Very interesting read

[Eomer]

http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,42210,FF.html

My favorite quote would have to be the one where he mentions they have made a million dollars on player transfers, alone. Oh, and the mention of a 40% profit margin also was cute, in light of their recent release of the 10 month late Bazaar!

Very interesting because it actually mentions some hard figures about the costs associated with the game. I wonder how Brad McQuaid feels about the article though... it tends to make it sound like John Smedley was the main man behind EQ, whereas I think it's more realistic to say McQuaid was. Smed did the business side of things during the development, I thought.

And yea, I know it was posted on FoH!

[zagzal]

thanks Eomer that made me think alot about eq :mad:

Lol it kinda made me mad :)

I know they are all about makeing money but for god sakes fix the damn game.

Btw I ripped this and posted it on the sk board hope you don't mind :)

[Eomer]

np, I ripped it from FoH!

[Grimthorn]

Slashdot's thread on MMORPG's yesterday was an entertaining read. (same story as what was posted above, I think, but with commentary from the users)

It did make me feel just a bit stupid for jumping through VI's hoops for certain things. (Timesinks in particular)

As much as I was originally looking forward to it, I'm not even sure now if I'll try out PoP, much less SWG when it comes out. If PoP is even half as buggy as Luclin is, I won't bother.

-Grim

[Dustyman]

damn i wish i could make that much money

[Eomer]

SWG will prolly be a good game, actually. At the very least, it won't require the massive time investment that EQ did/does to get enjoyment out of it. A MMOG where you can play for 30 minutes and feel like you accomplished something would be very cool. In EQ all 30 minutes lets you accomplish is to run across 5 zones devoid of any useful or interesting content to your goal, where you find it's camped or you can't find a group.

That said, raiding was always my favorite part of EQ, even though it was by far the most time consuming. I still have fond memories of my very first raid at level 44 with CN/Malla, doing Naggy. It took us three tries and like 6 hours, but we did it eventually!

[Zangeif]

And after those 6 hours a fight insued about a paladin book involving I think Khael from CN and some pally from malla!

[Eomer]

Hmm, I think that may have been a different raid Zang, that was about a year before we first met you in WW and attempted to kill some dragons. Unless you were around back then as well, I didn't know anyone at all really, so that's a possibility.

[Khael]

Hell, _I_ hardly remembered that Zang :p

[Rezz]

Nah, that whole shlameel took place quite awhile after the joint raids ended, probably like half a year or so. That standoff in the hole is like the only part I can remember really, I think half of each guild ended up porting out or something while the officers lambasted each other in shout. Brunore and Decadance had a way with words =o

SWG is under pretty tight reign from the Lucasarts guys, hopefully they actually learned something from all the bs that went on with EQ.. but from reading about EQ2, doesn't look like VI learned a thing =\ Lets hope Lucasarts can keep it good ^_~

[Zangeif]

Ya I cant remember exactly when it happened....I just vaguely remember it. I came in right after IG broke up the first time. I remember Vegar joined CN and told me it was a cool guild to join :P if that gives you any frame of reference :P

[vegu]

that was short after Epics were put into game

[Eomer]

I don't remember when Vegar joined, but I do remember when you started raiding Zang. Was about 2-4 weeks after the release of Velious, and for whatever reason you happened to be in WW at the same time as about a dozen people from CN who were exploring the zone for the first time. I just remember thinking that DE's looked way fucking cooler in Indo than Xuen! Kuru then proceeded to pull Glati or some shit and we got wiped hardcore.

[Mitsy]

SWG designers are also old UO designers. UO was a great game just lack of graphics and content. I think by mixing old uo and eq design the game should come out nicely. I'm just waiting to play a damn sexy female Wookie =)

[Zarxen]

Hmm only game I can see pulling me back into another one of these types of games is Worlds of Warcraft.

As for SWG I guess it's possible it might be good but then again who knows. Lucasarts has put out alot of Star Wars games but how many of them are really all that good? Jedi Outcast is exceptionally good mind you.

[Zarxen]

And speaking of Lucasarts and Star Wars games. There is also Knights of the old Republic coming out which is developed by Bioware( same people that did never Winter Nights) and distributed by Lucas. Looks like the same game engine as Never Winter but in the SW environment.

[Eomer]

Anything Bioware touches turns instantly into gold! I met a few of their employees while paint balling one time, and I was hard pressed not to felate them on the spot :(

[Khael]

The event in the hole was merely the end of it Rezz. I'm pretty sure most of what happened was kept under curtains in lmalla. Decadance was a fucking prick about the whole thing. Tried to start a conversation with him/her and ended up being ignored. Figured she was afk so I waited about 10 mins and sent another tell. By this time I had sent 2 tells, and now got the reply that I should stop my whining and bug Dlgoth instead since he/she didn't want anything to do with it, and also that I was placed on ignore list. Some officer, huh. Trying to get ahold of Dlgoth was like finding a needle in a haystack, only to find out once you find it the needle is glued to the floor. Once you actually find him online, he replys to one tell and then ignores/afk's for 30 mins :p Eventually they all started tossing the ball to the eachother. Pally(can't even remember who it was) told me to talk to an officer. Officer told me to talk to dlgoth. Dlgoth told me to talk to pally. Etc, etc..

For those of you who didn't know what happened, basically I had ruined my oracle faction and let Sosha loot my naggy book for MQ. By the time I got my vox book (can't remember who looted that one) Sosha had traded my naggy book for GBS and neck of superiority. Yay. Of course, it wasn't really sosha, it was a "friend" that had done it that had no idea the book wasn't his. So I pleaded Lmalla to undo the trade, as sosha had agreed, but of course got ignored. I don't think I even got the GBS + NoS :p

I remember I was pretty pissed for a while about that. Not only because I had let a jerk loot my naggy book, but also for how the issue was handled my lmalla. Luckily I think the Sev we did about 2 weeks later dropped a naggy book :)

[Tarissa]

Originally posted by Eomer
Anything Bioware touches turns instantly into gold! I met a few of their employees while paint balling one time, and I was hard pressed not to felate them on the spot :(

rofl wtf?

NWN wasn't exactly gold :|

[Eomer]

SP is pretty good, the engine itself, as well as the interface are spectacular IMO. And the SP wasn't supposed to be the only part about the game, there is so much more to it than that. That said, I haven't even touched the MP, DM, or tools at all really. But to get all that in one package is pretty good IMO.

And both BG games ruled!

They have yet to make a bad product, something not many companies can claim. I think they are up there with Blizzard personally, although Blizzard has a more proven record (although I have personally only ever bought one Blizzard product, Diablo, and only played it for maybe two weeks).

[Buazag Bonesteel]

/agree Eomer

[Rezz]

Rofl, thought you didn't remember it Khael ><

Nah, I helped Malachiyte do a bunch of the faction work for the FA when that was the only "epic" around at the time, I was there for all the fun ^_^ A large part of the problem was Kuru, something about L`Malla being a piece of crap that rode on the coat-tails of CN's greatness to become the questionable midlevel guild it was (not a direct quote mind you, but it was something really similar) that pretty much ended negotiations before they even began. Nobody had any proof that Sosha was the same person (it was someone's dual-boxed alt at the time I think) and with Kuru's wonderful thoughts about our Guild in mind, we hardballed about it. Skip ahead to the hole and that was fun! I think there was even some incident at the fear portal once during the whole thing, either L`Malla was gonna go in on CN's day or CN was coming in on L`Malla's. Not defending L`Malla, but can't say either guild handled it even close to decently, hell the yelling match in the whole was comedy gold!

And to top it off, the paladin ended up deguilding because the 24 people we were gonna send up to sky weren't at the sro portal at noon or some shit so he could do his handin. Talk about ghey.

Wow, remembering that almost makes me want to log in again and send dirty tells to Yendii =/

Back to topic!

NWN didn't impress me at all, I bought it and played through the single player game, tried online and wasn't impressed, so I gave it to my friend.

Hah, the thing about Blizzard is hilarious, I can't stand Diablo and I even bought D2 hoping it would be better, and wasn't prepared for how boring it got. Warcraft and Starcraft more than made up for it though, but a mmorpg? Dunno if they should branch out there to be honest, but I'll wait and see how it looks ^_^

FF11 is being beta'd by all of japan right now, lets hope they work the kinks out before it gets sent over to America >< Square was a little overambitious about it I think, though I'm unsure of the beta history it looks like it was pushed out the door a tad too fast. I wouldn't mind waiting an extra month or two for a game to come out if it was released without all the insane downtime that mmorpgs go through because of trying to squeaze em out early. FF11 seems pretty awesome from the little I got to play on my friend's import, but I really hope they can get the problems worked out and realize that it's not a single-player console rpg they released and that they can't treat em the same.

[Khael]

WTF, Diablo is the one game blizzard has made that has kept my attention for over a week. It was teh own back in the days, and actually quite original. Has to be a first even for blizzard, although it did become their last as well.

I'll probably find out they copycat'd some other game now :p

[Kenju Weeple]

That thing with the book in the hole was fun. think it was after i left coven nex and joined l`malla with bonebreaka. people in coven were senden me tells n shit. i was like "uhh, ya, i'm just here to make shit dead. leave me alone, thanks" then see some ghost with a name gets pulled and was told by like 4 people to nuke the shit out of it. think i died. oh~ and you indeed never got the GBS+NoS khael. i remember bitchen at you to make the hiz0re give it to you and you never got it

We used to have LAN party type dealios but we didn't call them lan parties cuz thats was computer geeeks do and would just play SC/WC/Diablo like non stop when i was in like middle school or 9th grade or something. blizzard>ed the sock. wtf did you canadians do with ed the sock anyways? they stopped showing him so i stopped watching muchmusic :/ i bet eomer stoled him for his own pleasures... SO THATS THE TUBE SOCK YOU TOLD ME YOU WERE WEARING WHEN I ASKED YOU WHAT YOU WERE WEARING. PERVERT! i'm going to wash my eyes out with castrol super cleaner :(

[Eomer]

He is still around, and still stirring the pot. He called all the upper management at Muchmusic cowards cause they edited a lot of his stuff from the latest Snowjob out, because some of it was kinda racey. He then called Rick The Temp a spineless stooge of the man, and challenged them to fire him. Fuck he is great.

See the one where Chad Smith from the Chili Peppers whipped out a sock from his pants and tried to put it on him? It was hysterical.

[Torrid]

If Blizzard is unoriginal, then there is no modern game company that is. Blizzard made the RTS genre what it is today

[Eomer]

No one is truly original, everyone borrows from everyone else. And Westwood did as much for RTS as Blizzard did, with Dune.

[Torrid]

heh, westwood RTSs are such crap. Blizzard's RTSs always had 10 times the strategy

[Rezz]

Hrm, diablo was pretty damn unique at the time, i don't remember any games that were all that similar. It just bored the hell out of me after a couple hours of playing. It's repetative to a fault imo, but then hell most games are to be honest. Look at EQ >< But by far, the best real-time strategy game is Worms! Go Team-17 ^_^

Not nearly the same kinda game, but it's fun as hell to play when you're drunk.

[Khael]

Hehe, yeah I loved worms and in mp especially.

"Bwahah, I'm gonna blow you away with this clusterbomb."

*aims, fires, watches it bounce off a wall and straight back*

"No.. NO... NOOOOOOOOOO!!!" *splat* :D