saluk

@FireWraith I like both pay 2 pay and cash shop models, but neither are ultimately fair, and both economic models have some negative effect on the game design. With pay 2 play, they are trying to keep your subscription, so there is an incentive to draw out the content to such lengths that it is not fun. Having small amounts of content that you either repeat or that takes many many hours to complete is one way to keep players paying longer. This also means that the game unfairly rewards those players who have the time to actually proceed in the game versus those players who can only play a few hours a day.

Cash shop of course has its own downsides. It unfairly rewards richer players, as well as encouraging gameplay to be drawn out and grindy to encourage paying to make the game more fun. As you mentioned.

Really the only way to make a good game is for the developer to work around the limitations of the model. With the box purchase model, in theory, that should offset some of the need to support the game through the cash shop, with the cash shop only being a supplemental amount of income. In theory :) There is also the 5 year development costs they have to recoup, GW2 was much more expensive than GW1, and they are going to have much higher support costs...

So yeah, all concerns are warranted.

@Rilman Yeah, I like cel shading when it feels like it's meant to be there, the way this was designed it feels like they made a normal looking game and then slapped on a dumb shader for kicks.

@NightlyNews Too true. On the other hand, fighting against the Nazi's did in fact lead to a lot of advances, which is more applicable to this experience as well. Computers and the internet are built on ideas discovered by the people trying to break nazi codes! Still, I don't see these attacks doing much but causing aggrivation.

I think it's funny you people saying it's a terrible game when you haven't been able to play. Obviously they misjudged the amount their servers could handle versus the demand, but this kind of thing is exactly what open beta is for! If they are in crunch mode right now, which I'm sure they are, you'll have to cut them some slack from being a bit tight lipped about it. At least they were smart enough to triage the problem by temporarily cutting off signups.

Anyway, I'm actually pretty sure the game is terrible and square is going to handle the release badly, but as always, you have to expect problems with beta and getting hissy about it when things go wrong is not getting the point.

I think wave was a good tech demo, and some of the ideas behind it are great. Where it failed was in the packaging. How to use it, and why you would use it, are not immediately clear from the interface. Some of the coolest things, like the live searching and public waves, are hidden behind clunky interface commands that are hard to remember. Not only is the interface clunky, but it's god awful slow. I could see myself using it a lot more if i didn't feel like i was working on a 20 year old computer while using it. Browser freezes/crashes, long load times for bigger waves, almost no navigation features within a wave. Arg. There were a lot of things I liked about it, but I just can't bring myself to open it any more.

There was supposed to be a feature to turn off the character at a time. At least during the preview period, everyone kept asking where this feature was. I don't know if they ever added it, but I was getting bad vibes even then since such a simple feature as that was not being developed.

The ideas may be good, but the implementation fell very flat. This one needed to be in the cooker a few more years before being unveiled I think. Now the reputation is a bit tarnished, I don't see them being able to save it.

Your criticisms are really rediculous this early in development. I'm sure even the first matrix was full of a bunch of shots of green at this point - heck, they probably hadn't finished the script...