The online racing simulator
Questions about masively multi player online games
I'm thinking about buying one of these but I don't want to buy the wrong one. From looking around the gaming stores I've seen a few that are probably on the short list:

1) Ever Quest
2) Dungeons & Dragons Online
3) World of Warcraft

Now, from talking briefly with guys I went to university with I know that World of Warcraft has different servers and once you start on one, you're stuck on it forever. At least that was how I enterpreted it. Can someone verify this and add any other information that might be useful to me please?

- Also, what are the fees for different games?
- How many people are playing which games?
- How many people are on a server at a time?
- Do I have a time limit per day, week, or month?
- Can other stronger characters come and kill me and take my stuff when I'm low level?
- I know EverQuest has many different add-ons or versions. Are they compatible with each other or do I chose only one to play?

Any other information that I haven't asked about that anyone can offer will be appreciated as well.

Thank you,

speedfreak227
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(thisnameistaken) DELETED by thisnameistaken
WoW has a few million players and the servers always have people in them. There is no time limit. You cant take other players stuff. You'd have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to get killed by higher players. Im not sure what WoW costs as my brother pays for it not me. I havent played any other games so i cant compare. WoW is time consuming and is addictive. I started playing yesterday and quickly wasted about 3 hours of my life when it felt like one hour.

You can create as many characters as you want on as many servers as you want but its not easy to transfer a character to a different server.
In WoW you are not stuck on a server forever. You can migrate your character to another server, but it will cost you.

-6 months' WoW subscription is around the equivalent of CAD 100.
-Loads of ppl play WoW, it's the biggest one.
-Again, plenty, I don't know what the actual limits are but there will always be plenty of people on WoW servers.
-No time limits in WoW, you can play as much as you like during the period of your automatically renewing subcription. There is scheduled server maintenance once a week I think on Wed nights when you can't play.
-Other player characters can and cannot attack you depending on what type of server you choose. On PvP servers I believe they can provided you are not in a major city. On PvE(nvironment) servers you can only fight other player characters by challenging them to a duel which they must accept, or in specific places where that's the whole idea (e.g. Warsong Gulch).

*edit: Roleplaying. You don't have to do it if you don't want to. There are servers dedicated to roleplaying (both PvP and PvE) where it is expected and you'll get flamed for not doing so. On non-RP servers you'll be wasting your time RP'ing, although on the rare occasion a willing PC will play along even on non-RP servers.

Might add some stuff if I remember something important..
World of Warcraft is the biggest MMO hit in the history. More than 6 000 000 people already own it, and play it. My friend has just bought a copy and he said, that it'll cost him 12-15 $ (can't remember the exact price :o ) a month. If I remember correctly then WoW also has a trial version. Also there is Guild Wars where you don't have to pay monthly for the game.
Wow is a great game and you WILL enjoy it if you don't believe me then go and watch the Leeroy Jenkins video !! ^^
I played WOW at a friends place...most boring game ever IMO
Guild Wars is another one you should consider, big audience, no monthly fees, costs £18 one off payment.

Used to play it quite a bit, the problem is by the time you get to the last missions, theres nowhere near enough people to form a party so you end up sitting in a district for an hour just getting a party together.

Otherwise however its a really good MMORPG.
guild wars isnt an MMORPG from what i hear and from what i read on their website. I havent played it and i dont really understand the concept.

WoW can get incredibly boring you need a lot of patience.
How about www.Runescape.com ok graphically it doesnt compare but its quite fun! ohh and its free
#9 - Lible
Quote from Lible :OMG! The worst game ever.

care to elaborate more on that comment?
#11 - Jakg
Quote from Madman_CZ :care to elaborate more on that comment?

its boring and full of n00bs?

Used to be addicted, had a level 78 (?) character, but after it got "hacked" (aka someone saw my password) and i had everything (which was actually quite a lot) taken i realised it wasn't actually that fun, and gave the account away to someone who kept getting killed
Runescape is pitched at and designed for a younger audience. Everquest was the original MMO and I gather now there is a version II, it was bought by Sony and turned into a cash farming excercise. Forget the monthly cost that is nothing, it is the relentless pace of expansions that will cost you the money and believe me there is absolutely no point playing the game without them because the moment a new expansion is released your old gear is no good, everyone is on the new continent/dungeon, and a single vital aspect (1 per expansion) will be missing from your character.

I haven't played the D&D one. WoW to me seems like Everquest only with a slightly more honest business model.

Both Wow & EQ are split into three parts, leveling up - this is dead fricken boring and involves repetitive gameplay. A bit like playing tic tac toe, it's dead fricken easy and is designed to be as asseccible as possible so that nobody is 'excluded' from paying their monthly fee.

Eventually you will have done all your levelling up and you're left with the two other aspects, getting cool gear: You do this by joining a guild and going on raids. For me this was always the point of the games and as an EQ player years ago I was in one such guild that was quite high up on the server and killing monsters most couldnt, so I can assure you guild life only rewards the most dedicated players.

If you cannot "raid" at leat 5 times a week you wont get the cool gear, there's 30 odd people on a guild raid event (more in some guilds known to 'zerg' to get the job done), a typical night might yield 1 or 2 very nice items and 3 or 4 bits of trivial rubbish.

For those who dont have the time and commitment to join a raid guild, because they need to eat and play LFS for example, there's option 3. You can instead take the trade route and do endless mouse clicks and bartering to earn the money to improve your characters equipment. Ironically this is as close to roleplaying as these games get.

All these games reward online time more than player skill. Never be jealous of a hero walking around in the tons of the best equipment in the game or who is high level, having played at the cutting edge of one of these games I can tell you most of them are twats.
Quote from Lible :OMG! The worst game ever.

From what I hear it's full of twats, cockheads, cheaters and cyberpervs.

MMORPGs are to be avoided IMO.
Quote from cs_drag :hey there how about counter strike

Fails in two points (off the top of my head, I'm sure others can add to the list):

1. It's not MM
2. Worst. community. EVER.
I was playing EVE quite a bit a while back. As far as actual Role playing goes I think it's one of the best. But it does take some getting into and the learning curve is quite steep. But it can be very rewarding given some time and effort. It's a single server system so everyone playing (Which is quite an astronomicl amount) is right there in the same universe as you. It's comminity system is great and the job creation process is incredable detailed and involving.

I won't play WoW on Principle.
Quote from sil3ntwar :guild wars isnt an MMORPG from what i hear and from what i read on their website. I havent played it and i dont really understand the concept.

WoW can get incredibly boring you need a lot of patience.

Duno tbh, its an RPG, its online, and theres a whole load of players Never played WoW so I dont really know how they differ.
Just wondering why this thread is only one star?
Quote from thisnameistaken :IMO the "purest" MMORPG ever is Progress Quest, and it's free. I have a level 23 Talking Pony Robot Monk and a level 18 Double Hobbit Hunter Strangler.

Dammit, im now addicted to this game, cant stop playing it.
In one night I now have a level 12 double wookie b*star*d lunatic with level 5 hastiness. Must stop...so much still to do...must sleep...
Quote from mantis9 :Dammit, im now addicted to this game, cant stop playing it.
In one night I now have a level 12 double wookie b*star*d lunatic with level 5 hastiness. Must stop...so much still to do...must sleep...

is there a graphical interface? when i go to the link there are no screen shots.
and it's free right?

speedfreak227
Quote from speedfreak227 :is there a graphical interface? when i go to the link there are no screen shots.
and it's free right?

speedfreak227

yes its free ... and theres a nice 3d mode you just have to see for yourself
I like this concept. Suits my personality somewhat
http://www.theshiponline.com/


BTW I'd love it if someone based a MMORPG on Iain M. Banks' Culture novels - the universe he's created in those books is utterly begging for it. Banks fans, show yourselves - I know you're out there...
Quote from thisnameistaken :I think The_Angry_Angel is a big EVE fan, so there must still be something to it that I just don't "get"

If I had the option, I'd be living out in the middle of space, on my own little rust-bucket ship with internet access (yes, I'm a sad little geek, and I admit it ) EVE just lets me play that fantasy out every few months (I limit myself otherwise I tend to ignore everyone and everything else) Plus I now know so many characters in the place its fun to be on a 26 hop journey and run into a few old friends. I certainly dont know of any other game where you could run into any one of 30,000 people at anyone time!

Plus like Funnybear says, its a real big, breathing place with a great although with an inflated economy. I will admit that its hard to get your head around if you're not from the elite / planetarion / battlecruiser 3000 ad scene, but its definately worth it.

Originally EVE was designed so that your playing time wasnt the be-all and end-all to the game (wilth skills always being trained whether you are online or not, but for this you sacrfice the time it takes to complete; often the very high level skills can take months), unfortunately with the inflated economy it makes it very hard to start out now, with 30mil ISK being cheap for a reasonable sized unfitted cruiser To put this into perspective, this is effectively a "level 3" (theres no real scale of skills tbh, theres a very wide range which interact a lot) ship, where as a level up from the beginners ship can be picked up for less than 5000 ISK typically.

So whats wrong with WoW, etc.? Well they're not EVE (obviously). I grew out of hack and slash around about the D2 era, and WoW just seems to be that on speed. Everquest never really interested me much, although I know a lot of people who could rave on about it for years. Guild Wars took away the MMO bit, basically making it a 3D IRC channel, with options for very small co-op play. Matrix Online seemed good, then they nerfed it in the beta. Project Entropia had a good aim, and did well, then they arsed about with the GUI and killed the performance with recent versions, and didnt seem to improve the environment much (then again I did play it when there were hardly any people in-world). PE did have the interesting angle of being able to withdraw in-game cash into your real-life account - long before Second Life. City of Heros was good, although very hack and slash again, and somewhat buggy (getting stuck on fences was a big irritation after a week for me)

Unfortunately most of your questions are specific to the actual agreements of the game.
Quote from Hankstar :BTW I'd love it if someone based a MMORPG on Iain M. Banks' Culture novels - the universe he's created in those books is utterly begging for it. Banks fans, show yourselves - I know you're out there...

Ah, for the time and money to do so Any specific story line you were thinking of being able to adapt to an MMO?
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(thisnameistaken) DELETED by thisnameistaken
Quote from thisnameistaken :I used to love Elite when I was a nipper, that's why I tried EVE. But yeah I think part of what put me off was seeing how slow it was at the start, and the fact that loads of people seemed genuinely excited about mining. Even though I'm from Yorkshire I just can't get excited about mining!

lol, yeah that is a really big downside. A lot of people don't know there are missions and many other ways to make cash in-game Unfortunately it usually means theres a lot of ways to "die"
I was always getting pawned in my Cat whilst flying lvl 2 missions . . . . And the last time I played it my new cruiser (Next one up from a Catalyst, Imitar? No, Damnit. I can't remember, looks like a a big . . . something. Anyway.) got sniped by pirates on a lvl 1 security gate. Harsh realities of the Eve Universe that bastard Pirate tactic when they travel in groups, pawn you with a heavier ship then the others loot you once the security guns have taken out the aggresor. . . . Got pissed of then as I had run our of money so I've cancelled my subscription untill my patience has returned . . . .

But at least my characture will always be there . . . Klyborn, if anyone is interested. I was a . . . . . thingy race. You know . . . Caldari? Think thats right . . .

I'll see you Eve'ers when I can be bothered to get back on line . . .
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