I wrote that I'm not happy with the state of my blog. The backbone of it should be direct gaming experience, analyzed from an economy standpoint. But I don't have a game at the moment so I can only write real-world data based posts or opinions which are ... well you know the saying with butts.
But I want to remain a blogger and you can only do that by posting. Stop posting and you lose your skills and your readers. So when I have no data-based valuable posts, I can choose between musing about my game idea that will never see the light, something about Trump or Clinton or I can kick the dying carcass of EVE.
Well, you seem to like EVE-kicking posts. I don't know or care if you like them because EVE devs wronged you too, because you hope it can be saved and desperate enough to even read my point or simply want to see a trainwreck. You come and read.
Don't get me wrong, I want to produce quality posts, but at the moment I just can't in a proper frequency. And a bad post that brings traffic beats a boring bad post and day of the week.
So if you don't like the 548.th "Falcon is a bully" post, you can recommend a game worthy of attention, or you can just not click on such posts and they will go away.
But I want to remain a blogger and you can only do that by posting. Stop posting and you lose your skills and your readers. So when I have no data-based valuable posts, I can choose between musing about my game idea that will never see the light, something about Trump or Clinton or I can kick the dying carcass of EVE.
Well, you seem to like EVE-kicking posts. I don't know or care if you like them because EVE devs wronged you too, because you hope it can be saved and desperate enough to even read my point or simply want to see a trainwreck. You come and read.
Don't get me wrong, I want to produce quality posts, but at the moment I just can't in a proper frequency. And a bad post that brings traffic beats a boring bad post and day of the week.
So if you don't like the 548.th "Falcon is a bully" post, you can recommend a game worthy of attention, or you can just not click on such posts and they will go away.
60 comments:
Plenty of games were recommended. You are the one deciding they are not worth the attention :D
Most games recommended are not even released. They are hopes, not games.
So, as you will be blogging about Eve, why not come back to it? You can get fresh evidence for your scandal posts, and uncover more murky goings on.
Didn't I suggest Puerto rico and prismata? what was wrong with either of those? Was non persistent world a non starter or something?
I read your past posts about World Of Tanks. Have you tried World Of Warships?
Personally I like it more than WoT.
All you need to get your visitor count up, is a link in /r/eve again.
@Anon: finding scandals needs data, not playing the game.
@Edmund: I couldn't find Puerto Rico game. "Prismata is still early in development"
@Anon: World of Warships is made by the same company, so the same cheats are likely in it. I didn't reject WoT for its gameplay, but for its matchmaking cheat
@Anon: and EVE scandals just do that.
any thoughts on Investopedia Stock Simulator ?
That's easy.
Path of Exile, low mechanical barrier, requires and rewards knowledge and ingenuity. Strong economy and best crafting in existence - surprised that you did not ponder that publicly, given that eve players are naturally drawn to it.
Many have recommended World of Warcraft. Yeah, the outside-of-raid experience can be analogized to an interactive movie. But if you can make just two nights a week of your time available on a schedule, you can do raiding at a level commensurate with your skill. One world top 100 guild raids only 2 days a week.
Plus, I think there's some interesting analysis to be done on gold/time spent activities available in Legion. I am not convinced crafting is the only or best way. Leveling alts for cooldown-based profession quests, selling carries of raids, and even gold from world quests compete for profit per time spent with running the auction house.
@Anon: never heard of it, but it seems like preaching to the choir blogging about that
@Next anon: I checked its website and "All world areas including outdoors ones are instanced for your party" sounds like "single player with always on DRM". Also, "play for free" doesn't look too promising. Both of P2W and because it's impossible to assess how many players are in the game.
@Raphael: the main problem with WoW raiding is that its rewards get obsoleted every patch. Therefore there is no competition for it, firstkilling bosses is just as much a vanity activity as picking the most peaceblooms.
Does it have to be a persistent, competitive online game ? What are the things you want from a game to try it out ?
@Naice:
- published (not alpha, beta, early access...)
- not pay-to-win (I'm aware that everything has a microtransaction now, but buy sword of uberness is no)
- competitive play which includes clear goal structure (people have no in-game reason to raid in WoW)
- online, the competition with other players must be direct
- no cheats, dev favoritism, no tolerance for botting and RMT
Path of Exile is the least p2w game in the market currently. Its main sources of income are: "pay for storage space" and "pay to look shiny" (with whale-targeted "pay to look popular and very shiny"). Totally no swords of uberness in there, not even small potions of +1% gained XP for 1 day. Honest competition is the main thing for the devs, and the main selling point of the game. If devs go away from it, PoE will lose not 1/3 but 99% playerbase.
Yet, it misses other points of your checklist. The competition is indirect, no clear goal structure, and there is some RMT exactly because devs sell no power, so players do it themselves. Devs are fighting it, I saw very few chat ads, but RMT websites exist, hard to take them down. At least they are not "content creators"...
Some other downsides are there too, the game might be no good to blog about, but, being almost the only game out there that at least tries to do thing right, it didn't deserve accusations of being p2w. Being non-MMO, maybe: it's small group multiplayer online instead.
@Antze: I learned in BDO how "convenience" like storage space is a very strong power item if you are in the crafting/economy game (and where is economy, it's always the most powerful way). Being able to store your materials instantly is huge advantage over "spending 10 minutes logging banking chars in and out to get your crafting materials in one place".
Anyway, I might check PoE out. Any guess how many players are in it? Ladders seem very good, but they end at #15000. Is the #15000 guy is the worst player ever, or is he a top 1% among 1500000 players?
Did Path of Exile stop being instanced? I mean, it is basically a better diablo clone, but it does not have much competition outside of ladders?
Or did all that change?
@Gevlon
PoE avoids nearly almost all forms of P2W as part of the concept and does so for years now.
The one exception is Stash Tabs (Non-on-character storage space), while you can do everything the game has to offer it adds a noticible amount of convinience to have a few more than the baseline (iirc 4 atm) esp. if you are looking for large scale trading. Which essentially means a one time payment of ~15-20$ - also with the premium version of those (4$ instead 3$ - without waiting for a sale) you can avoid using 3rd party tools to index/list your items on poe.trade. Everything else is cosmetics.
As far as numbers go, it has a steam client but this one is not very well liked (due to the patching process being a pain in the ass) to the point where i don't personally know anyone who uses it, but the part of the community who does is sized at peak 24k concurrent in the last 24h, last patch there have been at least 50k in queue waiting for the servers to go up.
How does this game survive with just that?
It just is that good. As far as i am concerned, in terms of gamedesign/concept (but sadly not tech/polish) GGG is on paar with Blizz and i gladly gave them 300$ for stuff i don't even want.
Sure thing, that's why I didn't say "no p2w". Being a Diablo style game in terms of item stats it's quite important to keep some sets of "good items" to be able to eventually make a set of them, and for that you need space, and the default amount of storage space is enough to start playing, but not enough for endgame.
Yet, 6 additional tabs cost 10 euro, it's enough for quite long time, I'm now fine with ~15, my friend who's quite hardcore, has ~40, so that's like 60 euro for several years of play.
I'll try to find answer for your question a bit later, and will also try to summarize other (down)sides of PoE, if you like (I'm quite a fan of the game myself, but don't want to be responsible for you wasting your time, if this one is not your thing).
@Gevlon:
About PoE, you can find the stats for those accessing it through steam here : http://steamcharts.com/app/238960.
Also, it's a limited time session, but you can be in direct competition with others players during the racing events.
Eve right this minute has 15,903 online.
Steam says Path of Exile has 12.097.
09:50 am Eve time.
There are non-steam PoE players as well, probably not counted above.
@Gelvon: Also, I agree "storage space" is very very strong in PoE, but, as far as I know, you can only buy 5 extra tabs, then it's done, you can't buy some more. So for like 5 or 10€, can't remember, you bought all the available power in the store.
PoE is literally Diablo that has slightly more convenient market and complicated skill tree, and that's about it. It's not a competitive game, unless you count the speedrunning mini-games aka 'races' a competition - in which case every single game in this list https://www.speedrun.com/games (and potentially every single game that can be beated) is competitive.
There are a lot of good multiplayer games that don't have any p2w mechanics. But they don't have a long term competitive aspect either (well, other than a ladder). The only semi-decent MMOG that's not completely dead is EVE.
Would you consider trying trading in Team Fortress 2? I doubt the PvP gameplay itself would interest you but I think it could be very interesting to see if you could start from the bottom and work your way up. There are also some valuable items that can only be obtained by completing some PvE missions, and again I think it could be interesting to see you develop strategies for beating these missions.
https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Crafting
https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Trading
https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Item_drop_system
https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Botkiller_weapons
come back to EVE, heal New Eden from the inside and make it a better place!
"So if you don't like the 548.th "Falcon is a bully" post, you can recommend a game worthy of attention, or you can just not click on such posts and they will go away."
I actually can't. I can choose not to read them, but I'll still show up in your view count statistic. The reason is simply that if I open your main page, the newest article is already loaded, even though I didn't read it yet.
@gevlon
http://en.boardgamearena.com/#!gamelobby for PR
Yes ok Prismata is early in development and that makes it a non-starter currently.
@Anon
Each season has a ladder ranking levelprogression which is, esp for hardcore, not the same as speedrunning. Also we now have the shaper - the endboss of mapping and has not been defeated on hc at all and is currently beyond the reach of 99%+ of the community across all modes (which can be proven by the challange statistics).
Actually that is a more than eve's rather implicit competition of eve.
PoE ladders and speed levelings seem to be about mindlessly grinding mobs instead of interesting decisions, though if one can outgear others via crafting/trading like in BDO, that can be interesting. But - just like in BDO - if there is no other challenge than get gear, use it to grind, it's not really a deep game.
TF2 is an extremely retarded shooter and on top of that, there is no persistence. So you can't even "metagame" it like in EVE.
EVE is beyond help. It can (and will) only be saved by going bankrupt and someone buying the IP from the bankruptcy court and runs it professionally.
Those who always read the main page are a baseline and create no peaks. Peaks occur when people come to see the blog who don't usually read it .
Actually choosing/creating your build is probably the most important decision in each PoE season and in every single one we had multiple new or reinvigorated builds crop up which are not commonly known to the community. And having played eve for years, PoE is not as wide in terms of complexity bast vastly deeper (read PI is an additional system to understand but trivial in itself, suicide ganking is another system... - while explaining why projectile damage will be included twice in your resulting chaos damage is something most people will never be able to correctly explain).
@Gevlon Gevlon, can you explain your requirement for “an in-game reason to raid” in WoW? It seems like you are talking about a requirement for there being an extrinsic reward (gear, gold, or similar) rather than an intrinsic reward (this goal was hard to obtain and we accomplished it).
It is quite silly to consider gear a reward – gear you acquire is a gradual nerf to the instance, not a reward for completing it. Gear serves raiding, not vice versa. When you did the all blues Ulduar project, you embraced these values – gear is not a reward of raiding, it just makes raiding easier.
The reward of clearing the content is the accomplishment of having done so. The challenge is completing it faster compared to other groups (or if you like, groups who raid a similar amount of time that you do).
When runners compete in a marathon, no one laughs at the people who finish in 2.5 hours because “haha everyone can complete the marathon eventually, even walkers complete in 8 hours, completing fast is just a vanity act.” Most marathons are amateur – there is no extrinsic “reward.” The reward is the accomplishment of finishing in an efficient manner.
This is the same with raiding – the reward is intrinsic to the activity and the accomplishment of achieving the team’s joint goal. There doesn’t need to be an extrinsic reward to make the competition worthwhile.
From what i'm reading, Gevlon just wants to play with people asocially, hoping to find a game the rules of which will protect him from the messy human interactions, while still allowing people to face each other. And which is also "deep".
At this point, the only game like that that comes to mind would be professional go (chess would probably fail the "deep" part :D).
@Raphael: I and you might don't care about gold or gear reward, but most people do. To compete with them, they must care. A high ranked chess or MOBA player is better than the low ranked since they both played the same "maps" and both tried to win, just one failed. A high ranked raider is NOT better than a "walk around in the world for fun" player, since the latter didn't try to win and had no reason to try it.
@Maxim: I always keep telling that WoW Burning Crusade, EVE without corruption or WoT without rigged matchmaking would keep me happy. Are they too much to ask?
PoE is a combination of not-so-mindless grinding (mobs are hard, you choose between relatively safe grinding earlier ones, and attempting to progress), some mouse action (requirements are not high, you don't have to be a Korean teenager) and economy. You really need economy, in endgame you mostly can't live with only items you get from drops, you need to sell/modify/craft/buy them to progress.
Actually, if your build and gear are good, the game can really turn to mindless grinding - for a while. Once you reach further, everything becomes hard again. If you manage to turn endgame maps into "mindless grinding", you are surely awesome. PoE is quite non-casual even to complete the main storyline (on Merciless difficulty), and there are additional endgame bosses which require excellent gear, builds and strategy. The last boss introduced, as it was already mentioned, is not killed by the most players.
I heard that #15000 is "quite good", but have no data yet to back up that opinion.
Now let's move straight to the most bitter pill, which you might have already noticed, but no one will mention. Yes, I opposed you when we discussed APIs and I said that APIs can be good and harmless, but currently Path of Exile's economy works through external websites like poe.trade and a couple others which use PoE's public API. Going full Gevlon, I won't pretend it's harmless - economy is important for the game, and there is theoretical possibility that the owners of these external websites might get corrupted and, for example, interfere with their search results, if they, for some reason, decide to turn against "some player or players". But I have asked around, and heard that's unlikely to happen currently. Authors of these websites are not very competitive in the game, and there was some story about owners of such a site mistakenly messing with the search results, PoE devs noticed and gave them some spanking.
In short, things are good now, and unlikely to become bad because of proper moderation, but the game does have a risky and questionable aspect here. I consider that a mistake and downside, but I believe devs are just experimenting with things, and will control them (their old loot system was also very questionable, in the end they fixed it).
> Are they too much to ask?
In some way - yes. You don't want to play half-made or poorly balanced game. Nobody wants. Development cost money. Servers cost money too. And there isn't enough players to pay for it. Most of them are idiots and just leave if they can't win one way or another. And developing multiple ways to win cost money too.
@Gevlon
A bit much, yeah
WoW Burning Crusade was a bit of a lightning in a bottle scenario. It was an evolution of an already well-established world, which took that well-established world into a wholly new territory and managed to make the entire thing look and feel consistent. There simply aren't many (or possibly any) worlds in current games that are established even half was well as Warcraft was after the RTS trilogy and first WoW, much less ready to undergo an evolution both as drastic and as effective as WoW did between vanilla and TBC. It wouldn't be an understatement to call TBC the culmination of the entire history of fantasy setting in western games up to that point. Creating something on that level would require another 15 years, and the only franchise that seems to have even a basic shot at it is Witcher (and maybe Dark Souls).
The fact that WoW:TBC was both was a pretty hardcore game, while simultaneously being among the easiest of all MMOs available at the time, also helped.
EVE without corruption is impossible, because any well and truly open world will inevitably offer a multitude of ways for devs to get corrupted and will always develop to the point where people will start taking advantage of all of these ways. The only way for devs to shield themselves from the corruption is to impose limits upon the world (something you should have found out in BDO).
Your chances of seeing EVE without corruption for a little while are better than your chances of seeing another TBC, because CCP tumbling down and someone taking up the mantle is far more likely than the emergence of a second Blizzard.
WoT without rigged matchmaking is impossible because of the specific corporate culture of the company behind it. I know some of these people personally and it is a basic fact of their existence that they are both especially good and especially comfortable at making digital one-armed bandits and probably won't ever see any reason to even attempt anything else.
@Gevlon, your reply is still a bit obscure to me. To continue my analogy: To compete with someone running a marathon, they also must be running the marathon. If they play cricket that day, or stay home and paint, or walk the marathon backwards “for the lols,” you aren’t competing with them. You can’t force people to compete with you at anything or care about what you do.
Gear or gold rewards are not a magical solution to this. You still have people say “I don’t care about gear, I just do battlepets” or “I am wealthy IRL I just buy wowtoken gold you scrub, haha you spend all that time making gold, I make 8 figures per year and just buy you with what I make in an hour” or “I have enough gear and gold, I am playing for the lols you tryhard.”
You seem to have an unstated requirement that “people care about the extrinsic goal you get from the activity in game.” Why? That’s a practically impossible requirement to fulfill. No matter the reward, people can say they don’t care – and actually not care. You can never get everyone to care.
What matters is a set of people are playing the same meta-game and competing for the same thing. And they are – “how quickly can we defeat this raid as a guild group?” The groups that do it faster are better. For people who are doing the same activity that you are doing, as in PvE mythic raiding, people care about how quickly you are progressing on the bosses. It’s the reason wowprogress.com exists and is so popular.
You can even try to compete against them as a pug group again if you really want to – pick one of the highest population servers and see if you can out-progress mythic guilds with a pug. Even if wowprogress didn’t exist, and no one else cared, YOU can care about how well you are doing and your group is doing. A requirement that the activity gives rewards people care about is… again, very obscure to me. You can never get everyone to care.
If your goal is “get the most people to care” you should stop playing video games, brush up on your software creation skills, and make money with stock market AI. Or become president of your country. But even then, you can’t force people to care about IRL money or power.
If you goal is “get the most people to care while playing a PvE video game” mythic raiding is WOW is a pretty good strategy if you like MMORPGs. WOW is still the most popular MMORPG, and the competitive mythic raiders, while a small subset of that community, are probably the largest “PvE group content competitive community” in video games. If you want to play PvP, you know of options like MOBAs, or sports games, or shooters.
Maybe I am missing something; if so let me know what exactly it is you are asking for. There are certainly good reasons not to play WOW and compete at mythic raiding progress specifically. For example you could just say “I absolutely refuse to commit two nights a week to a guild and don’t want to PUG” or “I don’t enjoy the type of coordination required in WOW, I prefer to try path of exile where I only have to rely on myself and grind loot like Diablo” or “WOW requires too much time outside of raids now, it’s not worth it to me.”
But “raiding is pointless because eventually everyone can complete the raid” or "people who don't raid don't care" don't make much sense at all. Those responses are just as odd as "anyone can compete the marathon in a day" or "people who don't run marathons don't care about the marathon."
@Raphael: nothing stops a kid from "playing chess" by putting the pieces into their mouth or a bunch of drunken frat boys from putting them to other openings of their body. But the rules and customs of chess mean that every chess player will agree that they are not good chess players. Socials care about peer opinions, competitive ones care about peer respect. So - despite the options are limitless - it's a practically visible truth that most people who play with chess pieces and chessboard are attempting to play chess.
Similarly - while I saw with my own eyes idiots who draw a big penis from wards in the base in League of Legends - vast majority of LoL players I met attempted to win the map. They sucked, but they clearly tried.
So a clear reward structure and ruleset guarantees that most of those who participate are actually participating. If I beat them, I've beaten them.
When I was the top solo killer for two months in EVE, the other players RIGHTFULLY claimed that it doesn't count because I was just ganking miners and they could do the same, they just didn't want to. I didn't beat anyone besides a bunch of M&S and bots, that was NOT a proper challenge. I want to avoid that happening again.
@Gevlon that’s a bit clearer, thanks.
In WOW, isn’t the only measure “how fast I can get Cutting Edge: BOSSNAME”? It seems like this is exactly what you are looking for – how quickly can you get that achievement compared to others (or others who are raiding similar time per week as you). No one can say “but we were doing different things!” You both are looking for the same thing, getting that achievement. The guild that got it next week is worse than the guild that got it the week earlier.
Gold helps at least a bit now in WOW too. There is no limit on BoE crafted gear you can wear into raids, and BoE rings and necklaces with the right stats are better than anything else you can get (non-warforged/socketed) for some classes.
If you are progressing on the raid with a guild without paying gold for it, people cannot reasonably dispute you are better if you kill the boss before they did. It’s an interesting discussion if “it counts” if you use gold to buy a carry to get a progression raid slot or just for the achievement. You got it faster than many people after you, but they would still complain that you didn’t earn it. And there is some legitimacy there – they got their through demonstration of skill at the activity, whereas you got it by buying a slot. But you still got the achievement they were looking for quicker than them…
Maybe you can write Friday’s blog post about whether that counts, or whether it should.
I remember you tried buying your way in by sponsoring a guild and quit after a bit. I can't remember why right now or find the post quickly.
@Raphael: the problem is that we don't know how big is the "want the achievement" crowd. 100 people? 1000? 10K? 100K? 1M?
If you check the number of sold chessboards or concurrent users in LoL, you have an estimate of competing players. In WoW there are 5M+ people who used the client in the last month. But how many are playing "the game"? It's very possible that the number is smaller than the players of some obscure indie game.
You don't know how many LoL players are competing. I'm sure there are a lot of players who don't care about ratings. They "just play". Even Splatoon has competitive mode. But not so many players care about it.
@Gevlon I don't see how it's hard to get numbers at all. We can estimate very easily who wants the achievement.
At the very absolute minimum, about 70,000 people wanted the achievement in Tier 18, since they got it. Per wowprogress, 2,850 guilds killed Mythic Archimonde, we can estimate 25 people per guild, 70,000 individuals at least wanted the achievement.
More likely, the accurate number is about 250,000 want the achievement. 9,925 guilds killed at least two bosses trying to progress in mythic Hellfire Citadel, times 25, about 250,000. That is the group of people who were trying to progress in mythic as a guild in Tier 18.
These are likely underestimates, as they do not count PUG groups, larger guilds, or people who bought a carry for the achievement.
Now, we can be even more optimistic, and consider the people who "want it" but didn't try Mythic progression. But 250,000 people wanted mythic guild progression, and tried mythic guild progression, and killed at least a few bosses.
@vv: they might don't care about ratings, but they do prefer "pwning that n00b" over being killed. And the game is DESIGNED the way that ratings are a good INDICATOR of killing opponents instead of being killed. WoW isn't.
@Raphael: there is another serious problem with WoW raiding: nolife. We don't know how many attempts were made before the kill. If I kill a boss in 20 attempts, I'm better than Joe who did in 50. But if Joe did 50 attempts on day one in a 18 hours session while it took me a whole week to get 20 attempts, he gets the achievement first.
What's wrong with DotA2? No P2W just a moba with purchaseable cosmetics and a ranking system that you can see your own rank with.
"- published (not alpha, beta, early access...)
- not pay-to-win (I'm aware that everything has a microtransaction now, but buy sword of uberness is no)
- competitive play which includes clear goal structure (people have no in-game reason to raid in WoW)
- online, the competition with other players must be direct
- no cheats, dev favoritism, no tolerance for botting and RMT"
So why not a FPS like Counterstrike or Overwatch ? I'd suggest Red Orchestra but it's pretty much dead right now, waiting for the release of Rising Storm 2. Hearthstone might be good too, but right now it's plagued with too much RNG (and you may argue that it's a pay to win, although I would disagree).
Since MMO is pretty much an outdated genre, with established ones like EVE and WoW surviving among a sea of little "freemium" MMOs (and future awesome MMO that all disappoint when they're released), I doubt you ever will find something persistent again. Maybe an online RTS ?
First:
about returning to EvE.
You clearly and convincingly proved the largest, most powerful coalition could be destroyed; and given uninterrupted time to do it you could have even done it yourself with the groups you had adopted. But destroying a coalition is actually not the hard part. What is hard is building one. I say you failed at EvE because you chose not to do what is really hard. The Mittani did that, not you. You went the easy route.
If you want to prove something you could try building a coalition, something orders of magnitude harder than uniting a few sociopaths in something destructive. You could clearly and convincingly prove you understand socials, morons, and slackers better than social leaders do or even better than socials, morons, and slackers understand themselves. I think you needed an excuse to quit exactly because you knew this task was the only worthwhile task for someone of your ability and you knew it was still beyond you and CCP Falcon's mild mockery of you was just the excuse you could delude yourself with. Don't mistake, I agree his commenting was inappropriate, but your reaction to his comments are exaggerated histrionics in the extreme, and his mockery WAS mild. You are every bit as bad as any of the left-wing liberal crybabies infesting western universities today. I think you are a social who is a failure as a social (despite having an excellent understanding of how socials tick), knows it, and rejects socials for exactly that. Sour grapes indeed. If you want to know what people are poor at just examine what they despise the most.
Even if you have alienated as much as maybe 2/3's of the player base that even knows who you are (but, of course, that is a tiny part of the playerbase at all), the other 1/3 is probably loyal to a level that the Mittani could only dream of and that is enough people to make a start of it with. The fact that even some goons have given you consideration means that even they see something distinctly lacking in their leadership. The same sort of social mechanic that Trump is exploiting in the United States.
Seize some sov and show the socials you can do it better than they can. Then you can reject Falcon from a position of power not weakness.
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Second:
As for other games, I would like to see you play the server at MechHero.com once or twice. It is non-persistent. It has an end-game mechanic sort of like Travian but when one group wins the server the server closes. A short time later a new server opens. There are fast, normal, and slow servers and currently the server open is fast so you could dip your toes in with minimal time outlay and since it is already a couple or three weeks old if you joined you would spawn in the outlying areas where you would be safe(R) from the experienced players for the few days you would need to learn the game. But if you don't like it the server would end quickly enough and if you do like it you could start in the next server instantly and be a force to reckon with.
- published (not alpha, beta, early access...)
It is 6 or 7 years old now. The current problem is that the dev's have vanished. New servers open when the old ones close so someone is still paying the bills but development has stopped and no one talks on the forum. And that is sad because the dev's actively sought player input. You may not like that, but it's a good thing. The players who are left are distraught they can't get their game moving again. People are even offering money to buy the game from the dev's if someone would just wake up.
- not pay-to-win (I'm aware that everything has a microtransaction now, but buy sword of uberness is no)
There is a shop but p2w doesn't exist as it does in any most other games. The items available in the shop take 10 seconds to examine and they are cheap as a bucket of warm spit.
- competitive play which includes clear goal structure (people have no in-game reason to raid in WoW)
Yes. You can't get a clearer goal than winning the server and you can only do that by knocking down the other players before they can goal before you.
- online, the competition with other players must be direct
It's a pretty standard game; build a city, use the city to build an army, and then use the army to attack other cities. The competition is direct.
- no cheats, dev favoritism, no tolerance for botting and RMT
Ok, GRIND HELL. as a result there are lots of player created aids for alleviating it. You would probably consider that cheating and botting but rather than fight that the dev's embraced it. There is something like an API but I don't have the knowledge to use it and never tried to. You do and the players that are left (a few hundred very loyal hardcore types) would gladly lend a hand in explaining anything in the forums. Toxicity is absent and they would be overjoyed to see a new name in the forums. RMT doesn't exist. I suppose a cynic would say that's because the game is too small to make any money on and the game is dead anyway because the dev's are gone. But that does atleast mean no dev favoritism.
I would like to see your opinion of city building and army building optimization. The market is mud. Don't go to the game looking for that. This game is about fighting armies. The game doesn't have direct control of units in battle but it's as close as this genre of game can get.
Good Luck to you.
@Gevlon: Outside of world top 100, that is easily dealt with. The vast majority of guilds outside world top 100 public log their raids at warcraftlogs.com. You can easily compare how much time they spent in raid compared to you, whether based on time per week or attempts.
Granted, this isn't perfect. Guilds can "cheat" by only logging half their raids, or they can private log, or they can not log at all. Perfect would be if Blizzard released how many wipes each guild had and how many hours before the boss kill. But still, this is a very good current system that works and is in place right now.
How about starcraft 2? if youre interested i could offer you coaching, former grandmaster here.
Why do your projects always have to be solo projects? Why don't you try instead of trying to make a difference by showing that you can get an achievement, show that you can make a difference by creating that a successful group that shares your ideas?
WoW problem is, after you done last boss, what then, competition is more or less gone? Plus you cant lose anything if you die. Wealthy get wealthier, grinder gets faster. Thats it.
Gevlon. What is your gaming habit. How many hours per weekday is optimal for you, and average totals in week, month? If and when how long are the breaks? What are the time limits of getting nolife feeling? And whats are time limits when game is to boring, because there is nothing to do there?
Competive gameplay must have equal ground. WoW raid is same for everyone. MOBA maps are same for everyone. Many fps maps are more or less mirrors. Even single player game speedruns have same game for everyone. Its good on first play, but after 100-th play, its not soo fun anymore. Games who invent randomness, usually have more fun gameplay. Let it be random loot from WOW raid boss or crit from bullet hit or crafting with luck. So here comes next big question.
How much randomness in a game you would accept. Pseudorandomness is art itself. What are the mechanics in randomness what WOW, EVE, BDO or any other game have done well, and what are the bad ideas in those games? What is the of extremes, how it influences the game if it has too much or too few randomness on those mechanics?
Gevlon said...
PoE ladders and speed levelings seem to be about mindlessly grinding mobs instead of interesting decisions, though if one can outgear others via crafting/trading like in BDO, that can be interesting. But - just like in BDO - if there is no other challenge than get gear, use it to grind, it's not really a deep game.
There is very much you can do with trading in PoE. The gear is highly randomised so by trading you can get seriously better and optimal gear. PoE also contains quite intricate crafting, and randomised, system and the crafting materials are the currency used in trading. About it being P2W; As others said before you can buy storage space but that is one time upgrade and rest are merely cosmetics.
Gameplay itself, as you posited, is advancing (grinding) to harder and harder content to get better loot and to get to higher levels. It does have 'end game content' with it map system now upgraded into atlas. For many people the gameplay is optimising the character (build+gear) and the grinding secondary.
Also notice the existence of leagues (seasons) and HC mode.
While in soft core you will always eventually get there (where ever you want to get to...) it is not necessarily so in HC as if your character dies that character and gear (and items) it was carrying are lost to you in HC mode (character is transofermed to softcore character). Seasons have the advantage for you that it gives time limit to achieve what you are trying to and opportunity to periodically to start from blank slate (no items or character from previously are available). I would think this would be useful for many projects.
What I would like to see you do is some comparison of mobas; For example target audiences and how they cater to them.
@Dornier: the Falcon hate was just a starting point of looking for dev corruption. I didn't quit because of it. Falcon saving the Goon criminals was much worse. Bowing to the Goon Document of Shame was worse. Un-banning the RMT-ing IWI bankers was worse. The citadels broker fee change was absolutely unacceptable. I am certain that the devs constantly change or break the game rules to cater to their friends and to whoever bribes them. I just focus on the Falcon hate because it's the easiest to point at. A white knight or a paid troll could argue how saving the Goon criminals was a honest move to protect 40K innocent players. They can tell that the Document of Shame was a good idea. They can tell that Team Security was incompetent and IWI isn't RMT-ing. They can tell that highsec trade citadels generate interesting PvP content one day. But no white knight can say that Falcon was right to openly hatepost about a customer.
You are extremely naive if you think I can do anything in EVE. Devs are GODS in a game. Falcon can delete ALL my alliance members with a few clicks. He probably won't, just the key members like Stunt was banned. Or they can change the rules any second, for example they can remove all the money moons, valuable belts and anoms from the Sov we live in and double them in the regions of our enemies. And Falcon made it pretty clear that he is ready to go any length against me.
@Shuri: no way, my APM is too low. I'm way over my twenties.
Update on the Anonymous @ 16 September, 2016 08:21;
Played PoE myself but haven't bought stash tabs and took at face value when someone said number of buyable stash tabs was limited. A bit further search seems that it is not so and you can buy large number of stash tabs. So there is some P2W in the trading aspects in form of storage space.
"WoT without rigged matchmaking would keep me happy."
I don't understand how WoT would fit your requirements. Ammo of uberness makes it P2W, and it has no persistence either, so it's essentially just a MOBA with tanks.
What am I missing?
@Hanura: Invisibility. In LoL or any other MOBA, most enemy players are in plain sight. That's why I liked jungler in LoL. In WoT all enemies are invisible at start and only a few becomes visible for a few seconds when they are spotted. From this limited information you have to figure out where they'll be, how your visible allies will react and place yourself accordingly. The game is won not by clicking but by thinking.
How about trying to start EvE as a completely new, incognito player and writing down your experience with NPE and features, that are different than they were when you have started years before ?
Not affiliating with any of your former names/accounts and eventually getting into top hierarchy of the major EvE players ? Showing everyone, that by manipulating socials and their weaknesses, you can be their master and perhaps change their ways ?
As soon as I blog, I am found.
Also, I wasn't attacked for myself, but for my fight against the then-friends-of-devs. Sure, if I would be careful not to challenge the status quo, I could mine silently in highsec. But why bother?
If you liked World of Tanks as a game, I still recommend you have a look at War Thunder.
Just because something brings people to your site doesn't make it valuable. It's easy to get cheap views, but to keep them, you need to have substance.
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