Just a question.....

[Maskil]

I tryed to play it, I have this Korean friend, and he went there like 2 years ago, to vist his dad. I heard about it, but did jack shit about it. Then two months ago or so, I decided to download it, but it costs money now.

And if im not mistaken, they want a credit card number to play free for like a week or so, i could be mistaken, but they want something like that.

[Bigfoot]

The current trend that seems to be emerging with online games now (not neccassaryily the top main stream ones but the 2nd teir ones) is that you download the game for free and pay for the monthly charges. JumpGate is one of these, Ryzom is to (or will be) as well as others...

If i was to set up a set of servers in own country for a game the cost of hiring or purchaseing bandwidth or dedicated line would be around 8-10,000$ a month (thats assuming I had a large user base, if you had 100-200 users would cost about 1-2000$ or so, maybe a bit less, i can alwasy shop around for lower deals) a month. In my country broadband still has a monthly limit on downloads (thats if you where useing a standard ISP to run your game, most comercial games buy or hire the actual Lines)

You then have to fit in the cost of a server or should i say servers, since there are rarely ever 1... unless the coders can code a network engine that can get the same performance from a single server as it woud from multiply, now servers are not your average home PC, these things are very powerfull specialised machines, they make your home PC look like an old 486, if you tried to run EQ or UO on your home PC (remeber youd have over 1000-2000 players accessing your machine at one single time) your machine would lock up in an instant or your modem would just freeze (if you didnt have bandwidth sufficient to handle it), although the most probable situation is your uses would experiance unearthly lag due to your CPU being unable to work out and send all teh data it needed to to all teh players fast enough.

 I havent looked into prices recently, and cant remeber vivdly what they where when I checked but I can tell you that your middle line server would cost at least 7-9000$ (im talking my countries currency), although I think there is a way to use older machines to make one large server, which I think is what the RS server system is, 12 old pentium 300\'s can do what a single server can normaly do data wise.

So for those that whine about p2p, do a  little research and come into the real world dont expect companies to spend 2-3 milion dollars developing a game and its software (your average PC game takes around that to develope comercialy) and then to say hey we\'ll let you play for free while we take teh huge cost of running the game servers our selves...

p2p is a fact of life (and as i see it keeps all those who are unable to apply for a credit card, ie all those bellow 18yrs of age out of the game)...

I hope PS can pull of the free use, and still have acceptable gameplay.. if they do they will have done something most cannot... and ill respect themforever for that accomplishment, not that it means anything.

[Cyonamie]

ok the difference between eq and like, lets say tribes 2.  tribes 2 has a 32 person limit to start, and YOUR computer hosts the game, just like age of empires or anything else, eq is hosted by big ass servers owned by SOE, which can kiss my ass )

[Bigfoot]

the devs at VI nerfed my main characters class yesterday.. teh beastlords... we did fine before the patch, and where promised an upgrade.. instead we got a shuffle that made us worse then we already where (mages are whinning since they dont want to lose there top seat at the pet classes)... but i love my beastie... ill perserver.. seems Verant has about 20 large scale bugs in this recent patch to EQ...

whats this got to do with anything?... I dont know... its jsut funny seeing a company like VI that breaks its game every time it patchs something, you got the patch then teh day after patch... hell they even forgot to put teh new shadowknight spells in they said where going to go in.. hows that for major stupidity.

[TheGeneral]

I myself was, and still am a beta tester. Used to roam the lands of the internet, looking for good, free games to play. There number of games that i went thought is unbelivable, starting form the first one that i played, Lineage. It was super addictive, and still in beta, so I wasted most of my time there. Anywho, that game is too big for us all, raking in massive amounts of hard cash daily, more than any of the other games could ever hope to earn in a month.
Anywho, the point is, don\'t whine about p2p, it is a way of life, and it has the basic concepts of our everyday life, like shoping for example, you don\'t go, \"Just Cause I bought that tommato, i should not pay for this orange!\" Plus, this has already been discusses.
So yeah, i agreed with the p2p side of this, since buying the CD is not often enough, and MANY of the MMORPGS on the market now a days don\'t even sell you the CD, they allow you to download the game, for free, and make you p2p.
Plus, there is a simple solution to this problem, don\'t play MMORPGs. Isn\'t that always the case, if you don\'t like something, you can just leave?

[Cthulu]

Originally posted by Bigfoot
whats this got to do with anything?... I dont know... its jsut funny seeing a company like VI that breaks its game every time it patchs something, you got the patch then teh day after patch... hell they even forgot to put teh new shadowknight spells in they said where going to go in.. hows that for major stupidity.

the VI office is about 5 miles from my house, and my friends dad used to work there, i\'ve met most of the programmers, and they are pretty bloody incompetent. This is magnified by the fact that almost no one who is there now was there when they made the game. I also have the suspicion that they make bugs on purpose, to create a false job security.

Originally posted by Bigfoot
the devs at VI nerfed my main characters class yesterday.. teh beastlords... we did fine before the patch, and where promised an upgrade.. instead we got a shuffle that made us worse then we already where (mages are whinning since they dont want to lose there top seat at the pet classes)... but i love my beastie... ill perserver.. seems Verant has about 20 large scale bugs in this recent patch to EQ...

I always laugh when i see people complaining about things now, they used to be oh so much worse. I played a rogue pre-kunark and it was terrible before they fixed them. Backstabs did about 50 damage max (the highest one i\'ve ever seen is 6k, my personal highest is 1872) and there was no evade, Rogues were about as useful as a bard tanking in 1337 full bronze. Also, if you can completely solo to 60, you have a gross advantage over other classes, and don\'t have much room to complain  

Anyway, to keep this rant on topic, yes Pay to Play is a fact of life, if you don\'t like it, don\'t play games, or make your own, whatever floats your boat.

[Vyse316]

Note: This post may be a little late.  

As a matter of fact Maskil, Ragnarok is an amazing MMORPG.  The art in that game is spectacular.  It\'s disappointing that the servers are down for a while (Much like Project Entropia\'s) but there\'s not much that can be done about it.

The only free MMORPG\'s that I know of are:

Planeshift (looks good)
Ragnarok (is good)
Project Entropia (Finding out on October 1st)
and good ol\' Runescape (is......Runescape?   )

Runescape gets a bad rap mainly because of it\'s simple graphics and animations.  It\'s actually not all that bad, and not all people on there are retards.  Many people try Runescape, but are turn off by the fact that it\'s not a newbie friendly game.  Give it a chance, it can grow on you.

Whoops!  I almost forgot about the Half Life MMORPGs that are coming out:

Quest: the Lost Realm
Role Play Half Life

These are also free and have the potential of being entertaining.  However, only if their teams to a good job and if a lot of people become interested in them.

~Vyse out.

 

[Link]

No, your extremely wrong, Alot of people loved runescape before it started pouring in with lamers, and thats whats turning people off from it, you cant walk around for 5 minutes without having some idiot PM you or follow you around.

[TheGeneral]

OK, it seems to be a \"thing\" now-a-days to annoy Alucard. You know the old saying \"Crap is crap, no matter how you look at it!\"
You can\'t just judge the game by it\'s graphics, or the size of it\'s download file. The bottom 3 games you have described are BY far the worst games I have encountered.
Ragnarok is \"crap\" because it harbours some of the most stupid people on the planet, and the company does NOTHING to fix that. No matter how you look at it, there are games that are updated daily to keep the hackers at bay, that game is lucky if it gets updated once a month.
Project EntaCRAP is another horrible example. It\'s just a massive pyramid scam online, and anyone with a brain of a four year old will understand. What kind of an idea is it, to convert REAL money, into \"virtual\" CRAP. And the curancy is just humourous 1:10. People I now, used to pile $100+ a moth, just to sustain their character, since EVERYTHING in that game needs repair, and guess what, it costs virtual money to do so. Plus the \"servers\" once in a while just decide to \"erase\" everything, and whipe out all the items and money, I don\'t know how it is now, but when i played, i lost my stuff several times. And i believe they still lag.
And the final one, well, those who have been around me long enough, know what i think about RuneCRAP! People don\'t play it, or stoped playing not only because of bad graphics, but because of those idiots that steal your character, and those mods that corrupt the rest. I for one, know a bad apple when i see one, and stay away!

[Princess Aelya]

*clap clap clap clap clap*very well put!

 but one thing i disagree with is your statement about ragnarok. i myself liked that game. i made many friends there and the people were not all that bad. although ill admit some of the people in that game were lame kill thieves, i didnt have much trouble other than that. the thing wrong with RO is there simply isnt enough to it. its missing quests, skills, and i think its a bit to hard to make money. but other than that, RO was fun for me. it is unfortunate you had a bad expirience with that game.

[tcd12642]

Tibia was released with graphics better then the R word. About as good as ragranok... which is pay now.
http://www.tibia.com

[Maskil]

Vyse316,

I played Runscape for like a year, i had all that good shit, the ammolite or whatever it was, the mining, that pissed me off, \"Click, Click, Click , Click, - You get no ore ,repeat\" How fruterating was that, and just in general, that game after playing it for a while, made me quiet mad.

Also with Ragnarok, yah, the graphics were amazing, but everyone on there was an ass(with the exception of like 20 people or so). And I got banned in it, after spending about 7 months on my char. that just pissed me off (I had a pretty decent char too. it was like lvl49, with a hell of a lot of money, and epquiment). But all the negative things about that game out weighed the good, so, it was crappy, in my opinion that is.

[Vyse316]

I have to disagree with most of the statements said about the MMORPGs that I listed.  

Firstly, I\'ll start off with Link\'s statement.  No, I\'m not extremely wrong, you\'re the one at fault here.  Many of my friends (you know what friends are right?) have been turned off by the fact that the graphics suck and that newbies are basically just thrust into the game with no special help given to them.  I have yet to have one complain about some idiot harassing them.  I myself find such rare instances humorous, and if I\'m in a good mood I sometimes even give them some free armour or money, just \'cuz I\'m a nice guy  .  It\'s a fact about all MMORPGs, don\'t fool yourselves into thinking that Planeshift won\'t have the same problem.  

Moving on Alucard\'s statements.  You can\'t fix how people act in a game.  How could the company fix a person\'s personality with an update?  You obviously didn\'t think that remark about Ragnarok over very well.  Plus, I played Ragnarok for about a month before the servers were shut down, and it was updated AT LEAST 5 times.  I also loved the \"witty\" names you gave Project Entropia and Runescape.  Replacing the ends of their names with CRAP! is down right original (Check your spelling, it\'s Entropia not Entaopia.)  God, you must have the intelligence rating of bread crumb to even think that those would\'ve seemed hilarious.  Idiots that steal your character?  Hmmmm.  People can\'t magically steal your character in Runescape, you have to GIVE them your password, and you\'d have to be a pretty big idiot to do that.  Plus, there is software in place now that bans people who use mods such as autominers.  Moving on to the Project Entropia statements.  \"And I believe they still lag.\"  Its amazing how a game that\'s been shutdown since August can still lag.  Do some research numb nuts.  The servers were shut down in August because so many people complained about losing their money.  The MindArk team has been working steadily ever since trying to make a bug free system.  The ETA now is October 1st, give it a try then and re-evaluate your previous statements.  Despite the fact that you\'re a blithering idiot who can\'t spell worth a damn, I partially agree with your view on Project Entropia\'s economy.  The 1:10 ratio is preposterous.  I know that I wouldn\'t pile on $100+ a month  to play it.  However, I am impressed with the concept of it.  It\'s refreshing to see that teams are still thinking of unique ideas to prevent their projects from becoming mindless EQ clones.

Phew,  that about does it.  That\'s a load off my chest.

~Vyse out

PS:  Princess Aelya, for God\'s sake capitalize.

PPS:  I apologize to all the people I lashed out at, but hell, in my original statement I attacked no one, it was an innocent little post.  I believe that my opinion should\'ve been treated with a little more respect.

[Maskil]

Ack, earlier today I downloaded and played that triba game, I didnt like it too much. Personally, I think Runescape had better graphics than this(last time I checked that is).

[Kiern]

I hate when people, who have suprisingly good arguments to begin with, yell at others for grammar mistakes and capitalization....its totally ruins the statement as people focus on the wrong parts, it also shows that you are running out of things to say, so you look for stupid things that have nothing to do with what your talking about

im not yelling at anyone in particular, i just like to post what i think right at that moment