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Why Dark and Light worth the while?
AhrumaN
Member Posts: 12
Why DnL worth the while?
The answer is really complex.
First of all, this game far not finished. Thatswhy people Flame it. But let us compare the game to another starting MMORPG on the market.
The first month or two gets away with server down-times and configuring. This is already done thanks to SoG, what everyone could play through for free. What you can enjoy now is an all-time-up server, what only goes down for 15 mins when it gets patched.
There is only one Big Server where everyone plays on a land, which size is 40 000 squarekilometers(Thats half of my country!) or say 15600 squaremiles, devided to 9 kingdoms, what you can rule and be a king of one even. Just for comparing WoW has 950 squarekilometers, and even SWG has only 2025. There is no more "i play on server xyz, oh damn we cant trade cuz youre on server zyx" cause EVERYONE play on this one server.
9 God comes for the 9 kingdoms, 3 Good, 3 Evil, and 3 Neutral. Which one you worship is up to you depending on your race, class, and faction(Dark or Light). The world is beautiful, and you can see even 50 kilometers far around you.
There are three XP gaining axes, Fight, Craft, and Social. Fight you gain for fighting and questing, craft for crafting, and social for your deeds, quests, being in a guild, a fort, a group and else. As you advance in these axes the more abilities in crafting and the more building licenses in social you get. If you achive a high enough social xp you can even build you city, and join the politics and economics. The fighting xp works fine now, but there are bugs with the other 2 axes. Their fixing is on the way, and as soon as its done a swarm of abilities are going to be accessible. These are new initiation axes and havent been tested yet by public.
There are bugs in the game, which game hasnt got bugs in it, even in the begining. What we have now is a potential of a great game. What will come out of it depends on the devs. I'm going to keep an eye on it, just to be safe.
The answer is really complex.
First of all, this game far not finished. Thatswhy people Flame it. But let us compare the game to another starting MMORPG on the market.
The first month or two gets away with server down-times and configuring. This is already done thanks to SoG, what everyone could play through for free. What you can enjoy now is an all-time-up server, what only goes down for 15 mins when it gets patched.
There is only one Big Server where everyone plays on a land, which size is 40 000 squarekilometers(Thats half of my country!) or say 15600 squaremiles, devided to 9 kingdoms, what you can rule and be a king of one even. Just for comparing WoW has 950 squarekilometers, and even SWG has only 2025. There is no more "i play on server xyz, oh damn we cant trade cuz youre on server zyx" cause EVERYONE play on this one server.
9 God comes for the 9 kingdoms, 3 Good, 3 Evil, and 3 Neutral. Which one you worship is up to you depending on your race, class, and faction(Dark or Light). The world is beautiful, and you can see even 50 kilometers far around you.
There are three XP gaining axes, Fight, Craft, and Social. Fight you gain for fighting and questing, craft for crafting, and social for your deeds, quests, being in a guild, a fort, a group and else. As you advance in these axes the more abilities in crafting and the more building licenses in social you get. If you achive a high enough social xp you can even build you city, and join the politics and economics. The fighting xp works fine now, but there are bugs with the other 2 axes. Their fixing is on the way, and as soon as its done a swarm of abilities are going to be accessible. These are new initiation axes and havent been tested yet by public.
There are bugs in the game, which game hasnt got bugs in it, even in the begining. What we have now is a potential of a great game. What will come out of it depends on the devs. I'm going to keep an eye on it, just to be safe.
Comments
By that time games like Age of Conan, Lords of the Rings Online, Vanguard, Spellborn, Archlord will be live or very close to release and nobody will care for DnL anymore.
An MMO is a long term investment for most players and DnL just not worth to bother as for now.
Yes, all games have bugs. But with DnL, the bugs just get ignored, or get worse. You have a small development team that introduces more new bugs than fixes with each patch. Some major bugs (transportation) have been ignored since launch.
And it took them 6 years to get to this point?!?!
And support goes through a 3rd party developer (AD) before going to the developers. I know players that have pioneer accounts (pre-ordered in Nov. 2005) and still are unable to log in 2 weeks after launch (Pioneers got access on May 30th).
Potential... Funny, that's what my mom used to say about my cousin that sat around drunk on the porch all the time "That boy's got so much potential". And just like DnL, he never amounted to anything either.
Cut your losses and move on. No sense beating a dead horse.
Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Very nice post regarding what is SUPPOSED to be there, what is SUPPOSED to work. What the IDEA is behind DNL.
The problem is IT DOESNT EXIST AS IS. You can have all the argument you want about how DNL will have whatever. The plain fact is ITS NOT THERE. And by the history of not only SOG, but its launch and the current game stopping bugs, it WONT be there for quite some time.
There is a pointless side to this game - the IDEAS are pointless until actual implementation and playability.
Kevin Tierney made a statement in his most recent article here at these boards regarding SWG and I would like to reiterate that for this thread topic:
"The problem is summed up nicely: Antagonizing your existing playerbase in the hopes of attracting a mythical “audience who doesn’t play, but will once we make these changes” almost never works. The “silent majority” never materializes, and your current base is alienated .......".
You could apply this directly to DNL. Antagonizing the existing playerbase with broken promises, terrible customer service, unethical business practices, illogical game play, broken features, unsatisfactory patches, the list goes on in the hopes of attracting a mythical audience who doesnt play, but will once we make these promises in game...almost never works. In this case, you can see, its not working. The "silent majority" of the claimed fan base is not there and never will materialize and you have alienated most of your current base.
Excellent statement by Kevin and excellent example is DNL.
they need money since they should have released it several years ago
no choice or they dead
i don't think the development team can do it
already too many players have understood they lost their money ^^
and there is too many work to accomplish before dnl may be a "finished" game..
One of two things must be true.
Either the game is complete or the developers have been misleading us all these years.
The developers told us they weren't like the others. Dark and Light would be released when it was complete and not a day earlier. That was their promise to the community.
If they have misled us for years, why would you believe their promises for the future?
I believed them and laid down the money for a pioneer account. I got burnt. No big deal. I learned a life lesson though. I may very well pre-order in the future, just not with that bunch.
If I could play a concept I'd really be happy with DnL right now.. But I can only play what is..
Farlan is selling a concept which in no way resembles the reality of what the game is..
If you want me to pay for the potential of the game, I'll pay in potential dollars..
If you want me to buy into the promise of the game, I promise I'll pay when I see it.
What I don't understand is why I have to pay for something that doesn't exist, of that I have no concept..
I miss DAoC
Actually, this game is dull. The concept has potential, the execution of this concept is amazingly bad.
No, it "doesn't have bugs like other MMO's at launch". It has a huge collection of major bugs. That bring's back memory's of early 2000's MMORPGs, when there was no real opposition, not a huge amount of choice.
We are in mid 2006. There is choice, and almost all of that choice is far, far, far superior than DnL.
Yes, DnL might be worth the wait. But not "DnL the video game", "DnL the concept".
DnL the video game is just too dull, such a failure, that, sorry, it is not worth the wait.
Imagine that?! People upset because a game isn't finished to the point of being playable after 3+ years of development, empty promises, and lies.
Huh... go figure.
I really had high hopes for this game. Been looking forward to it for what seems years, and now that it's here all I've read are poor reviews. If it came with a free demo I'd give it a shot, but I won't drop cold, hard cash until I know what I'm getting into.
If you guys really believe in this game you've built, put your money where your mouth is. Offer up a seven day free trial for people to see for themselves what it's all about.
By that time games like Age of Conan, Lords of the Rings Online, Vanguard, Spellborn, Archlord will be live or very close to release and nobody will care for DnL anymore.
An MMO is a long term investment for most players and DnL just not worth to bother as for now.
I'm going to play with them. They will be great games, like WoW, EQ or once what SWG was, but there arent any games even in concept, what DnL promises to offer. Yes, they are just promises yet.
I'm tempted to start a thread suggesting this on the official forums. But it just seems so futile to ask, why bother? Honestly, at this point in time, I would give DnL a better chance at survival if the devs did this:
1) Drop the price of DnL to a one time $19.99 download fee.
2) Call it what it is, a paying beta. They could market it like this: Help us create the biggest MMORPG world you've even seen. For a one time cost of $19.99 you can download the game and become a member of an elite group of beta-testers working on a cutting edge game!
3) Refund the different between the new $19.99 price and the cost of pioneer and normal accounts. And don't charge a monthly fee.
4) At some point in the future, when the game is actually playable, begin charging a low monthly fee to continue playing, maybe $8 a month.
Charging a premium price, as they are now, prevents many people from even trying the game. So the player base is just getting smaller and smaller.
I'm tempted to start a thread suggesting this on the official forums. But it just seems so futile to ask, why bother? Honestly, at this point in time, I would give DnL a better chance at survival if the devs did this:
1) Drop the price of DnL to a one time $19.99 download fee.
2) Call it what it is, a paying beta. They could market it like this: Help us create the biggest MMORPG world you've even seen. For a one time cost of $19.99 you can download the game and become a member of an elite group of beta-testers working on a cutting edge game!
3) Refund the different between the new $19.99 price and the cost of pioneer and normal accounts. And don't charge a monthly fee.
4) At some point in the future, when the game is actually playable, begin charging a low monthly fee to continue playing, maybe $8 a month.
Charging a premium price, as they are now, prevents many people from even trying the game. So the player base is just getting smaller and smaller.
I agree, this game is too expensive for what state in it is now
I'm tempted to start a thread suggesting this on the official forums. But it just seems so futile to ask, why bother? Honestly, at this point in time, I would give DnL a better chance at survival if the devs did this:
1) Drop the price of DnL to a one time $19.99 download fee.
I think they are in a catch 22.. In it's current state new players will leave in droves and demand a refund regardless of price. For example, this is the only game form which I've ever demanded a refund. I can live with a bad choice/not my style, but this is a fradulant product..
2) Call it what it is, a paying beta. They could market it like this: Help us create the biggest MMORPG world you've even seen. For a one time cost of $19.99 you can download the game and become a member of an elite group of beta-testers working on a cutting edge game!
This would have been a great idea about the time thatfamous quote came out (paraphrase) "Too many delays, we aren't ready, but it's time." They could have built good will perhaps then. Now there have been too many lies to go back, and little chance to regain good will.
3) Refund the different between the new $19.99 price and the cost of pioneer and normal accounts. And don't charge a monthly fee.
I doubt they have the money to do this. They were clearly going broke a month ago.. They are getting a huge number of Credit Card chargebacks.. I'm sure creditors are demanding a cut of the intital rush money.. The playing customer is just one more mouth they can;t afford to feed.
4) At some point in the future, when the game is actually playable, begin charging a low monthly fee to continue playing, maybe $8 a month.
If they ever were to make the game they advertised, I'd have no trouble with the full $15 a month.. at even only 15 hours play a moth, that is $1/hour, much cheaper than any other form of purchased entertainment I know/like.
I'm tempted to start a thread suggesting this on the official forums. But it just seems so futile to ask, why bother? Honestly, at this point in time, I would give DnL a better chance at survival if the devs did this:
1) Drop the price of DnL to a one time $19.99 download fee.
2) Call it what it is, a paying beta. They could market it like this: Help us create the biggest MMORPG world you've even seen. For a one time cost of $19.99 you can download the game and become a member of an elite group of beta-testers working on a cutting edge game!
3) Refund the different between the new $19.99 price and the cost of pioneer and normal accounts. And don't charge a monthly fee.
4) At some point in the future, when the game is actually playable, begin charging a low monthly fee to continue playing, maybe $8 a month.
Charging a premium price, as they are now, prevents many people from even trying the game. So the player base is just getting smaller and smaller.
I agree, this game is too expensive for what state in it is now
I agree 100%..This needs to be done because this game isn't even near 50% complete right now..We cant enjoy a product thats barely out of alpha beta stage..Its like buying a beautiful looking brand new car that looks super sexsy on the outside,but u come to find out it has no engine which means u can't drive it yet...Thats exactly what DnL is right now.. Its like ordering a large pizza pie and as u go to pay for it,u realize its missing the pizza..U can smell it nicely,but theres nothing there to eat lol..
Farlan,you and your team need to refund everyone their money asap,because you wont be able to fix the entire game in a month..Theres no way thats possible.. Broken classes,no content,no dungeons,dull character modules,no quests,no turtorial,etcetcetcetcetcetcetcetc obviously means this game is not near complete...We aren't idiots....Actually most of us are,,the ones who actually purchased the game like me lol...
I'll wait,hope and pray for the best,but I'll be cancelling my account by July 1st unless Jesus himself comes down from heaven and performs a miracle...
I,along with 99% of the people who purchased DnL will not continue their subscription past this month..You know this,hell,everyone who follows DnL should know this..U probably figured this would happen,knowing u would have 30 days to fix and add as much as u can.... But honestly,the only way you'll save this game from a total flop is refund the ppl their money,come forward and admit your mistakes,and allow the people who trusted in your team to deliver them a playable product to help beta test DnL for the next 6 months or until DnL is finally ready to launch...
Thats probably the only way this game will be saved realisitcally.. But,when Vanguard goes live in the fall or winter,I'd leave anything to play it..And most ppl here are waiting for Vanguard and AOC..And these games are due out fairly soon..So,,by the time u get your shiat together,it may have already been to late,,
Rallithon Oakthornn
(Retired Heirophant of the 60th season)
The worst thing about Launch for Dark and Light was the fact that the devs LIED! to their community in one of the last few interviews before launch. Its actually in MMORPG.com, and it says how much more improved DnL is and that is really now a game and all that crap. The devs lied, and that makes this game seem like it may have potential, but has no future! The developers are just full of bull, and we have to accept that there is no future for this game. Its loosing subscribers instantly, has one of the worst ratings a released game could have and is so huge you need a community of a few thousands online at once when you have no one actually in the game. This game will feel like a single player game. This is why the game has no future.
Edit: Correction, this game literally has the worst rating ever for a released game. I can't believe it got a lower rating then Irth Online!!!
I hope I don't get flamed for this, but in my opinion, another game that will probably follow the same route is Darkfall Online. Inexperienced team who made their own game engine (which has not proven its capabilities yet), and worst of all, doesn't communicate with the Community much. They are getting very well funded, and still not much information is released. They promised beta god knows how long ago, and we applied a year ago almost. Games which follow this similar road that DnL took, come to the same deadend. It happens to most games, where the community is ignored and funding is pulled, or because a dev team takes on a project which is beyond their capabilities, but their promises are all that makes their game sell.
Have to put something up!