Massively

What really, truly, absolutely matters to me. And listen up you marketing devils who are spying on these comments, is having combat that doesn't involve auto-attacking shit, I want to be able to create combos and control each of my attacks manually.

And not in some terrible ass Age of Conan fashion, I mean action game style, why in the Hell hasn't that happened yet in an MMO is beyond me, but I seriously doubt ANYONE in their right mind wants auto-attacking over light attack, light attack, heavy attack three hit combos, and of course, MUCH MUCH deeper combos than that.

For the love of God, if you're truly a "next-gen" MMO, and you have more of the same combat, I'm not playing your damn game.

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I didn't play KOTOR at all, all I know about it is from watching friends play. But from what I saw, combat generally paused while you made combat decisions, and then resumed to play out.

Considering MMOs don't work with the pause-and-act method of single player RPG play, can we just expect a more steady, standard MMO combat pace?

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smugglingplskthxbai

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This is a little bit of a tangeant but...

From my initial impressions and reading other comments on this game I think this game is going to suffer from what I would like to dub "The Warhammer Effect".

Basically the effect is like this....

1. MMO gains large hype and momentum from IP, timing, companies previous experience.
2. MMO launches with huge initial player surge from the above and people who are 'bored' from WoW and looking for new MMO. The game maker appropriately launches a proper number of servers in response to this.
3. The 'bored' WoW players who instantly miss WoW and their character, players who only played because of the IP, and the normal attrition of player lose hits relatively quickly. Quality of game will affect this rate but it'll always be a net loss as there's no way a company can fully fill the expectations of the above audiences.
4. While the total remaining player bases is quite high many initial servers become barren or lower population. This accelerates player decline on said servers as playing an MMO on a low population server is not as engaging as a healthy server.

At this point the company has been hit by the effect. They're stuck in a catch-22. Their two main option both have drawbacks. One option is they can leave their wide number of servers and continue to lose people on the barren servers + have a small number of people spread bad word of mouth because they didn't enjoy the game on their empty servers. The other option is to do server merges/transfers. This helps slow the attrition of players as people will be on healthy population servers but it doesn't stop the bad word of mouth from players who have left. It also sends out bad signal. Players will think that the MMO is 'dieing' and not worth their time.

So either way the company is somewhat screwed in the short term. It's only with good support, high level of polish, and continued monitoring of server population that they can begin repair their reputation even though they did nothing wrong to damage it in the first place.

With a doubly-so popular IP (both in terms of being KOTOR and Star Wars), setting other than high fantasy and a very well respected development team I think they're absolutely doomed to hit this effect.

There's no way a 1st time MMO developer can avoid all the pitfalls of MMO development and hope to launch a WoW-polished game (as it is now not as it was at launch). And unless you can accomplish that I don't think you stand a chance at building a huge player base without hitting this effect.

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All they are screwed on about is if they full a Conan on us.

Either tell us the truth or dont say anything.
Hype is good - as long as it's the truth. dont hype it up to rake up sales, that doesn't work for MMO's!

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