Star Trek Online

Frenzy said:
Instancing was introduced to cope with the sheer number of players trying to do one thing, im afraid instancing is a result of progress. You are being very unrealistic expecting new mmos to have no instancing. The sooner you get used to it the sooner you can enjoy the newer mmos coming out. There are probably the same amount of loading times in wow, and it is far more laggy.
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No! No no no no no! Instancing is a cop out, an easy way of making an mmo into a small scale co-op game. It reduces the complexity by a factor of 100 for the developer, but it's not progress by any means, it's a huge step backwards, but it's cheaper and easier to implement than designing a truly massive numbers mmo.

I can understand why it's become so common with the cost and risk of doing an mmo going through the roof, but it just pales in comparison to some of the best mmo experiences I've ever had - hundreds of people assaulting a base in planetside, massive sieges in dark age of camelot, chaotic fleet engagements in Eve.

Hell, even some fps's - tribes and BF2 64 player games are starting to look positively crowded compared to what people have been duped into calling an mmo.

Instancing has its place - there are times when having lots of people all after the same ten rats just doesn't work, but it's being used more and more as a crutch for quick development, making mmo's less and less massive with every new one.
 
Played this a little myself......and I agree with the general feeling, it isnt great, just average, iv not really played MMOG's before so thought id give it a shot, id barely buy it for £30 let alone keep paying to play it, any decent mmog's out there? not wow, tried it, got bored.
 
Frenzy said:
im pretty sure all mmos are "theme park" styled.
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To some extent - but some allow you to affect the gameworld more than others - every SWG server has different player cities, every UO server is the same.

Eve is truly sandbox - ownership of space changes depending on the huge wars going on, stations change hands and player stations appear and disappear, gates between star systems are set up and destroyed.

Some are strictly themepark, but at least make an effort to hide it - when you finish a quest line, you might get put in a burnt out instance of your starter village, rather than the pre-burning instance.

Others and just blatant - the quest giver resetting themselves right in front of you once you're done.
 
Yes i agree instancing has its place, and i feel it has been implemented well in sto for missions but sector space and pvp should not have been instanced.

I would have prefered the game to be sandbox like you say, this truely makes you feel like you are in space and apart of an MMO playing with other people..

I stated instancing was needed at present because the reason it was implemented in wow was because of performance issues and i believe this is the same reason for sto.

Who knows maybe this will improve in time, maybe it will not and continue which i think is more likely. The instancing is not a huge issue for myself as im used to it...

My first expectation of sto was that of an eve based open sandbox type game. I imagined myself warping to lightspeed in some random direction and eventually coming across systems no one else had discovered, perhaps claiming the planet for myself etc or discovering new tech... meh i can live with how it is atm.
 
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Frenzy said:
I stated instancing was needed at present because the reason it was implemented in wow was because of performance issues and i believe this is the same reason for sto.
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This is something I don't understand about mmo's at all - DaoC never seemed to have an issue with chucking a hundred people into one area and letting them slaughter each other. I used to play tribes 2 64 player games on a 128k isdn line and never noticed any lag at all.

Now everyone has links literally hundreds of times faster and yet we seem to struggle with having more than a few dozen people in one virtual place.

It makes me sad - if you're going to kill people online, you should be able to do it en-masse :D

Edit - Sorry Rave, I'm derailing your thread here, I'll stop about the good ol' days now ;)
 
Yeah im really envious of all this ganking i hear about in the older mmos where you would literally rob people blind and have a secret hide out etc and be known for your mischevious deads... ah well. I hope we can build fleet bases at some point.
 
Frenzy said:
I stated instancing was needed at present because the reason it was implemented in wow was because of performance issues and i believe this is the same reason for sto.
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The only instancing in wow is in in dungeons/raids and in phased areas, where instancing is necessary because players at different points in the story need to see the world a different way.

Apart from that I don't believe there's any instancing in WoW. And considering what EVE can do with a single shard with no instancing, I don't see why STO didn't go down the same route, other than a lack of desire to spend more time and money building the architecture.
 
I can understand the episodic instanced bit, normally you don't have giant fleets in one area unless its a war or borg invasion... What I don't understand, and perhaps its an open beta thing (i.e. only one sector and if everyone was in the same sector it would be crowded!), is why Sector Space is instanced. Sector space should operate like in EVE and I would rather it be a sandbox environment where you have to fly distances to reach anywhere, and then load a system up.

So far I am enjoying it though and having played the BETA of Eve and others, I think its not so bad... The only really problem is that the other MMOs are quite polished now after years of use they are compared unfairly.
 
Xenoxide said:
The only instancing in wow is in in dungeons/raids and in phased areas, where instancing is necessary because players at different points in the story need to see the world a different way.

Apart from that I don't believe there's any instancing in WoW. And considering what EVE can do with a single shard with no instancing, I don't see why STO didn't go down the same route, other than a lack of desire to spend more time and money building the architecture.
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Well ok, systems/missions are basically dungeons. Fleet actions are raids. Sector space is traveling continents. Its basically the same... How can you say i dont believe theres any instancing in wow apart from that, then say sto has instancing everywhere =/

Now i have realised im being "thick" yeah i just realised that even sector space is instance and so is sol etc... your right, there is too much instancing!

But as others have said it should have been like eve. Not this annoying sector space crap :(
 
Frenzy said:
Loading times for me are less than a second, granted im using raid 0. Instancing was introduced to cope with the sheer number of players trying to do one thing, im afraid instancing is a result of progress. You are being very unrealistic expecting new mmos to have no instancing. The sooner you get used to it the sooner you can enjoy the newer mmos coming out. There are probably the same amount of loading times in wow, and it is far more laggy.
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I really dont see how its very unrealistic to expect it at all. Both UO and Daoc had several thousand people simultaneously playing without the need for heavy instancing. As far as I'm aware the number of people simultaneously logged into a "modern" MMO is still roughly the same as back then. I wont get "used to it" because frankly I find that it destroys the MMO immersion feeling that I had for so many years in UO (greatest MMO ever imo) and Daoc. Even if the population size had to suffer I frankly wouldnt mind as it would enhance the game for me to not have instancing.

I vastly preferred the community present and feeling of a server in UO with 3000 people simultaneously playing than I get from most "modern" MMOs

Frenzy said:
You dont have to get to lt11, but this is an mmo. Usually mmos have leveling based systems. The reason for these systems is to introduce a sense of "progress". If you found it boring leveling up to this try using your imagination when playing the game, like you do in books. Or groups with friends, perhaps even pvp. MMOs give you the tools but you create the experience.
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"Usually" is the key word here. Like I say, they could have thought outside the box. UO didnt have character levels and was by far the best MMO I ever played. As for the tools, in my experience MMOs today actually give you far less "tools" than MMOs did in the golden days. 13 years ago in UO I was able to sit in a chair, play chess ingame, dye my furniture which I had crafted by cutting down trees and far far more. Can I even sit in a chair in STO, actually sit in it..not on it? 13 years later?

Frenzy said:
This up to you as an individual, personally i feel like you are missing out. I think wow has made it incredibly difficult for new mmos to launch. People forget that wow was probably worse than STO beta, the improvements came with community suggestions and new content. Again this would not be possible without the subscriber base.
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I'm not missing out, nor will I be bullied into buying the game just because its seemingly impossible to not like it. I've tried it, I tried hard to convince myself to like it (which in my opinion is something you should never have to do with anything). I'm not overly fussed about WoW, WoW also wasnt the right MMO for me, as I say UO and Daoc were the two peaks of MMO gaming from the last 13 years imo.

Frenzy said:
You keep saying this throughout the post, we get it! you dont like it in its current state!
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Yes I did harp on about that a bit didnt I :) Not surprising though when it seems that there is something wrong or shortchanged about not liking it. You'll note that I have never said for anyone else to not get it, always best for each person to try it for themselves. Some people like themepark MMOs, some prefer sandbox. No way to know til you try.

Frenzy said:
I think you need to open up your expectations a bit more, if you can name some new mmos that are exactly what you want then fair enough.
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I would love to be able to, but unfortunately I cant. I dont think MMOs have continued in the right direction for me to say that any of the new MMOs are what I want. UO was so very very close to what I want, hence why I consider it to be the best MMO I ever played. Daoc was also a very very good MMO. Since then though, its all gone in very much the wrong direction for me, becoming overly linear, hugely restricted on what you can actually do, less social, less community orientated and with far less features and freedoms in the games. For me the golden era of MMOs was the late 90s and very early 2000s the time of UO, Daoc and to a lesser extent AC.

So sadly I cant name any new ones as being what I want. All I can say is UO and/or Daoc.

Frenzy said:
ultima online for a couple of months but couldnt afford the phone bill at the time as i was like 12 years old.
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I feel for you on this and I mean that sincerely..tbh I feel for every MMO fan who didnt get to experience the sheer brilliance of UO in its prime.
 
Sleepery Said “Eve is truly sandbox -.... stations change hands and player stations appear and disappear, gates between star systems are set up and destroyed.”
Stations/outposts cannot disappear once built they are invincible and always there. You can take over someone else’s stations and outposts but not make them disappear. Gates between star systems cannot be setup or destroyed.
 
Not the actual gates, the player made links between systems, can't remember the correct term for them now.

Edit - Jump bridges.

Also, POS's disappear all the time, or did the last time I played :confused:
 
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Instancing is a necessary evil with a single "server" setup.
Wow has bugger all instancing because theres 50+ servers per region to spread the playerbase instead.
EVE technically is instanced in so much as every station and star system is a different instance, it just so happens instead of multiple Jita instances theres only one for everyone (hence the lag when its over crowded)

Yes the shear number of load screens on STO is a bit annoying but this whole rose tinted glasses outlook about instancing is just as bad.
Maybe they could make sector space one single instance but then you'd just get whining that space looks stupid because theres so many ships trying to fly around.
 
Im newish to mmo's. Tried WoW, gave it a good go, but hated it.

However, as this game is Star Trek based i was determined to give this genre another try - and i am enjoying it, even if i am the only one judging by the forum posts (particulaly the offical ones!)

I do have a problem however, and that activating multiple abilities whilst in combat. It looks like my left hand is having an epiletic fit when trying to activate all the weapons, buffs and steer/ walk. Atfer a period of time it starts to ache.

I guess this will only get worse as more and more weopons/ buffs/ skill become available to me for use.

So i was thinking... would i benefit from a proper gaming keypad or mouse? I have looked at the Razer Naga and the logitech G13. Are these worth it? If so, which one would be better?

My username: 139sroberts. Char name: Tiberious. ship name: uss Roberts
 
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139sroberts said:
Im newish to mmo's. Tried WoW, gave it a good go, but hated it.

However, as this game is Star Trek based i was determined to give this genre another try - and i am enjoying it, even if i am the only one judging by the forum posts (particulaly the offical ones!)

I do have a problem however, and that activating multiple abilities whilst in combat. It looks like my left hand is having an epiletic fit when trying to activate all the weapons, buffs and steer/ walk. Atfer a period of time it starts to ache.

I guess this will only get worse as more and more weopons/ buffs/ skill become available to me for use.

So i was thinking... would i benefit from a proper gaming keypad or mouse? I have looked at the Razer Naga and the logitech G13. Are these worth it? If so, which one would be better?
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Most people are in-game having fun - the trolls have the run of the official boards. Don't worry, based on the fact that their servers are full - well, it says a lot.

Bind all of your weapons to a single keyboard button. I have fire all weapons set to the space bar (in options). Don't forget you can have some weapons on auto fire.

Can't answer the rest of your questions, but glad you are enjoying it. Feel free to leave your username here (to be added to the first post) if you havent already :)

I am curious whether those would be any good too.
 
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