Off-Week Update (for Ep. 18)
Sorry for missing the update for Episode 17. I was still in debate as to whether or not I wanted to do these vlog style yet, but I’m not entirely sure where I’d want to host them. Eh, this is still easier.
First off, a quick thing from last week, the views on World of Tanks were fairly low, but then again, I didn’t expect them to be that high. World of Tanks, at least outside of Europe, isn’t all that well known and it doesn’t sound like something most people would want to play. They’ve gotten a bit better, but it was just an odd thing I noticed. Still not nearly as bad as Fantasy Tennis. Tonight, La Tale goes up on TGWTG, so we’ll see how that pans out.
Speaking of La Tale, I really do enjoy it. It’s yet another game I want to keep playing but have no time for. I am having issue with the gamepad not working well, especially if my computer is being heavily taxed at the moment. I even bothered to downgrade Skype, and I forgot how terrible the old version is, when it comes to speed. So it’s either render it useless when playing La Tale, or work with an inferior version.
And of course, since La Tale landed so many reference to Maple Story, I did start hearing about the planes again. Yes, I know about the planes. You do know that cutting 10 minute flights to 5 minute flights are still about 4 minutes too long. It’s still a pointless repeating cloud background, right? At least in… yeah I’m going to say it.. World of Warcraft… At least in WoW, when you ride a gryphon, you’re given a nice scenic tour of the landscape. The longest possible gryphon flight you can take in the game is only 9 minutes long comparatively, and that’s travelling from the top of one continent to the bottom. And no one takes that flight if they know a mage or understand the boats. Speaking of, the boats of WoW are a ton more like the Orbis travel system in Maple and they only last a minute. You spend more time (usually a minute or two) waiting for the boat, and once it arrives it takes off fairly soon, travel slightly away from the pier and then.. amazing concept here, a loading screen shows your map marker travel to the next area and you arrive seconds later. And please please PLEASE stop telling me I can just walk through Aqua Road to El Nath and up Ludibrium tower or whatever (don’t correct me. I don’t care.) and it’s “much faster”, well if that doesn’t make the game’s travel sound even MORE broken I feel the players are just trying to rationalize an obviously broken system and pretend like it’s no big deal. When walking around the FUCKING PLANET is “faster” than taking a boat to a neighboring continent, something is seriously wrong with your travel design. I really wouldn’t mind it if it happened ONCE, but every time you need to go back and forth is utterly ridiculous. Long story short, shit’s broke man.
Of course, Maple Story and La Tale isn’t my next game, so I need to get onto working on the next one, as well as my side project coming up.
A couple questions for the site-going public…
1. Would anyone mind terribly if I deleted all the comments from the Suggested MMO List once I finally get around to updating it?
My reason for this is WordPress, as far as I can work it, doesn’t have a way to group comments properly, and since it seems most people would rather tell me what to play, instead of commenting on my videos themselves, (Seriously, Suggested MMO List has nearly 200 comments to my second highest commented page of 26 comments.) the page is FLOODED with comments, many of which are repeats, and cause WAY too much to load for anyone clicking the page. I’m not saying I don’t want anyone to comment on that page anymore, but at least read the list before making a suggestion. Hell, I’ve had more than one person asking me to review games I ALREADY REVIEWED. See why I doubt the sincerity of some of these suggestions?
What I’m getting at is… every time the list is updated, all comments below will be deleted. Yay or nay?
2. Would anyone object to or have interest in a “Terminology” page?
Speaking of projects I’ll probably never do, some might have noticed that I use terms in MMO Grinder that don’t always get defined. This is due to two reasons:
A.) I used the term in several episodes already and defined them previously.
B. ) I forgot.
So I figured the best way to get around this is to have a terminology page on here, where people can familiarize themselves with terms that MMO players, or perhaps even just myself, use on a common basis. Not entirely sure how I’ll set it up, but something I wanted to gauge interest in.
Oh and Aion is going free to play. I know Aion is going to free to play and it’s all I can do to board up my windows against up the storm of people who will spam me with “PLAY AION IT WENT FREE TO PLAY” that I’ll have flooding my inbox in the next week. Well I’m going to tell you two things right now.
YES. I will be reviewing it.
NO, it won’t be the minute it comes out.
Trust me, you have to let the initial fervor die down or the game will be completely unplayable. It’ll be choked with more gold farmers and new players looking to play and/or troll until the servers crash, and I don’t want to review a product when it’s learning the free-to-play ropes. I have previous experience with Aion, and those who watched Episode 0 might have noticed more than a few clips of the game in that video. Like Champions, and STO, Aion was another game I fell for the fervor of playing at near launch. While I did enjoy the game to pay for another month when first starting out I had a bunch of issues with it, and I’m very interested to see what’s changed over the years.
One final thing: The very first MMO I reviewed on the Grinder will be shutting down on the 27th. Say good bye to LUNA Online for me, ok?
Posted on March 21, 2012, in News and Updates. Bookmark the permalink. 35 Comments.
MMO Grinder 
I don’t see any issue with having the comments on that page deleted with every major update. It doesn’t stop people from renagging you about a specific game they want to see. You should have a note of disclaimer that clarifies you had read and considered all comments before they were deleted. Then nobody can complain that you deleted their comments specifically because you are ignoring them. If someone really cares about X game being covered they will recomment.
The terminology page would be a cool idea. I’ve always appreciated when you do define a term since 1 out of 4 of those you define I wasn’t aware of the commonly used term. I bet you could trick us as a whole into writing bits and pieces of it for you if you did some kind of contest on it. Based on how you talk about other folks in your reviews there are at least some people that like helping you. If it was a fairly well covered page I could see it turning into some kind of passive advertising since if done well it could be another way people get sent here.
Also dang, Luna was one of the things you covered that I wanted to try. How sad but suddenly being closed seems like the nature of any game that requires online support from its company.
I guess, although I still say:
“Suggested MMO list”
sounds more like mmo’s you recommend people play like the:
“Regardless this game is on my “not delete” list and I try to return to it as often as I can. Considering that this is something I’ve only done with 4 of the games I’ve covered on this show, that’s saying something. Trust me.”
comment in the La Tale review said.
I see what you’re saying there. Although I’m not sure what better way I could word that. I’m hoping people who look at the list could ascertain the context.
Perhaps rename it to “List of suggested MMO’s” or “to do list”. Then make a second list called “Grinder Recommends” with a list of MMO’s that you would actually recommend people play.
Possible Review MMO list? Something to indicate that it’s a list of upcoming reviews might weed out people suggesting games you already reviewed.
No, the reviews come off as unbiased in suggestion of whether or not one should play it. Why ruin that by adding a list of personal recommendations?
I agree with that.
Just leave the list as it is, or possibly link already-reviewed MMOs on the list.
I think instead of deleting all the comments. Deleting the repeats, ones you have already review and the ones you have just reviewed or are going to review would work better.
*I share your reviews with 600 people on Facebook & 250 people on Google+ that I neighbored specifically for gaming purposes. I’d like to think that SOME of them are the curious type who check out neighbors videos about games better than what’s available on FB & G+
*The travel in MS annoyed the fuck out of me when I first got to a level high enough to travel. My method was to avoid Orbis until I’d done EVERY quest on the starter island so I wouldn;t have to go back, then when I got to Orbis & they had people sending me back to the other, I let 10 or 20 aquire before the return trip & cooked dinner for 4 while the boat was traveling.
*Yeah, go ahead & delete em. You’ve got enough on your plate already with the list as long as it is. You could actually discourage MMO suggesting by saying that “until I ask for more titles, all suggestions will be deleted.”
*Never noticed you using terms I didn’t understand. I made a point to learn the MMO give before I started playing MMOs, unless it was terms used specifically by players of that game that didn’t really carry over into other games, but I can’t think of anything.
*Thanks for the heads up on Aion going FTP. That will be MMO #41. I love having a terabyte drive.
*Luna Online, was that on my list? Nope,. it’s Lunia that I haven’t tried yet.
Luna Online wasn’t a good game, but at least better than Holic was. I think it’s sad when even the worst MMOs shut down, thinking of all the work put into the game & the amount of people that will probably be out of work because of it. Then there’s the fact that no one ever makes a single player version of the MMO so players have a way to remember old times. Sometimes the games can be good, but get terminated when they’re barely a year old when the developers are liquidated or forced onto new projects by their publisher.
I’d love to see the comments cleaned out if you updated the MMO list.
As far as a terminology page goes, I’m all for it. While I’d normally say, “pffft, noobs should just google terms they don’t know!” …but I’d probably end up needing to look reference at a page like that every now and then. I consider myself a seasoned MMO player, but even I have a few stupid moments of ‘what does that word mean again?’.
well about the comment page i see no problem in clearing it up,in fact i’d suggest its done regularly as someone said preferably whenever you update the list,and one more thing on that subject since you seem to have added notes to the suggestion page in case you dont know and it interests you Elsword is a spiritual successor to Grand Chase(another game on your list)both are still running thou,kind of like Ragnarok and Ragnarok 2,im glad you did a review on La Tale i played it a few years ago when i wanted something like maple but with better character sprites and a better community as you said thou the beggining is quite boring and i gave up before lvl 20 specially because when i asked when you’d get a 2nd class someone told me only on lvl 80
and about the terminology page its not a bad idea if you dont stop putting the less known terms in the video,it sounds great to be something to check when you’re playing and someone use one of the terms,it would be bad if you had to pause the video to go to the page search for the term used and then resume the video.
Also i would like to ask what might be a slightly delicate question,do you have a particular opinion regarding Brazilian Players?its just that i am from brazil and a regular MMO player and well i know in some games some of us can be considered a plague on MMOs of sorts and i am just wondering if i just see that because well i am from Brazil or if that really is a general view.
The only plague is 13 year old boys in MMOs who have nothing better to do than spam & PK noobs. If you are over 13, Brazil is forgiven.
great series dood! first time commenter, long time fan.
to address your querstions:
1) yay to cleaning the comments.
2) yay to mmo terms page.
keep them coming ganster.
Ok so I know this is like 2 or 3 days late.
For hosting your vlog, why not just stick with Blip? Another possibility is to look into whatever player AngryJoe seems to be using lately, I want to say its either Viddler or Vimeo but Im probably wrong.
Comment deletion and terminology page is cool.
As for Luna, Im going to be honest here, Im neither sad nor surprised to see it go. Actually, I take that back, Im surprised it lasted as long as it did. I never understood why Gpotato picked up Luna. In terms of game mechanics, Luna didnt really bring anything new to the table. If players want to do monotonous mind melting mob grinding, they play Flyff. If players want to do monotonous mind melting mob grinding disguised as quest grinding, they have Rappelz. Luna didnt do the grinding any differently or any better. Which means what we have here is…….well…..the Mass Effect 3 endings. Slight variations in context but its essentially the same thing with different colors.
The thing that makes me laugh about the planes in Maple Story or La Tale is that it’s not just done in 2D MMOs. Final Fantasy XI does this shit too with it’s awful boats and airships. To switch continents you need to wait for a boat in Mhaura or Selbina, and the round trip time of a boat is 15 minutes. So if you are racing there and watch it leave, kiss 30 minutes goodbye. The airships go from the capitols to Jeuno every 11 minutes, but arrive in a bizzare rotation, so if you want to go from Windurst to San d’oria, it could take 20 minutes, but 30-40 for the inverse trip.
The reason they do this is pretty dumb too, it’s to encourage players to use the teleport spells, which only Whitemage gets, and those STILL don’t take you to towns, but areas 2 maps away from the town, full of mobs. So if you’re low level and can’t use the chocobos, they’re mostly pointless.
1) Definitely clean that page out. It’s got a lot of repeats, some are far too old, and it’s getting unwieldly.. One might hope that it would encourage people to look at the list closer but… I know not to expect too much.
2) A terminology page wouldn’t be bad. It could be a place to store all the terms you define in your videos, along with other terms that are far more common but are expected to be known.
3) It’s always sad when another soldier falls. Good night, Luna. Maybe you’ll rise again in the future.
I think both deleting the old posts, and a terminology page would be a good idea. Aion going F2P honestly surprised me a little. I know the game wasn’t huge outside Korea, but it still seemed to be doing decent over here. I enjoyed it myself for awhile, until I hit the big wall of grind. Still one of the best looking MMOs I have ever played graphics wise. May have to give it a try again.
Well, I had a nice post all written up and it went and imploded into itself. The short of what I’d written was:
Sad to to see LUNA go! As silly as it sounds, all those banner ads for it (as well as Fiesta) actually remind me of when I first started playing MMO’s. Too bad, I never found the time to play it.
Deleting the comments it cool. If it’s possible, I’d suggest setting up some kind of system that allows you to track suggestions via a form. If someone suggests a game that has already been reviewed, have the url for the review pop-up for them.
I love the Terminology/Lexicon page idea! If you decide to do, also include how various MMO’s use these terms. For example resources like Paragonwiki have a different definition for “Proc” compared to that used by WoW players or the original MUD definition.
Keep up the good work :D ! BTW, I’m totally mentioning your show in the MMO Worlds panel I’m doing for the Geek.Kon convention in Madson, WI this September (7-9th).
Yeah I just noticed that your last comment was eaten by the spam filter for some reason, but I approved it. I know that gives you a “double post” now but I’m fine with that given the circumstances.
I’m not sure if I’d be able to set up any kind of system like that to give preemptive warning to suggested MMOs and I’ll just have to hope people are willing to police themselves, or at least know how to use the CTRL-F feature.
Also a major preemptive thank you for your upcoming plug at that panel.
Yay! Thanks for recovering it!
“I’ll just have to hope people are willing to police themselves, or at least know how to use the CTRL-F feature.” You DO know that this is the internet you’re talking about. I think you’re expecting far too much.
First off, I am really sad to see LUNA go :( ! There’s so many MMO’s out there that I’d love to play, but have no time for. Every time I would look up a game at onrpg.com, I’d see LUNA ads (along with Fiesta), but just never found the time to try it. It seems silly when I think about it, but I’ve come to associate those banner ads with the time when I first was trying out MMO’s (cir. 2008).
I think cleaning out the comments on the Suggestions List would be fine, or maybe setting up rules, or a form for people to fill out. If the game has already been suggested, then that person’s form would either be rejected, or “added to the pile,” as in the number of times a game has been suggested could be recorded and kept private (if made public, it would quickly turn into even more of a popularity contest). If someone suggests a game that has already been reviewed, then that person’s form could be outright rejected with the phrase, “The game you are suggesting has already been reviewed.” Or maybe something funny. Maybe there could be a way of placing a link to the review in the pop-up phrase to direct that person. I have no idea how you would code this system or set it up in WordPress, though.
I think a Terminology/Lexicon page is a fantastic idea! I would even suggest incorporating video/or images of examples, such as “kiting” monsters. Also maybe mention how different games use terminology differently. For example, the term Proc, which comes from MUD’s and originally meant ‘spec_proc’ or ‘special procedure’. However those familiar with World of Warcraft define it as “Programmed Random OCcurrence.” But, since City of Heroes precedes WoW, resources like Paragonwiki prefer to use the definition stated by one of the NPC’s when describing the effects of a special Invention Origin Enhancement group. Procs in CoH mean “a procedure that has a chance of happening.” (Source: Paragonwiki [url]http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Invention_Origin_Enhancements[/url])
The example Paragonwiki uses is:
“Every time you fire your sniper power with the Toxic DoT Proc Enhancement slotted in it, there is a chance your target gets hit with a Toxic Damage over Time effect as well as the normal damage and effect of your Sniper attack.”
Keep up the good work :D ! BTW, I’m totally mentioning your show in my MMO Worlds panel at the Geek.Kon convention in Madison, WI this September (7-9).
I like the terminology page idea, it sounds very useful, but I hope people will take the time to read it and not ask the obvious questions when the answers are right there on that page. They probably won’t but oh well, we’ll just see. Also I want to let you know that the game I suggested, Wonderking, shut down its servers on December 29th, 2011, just in case you didn’t know. Just telling you before you do your update.
http://wk.ignitedgames.com/center/default.asp
I actually looked into Wonderking again as I was going to mention it for a bit of trivia that I wasn’t able to confirm, and dropped. It doesn’t look so much like Wonderking was shut down as it was in the middle of a spat with the developers and put on hiatus, but I didn’t care enough to look further into it. They were plugging their OTHER Maple Story clone, Wind Slayer 2 which looks meh as hell. Maybe I’m wrong.
Oh I’ve played Wind Slayer when I saw that Wonderking was gone and yeah, its incredibly meh. It’s got better control than the first Wind Slayer and the combat isn’t as stiff where you do an attack but you miss and you have to wait for your attack animation to finish before you can move. The enemy could kill you in so many hits since you had no recovery time and it was just so bad both my sister and I rage quit it before we got past level 10. But I stopped at level 21 in the second game since it was so boring and repetitive. I liked it mostly for their enemy designs since they were kinda unique but the armor was so bland, the level requirements are weird, the npcs are kinda hard to find. You get lost often so you keep having to open your map, potions drop every kill and the better combat made it so easy I never once got close to dying. I would recommend reviewing it just to tell people to not play it but it’s your choice, if you wanna put all maple clones to rest that is.
As far as the comments on the suggested list go: Go for it. Most of that is suggestions anyway, and it makes sense to clean up old suggestions as you tick them off or note them down. I may be biassed in that I suggested City of Heroes, which made the list, got reviewed and now has no place on the suggested MMOs list anyway, but I find the list itself should be the focus, less so the comments about it.
I agree that the comments on the suggested list could use a clean sweep. Especially with list updates. It would be a kind of visual cue that the list has changed and before commenting it might be a good idea to review it.
As for the terminology page, I don’t think one is necessary. There are websites dedicated to mmo terminology a quick google search away. Though I admit having a page for the more common terms couldn’t hurt.
Chaos D1, are you sure that LUNA online is getting shut down? I’ve tried looking for an article about it, but I have turned up nothing
Unquestionably. This is from the official LUNA page.
http://luna.gpotato.com/?m=compensation
Man, that’s just sad :(. Well, I guess they have to if they have a reason to do so, and they are at least compensating people who are longtime players of the game. Although I never played the game, I still feel sad when a company has to make a cut back on its game selections. Oh well. THanks for the info. I love your show, especially your world of tanks review. I hope to play that one when I get the time :)
1, I don’t mind the comments being deleted. It’s always good to clean house, I reckon
2. This is also a very good idea, especially for those who are only starting out. Considering the nature of the show, this would provide good supplemental material
3. Sayonara, Luna online.
I think it’s a great idea to delete all the comments every time the Suggested list is updated. Go for it.
Terminology page is a good idea too. I don’t see it would hurt anything, it I’m sure it would help people getting into MMOs out a hella lot. It took me MANY years to find out all the terminology that pretty much all MMOs use. Mostly because I never really asked. lol
Also, may I ask why the first episode is being taken down? I’m just curious.
The episode isn’t being shut down. The game is.
OHHHH! That makes a lot of sense. Mkay. :P