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EVE I think suffers (suffered?) cruelly from arsehole players. The general shape of the EVE galaxy is such that there is a large area of civilised space, where law-breaking will very probably result in annihilation by (flanged, unkillable) police forces, and there is a large area of anarchic space, where the police do not appear. My experience of playing was that there would nearly always be powerfully armed pirate or gang players sitting in groups (for hours on end) just on the wrong side of the gates between safe space and unsafe space, and that they'd generally attack anyone trying to get through.
With a very light and very fast ship, you could generally zoom past them before they could react, but exploring in the unsafe areas was generally a matter of extreme tension and paradoxically extreme tedium (as it takes a very long time to get around), for very little gain; there's just not much to see in the EVE Universe. Maybe a dozen named landmarks and a large number of repetitive instanced areas.
On the plus side, there are nice spaceships to look at, rol-e-plai can be found if you look hard enough, and progression is not tied to killing things; the skill progression system is a function of time rather than slaughter. It does, however, seem designed to hook players (skill increase becomes slower and slower and much slower over time), but hey.
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I'd say my main gripe with online RPGs is that they tend to be translations of the dull formulae and rules-lawyer aspects of an "ordinary" RPG without managing any of the free-form elements. It's easy to transform a set of rules into a computer game; it's less easy to capture the spirit of those rules. Just the nature of the beast, really, but there's so many RPGs of a "kill things, get XP, get skills, kill things, get XP, get skills, kill things, get XP, get skills" nature; you might as well watch paint dry, in my opinion, especially if the only thing you're getting at the end of it is a shiny looking avatar.
Mind, I own freely that I hate complex rules systems, I'm biased and it's horses for courses; millions of people around the world enjoy or at the least tolerate the grind, grind, grind, so make y'r own minds up.
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Another gripe I have is that there's usually something of an imagination failure when it comes to combat, which tends to get slower and slower in direct proportion to the power levels of the characters involved, leading to what seem to me to be really silly fights. Especially in fantasy games, it's like:
"Ha! I am Conan, and I'll smite you with my mighty sword, o nasty Thoth-Amon."
Conan hits Thoth-Amon for 324 damage.
Thoth-Amon casts Flangebolt for 112 damage.
Conan hits Thoth-Amon for 418 damage.
Thoth-Amon casts Flangebolt for 124 damage.
Conan hits Thoth-Amon for 1299 damage. Critical hit!
Thoth-Amon casts Flangebolt for 93 damage.
Conan hits Thoth-Amon for 233 damage. Thoth Amon dies.
Conan has gained 34,100xp.
Yeah, right. Where'd I leave the Dulux?
(I'm not sure, but "Age of Conan", which is Funcom's next take on the genre, may deal with some of this in a better (for my money) manner. But he makes a good example!) |
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