Community or clique

Ur only mistake lgs is dat u, like many others, still think they r making a game.

Thy r not making a game. They are making some shit likeUktimate Collector (a Facebook game about collecting shit) at best, just milking ppl for mkney - in worst case scenario

Was it b4 or after u made him a sammich?

Well, why did any of us trust them? Because we loved one or more of the games in the past. They threw too large a net. Maybe they really had those grandiose ideas of storming the market by gaining all the fans plus new people. It's really hard to say.

But after the failed Ultimate Collector, one would think they would not merely go after the whales as the audience. One reason Zynga games did so phenomenal is the F2P, then small transactions. Not whopping ones before a game was even released.

No kick start.
No demo, no buy. (Sing it like no woman no cry lulz).

I don't think we can be entirely blamed, because the role of a developer or any artist is to filter what the public wants into becoming the great art that only they can create; Otherwise what's the point? Yes, most "Modern" art is simple pandering, here's a few coloured squares on a canvas, now you tell me why I'm a genius! And you'll say I am so as not to be the sort of person bamboozled by a simple set of squares... But that shows the weakness of the modern artist, more concerned with fame or income than actual Art.

What's actually happened with Shroud is that the Devs don't seem to know what their artistic talent was any more. The public tells them "We admired open worlds, deep plot, community and creativity"  and instead of saying "Ok, what elements of our game design history led into that?"  they've gone "Well our funding figures show that the most money is spent on these things..." and they've not stopped and said "what does spending money have to do with great plot?"

I'm going to talk about this publicly for the first time here, because I'm so sick of the world, especially the software world which forgets what it's there for; Whilst an EM, I had a blazing row with Mesanna (everything's a blazing row, she honestly prides herself on being an awful person) because I asked about clickable rewards that everyone could get, and used to be used a few years back. Here's the thing, the average player just wants a token of their day out, a reminder of personal history; They're not really into rares trading for profit. Why do people grind Raids in other games? It's not for a rare, as a rare at all, it's to generate the chances that ensure you get the item you want, an item which has a higher level of utility. The Purple is a signifier of it's power, and the time invested is required to unlock that power. It's the assumed certainty that makes people gamble and waste time, not the random nature in the short term, even if random chance makes the short term more thrilling. Understanding that is why World of Warcraft is so massive, and Ultima Online stayed a niche.

It's not like it's hard to know this, either; just listen to what the players say at the end of any event. They hate that it's a one shot gamble that most people lose.

On the other hand the PvP crowd wants the one of the kind Glass Sword so they can win fights easily and get bragging rights. The latter is disallowed for obvious reasons, that's why any item you can get that's equipable is the default, un-enhanced only but with a new name in UO. No breaking PvP, they do understand that. But the former... ahh, it's assumed in the Dev Team in UO that the reason people want rares is for the material benefit. They looked at where the money was, in terms of real cash sales and in game gold, and thought that this meant rares were the core of the game, rather than the more abstract "personal progression" they might signify, and people have long since moved on to other games to find. They honestly are biased towards rare traders. Not in the sense of giving them advantages, but they believe that's the mindset driving it, so all the rules are set up around it; "how many items dropped?", players may ask. Well, we couldn't see, and the design document we originally submitted, with a total of drops listed, would be re-edited to fit Mesanna's sense of rarity. 10-20 usually were allowed, anything higher was changed. We could ask for generated results from the databases and get you a total of drops later, but it might bear no relation at all to what we thought we'd designed. How do traders know which events are going to carry rewards? Because they've worked out the actual rules, which are the items have to be on a giant monster with the distribution code attached. Sure, you can have an ultra hard mongbat at the start of an event, but do it too much and you abandon any sense of story telling, or lore behind your items. So naturally EMs gravitate towards it being on the Big Bad, which the traders learn to spot when it's coming.

So...  "Who are you to speak for the players?!" I had screamed at me, whilst I tried to point out I was just passing on what everyone says at the end of every event. Here's the chat logs and everything. I pointed out there would be advantages too. Less arguments. If you placed the reward at the start, those just there for the shinies would go away and stop bothering the roleplayers... but the Devs think they know what the players have told them through economic activity. Even if it doesn't match what the players are actually telling them. If you don't agree with that assumption, or just kiss Dark Lady Ass, the working environment becomes hellish, so those who do survive on the program tend to be rares traders too; they won't necessarily get one if they turn up on a player account, as the code isn't accessible to them either... indeed, we couldn't even edit our own mobs, or see what stats it actually had, which is why if it went wrong we had to sit around on our thumbs until I found someone online who had the power to fix it, sorry folks. Trust me, I knew how much it upset you all. But it all flows from incorrect original assumptions about why you're there; they honestly don't think the story matters as much as the rarity of items.

That's not to say "The customer is always right"; a lot of the rules are also in place because of hyper competitive, attention seeking dickheads who would rather blow up the game than feel they aren't being pandered too all the time. The very first deco I did for the shard I got reported for supposedly giving people snowflakes, as they'd seen a Christmas Tree going up, and thought that claim might stick; which is why items now are automatically glued and EMs can't make even their own sashes any more. And when you tried to run PvP events for them, they'd cheat, break the event they agreed too beforehand as much as possible, and drive away all the other PvPers just to say they "won"; later they'd try and lie to the new EM and say they'd won the actual fights that weren't held, and the trophies should be renamed for them...

But it's the role of Devs to design a better game, not always react to the worst of people unthinkingly. They should be asking themselves "don't you actually know what good design, good people are any more? Don't you have a vision you want to keep pure?" Shroud has done the same thing. They've become besotted with the loud mouthed rich and stupid and forgotten what actual fun involves, and as a consequence risk wrecking their game entirely because very few people want to play it. However if it keeps the money coming in, and people treat you like you're a rockstar because "You work in computer games!!!" why should you change? Indeed, you can be a complete monster and people desperate to keep their jobs in the industry will still turn on whoever dares criticize you...

Bollocks to that though. And bollocks to Shroud too if it doesn't lead.

It didnt rly move to MMO. I mean, its some instanced shit that cant hold more than 50 ppl at once.

The video Caliya posted didn't give me a very good understanding of the size of the locations, so if anyone can post another video, Ill be grateful. Then I might have something to say.



Because we wanted to trust them. We all need a sammich great MMORPG like pre-tram UO.



God, nemo. This post was
1)useless
2)so long its painful to read. That's why I didn't. I just saw a wall of bullshit and instantly noped. Pls, make your text more appealing to the eye of the average citizen. 

If you even conveyed some worthy points in that huge pile of letters, you better try to combine them in a smaller text. With more spaces between paragraphs.

Let me attempt to give you an overview templara :

We aren't to blame for buying into SotA, their aim was to bait us with our needs rather than give us a good game. They shouldn't react to the biggest or most vocal voices in the community by changing the game to suit those voices.

I didnt quite understand the difference nemo pointed out between the success of UO and WoW. But I'm interested in knowing more and understanding.

PvP players want a WIN Button sword, click to kill easy and then to brag about it. Which I will disagree with, obviously not all players are exactly the same which includes PvP players.

Fuck SotA if they don't bring something new to the industry.

Thanks for that nemo.

I am afraid you are already quite correct; fair and fun fights and rare cash store it is.

Now my question is if they should have no excuse, and they shouldn't you are right, what in the seven kingdoms are they doing? Surly we can all agree that the game, if it ran two years instead of one, would be better served by running longer.

Granted the game isn't going to fail just because we think it is. But damn, outside the SotA forum which has been scrubbed harder than the deck of a ship with too many sailors, SotA is being torn to pieces.

To make things even worse, they can blame the community "we gave you what you wanted" - well the high level backers in any case. That is I suppose why I thought perhaps there is a great deal of money involved in selling off the remains to other publishers. It just doesn't make sense that they would keep moving forward like this, unless they thought they were going to make more money.