Why do people who hate the game so much keep playing and hanging around

[swords]

he quit again btw
He aint been seen in guild for well over two weeks now!
he has finally done it tbh!

 

[Flimgoblin]

he quit again btw
He aint been seen in guild for well over two weeks now!
he has finally done it tbh!

fifteenth time lucky?

Yaruar - it's quit sensible to take a break from the game when you're not enjoying it - I find a couple of days offline doing something different makes me enjoy when I am in game a lot more.

I was just saying the FH posts usually mean they'll be back in a week

 

[evzy]

Here's a brief summary for those who can't be bothered to read the whole thing: Go away, if you can't be bothered to read it all don't bother replying to any of it!

hehe gotta admit did kinda go blah blah blah through your post until i came to that bit and it did raise more than a chuckle

Personally as much as i never thought I would leave DAOC simply due to the fact i have spent so long playing it and invested so much time (which being a worker non dolely is quite precious) only to find TOA landing as well on me doorstep , I think i have come to the point now that once one of the next big mmorpgs come along i will probably jump to that simply to give myself a more even chance of competing as i will be starting out at the same time as everyone around me whereas now i just feel i am falling further and further behind the rest - I cant even envisage me finishing the ML's or even having time to camp for scrolls etc to get this months uber template drops and then having to level them... as much as i enjoy the game i have to be realistic and say i am only playing it now for the fun of the community , getting my ass kicked in emain , and erm.... i thinks thats about it....

ooo and so i can post in excal forums as i believe the FH coc does stipulate that you must have 40 hours gametime a week just to post here....doesnt it?

 

[Reznet]

Well, i tried to quit the other day but unfortunately my closest friends all play solidly and wont quit. i go round their houses to see what they are up to, and they are playing daoc.

the moment a decent alternative arrives, i hope they will switch but for now, if i don't play daoc (which ive played for 2.5 years nearly) i won't be able to hang out with my mates.

oh, and theres the obvious addiction, but ffs what can you do when your mates won't play any other fricking games? dont just say "play something else" because for mmorpg hack and slash action there is no reasonable alternative.

:kissit:

 

[Flimgoblin]

once one of the next big mmorpgs come along i will probably jump to that simply to give myself a more even chance of competing as i will be starting out at the same time as everyone around me

remember camlann?

everyone starting level 1

the l33t types were level 50 within a couple of days...

Same thing will happen at the start of any new game too... won't be as fast as people need to learn the easy ways to do things, but it'll still be a gulf.

 

[Bracken]

remember camlann?

everyone starting level 1

the l33t types were level 50 within a couple of days...

Same thing will happen at the start of any new game too... won't be as fast as people need to learn the easy ways to do things, but it'll still be a gulf.

So true...there will always be people with more time to play who have an advantage - no matter what the game. Its just the way it is. Aslong as you don't expect to be able to keep up with them then it needn't be a problem.

 

[Kathal]

I phear RL and I cant kill stuff IRL.

 

[Zargar]

Nice post Archeon (yeah we read community boards regularly). There are a few points I disagree with, mostly in the beginning of your post.
First and foremost about Mythic and GOA being interested in the community opinions.

There is the point of percetion. Most players use public boards for communication and community purposes outside the game. However, such boards have time and again proven unefficient and inadequate for gathering valuable player feedback. The distance between useful posts is too big, and the boards only represent a small part of the community. This was part of the reason why the GOA official boards closed back then, not that we didn't want feedback. This gives the perception that the companies don't listen/want to listen, since they don't directly interact the places where the communities do.

I honestly believe that Mythic is the single MMORPG developer company that listens the most to its players. The team leader program (among other things) serves as a filter for the feedback that the players want to give Mythic. The filter that is lacking on boards. Mythic has taken the big step of organising multiple costly channels of feedback (Sanya is another one, Pendragon test boards a third, GOA communications with them a fourth), to ensure that the important messages from the community reach them. Their level of dedication in this area is pretty impressive in my opinion. I will never claim that it couldn't be better, I am comparing them to other companies in the business.

For ourselves we really have the same problems as Mythic and every other company in this business. The real problems and the readworthy posts are too far between to warrant payed employees to go through them (yeah, I'm off duty at the moment). We need filters and one of them is the Eyes and Ears team who do a good job at alerting us when there is something we need to read up on and deal with. Another is Rightnow, which is really both a filter and mean of communication in itself. If people are willing to go through the trouble of opening it, log in, send a description of the problem and know they will need to wait for an answer, then it is usually because they really have something they want to say, somethng that we can read and evaluate.

Alright, that turned out to be way too long, and I have to stop typing even though there are many other things I would like to elaborate on, like how "listening to" doesnt equal "agreeing with" etc etc yadda yadda.

 

[Huntingtons]

I phear RL and I cant kill stuff IRL.

rofl
sooo true...

 

[Vodkafairy]

I honestly believe that Mythic is the single MMORPG developer company that listens the most to its players. The team leader program (among other things) serves as a filter for the feedback that the players want to give Mythic.

Shame some of the team leaders are very incompetent and not many of their actual good ideas are implemented. Mythic just disappointed 80% of the community with their new proposed RA system, if they will really listen well to the community it's going to have to change alot. We'll see..

And about GOA, listening to the community starts by having a decent customer service, but everyone knows how terrible it is. I'm glad I never have to use it

 

[Draylor]

Another is Rightnow, which is really both a filter and mean of communication in itself. If people are willing to go through the trouble

The admission Ive been waiting 2 years to see that RightNow is intentionally a slow annoying, time consuming system to use. Cheers

 

[Archeon]

Nice post Archeon

......
..-|-.. <== Happy Archeon
.../\...

The distance between useful posts is too big, and the boards only represent a small part of the community. This was part of the reason why the GOA official boards closed back then, not that we didn't want feedback.

The real problems and the read worthy posts are too far between to warrant paid employees to go through them. We need filters and one of them is the Eyes and Ears team who do a good job at alerting us when there is something we need to read up on and deal with.

I suppose that’s understandable considering the amount of garbage that goes back and forth wasting the bandwidth/server space of the nice people who host FreddysHouse...

But still, even if you do take in feedback through these various filters how are we supposed to know about it? We rarely see any feedback to the community about anything other than serious things. Would it really be too much to do things like... well to give an example, you could just put a little something like this on the main news page...

- We're aware of the display problem with the /realm window, we're currently working with Mythic to find a way to fix this as soon as possible.

Regarding that specific problem I don't know if it is being fixed, I don't know if you are working with Mythic to get it fixed. I don't even know if its a specific patch bug and the fix will be in the next patch. I know absolutely nothing about it other than that it’s broken. And yet it only took me 30seconds to type those... 26 words to form a single sentence, which at least lets me, know that your aware of the problem and that you’re working on it.


If you stop to think about it this would also have the knock on effect of lessening 'spam' to Rightnow because people know that you know and as such won't want to 'go through the trouble’ of reporting it.


Also to give another idea, posting news on FH itself. I can't imagine it would take even 5minutes to copy & paste 'The Friday News' - then use your mod-like powers to stick it to the top of the 'General' section. It wouldn't be so much about serving any practical purpose - but it would be a small reminder than you do know about & use Freddyshouse. It might even help you with getting 'feedback' in some respects.

We (I) don't ask for you to move mountains for us, or play god. But some times it can be the smaller things, which make more of an impact on you than the large.

Anyway I’m going to stop there, not much to be gained by going on any further. Dunno if this'll help any, but I really hope it does.

 

[[e]]

haha

/clap

Liked that a lot, indeed DAoC is the only place that doleys and wasters rule.

Nerf having a job and gf, if I didnt have these things I too could compete, ah well .

UBER RESPECT to the LAZY MOFOS whose lives I pay for through my taxes :wub:

 

[Glendower]

Sorry, Zargar, but that is not all valid.

If Mythic and GOA cared a great deal about public opinion, it would be child's play to set up login or newsite polls. Sony does this quite often with EQ and its other games, for instance.

Or they could hire someone who was respectful and reasonable to the TLs as a liason as opposed to Mackey telling them "We dont want to hear any more suggestions about certain things...oh, and leave XXX, XXXX, and XXXX out of your reports from now on irregardless of how your players feel"

Finally, the most telling indicator is of course the overall quality of service delivered over a few years, which has been subpar on the great majority of occasions (this applies to both GOA and Mythic), while demonstrating a lack of creativity and ability, along with rigid thinking and unwillingness to admit mistakes, much less actually correct them (timely manner or otherwise).

This does not reflect on your own personal efforts, just that of the companies in general.

 

[Kagato]

Firstly, thankyou for expressing an opinion here Zargar, would be nice to get more of this in the future.

However I have to disagree regarding the Team Leader project that Mythic uses, to me it seems nothing more then a way for Mythic to look like they are listening to the players without actually having to do anything. For the best part of a year now we have seen time and time again, month after month, patch note after patch note, nicely pressented logical Team Leader reports that have been (usually) well thought and would provide players with the tweaking and improvements they want.

What gets done about this?

Nothing.

There is little to no response to the Team Leader reports, I'd say they werent worth the paper they are written on if it wasn't for them being on the internet.
Im sure the pedants will throw at me the odd minor changes I have over looked to one class or another, but honestly, there is nothing significant done. All we ever get is crap about the problem being worked on.
Players want Balance above all else, the classes and the weaknesses they suffer or the over poweredness of others is common knowledge, we exploit these weaknesses every day in RvR to win, we know ! Talk to any player of the record and they will tell you what is wrong with a class even if it belongs to an enemy realm, the Team Leaders do a wonderful job of gathering this data it just never goes anywhere, we just get patch after patch with essentially nothing constructive in it. You only need to look at the latest patches to see this, they are scraping the bottom of the barrel because they don't know how to give us the balance changes we want without putting in alot of time to do it they would rather spend on developing the next money-grabbing pathetic expansion.

Ok ok, rant over, it just disgusts me that Mythic can have such a wonderful scheme like the Team Leader program and yet waste it entirely by directly ignoring all glaringly obvious solutions in it.

 

[chipper]

reat posts by glen and kagato i
n response to the original owner
1, i did quit
2, i made so many friends and spent over 2 years on this game and wont turn my back on it just yet

kagato pretty much covered what i wanted to say 2 years on and the game has been fun but in the last 6-8 months the game has gone so downhill its become a landslide

class inbalances are a complete joke you only need to look to RvR to notice this the same few classes there time and time again but they refuse to do any balancing even after all the threads and protests and petitions sent to mythic

as for listening to the TL's haha what a joke i wonder if they even bother to read them mythic really should take a look at how SOE manage a game SWG has many probs but thxs to the TL's and a spirited community things are getting done the game is actually getting things that the TL's have said we need the developers are constantly communicating with the community even on public threads if it catches there eye they care about us (swg community) all mythic cares about is taking your money they gave up on daoc months ago now all you get is more outlandish add ons and ridiculous patches that make the uber classes even more powerful and push the others further into obscurity and i think im just about to turn my back on daoc which is a shame as i did truly enjoy this game more than anyother that includes SWG, i made alot of friends here and it really was hard to quit 4 moths ago yes i was addicted i was a die hard player so if i could finally come to my senses and quit think about all those others who werent as addicted as me and dont have the commitment i once had sooner or later ppl will see sense and refuse to buy that next addon that gives you a dragon to fly or whatever bullshit ideas they come up with anyway rant over said what i wanted to.

 

[Marc]

i think its because at one time the game was about getting to 50 along the way picking up a good enough weapon getting your epic and going to rvr then you had lvls in rvr which you had to climb,then you had to go work out a template for your sc suit then you had to find someone to make the suit and sc it for you just before that you had to farm 15+ plat to cost that suit go to new areas get uber weapons ect ect now you have to go and get artifacts and lvl them and where do you end up 30+ hours later back at rvr where you was and you was happy and if you don't do these you don't go to rvr expecting decent battles i work 40 hours a week i can't keep up with all the doleys who and the people with nothing else in thier lives apart from doac (and sorry no punctuation before some smart ass tries to pick up on it cos they want a +1 post.yes i'm literate and have an a level in english but when you talk to 11 year olds some times they don't appreciate it anyway)

 

[gervaise]

Incidentally you might have noticed that the people that POST

or even just

are back within a week or two
QUOTE]

This is the type of thing that started appearing on the VN boards when people started to post that they were leaving. Along with 'no way are the numbers down' type posts way up at 34k etc to which some would say they used to be over 40k etc etc.

Well here we are in April and US server peak numbers are rarely hit 30k at peak time. 27k, 25k, 19k. The decline hasn't bottomed out yet - people with multi-month subscriptions etc - but there is no argument that US numbers are well down. VN boards are very quiet as well.

Now if only GoA would introduce there statistics graphs we could see what had happened in Europe. Oh look - no statistics button anymore.

 

[gervaise]

It does make me wonder just how sad people are when they
a: complain and whine all the time about how crap the game is/goa/mythic/etc and yet still play day on day
b: people who are ex players who keep hanging round moaning and bitching.

Why not, just stop playing, move on and do something more to your liking....

For some I believe it is a case of ANGER, DENIAL, ACCEPTANCE and then they leave. Boards having performed a valuable social function in allowing those upset to get things off their chest.

 

[Auriel]

Archeon's epiphany

That sir, was the finest post I've read in a damn long time :worthy:

I have to sympathise with the companies... the amount of wading though verbal vomit I do is maddening at times, but that's what communities are like!

 

[Raven]

1 question though zarger, what ever happened to the polls on the euro daoc page? the last poll was a year ago and is still up

 

[Flimgoblin]

Shame some of the team leaders are very incompetent and not many of their actual good ideas are implemented. Mythic just disappointed 80% of the community with their new proposed RA system, if they will really listen well to the community it's going to have to change alot. We'll see..

And about GOA, listening to the community starts by having a decent customer service, but everyone knows how terrible it is. I'm glad I never have to use it

TLs are there to pass feedback - not to design the game

and if you've never used the customer service how do you know it's bad? worked fine for me every time I've had to call it....

In fact I found it far more useful than /appeal on the US servers - with /appeal I couldn't check what I wrote, add comments with extra information etc and I was restricted to a daoc command line length of message.

(now I've probably missed some spiffy gui interface to /appeal but just typing /appeal submits the text after it, /appeal on its own gives you the appeal status....)

 

[Flimgoblin]

1 question though zarger, what ever happened to the polls on the euro daoc page? the last poll was a year ago and is still up

I think they were just mirroring the US polls - and the US haven't done any more polls yet...

 

[Flimgoblin]

Also to give another idea, posting news on FH itself. I can't imagine it would take even 5minutes to copy & paste 'The Friday News' - then use your mod-like powers to stick it to the top of the 'General' section. It wouldn't be so much about serving any practical purpose - but it would be a small reminder than you do know about & use Freddyshouse. It might even help you with getting 'feedback' in some respects.

The only problem i see with that is the "VN devs round table" syndrome.. did you take a look at it before it became the fans round table?

typical topics:

FAO SANYA- FIX MY CLASS!!!!
FAO JULIE - NERF THEIR CLASS!!!
FAO SONYA - FIX MY TELEVISION!!!
FAO MYTHACK - Y IS MY CLASSS BORKEN??!!!!

I guess we'd probably not get that here but the number of "FAO: Zargar" posts about how their ISP isn't connecting today would be massively increased.

 

[Archeon]

I never said they needed to take an active interest. All they'd need to do is appear to take an interest.

For example, your stuck talking to some insanly boring person who's voice sounds about as emotional as television statis, who's informing you about the life cycle of the Russian Earth-worm. What do you more likely to do?

• Listen intently, even if you do find it boring.
• Look over his left shoulder at the paint and wonder just what that particular shade of yellow is called anyway.

At the end of the day you've got no idea what the guy was talking about, but atleast you appeared to be listening and giving a damn. Which probably made his day.

By the way, isn't there somthing in the FH rules (or CoC, I dunno what its called I still havn't read it ) about bumping up old posts?

 

[Flimgoblin]

good point about the old post but this one is interesting so I'll forgive raven as he posted a bit more than just "hi" or whatever...

I wasn't meaning from a GOA reading the posts point of view but more from a "I have to read/moderate these forums" point of view.... GOA having a more active presence would lead people to think that FH was their own private (well ok public) RightNow service and route direct to the people in charge, and therefore post more crap - that said there's enough drivel here anyway I'd probably not notice the difference and people would have warm fuzzy feelings from a more public appearance of GOA listening, so I guess it'd be good.

 

[Asha]

I think that the bottom line between Mythic <-> Customers give and take is that Mythic's goals are NOT the same as the average players. Mythic's goal is .... to make money by producing a game. They do this by having as many players paying as many subs as they can for as long as they can. The average player's goal is to have fun, and I would say mostly through RvR as that is the big draw of DAoC compared to other MMORGs out there now. Mythic have required players to put huge amounts of time and effort into TOA in order to compete in RvR. This extends the player sub time by several months in itself, but it also increases the investment of players into their characters. I think the idea is that players will be less likely to move onto another game when they have not only invested the time from 1-50, but also now invested god knows how much time in TOA.

Totally off topic, but I think that we are more sensitive to the RvR issues here in Euroland because we essentially do not have the "exploration" side to the game. You can see this very clearly in TOA. How many people led a Mlvl or Artifact raid w/o reading some guide to it? Can you imagine experiencing TOA with no guides what-so-ever? It would be a completely different experience. Not knowing WHAT an artifact does before you start to level it. Not knowing how many people are required for a master level or the various effects that are going to happen... We miss out on all that exploring. Sure you could do it without the guides, but good luck finding enough people to do the master levels that way when there is an easier way. This means that we are much more focused on the other side to the game, RvR.

The lack of exploring/testing effect also means that we can make nearly perfect templates, specs, groups with much less efforts than the American server players. This ultra-tweaking means that we see just how over-powered certain classes/group set ups/RAs are. It also means that we probably focus on RvR in a totally different way. This is frustrating because we have zero feedback to the developers. It's kind of ironic that the more ultra-RvR focused players (through lack of need to do the exploring and testing side of the game) are the players with the least feedback to Mythic. We aren't allowed on test servers, test site forums, etc. Then again, since *most* worldwide players won't be playing in this style and Mythic care about the majority and not the elite (or whatever word you would put there), maybe our feedback would be ignored as irrelevant to "normal" game play.

We get our pros and cons for playing with a patch delay. I think I prefer it

/off topic

 

[judas]

well said. to bad your template is so gimped

 

[Archeon]

good point about the old post but this one is interesting so I'll forgive raven as he posted a bit more than just "hi" or whatever...

bah, didn't notice Raven's post (well the dat atleast) I thought you'd done it

 

[Asha]

my template rock your socks