Shuddup, OP. I played this game in beta. And at launch. And as recently as last June. I watched the Feedback Friday's during my non-sub time and they never once contained anything I cared about.
I was on Cassiopeia. I started a guild there called the 47th AFSEF. By January we were the largest guild on the entire server and had more high level players than probably the rest of the server combined. We hosted server wide events which were open to the public every single month with Critters, CuppaJoe, and some other dev I completely forget the name of.
I was extremely integrated into the community at PlanetTR and also that one other forum run by the European guy. I forget the name and link, it's been a long time since I cared. Geez, I even helped with some of the theorycraft over at TabulaSpot with Sansker.
I wanted this game to succeed more than anyone but the fact of the matter is that the game was terrible at launch, it was terrible six months after launch, it's terrible now, and it's so terrible that it has less than 30,000 subscribers (using the financial revenue report figures NCSoft released for Q3) and is being shut down three months.
There are a lot of reasons why TR was bad. Mostly just that it was simply incomplete, lacked basic features, and had a horribly mismanaged priority list by the dev team (i.e. devoting the first four months of development time almost exclusively to f*cking spies and letting the rest of the professions rot), but to me it's the PlanetTR community who wrought this shutdown.
When TR first launched there was legitimate debate at PlanetTR. You could actually criticize decisions by the dev team, game features, et cetera. And even though I absolutely loathed the mod over there, Epilogue, it wasn't until another mod, Adele_Mechka, took over and started banning anyone who didn't sing the praises of the game. I was, and am still, banned from PlanetTR because some guy made a post crying about how the devs shouldn't add group content because he doesn't have time to find other people to play with to which I responded, "Join a guild." That's the exact post, verbatim.
The result of that post? SIx month ban which doesn't lift until this coming January. PlanetTR was the most terribly run game site ever and what killed TR, or at least contributed greatly, was that with no official forums PlanetTR was the primary funnel of information from the players to the dev team. There really wasn't any other communication medium between the players and devs so with the absurd modding going on over there the face of the community presented to the dev team was horribly warped and nothing approaching the reality of the situation.
You wouldn't happen to be Gaius Kavadas would you?
No, I'm some other guy using the extremely common "Kavadas" name in my username.
Thats too bad. If you were, I was gonna say that I had always respected you and your opinion at PTR. As a starting grenadier you had helped me out a lot getting started in TR.
You've obviously got some sour grapes with the PTR management. Personally I haven't had much problem with them, but I'm sorry to hear that you did.
Originally posted by Aganazer Thats too bad. If you were, I was gonna say that I had always respected you and your opinion at PTR. As a starting grenadier you had helped me out a lot getting started in TR. You've obviously got some sour grapes with the PTR management. Personally I haven't had much problem with them, but I'm sorry to hear that you did.
I know the "Shuddap OP' was pretty harsh but your point about, "Only people who played beta talk bad about the game" struck a nerve with me. I have no idea how or why you would come to that conclusion.
And I hold PTR accountable for a lot of the terrible development decisions by the dev team due to the fact they were really only the conduit of information transfer between devs and players and they also censored the community's balls off by only keeping the posts which stroked the devs.
Plus I'm not gonna lie, MMORPG.com is very trollish so I make a point to be meaner on this website. Sorry.
5. The game is about to close. Another bit of total BS. Massively.com has been starting these rumors ever since TR was released. They generally base their articles on bad translations of unreliable Korean news sources. The truth is that TR is an operationally profitable game. Meaning that they make more money leaving the game open than they would shutting it down. It certainly wasn't the success they were hoping it would be, but thats no concern of ours.
What were the odds you would post this on this of all days?
I know the "Shuddap OP' was pretty harsh but your point about, "Only people who played beta talk bad about the game" struck a nerve with me. I have no idea how or why you would come to that conclusion. Plus I'm not gonna lie, MMORPG.com is very trollish so I make a point to be meaner on this website. Sorry.
Seriously, I was almost unwilling to believe it was the same Kavadas.
"A very large number of the people voicing their opinions about TR are those who played in beta over a year ago."
I probably could have said that better. It seems like every time TR is mentioned at Voodoo Extreme or Bluesnews, there are inevitably about 200 people saying "I played in beta, but it sucked soooo bad". I guess that without having been in my shoes, you may not have noticed. I don't think anyone is doubting that open beta really hurt TR. If the open beta would have started even a month later than it had, we might not have seen the game close today.
I still believe that TR, if it weren't closing, had the potential to be a solid niche game like Eve.
You think Rokurgetpta hasn't played since beta? I'll be interested to see how he responds to that when he gets here. That is if a moderator hasn't already locked and deleted half of this thrad by that time considering its just degraded into a big insulting match.
You don't cease to amaze me, Raltar. Rok and Torak are the ones who know what they are talking about.
Another interesting point is that the ones who call TR trash are the ones who played the game like a career. I said in my OP that its not that kind of a game. As long as you don't expect it to be a game that you can play all day every day for the rest of your life, then it can be very enjoyable.
{ Mod Edit }
I am convinced you are not a fanboy. No fanboy would come here and ever say I knew what I was talking about.
5. The game is about to close. Another bit of total BS. Massively.com has been starting these rumors ever since TR was released. They generally base their articles on bad translations of unreliable Korean news sources. The truth is that TR is an operationally profitable game. Meaning that they make more money leaving the game open than they would shutting it down. It certainly wasn't the success they were hoping it would be, but thats no concern of ours.
What were the odds you would post this on this of all days?
I know
I am seriously never going to say that about a game that I like ever again.
To make matters worse, I had just loaded up Hellgate London no more than a day before they announced its closure. I was also playing Mythos every day right up until Flagship closed.
I'm cursed. I think I'll go post the same thing about WoW and see what happens.
5. The game is about to close. Another bit of total BS. Massively.com has been starting these rumors ever since TR was released. They generally base their articles on bad translations of unreliable Korean news sources. The truth is that TR is an operationally profitable game. Meaning that they make more money leaving the game open than they would shutting it down. It certainly wasn't the success they were hoping it would be, but thats no concern of ours.
What were the odds you would post this on this of all days?
I know
I am seriously never going to say that about a game that I like ever again.
To make matters worse, I had just loaded up Hellgate London no more than a day before they announced its closure. I was also playing Mythos every day right up until Flagship closed.
I'm cursed. I think I'll go post the same thing about WoW and see what happens.
I am making sure to not ever tell you what games I play from here on out.
I know the "Shuddap OP' was pretty harsh but your point about, "Only people who played beta talk bad about the game" struck a nerve with me. I have no idea how or why you would come to that conclusion. Plus I'm not gonna lie, MMORPG.com is very trollish so I make a point to be meaner on this website. Sorry.
Seriously, I was almost unwilling to believe it was the same Kavadas.
"A very large number of the people voicing their opinions about TR are those who played in beta over a year ago."
I probably could have said that better. It seems like every time TR is mentioned at Voodoo Extreme or Bluesnews, there are inevitably about 200 people saying "I played in beta, but it sucked soooo bad". I guess that without having been in my shoes, you may not have noticed. I don't think anyone is doubting that open beta really hurt TR. If the open beta would have started even a month later than it had, we might not have seen the game close today.
I still believe that TR, if it weren't closing, had the potential to be a solid niche game like Eve.
TR could have went on as a niche if they were turning a monthly profit, but it seems they were making about 50% of what they were spending, not to mention the 74 million they spent before release. With numbers like that, it was going to be over a decade before the initial investment was returned and the continued losses would have just become too much.
I normally avoid the MMORPG.com forums. There are typically too many trolls and uninformed posters talking about games that they either know nothing about or have only played for very short periods of time. I don't mean to discredit the ones who do know what they are talking about, but what I am saying is that the signal to noise ratio around here is pretty bad. A very large number of the people voicing their opinions about TR are those who played in beta over a year ago. Richard Garriot has already acknowledged that he handled the open beta wrong. Most companies treat the open beta as a marketting tool, only starting the open beta after the product is ready for release. In TR the open beta was still a very incomplete game which created a bad first impression for many. Its hard to overcome a first impression. The first thing people need to understand about TR is that its not going to be anything like the mainstream MMO games have been. It does not build on the same play style of games like EQ, WoW, WAR, and Vanguard. In fact it has very little in common with those games. Its much more appropriate to compare TR to games like City of Heroes and Guild Wars. Its a niche product and not everyone is going to like it. There is another fundamental difference between TR and the other mainstream MMO's. TR is not a career game. Its not the kind of game people can play for 8 hours a day for the rest of their life (like WoW). You can think of it as having a lot in common with a single player game where you start playing, go through the content, and then finish playing. Its difficult for me to argue with the amount of content when I take into account that I have played the game on a casual basis for 6 months and have only covered about 2/3 of the content. When I run out of content I'll quit playing. I won't cry about it because I have thoroughly enjoyed the content so far. You'll certainly get more bang for your buck out of TR than you would nearly any single player game ever released and many MMO's. The reason to play TR is the action oriented combat system. Its like no other MMO. It is by far the most realistic combat system of any MMO on the market. In most MMO's the combat is nothing more than a means to an end. Its a necessary challenge so that you can get your reward from that loot pinata you've been hacking on. Honestly, I am sick to death of MMO's where the monsters just stand around a zone doing nothing at all waiting until someone comes within their 10 foot aggro radius so they can attack. In TR, the enemies respond at realistic distances, use teamwork, and interact quite a bit with the environment. The only MMORPG that even comes close to the 'fun' of TR's combat is City of Heroes. I'd like to respond to some of the common criticisms of TR. They are mostly justified, but also need to be taken with a grain of salt. 1. TR is a linear game with only one path through the content. There is only one set of content including only a single starting zone. This sounds aweful to some, but after you take into acount the cloning system and the branching character development, the repeated content is greatly reduced when developing new characters. Also, unlike many MMO's the draw of TR isn't necessarily new content as much as the gameplay itself. 2. TR has no end game content. Even if this were true the ride to 50 is well worth the price of admission. Unless you've actually played the game to level 50 then why worry about it? It took me years of playing WoW before I cared about end game content at all. But when it comes down to it, there is a fair amount to do at level 50, but most of the good stuff is just about to be released in D15 (about a month from now). http://eu.rgtr.com/en/news_article/feedback_friday_24th_october_2008 3. The game is only fun until level 30. Six month ago I might have agreed. The content felt very unpolished past about level 30, starting in the Mires in particular. Since then, the developers have gone through the game and polished up most of this old content. The quality of the content is now relatively high throughout the entire game. 4. Your character stops developing after 30. This is total BS. At level 30 you choose your final class. All of your final abilities are available to you at that time. Technically you could spread out your skill points and have every ability available, but you'd just end up with a bunch of gimped first level abilities. Most players focus their points in certain skills and when the skill is maxed out they choose another ability and start working on that. In other words, you end up learning new abilities at all level ranges. Not only that, but enhancing abilities changes them dramatically. For example, my level 45 engineer just got to the 4th level of 'Bots'. Each level of 'Bots' is different.
level 1: Flame bot - uses a short range flame thrower
level 2: Rocket bot - uses a long range rocket
level 3: Repair bot - heals the player and shoots medium range lazers
level 4: Shield bot - Puts a shield over the player and their group. Also shoots rockets.
level 5: Multi bot- Has a shield, rockets, repairs, etc. 5. The game is about to close. Another bit of total BS. Massively.com has been starting these rumors ever since TR was released. They generally base their articles on bad translations of unreliable Korean news sources. The truth is that TR is an operationally profitable game. Meaning that they make more money leaving the game open than they would shutting it down. It certainly wasn't the success they were hoping it would be, but thats no concern of ours. 6. They lied about PAU's (personal mechs). They certainly didn't handle this as well as they should have. There have been a lot of good ideas that just plain didn't work out. Many other ideas died on the test server once they try them out. Most companies keep their mouths shut until they know an idea will work, but the TR devs screwed up and announced them before they were even tested. Yes, even game developers are human and make mistakes. The zones were never designed to handle them. The on-foot gameplay has too many overlaping features with mech combat. I totaly understand that there were too many issues trying to get these things to work. The good news is that they are designing new zones with vehicles in mind. We'll most definitely see playable mechs in the newer PvP zones and on Earth. 7. No one plays TR Total BS. The game would be cooler if twice as many people played, but there are plenty playing right now. Sometimes the crowds that build up around the crafting tables can get down right annoying. One of my biggest complaints about TR is that they spread the players out too much. There is no cultural center of TR. There is no Shattrath City or Atlas Park where all the players go on a daily basis. This can sometimes make it look like there are fewer people playing than there really are. 8. TR's crafting system is awful It was recently revamped. Its now actually quite good. Its a recipe based system that requires no skill points and no skills to level up. My personal opinion about TR I'd much rather play TR than AoC, WAR, and Vanguard. Its more polished, more exciting, and to me its more fun. I'm sure TR could have been a better game, but its time to get over what could have been and be realistic about what is out on the MMO market right now. People have been dissapointed in every MMO released since WoW. One of the main reasons people get so upset is because they insist on playing these games right when they are released. MMO's are like wine. They need some time to develop before they are really good. If you haven't played WoW then play WoW until you are sick of it. If you have played WoW then try City of Heroes. CoH is fantastic once you get over the fact that its nothing like WoW. If you've played both of these games and are are sick of them both, then you'd be doing yourself a disservice by not trying TR.
Wow. Total, complete and utter fail. I like how you claim TR was NOT going to be shut down AND that it had a healthy population. Couple that with the fact you said you liked Hellgate London and I see no reason why anyone should pay attention or take into consideration any opinion you make about mmo's.
Is a man not entitled to the herp of his derp?
Remember, I live in a world where juggalos and yugioh players are real things.
Comments
Shuddup, OP. I played this game in beta. And at launch. And as recently as last June. I watched the Feedback Friday's during my non-sub time and they never once contained anything I cared about.
I was on Cassiopeia. I started a guild there called the 47th AFSEF. By January we were the largest guild on the entire server and had more high level players than probably the rest of the server combined. We hosted server wide events which were open to the public every single month with Critters, CuppaJoe, and some other dev I completely forget the name of.
I was extremely integrated into the community at PlanetTR and also that one other forum run by the European guy. I forget the name and link, it's been a long time since I cared. Geez, I even helped with some of the theorycraft over at TabulaSpot with Sansker.
I wanted this game to succeed more than anyone but the fact of the matter is that the game was terrible at launch, it was terrible six months after launch, it's terrible now, and it's so terrible that it has less than 30,000 subscribers (using the financial revenue report figures NCSoft released for Q3) and is being shut down three months.
There are a lot of reasons why TR was bad. Mostly just that it was simply incomplete, lacked basic features, and had a horribly mismanaged priority list by the dev team (i.e. devoting the first four months of development time almost exclusively to f*cking spies and letting the rest of the professions rot), but to me it's the PlanetTR community who wrought this shutdown.
When TR first launched there was legitimate debate at PlanetTR. You could actually criticize decisions by the dev team, game features, et cetera. And even though I absolutely loathed the mod over there, Epilogue, it wasn't until another mod, Adele_Mechka, took over and started banning anyone who didn't sing the praises of the game. I was, and am still, banned from PlanetTR because some guy made a post crying about how the devs shouldn't add group content because he doesn't have time to find other people to play with to which I responded, "Join a guild." That's the exact post, verbatim.
The result of that post? SIx month ban which doesn't lift until this coming January. PlanetTR was the most terribly run game site ever and what killed TR, or at least contributed greatly, was that with no official forums PlanetTR was the primary funnel of information from the players to the dev team. There really wasn't any other communication medium between the players and devs so with the absurd modding going on over there the face of the community presented to the dev team was horribly warped and nothing approaching the reality of the situation.
/endrant
You wouldn't happen to be Gaius Kavadas would you?
No, I'm some other guy using the extremely common "Kavadas" name in my username.
No, I'm some other guy using the extremely common "Kavadas" name in my username.
Thats too bad. If you were, I was gonna say that I had always respected you and your opinion at PTR. As a starting grenadier you had helped me out a lot getting started in TR.
You've obviously got some sour grapes with the PTR management. Personally I haven't had much problem with them, but I'm sorry to hear that you did.
I know the "Shuddap OP' was pretty harsh but your point about, "Only people who played beta talk bad about the game" struck a nerve with me. I have no idea how or why you would come to that conclusion.
And I hold PTR accountable for a lot of the terrible development decisions by the dev team due to the fact they were really only the conduit of information transfer between devs and players and they also censored the community's balls off by only keeping the posts which stroked the devs.
Plus I'm not gonna lie, MMORPG.com is very trollish so I make a point to be meaner on this website. Sorry.
What were the odds you would post this on this of all days?
Seriously, I was almost unwilling to believe it was the same Kavadas.
"A very large number of the people voicing their opinions about TR are those who played in beta over a year ago."
I probably could have said that better. It seems like every time TR is mentioned at Voodoo Extreme or Bluesnews, there are inevitably about 200 people saying "I played in beta, but it sucked soooo bad". I guess that without having been in my shoes, you may not have noticed. I don't think anyone is doubting that open beta really hurt TR. If the open beta would have started even a month later than it had, we might not have seen the game close today.
I still believe that TR, if it weren't closing, had the potential to be a solid niche game like Eve.
You don't cease to amaze me, Raltar. Rok and Torak are the ones who know what they are talking about.
Another interesting point is that the ones who call TR trash are the ones who played the game like a career. I said in my OP that its not that kind of a game. As long as you don't expect it to be a game that you can play all day every day for the rest of your life, then it can be very enjoyable.
{ Mod Edit }
I am convinced you are not a fanboy. No fanboy would come here and ever say I knew what I was talking about.
What were the odds you would post this on this of all days?
I know
I am seriously never going to say that about a game that I like ever again.
To make matters worse, I had just loaded up Hellgate London no more than a day before they announced its closure. I was also playing Mythos every day right up until Flagship closed.
I'm cursed. I think I'll go post the same thing about WoW and see what happens.
What were the odds you would post this on this of all days?
I know
I am seriously never going to say that about a game that I like ever again.
To make matters worse, I had just loaded up Hellgate London no more than a day before they announced its closure. I was also playing Mythos every day right up until Flagship closed.
I'm cursed. I think I'll go post the same thing about WoW and see what happens.
I am making sure to not ever tell you what games I play from here on out.
Seriously, I was almost unwilling to believe it was the same Kavadas.
"A very large number of the people voicing their opinions about TR are those who played in beta over a year ago."
I probably could have said that better. It seems like every time TR is mentioned at Voodoo Extreme or Bluesnews, there are inevitably about 200 people saying "I played in beta, but it sucked soooo bad". I guess that without having been in my shoes, you may not have noticed. I don't think anyone is doubting that open beta really hurt TR. If the open beta would have started even a month later than it had, we might not have seen the game close today.
I still believe that TR, if it weren't closing, had the potential to be a solid niche game like Eve.
TR could have went on as a niche if they were turning a monthly profit, but it seems they were making about 50% of what they were spending, not to mention the 74 million they spent before release. With numbers like that, it was going to be over a decade before the initial investment was returned and the continued losses would have just become too much.
Wow. Total, complete and utter fail. I like how you claim TR was NOT going to be shut down AND that it had a healthy population. Couple that with the fact you said you liked Hellgate London and I see no reason why anyone should pay attention or take into consideration any opinion you make about mmo's.
Is a man not entitled to the herp of his derp?
Remember, I live in a world where juggalos and yugioh players are real things.