102403-is-sticking-it-out-actually-a-thing-page-2

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Probably for the same reason I left TOR, a content drought. Not even WOW can get away with a gap that long.


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You'd almost think that developers and publishers would learn by now, wouldn't you?


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Out of curiosity, is this your first MMO? From my experience with playing MMO's since UO which was in the mid 90's, this is generally the pattern. In saying that I do agree with your point, it doesn't seem like a good business practice. Now the reason for my question? I'm interested in knowing if your new to the genre and giving a fresh perspective as a new comer (which could be a sign of complacency amongst MMO gamers who have just accepted this as being the norm) or someone whose been through this before and no longer content in accepting this process and trying to push an initiative (which honestly I'm all for).


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An MMO on W* scale is difficult to compare to anything from a typical software shop. The network software or editing program I push out is engaged by its users in a mostly predictable fashion; the users of MMO software engage it in ways noone can predict so that alone is part of the reason huge MMOs seem buggier - more code, more users, more unpredictable ways of engaging the software, more bugs. Just because some other software program doesn't seem to have many bugs might be due in part to the fact those bugs just don't get discovered because of scale, the way it is used, etc. One of my pet peeves is the widespread belief that the gals and guys who write and QA the code have control over when the product ships. When you're painting the interiors of 1200 subdivision units, sometimes there are 'holidays' because the carpet guys are coming tomorrow and the tape and texture guys ran late because the sheetrock hangers went slow because deliveries were held up and the... you get the picture. A better test of the studio is how fast those guys and gals can make fixes, not how many went out at release. Be interesting to see what gets fixed in Sabotage this week. A gaming studio failing at release discipline would be more true if they self-finance and self-publish. Not so much when they're owned by a big, soulless corporation.


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Yea talk bad about the current "younger" generation. Let's see the generation where more of them are 10x less racist and homophobic then older generations. No matter what people *cupcake* about the younger generation at least I see them being a lot more tolerant than I remember my Generation being.


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If that was true, there wouldn't be a FFXIV:ARR. Imagine if people said, "FFXIV 1.0 is too horrible to ever trust Square again." I'm glad SE kind of proved that kind of snobbery wrong; in three years, they made a decent game out of a complete dud by essentially completely redesigning the game. Actually, it was very normal especially for older games to launch bugged. I remember multiple bugs in my NES games, from sprites disappearing to game graphics not functioning to bosses disappearing and forcing you to reset. We don't talk about it because we dealt with it, but you could read for days about the bugs in even well-received games that you sometimes had to know how to work around, since there was no hotfixing. And this was when game programming was a LOT simpler. I still remember having to fight a bug in Mega Man 4 on the (I think) Bright Man level where the light would go out when you were sliding and the game would lock up, so I had to time my power slides to not occur during a dark segment. I mean, if people really think the game is so horribly made that they can't move forward, they shouldn't subscribe. I'm actually very impressed by how few bugs there are, given the vast amount of code in this game. It puts even other MMORPGs at launch to shame with the sheer scope of what they're trying to do. There's simply no way to know what the problems are before you put it in the field and pile the players on. I think the "entitlement generation" argument is based around this idea that, with the games getting larger, more complicated, more broad, there should be no issues at all, regardless of the fact that games have always had bugs and issues, all the way back to the dawn of programming. Most of us old fogies are sitting there, saying, "have you never slipped between two clipping planes and fallen into the middle of limbo?  Game developers aren't computer programs themselves, they make mistakes.  We're just happy they can fix them now with updates; before we'd have been stuck trying to work around them."


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I thought the complaints were that they can't earn a silver while pugging dungeons and that turned into "too much time required" which really meant "making friends is hard". Some parts of attunement do need easing up on though, yeah, not the silvers though.


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