The KGB Oracle Forums The KGB Great Hall of History (ARCHIVE) KGB ArcheAge Faction Planning The PVPer formally known as ChewY now in Archage

Eya fellas, old friends and most tenacious opponents, glad to see Jetstar and the KGB doing well.

Shoot me a tell on Ollo, I'm just learning the game and trying to figure out if I'm going to stick with it. I would love to play with those I have shared history with.

I don't know if FL still plays but I haven't been part of FL since Dracus died. Du-Sith and I ran a few rounds in Darkfall but we don't keep in touch anymore either. I haven't spoken to Cinder in years.

Is Archeage turning out to be anything like UO? I feel the summers of 97/98 were the best times gaming has had to offer, and it wouldn't have been exciting without KGB involved. We were rotten kids with bigoted tyrannical ideas, but UO provided a safe environment for catharsis of our sickness. That wouldn't have happened without KGB either.

I hope something comes along that re-creates that 97/98 UO environment, the industry seems to be moving that way with the term "Survival MMO" becoming a buzzword.

Anyway, I'm lvl 18 or 19 and need to get back to lvling. Salute.

Hey bro!

Long time!

There is some instance of FL on another server, but nothing like what you grew up with. Join us in TS3, the link is in the Join KGB page.

We would love to work with you again.

Sup man. Long time no see.

Did you play Shadowbane as well? The name sounds familiar.

Ey Derid. Still talk to Skull or Binbs? How is this Archeage, will it sate a old timer? I have some 95s in WOW and LOTRO but I haven't had a long term sub to an MMO since pre Trammil UO.

Drakiis I don't think we've formally met. I trolled the Shadowbane forums, pre-release Darkfall as well. I think I ran with CoS in SB, but I wasn't anybody. They kicked me out in one of their officer's Scumbag Steve moments. I gave the group officer a 40 int rune we camped, she kept it and said I refused to turn it in, booted.

As for the name I came up with Bleakwise while conjring up a name for a Hobbit in LOTRO. I have a thing for aphorisms and was dwelling on the phrase "Wisdom is bleak" at the time. I really started liking the name when considering that "The Hobbit" was a tale about the "little man" inside us all. I've only used the name in Diablo 3 Archeage and ESO.

Anyway, I might put in a heavy grind in Archeage soon, but I have no interest in a "traditional" themepark experience, not sure if it's worth it.

PS: Sorry JetStar didn't mean to be rude (ignore you). I'll have to jump in next time I game.

Just started playing AA, hard to say. Its got world pvp, housing and whatnot. I dont think its full loot, but it has trade routes like an old skool MUD - and the trade packs drop. Which is a feature I have been saying is needed in an MMO for like a decade.

The char spec system is nice, lots of build variation.

Game is an interesting blend of sandbox and themepark. I think it has the necessary sandbox world attributes of old UO and then some. What it likely lacks compared to UO is the sandbox social aspect. Instead of people of all sorts hanging out at dungeon entrances and duel rooms, expect roving blobs.

Cant really comment on endgame much yet though, I've just read stuff and played for a day.

Yeah. Agree about drops. The way I look at MMOs, the way I looked at old UO, is that going out of town and doing things were a gamble. Your gear was your "antie" and you had the option of raising your "antie" for a bit of an advantage on the field in the form of Vanquishing weapons, potions, and hardening armor. Modern MMO have virtually removed all risk for playing. It's like playing poker with monopoly money, just for kicks, it's more fun watching power poker players play for real money on TV.

The risk of loosing something is more interesting in the possibility of gaining something. I'm sure there are some psychology studies that back that up. It's a design lesson I learned playing MK and Street Fighter at arcades, anyone else remember being 13 and you and your opponent were both at 1/4th health with 20 seconds let in the bottom of the 3rd round, no quarters left? People talk about ganks and grindfeasts but it was moments like those that defined oldschool gaming. It's like a game of Magic where the winner keeps the graveyard-- I hated Magic but those rules made it fun. I'm not saying we need absolute full loot but something close to it, tho that's not all UO had that modern MMOs are missing.

Don't get me wrong I'm no longer what PnP players would call a "PVP tard", I've learned to really enjoy solid roleplaying, but modern MMOs kinda skimp out in that area as well. People talk about "realism" in MMOs as either a good or a bad thing, and depending on the level of realism it's either one or the other. I think an MMO should be about as "real" as a fantasy novel. You were never concerned with where Bilbo dropped his 2nd breakfast stool, or Gandalf having to go "number 3," after talking to Arwen, but some level of realism needs to exist so that players can suspend their disbelief. I'm sure most of us can remember a time when we sort-of believed ghost stories, aside from a solid mechanic, UO's "play as ghost" system was believable and really sucked players into the virtual world.

I wish I had the budget/manpower to do something about it. MMO game design is something I've thought a lot about, I'm actually forming a wiki called "Survival Fantasy MMO" where I'm laying some ideas and dynamics down, all under a creative common license to prevent vendor ownership of them. I also lurk the CryEngine and UE4 scenes looking for talent that might be interested in the project. I need talent, not only in game design and art but also in economics and psychology. My dream is an MMO is something of a fantasy EVE online, with real-time combat and a mixed market economy, complete with a "Fed Chairman" maintaining it. Aside from being a capitalist and roleplayers fantasy land it would allow closet sociopaths to get that sickness out of their system, in a game instead of real life. Somehow we gotta teach these RPKs the value of human empathy, which I'm sure is doable tho it's not immediately clear how.

I have an RTS style conquest/guild-war system that puts past attempts of nation building/conquest like Shadowbane and even Darkfall to shame. Pages and pages of documents, I lost my D drive yesterday and I'm really bummed about it, I didn't have a backup. I know ideas are a dime a dozen in the gaming industry but putting them up on the marketplace and learning a bit about the tools involved in executing them is all I can think to do to move them forward. The Survival Fantasy genre is unclaimed frontier in the gaming world and I KNOW there is a market for it, AAA companies just haven't realized it yet because the indie attempts at it have been such total failures. Thing is those indie attempts have been such poor production quality people decide to stay with UOGamers. When it's finally done right I have no doubt it will be adopted on the same level as WOW.

Yep I thought so, I definitely remember that day, I was a original founder of Cadre Quietus, a Prime Echelon and Principle Elder of the Clan which created and maintained Covenant of the Swords Alliance for Shadowbane, we fought everyone and in the end we fought each other. Cadre Quietus suffered terribly from internal strife as certain leaders sought to seize control of the Clan at it's height in Shadowbane, namely Zorak with his PRX cronies. The old guard was being pushed out and younger, newer, less respectful people were recruited to bolster our war footing. It meant for less politics and more slaughter, a reason Treachery fell to COS so easily, until the Empire could not be everywhere to defend everything, and Zorak made up some BS about community supportive scaling back of operations, when the reality was the entire server had put the pressure on him. By that time we who were True Cadre had left. I think many people had been caught in the crossfire of the internal strife, or coup if you will.

On the MMO front there are many burgeoning game designers here, some professionals as well, and enthusiasts like me who have or are doing the same thing you have. I've personally written so much on the ideologies and psychologies centered around pvp and mmo design that it's sickening to know it will never be applied or recognized anywhere. I've trolled professional game design forums and chat rooms for years and spoken to some very interesting people concerning the industry standards and game design trends which trouble me as well as those which show great promise, but either way have never had any opportunity nor the proper credentials to support my theorems. Much of what I have gleaned has come from years of game play and living digitally from within various social groupings. I believe the social aspects of pvp feed a great many deep seated needs, and designing a game which caters to those needs can be done but must have specific mechanics which offer the players greater choices and freedoms than most MMOs have done to date.

PvP nowadays has been distilled down to either a battlefield confrontation between small groups (which I liken to "a knife fight in a phone booth") or horribly done mass scale where your combat awareness is stipped from you as the screen fills up to the point where you cannot tell friend from foe, let alone target anyone specific, (which I call "fighting in a shopping mall")

Dying in the modern MMO has about as much emotion tied to it as dying in Quake. It only becomes meaningful when you're playing at a competitive level. I admit, it's tedious loosing and having to back to "grind" and "farm" to get back to the fun part of the game, but that doesn't have to be how things have to be. Loosing is only a tragedy if the MMO experience is centered around materialism and material wealth. The focus needs to be put back on engaging in your community and roleplaying, and by roleplaying and community I don't mean queing up to tank or dps in a dungeon raid. As for the likes of Shadowbane and Darkfall, there needs to be things to do and fun to be had at all levels of the game, not just a grind to get to the "end game."

To put it another way. I think I would have more fun defending a farming or logging providence from NPC orcs, getting a reward for my services and spending the evening fighting/gambling in the local tavern's boxing ring than I would raiding for the top-tier equipment of WOW. I say that because I had more fun in the early days of UO, meeting my neighbors and participating and policing local events than I have had in any MMO since. As UO became more and more a game about acquiring material wealth and less and less about social encounters it became less and less of a role-playing experience. Now, some of that was due to game design changes and some of that was due to my perception of the game as I amassed more items, but there is no reason that another game can't come along and be what it is that we imagined, even though UO itself wasn't it.

I think people get mixed up in calling UO the pinnacle of Sandbox gaming, when really it was just the beginning. I think the reason we don't see Survival Sandbox MMOs becoming more popular is because investors look at early UO as a failure; they wronly attribute EQ's success as proof that gamers want Themeparks and not Sandboxes, but I grantee you that if UO were the first voodoo 3d accelerated online game and Everquest was the 2d isometric game that looked a decade old the MMO scene today would favor the Sandbox.

What happened to your drive, cant recover it?

If it froze up/started clicking before fail, try putting it in the freezer for a couple hours.

I generally think in similar term as you regarding game design, there are some minor differences but I suppose it is the shared UO base.

You should hop in TS sometime, we could talk shop MMO design style just for old times sake if nothing else.

edit: nm I see you were in TS, but you poked my laptop which was in other room. Next time poke both accounts, cause im a lazy ass about loggin out/in

To tell you the truth I didn't have much worth saving, maybe 10 pages of notes tops. I wrote something out the other night on siege warfare. Here it is, tho I warn you it's a bit wordy.

Massive Survival Roleplying Game
1 STRATEGY GAME
In the past “Sandbox MMO” and “PVP MMO” have been used pretty much interchangeably. While this couldn’t be any further from the truth early attempts at Sandbox MMOs have been so damaging to the reputation of the Sandbox that it’s only now in 2015, almost 20 years after the launch of Ultima Online that AAA developers are starting to again take interest in the Sandbox genre.

When we’re talking about a Survival Sandbox, we’re talking about a game where opposing players take possession of your survival gear on your passing, but Survival Sandboxes have to be more than online deathmatches to be considered Sandbox games. Even the earliest sandbox games have offered players some form of territorial control, though the implementations have been imposing and awkward, never quite fitting in naturally with the rest of the game.

The implementation of player housing will determine how your game is played. If destruction is allowed then players will destroy any house left unprotected just because they can. If real estate is invulnerable then the entire game-world will be littered with houses, and any suspension of belief in the game will be broken. The answer to this problem comes from a genre that’s perhaps much more familiar to us, RTS games. While RTS games can play out in many ways, the scenerio that players would want to implement in an MMO would be the "construct and counter" strategy.

In an RTS game owners of various territories will either be allied or at war with other territories. It is the commander’s goal to simultaneously protect their property and that of their allies and to destroy that of their enemies at the same time. This task isn’t as simple as it sounds, players tend to “turtle” that is they construct defensive structures around their cities that make all out assaults on their city a very costly exercise-- as long as the defender has resources it is virtually impossible for them to loose. Simply put, a player city with ample resources should not defeatable, period. This is an interesting concept for Survival RPGs because it eliminates one of the most loathed aspects of these type of games, the 3AM raid.

In absence of the “zerg rush” (which will be a valid strat employed on budding hostile-provinces), the focus of the RTS then tends to hang on the outcome of skirmishes around the rest of the map. Players are not strong enough to overcome eachother on their own, BUT, if they manage to expand and acquire more resources and territory they can successfully siege one another. In an RTS the outcome tends to depend on the “micro management skills” and strategy employed by the commander, but in an RPG the outcome would instead be the skill and unit cohesion of the individual players. The success of a campaign in a Survival RPG hangs not only the player’s ability to patrol and protect their own citizens and resources, but also to successfully raid their enemies, to keep them from acquiring more resources, to kill their worker units and force their enemy to expend resources restoring their infrastructure. The guild or clan that can both do and negate the most damage while simultaneously creating the most wealth eventually wins.

I say “eventually” wins because guild/clan warfare is intended to be an epic event, not something decided in the midnight hours of a weekend. Unlike an RTS that can last either 10 minutes or a couple of hours a war in a Survival RPG should extend over weeks, months or even years. The battles may be familiar, but the war should be truly epic. They are wars between not only the players but also between economies, statesmen and ideas. Senators will spend gathered resources on replacing both combat and worker structures and units. Generals will assign units to players (captains) or place those units on patrol routes and implement strategy on how to react to invaders, overwhelming or defending against attackers depending on the amount threat. Invaders will raise farms and scout resource nodes for unprotected structures or units. And while they may have the “3AM advantage” for a day or a weekend that is likely to change over the course of a war.

In times of peace resource nodes and player cities will serve as trade hubs. In the lack of instant travel or universal banking there will be gold to be made moving excess goods to an area that values them as an import. In fact, this is part of the end-game. Though, you might not want to make the runs alone, aside from lawless players NPC bandits will take note of popular trade routes. Though risking a personal shipment won’t always be necessary, escorting merchants from capitals to your clan’s city and back will provide much needed supplies and favor to your clan which will help your leaders garner military and labor recruits.

BTW I'm logged in, going to put an hour or two in AA, I got my headset on and am feeling a bit chatty if you're around.

Dracus died? I had no idea, was it natural causes?

Also here is the second coming of UO, well maybe. https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?page_id=29385

Dracus died some years ago. We have lost a few ourselves over that time, the most notable was probably Toxiclore. I really miss that guy, made me always seem so happy in comparison..LOL

Tox was a worthy player to be sure, you are always such a glitter rainbow of joy Vuldan, I doubt even the mighty Tox could rival your grouchy ass.

On a MMO gaming note I believe games featuring/focusing on pvp or conquest and siege should first go back to the roots of what MMOs are based on which is paper and pencil role playing games. Diversity of race/class, and rolling/placing of statistics and skills. I like Hybrid class/skill systems because they favor diversity and allow players a greater freedom in the type and style of game they like to play. I believe that social mechanics also need to be implemented to better foster communal game play and create player driven story. I believe ensuring a game has the proper social toolsets for clans to recruit, declare war/peace, make alliances, build/train together, organize and structure ranks and maintain order for better communication, and finally display their achievements to the entire game community, manage their lands and so forth. Is a game where pvp and conquest will thrive.

The problem is current trends and game design standards do not take into account the various needs of their communities or social groups and virtually none of the current games trace any mechanics back to roleplaying paper and pencil gaming. Everything is preset, "balanced", and pre-scripted, from raids to pvp, you are given the illusion of choice, and enticed with shinies to placate your desires.

LOL..well said, but Tox really could make me seem like I was Elph..HAHA

Look what the cat dragged in !