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This game could have been so much more
angriff
Member Posts: 154
WWII Online was a really great game then they decided to give in and make the air gam just like all the other dime a dozen gamees where the players can stop playing the game for the sake of the war and start playing a silly game of who killed who. It was the day the wargame died. No matter what the devs do now the game is polluted with cheap stat gamers and has lost all the appeal of the ONLY true online wargame.
To give you a flavor here is one of the better pilots in the game spends time telling his buddies on a the game forum that another player who has two accounts shoots him down reguarly. This guy gets a report that his nemisis enteres the game. He thinks that he shot them down. Instead on blaming the fact that you can shoot someone in this game and if they ditch their over 1 minute later the kill will not be awarded. This longtime player of this game Thief is more intersest in telling his buddies and whining to CRS that there appears to be something wrong . I shot this guy and I (Thief) did not get a score kill.
The wargame is secondary to these guys. It is one of the biggest reasons that game has dislodged itself and become just another niche low dev, poor graphics game. The devs never held onto the basic concept that won them the niche. They fell into the need for stats ... instead of just saying you killed 24 enemy planes and died never they have to tell the guys name so players do nothing but worry about stuff like this and not the game or how many enemies they really kill.
The game has become an archaic type stat ladder type and lost its Wargame affect.. It is so sad. To paraphase (the situatiion by Joni M)... It could have been more than a name on floor... It could have been a real wargame but no. The game has fallen victim to the me generation stat aholics and lost all respect amonst true wargammers.
The game is now full of these stats only players who hardly play the game until their favorite plane is rotated into the game. The air model does not compete with other sims. Its appeal was a combined arms wargame but now that nobody playes the game except when their favorite mount is there and these type pilots never engage in any serious effort to further the wargame to a victory condition the entire game becomes a farse.
Advice pass this one by.
From the Hanger Forums of WWII Online
Comments
Angriff, you are correct in all aspects.
It will never change, the potential that was there in the land/sea/air war has become nothing more than a joke.
The propaganda machine with certain people(MM) will tell you things can't be better. The game lacks so many reasons not to play that overall the only thing left for some players is being stat whores. CRS butchered the game down to attempt grabbing players from other games.
CRS basically introduced their version of a NGE, but they took years to do it.
I just started playing the game, I can see thiers alot of fun things in game. I also can see thiers alot they could do to improve it. But looking at thier budget it must be difficult to push out content. Maybe they need to put in a FTP model, with payment options to buy level, lets say you want to open the Army, pay 5$ for that month.
The area I think they need to work on is the Navy, I just dont get it? Level 1 and level 5, ships. They could add in more content to get this going. Frieghters could run supplies and thier could be more production areas in England. Why mirror the two sides? Have the Allies run supplies and such to France, then have the Germans on the attack.
I can see alot of possibilities, but this is an old game that doesnt look like it has a budget to implement most of them. And Id say time is not on thier side. It does look like thiers a nitch market for a WWII online game. And sooner or later someone will use the ever cheapening game engines to build one. The problem with this game is its a monumental taks to drag the already made game in a new direction with a small staff.
No matter where you go, you can't escape Angiff crying over this game. Seriously man, it's been 10 years. Time to let it go. CRS has a long history of lancing pimples with Saturn V rockets. That isn't going to change. the biggest obstacle for the Allied side was always the French. All of the stupid things they did, like giving the Axis the only anti aircraft gun in game for a while didn't help but could have been overcome by having player numbers. Nobody wants to play the French in WWII. It neverhelped that guys like OJ anc company abused the population differences to make the game unplayable for so many people. Thus we got AOs and the Squad nerf. They finally removed the hardcoded handicap with TO&E but killed much more in the way of team play and freedom. They also plowed the Axis under with the rediculous supply lists at that time which only helped the flood of returning Allied players to roll over them. Then they killed RDP and though skirting was no longer an issue, they added the poorly designed gheydar which killed bombing altogether.
Seriously, just walk away. I did.
He longs for the same game I do. One that got away. The stat whores and forced AO's, insta-action, etc...killed it for me and so many others.
Trying to cater to the FPS-console crowd was, and is, a failure.
I played this game on release before everything was semi-coordinated. At times there actually was a few hundred players online.
I know Angriff's gripes about the air war. With so few players, its now about who killed who. Near launch, you had dogfights that involved dozens of planes.
To this day, not one game has been slightly as fun. World of Tanks almost got there...but it has turned into a stat fest. I had considered coming back to this game but I'm more concerned about lack of players.
I know people want to call out Angriff for being a whiner/hater.. but really.. he's pretty much always spot on with his arguments. And can you blame him for being so bitter? Because there's seriously no other game that comes close to WWIIOL. And, quite frankly, there never will be. Sure, get over it.. but I dunno.. (there's a reason why I frequently visit these boards)..
@nachofoot: When I stopped playing this game it was quite dead. There were hardly anyone in the towns and the air was dominated by the same 3 people. That said it was a while ago so with the upcoming updates/patches it definitely will (read: should) increase the population. So make a new account and give a go at the trial, but personally, I wouldn't put any money in before you knew for sure.
Currently Playing:
Nothing.
I tried it out. There's more than just 3 planes in the air but Allied planes dominate. A few know the map too well and avoid fire bases with AA even when there's no AA spawned.
The game is usually confined to 2-3 towns. Playing with infantry is much better than on launch. Its still feels a little robotic but at least its better. There's just enough players too to make it fun. Still haven't made up my mind to resubscribe though.
I cranked up my free-to-play account this week to kill some time before BF3 and Skyrim drop. Prime time US, there were only two towns under contention . The battle I spawned into had between 13 and 17 people on my side, I would assume the opposition had a similar amount. I played until I had my first simultaneous kill/death (which was about 30 minutes). I can't believe they still haven't fixed that.
That's due to the significant lag in infantry gameplay. After launch it was horrible. I could run into the cappable building, kill everyone in it, and cap before anyone saw me. This week, I would say at least 1/4th of all kills are simultaneous.
Also, I experienced a few mysterious hits while guarding a hallway. I believe it was due to my foot sticking out of the building wall and someone shot it.
That's the one of the things I don't have a problem with, or at least I understand it. In other FPS, the central server determines who kills who depending on which kill it receives first. Thus the better ping usually rules in those games. With enough ping difference, you could kill people even before they saw you.
Either for fairness, or for server load reasons (can't remember which) the players PC determines the kill and sends the message to the central server, which sends it to you. So as long as you can kill someone before you receive the message that they killed you, you'll get a dual kill.
In other FPS games, I choose the servers with the best ping rates for my location, as everyone else does. Everyone has a similar average ping and the playing field is more or less level. IIRC cost is the reason kills are handled the way they are in wwiionline. It's cheaper to do it PC side rather than server side.
long thread here about infantry lag: http://forums.battlegroundeurope.com/showthread.php?t=334590
Back in the beginning, there were many cheats as well. That was the main reason I quit. The various ones I saw were:
1. Wall clipping (you can still clip walls to a degree and climb up structures this way somehow).
2. No foliage bug giving players the ability to see everyone in hiding (still exists).
3. Dual account traitors that give away your position (probably still exists).
Other than that, infantry are actually somewhat fun to play.
I also came across a rifleman that hid himself in a town and went afk. I noticed that, after I killed him, the map no longer displayed the enemy soldier icon under the town name. Are there any reasons to hide in a town?
Most of those bugs still exist. Yes, two reasons to hide in a town. Y
You are bored waiting for anyinfantry to spawn into the game and fall asleep or walk away to watch TV
You have a second account and want to draw off assets from another attack making players spend hours chasing ghosts. It is most prevalent around airfields.
Non-combat was also why I left the game many years ago. The best way to take a town was to attack it when no other players were around. I can deal with some stuff but avoiding combat is just silly and makes it a single player game. I'm glad they changed that. That's also why I don't agree with RDP bombing.
This is both the best tank game and worst infantry game I've ever played. Why did they design infantry to lag so much? You can literally run inside a building and grease everyone inside and no one will see you. Its much better than release but still there.
I can deal with all of that but I just can't deal with the lack of players. They need to also give basic tanks and fighters to free players. Just giving them basic infantry isn't enough to fill ranks especially with the problems facing infantry gameplay. It could be that this new beta is pulling players away from the campaign.
Ahh...I found more bugs:
1. Mission results are not displaying. Can't know what I did without exiting the game.
2. Sometimes I have to double click to make sure Im picking the right unit. The highlighted unit I want never appears.
3. Sappers can blow up tanks. Is that right? How did sapper packs go from detracking an enemy tank to completely obliterating it. Check youtube for a video of someone blowing up a Tiger tank with one pack. It is my understanding that satchel charges are coded as shaped charges. Is that possible as the first shaped charges for infantry use were bazookas and panzershreks? The Fins state that approximately 4kg of explosives are needed to destroy a medium tank (30 tons). Even then, its stated that you needed to climb on top of the tank to accomplish this feat.
Schrecks and Bazookas are now in game and the Sapper is being reduced in its potency.....
As for the others..how much do you hate the romans?
Wait Stug isn't illegal or at least unethical of you the misrepresent this status as a Dev? The Schrecks are not in game. They are in a beta version of RA. Ready Action Scenarios you know the game is going small room scale. The items you are talking about are still in a BETA and not "in game". In fact that beta version has been in developement for what 10 months now?
The reduction of the now called Engineer is sort of funny because Engineers were called Sappers because they were used to destroy harden formations as well as build and increase the infantry units defensive capability. Shame it has bee in the game so long as an banzai antitank weapon which alienated so many players who played that game for the wargamming and supposed realistic war environment.
Well that's just it, there's only one server. So you can't be 'fair' by having people picking the server that's best for them and having everyone with a sub 100 ping. This is not your usual FPS where there's hundreds of seperate servers you can pick a local one from, but then only play local. They needed a central system as it's a MMOFPS
Considering even now server resolving FPS games are 64 max (ie battlefield 3) with todays hardware, hundreds can't be done period let alone with hardware 10 years ago. If you're thinking other MMORPGs like WoW, well they have way less combat overhead to deal with and even then they split into multiple servers and for all I know they resolve combat the same way. Probably way less noticable with their combat style.
WWIIOL had a ton of issues and design decisions I don't agree with. Not finding a perfect solution that would make a global MMOFPS play like a 32 player local FPS like TF2 or Quake in regards to lag and combat determination just wasn't one of them.
For #3, think of it as a stop gap measure. They needed something for inf to kill tanks with, so they used the sachel. Yes it shouldn't have been as lethal as it was, especially on the later tanks where even with extra armor all had coded weakspots just so a sachel could work somewhere. And that's not going into the magnetic properties the sachel seemed to have.
I think HEAT rounds and Pfaust etc came in pretty close. IIRC there was an early HEAT rifle-grenade for the germans, might have been first overall. Pfaust first, Pshreck second (though not by much) as a copy of the bazooka. Way more Pfausts were made though.
But yep, sachel basically a fantasy weapon the way it was coded.
Back in the day when you had more than 64 players in a battle at a time I was willing to overlook the connectivity issues in favor of the overall experience. All the times I've resubbed over the last couple of years I never seen near those numbers. So once again I turn to a Battlefield product to give me the more polished and more importantly, populated combat experience. Sure the battlefield 3 maps are smaller than the whole map of Europe, but playing as infantry how much room do you need?
Oh I hear you on that. Once the pop dropped, the squads died, the teamwork died and all the jungle cover was added and made ATG mostly bogus, MSP shrunk the battlefield to regular FPS size, why not go small server regular FPS.
Then if I wanted inf play, I'd play Red Orchestra (soon to be RO2 when that gets up to speed) for good WWII inf gameplay. Yep then you've got better gameplay, no lag, no warping, WAY better graphics, real artillary and so on. And better graphics doesn't just mean eye candy, it means inf that doesn't twitch when hit and then go into death animations 15 feet and two seconds later. So much better shooting someone on a roof and watching them rag doll sliding off (kinda sick really) than having them floating flat in mid air until body despawns. That's when I stepped back and asked myself why I was still paying for WWIIOL. Played a bit for ATGs (which are fairly unique), but with the crazy cover and MSP zerging, just wasn't worth it.
And considering after AO's were put in, it's only put on the "important" cities you can fight in, it's not like there's a ton of cities you end up fighting in anyway which makes that 'massive map' even smaller. I can count the number of times on one hand I fought in the amazing landscapes of the southern regions. End up with more map variety in RO heh.
The weekends are nice. Right now, the weekdays have population problems. Last weekend, an axis clan took to the skies and it was ok. I think I got 5 of them but they kept running to flak. Two of them shot me down and automated flak from the airport took me down before I could get anymore. After 30 min or so, we couldn't find them. We went up to 12k to find them and two came back at 16k altitude. I was able to knock one out of the sky but the other ran. It can be difficult just to find someone to fight.
Battlefield 3 won't run on my computer. However, I did play Battlefield Play4Free for awhile. Its like Battlefield 2 but its a distinctively different product. For instance, you can't go prone. They also seemed to have reduced jet visibility a bit so its a little more difficult to dominate a battlefield with it.
Yeah that was one of the final straws that got me to leave. With the lower pops and AOs (which got even fewer with the lower pops) even with people on you just couldn't find a good battle. Sure there might have been two battles going, but if both were in the late camp phase, not really my cup of tea. Or worse, if you wanted to play some ATGs, can't do it in the later phases. Originally the vastness of WWIIOL and it's large pop (and no AOs) is whenever you logged in, there always something to do with whatever class you wanted. In the end not only did I find so few chances to use ATGs really, I couldn't be bother to log in to see if there was any chance to as the odds were so low.
You should check out Red Orchestra 2 for your inf play. It's WWII based and slower paced than Battlefield three with none of that 'no prone' stuff. Probably easier on the computer also. Tech vid on RO2 MGs (which rock) and tanks. As in RO, no crosshairs, ammo count etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zogCqAI2uY