🚀 go-pugleaf

On 18/03/2012 12:48 PM, Rin Stowleigh wrote:
> On Sun, 18 Mar 2012 09:10:25 -0400, David Lamb<dalamb@cs.queensu.ca>
> wrote:
>> On 17/03/2012 8:00 PM, Rin Stowleigh wrote:
>>> On Sat, 17 Mar 2012 16:41:45 -0700, John Slade<hhitman86@pacbell.net>
>>>>        What everyone seems to want to do is be the next WOW. Well
>>>> WOW already has that market and anyone else trying to get into
>>>> it will probably fail.
>>
>> Not relevant to Skyrim, but: wouldn't a change of genre, e.g. to science
>> fiction, make a difference?
>
> There was a lot of speculation this big MMO project might be a Fallout
> series world instead.  Personally I wish it was.  But a setting that I
> prefer does not necessarily mean it would be a better or more
> successful game.  I played some "wasteland" themed MMORPG about 5
> years or so ago, and it was so horrible that I can't even remember the
> name of it [side note, I noticed that Wasteland 2 is in development...
> maybe I'll post a second thread for that one]
>
> Its been known for a while that they've been staffing up in areas that
> made it clear MMO was one direction the company was headed.  During
> the hiring process you can only prevent word of mouth to a limited
> degree.  What nobody knew before now was whether it would be an Elder
> Scrolls type game, a Fallout game, something else, etc.  Looks like
> the recent success of Skyrim might have helped them make up their
> minds.
>
>>> ...Now his server shows up in the server list, but when people join they get
>>> client mismatch errors.
>>
>> Can't the server list include the server version?
>
> Well it could, and games have used this to varying degrees of failure
> in the past.  ... What ends up happing is people just set
> their filters to exclude hits for non matching versions, then there is
> no motive to go back and clear the filter once in a while.  This means
> they end up playing on Admin Joe's server forever, and forming all of
> their opinions of the game based on the way it plays on his server.

Hmm.  I'm a programming geek so keep trying to think of technical 
solutions, even to things that are basically social problems.  The 
filter issue for selecting versions could be partly automated, if I 
understand the problem correctly, by only showing you servers compatible 
with your current client, and if you were considering upgrading your 
client for some reason, only then would you have to consider a larger 
list of what servers (and version numbers) were out there.

>
>>> The game is not going to be fun if a clan can set up cheat-capable servers
>>> for their people to level up, then folks with ungodly powers can go to
>>> any other server and abuse (or just have the upper hand on) the
>>> mainstream crowd.
>>
>> Disallow character transfer between servers?
>
> ...that is catastrophic, because most people want to
> develop their character, meaning that even if you don't have the
> server/client mismatch problem I described above, you have a bigger
> problem in the sense that when Admin Joe ...  server goes down and the
> character you worked for months on is gone forever.
>
> There are of course ways around every problem.  ...  There was ranked mode and player
> mode, dedicated servers and non dedicated servers.

Some kind of 2-level thing like that might wind up being acceptable. Was 
there a reliable way to tell which servers hadn't been modified?