[MUD-Dev] [bus][des] Anarchy Online and the free MMORPG...

[Johan A]

Adam Martin wrote:
> Johan A wrote:
>> ceo <ceo at grexengine.com> wrote:

>>>  It's just a pity that - even 3.5 years after launch - the
>>>  experience is frequently ruined by the incredibly sloppy coding

>> This is common among all MMORPG's I'm afraid. The quality of the
>> games at release is awful most of the time. Newly added content
>> not

> You and I are playing very different games; it's not "common"
> amongst those I play...

Can you honestly say that most MMORPG's are good at launch? AO was a
disaster yes, SWG was very bad, WoW is not very good although its
server issues the most, EQ2 has problems too. There are exceptions
of course but in general, MMO's do NOT score high when it comes to
quality. EQ's expansions..., ill leave it at that.

> There's a big difference between "a few months or years" and
> (almost) 4 years.

Of course, I am not saying AO has any real excuses but what you are
experiencing sounds like a different game to me.

>> In AO, when you create a new account a member of ARK (volunteer
>> helpers) usually pops in to spend some time with you to answer
>> questions you may have

> Nope, never happens. You are getting mixed up between your
> personal experience and what is *actually happening* in the game
> today.

And your are mixing it up with your personal experience. Do a little
search on AO forum about this. Take a look at ARK homepage
http://ark.funcom.com/Public/ARKsite?page_id=7 And I quote "Greeters
are a valuable group of volunteers who help welcome new players to
Anarchy Online and make their start in this new world as painless as
possible."

Now, like I said, I have not played AO for a few months so I don't
know how big an impact this 'free AO' has had. Maybe they are
swamped with new accounts and the servers are suffering like
WoW. Unlike some other games, AO has 2 official servers and 1 German
server (run by another company). If there has been a huge flood of
people the server may be under quite some stress causing this 5 min
lag that I have never experienced but am not denying could be
occurring.

>> Sounds to me like you were dropped in to pandemonium (highest lvl
>> zone) from what you have experienced.

> Nope; again, if you want to see what I'm talking about, you should
> create a new (free) account and see what happens.

I would if I could, right now all computer access I have is from
work and I can't play games here.

>> The GUI was updated with SL and some may argue it was not for the
>> better. The old GUI is still there but unsupported now
>> days. There has been a few player made GUI's that are great. The
>> main complain

> Been there, done that (because I play other MMOGs, and went
> googling for this stuff pretty soon), found that they all either
> don't work ("this page last updated 2002" etc) or are no better /
> different from the default GUI except that they have different
> pixmaps.

Some GUI's no longer work with the new one. You probably ran in to
one of those. I am sorry you didn't like the other GUI's though.

>> I have never experienced a five minute load. Sometimes it may
>> take a

> As noted by others, this again is NOT the common experience:
> almost everyone who plays DOES experience the long load times,
> irrespective of ninja-PC and super fast broadband.

Again, this must then be a 'new' problem when they made AO free as I
have not experienced this myself.

>> AO is not great with a lot of people on screen. I don't think
>> they even can fix this. This is most apparent in NW wars or in
>> cities.

> For the record: of course they can fix this. It's not as if I'm
> one of a select few in the world who know how - it's almost common
> knowledge these days how to deal with large numbers of players in
> small areas.

Yes, of course they can fix it. 2 years development and lots of
money to rewrite lots of code. If it was an easy fix I am sure they
would have fixed it by now. Now, do they want to do this? We are
talking about a 4 year old game with a low amount of subscribers. Is
it worth the risk to put all that money in to rewriting the game for
a game that has maybe 1,4% of the market and a bad name due to the
rocky launch?  FunCom has new projects in the pipeline and I would
think most resources go in to that now. What is possible and what's
sane to do are two diffrent things.

>> Now you are just picking on things. This game is old and the
>> graphics still rival even MMORPGS released to day in my
>> opinion. How often do you zone? You see the zone wall and zone, a
>> few seconds later you are on the other side and on your way
>> again. This accounts for what 0.5% of your play experience? I
>> think there are more important matters to deal with in AO first.

> Play the game, get a stopwatch, and count. Your "few seconds" is
> typically "four minutes" (i.e. 240 seconds).

Again, I have not experienced this and it may be due to server
load. A game made free is bound to attract lots of players causing
problems.  Suite them self's? Yes. Have I experienced it? No.

>>>   I have no idea why this is happening. I noticed it several
>>>   times on GeForce2/4 cards, both of which are more than capable

>> I think someone here said AO is pre much 100% CPU dependent. You
>> graphics card will not make a real difference to the game. The
>> engine is not the best no .. DX 7 based I think.

> That's irrelevant: if your game is properly written, the graphics
> card will be used. Hardware acceleration is automatic if you're
> doing 3D and has been around for more than 10 years as the
> "default" for games development.

I do not know a lot about how DX works. I do know I get FPS
difference with my super expensive top of the line card an my old
crappy card.

- Johan
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