like the basic game and can tolerate the combat mechanics then your goal is to decide what is your future path. Spend the month wisely making sure the game is for you.

As I said this is a long-term game so don't be frustrated. The best advice is try to make many friends so when you login you can try to group up. You will learn much more that way then just running tutorial after tutorial solo day after day.

Good luck.