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Entropia Universe: Update and Crafting - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Entropia Universe: Update and Crafting - MMORPG.com
Entropia Universe released sixteen years ago and with a new update out this week for the game, the developers offered to show Red Thomas around and answer questions. Red talks a bit about some of the new changes and explores crafting a bit more with the help of the devs.
Comments
can you enlighten everyone on how much money you put into the game to test it? and the duration?
http://twitch.tv/woetothevanquished
This is a game Red is recommending, I do wonder what concerns he might have about a game which would make him to not recommend it? Bankruptcy? I did mention in my last post about EU that many gamers now think nothing of a game being more like an online casinos, where only money counts.
Well at least Gdemami the poster who sets the gold standard on what makes for a quality MMO will agree with the OP.
But, I just looked again at their new shit and I think crafting can become something that should provide pure profit if done right. So i am going to deposit some more money. Between $100-$400 for a decent pool of crafting money. I have about 2k peds right now for crafting, but i still have to wait for my shit to sell before I re-do my crafting runs.
Basically, the formula I will use will be the following.
[(MU of cost materials - (0.54)]/0.36 = MU of end materials
as long as this is true, i should over time make profit or break even.
Took me about 10 minutes to come up with the calculation. But I was using 90% tt return on a maxed bp. I also used that 60% of my return would be in residue which i don't give a MU to.
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
Entropia Universe is a total mess. 15 years of development without any clear direction, I'd even say the total denial to follow any direction or concept, has lead to a patchwork of disjunct systems, partially overlapping systems and partially obsolete systems. The history of Entropia develpment is a history of fails, with the developer always years or over a decade behind the standards, then over-promising new development, then delaying for years, then release "stage 1" half-heartedly, then never get to "stage 2", always under-performing in any way imaginable.
This isn't limited to the development of the game but also includes the almost non-existing communication with the playerbase. The company is not run by visionary gaming industry veterans with the motivation to build their dream game, it's run by slick, evil business men with the only intent to squeeze as much money out of the community as possible. Another point of criticism is that the developer doesn't spend money paid by their customers to improve the product but instead is constantly burning it for other failing endeavorus, such as a failed VR business communication software, a failed cryptocurrency, a failed game assets marketplace (they wanted to sell off the game's assets in something like a homemade Unity Asset Store), a failed cheap mobile game with cute pets battling in arenas, and so on. This has been just the recent ~2 years.
Entropia Universe is terrible grindfest, its repetitiveness is unmatched. The mission system is very very basic. 90% of the missions ask you to kill a number of x of creature A, mostly 100, next stage 500, then 1000 and so on, there are mission chains in which you have to kill 20000+ of the same creatures to finish the chain. Creature AI is an insult to anything remotely related to intelligence. You mostly stand in front of a creature and click that pile of pixels, click, click, click, click, until it's dead and you move to the next same pile of pixels, repeat 20000 times, have fun...
If you engage in that super-exciting activity you can easily spends dozens of cents per hour on lowest levels, a couple of bucks per hour on "mid levels", or dozends of bucks on higher levels. The worst in Entropia Universe is the crafting system praised in the article above. It's the same as killing creatures but you don't engage fierce creatures in the wild, you do it in front of crafting machines. Crafting is plain gambling. You put in recources with a value of X, you have a specific chance determined by your blueprint and "skills" to receive item Y with a value of Z, needless to say on the long run the bank always wins. Oh, and the grand majority of items crafted in Entropia Universe are probably useless.
You think it cannot get worse? It can. Entropia Universe doesn't have any sort of concept for a conclusive setting or an elaborated story. All content has been puked into the existing game world with a total disrespect for what's there already. There's rarely any content update that isn't lore-breaking. The top of it is the weird idea, also greedy money driven idea, to let other developers create planets inside Entropia Universe besides the original planet Calypso. Iirc ~10 planets have been announced, between iirc 2009 and 2012 five planets have been added, the others failed before release, of the 5 released 1 has totally failed, 1 more has been downgraded to something like an extension to another planet, 1 planet was released in "soft launch" / early access something but never made it any further, and only 1 planet is somewhat sucessful, it happens to be a close copy of original planet Calypso. Planet Calypso was marketed as a colonist MMO with a sci-fi planet colonization theme, then came a pop-culture planet where Motorhead Lemmy has a castle and vampires, and zombies and music video vixen, also King Kong and The Thing, 80s sports car and weirder and weirder stuff, then came the time-travel planet where you can travel to Ancient Greece, the tresaure hunting planet and also the Arabian themed planet, not to forget a Cthulhu themed moon. Most of these planets don't see any development worth to be called development, no new planet has been announced since 9 years or so, one can easily conclude the "planet partner" concept has failed too.
I could go on for hours but I guess those you took the time to read this now have a better understanding of what Entropia Universe is all about.
Paid expenses,treated like a king but still can't say anything the Entropia team does not deem fit,in other words,just hype up our game and nothing more.
How else are we going to get news unless we kiss ass with developers,try digging up some news,wait for the content,PAY for it out of your own pocket,then give us some news.
EARLY news is just advertising and nothing more,it is like the developer putting out their own speech but having another person doing it makes it appear legit.
Pretty simple really,this site never cared about the game,now 16 years later we care,,haha good one.
Here is a VERY simple tactic,offer a free trial,if people like it they will play if not they are gone.This type of tactic does not sit well with me,it is a dishonest tactic.Yeah i get it,people need to work,they need to eat,HOW you do it though is very important.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
It's not like you'd expect reporters to report on a topic, and then never interview someone that directly works on/in that topic.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
None yet. I haven't decided if I'll be playing enough to warrant investing any cash yet or not. Though I've been playing on my own character. The devs let me use a higher-skilled character to test out the crafting and some of the higher-end content last week, though I didn't really participate in the economy with it in any way, due to the real-money nature of the game.
w/r to time... I'm not really sure. Think I dorked around with the dev's character for about three hours or so. The one I played on my own.... Maybe 20 hours? Certainly less than 40 because I've been in the office a lot over the last few weeks and haven't much time to play anything.
If I actually billed for the time I put into these articles to include time playing the game, they'd be out more than $10k before they even started compensating me for my time. I seriously doubt anyone care enough about getting covered by some unknown dude to invest that much in a single article.
Some of the larger companies will wine-and-dine on a very rare occasion, but I really doubt the EU folks have enough in their budget to fly me all the way to Sweden just to talk about being able to toggle views and a new aiming system.
Do you ever sit down and really think about the feasibility of some of the things you say? A round trip to Sweden is like $2k, and maybe another couple hundred for the room, another for c-bill for food. With swag and whatever else they might throw in, you're talking something like $3k at the bottom end for this article if they really did that. You really think I have enough readers that someone would pay $3k for me to kick out 1,500 words on their product? Never mind the ridiculous amount of money it'd cost me to be our of the office for three days...
Yeah, it's a slot machine with an MMO wrapped around it. I know. I'm okay with it.
Also, the markup system is what other players pay for your items, has nothing to do with them. TT cost = trade terminal cost which is basically set price of an item.
I'm okay losing a few thousand dollars a decade over a game. Hell, I lose a few thousand dollars a month due to my wife . . .
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
You didn't get wined and dined? No fat cigars and whiskeys like Tim?
I do sometimes wonder how much life experience people who believe these sorts of ideas have. They take the sort of thing a whale of an oil company can do and assume every little fish in the sea can do the same.
If this was say EA and there was some evidence I would consider it, but otherwise such accusations are laughable.
Funny enough, EA/Bioware wasn't really all that crazy with their wooing when I went to check out SWOTOR. They did drop a bit of cash over dinner when they found out that I was a scotch guy, but nothing really impressive.
I think part of it is that folks severely underestimate the bill rates of a lot of the folks who write these articles, too. Over the years, I've found a lot of other writers also have day-jobs, and it's usually something IT-related that pays pretty well. Like me, they're only going to write about something they're interested in and probably have issues with free time, as well. So if you want to pay someone like that to play and then write about a game they don't like... well, it won't be cheap.
Personally, I do it for the tax write off. I spend a stupid amount of money on games, but getting a little revenue from writing these articles lets me deduct it all from my taxes.