http://www.ageofconan.com/playfree/
Age of Conan. Huge hype, huge number of players day one, empty guilds at 3-6 months.
Why? Bugs that should have been fixed before release. Band-aid fixes, and dumb decisions by the developers.
I'd rather NOT see ESO go that direction because it has a lot of potential.
AoC is not even close to a fair comparison. I played AoC exclusively from beta till 8 months after release. AoC suffered because of huge problems, and a completely different experience from the opening Island to the rest of the game. ESO's first 8 months hasn't been perfect by any means, but you can't compare it to the train wreck that was the AoC rollout.
ESO. Huge hype, huge number of players day one, empty guilds at 3-6 months.
ESO just took the "thinking" out of gaining Ultimate, which is a huge part of combat. Much how SWG started taking the thinking out of their game.. which eventually ended up in a huge purge of subscribers, and the game getting shut down.
ESO just took the "thinking" out of gaining Ultimate, which is a huge part of combat. Much how SWG started taking the thinking out of their game.. which eventually ended up in a huge purge of subscribers, and the game getting shut down.
Spamming healing springs on the group before an encounter to farm ultimate wasn't exactly "cerebral gameplay".
ESO just took the "thinking" out of gaining Ultimate, which is a huge part of combat. Much how SWG started taking the thinking out of their game.. which eventually ended up in a huge purge of subscribers, and the game getting shut down.
Spamming healing springs on the group before an encounter to farm ultimate wasn't exactly "cerebral gameplay".
But not everyone was relegated to doing this. It wasn't the ONLY way to gain ultimate. Not EVERYONE specs healing on one bar.
Now the ONLY way to gain ultimate is doing a light attack, or running a resto stick in one hand and throwing a healing spell every 8 seconds.
You will now only have 2 choices to gain ultimate, instead of many many many options.
Another example that comes to mind is Star Wars Galaxies. It was a very good and thriving game.
Then they came out with the NGE combat update and things started to go south. They continued dumbing down the game making things more "simple" to appeal to new players while purging long-time loyal subscribers.
The thing they didn't bet on was that the new players wouldn't stick around that long. The game was so dumbed down that it quickly got boring. They essentially removed what was fun and unique about it. A lot of the long time players wanted to embrace the change..but they ended up leaving because it just wasn't fun anymore.
Queue in the ESO Ultimate change. This is essentially a dumbing down of what was a dynamic system to "You get 3 ultimate every 8 seconds as long as you do a light attack".
This is probably just the start. Expect other things to start getting dumbed down and replaced with more mindless grinding for passives.
ESO just took the "thinking" out of gaining Ultimate, which is a huge part of combat. Much how SWG started taking the thinking out of their game.. which eventually ended up in a huge purge of subscribers, and the game getting shut down.
ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »Short answer is DKs likely won't be seeing a ton of changes before we go live; this class is still quite powerful (as it should be being a tank), even after some of the adjustments we've made to other classes and abilities.
ESO just took the "thinking" out of gaining Ultimate, which is a huge part of combat. Much how SWG started taking the thinking out of their game.. which eventually ended up in a huge purge of subscribers, and the game getting shut down.
Spamming healing springs on the group before an encounter to farm ultimate wasn't exactly "cerebral gameplay".
ESO just took the "thinking" out of gaining Ultimate, which is a huge part of combat. Much how SWG started taking the thinking out of their game.. which eventually ended up in a huge purge of subscribers, and the game getting shut down.
Spamming healing springs on the group before an encounter to farm ultimate wasn't exactly "cerebral gameplay".
Stopping out of combat ultimate generation is a good change. Never should have been allowed in the first place. With that said, I don't think the conversation is about keeping out of combat ultimate generation. It's about the dumbing down of "in combat" ultimate generation
ESO just took the "thinking" out of gaining Ultimate, which is a huge part of combat. Much how SWG started taking the thinking out of their game.. which eventually ended up in a huge purge of subscribers, and the game getting shut down.
Spamming healing springs on the group before an encounter to farm ultimate wasn't exactly "cerebral gameplay".
Stopping out of combat ultimate generation is a good change. Never should have been allowed in the first place. With that said, I don't think the conversation is about keeping out of combat ultimate generation. It's about the dumbing down of "in combat" ultimate generation
If they wanted to stop out of combat generation, just make it so you can't gain ultimate unless your in combat.
If they are worried about Dragon Knights gaining too much, lower the Ultimate gain from their skills.
If they are non-class skills, then everyone has access to them so it is equal across the board.
If it's Batswarm and DK Banner that they feel are getting dropped too often, then just increase the Ultimate cost on them to something like Meteor.
The change is not needed as there are easier and better solutions. From what they said in ESO live, the reason they made the change was that the current system was too "complicated for the dev to work with" so they were simplifying it.
Honestly, the change has NOTHING to do with how fast classes are gaining Ultimate. It was an issue they were running into when trying to finish the CONSOLE game, and rather than do a proper fix, they just decided to make it based on light attacks.
Seriously, you can watch the ESO live episode at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74RNVpzXbA8 at 48:08 he flat out says "It's confusing for the designers".
He also says right after that, "Someone playing a tanky character is not gaining much Ultimate." I had to LOL at this because the big complaint is DKs, who generally play tank style in PvP are gaining TOO MUCH Ultimate.
ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »Short answer is DKs likely won't be seeing a ton of changes before we go live; this class is still quite powerful (as it should be being a tank), even after some of the adjustments we've made to other classes and abilities.
I don't disagree with you. This is a big change that most of us are rightfully skeptical of. But the proposed change does, at least in theory, sound like it will even out some of the current imbalance plaguing ultimate generation. The Developers could, as you suggest, approach each Ultimately and skill separately to fine tune generation--but that could take months and never actually solve the problem.
Yes, normalizing ultimate gain will kill many of the tactics use to generate lots of ultimate. But it's a small price to fix the non-stop ultimate spam DKs in PvP.
I don't disagree with you. This is a big change that most of us are rightfully skeptical of. But the proposed change does, at least in theory, sound like it will even out some of the current imbalance plaguing ultimate generation. The Developers could, as you suggest, approach each Ultimately and skill separately to fine tune generation--but that could take months and never actually solve the problem.
Yes, normalizing ultimate gain will kill many of the tactics use to generate lots of ultimate. But it's a small price to fix the non-stop ultimate spam DKs in PvP.
They've been using the slow pruning method since launch, and it hasn't really done much if anything to solve the issue.
I'm not surprised that they're using a more aggressive strategy now.
ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »Short answer is DKs likely won't be seeing a ton of changes before we go live; this class is still quite powerful (as it should be being a tank), even after some of the adjustments we've made to other classes and abilities.
AoC is not even close to a fair comparison. I played AoC exclusively from beta till 8 months after release. AoC suffered because of huge problems, and a completely different experience from the opening Island to the rest of the game. ESO's first 8 months hasn't been perfect by any means, but you can't compare it to the train wreck that was the AoC rollout.
Would WarHammer Online be a better comparison. Again, great game, many of the same ideas. While not exactly alike, AvA with Siege.
But they had major problems with class imbalance, and tried to fix them with poorly thought out band-aid solutions.
Where did that get them? http://www.warhammeronline.com/
You might think I'm hating on ESO. I'm not, I really like this game. Just like I liked AoC and Warhammer Online. I don't want to see it go to the wayside like they did because of poorly thought out changes. That's all.
http://youtu.be/YPOlV8TjvEk ESO just took the "thinking" out of gaining Ultimate, which is a huge part of combat. Much how SWG started taking the thinking out of their game.. which eventually ended up in a huge purge of subscribers, and the game getting shut down.
Spamming healing springs on the group before an encounter to farm ultimate wasn't exactly "cerebral gameplay".
Stopping out of combat ultimate generation is a good change. Never should have been allowed in the first place. With that said, I don't think the conversation is about keeping out of combat ultimate generation. It's about the dumbing down of "in combat" ultimate generation
ESO just took the "thinking" out of gaining Ultimate, which is a huge part of combat. Much how SWG started taking the thinking out of their game.. which eventually ended up in a huge purge of subscribers, and the game getting shut down.
Spamming healing springs on the group before an encounter to farm ultimate wasn't exactly "cerebral gameplay".
Stopping out of combat ultimate generation is a good change. Never should have been allowed in the first place. With that said, I don't think the conversation is about keeping out of combat ultimate generation. It's about the dumbing down of "in combat" ultimate generation
Adding a metric to prevent using it as a crutch != dumbing down. People were generating ultimate too quickly, this is ZOS' s response. A response that allows further control over player abilities moving forward.
ESO just took the "thinking" out of gaining Ultimate, which is a huge part of combat. Much how SWG started taking the thinking out of their game.. which eventually ended up in a huge purge of subscribers, and the game getting shut down.
Spamming healing springs on the group before an encounter to farm ultimate wasn't exactly "cerebral gameplay".
Stopping out of combat ultimate generation is a good change. Never should have been allowed in the first place. With that said, I don't think the conversation is about keeping out of combat ultimate generation. It's about the dumbing down of "in combat" ultimate generation
Adding a metric to prevent using it as a crutch != dumbing down. People were generating ultimate too quickly, this is ZOS' s response. A response that allows further control over player abilities moving forward.
Taking a metric that actually required experimentation and thought into your build and turning it into "Left mouse click, wait 8 seconds, left mouse click" IS DUMBING IT DOWN.
I'm assuming this is just a L2P issue for you.
ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »Short answer is DKs likely won't be seeing a ton of changes before we go live; this class is still quite powerful (as it should be being a tank), even after some of the adjustments we've made to other classes and abilities.
ESO just took the "thinking" out of gaining Ultimate, which is a huge part of combat. Much how SWG started taking the thinking out of their game.. which eventually ended up in a huge purge of subscribers, and the game getting shut down.
Spamming healing springs on the group before an encounter to farm ultimate wasn't exactly "cerebral gameplay".
Stopping out of combat ultimate generation is a good change. Never should have been allowed in the first place. With that said, I don't think the conversation is about keeping out of combat ultimate generation. It's about the dumbing down of "in combat" ultimate generation
Adding a metric to prevent using it as a crutch != dumbing down. People were generating ultimate too quickly, this is ZOS' s response. A response that allows further control over player abilities moving forward.
Taking a metric that actually required experimentation and thought into your build and turning it into "Left mouse click, wait 8 seconds, left mouse click" IS DUMBING IT DOWN.
I'm assuming this is just a L2P issue for you.
ESO just took the "thinking" out of gaining Ultimate, which is a huge part of combat. Much how SWG started taking the thinking out of their game.. which eventually ended up in a huge purge of subscribers, and the game getting shut down.
Spamming healing springs on the group before an encounter to farm ultimate wasn't exactly "cerebral gameplay".
Stopping out of combat ultimate generation is a good change. Never should have been allowed in the first place. With that said, I don't think the conversation is about keeping out of combat ultimate generation. It's about the dumbing down of "in combat" ultimate generation
Adding a metric to prevent using it as a crutch != dumbing down. People were generating ultimate too quickly, this is ZOS' s response. A response that allows further control over player abilities moving forward.
Taking a metric that actually required experimentation and thought into your build and turning it into "Left mouse click, wait 8 seconds, left mouse click" IS DUMBING IT DOWN.
I'm assuming this is just a L2P issue for you.
To be fair, your argument is pretty dishonest because you're intentionally ignoring that some classes could simply out generate other classes in the ultimate department. It had nothing to do with "build." It had nothing to do with "skill." DKs could out generate Sorcerers by virtue of the class skills available to DKs.
They could out generate every class since Day 1. That issue had never been fixed. Never even got close to getting fixed.
So please, don't make dishonest arguments here. You seem to know what you're talking about, even though I think you're becoming increasingly disingenuous to prove a point. But I also know what I'm talking about. Other posters here seem to know what they're talking about. The classes were not balanced with regard to ultimate generation. Full stop. It had nothing to do with build. Nothing to do with skill. Full stop.
ESO just took the "thinking" out of gaining Ultimate, which is a huge part of combat. Much how SWG started taking the thinking out of their game.. which eventually ended up in a huge purge of subscribers, and the game getting shut down.
Spamming healing springs on the group before an encounter to farm ultimate wasn't exactly "cerebral gameplay".
Stopping out of combat ultimate generation is a good change. Never should have been allowed in the first place. With that said, I don't think the conversation is about keeping out of combat ultimate generation. It's about the dumbing down of "in combat" ultimate generation
Adding a metric to prevent using it as a crutch != dumbing down. People were generating ultimate too quickly, this is ZOS' s response. A response that allows further control over player abilities moving forward.
Taking a metric that actually required experimentation and thought into your build and turning it into "Left mouse click, wait 8 seconds, left mouse click" IS DUMBING IT DOWN.
I'm assuming this is just a L2P issue for you.
It is absolutely an L2P issue - learn to complete content without relying so heavily on ultimates as a crutch.