Good way to get the religious to send money. I mean how can they not if you're FIGHTING SATAN.

I am going to assume you mean 60-80 million, because 60k-80k wouldn't cover one guy's wages for a year.

Ludomancer wrote on Feb 11, 2014, 17:27:
As of 2010 it's generally well known (shared developer experience, conference panels, etc) you need a minimum of $60k-$80k to make an MMO in todays market, with $55k of that amount going only toward marketing alone.

AAA is not a valid definition of a product as it's just marketing terminology (no offense to jDreyer).

I just painted a more candid history of that company than most people have posted in any of the stories, and I most employees do agree with me, myself included.

In the end, Rhode Island didn't lie to the employees of 38 about their home mortgages being closed and giving the okay to open new ones so families could relocate, nor did they cause the forfeiture of some employees healthcare while 38 was still in business, which resulted in 6-digit hospital bills for at least two families.

I'm just incensed that some jackass suit is trying to kiss up to Shilling by erroneously planting the blame on the state that gave them a home they weren't worthy of.

Can't comment on the different frequencies they use and how it affects their coverage. But Verizon spent a bunch of money about 10 years back getting towers up all over the region I live in. Then after they were done, the towers were sold to "American Tower" or something like that. Then this new company would allow others to place their hardware on the existing tower to expand their coverage.


I have no idea why Verizon would sell their tower network unless it was one of those deals where they still own it, but it looks like they don't because of the different company name.

But, NOW it's really hard to even get a tower put up if it's needed, because all the local population calls them an eyesore, etc etc. I personally think a lot of the complaints about the towers are people trying to get the tower moved to properties they own...or governments trying to make sure the lease checks end up sent to them by forcing it to be on their properties.

They could definitely cut out a lot of the nonsense by calling it a necessary utility and stomping down on a lot of the BS reasons people use to kill new tower installations.


And I have to point out that a lot of other upgrades to current utilities are stopped because of people complaining about the inconvenience or additional hardware being put in to utilize the new tech. Instead of trying to work together to find a solution, it ends up being everyone bends over to XYZ company or nothing gets done...and there are legitimate reasons to not put shit in certain locations.

This comment was edited on Feb 3, 2014, 20:48.

EA takes lessons from a lot of things. They just never seem to remember them when it'd be useful.

How many times in the last 5 years has EA said they were learning or changing things to improve anything? Probably as many times as they've had a big public problem, and it just keeps happening.

Guess I should have been really specific and said in MMOs. But I just figured it'd be given since it was in a thread about voice acting in an MMO.

I'll use SWTOR as a really good example of it. It was interesting for a bit. Then if you grouped, you had people waiting around on you if you stopped to listen. Or people who'd keep you waiting after you heard the dialog half a dozen times yourself.

If you made another char on the same side, after one zone you ended up with the same dialog as every other char on that side. The only variations were your class specific quests assuming you didn't roll the same class twice.

Or when they did char wipes and I made another guy, I skipped all the dialog until I got back to my level I was before wipe.

They spent stupid amounts of money to get these voice actors, spent loads of time on it.....and I only listened to it once, twice at most. On the other hand, you have content you repeat all the time. Dungeons, zones, etc that could have had that money put into expanding on them. Lots of people skipped the dialog like I did. It was a joke after awhile for people due to how unimpressive SWTOR was given it's astounding budget numbers.

I don't find it untrue at all.

Beamer wrote on Jan 24, 2014, 11:18:

Veterator wrote on Jan 24, 2014, 10:41:
Voice acting in games is fun the first or second time you hear it, then after that it's either skipped or annoying.

That's probably the least true thing I'm going to read on here all day. It's 2014 - character is a part of games. One of the reasons Valve is likely struggling so much with HL3 is that, while a silent protagonist made perfect sense in 1998, it would be baffling now.

I mentioned in another thread that I'd buy a PS4 for Uncharted alone. And I'll say with 100% certainty that's due to the voice acting. Fantastic voice acting (and writing) raises any game. Uncharted is a Tomb Raider clone with some iffy combat thrown in, but the main character is just a ton of fun, due to having very charismatic acting behind him.

Few people tune it out, skip it, or find it annoying. In fact, I doubt anyone really has since the days of Warcraft 2, when "Join the Navy they said..." was hysterical the first time you heard it and aggravating the hundred thousandth time. But things don't repeat anymore, outside of bad design, so it should neither be skipped nor annoying.

Ah, but to get any access prior to it's launch. They are collecting money for alpha and beta access. Which is what I referring to.

And my point with the building assets is that unless they do something to detect, check...somehow verify the structures being sold as assets. People will just copy and undercut. But yes the flip side is that if they do verify and turn things down as too similar, then early adopters will have a big upper hand as well.

Im a minecraft fan, I just can't envision minecraft having a pre-built asset for money giving me the same sense of accomplishment...and it kind of trivializes your work if other people can just buy better versions of what you built yourself. Since theoretically you'll have to mine and collect all the components then construct it...and they will not unless they are being sold just the blueprint which seems unlikely.

I'd love to try it out, but I refuse to pay for what essential is building potential content for their future game and testing their engine for them.


Supposedly they are going to monetize it so people can buy your pre-built assets to use in their structures...so I guess it would be beneficial to people looking to try to make money that way. I don't see how they are going to stop people from making the same or near same arrangement of stuff and just making it cheaper.

So that leaves.....Everquest 1 and 2, Planetside 2, DC Universe Online, and maybe Planetside 1 (I don't know if they are ending it or making it f2p or what at this point).


I guess that ain't too bad, but having Vanguard on there would have rounded it out since EQ 1 is pretty damn old. Last time they had a free play period on EQ 1 it had changed so much since I last played it, I didn't have a clue where to begin learning it over again with an existing char.

Vanguard had some good ideas, but the bullshit associated with it far outweighed any novelty of ideas. Still would like to see them fix it, but like was said...the engine is probably just too wrong for the task. Don't get McQuaided on Pantheon like I was on Vanguard.

Voice acting in games is fun the first or second time you hear it, then after that it's either skipped or annoying.

I think a lot of these game devs just hire these famous people so they can hang out with them. And get the added benefit of mentioning what an outrageous amount of money they spent on development of the game...in which more than half was spent on voice acting and marketing....which........kinda sounds like they got their priorities backwards to me.

Scottyl42 wrote on Jan 21, 2014, 12:36:
I just started playing this. I made a ranger..I find them to be weak? Only level 20. But doesn't seem powerful? Maybe its just me.

I liked rangers with longbow and greatsword. They need to be fairly close to your level to get the most out of it. If you're using stuff 10-20 levels below you on weapons...you're gonna suck.


And as for this patch. So far I am not a fan. I suspect it's some bugs causing issues, but they took a lot of shitty elements from other encounters and crammed them all into these fights it seems.


Weird mechanics with almost no time to figure out wtf you're doing, then wait 2-3 hours to do it again.

No drops from the myriad of things you have to kill to get to the boss, and if you fail at the boss you get the "lesser prize" of hardly anything....and wait hours to try again. I know it's to discourage farming, but man is it annoying to spend half an hour after waiting 2 hours and get damn near nothing while you constantly kill things.

It really makes you start to hate your fellow player when you fail to win for the third or fourth time because you can't possibly explain every aspect of the fight to new people with how they are setup. And chances are you're probably wrong in some regard anyway because so much stuff is happening at once.

If you got SOMETHING worthwhile of time investment it wouldn't be so aggravating, but you basically walk away with nothing and have a bunch of other people there making the fight scale up but not contributing to the win in a positive manner.

And then you toss ending up in overflows into the mix, and you just end up with all sorts of mixes on the above issues over and over.

Unless this things gives out some amazing rewards, which I doubt given Teq gives pretty low chances of getting anything good, it's going to end up being largely ignored once people get their achievements. Too much hassle, not enough reward to keep people coming back to learn it really well.

Queen's arena was pretty boring after awhile, but at least time spent there running around in the zerg was steadily rewarding.

Funny. Person of Interest episode last night had a guy being belligerent about his phone when the stewardess asked him to stop. Then gets knocked out by the main character when stewardess turns her back.

I could see it happening already.

Only flown one round trip in my life, and it wasn't very enjoyable. That was before all the changes 911 brought. So I hope I never have reason to fly again, or end up so filthy rich I don't have to fly with others. So...here's hoping the former at least stays true, cause I doubt the latter is gonna happen.

Don't trust McQuaid one bit. But looking at the other teams history, I see a lot of Defiance...which is a pretty lifeless and dull world of an MMO.

Pantheon sounds neat, but so did Vanguard.

And to boot it's a 3 year turn around on the kickstart. Beta access in 2017, which most people will probably forget if they kickstarted by then. But 3 years on only 800k is impossible. And 3 years just to get to beta on 7 mil also seems like hopeful thinking considering the cost of much simpler projects and how much testing an MMO needs towards the end.


Got McQuaided once myself, don't let yourself get McQuaided.

Prefer tower and monitor over laptops myself. And laptops over the rest of the tablet stuff.


Maybe once they get some really good google glass like alternatives that can replace monitors, look good, perform well, etc.....the more mobile stuff might appeal to me more. They'd still have to come up with an alternative to touch interfaces that makes sense to accompany the wearable monitor though.

Think it'd be pretty damn handy to have the eyewear that interfaces with your phone/mobile device. Then that in turn interfaces with whatever machine you may need to connect to...home computer network, work..etc for more capability. Means you could have one really bitchin "monitor" you use everywhere.

Got my invite for this weekend to ESO. Didn't use it. Maybe if someone says something good about it later down the line I Might try another beta weekend out...but my first a month or two back was pretty lackluster.

Wonder what will be the guideline for their additions now, because they didn't really follow the roadmap...or add anything to it after a certain point.

Game needs some more vehicle variety per faction. And not in an attempt to sell more guns, make some of the vehicles share the various cannon sizes and types of weaponry. Cosmetics are fine, but having different versions of the same gun is just confusing...take the time to vary them visually/statistically/name wise if you want to sell it more than once.

McQuad lied a lot concerning Vanguard, and it's release state, while visually pretty, crashed every 20-40 minutes for me.

Plus all of the duping and shit that quickly ruined the crafting in the game and made everything so inflated the money was basically worthless....

I liked some of the ideas in Vanguard, like the way bards could customize songs and the necro pets could be changed somewhat.

So, hopefully someone will come along, take any good ideas he tries to put into the new game and releases one that runs well.

Yes I pretty much said what you posted in #1. I just disagree with the conclusion you've come to. 30 days of daily deals and member deals means you got 60 shots of having an item you want come up for half off or better. So 500 SC will buy you pretty much whatever you want when it's on sale, and you'll have some left over. Eventually you'll be able to buy two of the most expensive on sale items (non gold versions) in a month due to the build up of left over SC.

Like I said if it was 2k buy this month and a 500SC roll over if you didn't use it, it would be an obvious upgrade. Right now, unless items become more expensive than 700 an item, it's not going to be as flexible or as useful given time, especially if you don't care about cosmetic stuff.


Now if they give you an item up to 2k SC and the ability to BUY station cash at a big discount up to some amount every so often as a member. Then it be very beneficial for people who want to buy lots of shit on sale, but still get the real expensive items with the one-time thing each month.

But I think they are making this change specifically to combat Station Cash build up for whatever reason...personally I think it's EQN. But it could be the PSN pricing structure needing to be lined up with the PC, etc etc. No idea, don't know how they handle PSN purchases.

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After not seeing any between stages of some of these areas, the walls and barriers really stick out to me. Maybe they'll be less obvious if I played more, but the game hasn't added enough changes for me to be interested enough to continue right now. I'm hoping they add resource gathering next so there's reasons to use more of the map more of the time. Right now with the links and stuff, it's just a few bases most of the day.

Vehicle flip issues were addressed some back in the summer, but it seems like it's worse now than it was. Probably due to some of the map redesign and how tires and what not like to crawl up surfaces you're driving by instead of on. Hell flashes are by far the easiest thing in the game to flip. I've flipped them on open terrain with a slight slope with no visual reason as to why.

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Im betting the engine won't handle water properly. There's a few places in the game that have very small pools of water, if you drive a flash or something that'll fit into them, you can drive on the bottom of the water or even sit under the water on it. No drowning, no explosion, unless it's been fixed. I think those pools of water were on Amerish on maybe the western edge...been awhile ..never much cared for Amerish.

This change is not for the players benefit as far as I can tell. Overall it might help a very new account to the game acquire a few things versus just having straight station cash. But in the end, unless they are going to jack up the prices on items or stop doing %off discounts it's taking away options. And it forces you to pick an option every month, where as before if nothing came out, or caught your eye you could save it until something did.

It'd be a different thing if they let you pick up to a 2000SC "thing" (the choices according to the release suck...I bet they allow bundles but they'll be priced to block people getting them more than likely), or if you don't they give you 500 SC. Then it'd be a total upgrade for subscribers.

Which is why I think the whole change is because they've decided to put their "weight" behind Everquest Next, and want to limit your station cash options. To support this, you'll notice they have done almost no station cash discounts in the last 6-8 months and when they did they were MUCH lower than they had been.

And I think they stopped producing content for PS2 not because the players bitched, but because it's engine is used in EQN, and they realized those optimizations will help their future cash cow while being paid for by another player base.


As for my experience with the game:

I basically stopped playing in August. Came back in December for a bit with the new optimization patches.

They have redesigned continents and ruined a lot of the fun in the game by funneling vehicles and people through narrow alley ways, etc. Instead of defensible/sensible bases, they went and stuck walls fucking everywhere. Some of the bases are so maze like now, and let vehicles still drive up into them...but now they are funneled a little more than they were.

Haven't addressed shitty handling of some of the land vehicles and their tendency to just flip on little rocks. No new discussion about the resource gathering they were talking about adding by last September.. Really I haven't seen anywhere where they have discussed the future of the game.

I'd like to see some new vehicles or better utility to a lot of the under used vehicles.


I think one thing they could add to the game that is probably a lot more complicated than Im assuming it is, but would make more difference than you'd assume would be bodies of water. Like rivers/lakes, etc. So hover vehicles could pass over it, then they could give vehicles other utility items to deal with water. Think it'd be kinda fun to have a flash turn into a jet-ski. Since flashes steer like are hydroplaning already.

But if you ever played PS1, and having rivers block most of the vehicles on the ground. Where they either had to shuttle over or go on the bridge...the fights would center around the bridge and it was just a fun fight where every kind of weapon got used. Open field fights now are just........well there aren't really all that many open fields anymore after they got done redesigning the continents. And where they are they have hillsides and stuff that make it really hard to engage on even footing....and they also tend to be out in the middle of nowhere and not on the way to connect bases.


In the end: I am really disappointed by what SOE has accomplished with PS2 in the year it's been out. The Roadmap, damn near all of it has been ignored. Stuff that people didn't want got added, things they did want got purposefully misunderstood.....

Hope someone else comes out with a Planetside alternative, I really don't think it'd be hard to out do SOEs "dedication" to the game at this point. The engine is really the only thing SOE has, everything else is designed pretty poorly. Animations, weapon variety, vehicle handling, menu system, store front, etc....a lot of it is just poorly done.

What bothers me most about the healthcare system is that once you are dead broke, then you can get on medicare/medicaid of some sort. Where once you get that, your out of pocket expenses are covered usually better than a policy elsewhere, but your options are limited by the deals the medicare/medicaid system negotiates with providers.

Now that sounds shitty, but most insurance providers basically base their offerings off the medicare/medicaid guidelines. So unless you really splurge for a policy, your options are going to be a little better for places to get care, but you still got your out of pockets. Doctors make more off health insurance providers not being reimbursed by medicaid I believe...but the whole thing is just so unnecessarily complicated to make it so Anthem and them can make their bank while they basically piggy back on top of the deals Medicaid and them negotiate and treatment procedures they implement.


So back to the point, instead of helping you cover your expenses for what amounts to a disability (cancer), hopefully temporary, but possibly long-term/terminal. You have to become so broke that you have under a certain income, don't have much or any savings...and other possible avenues of income such as inheritance, retirement, etc. People who legitimately get to this point are going to be too fucked up emotionally, physically, etc that I doubt they are really able to deal with it without help. And that's where people have to legally "game" the system so they aren't so fucked financially that their spouses and kids will be screwed for potentially the rest of their lives paying down the mutual debt you saddled on your spouse.

This is where you see those well off not-quite-rich people divorce their sick spouse, makes em look like evil assholes (which they may be still). So they can split their assets, let the spouse take the kids and more assets due to the kids. So the sick one will be broke faster and be eligible for medicaid/medicare. In the process, the spouse might lose medical coverage, but the kids will still be covered under the sick spouse's plan..etc etc.


It's fucking crazy IMO. Here you have this system that probably a good third of Americans are already on --- Medicare/Medicaid. Then we have these rules to prevent really sick people from dieing due to their illness, but in the process they have to basically dig themselves into a financial hole to get there. Meanwhile, they've paid for the Medicare/Medicaid system, and they are paying for their healthcare plan...and getting fucked by both when they get truly sick.

It's why I still don't understand why people in the US are still so vehemently opposed to having a national healthcare system so the insane bullshit could be pushed out. The government already funds a lot of research for drugs and cures to various diseases, yet if anything comes of it some company makes money on it. They got all this infrastructure and money tied up into medicare/medicaid, and the other insurance companies insert themselves into the process when people pick a provider. So they already have the companies involved in what portion of a national healthcare system we have...I just don't think a lot of people are really aware of how fucked up it all is until it's too late and they are sick or have a child born with some kind of disability...etc.

Well there are real world examples of what they could do to encourage cooperation. Like adding useful things or mechanics that require two people to do without risk. Like pulley systems to move things to a second or higher floor. It'd suck to have to tie it off, run to the top, hope you can pull it in the window by yourself etc.


Or pushing a big rock over the entrance to a cave where you're staying or keeping supplies.

I am not against PVP for reasons, but the reason shouldn't end up being "because he might kill me first". Then the next guy's reason for killing is "he killed that other guy that I didn't know at all and who started the fight"....on and on. "Just because" killings like this end up turning more people to griefing if it happens to them more than once or at critical moments.

I'm guessing a lot of EVE players like playing like that....I couldn't stand EVE simply because a significant portion of people played solely to make the game as shitty as possible for others.