The Shrine

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>I am looking for a new game to play for computer, but have had no luck. I am tempted to play another MMORPG, maybe pick up DAoC again, or starwars galaxies, or maybe wait for WoW. Any ideas or thoughts?</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>SW Galaxies is the devil! Repent! Repent! :P</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>I despise RTSs, but I'm looking forward to Rome: Total War. That, next to Half Life, was the most impressive game at E3 for me. You can also pick up Medevil: Total War and the expansion for it together for dirt cheap ($20 Cdn at EB)</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>If you go MMO so far I've been having a lot of fun with FFXI and CoH. FFXI's only problem is finding a group can take forever sometimes but it very fun nontheless. CoH just oozes style for the most part....a much more active battle system and great quest system makes for tons of fun....</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>lol, yeah...SWG is too expensive for what you do...it just got fanboy appreciation when it came out, WoW is where it'll be at</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Blizzard games are as fanboy as anything else. In its current stage, anyone playing 'casually' (say, 4-5 hours a day, which is the average for MMORPGs) will get to level 60 in about 2 months easily. Some beta testers did 50-55 in 9 hours, so that puts 1-60 at 120 hours, and let's say you're only half as good as a seasoned EQ treadmill runner, so that's 240 hours/4 = 60 days = 2 months @ 4 hours a day. At that point you can either do the same thing all over again on another character, or do the raiding game that no one has a clue what it's going to be about and hope it is actually going to be good. Historically, no MMORPG has ever got the raiding game right on release, which is why they take a stupidly long time to level on purpose so you can make tweaks to the proposed endgame as you watch what players can and cannot do. Actually, a lot of the blind optimism on the endgame is because Blizzard has ex-EQ players on the staff working on the endgame. Of course, this largely ignores the fact that no game I know of that tries to go to players to design encounters of any kind has ever succeeded, because if you get someone who truly cares about the game, you'll get an encounter that is way too hard. If Furor and Tigole are going to do what they claim to have hated in EQ all the encounters will just be stupidily difficult that the avreage player will just get slapped by them without any possibility of winning. Actually, that'd a pretty gutsy move, and the right move, but I really doubt Blizard can withstand the inevitable whine that the game is too hard.

But, if you make the encounters easy, then people will beat them too fast, and since there is no time to slow people's progress via leveling, that means you'll run out of content and run out of things to do. I suppose you could always gank people in PvP, but how long can you do that? Then you'd have to wait for expansions for new things to do, and we know how fast Blizzard gets those out.

While it's okay to play say Diablo 2 to level 70 or whereever you think is 'done' and start over, when you're paying on a monthly level people want the ability to progress, or at least the illusion to be able to. I really don't see a lot of people getting to level 60 and then keep paying a monthly fee just to do that all over again, so WoW's playability will depend on how its endgame go, and history doesn't look favorably on Blizzard's side.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>in the end, isn't that the problem of every MMO right now? The endgame.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Successful MMORPG have good endgame, but to do that, you need time, and I don't think WoW has the time because the leveling is too short.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>but knowing Blizzard, they'd just hold off release until they had it instead</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Well the plot seems simple enough right now. I like the Undead back story, with the forsaken and such. Also in the game you get to assassinate Thrall, and Corine, and other leaders, it's pretty cool from what I've heard.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Four to five hours a day is casual play? I think you've lost some perspective.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Nope. Hero Class has been stated to come in after release, and raiding game looks to be in the same boat.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Tahoma; text-align: left; '>No kidding; thats like wake up, go to work, come home, game, go to sleep, wake up, go to work, game, go to sleep... i dont have 4-5 hours to do anything anymore, real like sucks.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Well for those of us without careers it's doable. :)</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>That's the numbers the industry quotes for an average player.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>a lot of high end EQ player (hence the most active playing) are not students.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>neither are the 'high end' alcoholics or crack heads</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>"Average" is not necessarily "casual." If you do something four to five hours a day, you don't have a casual relationship with it.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>For an MMORPG that's pretty casual, if I'm spending $13-20 a month on a game I'm gonna play the living hell outta it.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Just because you can't play a game a lot doesn't mean people who do are somehow messed up. Jealousy of someone who can dedicate a lot to a game is sad.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>You can call it relatively casual, but compared to the big picture, no way. For comapision, four to five hours is about how much Michael Phelps trains every day. If you're putting in similar hours to any Olympic athlete, it ain't casual.</div>

<div style='font: bold 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Hahaha..."I train 5-6 hours a day!" "Really, what event?" "Oh uh...Massively Multi-Player...Online RPGs.."</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>lol, jealousy? no. I was comparing it to other addictions/obsessions, which is what it is if you spend that much time on a game</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Ummm, time flys when you're doing something you enjoy doing. When I'm playing WC3 or WoW it can easily become 5:00AM and I wouldn't notice because I'm so into the freakin game.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>That's tangential to my, admittingly semantic, point.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: left; '>Bah! You and your semantics!</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Then why not screw the new MMO (*cough* new fad *cough*), and go back to an older MMO that has already had the time to create the endgame.</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>I've known guys at past jobs who somehow managed to put in minimum 5-6 hours per WEEKDAY into EQ and UO (is UO still around?). And I repeat minimum. Don't know how they did it...</div>

<div style='font: 11pt arial; text-align: left; '>And your tangential admittances : )</div>