Drew

I really hate how the term MMO gets slapped on basically anything these days. I enjoyed Planetside while it was teeming with players, but frankly it was as much an MMO as Battlefield 2 was, and while I'm likely to be one of the first through the gates for Planetside 2 (a game like this is going to be best at release), calling it an MMO is just downright silly.

The problem of course is pricing. The pricing for Planetside made little sense since it was essentially a persistent online shooter, with little difference from the plethora of free shooters (well, other than the box price) out there. I doubt a subscription for Planetside 2 is going to make much sense either. I'll still gladly pay it (or more accurately, buy the box and play for the first 30 days free), since I'm sure there'll be a vibrant population for those first 30 days, but I don't see it keeping that vibrant population as there are plenty of quality shooter alternatives that do not have subscriptions (or cash shops), and ultimately, Planetside was a shooter, and I don't see Planetside 2 being much different in that regard.

It's really a shame. I thought FE was the best MMO to come out in years, but stopped playing because no one plays, and I don't play MMOs to solo play. It's failure really shows the state of the playerbase, which is mostly super casual and addicted to lobbies from which they sit afk until their instance pops. What fun, and if I was prone to crying, I would be ballin' over the state of the MMO genre today.

I'm not really sure what the genius is behind splitting the already sparse pvp community between two servers.

I also don't get people who want instant 80s with preset gear. What's the point of pvping in an MMO then? Just play an FPS. They do it much, much better.

PvP in an MMO SHOULD be about battling each other over finite resources in the open world. An open world where all the raid bosses are. No instances at all.

That's obviously not going to happen since the harsh truth is that the majority of any modern MMO's playerbase are the ultra casual, and the ultra casual wouldn't play an old school open world MMO where you could do nothing solo and sometimes waited an hour or two to get a group together to do anything if you were unlucky. Yet, those games had the best pvp.

So, in summary, this server is going to be an utter failure, because the game itself is an utter failure. Every single current gen MMO is an utter failure when it comes to pvp because of instances.

Am I the only one wondering if his face is a billboard for world's worst spray on tan? :/ Especially in light of how light skinned his neck is.

Well, here's my two cents. I thought GW was a horrible game. About on par with a $20 Xbox Live Arcade game. To be fair, it's dirt cheap now, but certainly not when it was released.

That said, I think the no subscription model is the primary reason why their servers were horrible (yea, yea, server performance is amazingly subjective), as I can't imagine their revenu was all that strong over the last few years (ie: I'd love to see a graph that measured # of new players over the years).

Initially, I had no interest in GW2, until someone hammered it into me that they were trying to be very different from Guild Wars' incredibly boring and grindomatic play (to be fair, I don't actually mind grind as a general rule, but the Guild Wars grind is just mind numbingly dull). A lot of what they say about GW2 sounds interesting, but:

1) Hype is hype. It's been...six years now since an MMO didn't fall horribly to the hype machine. Statistically, this suggests the chances of GW2 not being incredibly over-hyped in the features department to be very slim.

2) It's still F2P, so I'm guessing the server performance is still going to be utter shit. When characters slide around because servers are crap, well, it contributes to the whole clumsy control mechanics virtually every F2P game has. I've always attributed this to not being able to afford good enough servers to handle calculating the # of animations/second or minute required for smooth combat. Considering at least half of subscription-based games can't seem to get this right, I don't really blame F2P games to be so bad on this issue.

So...am I excited? As I said, they're talking a good talk, and being different from the incredibly boring game called GW is a great thing, but the reality is that talk is cheap, and I no longer believe a word a game developer says unless it meshes with my actual game experience, something I can't do until the game is released. So...not really.

Would I be more excited if it was subscription based? A little, as it would suggest they'd have enough revenue to not have GW-era server architecture. Certainly not a guarantee, but there'd be hope. Even my most die-hard shooter-loving friends who go no deeper into the MMO genre than GWs admit the server performance is bad, and these guys have spent years nagging me to give it yet another chance to join in the "skill"-based pvp. For the record, I've tried it at release and at least once a year since then, and the servers have always been shit (from a person who averages 40 ms ping to virtually any game that allows you to measure this). ;p

I was going to say no instanced pvp is fun, and then I realized it isn't so much the instanced pvp that sucks, it's the tying of gear progression to instanced pvp that causes the vast majority of participants to join simply for shiny lootz, rather than the joy of smashing faces that isn't fun.

It's impossible to separate the two in today's MMO climate.

That said, if I had to pick my favorite instanced pvp, it'd be the original server only Alterac Valley battles that could last 36+ hours. No one did those for honor, as it was worth shit honor. You did it for faction pride, and some select classes might have done it to grind reputation since originally weapons like the Unstoppable Force were quite badass when it was first released.

Still, the key point here was that most people who joined AV back then, did it to smash face. Without that as the motivation, it doesn't matter what the pvp is like; instanced, open world, whatever. It blows, as soon as it becomes more about earning gear than smashing faces, because you go from having most people trying their damndest to beat the other team to most people trying their damnedest to make games go as fast as possible, win or loose, so they can earn their honor/prestige/whatever currency your game uses to buy gear as fast as possible.

Which is why MMO pvp is essentially garbage today across the entire genre.

So, either you got rid of the "previous" page links so it's now impossible to read anything that's not on the front page, or you attached them to ads somehow and my adblocker (Google Chrome) is now blocking them, as...I no longer see any "previous" links. :p I know, nothing to do with all those poor girls that need a helping hand, but just thought I'd let you know of this little navigational hiccup that now exists on your site.

I logged on for the first time since November. You can't seem to use the social tab to see how many people are online anymore. ;p

However, I saw a grand total of three people in the ENTIRE city of Limsa Lominsa as I ran around reacquainting myself with the game over the course of half an hour. Three people. One of whom was crafting, and the other two being afk private stores.

I then went out to do some leves. That took about another half hour. I saw one person during my walk out to the level 30 area and back.

This was on Besaid, which at least back last year in November, was one of, if not the most, populated server (granted, even back then that meant ~1k players online during "primetime").

So, I suspect hardly ANYONE actually plays the game, making me wonder just how SE thinks they're going to revive it and make a return on their heavy investment.

Of course I'd love to play a truly evil faction. I'm sure quite a lot of others would as well. That said, it's not just MMOs. Truly evil is almost non existent in video games, movies, really any type of media.

Whether it's out of some sort of fear of public backlash from watchdog groups, or fear that not enough of their players would be willing to use video games as escapism, and thus have issues playing a faction that might delight in bathing children in battery acid, while not actually having been abused as a child or any other sympathetic backstory rendered in such a way to provide a minuscule excuse for such sociopathic behavior....well, who knows. I'm not a game developer, or a producer. You can bet if I was though, I'd make damn sure to have a faction of true unremorseful evil. ;p

Since I doubt true evil will ever make it as a playable faction in an MMO, I think the far better daily grind question of the day is this: why do games even have factions if there's no real difference between them, nor any real game mechanics that take advantage of it? I look at WoW for example. Outside of some lore nerds, no one really thinks of the factions as being opposed. Hell, they're both fighting to save the world from the same evils (often together). Imagine if the entire playerbase was just one faction. Very little would change. Or, even worse, Rift. There's literally no game mechanic that takes advantage of having two factions.

The list could go on and on, and you have to ask yourself: if there's no real mechanistic reason behind factions, why in the world did the game developers decide to split their population in half in a genre where more people generally means more activity for players?

To be clear, I think factions are good, but they need to actually mean something, and they've become less meaningful to the point of being utterly meaningless in the last few years. If games can't even get factions to be truly different and in opposition of each other, what hope is there that we'd get a truly evil faction? Yea, that's what I thought. ;p

Considering Trion's macro system lets you stack commands into one macro, so most players end up using three macros to fire off 99% of all their abilities mindlessly, and just leaving a few key skills like interrupts on their own shiny little button...for some reason I suspect the incoming addon api is going to simply automate gameplay even more.

When I first met the macro system, I figured it was a joke/placeholder. But, here we are months after release, and we're still stacking half our commands to an individual macro, and even if you hate it, you're basically forced to do it, since no human being is physically capable of hitting all their reactionals as fast as someone who's just mindlessly firing them off because they've bound them all to every other skill they use.

So...hey, maybe Trion surprises me with the addon api and it's limited to UI custimization, but considering their past track record, I doubt it.