World of Darkness

[Joose]

CCP have said a few words about WoD the MMO, and they are interesting.

My cynical side says that this will slowly bleed features until what is actually released is WoW with vampires, but I hope I'm proved wrong. The idea of an MMO with perma-death is something I find oddly exciting. Its something that other MMOs avoid due to how fucking irritating it would be to lose all your stuff due to one stupid move, but CCP have *sort of* got this already in EVE. Your character might not die, but you can permanently lose huge expensive toys in that due to slight slip ups.

If anyone can make a WoD game that isn't generic and dull, CCP can. I'm just worried that they won't.

[Grimmie]

Will there be spreadsheets?

[buzzmong]

Last summer, I would have agreed with you Joose. However since CCP went off and shoehorned the cash shop into EVE, have stated that Dust is a cashshop game, then I feel the writing is on the wall for WoD.

Sadly, considering the demographic, I can easily see the beancounters deciding that selling in game clothing and items is the only way for the game.

[Joose]

Yeah, hence the:

I'm just worried that they won't.

[Dog Pants]

Permadeath is, I think, a good thing if done properly. Take the old tale in Eve of the Guiding Hand Social Club assassinating one of the faction leaders. It couldn't really have been an assassination unless the guy was monumentally stupid and didn't back up his clone. In this you could, hopefully at a very high price, properly assassinate someone like that. The promise of Eve-style politics is also a good thing, especially given the setting, but I also forsee Eve-style commitment, which will exclude me from the game. Also, the whole LARP thing is off-putting. Not that I have anything specific against LARPers (I was even one myself when I was a teenager, although it's not for me now), but there a lot of dicks in that hobby and I can see a game about vampires attracting the worst of them.

[Joose]

I think the problem with permadeath in a game is, like you say, the dicks. Permadeath is a great way of making a game interesting in theory, but im interested in how they plan to deal with roaming bands of high level fuckwits ganking low level guys for shits and giggles. Theoretically, there are lots of in universe ways of dealing with that. I don't know how practical any of them would be to impliment in an MMO though.

[buzzmong]

Unless I read it differently, I interpreted "perma-death" as a bit of a joke, based on the fact you can start mortal but become the undead...aka a vampire, rather than actual character permadeath.

[Dog Pants]

Fair point Buzz, could be. I said above though that I'd hope the more normal interpretation of it would be prohibitively expensive. I'm assuming a normal PvP battle wouldn't end in perma-death, that you'd have to fork out huge amounts of cash on some one-shot item that would stop a player being able to respawn. I'm talking billions of ISK or tens of thousands of Warcraft gold. That's not something you would squander on a lowbie.

[Joose]

Unless I read it differently, I interpreted "perma-death" as a bit of a joke, based on the fact you can start mortal but become the undead...aka a vampire, rather than actual character permadeath.

Uh, no. When the devs were talking about it, they actually used the phrase "Final Death". Which, in case you dont know your WoD terminology, is what they call it when a vampire dies. They also said they were thinking of making it a server option, like how other games have PvP and non PvP servers. So unless they intend to have vampire free servers...

[buzzmong]

Quite right, I've re-read it (and read another one on RPS). Seems they are doing perma-death.

Interesting.

Because it's the complete antithesis of the cash-shop design (ie, why buy something with real money when you could lose it all?). Unless your items persist on accounts. Meaning death becomes a bit pointless if characters are throwaway.

[Joose]

Because it's the complete antithesis of the cash-shop design (ie, why buy something with real money when you could lose it all?).

That's a good point. I would think that you cant really have both micro-transactions and permadeath, unless they are hoping people will be happy to buy stuff over and over. Of course, permadeath isnt set in stone, so maybe when they realise its not compatible they will drop it.

Would be a shame if they did, I think.

[Dog Pants]

Or they'll make the items bound to your account.

[FatherJack]

I found the harshness of Eve's death system so crippling as to be too scared to fly my toys, but it was always a choice - I was happy enough in Empire. People who got more out of the game than me had the mindset that their stuff was expendable and a proper permadeath system in a game would reinforce that attitude from the get-go.

Making it relatively easy to get back where you were, only older and wiser could work, but there has to be some sense of accomplishment with each iteration or people get bored and give up and the elite end up playing their own private game in which everyone else is only their cannon fodder.

[friznit]

"Never fly what you can't afford to lose" was the mantra in Eve and once you learnt to downgrade for PvP, it was a massive buzz to have your ship on the line. Ironically, getting rich was a game killer because it no longer mattered if you lost your shiny toys. I imagine that the cash shop stuff would have to be account bound, cos the amount of emo that would flood the forums if someone lost real monies that hadn't been through the official game cash laundering process would be epic. Which is ironic really. People in Eve will spend a fortune on Eve Time Codes, cash them in for ISK and blow the shit out of it, but if they lose a single penny they spent in the cash shop all hell would break loose.

[buzzmong]

Which is ironic really. People in Eve will spend a fortune on Eve Time Codes, cash them in for ISK and blow the shit out of it, but if they lose a single penny they spent in the cash shop all hell would break loose.

True, but that's because of the psychological effect of mearly speeding up an existing process via money (ISK came from someone, somewhere grinding it. You don't have to spent money to get it) or losing an item which is only available via money. One has a choice, the other doesn't.

@FJ, did you really never know the mantra of "Never fly what you can't afford to lose". It was drummed into me from the moment I started reading noob chat in my first hours ingame.

Still didn't always take it to heart mind you

[friznit]

Mind you, I never did get any good at solo pvp. Those guys who flew 3 accounts at once were nuts.

[FatherJack]

@FJ, did you really never know the mantra of "Never fly what you can't afford to lose". It was drummed into me from the moment I started reading noob chat in my first hours ingame.

I knew it, but didn't feel it applied to me, also I turned off everything expect 5punkchat. I wasn't particularly interested in PvP and bummed around Empire ratting, mining and trading. Every penny I made went into my next upgrade, yet I played so infrequently and made so little money that I ended up grinding just to afford my ship insurance.

I admit, I mostly didn't "get" the idea of PvP at the time, finding it horrid and spiteful, rather than exciting. But I was content floating through space with only mild scares when perhaps another player would enter the same galaxy as me. There came a time though, after a lucky drop/salvage operation where I made roughly 200 times the amount if ISK I'd ever owned. This rendered my bumming rather pointless, but having bought more powerful toys the only place to use them was in low sec - where I was too scared to go.

I hope I don't always sound negative about Eve, I enjoyed the time I played it and reached a ceiling entirely of my own making. I played it my way, casually and noncommitally and still occasionally sign up for a test account just to fly through space while spinning the view around my Rifter- which is all I ever asked for from the game, really. It was fun being invisible though.

[buzzmong]

Next time you sign up for a test account, go pvping. You might, just might, like it, and you'll have nothing to lose either.

Despite lots of other rubbish things that have happened to Eve that are slowly killing it, pvp fights in that game are still one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had.

I kinda regret not getting into it and doing it more.

[buzzmong]

Fuck. Thinking about Eve made me go off and check for new dev blogs.

What a colossal mistake.

Because I read this one.

In short, after months of complaints on the forums stemming right back to the April beta and the promises by CCP that it would always be a choice, they're FINALLY putting the old hanger view back in, admitting CQ is a resource hog and reduces functionality and best of all, doing it via a board/unboard button which was the logical option in the first place (and original premise given by CCP).

Not only that, the utterly stupid 3D rendered "icons" for the new turret models which amusingly didn't work as icons at all, are being reverted back to the original hand-drawn ones.

Will wonders never cease.

Other bonuses include tweaking shaders, a glimpse at the Caldari CQ, and in another dev blog, the new font they've been planning for about 5 years.

I can't help but think that since t0rfifrans has posted the blog that the subscriber numbers have dipped enough to upset CCP's management into actually allocating resources back to the game and letting the actual dev teams work on it again.

[Dog Pants]

CCP related thread getting railroaded into Eve politics shocker!