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

[Johan A]

ceo <ceo at grexengine.com> wrote:

I have been playing AO on and off since release and full time for
the last 1,5 years so I though I would write a little reply.

> There's a couple of interesting things here:

>   1. It pretty strongly confirms the prediction made by myself and
>   many others that the AO launch was the beginning not only of AO
>   but also of it's own end. They never truly recovered.

I think the launch had a lot to do with it but so long after release
I think it has more to do with the fact that fantasy games are just
more popular then sci-fi ones.

> First thoughts:

>   AO has excellent game play and some really fun stuff buried
>   inside it. Everything from the art, to the concepts (a
>   cyberspace grid you travel around in instead of just teleporting
>   to locations), to the flow of game play (pacing, downtime,
>   casual vs forced downtime, etc) are excellent.

Well I couldn't agree more on this. The grid is an excellent idea
and how it requires computer literacy to restrict certain areas from
to low lvl players in brilliant. It also sparks the interest to try
to get more CL gear at to explore the world and move about easier.

>   It's just a pity that - even 3.5 years after launch - the
>   experience is frequently ruined by the incredibly sloppy coding
>   / implementation. Sometimes you feel like entire sections of the
>   game had no quality control at all. The thing is riddled with
>   bugs, riddled with incompetent design decisions, and the
>   architecture seems up the spout.

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
to mention expansions follow this trend. It may be OK to say 'the
game was just released, give it some time' but after a few months or
even years it's just embarrassing. The 'experience is ruined' and
'entire sections' that you talk about I do not know what you mean by
though.

>   If you can bear to push through the pain barrier (and, yes, a
>   lot of the first week of play is so extremely frustrating or
>   incomprehensible or simply unfair as to be almost physically
>   painful) then it's great fun and easily worth paying
>   for. But...if I were paying for this, I'd have cancelled my sub
>   and demand a refund 3 times within the first 10 hours of game
>   play.

Once again I do not know what you are referring to. SL's starting
ground and the newly added one for Alien Invasion beats any other
MMORPG I have played. DAoC is among the worse. 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
about the game. This is awesome and I have never seen it in another
game. This of course could never be done in WoW since it's too big a
game.

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

>   This is quite possibly a simple reflection of Damion's "AO
>   Purgatory" theory: that the business side of AO's catastrophic
>   launch and mediocre profitability led to them being unable to
>   afford to implement any new features properly or to any standard
>   beyond the most utterly minimal.

Now once again I can not agree. AO has really nice features and were
the inventor or among the earliest adopter of these features such
as:

  Mission terminals
  Raid On Demand (Alien Invasion)
  Instancing (we all love this one)

> Bugs and Irritants: the big two

>   There's two things that above all else drive you mad about this
>   game: the GUI and the code-architecture. Even now, after a week
>   or two of playing, both of them regularly drive me up the wall
>   (although contrary to expectations I now take the GUI and it's
>   awfulness largely in my stride, and it's just the arch that
>   causes me to still bang the table in pure impotent rage).

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
from my side was that the SL GUI takes up too much space on 1024x768
and below resolutions. I made one myself but I am not sure it is
working with the latest version of AO since I am no longer playing
the game (due to RL commitments).

  http://hem.passagen.se/driddle/

There is also a sticky in the AO forum where all the major GUI's are
named and linked to.

> How not to design a GUI:

>   4. Use a slotted/compartmentalised inventory with 48 slots that,
>   when you die, is returned to you in randomised order. Make sure
>   that for practical purposes it's only feasible to have a small
>   portion of the inventory open at once, and definitely make sure
>   that most items have 100% identical icons, so that it's
>   impossible to distinguish between them without going into a
>   separate UI, so that sorting becomes critical. The same sorting
>   you regularly randomize.

This annoying bug was introduced when they added the final GUI tweak
some months ago. FC follows the MMO standard of not fixing bugs
newly introduced just to let them 'mature' and because it's probably
added to the bottom of the long list of already knows bugs.

>   5. Every spell (of which there are approx 1,000) and every
>   attack action (of which there are approx 10) and every combat
>   action (approx 20) has a random setting of whether it activates
>   on:

>     - the monster you are attacking - the person you have selected
>     as your current target

>   Make sure that EVEN IF you have selected another target, your
>   monster always appears directly in front of you and ALWAYS shows
>   up as your current target (so, if you target something else
>   whilst fighting, you have two targets simultaneously, both shown
>   identically and indistinguishably without casting a spell and
>   waiting to see which one it hits!).

What?

>   Doesn't sound too bad. Well. Wait till the player uses attack
>   type D for the first time in his life in the middle of a combat
>   (having used A, B, and C up until now) and watch him cry when it
>   turns out that C will happily cause you to attack YOURSELF if
>   you happened to be targeting yourself.

Now having a little experience in real life I know better then to
target myself with lethal gear so I tend to avoid the same in games
;)

>   Also make it so that practically all healing requires you to
>   target yourself, and in a hard battle has to be triggered in sub
>   one-second. Now laugh at the vast number of times people try to
>   do a special attack whilst doing 3 or 4 heals in a row, and the
>   special attack turns out to be a "happily commmit suicide
>   because your avatar is incredibly stupid" kind of attack.

Using F1 to F6 to target group members (F1 always being you) and
then pressing 'Tab' to target your enemy. This boils down to what
you are used to of course so if you have played EQ2 with its 'smart'
target system this may come across as a pain. I have never even
though about this before.

>   6. Randomize client-animations so that 50% of actions are "play
>   animation in parallel with sending message to server" and 50%
>   are "wait for server before playing".

>   Even better: randomize not only the animations, but also the
>   client-side logic to enforce user-actions!

>   So, one type of heal you see you heal yourself but also get a
>   message "you cannot heal at this time" (paraphrase).

>   Often, your health bar goes down for no reason, and then 5
>   seconds later an explosion hits you and the health stays put.

Happens some times but usually when you are lagging or on a very bad
connection.

>   7. My favourite one of all: when the player zones, or the server
>   gets ANYTHING complex to do, or the client renderer has a lot of
>   work to do, freeze the entire GUI.

What do you want to do the few seconds the game load?

>   When I say "freeze" I mean "take a screenshot, disable the mouse
>   and keyboard, and paint that screenshot to the screen. Leave it
>   there for up to 5 minutes [I counted a couple of times] whilst
>   you faff around".

I have never experienced a five minute load. Sometimes it may take a
while but that is if there is an error in the zoning and you are
kicked back to your old zone. This though takes maybe 1,5 minutes
the most before you get an error message saying the zoning
failed. This is insanely rare though.

>   This is especially good when combined with team play:

>     A: heal C
>     A: B!! You need to heal C too! we haven't got enough!
>     A: B, heal C NOW!
>     A: B!
>     [C dies gradually]
>     [team kicks B out]
>     [B's screen unfreezes and B discovers he's been kicked out of
>     team and then been slaughtered by a monster they left him to
>     kill on his own]

You must be on a really bad connection. Can't say I have ever
experienced anything like this unless I'm in a tower battle.

>   Which leads nicely into...

>  How not to design your architecture:

>  If your game nearly went out of business because, at launch, you
>  neither stress tested your game appropriately nor had a game that
>  could handle even a small number of people in one place together,
>  then don't you think it would be rather a good idea to fix this
>  before making the game free?

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.

>  Then, insult to injury, if you zoned into somewhere with lots of
>  people, your frame rate is approx 0.05 to 0.1 frames per second
>  for anything from 20 seconds up to 2 minutes. In one extreme
>  case, it was still only one frame every 2 seconds something like
>  5 minutes after entering the zone.

Well I think you must be on an old computer. The game does drop to
killer FPS when zoning and you computer is loading everything. Once
this is done it's fine. 5 min? 1-2 min the most and 2 min I am not
even sure has happened for a long long time.

>    2. Walking along the road / woods / plains

>    This is just the "giant wall with a painting of the other side
>    glued to the front" scenario. Obviously, there are practically
>    0 people the othere side. However...this really really really
>    needs to be fast; you can tolerate a delay whilst being
>    teleported somewhere (heck, they could even play an animation
>    if they weren't so busy freezing the screen solid!), but
>    walking along a path and then suddenly freezing like a stone is
>    NOT conducive to player happiness.

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.

>    My longest recorded waits (5 minutes or more) were walking
>    along the road like this. God forbid you should accidentally
>    step backwards once the process is complete (yes, you do have
>    to wait ANOTHER 5 minutes to go back to where you were :().

Get a Yalm and GSF ;)

>    Just in case you're sure this is all server-side problems, let
>    me outline something I've seen a couple of times. I've watched
>    the sky-box being DRAWN to the screen after alt-tabbing to
>    windows (by accident!).

Hey, at least you can get back in to the game after alt-tab now. A
few months ago the game crashed every time you did this.

>    This is a classic symptom in mainstream game dev of the
>    graphics card dumping it's on-board textures + geom when the OS
>    grabs the surface to do windows rendering etc. When the user
>    swaps back to the game, the game has to download all the geom +
>    textures again, which could be many megabytes. With AO, a
>    simple beach scene with large cliffs and little detail takes
>    almost a minute to draw the first frame, and you can watch each
>    little chunk of geom being loaded and blitted onto the
>    background.

>    I have no idea why this is happening. I noticed it several
>    times on GeForce2/4 cards, both of which are more than capable
>    of rendering exactly that scene from cold in way under a
>    second. So...it's just possible that the massive "lag" times
>    are in fact really bad client-side 3D engine code.

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.

> Well, that was a quick tour of the biggest glaring problems. If
> anyone's interested (and I get time) I'll follow this up with a
> quick tour of some of what AO does really really well.

> Even though some of that is tinged with a little bitterness too,
> it's worth pointing out that the major fundamental non-battle
> gameplay element of AO doesn't have any flaws at all that I've
> seen (PS: it's not crafting! that's the second biggest non-battle
> gameplay bit :)).

Well to be honest, I am surprised you would even touch this game
with a 10-foot pole after reading all this so yes, at least I would
like to hear what you do like about the game ;)

AO do have some problems. One that affected me the most was how they
killed the 'fixers' with SL, my profession of choice. Everything
that defined a fixer was removed and/or replaced with broken (to
this day well over 1 year after SL's release) nano programs. FC has
clearly lost it's path when it comes to fixers.

A lot of nanos we're also given to other professions such as team
'grid' in SL we're given to MP's. Adventures had better run speed
buffs (a fixer trademark buff) and we're only team castable with a
10 min timer.

Not to mention snares and roots. Roots we're removed and snares were
given short timers with incredibly low chance of landing them on
high level mobs. No team beneficial buffs and I spent 6 hours a day
LFG (yes I was unemployed at the time) and the only time I managed
to get a group was when I got a mercy invite.

Still, I love the game. Will I go back? No, I got other projects and
EQ2 and WoW looks like the way to go now. The game recently got a
new Game director and hopefully things will change for the better.

- Johan
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev