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

[ceo]

Some brief responses to clear up some misunderstandings....

olag at ifi.uio.no wrote:
> Adam M:

>>  2. Especially don't document the fact that 20% of all keyboard

> Aye. Of course, those who bought the game would have a big map of
> the keyboard layout. It is an interesting dynamic. I suppose many
> who just download never read the "manual" or even locate the
> keyboard layout map.  That will make a game look rather steep.

New players are/were not allowed that manual; we were given access
only to a crappy excuse for a manual that contained approximately
15% of the "normal" manual (guesstimate from talking to other
players).

Eventually, 3 weeks or so after the new players arrived, Funcom
emailed us a PDF manual aimed specifically at us, which contained
some good stuff in it. One would have thought it wise (espeically
given AO's history!) to have written something like this *before*
starting the influx of new players...

> ...  Well, this works when you have lots of newbies
> anyway. Oldbies get tired of answering.

When you make the game free, and thousands of new players all arrive
at once, how long do you think this takes? The oldbies get tired of
answering after around, oh, 12 hours? 6? 3?

Which reminds me: the "newbie-only" starting area contains approx 6
quests, one of which is BROKEN and another claims (in story text) it
will give you an item (although it doesn't appear in the system
messages) but never does.

How long would it have taken to check this out and fix the damn
quest before letting the players in?

> Actually, I like these things. Why should the gameworld prevent
> you from making mistakes and slapping yourself in the face? I
> agree that

You're misunderstanding the situation: it is not the gameworld that
is killing the player, it's the GUI.

Just like in Diablo2 where high level players lose masses of
experience, gold, etc, because the GUI *would not allow the player
to click on the teleport* (FYI: it has an order of precedence where
items on the floor and corpses are more important in the picking
order than the teleporter, even thought the teleporter is probably
going to save your life, and there are often hundreds of corpses on
the floor in a big battle, all in one pile AND you can't pick them
up to throw them out of the way).

>>  I appreciate the concept of QoS for network packets, but how
>>  many bytes, exactly, would it cost to send the animation-UID in
>>  the hp packet? (a guess: at most 2).

> Why would you do that? You only send the event, right? Anyway, I

Worst-case scenario: sending the event data is too much data, so
they decided to send it separately from the HP decrement; I'm saying
they could *at the very least* have squeezed an animation ID in
there, and solved 95% of the use cases...

> You want a better harddrive, hun. :-)

It's less than 2 years old. It is ridiculous to think that a 2004
harddrive is "not good enough" for this kind of task. I would expect
a 20 gb disk from 1998 to be good enough, if the client were written
competently.

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...

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

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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).

>>   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.

Adam M
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