An update on recent technical problems and more from the admin: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/250292/on-technical-difficulties-mod-coverage-and-other-things/p1?new=1
Options
So I just downloaded "Perfect World" (MMO Questions)
halkun
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Ok, a little back story.
The last MMO I played, not including a pointless 3 day trial of EvE, was Asheron's Call. I played AC for about a month and got really board with it. I don't know why. I guess there was just nothing to do. I would run from town to town, basically looking at my own ass for about an hour, and shut it off. In the end, I gave the game to my cousin who wound up losing a two jobs over it.
Today my friend downloaded perfect world which is a free Chinese MMO. Because I really had nothing to lose, and a few hours of free time, I gave it a shot when I got home. After spending about 4 hours downloading it and getting updates, I gave the game a whirl.
I spent about a half-hour making a really cute little cat girl. Then I jumped into a server....
...and spent an hour running around looking at my own ass again.
I guess the question I have is, where exactly is the fun in all of this? I guess I can't really say I ran around looking at the backside of my character the whole time. I did pop a few monsters on the head with my stick, played with the emotes, and generally just looked at the landscape. I saw a huge floating island, but unless I sprouted a pair of wings, it wasn't very interesting other than it just hung there. There is simply nothing to do! It was the same thing with EvE and the same thing with AC.
So an hour in, and the only thing to show was a cat girl and a few dead carnivorous plants, I really have to ask... Is that all? I'm not getting how people are plugging in to something like this for hours (days?) at a time. My friend has a dude she lives with who plays EQ, and this guy has two clients open all the time. I don't see him doing anything different then me.
*whack* *whack* *whack* (switch screens) *whack* *whack* *whack* (switch screens) *whack* *whack* *rrrrruuuuun* (swicth screens) *whack* *whack* *whack* ( switch screens) *rrrrruuunnn* *whack* *whack* (swicth screens) *whack* *whack* *whack*
I am dead serious when I say I just don't get it. Am I missing something? Where's the happy fun ball?
Enlighten me please!
The last MMO I played, not including a pointless 3 day trial of EvE, was Asheron's Call. I played AC for about a month and got really board with it. I don't know why. I guess there was just nothing to do. I would run from town to town, basically looking at my own ass for about an hour, and shut it off. In the end, I gave the game to my cousin who wound up losing a two jobs over it.
Today my friend downloaded perfect world which is a free Chinese MMO. Because I really had nothing to lose, and a few hours of free time, I gave it a shot when I got home. After spending about 4 hours downloading it and getting updates, I gave the game a whirl.
I spent about a half-hour making a really cute little cat girl. Then I jumped into a server....
...and spent an hour running around looking at my own ass again.
I guess the question I have is, where exactly is the fun in all of this? I guess I can't really say I ran around looking at the backside of my character the whole time. I did pop a few monsters on the head with my stick, played with the emotes, and generally just looked at the landscape. I saw a huge floating island, but unless I sprouted a pair of wings, it wasn't very interesting other than it just hung there. There is simply nothing to do! It was the same thing with EvE and the same thing with AC.
So an hour in, and the only thing to show was a cat girl and a few dead carnivorous plants, I really have to ask... Is that all? I'm not getting how people are plugging in to something like this for hours (days?) at a time. My friend has a dude she lives with who plays EQ, and this guy has two clients open all the time. I don't see him doing anything different then me.
*whack* *whack* *whack* (switch screens) *whack* *whack* *whack* (switch screens) *whack* *whack* *rrrrruuuuun* (swicth screens) *whack* *whack* *whack* ( switch screens) *rrrrruuunnn* *whack* *whack* (swicth screens) *whack* *whack* *whack*
I am dead serious when I say I just don't get it. Am I missing something? Where's the happy fun ball?
Enlighten me please!
halkun on
0
Posts
There's also the dungeons, which lets you group up with other players to tackle more difficult enemies and usually bosses as well, and they tend to drop gear even better than you get from the quests.
But... well, yes. You run around, looking at your characters back while fighting things. That is the most basic way to explain an MMO that involves you controlling an actual character rather than say, a ship. It sounds to me like you've never been able to see the carrot dangling in front of you, so never tried to chase it. I will admit trying to explain this all to someone who isn't very into the genre is difficult, if you were to ever try a good MMO to ease your way in better though City of Heroes/Villians is an excellent one considering the fighting is a bit more active in that to attack you have to use your abilities.
Perhaps someone else could try and explain it in better words, though that's about all I can think of at the moment.
One of the big draws to MMOs is the social aspect. You can gather friends and go through dungeons and kill big things together. Everyone gets to play a role and be unique. Later on you can form raids where lots of people get to work together and utilize strategy for boss battles that make you think in different ways. My point is, run around alone and hit monster A with stick is like the first chunk of any MMO. The reasoning behind this is to gradually give you your abilities instead of all of them at once.
World of Warcraft, for example. If you gave people instant max level characters with all their abilities, it would be chaos. The leveling allows you time to learn your class. I'm not going to claim leveling is a joyous time, or even intelligently implemented, but I do see the reasoning. Even after this leveling process, a lot of people still manage to suck. I'd hate to imagine what it would be like if they didn't even have to do that much. Besides, they made a huge world for a reason, and leveling up will change your setting often and try and give you the feeling that you're working your way up and traveling a huge world. This was more effective in Everquest when you really had to run everywhere and the world was pretty large. WoW is purposefully scaled down and given multiple means of fast travel in order to speed up gameplay.
You have PvP combat in most of these games as well. Course I'm not going to try to promote the benefits there since I hate pvp so someone else might be a better choice.
Anyways, I dunno where I'm going with this. It's possible that Perfect World just plain sucks, butyou say just don't 'get' MMOs and that's okay. They're not appealing to everyone. But I think if you're going to attempt to have an MMO experience at all, it should be WoW (or maybe Warhammer for PvP). WoW is far from perfect, but still the most polished. Leveling is also ridiculously simple now. I always talk about how I hate leveling up new characters but I've done it a few times and each time I get pretty into it again after the first few levels. They're purposefully mind numbingly easy, as a lot of people pick up the game who aren't gamers at all.
After that was EQ....which turned out to be a lot more challenging then UO. There were many things I didn't like about the game that I felt were not so much a challenge as just bad design but again...it was a chance to explore new lands, see and do new things, take on new challenges, and share that experience with friends.
What kind of games do you normally play? Do you like strategy games or fps? Do you prefer turn based or more action oriented games? Do like rpgs or puzzle games? Try and sort out what it is you like about games and then try an MMO that has those qualities. If it still doesn't click well, not everyone is into MMOs. No big deal.
And, in reality, playing them is often very bland.
I think there are a few key points to enjoying an MMO.
1. Exploration and discovery. For someone who is new to MMOs in general, you need to be willing to say "no" to people and websites that give you spoilers, hints, or even "ten easy steps to victory" information. The best MMOs have a fully developed world, with a rich history and involving storyline. Discovering that world and making yourself a part of it is probably the most entertaining part of the game for a new player. Once you break down that fourth wall and start looking at it as a "graphical spreadsheet", delving into experience rates, damage per second calculations and the like...the innocence wears off and your interest will either turn to another aspect of the game or fade altogether.
2. Playing with friends. Find yourself a regular group of decent, reliable people to work with. I don't think there are very many experiences in gaming that are more tedious than playing a multiplayer game alone. Don't get me wrong, I'm okay with doing things solo - I did a lot of that in Asheron's Call. But these games are created to handle thousands of players at once for a reason. While your lone warrior getting pounded by a fifteen foot tall ogre might not be fun, coming back with five of your friends and showing that ogre a thing or two is a lot more satisfying. Most of the big MMO games have a thread on this forum, and a PA forum group is usually a great place to start if you're new and looking for others to work with.
3. To get the full experience, definitely try one of the more polished commercial offerings. As mentioned by others, World of Warcraft is obviously the first one to look at. Grab the free trial and give it a whirl. It'll be a better experience than trying a free MMO, as very few free ones can even come close to the level of professionalism that the commerical ones do. Depending on what type of things you like, there are other offerings that, while not as successful as WoW, provide their own unique take on the genre. If you're into the Lord of the Rings series, there's an MMO for that. Like D&D? There's still an MMO for that, too. Someone mentioned City of Heroes, so if you're into comics, go make your own superhero. Guild Wars, while not a "standard" MMO, gives you the opportunity to customize your character with a specific set of skills (though you can have many skills, you choose up to eight to use at a time, making combos based on what type of role you want to play). It also leads you on a very structured path, complete with storylines and scripted cutscenes, rather than expecting you to just roam an open world and do whatever you like.
Having played Asheron's Call for over 4 years the first time through, plus a few "nostalgia" returns in the last couple of years, I can tell you that the game itself...how it's played from a standpoint of pushing buttons to kill monsters...isn't what sticks with you. It's the events and adventures and the people that you remember most.
The heart of the gameplay is very simple, yes. You and countless others very much like you but sometimes operating under slightly different constraints and perhaps colored pink, yellow, grey, green, orange, brown or sometimes very dark brown are set loose upon an unsuspecting world to do as you please.
What most people please to do is to find the nearest fluffy thing, set it on fire, hack it into tiny pieces, and sift through the gore for whatever scraps of clothing or funny shaped entrails got through mostly intact before tromping off to intimidate a shopkeeper into giving them shiny coins.
This process is very similar to going to a mall with an express card only you have to jam an ice pick into ten garden gnomes for every dollar, and the garden gnomes scream.
Now if you're not a psychotic danger to humanity, that particular aspect of the journey gets kinda glossed over in favor of the destination. That being the cool stuff you get after the garden gnomes stop twitching.
Collect so many burnt scraps of elf underwear and you can stitch together a robe. But not just any robe, it's your robe. You made it from the thongs of a thousand rangers, each lovingly crushed and eaten by your pet Bandersnatch and their belongings stuffed into your bag via mouse click. The time and effort spent makes it real, and the moment the little icon takes on that extra hint of meaning, the game stops being checkers.
It's a hard and fast addiction, loot. It really is.
That aside, there's the usual draws of any social game of skill. Beating people you know and proving it with graphs, tossing a hated enemy off a cliff and watching him flounder in the lava until he manages to drag himself out after the fourth corpse run... It's not all about clobbering rabbits over the head. It just looks that way. Most of the time.
This may be the best description of MMO gameplay of all time. Ever. In the history of the interwebz.
This is perfect world in a nutshell.
"OH MAN WE GOT THIS SWEET CHARACTER CREATOR"
Nice, so where's the game?
"Game?"
Next time, I suggest looking at things in front of your character.
When you're walking around in the real world, do you stare at your stomach all day long or do you look ahead to where you're going?
My friend logged on with me the other day. She chose a male human, and she modded the face to make him look like the undead. Very pale skin, eyes rolled back in the head, thin, gaunt, and the skin pulled so tightly against the "bones" of the model. It nearly looked skull-like.
I met her at the gate, bounding with my war puppy of death behind me.
Yup, I'm a chubby-faced red-hard Japanese cat-girl! The utter disgust from my friend over vent was a riot!
"Are you fucking serious?"
I should hope so, I had 7 levels on her.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Why people played AC
Stroll around landscapes
to club monsters like
to look all fly
And then you keep playing because there's people looking like
and damn you're competitive and want to look even cooler.
*edit: and yes PW is ridiculously grindy, I don't quite like it any more. It's not a very good introduction to MMO-land at any rate.
Classic.
You can have anime hair...
And anime eyes...
And an anime girl...
AND SHE WILL KISS YOU...
While you casually fly around on a sword...
And your anime crotch shines a brilliant gold...
This is truly...
A Perfect World...
It's better than a mount, and the only cost is that you die a little inside.
But then nobody would get anything done. :winky:
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
Just wanted to chime in and say, good lord those are some huge breasts on that pink haired character to the right of the center. There are some things that are not meant to be when you use a character creator. That is definitely one of them.
Alternative joke post: "Well...I see the weeaboo has equipped his daughter with ballistics too."
But yeah, most people I know either play MMO's for the social aspect, be it griefing, or just to hang out.
Though, I will mention that I know two people who are currently morbidly obese, are absolutely obsessed with WoW to the point of not paying attention in classes at college, surfing the official forums instead, and when told that the game sucks endgame wise get very angry, to point of flying into a wheezing rage about the epic storyline and how everyone is missing out by not sitting in on a massive raid and sitting at a computer for hours on end to see a few seconds worth of NPC dialog. How they've not failed out in the past year or so is beyond me.
Also, what's the catch to this? Why can you play this for free while WoW costs cash? Do they really support the servers with the cash made with the botique sales?
Zephyr: is that ACTIVE players or just the raw number of accounts? :P
I dunno, maybe accounts? Even still, that's a huge userbase. I don't think PW offers you many duplicate accounts.
The game is pretty polished for free MMO standards, but the huge evergrind and lack of other content (enjoyable trade skills, social features, fishing, in game events, etcetera) put it far behind even the simplest of current day pay-to-play MMOs. Still, I'd prefer PW over 3/4 of the stuff on my free mmo list.
After a bit though it got really grindy so that was that. It does look pretty fantabulous though.
But it was the grinding grindfest ever.
There were about 7 quests for the stretch from 10 - 40, and the item rewards from them were pretty much awful. And if you spent a single point on a non primary stat for your character, you couldn't use equipment at the first level it was available.
That one sweet moment of human interact was pretty sweet. I can see the allure, but I'm back looking at my ass again. I could doll up my character a bit (Which requires cash) or maybe improve the character functions a little(also requires cash) and gimp out and grab a few packs like a predone transportation map, some teleport stones, and some quest items....
...which require cash.
I'm in a faction now, so I'll see what my teammates are up to.
the fact that the 'double jump' function is client side and determined by a simple 1/0 value change made it hilarious to hex edit.
I made a male character, would try to get ladies to cuddle me, then I would fly them to far off lands and drop them in the middle of nothing.
They were not happy.
OH NOES LARA CROFT IS FEMALE I CANNOT PLAY THIS GAEM NAO.
At least there is no fall damage. Does this work the other way around with female chars throwing males off cliffs? Nida still plays PW every now and again and she loves fucking people over.
I was lvl 10 today when I started my quest walkthough and made it to lvl 18 by just experience gained from questing. I don't know, maybe I'm retarded but it was really fun. I'm pretty much just soloing, I joined a faction, but never have the window open. I never see anyone else from my team. I just go out by myself and my pet and fetch things for people.
Yes, I'm playing an MMO..... by myself.
My friends will not install the game. My cousin is banned from MMOs by edict from his wife, (Funny thing, they met on AC). My other friend and his daughter won't touch MMOs with a 10 foot pole, and my last friend who introduced me to this timesuck uninstalled it yesterday to play some shump mmo instead.
SO yea, I just play my myself now.
CAN'T YOU SEE THIS IS A CRY FOR HELP?
Maybe I should either 1) redo the OP or 2) make a new OP inviting PAers to play the game...
== EDIT ==
Actually, Making a new op is a pretty good idea.... I'm going to ask the mods to lock this and I'll start Anew...
If you want a solo MMO, Ragnarok Online recently went F2P.
I am, tempted to join you, I could probably get some enjoyment out of PW again, but I dunno...