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Profile: Enigma
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UsernameEnigma
Rank: 95/100Rank: 95/100Rank: 95/100Rank: 95/100Rank: 95/100
Real NameRob H
RankElite Member
JoinedSeptember 25, 2003
GenderMale
Age33
LocationHell, MO, United States
Last VisitAugust 21, 2008
Post Count9732
Biography 
Quote

Save the environment; inflate your tires!

 

5 Most Recent Threads by Enigma [more...]

Latest Blog Entry - A growing trend I have been noticing among MMO players ....
From my blog The Official MMO philosophizing corner. [Enigma]

 

.....and that is MMO players are having less patience for the many ways developers handle their games and, in my opinion, this is a good thing as it may force developers to actually make sure their games are playable before releasing.
The reason why I bring this up is because of three MMOs that comes to mind:
  • Star Wars Galaxies: New Game Enhancement.  This has been debated FOREVER and I wont go into who was at fault or screwed up this more..LA or SOE.  I could really care less at this point.  I remembered when I was on staff here I did a review on the NGE (its still on the SWG section) and while I was playing it, I thought to myself: well, crap, this wont go too well with the players.  I remember when SOE tried to keep it under wraps but Amazon dropped the ball by releasing the new NGE details too early.  The Community Manager over at SWG kept on denying the truth that the Developers were messing around with a game that has been in productivity for two years now. Sadly, the Community Manager literally did not know and when she voiced her opinion against NGE, she was promptly fired.  No matter how many commercials (you guys remember all those SWG NGE commercials?) they produced, the exodus of players from SWG was jaw dropping.  Since I have been playing MMOs (since 1999), I had NEVER experience such a massive withdrawal of players from any MMO at one time ever.  This was the first wave (and hint) that players weren't going to take it anymore.
 
  • Vanguard Saga of Heroes:  This game was the second AAA rated MMO that was affected by the players' mentality of we aren't going to take it anymore.  Brad McQuaid took a good idea and completely crashed and burned it into the ground leaving only a few survivors.  In his mind, he thought he could lead a company because he had a nice ranger in EQ and he was on the EQ development team. Well, common sense dictates that a game developer who helped with artistic rendering would not necessarily qualify them for running a multimillion dollar software company.  He had no business skills (or educational training) whatsoever.  He was so convinced that people would play his game regardless because of the nifty features he was adding (seamless world, diplomacy side quests, etc) but what he failed to realize was that many players just will not play a buggy game anymore.
McQuaid was so convinced of it, that he screwed around with Microsoft and lost millions from that and during the last 2 months of development he hardly ever went to work.  But when it was released, the players quickly realized how buggy the game was and in two months time the subscription numbers went from 250,000 to 20,000.  They lost so many players that Sigil could no longer afford to maintain the servers and to pay their developer salaries.  Later in the second month, Brad drove away on his motorcycle and hired a 3rd party person (who is paid to fire people...kinda like in Office Space) to fire his entire company save for four people. They brought them out in the parking lot, said you are fired and made them all go home.  Sigil failed because they hyped a game and lied about results. They thought the player would be understanding and that Sigil will continue to get money from there player base so they could "fix" their game while we payed to beta test their game further.  Their failure to comprehend basic principles of business cost them their company and they ceased to exist.
  • Age of Conan:  We all knew the hype.  It was hyped for YEARS and 99% of us thought it was going to be our miracle MMO that we have been waiting for years.  The screenshots were incredible, the combat combos were revolutionary and the fatalities were new.  However, when we started to play it we realized the hard truth.  It had a pretty game skin but the inside was just rot.  They are plagued with bugs, GMs unsure about their own PvP ruleset, questionable moderators, etc.  They boasted 750K subscribers in the first month alone declaring it from rooftop to rooftop and we saw it. The servers were packed and many more were coming in.  However, it had a fatal flaw:  it was release with way too many bugs, false promises, and missing features.
Funcom has had the mindset that Sigil did. We'll let the monies that come in from the release and the subsequent months to further pay for our developers to come out with better patches to stabilize this game. This is a fatal flaw because players are tired of paying for beta. They've just washed their hands and said no more.  We'll see what happens to funcom in the future. They still have a chance to save themselves but they need to be honest with their playerbase if they hope to achieve this.
Players are tired now of half assed MMOs. It doesn't matter if the MMO is the most hyped MMO of the century, if it is release in a shitty state of affairs players just aren't going to stick around anymore.  It isn't because players have lost patience in development of MMOs; it is because players have grown to dismiss the excuses that developers give them now.
Watch the interview with Jon and the Lead Developer of Funcom. Funcom was skirting those questions like Clinton during the Monica Lewinksy hearings. 

It’s in the hands of us now as the players to tell these companies that enough is enough. Develop it right the first time or don't do it at all. MMOs have been released with VERY LITTLE bugs in the past so it can be done. The question is whether or not these companies have the ethic morality of taking the time to do it right the first time versus having their first few months of subscribers pay for their patches

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Recent Forum Posts [more...]

    • Bigfoot hoaxers not getting the last laugh
    • They both lost their jobs and now are getting the crap sued out of them by several organizations who (stupidly) gave them money to see the body.

      The two men who claimed to have found the carcass of Bigfoot have surfaced to say: Hey, it was just a joke.

      Matt Whitton has been fired from his job as a police officer because of his role in the hoax.

      Matt Whitton has been fired from his job as a police officer because of his role in the hoax.

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      Not everyone is laughing.

      In an exclusive interview with CNN affiliate WSB, the two hoaxers -- car salesman Rick Dyer and now-fired police officer Matt Whitton -- said the whole situation began as a joke and then got out of hand.

      "It's just a big hoax, a big joke," Dyer said.

      "It's Bigfoot," Dyer explained. "Bigfoot doesn't exist."

      Whitton chimed in: "All this was a big joke. It got into something way bigger than it was supposed to be." Video Watch the two men explain their "joke" »

      At a news conference in California last week, the two men had stood by their claims that they had discovered Bigfoot's corpse and had it on ice. Scientific analysis would prove it, they said.

      Not quite.

      Now the two Georgia men admit that the hairy, icy blob was an Internet-purchased Sasquatch costume stuffed with possum roadkill and slaughterhouse leftovers.

      Whitton and Dyer say that when they came up with the hoax, they had no idea it would become a media circus.

      "It got legs and ran. It's crazy now," Dyer told WSB.

      Co-hoaxer Whitton agrees: "It started off as some YouTube videos and a Web site. We're all about having fun."

      "Fun" isn't exactly how Clayton County Police Chief Jeff Turner sees it. He has kicked Whitton off the police force.

      "He lied on national TV," Turner says of Whitton, "so a defense attorney now could say, 'How do we know you're not lying now?' "

      Whitton and Dyer had announced that they had found the body of a 7-foot-7-inch, 500-pound half-ape, half-human creature while hiking in the north Georgia mountains in June. They also said they had spotted about three similar living creatures.

      Still unclear is how much money Whitton and Dyer got out of the hoax.

      Steve Kulls, who maintains the SquatchDetective Web site and hosts a similarly named Internet radio program, first interviewed Dyer on July 28 for the radio program. On August 12, Kulls said, Dyer and Whitton "requested an undisclosed sum of money as an advance, expected from the marketing and promotion."

      Two days later, after signing a receipt and counting the money, Dyer and Whitton showed the Searching for Bigfoot team the freezer containing what they claimed was the carcass: "Something appearing large, hairy and frozen in ice," Kulls wrote on the Web site.

      It was, as many had suspected, an ape-like costume stuffed with entrails.

      After the news conference last week, Dyer and Whitton disappeared from view. The truth came out over the weekend.

      In a Web posting this week, Kulls wrote that "action is being instigated against the perpetrators."

      The two hoaxers have hired attorney Steve Lister to represent them.

      "There have been some threats made to them for both civil and criminal prosecution," Lister said.

      The attorney says the Bigfoot incident "got out of hand."

       
       

      Dyer, asked whether he ever thought that the hoopla had become more than just a joke, implied that everyone should have known it was a hoax.

      "Well, we told 10 different stories," he said. "Everyone knew we were lying."

    • Posted: 8/21/08 4:55 PM
      General Discussion
    • Living Abortions
    • Originally posted by Wolfenpride

      Man has no real "natural right" to life, though we try our best to guarantee it to everyone.

      Its just nature taking its course if you ask me.

      A doctor inducing artificial and premature labor to expel an infant out of the womb so that it will die without medical intervention is not "nature taking its course."
       

    • Posted: 8/21/08 4:10 PM
      General Discussion
    • Serious question about the user rating of 7.49
    • Originally posted by alien1984

      I am just curious how this game maintains a user rating of 7.49? The majority of the posts are anti funcom and how the game sucks. Heck i even bought the game and quit after the first day of playing. The game is obviously a epic failure, so how does the rating stay so high?

      Seems like someone is getting paid if you know what i mean. /discuss

      WAAGGGGHHHHHH


       

      dont look at the user rating. I dont pay attention to it....also you'll get about 329 posts per MMO about why Game X is 7. whatever. It happens on literally every MMO ever release....even the ones you love.

      There are those who like AOC who just doesn't post on the forums.

    • Posted: 8/21/08 3:58 PM
      Age of Conan
    • ==__McCain and Obama's Tax Plan__==
    • Originally posted by Venger

       

       

      If you believe this you don't understand the beast that is humanity.

      As far as Obama winning time will tell.  If Obama wins I'm not expecting much.  Going from one extreme to the next isn't a step in the right direction to me.  If McCain wins I'm not expecting much change either.

      To bad no good moderate or independent that actually cares about the American people isn't running.


       

      exactly

    • Posted: 8/21/08 3:54 PM
      General Discussion

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