Goblin Squad Member
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...like constantly comparing Pathfinder Online to EVE and WOW. I realize Ryan Dancey is closely associated with EVE, I also know he has expressly stated PFO will not be 'fantasy EVE Online', just that Goblinworks will learn from the mistakes made by that game. Battle is going to be different. Hell, movement is going to be different. PFO will not have flight, it may not even have mounts. Do you realize how different having your army trudge across hexes towards where you suppose the fight is going to be is compared to a spaceship battle? A Dreadnought or whatever you call it in EVE can be permanently blown up; a 20 Merit Badge character in PFO rezzes and keeps fighting. I realize a POI or Outpost can be razed, but destroying a settlement is involved enough that it has been suggested that cutting it off from supply and excepting it's surrender is probably preferable. I thought maybe assasinating a general or settlement official at a crucial time might be similiar to destroying a command ship or something but then again, no it's not. However, at least EVE shows examples of organizational and leadership skill, which is very relevant.
Now, on to WOW. Not only is it a themepark (or wax museum, as I like to say) but I submit that most of the people who still play, in their millions, are only gamers in the sense that someone who plays Madden 2014 is a gamer-nothing wrong with that, but it's a diversion, not a hobby. The average WOW player is a different animal than someone who wants to play a sandbox MMO. Try this: make a Match.com profile. Say that you play WOW with your friends every Wednesday night. No problem. Then change it to 'Hey, I'm Lord Sepherum, Warden of Shadowhawk Keep in an immersive game called Pathfinder Online' and watch your responses fall through the floor. WOW players keep demanding the game get easier and easier and their demigods get shinier and shinier and they're willing to pay for the privilege-I don't know that these folks would try PFO although I hope some do and Goblinworks certainly deserves the biz. As my buddy Phil likes to say: "I loved Everquest. Gaining a level meant something."
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Goblin Squad Member
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i think everyone knows this game wont be EVE or WoW.
however I dont think discussing those games is harmful to PfO and looking at PfO from those angles helps us out.
As it stands EVE and WoW represent the most successful Sandbox and Themepark mmos. For WoW darn near everyone who has played a themepark MMO has at one point in time played WoW. Even those who havent played it know what its about. EVE is less well known however its the best example of a sandbox MMO that is currently on the market.
I think that looking at those two games and seeing what is good and bad about them helps the devs. Sure they probably wont make major design changes to the game, however it can point out some things that perhaps they havent thought about.
So in EVE your battleship gets destroyed, but your character rezzes and keeps on going. The limiting factor is your ability to replace your ship and its components and having a recent clone of your character. In PfO you have a similar limitation. You can thread some of your gear, but you can lose it when you die. Sure its not as final as having your ship blow up, but its sorta like getting insurance.
I wouldnt say that people who play WoW are the same as people who play madden. Saying someone isnt a gamer because they dont play a primarily pvp game is not right.
So talking about EVE and WoW are helpful, it can provide the devs with insight as to what the people on the forum are interested in and what we are not. This could lead to the devs discussing points they otherwise would not have.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think WoW is a terrible comparison for PFO. Take out the basics of an MMO (Persistent world and characters, character customization etc.) and drop the graphics / lore / atheistic stuff and you have a game that shares maybe 10% of it's features with WoW.
Do the same thing for EVE and you have a game that shares at least 50%+
Yeah it's got a different visual style and (Please God! Please!) a much more engaging combat system but it's character advancement, market system, crafting system, questing (or should we say mission) system, and more are pretty much the same based on what we've heard so far.
Not saying they are 99%+ the same, as some people seem to think, but there is a huge amount of basis for comparison.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It could be used as a meme::D"What if I told you...
PFO has tab-target fantasy combat as per WOW + territory-driven conflict as per EVE?"
Based on what we know so far I think the combat is much more comparable to Guild Wars which is also tab-target / fantasy but still very different in terms of how it works/feels.
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Goblin Squad Member
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i think everyone knows this game wont be EVE or WoW.
however I dont think discussing those games is harmful to PfO and looking at PfO from those angles helps us out.
As it stands EVE and WoW represent the most successful Sandbox and Themepark mmos. For WoW darn near everyone who has played a themepark MMO has at one point in time played WoW. Even those who havent played it know what its about. EVE is less well known however its the best example of a sandbox MMO that is currently on the market.
I think that looking at those two games and seeing what is good and bad about them helps the devs. Sure they probably wont make major design changes to the game, however it can point out some things that perhaps they havent thought about.
So in EVE your battleship gets destroyed, but your character rezzes and keeps on going. The limiting factor is your ability to replace your ship and its components and having a recent clone of your character. In PfO you have a similar limitation. You can thread some of your gear, but you can lose it when you die. Sure its not as final as having your ship blow up, but its sorta like getting insurance.
I wouldnt say that people who play WoW are the same as people who play madden. Saying someone isnt a gamer because they dont play a primarily pvp game is not right.
So talking about EVE and WoW are helpful, it can provide the devs with insight as to what the people on the forum are interested in and what we are not. This could lead to the devs discussing points they otherwise would not have.
You make some good points leperkhaun. I don't know how long you've been on these boards, but the lessons to be learned from EVE and WOW have been discussed ad nauseum for months. I believe the developers are very smart and aware of different MMOs and whatever wisdom can be gleaned from them, has been gleaned. Meanwhile, I sometimes go to a thread and hear on and on about EVE and it's mechanics and latest news often with no mention of the direct relevance to PFO. If I wanted to go to the EVE Online messageboards, I would. I think we should start discussing PFO on it's own merits-we certainly have a great amount of information to digest now.
I've played Madden-it's fun. I didn't intend to 'accuse' anyone of not being a 'gamer'; if that is some sort of grave insult I, uhm, apologize, I guess. Maybe I should have used the term 'serious MMO enthusiast' instead. I know a lot of people who play Madden and games like it, but I don't know a single one who will wake up at 3a.m. to stop the Vikings from scoring on the Patriots or ask some guy in Thailand to do it for them. If you haven't noticed, we have a large thread going on that very subject right now.As for WOW, I don't know if you caught the very contentious discussion we had about having a cash shop. During that debate, Ryan Dancey made mention of a special fast mount that could be purchased with real money in the WOW cash shop and that no one seemed to care. My point is that many WOW players are no longer gamers (oh, sorry, serious MMO enthusiasts) but more like normal consumers-they don't want to pay for the opportunity to earn and build, they want to buy something and get it now. I personally don't think these will be the majority of Pathfinder Online players. I couldn't care less what Blizzard is doing, as you stated, I played WOW myself and they lost me a long time ago.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It could be used as a meme::D"What if I told you...
PFO has tab-target fantasy combat as per WOW + territory-driven conflict as per EVE?"
Ah, the Devil being in the details...last I checked, in or out of combat, you can use any ability, spell or item you can fit on your screen in WOW. And the territorial conflict in EVE are fleets of destructible spaceships coming out of warp gates, not resurrectable soldiers fighting with sword and spell in a forest hex. Now, leperkhaun just said that no one is saying PFO will be WOW or EVE. Do you and your meme disagree?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Honestly with the WoW cash shop mount thing, for WoW its not really an issue. In a game like PfO i think doing something like that would be an issue given what being able to outrun everyone who didnt pay cash money will allow you to do.
I think even some talks about EVE mechanics are helpful. The reaction of the players can be seen to specific things. take the jet canning talk. We know something like that wont be overlooked in PfO for the reason that you would get flagged without making a choice about your action. In general it showed to me that what GW wants is their players to make a choice and then deal with the consequences of their actions, NOT get tricked into doing something that should be perfectly safe and then get flagged due to a loophole.
The EVE talks also has brought into the light far better than previous talks that this is a game about competition. I think some people were surprised that not everyone is going to treat this like a pve game and only pvp during declared wars. It also gave the devs some things to think about as to what kind of tactics some people will use and what kind of things they will have to consider. All of those I think are important, if only because the devs went "hmmm i hadnt thought about that we need to take that into consideration for our design".
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Goblin Squad Member
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Honestly with the WoW cash shop mount thing, for WoW its not really an issue. In a game like PfO i think doing something like that would be an issue given what being able to outrun everyone who didnt pay cash money will allow you to do.
I think even some talks about EVE mechanics are helpful. The reaction of the players can be seen to specific things. take the jet canning talk. We know something like that wont be overlooked in PfO for the reason that you would get flagged without making a choice about your action. In general it showed to me that what GW wants is their players to make a choice and then deal with the consequences of their actions, NOT get tricked into doing something that should be perfectly safe and then get flagged due to a loophole.
The EVE talks also has brought into the light far better than previous talks that this is a game about competition. I think some people were surprised that not everyone is going to treat this like a pve game and only pvp during declared wars. It also gave the devs some things to think about as to what kind of tactics some people will use and what kind of things they will have to consider. All of those I think are important, if only because the devs went "hmmm i hadnt thought about that we need to take that into consideration for our design".
Yeah, such a mount would probably ruin PFO. Goblinworks promised there would never be any 'pay to win' stuff in the cash shop. And once again, you make some good points.
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Goblin Squad Member
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We don't have an actual game to talk about so yeah it's not a crime to use games we know to help visualize what this game is going to be like. I'd say it's a perfectly natural way to go about theorycrafting.Cool. I prefer to go back and reread the blogs to do my theorycrafting.
Cool. Well I'd say you are more intelligent than I am, or at least better at learning without visual aides. I find it extremely difficult to wrap my head around many of the concepts unless it's compared to something I have already played or seen. Heck, even the football analogies help...
In my defense PFo is not being built in a vacuum, almost everything in the game is variants of things in other games.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In my defense PFo is not being built in a vacuum, almost everything in the game is variants of things in other games.
Hard to avoid having systems other games use or have used and still be playable. Players will still be human with only so many fingers and toes to work the controls. Expectations will be imported from other games. People will try and play PFO as if it were WoW and complain that it sucks because it doesn't play the same way.
Cultures naturally change over time. My generation was quite different from my parents' generation, and today's generation seems very different from mine. And that's okay because the world is in some ways quite different than it was.
People may well want to simply buy what they want now for instant gratification. EQ2 will sell you a level 85 character right now, nicely geared and with all the achievements you would expect to have earned in 85 levels. It should be no big deal if the players are different and make decisions based on radically different values than we would.
It is part of maturing to have room in our worlds for change. The more things change, the more they stay the same too.
