Quote:
Originally Posted by eqdruid76
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For years I've felt that EQ Live has devolved into a coding/development sandbox for Sony new-hires/trainees who care more about virtual card games than MMOs. Of course, the same can be said (and much more deservedly) for Star Wars Galaxies.
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This. I also believe they may of lost or not kept some of their own in house tools/data/talent.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Itchybottom
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We don't even know most of the formulas used to calculate skills from live, aside from those that have been in dev discusion on Sony's forums! We can do some simple algebra to approximate things based on parses, but we don't have the answers.
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Oh yeah those super advanced formulas with their 'soft caps' and focus on one primary stat... Don't know if you ever bothered reading descriptions of classes, races, etc.. But there was a huge disconnect between the way things were describe and how they played out in game mechanics. So while your point is valid in that we won't have exact formulas until some past dev kindly dumps some info (like they did with Sonic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_X...cancellation); there is also a point you're overlooking and that is EQ just wasn't that advanced. Databases are a standard genre of computing programing, so are game engines and 3d worlds and the fact remains what we are trying to recreate here has no secret sauce, no magic. Just some data that we don't have... yet. Just take a look at sites like unseen64.net and you will realize there is a whole army of basement dwellers chomping at the bit to relieve old games, betas, engines, etc. and with all the people that worked on and loved EQ it's just a matter of time before we get true classic data (if it still exists).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Itchybottom
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But don't try to knock Sony for it's accomplishments based on your personal taste, because you're dealing with a realm of fiction.
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But in reality I'm just going to call bullshit on Itchy's whole post, the fact remains EQ as software was in a piss poor fashion from day 1. There was nothing robust about the client and the server, especially in the early days. But what was there was magical but that is a testament to the original devs and designers, not Sony. They simply took a good thing, made a ton of money off it and then pissed it away. From the tons of promised features that never made an appearance to the constant crashing and network issues that took years to fix. They knew they had a cash cow on day one yet (seemingly) never scaled up any resources to deal with problems. From the busted boats to the lackadaisical attitude in adding major & minor quests/items/etc piecemeal, all one has to do is take a look at what Blizzard did better with WoW, they offered robust and well running game that when it comes down to brass tax is basically an EQ clone yet they completely dominated in subs and I think that is in no small part to how well the client runs on a myriad of hardware and their commitment to offering a consistent and working game environment.
08-16-2010, 02:42 AM
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