Ignacius

Well that's just it. FFXIV is showing, for example, 4 or so nose types. Essentially, when drawing a character, it calls up nose3 or whatever, which is loaded on everyone's version of FFXIV. It's fairly quick. Conan had a slider for the nose that allowed you to lengthen, hook, crook, flare, and more to your nose until it was just the way you thought you wanted it. While highly customizeable, I can't remember ever noticing a character's nose in that game. Or any game. But that means in a major city, everybody's nose has to be rendered individually as a scalar unit. So instead of nose3 for several characters, everyone has a 6-part variable function for just their nose. Not sure that's essential to modern gaming.

To be fair, I knew what that word was and was using it in first grade. Honestly, would it be better if he was calling someone a "vagina?" My problem with it isn't that profanity offends my delicate sensibilities, but that he's just doing it wrong. You can't just throw profanity into a conversation and suddenly you sound cool. Especially people that use it as an adjective, e.g. "cunting door frame!" I've heard it, and it needs to stop. It needs to stop in your brain before it becomes a spontaneous utterance and should make you slam your own face into the nearest gypsum wallboard before you say something that sounds that stupid. Yeah, that's how you do it, Duke!

I'll keep that in mind actually, I can see how easy it would be to unintentionally have you own personality bleed through in those situations. Oh the things my characters have done in RP that I would find sexually repulsive... but still....

Honestly, I kind of wonder about that. I mean, detailed character creation is great and all, but it seems like a relatively vast waste of system resources. How closely do we honestly look at other people's characters, but having sliders for proportions means every single character in the game has to be custom made and calculated by the system. I mean, it's nice to have, but I wonder if it's something that isn't as necessary as maybe being able to play with more clothing or weapon options if we're just talking about cosmetics.

Either fade to black or do it right. Just saying, if you're RPing sex, actually make it seem like it's your character. I've done the fade to black and RPed it out, and there's nothing creepier than someone clearly giving a character that wouldn't otherwise be acting that way their own personal sex drive. Just saying, if you can't keep the OOC from bleeding into the IC, that's the best reason to fade to black.

I'd much rather get on his case ICly. I mean, how many people run out cursing as much as possible that are then taken seriously by anyone? I'm kindly surprised nobody's given him a bollocking yet.

Just do what you would do in real life. If someone swears occasionally, it's okay. If they're entertaining about it, it's hilarious. If they're overdoing it, you are allowed to treat them as if they're uneducated and overcompensating. That's what I would do. I've played a character who didn't just swear, but said some pretty awful things while doing it (such as threatening to chew someone's liver out through their fucking chest and other children's stories). But I don't think it was the language that was excessive as much as he was a biker thug and acted like a biker thug. The problem with cursing a LOT isn't that it becomes ineffectual, it's that it has the opposite effect. People don't see you as a scary biker thug, they see you as a seventeen year old with a leather jacket who can't afford a car so he rides a dirtbike. Just treat him with belittling dismissal for a while. That'll sort him out.

Well, no, I made a new character, got to the part where I pick a server, and both Balmung and Gilgamesh are grayed out. It says, "This world is not accepting any new characters. You may either wait for the restriction to be lifted, or you may select a different world. Is this a really temporary thing, or should I just give up, save my appearance data, and wait until a certain day or time?

I'm a regular account. Which I'm starting to regret if I'm not even going to be able to make my second character on Gilgamesh, much less my first on Balmung or even second character period.

So I was trying to make a new character (so I could run the storyline quests with my brother) and found out that there's some kind of limit on how many new characters can be made at any one time. I always thought that was per-account. Seems like I can't make a new character on Balmung OR Gilgamesh. How do I get around this? Is there a certain time I need to be on?

I;d love to hear your crits of CCP if you ever want to post about them in this thread In addition to the thread that was split off from this one specifically about EVE? Maybe it would be better for PMs. Suffice it to say, I played EVE for a while, I liked it as a game, I thought it was terrible as an MMO, and I blame CCP for their development strategy. And for a lot of other things. I'm not their biggest fan. I think that if you gave the game to another, better developer, they could vastly improve it in a short amount of time. But like I said, I liked the game, just not as an MMORPG. And even though I think someone else could have definitely done EVE Online better, no one did. So I will give CCP props for being original, at the very least. I can certainly see why some people might want to pay a subscription to play it.

Yeah, things are different once you're older. At one point, women dated me because my hair was dangerously spiky, my pants were fabulously huge, my shirts were relatively shiny, and my attitude was inconsequentially arrogant. Now, the women my age are impressed because my hair is shampooed daily, my slacks and shirts are dressy, my job title is moderately impressive, and my income is regular. Playing bass and still being a bit of a goth helps, but I have a feeling that, if I ever were made a bachelor again, I think I'd be attracting women for completely different reasons. Women approaching 30 don't necessarily care if your hair is long, they're more worried about you ruining their credit. I suppose I'm different, too. My dream woman now always has a college degree and doesn't necessarily need my income. I'm getting old.

Sooo... what, you'd be able to get married in a quickie ceremony by someone dressed as Final Fantsy's biggest pop star? Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded.... are... are you paying attention?

Hey, RP Brittney Spears syndrom! Now all you have to do is marry your backup dancer, have kids with him, and turn him into a level 3 BRD he never plays after the opening quests.

Thinking of signing up and making sure we're in Coerthas for NO other reason than I want to use the line, "If we don't huddle together for warmth, we'll die in this cold!" HA!! That is almost exactly the sort of thing I was thinking about when I came up with this. All the Asian dramas and anime that feature scenes like that were a super inspiration. "Oh no! We're stuck in this broken elevator together!", "Oh no, our clothes are completely drenched and we have to hole up in this tiny shack with just one blanket!" Incidentally, there isn't just one day that this is happening. The only date on here is the date that I will stop taking sign ups. The couples can decide when they want to do the actual RP so that real life can take precedence. Sign me up, then. It might have to be a week or so, though. This weekend is the wife's birthday, next weekend (hopefully) we move into our new apartment. But I'd love to be able to RP eventually. This seems like a good idea.

To be fair, I think the reason free-to-play games are more numerous isn't necessarily a badge of quality, it's that a free-to-play game that isn't very good can stick around for a long time simply by drawing people in and keeping them hooked for a few months. Subscription games don't work that way. The truth is, it isn't just any kind of company that can make a game fifteen-dollars-a-month good. People will play big handfuls of F2P games because it doesn't cost anything to have the account. You can't play more than one or two P2P games; it's just too expensive and at some point won't be worth the money you pay. It isn't that there haven't been a wealth of subscription games that have tried, you just have to be a cut above to make it on that model. Let's take XIV for example. What did it cost them to get to stay subscription based? They had to COMPLETELY REDESIGN THE GAME! Seriously, I can't stress enough how Square managed to get my respect by doing that. All these laughably bad Final Fantasy games later, and they still had the panache to say, "No, we ARE still big dogs in this industry, and we're not going to charge you less for it, we're going to make our game worth the money." To their credit, they did. I think FFXIV:ARR is worth the sub. They could have just said, "We'll make if F2P and make it work as it is," but that wasn't good enough. And for all my criticism of CCP (and my criticisms are many), I wouldn't necessarily say EVE Online is a terrible game. Definitely, I think, a complete undermining of the strengths of an MMORPG, but my issues with it are philosophical more than technical; I get why people would pay monthly for it. Blizzard is.... well, it's Blizzard. Say what you want about the megalith, they scrapped an almost-finished game not because it wasn't reportedly good, but because it wasn't reportedly World Of Warcraft good. Blizzard, for all that we tend to riff on them (me included), are very serious about their work. I haven't played a Blizz game that hasn't been good, though I haven't played Hearthstone yet so someone can tell me if that's horrible. I spent most of this weekend playing Diablo 3 and WoW. Blizz makes sure they're worth the money. But who else can develop on that level in the industry today? You have to make a game not only great, but KEEP making it great month-in and month-out. It takes some brass balls just to stay in the arena. Who else can design that well for that long? Even decent companies like Bioware couldn't maintain that level. Who could that isn't in it now? Capcom? Nintendo? Valve? From? Heh, From Software. I'd like an Armored Core or Tenchu MMO.

Hey, that sounds totally awesome. I would honestly love something like that, a sort of evolution of TERA, GW2 and Wildstar, the "logical progression" of action-based, active combat MMOs. Though, to be honest, I'd prefer if it had servers with different game rules, like normal (generic MMO rules, instant heals, no large penalties for death, teleport/fast travel etc) and hardcore (heals are all slow HoTs, dying carries a harsh penalty, no teleports/fast travel)... and had a role system (tank/heal/support/damage). I legit enjoy having the role system. Lots of people do. Naunet has already mentioned that she doesn't like playing a damage-dealer role at all, which means that non-trinity games just completely lose her right from the starting gate. When you make a "non-trinity" game, everybody is just a damage dealer. I like playing a damage dealer, but I also like playing a healer and a tank and a support class. There's a reason why class-based games are so popular--because you get lots of variety in gameplay. So-called "classless" games aren't really without roles, they just don't narrowly define them and you have a bit more freedom to play around (however, there will always be builds that are utterly terrible and those that are amazingly broken). Also... not to put a damper on anyone's enthusiasm, but I don't think the tech is where it needs to be to create something like that, not to mention that something like that is so far outside the "norm" that publishers are really super unlikely to want to take a risk on it. Well, no, just because you don't have a trinity-class system doesn't mean you'll all end up doing the exact same thing. Let's take your standard "assault the castle" scenario. The average MMO splits you into tanks, DPS, and healers, then gives you small packs of enemies to fight at a time. There are other ways to do this division. Let's say that, instead, you split everyone between melee and ranged. Ranged include your support classes and ranged DPS (archers, wizards, etc.). Their only mitigation is space, so solo they will use crowd control, but in a group that leaves them vulnerable, but necessary. Melee mitigate by whatever means (dodging, tanking with armor, maybe ranged control with a polearm keeping them at a distance). Point being that everyone deals damage, but the melee form a battle line to keep the ranged from being swarmed. That means sometimes huddling around one enemy to keep it contained, ranged to the outside staying out from in front maybe depending on mechanic? Sometimes they have to circle the wagons and you'll surround the ranged with the melee in a ring. Maybe it becomes important to keep the high ground or escape low ground because you can be fired on with impunity? I think that was a sort of goal at the beginning of XIV's development, but it never panned out. Kind of sad, though, I think it's really going somewhere. It would involve the kind of tactical coordination you just don't get from a random group of people. Or, let's imagine the "kill the dragon" scenario, returning to the theoretical example from before. Let's say, instead of needing tank, DPS, healer, you need someone that can disable the dragon, so they know it won't escape. That could be an entire job, or just a side job for someone dealing damage. Someone might be your support character, like an alchemist who paints everyone up for battle and buffs them depending on what's coming. Maybe you need a debuffer, some kind of crippler that mitigates the incoming damage with traps or other tools. Hell, we'll even say you need a tracker just to be able to find one reliably or draw it into a trap with beast knowledge. Now let's say that the dragon, once you've got it tracked, pinned, debuffed, and you're buffed, you need to dismantle it essentially. It's too big to kill outright. So you need someone with a long weapon to attack the wings and the bits that are hard to reach. To eventually knock it over, you need someone taking potshots at the legs with blunt objects. You want to cut off the dangerous bits to make it easier, like using a sword or an axe. Maybe risky people would like smaller weapons, like swords and shields, to get right underneath and poke at the soft bits. Maybe you even get archers or riflemen to do that. In essence, you'd have created a role/damage variable class system that has nothing to do with tanking or healing, but still requires those things to perform what might be considered a raid or party task. Another example I can think of off the top of my head would be a totally classless system, in fact might be completely without level or stats, but would instead be based around gear. Let's say dragon-kill-scenario, you have certain people who have no fear of dragon abilities and sets up a set of heavy armor and a long spear to attack from the front. Then you need people to every side to make sure it doesn't go anywhere. Maybe instead you want lighter armor, but rely on being able to evade and jump out of the way of attacks faster. Or you can equip different armor for different playstyles, tailoring it to the way you feel most comfortable. Apply that mentality to the castle assault. Let's say you go Bushido Blade style, one hit to the fleshy bits can kill you, but depending on what armor you wear, you might stand a better chance of surviving. So do you sneak into the castle as a set of ninjas and assassins, avoiding the enemies? Do you do it 47 Ronin style, sneaking in and then charging through with swords out? Do you besiege it with arrow fire? Do you assault the main gate like a boss? That might rely on different kinds of armor, different weapons, even different learned skillsets. It would be classless since your level of armor is arbitrary to your playstyle, how and if you deal damage would be likewise (and would be more about that one hit that disables/kills your enemy rather than racking up big numbers, so it would be more in the technique), and there would be no healer. You would avoid damage or you would die. That last example might be the only one we could have technical issues on. Instant kills by lag would be a nightmare. I wonder if it would be better to have the launch of the attack be the trigger in the game so that the lag would be in the beginning, not the end, of the attack, giving everyone a chance to react. In a sense, those have been done in Bushido Blade and another great game, Tenchu (if you never heard of it, check it out). These are just ideas off the top of my head. I'm sure a developer could get something even more intuitive and interesting if they thought about this kind of stuff all day as a job. That's why I'm disappointed. They could make these kinds of things work, and the games they would have made would all be MMORPGs, would all be idiosyncratic and different from each other, and most of all they'd all be awesome as Hell if done correctly. And that's just the two most common scenarios in a fantasy/medieval setting. You could really go nuts with the sci-fi stuff or even crazier settings. That's just classes and roles as it pertains to the most common PVE scenarios in RPGs.

Actually, I was kind of thinking of something right up Monster Hunter's alley. You can have mechanics, just that you have to be good enough to dodge them, because everyone is a potential target. Lose enough people, and you can't contain what you're fighting at best, can't survive what you're fighting at worst. Like I said, we're just spoiled. We watch our cooldowns, watch our healthbars, watch for our raid warnings. I remember the first time I fought the Kut-ku and being completely awed by the size. Not the comparitive size, obviously every MMO will throw a large boss at you. It was how big the Kut-ku was and the sword I was trying to kill it with. You were constantly looking to see if the tail was coming in your direction, to see if it was preparing to charge, watching for it to rear up for a small fireball. That was the first and smallest drake in the game. Monster Hunter isn't like what I'm describing, but then again it's also not an MMO. It could be, and the idea of having to get to where you're going over a day or two of travel, making sure you're prepared, then finally hunting, trapping, and killing the raid boss rather than queuing and doing it automatically does seem refreshing. What would be great fighting a raid boss is getting thrown halfway across a briar and wondering if you should rejoin the fight and risk death, change tactics and try attacking a less dangerous side of what you're fighting, do you stand out and try to crawl behind a rock to stay safe? That's if whatever you're fighting gives you a chance. It might start hunting you, and you might have to desperately get away and get back to some kind of camp or hiding place. Again, just ideas of how a non-trinity PVE MMORPG would work. I bet if you were hurt and trying to escape a howling wolf pack that was following your blood trail, you'd pray that someone, ANYONE would be around and would find you.

A couple things about this, some that other people have touched on. I don't play any Korean MMOs, but I wasn't actually aware that the games I wasn't playing were Korean. I just haven't been impressed by them. I wasn't aware it was a cultural thing. However, having read through their endgame content guides, they do seem a lot "grindier" than I'm used to. Hell, western MMOs are damn near throwing new gear at you these days. WoW is literally giving you a roll on gear that works for your class and spec at this point instead of making you RNG completely for the entire party. It's one of the things I like about WoW nowadays as compared to the vanilla days. No ninja looting hunters. Second, there is actually an economic disparity between F2P games and subscription games, namely their focus. A F2P game makes, generally, initial money off the sale of the game and then all the rest of their money is made on little microtransactions. It then behooves them, like facebook games, to get you hooked early and then make sure you find advancement difficult without the microtransactions. Then, you'll either leave (which they won't worry about, since the customer is just a financial liability at that point) or you'll spend money in their store, at which point they make sure you need to spend more money there. I think the only possible way that would be mitigated is with in-game advertising, and people are already adblocking the free content on YouTube, which means few have any faith in that anymore. It might work if Blizzard does it, but it doesn't seem like it would work unless you could really make sure people were paying attention. If you could, your game becomes like a subscription game, where the focus is to keep people playing the game as long as possible. That means walking a tightrope of not pissing them off enough to quit but keeping them fed with content that keeps them interested. So content is a lot more important. Contrary to your assertion, World of Warcraft drops new areas, dungeons, and raids at least on every patch, which is every few months. In the last expansion, Mists of Pandaria, WoW players did get four further free patches that contained major content changes and advancements (you can argue about the relative merit of then having to pay again for the expansion, but they tend to make it worth the money). I'd say WoW players aren't wont for content; after so long being the top dog via content drops, I'd say it's probably the most extensive MMO in the world. If anything, I'd say their biggest problem is that they're too extensive. Having to balance high end PVP and PVE, along with making all the deviations and distractions along the way relevant and interesting, means they're constantly having to fix things that cause problems elsewhere. I guess that's a better problem to have than "no-content".

Funny that you should say this, because this is pretty much how Blade & Soul works. There are no healers. There are healing potions but those have 30-second (special potions) or 60-second (normal potions) cooldowns, so you can't rely on them except to help you recover from an occasional mistake. There are lifesteal gems but those only account for a very insignificant fraction of your HP pool. There are lifesteal attacks but they're either really weak or have really long cooldowns like the healing pots. I quite enjoy it. Actually, it all feels remarkably intuitive. You're responsible for your own well-being, and while your teammates can help mitigate for you with some support abilities and CC effects, there's no situation in the game's later dungeons where you can just sit there, take aggro, and let the healers cover the rest. You have to move, block, dodge, or otherwise avoid taking damage if you want to survive. Also, the fact that everyone can revive others is something I sincerely miss when playing other games now. As it is, in FFXIV, when the healer goes down, you're fucked, pure and simple. Letting other players get the healer back up would do a lot to mitigate that harsh dependency. Actually, that's also how Diablo works. It's just not harsh enough for me. I mean, complete harshness. Get hit too hard and you'll lose movement speed or attack power, as you'll be injured. And when I say slowly coming back, I mean your health only will regenerate after a day, so you may have to think about whether you want to risk going somewhere while injured, knowing you are risking becoming more injured. It just seems more realistic that way, to have armor actually mitigate damage normally and injury works how it does in real life (-ish). So you can only have so much damage you can absorb without retreating from the danger of the game world to town (or whatever). We just don't have the danger of being low on health. It's a temporary warning circumstance. We just never have to really make long-term decisions based on our well being. It would be nice if that was combined with a game where travel times are significant, so what actually keeps you from traveling isn't that creatures just have arbitrarily larger "level" numbers (or that you don't meet them; you could probably not have a level at all at that point), but that you don't have the skills or equipment necessary to undertake the danger of a long voyage, and a trek deep into the wilderness for people who have no survival or combat skills is essentially suicide. Just saying that it is a model that would work, but doesn't seem to be explored. Most MMOs have you as a globetrotter rather than being at the mercy of a hostile world.

Or they just make it less forgiving. Or make your armor durability into a sort of HP. What I'm saying is that we've gotten a bit too used to games that coddle us and give us ways out. I'm saying you could make a game where you fight a dragon and you would have to go into it knowing that a mistake doesn't get fixed, it can only be overcome, and your mistakes are limited. I think a "healer" is sort of a facet of game design that's been with us without question for so long, especially in fantasy games. It's not strictly necessary, though. It could be that you only have a limited amount of health and take injuries as in real life, so you need to know how to avoid attacks and manage your own health. It isn't in the current crop of MMOs not because of viability, but because of creativity. The answer game developers come to in the race to erase the class system is to simply homogenize the classes, I.E. make everyone their own healer and tank, not to simply reorganize the structure of the gameplay to make class a non-issue. One game that comes to mind, oddly, is Bushido Blade, a PSOne fighting game developed by Light Weight (and ironically published by Squaresoft). Unlike all other fighting games, there was no life bar and no health pool. They structured the game so that any single hit to a vital area of your body would kill you, and any strike to another part of your body would be debilitating. You certainly paid a LOT more attention to what was going on, and the UI was totally clean. It was ingenious. Nobody would have thought to make a fighting game without the traditional health bar and light-medium-heavy attack at that point, but I'd say that Bushido Blade was my favorite fighting game of all time. Not only was it idiosyncratic, but it was genuinely more thrilling. Most of all, it was intuitive; it wasn't just a fighting game with no HP, it was a completely different animal. MMO developers, I daresay even modern developers in general, just don't develop that way anymore. Originality, today, is to set the same FPS game they released last year in the wild west instead of World War 2 Belgium. The problem with MMO design is that everyone's gotten stuck in a rut and essentially tried solving some of the player disaffection with band-aid solutions, e.g. giving us FATE-style quests to keep us from falling into the paragraph-chapter style of leveling or giving us a more "active" style of combat by removing cooldowns or the auto-attack. As much as I've complained about EVE, it is, to its credit, something different. I'm not sure it's necessarily better and certainly not carried to its full potential, but it is structurally and organically different from the rest of the MMO market. And it isn't like other companies aren't capable of making something structurally different from the ground up; lots of the old companies that made genre-bending and idiosyncratic games are still around even if the new batch wasn't able to come up with something. It's just disappointing seeing the new crop and knowing I'll still be playing World of Warcraft when its next expansion comes out. I sometimes wonder if I play it not because it's, in and of itself, a great game, but because of all the games trying to do what it does, it is simply the best, and everyone shouldering in to try to take their market share is doing so by adding and subtracting from what WoW did well (though not first, even it wasn't the original). I guess it's just being in a design profession myself. Game design is very similar to architectural design, they just seem to have become somewhat complacent, even with the almost unlimited resources that modern technology gives them. Or maybe their failings are like ours, and pedestrian video game design is like pedestrian architecture, generally dictated and organized by business minds that don't understand how design actually works, just what they saw in their hometown. Reminds me of a project we were working on where a Christian television station in Atlanta asked us to design a new studio in the southern antebellum style from an abandoned grocery store. They even gave us a picture of EXACTLY what they wanted it to look like. It's the ugliest thing I've ever put together in Revit, and largely because people who don't have any idea how a building will actually work or look in real life are dictating architectural decisions. Who knows. I know CAPCOM hasn't exactly benefited from its horrible business analysts and administration, despite still having a game design studio that can intermittently churn out an amazing game.

Thinking of signing up and making sure we're in Coerthas for NO other reason than I want to use the line, "If we don't huddle together for warmth, we'll die in this cold!" I'm also going to have a Les Stroud-style talk as I set up rabbit traps. In all seriousness, I'd really love to go, but it's my wife's birthday that weekend, so I can't...

There's also the fact that a lot of people just like the holy trinity (or quadrinity, if you throw in support). I enjoy playing the role of tank and the role of healer and don't really feel all that fulfilled in combat when I can't. GW2 lost me more on the "you have the same skills forever, the end" bit, alongside the cheating "we're tab-target but not but really we're not tab target but actually yea, we mostly are lol" thing. Too half-assed for me. WildStar's combat goes well beyond GW2 and is as close to TERA's action combat I've seen yet in western MMOs. Blade & Soul loses for the simple fact of being NCSoft and eastern and thus doomed to grind and inevitable F2P shittiness. I learned from TERA that no amount of beautiful graphics or even fun combat can counter the insidious nature of Korean f2p models. I'm waiting for the game so unforgiving that there are no more healers or tanks, just players. And you don't get to refill your health until after the fight is over. There's just no economy in HP in the trinity system forcing you to adapt and make hard choices, sometimes putting you at a severe disadvantage. If anything, games these days refill my HP so quickly that I don't even notice it.

Haha, I couldn't have said it better myself! Well, except the killing of people in order to communicate sort of deal. A long history of living by the sword has taught Xydane that gender doesn't mean squat when someone is trying to kill you and/or harm others. Underestimation and sexism will just mean a knife to your throat when you least expect it. *Sagenod* That, and Orleans just doesn't see women and men differently. He sees weak people the same way whether they're men or women. He might sometimes feel sorry for them if they're getting pushed around, but he doesn't necessarily see people who can't take care of themselves as his "equals" no matter what set of genitalia they have. Unfortunately, he hasn't found any women he's met in-game attractive yet. It's hard to find women who both have a take-no-shit attitude but also aren't overcompensating. It's not a usual female RP archetype, I suppose, at least not on Gilgamesh. But yeah, if you're armed and in his way, regardless of your gender, you're asking for the exact same asskicking.

Orleans is an equal-opportunity asskicker, and has no problem killing someone of any gender. Generally speaking, killing people is his natural mode of communication.