vamp_emily wrote: »

I just want to ask all you old people.

pong/atari or what ever games you are referring to.

Did they crash?

This is my normal night.

1. I log in and go to PvP - I teleport to a keep, once I get there I take a few steps... CRASH
2. I see a resource that is flagged, so I go there and help.. i travel to the resource I see my group.... CRASH
3. I'm in a battle i'm trying to help save a Keep... CRASH
4. I take one of my purple drinks.. yes Purple the ones that cost most.. I head to a fight.... CRASH

I do this several times a night, so yes I have the right to complain.

Take the cassette out, blow on it, then press down as you push it into the console and it will work. Also when the battery dies in the tape you can no longer save your progress.

I if already stated this this in a previous post, I'm sorry for be redundant:

I'm 58, and I'd been programming and playing games on computers before even the first Apple computer was designed. I played Air Warrior on the Internet long before the World Wide Web (WWW) existed and connected to the Internet using a dial up 1200 baud modem. I also have a degree in computer science, and wrote several articles on game programming.

Here's an article called "Softsprite" that I wrote for Compute! Magazine back in 1987; This small utility program was written entirely in assembly language for the Atari home computer for game programmers: SoftSprite Link

Now that I got that out of the way, I totally disagree with most of the OP's statement, and many of the statements made by most of the posters who have no clue as to what goes into programming high budget games today.

The game development and programming suites and tools used by programmers today to create game content are exponentially better than those that I used decades ago! These development tools (Called frameworks) do all the tedious coding which allows the game programmer to focus more on the game design and less on the actual code; examples of this are the Unreal, Hero, Blender, and Cry Engine, and etc. These tools allow modern programmer to collaborate and compartmentalize program functions; for example, correctly designed programs are broken down into tasks such as network, combat, collision, movement, communications, and etc. Each task depends on the the other in order for the game to function, but each task doesn't know and care what the other task does with the data it send it; hence the name Black box. Changing the functions in one black box should not break function in another black box if the program design goals are properly documented.

To understand a program's design cycle refer to this link: Waterfall Cycle

I have been very critical of the bugs in ESO since beta because many of them still exist after numerous bug reports and feedback submissions, etc.

How many of you have had an uneventful play session where you didn't encountered a glitch to where something just didn't work the way you expected: you had to hit the escape key, reload the UI, log off and then on again, restart the game, and in some cases had to wait several days until the game server caught up to your characters actions, or items and NPCs just phased in and out breaking the quest objectives? I could go on and on with the problems that many ESO players have, but just search the forums if you don't believe me.

In closing, I believe that with all of the modern programming and game development tools available today that the ESO development is most likely using, or should be using, and after a year of going operational,the current state of ESO is inexcusable!

Mirelurk wrote: »

P3ZZL3 wrote: »

Jeezus, talk about old-school and over the hill

I'm a spritely 42 here

I like how some people went from Atari playing Pong to a C64 What about all the cool stuff in the middle.

The plastic shells of the ZX81 - Running a massive 2k of Ram allowing you to Hand Code

Anyone else remember getting your monthly magazine and spending the next 5 hours typing:

With me it was 4 hours and 59 minutes of carefully pressing those damned plastic bubble buttons on the ZX81 until you accidentally (and inevitably) wiggled the 16k RAM expansion pack and *pzzzzzt* all gone.

That resurfaces some awful memories.

You could save games on tape, but that was a glitchy process too.

AhPook_Is_Here wrote: »

My first character's name in this game is Wumpus the Hunted.

Great name! I played Hunt The Wumpus back in the day on the TI 99/4A. Funny thing is, someone made a very authentic remake of it for Android.

-Aletheion

Our local science museum recently had a "History Of Video Games" from pinball machines all the way up to the latest consoles. The exhibit was like a giant free arcade and was an absolute blast. Funny thing was the age groups of the various sections. 50 somethings were in the pinball section, 40 somethings in the original arcade section (with me!), 30 somethings in the later arcade/early console section, 20 somethings in the early Xbox/PS console section, teens in the modern console section.

My dad was a techno junkie so when I was a kid in the 70's we had all the latest electronics in computers, consoles and handhelds. Here is a nice sample of the games from one of the many consoles we had:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCJNA0EDIYY

Oh, and a note for the topic, there are things to complain about with ESO and I think those issues should be raised - particularly since the developers solicit feedback and issue updates. Just try to communicate in a productive, non-judgmental, non-emotional way and enjoy the game in spite of it's flaws. If your patience runs out and it's too frustrating to deal with those issues, move on to something else.

-Aletheion

Yeah well, i played games since 8bit consoles and first intels aswell, doesn't mean i have to settle with mediocrity and bugs.
Being an older gamer just widens the experience, if anything - we are the ones that spot minor things young gamers overlook because they probably think WoW is the very first game in the world and use that as a comparison for everything, but that is beside the point.

Age and time spent gaming has nothing to do with complaints or issues - personal preferences and expectations are.
There are also plenty of "mature" trolls that spout out things you wouldn't expect even from a 13 year-old.
Age in the gaming world means very, very little. It is one of the industries that tends to turn grown men into monkies, just like football (soccer).

Heh. Lots of old memories here. I'm 53, and my first gaming system was some mainframe halfway across town that we dialed into using an acoustic modem hooked up to a modified IBM Selectric typewriter, which we played games on by programming them into the mainframe in BASIC. From there, I graduated to a SWTPC 6800, although in our local computer club we also had people with an Altair 8800, an IMSAI 8080 (Front panel switches were no match for Macsbug in ROM on the SWTPC… :P ), a Heathkit computer with 8" floppy drives, an Apple II, and a Commodore Pet, all of which I did some gaming on at some point.

Sitting in my closet right now are my Colecovision (with Atari 2600 extension), my C64, my TI-99/4A, my Odyssey 2, my Nintendo NES, my Sega Genisys, my Amiga 2000 and my Amiga 4000. (Sadly, I no longer have the SWTPC 6800…) My first MMO equivalent was British Legends on Compuserve, a commercial port of the first Multi-User Dungeon (MUD).

And yes, computer games back then had plenty of bugs. Even the console cartridge games had bugs. With only a little bit of Google-fu, you can find references to game console bugs for nearly every console system ever released.

A modern MMO is at least an order of magnitude worth of orders of magnitude more complicated than those games. Probably more complex than that, even. It stands to reason that debugging such a beast is equally more complex, and because the code being executed is spread out across multiple computers with complicated networking involved as well, finding the cause of bugs is far more difficult. As a programmer who has worked with some incredibly complicated systems, I sometimes get frustrated with the game bugs, but honestly have to admit that the ESO team tends to be pretty good at finding and fixing their bugs *very* quickly.

Some of you laugh at that, but having spent *weeks* tracking down a single elusive bug (and redesigning and rewriting several thousand lines of code to fix it…), I assure you that for a product as complicated as this one is, they *are* in fact fixing things quickly. Be patient.

Egonieser wrote: »

Yeah well, i played games since 8bit consoles and first intels aswell, doesn't mean i have to settle with mediocrity and bugs.
Being an older gamer just widens the experience, if anything - we are the ones that spot minor things young gamers overlook because they probably think WoW is the very first game in the world and use that as a comparison for everything, but that is beside the point.

Age and time spent gaming has nothing to do with complaints or issues - personal preferences and expectations are.
There are also plenty of "mature" trolls that spout out things you wouldn't expect even from a 13 year-old.
Age in the gaming world means very, very little. It is one of the industries that tends to turn grown men into monkies, just like football (soccer).

Amen