User talk:Quizzical/Bye

I'm going to miss you. You have left your mark here and improved the wiki quite a lot. I wonder why you eschew PvP, I could imagine you'd like Hero Battles (there's probably already an article in your userspace that details why). I hope you keep us posted on what game you enjoy next, because your preferences make a lot of sense (as you usually do). --?mendel? 07:57, 8 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Simply put: Agreed, Mendel. Except for hero battles. Personally, I can't stand flagging heroes to some shrine that gives +200 max HP or some severly underpowered NPC. And what is your task? Healing, or spiking. Blaahhhh. But that's just my opinion.
 * Also, a truly great game? Diablo II. Made in 2000, I bought it in 2003 or so. I picked it up back in 2007 again, and play it sporadically again. I'm now running a mod (called Median) and that makes it another completely different game.
 * So, if you like hack-and-slash ARPG's, there's my suggestion. Besides, it's only 10 bucks for the original and the expansion :P Online play isn't too much fun unless you're playing with a friend, cause generally, there's only farmers and dupers playing now, and the occasional regular player looking for the uberest gear to twink his lv30 so he can one shot everything untill Hell (difficulty 3).
 * Or you could wait for the successor (sp?) of Diablo II, named *drumroll* Diablo III! *anti-climax*
 * Which is basically bound to be a massive succes, imo. --- [[Image:VipermagiSig.JPG|Ohaider!]]-- (s)talkpage  10:41, 8 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I was mainly hoping for a relatively recent online game to play. A lot of the suggestions on my main talk page were very old games.  If I wanted to play a game that came out 15 years ago, I'd have picked it up 13 or 14 years ago (but not 15; I virtually never get games immediately after they come out).


 * I've ordered Pirates of the Burning Sea, and am waiting for it to come in the mail. Having not yet played it, I don't know whether it will be any good or not, so I can't really make a recommendation on that one way or the other.


 * If you want my recommendations on other games I've played, I guess I could summarize what I've played in the last decade or so.


 * Probably the best online game I had played before Guild Wars was Infantry. Unfortunately, that has to be past tense, as it was a really good game from 2001 through early 2002.  Then it went pay to play.  While I'm not opposed to paying, the problem with this is that the game lost most of its player base at that point, making it so that there were a lot fewer things that you could realistically do.  Around this time, Sony transferred the game's main programmer to work on Planetside, instead, so any future glitches that players found to abuse would no longer be fixed.  Today the game has too small of a playerbase to do much, and too many games ruined by flagrant cheating.


 * Another game that is still pretty good is Puzzle Pirates. You get some players on a pirate ship and go out and fight NPC pirates.  What makes the game unusual is that everything is strongly based on player skill.  Rather than directly hacking at enemy pirates, you play puzzle games (e.g., Tetris or Dr. Mario), and your performance in the puzzle determines how much you make the ship go faster, repair damage, or whatever.


 * Puzzle Pirates used to have a pretty deep economy, but the company nerfed it a few years ago. It used to be that prices on items could float pretty freely with supply and demand, so you could look at something and say, aha, the supply of this is going to go up, and react accordingly.  Then they rigged item spawn rates to float up and down to force prices to a particular arbitrary value, which removed the depth from the economy.


 * A niche game that I've played quite a bit is A Tale in the Desert. It's probably the weirdest MMORPG in existence.  I sometimes like games that go off the beaten path to try something new, rather than just being a mediocre clone of some other game I already have.  If I wanted to play a mediocre clone of some other game, I'd just go play the other game.  ATITD is about as far off the beaten path as one can go.  There are some things that online games just don't do, because they really shouldn't, but the game's programmer recognizes no such limitations apart from what can be coded.


 * For starters, there is no combat. If you ask players whether the game is PvP or PvE, some will assert that there's essentially no PvP, while others will claim that everything in the game is best understood as being PvP.  My take on it is that whether a given activity constitutes PvE or PvP often depends on your long-term goals.  Here's a longer write-up on the nature of the game that I wrote a while back:.


 * But to really appreciate how weird the game is, you have to understand the scandals. One of the biggest was the time that someone sold on Ebay the ability to ban seven accounts from the game.  That's ban as in, your account is gone, forever, and if you ever want to play the game again, you'll have to make a new one.  While the game has a monthly fee instead of making you buy a box, apart from payment issues, that would be about as devastating as getting your account banned in Guild Wars.  The company knew about what happened and declined to intervene.  To properly understand the game, it is essential to understand why that was arguably the right decision.  Incidentally, no one got banned; the person who bought it declined to use it.


 * I've also played several other online games that I wouldn't recommend. Chain of Command was my first online game.  It had a good underlying game concept; it was real-time combat that moves at a pretty slow pace so there's a lot of strategy.  It was also extremely buggy and laggy.  The company had a bizarre obsession with trying to convince players to do stupid things to sabotage their team's chances of winning.  But whether I'd recommend the game or not is moot, as the company that made it went out of business in the dot-com bust, so the servers have been gone for more than seven years.


 * I played Anarchy Online for a short period of time. The only thing it really had going for it was the randomly generated missions, which give some variety.  Unfortunately, the rewards were also randomly generated, so you may have to call up dozens or hundreds of missions to find a reward that you can actually use.  The locations were also randomly generated, so you'd often have to spend 10 minutes running to get to a mission that takes you 15 minutes to beat.  And the very slow grinding for levels was also a nuisance.


 * I played Runescape for a shorter period of time. There are a lot of players who have a lot of free time and no skill, and thus want winning to be based on whoever has the most free time.  Runescape caters to this market.  If you spend several hours playing the game, you'll probably have done nearly everything there is to do, often many times.  Beyond that, it's just doing the same few simple things over and over to grind out levels.


 * I played SmallBall for a while. It was a baseball game, where you train your players every day and they get better.  Their skills degenerate with time, so how good your team is eventually levels off.  The glaring problem with it was that you had to play to train your players for a short time every single day; to be competitive, you couldn't leave your team alone for more than about 24 hours.  Go on vacation for a week without playing the game and it takes you months to recover.


 * I do play some offline games, too, sometimes, though less than online games. The best one I've picked up in recent years was Europa Universalis II.  It's technically classified as a real-time strategy game, though it's kind of a hybrid of real-time and turn-based.  Basically, you let things go in real time, but pause the game whenever you want to do anything.  It's sometimes compared to Civilization, but with a lot more emphasis on diplomacy and a lot less on micromanagement.


 * How hard the game is depends more on what country you play as than what skill level you set. Play as a major European power like England, France, or Castile (which later becomes Spain), and it's easy.  Play as a minor or regional pwoer like Pommern, Modeno, or Hyderabad and it can be harder.  Play as some remote minor country like Lenape or Xhosa and there's not much you can do when the European powers show up.  There are a lot of events that kind of push the game along historical lines, but players can diverge pretty far from actual history.  Apparently Europa Universalis III has since come out, though I haven't played it.


 * I've also been playing Civilization IV some recently. The company did a fantastic job of diagnosing the problems with the previous Civilization games and creating fixes that sound great on paper.  Unfortunately, they don't work as well in practice as one might hope, but it's still a reasonably good game.  The main problem with the game is the company went way, way too far in trying to provide varied graphics, background music, dialogues, etc.


 * For example, the game wanted some background music to play while during diplomacy with various foreign leaders. But with 26 possible leaders in the game, the company had to give every leader his own soundtrack.  And not just one, mind you, but typically three or so; which one is played depends on how technologically advanced you are at the time.  So you have several dozen 1 or 2 minute background music clips.  Meanwhile, a diplomacy typically only lasts 5 or 10 seconds: one side says, here's a deal I'll offer, the other side says yes or no, and that's the end of it.  So the game has over 100 MB of background music for diplomacy alone, most of which an average player who spends hundreds of hours playing the game will never hear.  That sort of overkill is pretty typical of the game.  While a bunch of background music that doesn't play is harmless, dialogue lines that have ten different ways of saying the same thing can sometimes leave it unclear what is being said.


 * Where it really becomes a problem is system performance. My computer computer handles Guild Wars just fine with all the settings turned all the way up, but struggles with Civ 4.  It doesn't make the game unplayable, as it is turn-based, but the frequent 10 seconds of waiting is a nuisance.  I think this is rather bad, considering that my old Pentium II/400 with an 8 MB video card was able to run Civilization 2 quite well.  Maybe I'll like Civ 4 better when I get a new computer in a few years, though it's unlikely that even the next computer I buy will be able to run Civ 4 as well as the computer I had 10 years ago ran Civ 2.  Quizzical 14:49, 15 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Still, I advise you to play (Net)Hack. Even if it's stone-age (it doesn't even have graphics :P ), it surpasses even GW and Diablo II in replayability and lulz.
 * I've played Puzzle Pirates for a while, too. It's defo nice, but not my type of game (I generally played Bilge or something like that, pumping water out of the ship). Sometimes it felt so.. useless...
 * A while ago, I've downloaded a demo for Civ' Revolutions. The demo doesn't last long enough to ever finish any foe off, or advance far, but it's still fun. And something different than a little over 50% of my Xbox games (Shooters and RPGs ^^' ).
 * And, I've been working on a weird Warcraft map. Now just working around a TD concept, using a code to spawn units and test my towers. I can't get Chain Stun to work, which makes me sad. It's vital to win, but if it wont stun.. >.<" --- [[Image:VipermagiSig.JPG|Ohaider!]]-- (s)talkpage  15:03, 15 August 2008 (UTC)


 * If you want my verdict on Pirates of the Burning Sea now that I've had some time to play it, it's basically a Massively Multiplayer Online Single Player Game. I say that only half in jest.  It's about as friendly to soloers as Guild Wars is with its henchmen and heroes.  But if you want to group, well, tough luck.  While it's an online game, most of the players at any given time will be in some instanced content, and the rest are too scattered around the map to realistically be able to find each other and group even if so inclined.  There isn't even a lot of random chatter like you'd get in a town in Guild Wars; it's likely that spam messages by gold sellers constitute an outright majority of the messages sent in public chat.


 * But taken as a single-player game instead of an MMO, it's a reasonably good game. Some combat is in ships and some is on land.  The ship combat is pretty well done, and certainly different from any other game I've played.  It moves at a slower pace than combat in a lot of games, but it's mostly time spent maneuvering to get into position to blast the enemy ships more than they can get you, as opposed to time spent waiting while you could leave the room to grab something to eat (though there is a little bit of the latter, too).  The land combat is ill-conceived and stupid.  Fortunately, ship combat probably constitutes more than 80% of the combat in the game weighted by time spent.


 * There is theoretically pvp combat, but it's hard enough to find players that it barely exists. I've never yet seen a pvp battle.  That's not merely not participated in one; if players are in pvp combat, it still shows them on the map to anyone who happens to be nearby, and I've never seen players in pvp combat as I sailed by.  Quizzical 04:23, 11 October 2008 (UTC)