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[Pathfinder Online] It's a Pathfinder MMO
Posts
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Quoting the game relevant stuff (question is how much of this will end up in the game):
Some sort of chronicle group feature?
No one is truly self-sufficient (much like EVE, again!):
Chartered companies are quasi-guilds that can create player-settlements, which are essentially player-run towns/cities, and these settlements can then get together and create "kingdoms". This is kinda analogous to corps and alliances in EVE, except that these are in Pathfinder online dependent on a physical location - if you got no settlement, then you can't create a kingdom.
And these are all similarities that they are very well aware of:
Hardcore pen and paper role playing types that might have played a bit of wow and Eve players.
It'll be a very interesting game with those 2 groups mixed together and I think it'll be really hard to balance for both. The role players will hate it when they get stomped all over and scammed by the eve players. The eve players will hate it if they can't stomp all over roleplaying nerds...
I get the feeling they'll make the game mechanics up and tweak them for balance after release.
I'm not saying it'll work, but it's a neat idea and might work out. I'd say there is a pretty good chance of them at least getting to their planned first release with a limited user base. Not saying it'll be a game that anyone wants to play though
New update with a little info and mostly ideas on player created buildings.
Buildings can be built in set locations in the world, in order to avoid over crowding and abuse of mechanics, and then upgraded, razed, and repaired.
I like the idea of restricting build areas, but hope it is more along the lines of not being able to build within a certain proximity of some things. Meaning, I would be annoyed if they just set a bunch of areas aside as build areas, as it is a very inorganic model to follow.
The problem with using a system that works well in Eve is that everyone who wants to play Eve is playing Eve. Unfortunately, there just aren't enough people clamoring for an MMO like Eve to support another one. Are there really enough people to support eve and (darkfall, perpetuum, whatever)? Probably not. I guess the devil's advocate there is that there probably are enough people who would go to another game like Eve if it had more entertaining mechanics.
I'll resist the urge to go on a rant about Eve.
I hardly think this one mechanic defines the entire game.
This neo-feudalism would be more tolerable if our betters had fancy titles.
that is not the only problem with eve
My biggest complaint with eve is the controls. Asteroids has better space flight.
I got into the meta. I figured out how to fly a good ship. I got a sweet battleship, battlecruiser and assault. Then I realized that spending 10 hours doing something insanely monotonous, like ratting, mining or patrolling, was not worth the 3 minute pvp payout I got.
That's why it's called spreadsheets in spaceFiguring out how to train for a battleship, battlecruiser and assault ship isn't going very deep. If you are spending 10 hours doing monotonous stuff for 3 minutes of pvp then there is probably a LOT about the game that you don't know.
I make enough to pay for an account by logging in for 10 minutes every week.
The really important point here though is this: None of these complaints about eve have anything to do with the bounty system they are planning for pathfinder, which sounds like a much improved version of the one used in eve.
This post made me realize why I like Eve: It is a lot like old BBS games. If you want to know what the best way to play is, you need to do some reading.
Nothing is really handed to you, and I can appreciate a lack of spoon-feeding.
Theme park MMO's suck for roleplaying because you have very limited options, sandboxes suck because you have no way to force everyone to role play. There is one large alliance in EvE that is role-play focused but it's hardly an ideal environment
I don't understand this sentiment. "Nothing is really handed to you," but then you just said that you look up the answers online. Which is, you know, having the answers handed to you. So, it's not the principle of the thing, you just like the idea of the game being a pile of obscure shit.
The only possible straw I can grasp at here is that you enjoy the idea of other people not being good at the game, but then you're just coming here to post "yeah guys I am the biggest fucking sociopath" and I'm not sure why you would do that.
I really don't get how you came to this conclusion, so I am going to have trouble defending what I've said. First off, needing to look up information in order to determine what is the best course of action is having things handed to you? Post-secondary education as whole is basically expensive day care if this logic is sound.
Second, I do like the game being obscure, it adds mystery and depth. Take WoW for example, when it first started up, you were given quests with vague directions as to where to go. Last I played, they decided to remove that element and just show you on the map. Features such as this remove any sort of exploration or interest in the setting, and basically turn it into a pointless grind. This is spoon feeding, as a developer you are basically assuming your players are too stupid or useless to be able to do some research, or engage other players, in order to gather the information resources in order to reach their goal. What is the point of playing a game if you can't learn more and improve your own capacity to play?
Third, every game will have players who are better than the other players. I don't quite grasp how you think those who are willing to invest more time in learning to play in a fashion that is more productive are somehow sociopathic. MMOs with a strong PVP core, such as Eve, rely on player competition; this does not mean these players all hate other people and lack empathy. Additionally, enjoying being better than someone else at something does not make one a sociopath.
Nobody said you type "how to play eve" in google and everything is there on a silver platter.
As an example, I wanted to put up some towers and do reactions to process moon materials into advanced materials for profit. Here's a list of things that I had to look up and/or do in order to find out if I could make any money doing this.
- How towers work
- How reactions work
- Caldari control towers stats
- Gallente control tower stats
- Amar control tower stats
- Minmatar control tower stats
- Faction tower stats (that's 8 more tower types)
- Fuel usage for all these towers (that's for all 12 towers)
- What reactions use what materials (20+ different pages on the eve item database)
- Get a character to the major market hub
- Create a spreadsheet of all the raw, processed and advanced moon materials
- Look up the value of these materials in the market hub and add them to the spreadsheet
- Create spread sheets to calculate what modules I can put on each type of control tower
- Look up what all the different modules do to see if any are useless and find out what I need (looking at 15-20 different seaches)
- Create spreadsheets for simple reactions to calculate how much each of each input resource is needed and how much it will cost each month vs how much profit I could expect from the output
- Create spreadsheets for complex reactions, same as above
- Look up historical pricing data on the output from the complex reactions to see if any are high and/or low right now and how volatile the prices are
- Look up what the different advanced materials are used for to see what future factors could affect my profit margins
- Talk to my corp to see if anyone with a jump freighter is willing to move the input and output in/out of high sec for me and how much it would cost
- Use above spreadsheets to calculate weekly transport volume and factor the price into profit margins
- Talk to alliance leadership to see if I could get moons to anchor my towers on and what systems they would be in
- Look up ways to move the materials from the null sec transportation hub to where my towers would be
- Look up training for an orca and calculating how long it will take
I'm missing a bunch and a lot of that is condensed but I think you can get the idea.
Oh and in case you think none of that was necessary, after doing all that, I was able to determine that it wouldn't be possible to do this without a good chance of losing lots of money, despite the cost of the input materials + tower fuel being way lower than the output. The little expenses added up and it would take too long to pay off the cost of the initial towers.
If none of that makes sense to you, I suggest you google it, since it's all handed to you anyway.
Do you spit at the monitor whenever a tutorial pops up?
See, I'm confused because this is objectively bad game design, and yet somehow you take pleasure in it.
You may be confused because you are seemingly approaching this subject in a black and white manner. Seemingly, you view games as either having everything laid out and being awesome, or being complete shit with no instruction what-so-ever. Which is really not what we are saying, or attempting to explain to you.
What I am saying is that I really don't like having the game spoon fed to me and that I really enjoy a complex game. Even after years of playing, I still discover new things. Moon mining is a good example of this. Your average Eve player knows the basic concept of power grids and such, and through gameplay will know how to set up a moon mining operation. However, in order to make that operation efficient and profitable, those players will need to consult internet resources to read up on the most efficient tower to use and setup ideas. While this information is not critical, it is extremely helpful and not at all handed to you through tutorials. Effectively, situations like this make the experience more immersive, as you need to consult with other players or their websites to figure out the best way to do certain operations.
You are right, I have changed my ways. FUCK EVE!
But more seriously, this argument is going in circles and accomplishing nothing productive at this point.
I try to participate on that site, but there are people there with a serious amount of free time at their hands so if they go for the "community" peeps I'm afraid I wouldn't be one of the 45 hundred.
Really? So any game that isn't simple, is bad and nobody should like it?
I don't care if you don't like eve, that's fine, but saying any game that uses a system that is remotely similar to one part of thousands that make up eve is pretty bold.
There is plenty of useful documentation in the game that explains the basics. What you fail to understand is that there is a lot more to eve than the basics. "A starbase tower floats in space near a moon and provides power to other starbase components" is the basic description. If you want every detail of how it works beyond that handed to you then you are pretty lazy. I never said anything about third party documentation and nothing says "This is the optimal configuration for XYZ", there is no optimal configuration. How you configure your tower depends on what you are doing with it, where you are doing it, who your friends are, how well your friends control the area, how many enemies you have in the area and what they are capable of, what resources your corp/alliance can provide to help. These are the things that you need to research on your own.
Expecting that is like walking into a bank and saying "I want a business plan and loan, now!". It's just a tiny bit more complicated than that.
Eve is a sandbox game, there is no optimal configuration for anything. Every single thing that you do in the game interacts with other people playing the game. You don't hit some third party site that says "use these modules" and win the game. "How does this component of the game work" is not a basic question. This isn't an FPS where you can explain the entire depth of the game in a 30 second tutorial "W moves you forward, mouse aims, mouse button one shoots, space bar jumps". That said, the high level description of each component of the game is given in the starting tutorials.
Every item in the game has it's statistics fully viewable without buying the item first.
I get the impression from your post that you hate sandbox games because they require you to think for yourself and figure out what you want to do. I don't think you'll like pathfinder. They are planning to make it a sandbox game, that means there is a world and there is things, that's it. It's kind of like real life, you get dropped into the world and it's up to you to set your goals, learn what you need and plan your actions. Some people find this fun, just because you don't get it, doesn't mean it's dumb.
Some of the guys who worked on eve at the beginning are now doing the pathfinder game and from what they've said in their dev blogs, they are using and/or improving on a lot of systems/mechanics used in eve. Also, there aren't very many other sandbox games that are comparable.
At least, that's why I mentioned it. As far as I can tell, everyone else just posted to rage because they hate and/or suck at eve.
Corp fighting would be concentrated on the edges of their territory, rather than letting random squads be able to fly through the territory with impunity. This would allow far more collaboration for the economic stuff without the neurotic tic of watching Local every second for hours and worrying about rat respawns, etc. You would actually be able to make good use of "industrial capital ships" etc. most of the time rather than rarely. Maybe some types of bonuses to ore yields that would encourage grouping and make it worth more than just solo mining with a rat-tank build and a 2nd account for hauling, etc.
https://goblinworks.com/blog/
Some more stuff on fast travel and stuff, that sounds similar to EVE gate jumps and whatnot.
Some basic stuff on the in-game economy, and some juicy bits on their cash shop:
Seems like we got ourselves a fusion between DDO and EVE at this stage.
Oh, and they got a PLEX-like system (pointed out as such by the devs):
For more details on in-game/out-game economy, and accounts, see their blog:
https://goblinworks.com/blog/
Plenty of more diagrams and info on their blog detailing what you do with all the harvested stuff.
Remember how the developers said they had an awesome plan to quickly develop and fund PO?
Well...
you're their plan.
Kickstarter.
I wasn't sure about the Kickstarter thing, but I think it was blatantly obvious from all the detailed design documents they've released before even writing any code, that they were shopping around for venture capital....