But the more people that give it a try the more people that it is for will find it.
True, but the devs need to figure out a 'mentorship' program, or better yet, a skillset, to trick half of the asshat population into being helpful. New players are castrated, and physically, rather than taken under-wing.
It's the same old story... PvPers killing their own game for their own short term lolz, and then wondering why no one stays.
PvP focused sandboxes will always ultimately fail because off the type of people that play them.
The sad fact is that those people cannot see that they are the issue.
Not this again....
EvE,DF,AC1...All pretty successfull with EvE having the most consistency of the pack and as time goes by we will see more death penalty mmo's that will most likely adopt EvE's structured safe zone mechanics.
MO is just a shit bad game on its last leg, and yes i think its on last leg reguardless of who ever it is funding it...No buisness man is going to keep investing without seeing any return, even if his daddy is loaded.
Darkfall never has really had a much larger population than MO (e.g. it has been larger for much of that time but not an order of magnitude or anything) A significant portion of there better financial success was moving to Greece, where they have lower operating costs (plus assistance from the Greek government)
Asheron's Call 1 started at a time when there were 3 MMOs to chose from, so it earned back it's development costs with very little competition. It is much cheaper to keep an MMO up and running after it is working smoothly, than it is to develop a new one. Also, while Darktide may be the most popular single server, AC would never have been able to survive on Darktide alone (or if all servers were like Darktide.)
On Eve, I would have to agree with Toferio (for once). A significant portion of EVE;'s success is that they use a good system of safe vs wild zoning with a gradation leaving huge portions of the game "semi-wild" As I understand it, MO has intended to have something similar but other issues have prevented the implementation. (e.g. wandering guard patrols would require getting the A.I really working smoothly)
Back to Earthrise, MO outlived Earthrise because Earthrise decided to cut their losses sooner. ------- There are lots of aspects to that decision. Maybe they had less resources to start off with. Maybe they had fewer subscribers. Maybe they were done in when they went FTP (which could be interpreted as either doing right by the players or a desperate attempt to retain players long enough to get the game to a state that was worth paying for) Either way, Starvault is still working on making their game better, while Masthead is shutting down Earthrise.
P.S. Other MMOs that MO has outlived: APB v1.0, Lego universe. .... Gods and Heroes(? we'll see about that one?)
P.P.s. Can we now settle on Earthrise being the recent equivalent to Dark and Light? They even have the lawsuit to prove it.
It's all nice that Masthead tried to play on the care for costumer string (I salute to the idea and wish it worked) but reality showed something else. They failed.
I geuss they forgot spoiled-nerdy-instant gratification masses want to get served like Kings, before freely giving out a single dime.
There is hardly anything like MO out there. So many people wants this type of game and are apparently sooooo sick of themepark cookie-cutters.. But everyone is still jumping from one WoW to another willing to throw money on something they are sick playing after a month.
Yeah, keep jumping from 1 themepark MMO from another while slagging on games like MO. Ever thought YOU are the exact reason why no big company makes a game like this?
P.P.s. Can we now settle on Earthrise being the recent equivalent to Dark and Light? They even have the lawsuit to prove it.
I would have to agree somewhat about Earthrise beeing the closest we have gotten to D&L in recent times but I would argue the whole D&L debacle was worse.
MO outlived Earthrise for a variety of reasons (one being SV's family funding) but I will have to give credit where credit is due: I did not play ER but after reading up on it this weekends and talking to some of my friends that had played it, I will say it seems, faults and all, MO was the better game of the two.
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true...
Mortal Online went live in June 2010 making it nearly 2 years old now. With it's rising population, steady progress with patching, and an upcoming expansion in April it looks like Mortal Online will live on for many years to come.
So why did I post about Earthrise dieing in the Mortal Online forums? Both games are indy sandboxes, and while Earthrise failed Mortal Online succeeded by staying true to it's sandbox principles. Earthrise tried to take the middle road to appease both Sandbox and themepark gamers, but failed miserably. Both Earthrise and Mortal had very buggy beginnings, but later improved with bugfixes and more features, but Mortal Online is still going strong and Earthrise has failed to find serious investors to go free to play.
It's always sad to see an MMO die, but at least former EarthRise players can try MortalOnline for there sandbox pvp action.
I played this mmo about 3 months ago and it was buggy as all hell, which was unfortunate because if not I would have seen myself playing this for years to come.
Mortal Online went live in June 2010 making it nearly 2 years old now. With it's rising population, steady progress with patching, and an upcoming expansion in April it looks like Mortal Online will live on for many years to come.
So why did I post about Earthrise dieing in the Mortal Online forums? Both games are indy sandboxes, and while Earthrise failed Mortal Online succeeded by staying true to it's sandbox principles. Earthrise tried to take the middle road to appease both Sandbox and themepark gamers, but failed miserably. Both Earthrise and Mortal had very buggy beginnings, but later improved with bugfixes and more features, but Mortal Online is still going strong and Earthrise has failed to find serious investors to go free to play.
It's always sad to see an MMO die, but at least former EarthRise players can try MortalOnline for there sandbox pvp action.
Mortal Online is going strong?
That is news to me... I thought it was down to around 5-10.000 subs and showing no signs of growing. That is not going strong even in indy therms.
How that compares with regards to Indy sandboxes depends on how you define "indy" and sandbox, but here are some points of comparison in the same neighborhood. http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-4.png
@youngkg: I allowed for the fact that Darkfall had a higher population, that's why I said there had never been an order of magnitude difference. MO had 10,000 at launch. Is there any credible source indicating Darkfall ever approached 100,000?
"Dwarfed" is kind of a meaningless term when sustainable commercial MMO's range from 2,000 (A tale in the Desert) to 6 milllion.
The subscription numbers I linked to were for a complete listing of guilded characters. The one from June 2011 would be towards the end of the "good run for 2 years", but here is the NA numbers for earlier http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=257576, before Darkfall was "[for all intents and purposes] dead in it's current state.
@argirop : I don't know what costs were controlled by moving to Greece but ..."While working with Razorwax to put the development team together we realized how high the operating costs, and the cost of living is in Norway. We decided to move our activities to Greece under Aventurine to get more game for our money. It took a while to organize and assemble the team and to get into full production which started about three and a half years ago. Aventurine was now developing the technology, the tools, and the game. At the time this project started there was no technology available that would allow us to do what we wanted, so everything had to be made from scratch. "-- Tasos Flambouras http://www.warcry.com/articles/view/devjournals/darkfalljournals/3331-Darkfall-Developer-Journal-1-About-Adventurine
Bringing this back around to the original topic, both MO and Darkfall have outlived Earthrise. Depending on how 2.0 limbo affects Darkfall, Darkfall may outlive MO. It has some advantages that may be based on the merit of the game (a somewhat higher population) and business decisions unrelated to the game (moving to Greece) Both (MO and Darkfall) have outlived Earthrise based on some combination of business decisions and the merits of the respective games.
I would not pile up EvE together with other FFA "sandboxes" such as MO and DF. EvE actually went smart with its design of well protected zone which gradually fade the further you go, resulting in a very solid safe area for crafters and non PvPres to play in, leaving the outskirts to the guilds to fight for. MO and DF got nothing of this, ouside of town it is lawless zone everywhere you go.
That's the difference between good design and henrik design.
Oh, you carebear! Don't you understand that it's much more hardcore and realistic with an invisible guardzone line so that new players can chose between being ganked by gangs of reds 1 m outside of town, and being griefed by their blue alts by the bank?
Obviously lots of people enjoy this experience, since MO's pop is B O O M I N G !
I know this for a fact because some guys on a forum said so!
So all you scrub naysayers can go back to WoW where you belong, MO is obviously way too hard and sandboxy for you!
Haha nice.
##Best SWTOR of 2011 Posted by I_Return - SWTOR - "Forget the UI the characters and all ofhe nitpicking bullshit" "Greatest MMO Ever Created"
##Fail Thread Title of 2011 Originally posted by daveospice "this game looks like crap?"
I wouldn't be suprised if a lot of new players in these dying games are just bots.
I know vanguard has bots that I expect are being run by SOE? I went back to play that game a while back and noticed ranomd chats from players being spammed every hour or so. They would never respond to tells. And they would stand around idle at random places in the world.
Comments
Darkfall never has really had a much larger population than MO (e.g. it has been larger for much of that time but not an order of magnitude or anything) A significant portion of there better financial success was moving to Greece, where they have lower operating costs (plus assistance from the Greek government)
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/318280/page/1 http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/4327818#4327818
http://darkfallinfo.com/pmap/index.php?page=clans&sort=members&order=ASC http://darkfallinfo.com/pmap/index.php?mapserver=eu1&page=clans
Asheron's Call 1 started at a time when there were 3 MMOs to chose from, so it earned back it's development costs with very little competition. It is much cheaper to keep an MMO up and running after it is working smoothly, than it is to develop a new one. Also, while Darktide may be the most popular single server, AC would never have been able to survive on Darktide alone (or if all servers were like Darktide.)
On Eve, I would have to agree with Toferio (for once). A significant portion of EVE;'s success is that they use a good system of safe vs wild zoning with a gradation leaving huge portions of the game "semi-wild" As I understand it, MO has intended to have something similar but other issues have prevented the implementation. (e.g. wandering guard patrols would require getting the A.I really working smoothly)
Back to Earthrise, MO outlived Earthrise because Earthrise decided to cut their losses sooner. ------- There are lots of aspects to that decision. Maybe they had less resources to start off with. Maybe they had fewer subscribers. Maybe they were done in when they went FTP (which could be interpreted as either doing right by the players or a desperate attempt to retain players long enough to get the game to a state that was worth paying for) Either way, Starvault is still working on making their game better, while Masthead is shutting down Earthrise.
P.S. Other MMOs that MO has outlived: APB v1.0, Lego universe. .... Gods and Heroes(? we'll see about that one?)
P.P.s. Can we now settle on Earthrise being the recent equivalent to Dark and Light? They even have the lawsuit to prove it.
It's all nice that Masthead tried to play on the care for costumer string (I salute to the idea and wish it worked) but reality showed something else. They failed.
I geuss they forgot spoiled-nerdy-instant gratification masses want to get served like Kings, before freely giving out a single dime.
There is hardly anything like MO out there. So many people wants this type of game and are apparently sooooo sick of themepark cookie-cutters.. But everyone is still jumping from one WoW to another willing to throw money on something they are sick playing after a month.
Yeah, keep jumping from 1 themepark MMO from another while slagging on games like MO. Ever thought YOU are the exact reason why no big company makes a game like this?
I would have to agree somewhat about Earthrise beeing the closest we have gotten to D&L in recent times but I would argue the whole D&L debacle was worse.
MO outlived Earthrise for a variety of reasons (one being SV's family funding) but I will have to give credit where credit is due: I did not play ER but after reading up on it this weekends and talking to some of my friends that had played it, I will say it seems, faults and all, MO was the better game of the two.
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true...
I played this mmo about 3 months ago and it was buggy as all hell, which was unfortunate because if not I would have seen myself playing this for years to come.
i love how everyone is out to file a business report.
Mortal Online is going strong?
That is news to me... I thought it was down to around 5-10.000 subs and showing no signs of growing. That is not going strong even in indy therms.
My gaming blog
@ Yamota : I don't know where you are getting 5,000 - 10,000. No one has claimed 10,000 for quite some time. http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/323278/guy-finds-out-mortal-online-population-which-btw-is-around-5000-subs.html
How that compares with regards to Indy sandboxes depends on how you define "indy" and sandbox, but here are some points of comparison in the same neighborhood. http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-4.png
@youngkg: I allowed for the fact that Darkfall had a higher population, that's why I said there had never been an order of magnitude difference. MO had 10,000 at launch. Is there any credible source indicating Darkfall ever approached 100,000?
"Dwarfed" is kind of a meaningless term when sustainable commercial MMO's range from 2,000 (A tale in the Desert) to 6 milllion.
The subscription numbers I linked to were for a complete listing of guilded characters. The one from June 2011 would be towards the end of the "good run for 2 years", but here is the NA numbers for earlier http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=257576, before Darkfall was "[for all intents and purposes] dead in it's current state.
@argirop : I don't know what costs were controlled by moving to Greece but ..."While working with Razorwax to put the development team together we realized how high the operating costs, and the cost of living is in Norway. We decided to move our activities to Greece under Aventurine to get more game for our money. It took a while to organize and assemble the team and to get into full production which started about three and a half years ago. Aventurine was now developing the technology, the tools, and the game. At the time this project started there was no technology available that would allow us to do what we wanted, so everything had to be made from scratch. "-- Tasos Flambouras http://www.warcry.com/articles/view/devjournals/darkfalljournals/3331-Darkfall-Developer-Journal-1-About-Adventurine
Bringing this back around to the original topic, both MO and Darkfall have outlived Earthrise. Depending on how 2.0 limbo affects Darkfall, Darkfall may outlive MO. It has some advantages that may be based on the merit of the game (a somewhat higher population) and business decisions unrelated to the game (moving to Greece) Both (MO and Darkfall) have outlived Earthrise based on some combination of business decisions and the merits of the respective games.
@Osmunda ; Username has said a couple of times that the pop in MO is 10k and 20k.
Stay on topic please. Thanks.
Haha nice.
##Best SWTOR of 2011
Posted by I_Return - SWTOR - "Forget the UI the characters and all ofhe nitpicking bullshit" "Greatest MMO Ever Created"
##Fail Thread Title of 2011
Originally posted by daveospice
"this game looks like crap?"
I wouldn't be suprised if a lot of new players in these dying games are just bots.
I know vanguard has bots that I expect are being run by SOE? I went back to play that game a while back and noticed ranomd chats from players being spammed every hour or so. They would never respond to tells. And they would stand around idle at random places in the world.