Camping hits the front page!

[____________Isembard]

Plenty of people have already tried pointing out that camping for spawns is bad.

Just to add fuel to the fire (please take notice Funcom!) - the following story appeared on the FRONT PAGE of the BBC news website (this is the electronic equivalent of it apprearing on the front page of a national daily paper).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2129912.stm

Think the beeb website has a daily readership of 20 million or so.......

An advertising tagline of 'No camping required' for an online game would, I suspect, be a definite selling point .

[ethernal3]

Not insulting SWG or supporting AO, but that was more or less the same thing promised on AO.
~Chris

[______Biffstatsnugly]

well they fell so far short you couldnt tell they tried.

[______________Luxxan]

Camping was never really a problem until everyone started whining "boo hoo we want static dungeons" and lo and behold there is camping in the static dungeons. Granted there are probably a thousand ways FC could have implemented things that wouldn't have required camping, but still, play the game like there are no statics and you'll find the amount of time you spend camping is drastically low.

[_______________Morph]

I am afraid your memory appears to be a little selective.

First, there has been camping of MOBS and hunting sites in the game since the beginning. Remember the minibulls, manateze, breeders etc.?

Second, peeps were screaming for static dungeons because there was nothing in the game to do but level. Don't blame the player base because FC released a half complete program with no content. There is a world of content FC could have added to the game but didn't and still haven't. At the very least they could have put some thought into static dungeons instead of just making them eq style copies.

[___________Elderetch]

Ideally the static dungeons should require a key like missions. Simply stick a terminal, person etc outside - that way you separate instances of it running for each "group" that wants to use it. This is one of the better features of missions and it should have been carried over.

It might be a pain to dupe 30 keys - but it beats the hell outta dragging 30 friends to a dungeon and finding it camped tod eath.

[Bionitrous]

The dumbasses at FunCom said they would spawn multiple instances of the static dungeons so that we wouldn't have the horse crap that started at Nelebs and is now in full force at Smuggler's and the Lab Director and Camelot.

They promised us that the game would be Fun. They lied and broke their promise. Jerks.

Those dungeons are actually pretty well conceived and implemented for group dungeon crawling. Problem is you have to deal with horse holes at every turn. Something FunCom promised the players they were going to avoid by allowing teams to pretty much choose their own adventure. Liers and thieves is what I consider them.

Every single dungeon in the game is a headache because of other players and camping. When I go to Nelebs now, it's me who is the a hole. If I had a magic wand and could send them poor guys to another instance of the dungeon so I wouldn't be bothering them, I would.

Then the bungholes promised that the unique loot would not be overpowering and would be just for 'fun'. Idiots. How about a billion credits for Dragon Armor? Seriously mentally incapacitated game designers we're paying here. That stench pit called Camelot does nothing but make players hate each other (same side as well as opposite side). Personal pit of aholism for about 80 people in the game. Yeah, that's a good idea.

What could have been a fun thing for people to do is a place for people to piss each other off in the quest for uber penile substitutes.

Raph Koster knows what he's doing. He has the power to prevent this bs in SW:G. The game designers at FunCom are amatures fumbling around in the dark. They are clueless when it comes to game designer. Poseurs.

There were some people who knew what they were doing at FunCom and inklings of enlightenment still show through here and there. The current vanguard over there is slowly destroying both their credibility, the enjoyment of the game, and hopefully their future employment chances. God forbid any of them get any input into a future project.

One word to illustrate how inept these people are: Dodga.

[nipsnaps]

I love AO for what it is at low levels. I ignore AO for what bad points it brings up at high levels.

It IS very hard to ignore the bad points, but I try to do it. Makes me feel happier playing it. Too few instances of static dungeons is a big time "I try to ignore it" thing. I just don't go there, whee!

Yes, the things are uber. That is another thing I have to ignore. Urgh. It is getting tougher to ignore.

If they bring level limits on every nano and your neighbours doorbell, it will probably exceed my potential ignore limit.

But really, I'm trying real hard to not be powergamer and ignore all that ****. Why? My fiancee isn't a powergamer, she is blissfully ignorant of most unbalances, and she is having fun. And hey, she likes it and thinks it is powerful enough if we can duo oranges easily. She's happy, I'm playing games with her, I'm happy. Static dungeons be damned, I'm not popping my nose there!

[_____________Federot]

Originally posted by Isembard
Plenty of people have already tried pointing out that camping for spawns is bad.

Just to add fuel to the fire (please take notice Funcom!) - the following story appeared on the FRONT PAGE of the BBC news website (this is the electronic equivalent of it apprearing on the front page of a national daily paper).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2129912.stm

Think the beeb website has a daily readership of 20 million or so.......

An advertising tagline of 'No camping required' for an online game would, I suspect, be a definite selling point .

They say they are going to control camping by limiting the number of players per server. That's hiliarious, since that's the exact same stance that EQ took, and ended up raising the population limit per server ALL the time, until they got so crowded it was impossible to move around.

-Yense

[Snuble]

I like the idea of one big world, and I never liked to select from 1001 dimensions for one to play on (always ends up leveling a char to xxx just to find out that a friend is playing his xxx level toon on another dimension). Crowding is a problem i AO, but if we could get rid of the lag associated with crowds like Tir and BS, it would just be that much better! Again fix the problem not the symptom.

Oh and have anyone noticed that crowds are getting a lot bigger? And that its a lot of noobs around now?

[______Biffstatsnugly]

Well if you read the article on star wars and have not actually read the star wars site, or message boards that can be misleading. Star wars is making all items player made, and adding item decay. So no uber rare equipment to camp ala. EQ or even AO. Now with that said, i will just have to sit back and see if they get it right or not. God i pray they do.

[Kireth]

It seems that some of you are missing the fact that a huge number of players actually WANT to camp for an item. They WANT to have a status symbol that only a few other people have.

I mean, if they didnt want do do it, they wouldnt be there waiting would they?

Of course there are also people like me who would love to have the items, but I'd rather shoot myself than camp for something for more than an hour or so!

Then there are other people who get annoyed that it takes so long to get the item and resort to thievery and corruption to acquire it.

AO was concieved of the same qualities you are now attributing to SWG. When it started, there was an expectation that you would one day be able to make all items. There were no unique bosses and no camping.

Of course, people found that a little lacking and called for unique stuff and places to camp. Things that were rare and had huge value.

This happens in real life too. People have to earn the money to pay for a status symbol and then often have to wait on a huge waiting list for delivery of that new car, yacht or personal jet!

[_______________m0000]

they found it lacking b/c just saying you will be able to make things is not the same as being able to make them.

Trade skills are finally here and they suck horribly, worst implementation of anything in any game ever. The %^*^&*% jumping in the NES game 'TOTAL RECALL' is done better than AO trade skills, and that is sad. It's like if iron in UO was ultra rare and only 10 pieces existed the world over.

I'd have been happier to find a raw egg in the box instead of an AO cd at this point.

*So why play? I'm just messing around with a few friends that live cross country until swg is out. It will have problems too, sure, but *funcom didn't make it*. You could sell me just about anything with that line these days.

I like *some* of the art in AO, some of the texturing is the best thing about the game. Almost nothing else is done even remotely professionally, especially animations, models, environments, and gui/menu design. I can't really comment on code b/c you cant see it, I'm not a programmer, and I dont really ever crash. The design of the game istelf is ever shifting and nebulous, no descriptions of the classes are even accurate for crying out loud.