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Help me find an MMO
Hello Folks,
I look at myself as an old school MMO player having grown up on EQ/UO/DAOC/EQ2/WoW, for me it feels as if you are not playing WoW your not playing a well populated mmo. I miss the "skill" factor WoW used to involve, it has dwindled into pure bordem best suited for 13 year olds now adays...
After qutting WoW I went out and purchased Tabula Rasa (POS literally), AoC (waist of cash), then WAR (dead imo, player base dwindled to nothing). Since then I have gone back to the only MMO I missed playing EQ1, but this player base is the worst out of all of them...
So I am looking for a new mmo, something I have yet to try or even possibly a title yet to be released. I look most in an MMO for it to have:
1) A game based on skill
2) PVP and PVE are both a must
3) A large player base
4) grinding or questing, I prefer something like EQ but not really picky
5)P2P only please
Thanks
- ionscorp
Comments
I stumbled upon Requiem thinking it was a F2P game, which it is not. After playing for a month, I wound up subscribing. I'm a big fan of the horror genre which probably helps.
1) Skill based? Yes
2) PvP and PvE? Yes
3) Large player base? Not sure, but there are always a ton of folks playing on the PK server.
4) Questing? Yes, doesn't feel like a grind, however.
5) F2P if you want a crippled version. P2P gets you the normal game. You can play the game free, if you want but there is a lot of missing functionality in the free account. Think of it like a non-timeout demo.
I expected it to get boring after a few weeks, but now I'm addicted and look forward to playing every chance I get. It's worth a try.
BTW, you have to be 17+ to play but I'm sure there are ways around that
On point 1, I'm hoping that you mean the skill of the player, rather than the lots of separate things to grind levels in, which sometimes gets misleadingly called "skill-based".
Anyway, in that case, I'm going to say Guild Wars. You get to the level cap and essentially perfect gear pretty quickly, so whether you win or not depends on how good you are at the game, rather than how much time you've spent grinding levels. If you switch to hard mode, it takes a lot more skill to do well at Guild Wars than WoW ever did. Well, unless you want to avoid a challenge by heavily using the PvE-only skills that are basically cheat codes to help prevent incompetent players from getting stuck.
Guild Wars has both PvP and PvE, and they're kept pretty much separate. Guild Wars is the only MMORPG I'm aware of where PvP is won by the side with more skilled players, rather than higher levels, better gear, and/or more players. The PvE is very well done, with a lot more variety in the content than most other games.
Guild Wars doesn't have as big of a playerbase as WoW, but it's in the next tier, with more than 5 million boxes sold and closing in on 6 million, and apparently still selling a couple hundred thousand per quarter. Realistically, you're not going to find a meaningfully larger playerbase except by playing WoW--and unlike Guild Wars, WoW segregates the players into a lot of separate servers, making the playerbase effectively seem dramatically smaller than it really is.
There isn't much grinding to be had in Guild Wars. There are several hundred quests that you can do, as well as 70 or so missions, and some repeatable dungeons and elite areas.
Guild Wars doesn't charge a subscription fee, but you do have to pay to buy the box to get access. Right now, you can get the Guild Wars Trilogy (all three campaigns) for around $50. If what you mean is that you wish to exclude the sort of players who stick to "free to play"/item mall games because they can't pay a dime to play, Guild Wars does that just fine, without needing to charge a monthly fee.
I hear this request a lot. Even though there a a large number of amazing mmo's out there some people are always either bored or unsatisfied. Shopping around for a new mmo can be tough, especially starting into a new game that has been around for a while. Adapting to new playing styles and lingo can be difficult. My suggestion to you is to be patient and look into some of the newer mmo's that are to be released this year. There are some highly anticipated titles such as aion, darkfall, star wars, star trek, etc.. anything to suit your tastes. Feel free to keep looking at the ones that are already out there, but don't pass up taking a look into a fresh new beginning.
Keep on gaming!
-talonsgrasp
Player base is a tricky item, mainly because in most cases, the number of active subscriptions doesn't mean a high population experience.
For example, EVE has a higher population experience than WoW because it has one server with around 57,000 people online at any given time. You can see this on the login screen. WoW has 267 servers and if you do the math, that's only ~42,000 per server, if all 11 milllion are playing at the same time. Obviously, some servers will have more and some less, but its still highly unlikely any WoW server would hit 57,000.
Remember as far as the game is concerned, there are only as many players available to you as are logged onto your server. The rest of the subs don't exist as far as your gaming experience is concerned.
If having a lot of people playing WITH you is important, do some research and look for a game that has a larger population per server.
EDIT: After posting, I did some research on warcraftrealms.com census section and most servers don't eve come close to HALF as many registered players on each server, ~26,000 being the top. That's registered on that server, not playing. So, WoW servers don't even come close to EVE on a bad day.
BTW, the data on that site is for the past 30 days and if you query ALL WoW players, there are only 7,901,645 characters registered on all servers. I suspect many people have multiple characters so how WoW can have 11 million active subscribers is beyond me. (this data is for US and EU) Look for yourself.
But that's one of the great things about Guild Wars. It doesn't artificially divide the playerbase into a lot of separate servers, the way that so many other games do. If you want to do Dzagonur Bastion, for example, then everyone else who is looking for a group for the same mission is placed in the same outpost, making it easy for you to find each other, rather than being stuck on different servers and unable to group.
There are, I suppose, some exceptions to this. First, there are different language outposts for different languages. Second, English is split between American and European districts; as far as I am aware, no other language is split like that. Finally, if there are too many players in an outpost, to avoid overcrowding, the game opens another instance of the outpost. For most outposts, this is pretty rare, but at any given time, there are usually several American English districts of Lion's Arch and Kamadan. During the Chinese New Year event, you can end up with more than a hundred American English districts of Shing Jea Monastery. But most importantly, you're free to switch between districts in a few clicks whenever you feel like it--including switching to foreign or other language districts.