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Question for old players trying it again.
Elnator
Member Posts: 6,077
First of all: This poll is ONLY for those, like me, who tried Horizons when it came out, or shortly thereafter and didn't like the game and left.
If you didn't try Horizons in the first 6 months after release and left because you didn't like the game DO NOT ANSWER THE POLL or you will skew my results!
For those who fit that category and are now trying the game again: Please answer as honestly as you can.
If you reply that it's better please post what you feel is improved.
Thanks!
Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Sig image Pending
Still in: A couple Betas
Comments
Well either the 57% is a total lie or people aren't posting WHY they think it's better now then at release.
So, so far I'm only going to count 2 of the YES votes since the voters just voted 'yes' for no reason which leads me to believe that they don't meet the poll's criteria and are just fanboi voting.
Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Sig image Pending
Still in: A couple Betas
I would participate in the poll but I don't know what you are asking. One of the answers is a question.
If you answer yes, are answering the question "is Horizons better now than at release" or the question "do the characters still walk funny"?
SO I'm not going to vote.
Only played the game to be a dragon...
I had hopes that playing a Dragon would be more entertaining, but everything plays the same...
Had more fun jumping off the cliffs and getting killed...
Playing from beta to release, and from release to 5 months afterwards
I must say, Yes
the maps, navigation, Lag,
The overall feel of the game is better
I played from about 2 weeks after launch till Dec of 04. Left for a little bit and came back.
Is Horizons better now than it was at release? Yes. Horizons has gone a total transformation since release. If you played at launch and quit after a month or so, you would not even recognize the world as it is today.
Make no mistakes, there are still problems. But IMO the good outweigh the bad when it comes to Horizons.
Very true Dha'Vol,
I have to Agree with you 100% percent,
Played in beta and stopped after the Satyrs was freed.
Then made a short return to the game Feb. 05. till April.
and I have to say, a lot I did recongnize but there was a lot that
I also didn't. Was lost for a bit.
I agree with you 100% percent
I've never played the game but wanted to see the results so I answered "No, but I'm still jaded about the game so I am biassed."
Next time add something like "I have no opinion" so that those that just want to see the results have a place to vote!
so...
Hail and well met Realmer !
Dunno where you got the bit about jumping off cliffs and getting killed from, thinking of another game maybe ? Admittedly if you jump off a cliff into deep water then that'd be one way to guarantee death, or jumping off a cliff into a pack of monsters you're not equipped to fight...
Falling off a cliff and dying needs something else in the equation though, it just doesn't work in the way of *jump ..... splat* in Horizons
Edit : You might want to go take another look at dragons, in comparison to the rest of the races in Istaria, dragons are certainly unique beasts both in how they play and the immersion of lore that surrounds them
Right, first of all I never left Horizons. I've voted regardless, because I think the poll needs to hear from all people who have been able to see the game improve as time has passed, not just those who took a break and came back (though I'm pleased to say that of those who have come back in the last few months, most of my old friends have chosen to stay now that they have returned).
Has the game improved ? Yes. I don't mean things like a few new continents, or new monsters, I mean the mechanics that are fundamental to gameplay have improved. Wouldn't say that things are perfect, but that's not what was asked
Going into detail about what has changed overall is difficult to do in a single post. I strongly encourage you to read through all patch notes since release, because there's no way I can cover all the little bits that have helped improve the game overall here. I'm only going to touch on a selection.
Bug fixes. They're always a way of improving a game. There's been plenty of bug fixes.
Consignment changes, instead of ten items per imperial consigner, we can now have 150 items in total spread across all imperial consigners, ie 100 on one consigner, 50 on another, or all 150 on a single imperial consigner (imperial consigners are the ones found in racial towns such as Aughundell, Dalimond, Kion, etc).
Plot / building construction. Plenty of new structures with new purposes have been introduced since the game launched. Even decorative things related to events such as various jack-o-lanterns, christmas trees, snowmen, skeletons, skulls, I've now even got a giant tree on my plot that is four or five times taller than the tallest building on my plot. Gambling dens are fun, although I'm getting jealous of one of my friends who has now won insane amounts from my slotbot whereas I just feed the silly thing and rarely get any payouts from it. Taverns are a great place for confectioners to store their many food types (I don't know what the limit is, but I've had 38 different types of food on sale at one time in my tavern, I'll get around to testing what the limit is at some point). Could go on, but I'm sure you can take a gander at the community website and see a summarised list of some of the structures both new and old that are available. Oh and let's not forget that if you want to move to a bigger plot, you won't need to worry about sacrificing all your hard work soon. Oh yeah, taking a load of 120 construction blocks at a time instead of 30 thanks to being able to port with a tarbash disk helps remove some of the grind from construction.
Dragons now have their own dedicated tutorial which really is a wealth of information, and a lot of fun to play. Dragons are more powerful now, more in line with what you'd expect from a big scaley beast. They have more lore, more abilities, better armour, they don't drain hoard from just being logged in (many who played in the first 6 months will remember that pain of playing a dragon) but instead hoard drain is now player-controlled. Easier ways to get hoard, oh and dragon claws can be crafted allowing dragons to equip many of the fancy stones and crystals that were previously only available to bipeds (monks got something similar in the form of handwraps). I'll let someone who plays a dragon full-time go into more detail about what's improved there.
Could type more, but tbh I'm just touching the surface. I have restricted myself to 3 'topics' which are unambiguous in terms of them most definitely being improvements. Three topics out of many many areas of improvement.
I played the game for seven months when it first came out, and left for the reasons that most folks have posted before.
I recently returned and tried for a month to get back in the swing of things. the server merges were a good ( needed ) idea, but the game is still so far behind the pack leaders like DAoC and WoW that I won't be renewing when my account runs out in two days.
I really felt that I gave it a fair try, but it the long run it's pretty much a third rate game with just too low of a population to get a loyal following out of enough players to pull it out of the dulldrums.
I started playing this game 2 months after his release. I was lured into it by a good friend of mine.
I managed to play this title for 8 months .. but after that i got so sick because of lack of improvement. Not listening to the community etc.
Therefor i don't think i will reactivate my account ... there are better MMORPGS out there now
(ps .. didn't vote
)
During the period you played, I would agree with you. But the majority of the poisitive changes to this game and improvements in communication began early this year and have been continuing up until present and looks as though it will continue to be so. So maybe later down the road you may reconsider and think of giving it another shot.
Btw - I voted yes because of my reasoning stated above, even though I've been playing since release.
The trouble is, even with the positive changes made, the game still can not honestly match up even to second tier game. The long period of no improvements at all has pushed this game into a small niche from which it won't be able to climb out of.
Plus, you have to admit, Horizon's reputation is just awful in the gaming world. And that kills a game faster than anything.
Maybe.
I'm just not that quick to right this game off as a loss just yet judging by what I have seen over the past several months, nor imply that its future holds no hope of becoming a more stable and popular game. All things can change, including the game's reputation, with time and hard work. It will be difficult I admit, but I just still think theres enough of a chance that I may hang around and maybe watch and see. I don't expect it to ever reach heights of hundreds of thousands, or millions of players - not a big thing to me there.
Anyways, only time will tell I guess so we'll just have to wait and see. Even if it can be nothing more then a niche game, as long as there all those who are enjoying it then that will be fine by me (although I'm sure the investors wouldn't agree with me, but who cares about those guys anyways, not I
)
I totally 100% disagree. I tried this game again after all the hype about improvements but still didn't trust Bowman & Co enough to reactivate my old account so a 7 day free trial was obtained.
The server was almost empty, lag was indeed evident even with such a low population and they have not even sorted out the sound problems with some cards. All in all pretty much what I expected from this set of losers that call themselves a dev team.
There are a pile of mmorgs out there that offer more content and better gameplay, spend your money on one of them instead.
Strange, you must be playing on your own Horizons shard, might explain why you think there's no-one around... As for lag, yeah right. Maybe you're confusing client performance with server lag, the former has problems, no-one is denying that. The latter is practically non-existent.
Maybe you would like to go into more detail with your observations Eric1000 instead of making a post that makes it blatantly obvious that you did not try the game. For you to 100% disagree with the comments made by Salenger in this topic implies that you are all too happy to ignore the facts.
Lag (delay in responses from the servers) : next to nothing, especially compared to WoW or EQ2.
Monsters can be found in plentiful supplies.
Population is not thousands of players per shards, but it is most certainly hundreds of players on at the same time.
Turn off 3D sound if you've got problems with your sound card / audio chipset.
I'm only addressing the points raised by Salenger and yourself, there is a tonne of good in the way of improvements since the game was launched that is not being mentioned here. We're not talking about a game that is a bed of roses, not by a long shot, but the fact remains that the game is improving, not steadily, but gaining in momentum as the months have passed this year.
They have patch notes now? That in itself is an improvement.
Seriously though, have they added much to do after levelling and plot construction? Before, it was basically all crafting and adding structures to your plot, half of which didn't work. There'd be an "event" of some sort every other week; most of the earlier ones gave a reprieve of a few hours of adventuring before going back to grinding.
Did they ever add anything to the abilities and items? Getting the same skills for combat and crafting, repeating every 20 levels with a new tier didn't help the lack of content at release.
I see the Istaria FAQ still references a PvP version of Horizons. Any word on if and how they would be implemented? And did they ever open up the blighted lands past the Gates to the Withered Aegis? I remember an early claim that the original "world" at release was only supposed to be between 1-5% of what the explorable region would be.
Troll!
Horizons has seen major improvement! The world has been reborn and redisigned. Try it youll see. Dont listen to the haters that will try to tell you that it still as bad...they dont know what theyre talking about.
Sheesh. I made one joke in reference to the fact that patch notes were all but non-existant for the first few months, and I get called a troll. The questions I was asking about whether specific improvements/changes have been made to the game all deal with mid to end game and future developments. That's not exactly something that you can try out and see in a short time. If I had been talking about early game performance, then a comment to trying out the game might be warranted.
Yup, real patch notes, they're here ! omg it's such an awesome feature too, every game should have patch notes
There's work going on with what might be called 'elder game content' just now, I don't know what to say about it since there's nothing concrete, only hints and rumours from the devs about what they're working on with it. I reckon elder game content is what you're looking for, but in the meanwhile I'm still finding plenty to keep me preoccupied so whatever elder game content actually means will inevitably be icing on the cake for me
Plot building is a lot better now, things like taking a tarbash cargo disk through portals so I can carry 130 ironsilk tapestries at a time instead of the 30 or so I can fit in my backpack. Man wasn't it just a drag when you had to do all those ports to get to your plot with only what was in your backpack ? Glad that there's not so much porting, although the work isn't any easier in terms of amount of resources needed. Oh yeah, houses all have varying amounts of bulk and stack capacity, you've got taverns and gambling dens, guild houses, shrines to bind to, workshops that offer a bonus to your skills (for example a journeyman alchemist shop has the essential machines for the school and offers +50 to the main skills used), and so on. Not come across any structures that are broken in terms of their functionality since structures were reworked roughly a year ago.
Events aren't coming at the same pace they used to. With all the downsizing in terms of staff that happened last year, most of the developers are up to their eyeballs in work that's helping improve the game. I'd love to see more dev time spent on events, but since we see them improving the game constantly I'm willing to make allowances. The occasional invasions and things like the devs attending community meetings in-game for Q&A sessions helps alleviate the slow-down in event content.
Abilities probably haven't changed much since you played, aside from improvements (and in a few rare cases, nerfs) to some of them. Elemental Archer would be an example of one school which recently had a number of their abilities improved to help make the school more viable and enjoyable to play
As for items, there's various blighted equipment that's worth having, I've got a blighted mithril maul that converts the damage to mind (great since very few monsters have mind resistance), has a 7% chance of converting the damage to ethereal, and a 20-something% chance of dealing an extra amount of damage to undead. Crimson jewelry is nice, offering a number of benefits over traditional jewelry, as well as a negative effect (a slow DoT which doesn't bother a high level adventurer, but you wouldn't want to wear any of this jewelry at level 1 
). If you want to check out some of the other lootable equipment, check this page out : http://www.guildportal.com/Guild.aspx?GuildID=26751&ForumID=141412&TabID=240699&TopicID=1080564
As for PvP, I wouldn't mind some form of arena PvP, but that's not a priority since the devs have many more things on their plates to offer first. Also in terms of available landmass, we've had a lot of new areas open up since launch, including large island formations to the south-west where guild plots and many new private plots are located. The northern continent (aka Trandalar) has been discovered, this in itself is a very large landmass that offers a variety of resources as well as monsters that cannot be found on the main continent of Greater Aradoth.
I think that covers all your points for now, and it also helps me list a few more things for this topic to lend weight to my opinion that the game has definitely improved
Thanks DoomReaper; that was very informative. One last question though: were all the old US shards rolled up into Chaos? I'm tempted to take a look and see if any of my old guildmates from Dawn server are still around.