Out of Pod Experience

Heres a quick recap of everything others, including me have been finding quite enjoyable about the game

ANGRY JOE reviews Guild Wars 2

Cheers!

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Yup, muskets and pistols. A lot of engineers in WvW. That's my next role to try, and usually my favorite profession in games that have the class. My fav build in gw1 was necro/ranger, so I've been using a ranger with a pet in WvW so far, that works well too. I've just been trying to think up a good steampunk type name for my eng, and I'll tell you, if you use common names you'll be stuck at character creation for hours trying to find something not taken lol. In fact, as I was shuffling through my usual names, trying to find one not taken already, the world server that I had signed up for (you can only choose one per account), it filled up and I had to choose another world. And no kidding about the WvW queue times, it's crazy. But there is always something to do in pve land while you wait, like harvest and craft. I'm glad it's not EVE like though (can play both), nor yet another WoW clone as if the world needed another, though I'm not sure how GW2:WvW will hold up against planetside 2 when that goes live.

I think that there are enough AOE drops to be fps, or at least fps-like/quasi-fps. No first person cam, but apparently it's on a dev list but at low priority. But I meant base capture wise. lol @ flamethrowers. Games around 35GB, I opted for the DVD's, myself.

Not a true mmo? You know, EQ2 had/has public instances of zones (of regular static zones), with a 100 player cap. At launch it was common to have 5+ instances of the same zone. I'm not sure what the cap is, but it's far more than 100 in the pve zones. The mists (WvW area) have four persistent connecting maps and supports 500 players each map (2000 in total not counting MOB's). 500 a map is around something planetside had. I've always said gw1 was w/o a doubt not an mmo, not even debatable, but I don't know how anyone can say gw2 isn't. If so, there are only two mmo's ever created that I can think of by this definition, EQ1 and EVE, the rest are not mmo's. And EQ1 I don't think allows 1000+ players in a zone any longer.

Yeah, shards, or worlds. I really dig development, exp in indie stuff mostly, and I can't think of any way to put it all on one shard. Outer space sandbox, certainly. But terrestrial content, and for millions of players, it's just inconceivable how much content that would need to be created to keep everyone sort of spread out. It's cost efficient too, in this case considering the game style and mob population, as a single shard you would need larger and more powerful clusters as well as a greater exponential usage of bandwidth which would also require players to have hefty broadband connections (G3 works fine at this point). What makes it possible for EVE is that many zones have virtually no mobs until players trigger them to spawn. Some, but not a real load like most games that might be tracking a few thousand mobs in a zone. MOB's aren't players but they do take some resources including bandwidth that needs to be sent to players.

Yeah, nothing like EVE, no need for an EVE clone. Oh, well, there are some technical comparisons, but tl;dr bait.

In the second MMO I fantasize about, the action would be in a single shard on a planet -but would be a water planet, with action zones limited to certain "grids" and most of the underwater space would be procedurally generated and uninviting. Players would travel from node to node to get action.

EVE is essentially made of thousands of grids where things happen, triggered by players, and separated by warp travel animations. That is uncompatible with land maps, but an ocean world would allow the same scheme. And the underwater physics would make a lot more of sense...

AOC also shards its pvp instances. I did a lot of sharding in that game.

If I only played games based on one criteria and one only, my selection would be rather limited as would my experiences and my views. Perhaps that is why you do not understand why other people are enjoying this seemingly carefree game.

We veterans of DAOC would call the WvW a zone, like the old battlegrounds and frontier were. Yes you had a load screen but everyone stayed on the same map. For AOC's pvp grounds what happens is when a zone gets too many people it opens up another instance and continues to do so as long as people keep joining the party. GW2 seems to function much in this aspect as I often find myself in some population overflow.

Yeah DAOC had no overflow and no player cap either, and being a member of the red headed stepchild realm I saw plenty of days when my eight man and I would find ourselves defending a keep from 60+ albs (which was lagging all to hell and back). I haven't tried WvW yet myself but I'm told that a lot of the actual gameplay is reminiscent of the old frontier days with actual seiges including war machines, keep claims, and 3 way stand offs. Looking forward to all that.