Mark Jacobs (EA Mythic) on MMOG design & costs

[findar]

Originally Posted by Dashal

DAoC was very stable and had a great release. WAR will mimic that. DAoC had a lot of unfinished, unitemized content, WAR wont repeat that. This is mainly because with DAoC they ran out of money, which is not the case this time.

Pathing was fine, by new MMO standards, when I played in CE closed beta right before Preview Weekend. I'm not concerned.

daoc also had intense memory leaks in major cities and you could easily fall through walls.

well... in my experience with the first 2 weeks of daoc anyway.

[Havelock]

Originally Posted by Eonan

Elaborating more, it was broken by the Preview Weekend patch (which like Malkav said had server optimizations in it). The previous week during the Collectors Edition closed beta it worked just fine.

That's not in the notes.

[Dumar]

make mmos that aren't garbage and you get sales! what great insight, mr. jacobs!

[Azrayne]

Originally Posted by Dumar

make mmos that aren't garbage and you get sales! what great insight, mr. jacobs!

Well it's something a huge number of people in the industry don't seem to grasp...

[Cinge]

Originally Posted by Tred

Holy shit I thought you died or something.
.

One can only hope

[Dashal]

Originally Posted by findar

daoc also had intense memory leaks in major cities and you could easily fall through walls.

well... in my experience with the first 2 weeks of daoc anyway.

True, and it lagged to death with a lot of people on screen. I havent had any of those issues in WAR though.

[Kodylan]

So, Mark Jacobs has started blogging. This is his first post, and the full blog can be found here: Online Games Are a Niche Market

3) With the increased competition of free-to-do-almost-nothing-fun games and other models, there’s a lot of chatter in the investment community about whether high-end, subscription-based MMORPGs are a good investment. As I said during a panel at GDC, there was a lot of very dumb money in this space (Hey, let’s give 25M to guys who know nothing about MMORPGs and sometimes nothing about online games other than they played them. What could possibly go wrong with that?) and that I thought the money would start to leave this space once some of the games I expected to tank did just that. The money guys run very, very hot and cold and right now, they are getting on their winter coats.

I had a great laugh at the bolded portion of that quote. Will be fun to follow his blog because he definitely doesn't hide his feelings or thoughts due to PR concerns.

Edit: And ouch-

7) Since 1997, you can count on two hands the number of MMORPGs that have held on to more than 200K monthly paying subs for any substantial period of time. OTOH, you would need all the fingers and toes of a baseball team to keep track of the MMORPGS that have failed to maintain that number and/or even launch. C’mon kids, you can try this experiment at home, no plastic bag required! Count all the MMORPGS since 1997 that have had great numbers and then think of all the abysmal failures. Not only have we had lots of failures to launch, we’ve had failures that set a new bar for failures.

[Desidero]

I'm curious how many people will hold off on getting WAR because they got burned by AoC (or other recent shitty MMOs). I know I won't be getting it until I can try a demo or play it at a friend's place.

[Havelock]

Originally Posted by Desidero

I'm curious how many people will hold off on getting WAR because they got burned by AoC (or other recent shitty MMOs). I know I won't be getting it until I can try a demo or play it at a friend's place.

Why not just preorder, try out open beta, and cancel if you don't like it?

[Jabberwhacky]

Try a demo? Open beta starts Sunday.

[DJk_zero]

AoC just went up on steam, tee hee.

[Utnayan]

Originally Posted by Dashal

True, and it lagged to death with a lot of people on screen. I havent had any of those issues in WAR though.

DAOC also had a lot of game breaking bugs. I could stack two dex debuffs on mobs and they would not be able to hit anything. (That was a fun one). Almost as fun as the time a cleric AE mezzed over 100 albions who were planning an assault on the supply fort, and we had 10 people... They all died. All 100. RvR was pretty much pointless until 3 months after release, and staying in an unitemized Spindehalla for 3 weeks (A month after release) straight killing trows at level 35 was pretty disheartening. Relics, everything. I agree with the previous poster, the memory leaks were awful. I would have to restart every hour or so.

But the main purpose of the post was to re-iterate that Mark Jacobs doesn't have a great track record (Even though that could pretty much be said about anyone) and EA's is horrible. I hope WAR comes out polished and competes well, as they are going to have to be to be successful, and we all know this genre needs is another AoC/Vanguard flop like we need a hole in the head. But they are going to have a very small window to make sure they nab onto players to keep sustained subs.

It better be one hell of a polished piece of software, or it will end up being a game that will be nothing more than a side track until the expansion for WoW comes out.

[Kaxmax]

Originally Posted by Utnayan

Almost as fun as the time a cleric AE mezzed over 100 albions who were planning an assault on the supply fort, and we had 10 people... They all died. All 100.

So a cleric, which was an alb class, mezzed 100 albions?

[Kiroy]

Originally Posted by Desidero

I know I won't be getting it until I can try a demo or play it at a friend's place.

Unfortunately, this plan flat out doesn't work for MMO's because the genre is started to perfect the art of making the first 10-20% of the leveling process really fun. The only way to know for sure is follow message boards for a couple months.

If I would have demo'd or played AoC at a friends house I would have picked it up in a second, and still canceled in a month.

[Necrolyte]

Originally Posted by Kaxmax

So a cleric, which was an alb class, mezzed 100 albions?

Pretty sure he meant Midgard Cleric or whoever the Midgard Smiter was that could Smite hundreds of players because at DAOC launch the stun was something like 40s in duration with no immunities so you could chain-stun players.