Splitting the game world into multiple copies to distribute player population. “Shard” comes from Ultima Online. These days they’re generally just called servers, though.
Thanks.
Yeah, that makes no sense especially given the friendly fire aspect.
As for quests, games just shouldn’t have quests at all, they are retarded. I’m waiting for a game that actually assigns GMs to run quests. I am sure there are plenty of unemployed nerds out there willing to run quests for $ 8 an hour.
WoW, since Jan '05. 85% of my time is here.
LoTRO, open Beta, lifetime subscription, rest of my time is here.
Tried COH/V for three months, nice break from Sword & Sorcery, only made it into the high 20’s level wise. Lost interest for some reason. (I still think this has unmatched character skin customisation.)
Have not tried EVE, 'cause I am such a carebear, and think PVP brings out the dick in people. 
Casual snarking aside, I can tell you that’s never gonna happen.
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Scale. We’re talking MMOs here. 100,000 players is a small game. Even if you only had 1 GM per 5 players, that’s 20,000 GMs. That’s a lot of money to shell out.
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Inconsistency. GMs work for tabletop games because you have one group that always plays together. On an MMO, consistently adventuring with the same group throughout your MMO career is a rarity, even if you belong to a small guild. Sometimes you’re soloing, sometimes you’re pugging, sometimes not all your members of the group will be there. And what if you can’t get the same GM all the time?
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Prep work. Being a good GM is akin to being a teacher; the time you spend actually playing the game with your group is only a fraction of the time you actually spend on the game. The rest of the time you’re creating encounters, maps, treasure, and plot development. Sure, you can use a pre-made adventure and run it without any personal touches, but at that point why wouldn’t you just have the computer automate the quest like we have now?
MMOs are the fast food franchises of the gaming world. They provide cheap, consistent entertainment for a huge number of people, but because of the scale they’re frequently impersonal about it. If you want to be catered to by a human being, you need to go small business. Family-owned. Like tabletop games or MUDs/MUSHes/MUCKs. I play on a few text games that are very small and do have GMs run adventures. But they’re not graphical and they’re entirely volunteer, and even then they only have about one GM per 10-20 players. There’s not that many people willing to administrate when they could be playing it themselves.
Yeah, I snipped your other bullet points because they were irrelevant after clarification.
Hardly irrelevant. They’re the reasons why large-scale games will never have human GMs.
Sorry my response got messed up.
What I meant was GMs that don’t micromanage a la D&D but GMs that manipulate NPCs so that there are not instanced dungeons that people can read. Have the NPCs floating around the world doing things with preprogrammed hierarchies to control strategy and tactics and GMs acting as their commanders in a way. Also GMs as agents telling them what they can and cannot do.
I’ve got both City of Heroes and Warhammer installed, but I don’t even know the state of my subscriptions to either. It’s been ages since I played either. I got tired of the pervasive jerkness.
I also have the Champions Online beta, and had it before the open one. Translation has perks :]
I used to play Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest 2, as well.
Yes and no. Or maybe I just have a flawed definition ? But to me, a shard is a free (and possibly pirate/rogue) server, as opposed to the regular, subscription ones provided by the game’s publisher.
If you quit in your upper 20s, you were just getting to the really good stuff. The 30s and 40s have some great story arcs, and your powers really fill out with plenty of slots and abilities. I don’t know when you played, but the added content for characters 35+ in the various Issues has given people so many things to do, the Devs added the ability to stop gaining experience so players could not level and see everything they wanted.
Well, they are increasing their customization on COH, giving people the options of changing power colors and eventually, whether they are heroes or villains. A lot of people are really looking forward to the next few months.
Believe me, I am also a carebear in EVE. Mining, manufacturing, trade, mission running, I do all of that, but PvP is not my thing. The closest I come is making runs through lowsec to do pickups on purchases and moving around research items. Although those runs are actually more dangerous then if I picked a 0.0 corps and moved into their region.
I do agree that PvP can bring out the dick in people though. And EVE’s system of completely ignoring anything that is not an exploit makes that even more prone to happening then the PvPlite in something like COH.
Kobal2, are you really saying you don’t know if you are paying $15.00 a month to 2 different companies for games you aren’t playing?
Sounds like you’re talking about world events and not really quests, then. You’d probably enjoy Planetside, which has no quests and no computer-controlled enemies at all, although it’s an FPS/strategy game more than RPG.
I can see this if you were paying attention to UO around the time private servers came into significant use. I’m pretty sure Finn was just using it in the sense of different official servers, since EVE only has the one server everyone uses. (Hardware-wise, it’s really an insane number of server clusters linked together, but in game terms it’s all just one “server”.)
I started out with EQ because a lot of friends at work were playing it. Used to group weekly. Eventually schedules drifted - when my cerdit card chnaged #s I didn’t resubscribe.
I played Clan Lord for a while (Mac only MMORPG)
I played a little Anarchy Online when it was free (for the base game - got spam for the non free expansions)
I was a beta tester for SW:Galaxies which had some nice features but didn’t feel compelled to subscribe.
Played City of Heroswhich I liked but not enough to keep paying
I now play LOTR online I actually got the lifetime subscription because I play infrequently (every other saturday at best) - I have not bought the expansion (My character is level 39 or 40)
Brian
Ha ! No, I’m really, really not that rich :). I’m saying I have no idea whether they’re still extant or not. I paid CoH for 3 months flat, hoping to hook my GF, and WAR for 6 hoping my EQ2 guild-that-moved-to-WoW-against-my-wishes would stick around this time. Neither worked out, but I honestly have no idea when I paid those two fees. I’d wager both are out by now, but never checked.
I don’t do the whole “just take it from my bank every month” thing, specifically because 1) I don’t really check my bank account that closely and 2) I’ve read horror stories from people failing to unsubscribe themselves from a number of online things (or even magazines).
The ones I’ve tried and given a fair shake:
Everquest (grind and griefing, no thanks)
Eve (fun, but too large of a time-sink to feel worthwhile)
LOTR (can’t put my finger on it, but there’s just something missing in the immersion and character system that makes it almost, but not quite, fun).
The only one I stuck with:
Guild Wars for 3~4 years now. It has been just the right blend of casualness vs time, fun, and exploration, to hold my interest. I’ve been through all of the content and expansions now, so I’m somewhat dormant but still log in for the special holiday events and PvP play.
No, I am saying there could still be quests, but that they be engineered based around having an NPC agent pay people to go and clear out an NPC cave that already exists rather than spawning an instance when the player accepts a quest.
I just canceled my WoW account today. I realized last night that I’ve only logged in a handful of times in the past month or so.
I don’t really have a game to replace it, but I’m looking forward to trying out Aeon and Champions Online.
It looks interesting because all you are reading is a list of features. The game is a buggy hack and exploit riddled joke that was cobbled together by rank amateurs and has absolutely no enjoyable qualities whatsoever. If you wanna try it out go ahead i’m just letting you know i haven’t read, seen or heard one single person have anything good to say about it at all and i frequent a lot of gaming sites, some based entirely about wanting a game exactly like what darkfall promised.
I just did the third beta for Aeon and it was fun, ran both characters up to level 20. I have to admit, unless things change I will probably stick to WOW and EVE [I detest games where europe is on its own servers, I have euro buddys I have gamed with for years and dammit, I want to log in and play with them…]
You should give Runes of Magic a shot, it is free … I am on american server Govinda as Aruvqan … we can try and hook up in game and Ill help you with the baby quests =)
Yep.