[MUD-Dev] GameStorm

[Matthew R. Sheahan]

a few days ago, i signed up for an account at gamestorm.com.  today
i cancelled it.  i wrote a long note on the cancellation form detailing
why and giving feedback on individual games, which the form processor
rejected because it exceeded 100-odd characters.  oh well.  i'm posting
it here because i think the content is relevant to the list and because
i seem to recall there being a GameStorm person or two here, so hopefully
the feedback will make its way to them one way or another.

								chiaroscuro

Hi.  I'm sorry to be canceling this account, but I'm just not finding
anything here that I want to spend my time on.  I don't know if my feedback
on your content would be useful to you, but I have played your games for a
couple of days and feel like I should give something back, even if it might
sound like complaining, so I'm going to go over my impressions.

1) Legends of Kesmai -- this is sort of what brought me here, as I once
played IOK on CIS and thought I'd look up kesmai.com, which referred me
here.  Unfortunately I found it totally frustrating -- more than anything
else, because I was spending so high a percentage of my time doing nothing
more than waiting for the system to be ready to accept my next command.
It'd have been a lot nicer if it had just taken the command and executed
it the next time it was possible, and I might've had fewer
character-destroying deaths which seemed to be induced by the interface.

2) Darkness Falls -- same problem as LOK.  This is basically a MUD, why do
I have to time my command entry to get decent results?  And as MUD
administrator myself, I was really depressed by the content level in the
descriptions and so forth.  Not to mention the basic concept of having to
type repetitive combat commands just to get my character to defend himself.

3) Magestorm -- this one held my interest the longest, even though I
really don't like first person shooters in general.  But when I'd played
half a day for the privilege of shooting two bullets at once instead of
just one, it started to seem lacking in depth.

4) Aliens Online and Stellar Emperor -- I got as far as downloading these
and seeing the quick summaries, saying "oh, first person shooters", and
uninstalling.  This is really just me, I know people like FPS games, but
from something called "Stellar Emperor" in particular I was hoping for
something strategy-level.  (I've no real interest in multiplayer Warcraft
II, I like Starcraft a lot better, and that's still way too much tactics,
too little strategy.)

5) Starship Troopers -- I like this one a lot and think it has real
potential.  Only complaint would be that the campaign games are really
long, but that's not all bad.  (You could really cut down on the drag
factor by having hyperspace capacity fully charged when you come back
after death.)  But the annoying thing is that, hours into one of those
really long campaign games, the whole thing and those hours invested all
went "blooie" with a terminated connection from server.  Which is when
I finally said to hell with it, I'm terminating my account.

That's pretty much it.  Some people told me AW3 and MPBT were good, but
AW3 is a genre I'm totally uninterested in, and I've had enough BT in
single-player to last me for quite some time.  I'm a picky longtime gamer
and pretty hard to please, so I don't mean to sound like I'm really
ragging on your efforts -- I do like what you're trying to do here -- but
a lot of the material is of types that I'm not interested in, and the
stuff that _is_ of types I'm interested in, there are elements of the
interface that really, really bother me.

I wish you all the best of luck, and I will probably check back in six
months or a year and see how things are going.

By the way, if you'd like to know what offering would make me perfectly
happy to pay $50/month for your service, it is this: a persistent-world
multiplayer rendition of the game Master of Magic.  (Make it so that you
can act both on the MoM strategic scale and on a Diablo-like tactical
scale and I'm yours forever.  And I don't think I'm alone.)