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Originally posted by Volcanon:
Also, I usually play games for years. I still play old Bungie games like Myth II and Marathon online. And Starcraft 1 once in a while. I probably paid $100 total for SC and it's expansion when it came out. $100 is, what, a bit more than six months of WoW (if it's $15/mo)? And then after that I don't have the game anymore. Or anything I "accomplished" therein. For Starcraft that would mean I'd have had to have paid something like $2400 by now.

Gets worse when you think about those NES games I had in the '90s and still own now and play once a year or something.

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I'm not like that. I'm extremely picky, to the point that most games don't last me even 5 hours with rare exceptions. RDR is supposed to be a 15 hour game without going online or any DLC; I played it for 8 hours offline and 2 hours online before getting bored. The games I love, though, I spend months on. Morrowind I spent an average of 6 hours a day for four months playing.

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Originally posted by Tranderas:
I'm not like that. I'm extremely picky, to the point that most games don't last me even 5 hours with rare exceptions. RDR is supposed to be a 15 hour game without going online or any DLC; I played it for 8 hours offline and 2 hours online before getting bored. The games I love, though, I spend months on. Morrowind I spent an average of 6 hours a day for four months playing.

The only games that I consistently return to are games for Gamecube or older, not on 360. Games in this gen have no replayability beyond your first playthrough and usually aren't even fun enough to justify that. I play Smash Bros Melee with my friends; I'm working on another run-through of Ocarina of Time while I try to perfect the infinite sword glitch and bombchu hovering; we have a save file on Harvest Moon and Mario 64 we work on occasionally. I mean, I think the golden age of games has long passed. Hopefully, Brink and the Star Wars MMO will change my mind, because if they can't, the future is bleak for what was, at one time, my favorite hobby.

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See that's my point. If Morrowind was on a subscription service you'd have spent more than even the full retail price on it. I think I played Morrowind for about a month until I got bored of the fetch quests and the fact that there's no real fast travel.

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Originally posted by Tranderas:
if morrowind was on a pay service at 15 a month plus the initial cost to buy it, i would have spent $120 to play it for 400 hours. I don't think I need to show you the math- you're smart enough to know that'd still be an amazing deal.

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Also, I noted that I played Morrowind for 400 hours for $60. I did not, however, note how much I've played WoW and Runescape. I gave a conservative estimate of how much an average person would play for purposes of illustrating how good the deal is to play MMOs.

In the past two days I've played Runescape more than my conservative weekly estimate I used to illustrate the value of MMOs. I don't keep exact tallies; but I can extrapolate based on my experience gain in the skill I'm working on during any given day.

Yesterday, I earned 280,000 experience in the Magic skill. The spell I'm using to train Magic is High-Level Alchemy (aka high alch). I can alch 1,000 items in an hour, at ~60 xp per cast, and spend roughly 1/3-1/2 as much time as I spend alching doing other, less boring things. So, I had about 5 hours worth of training done and spent 2-3 hours doing other stuff throughout the day. And I played for 3-4 hours Saturday when I came back, trying to figure out the changes made since I left.

Besides MMOs being at least as good value-wise as RPGs, they also hold a distinct advantage for a picky gamer: Once you find one you like, you'll be able to invest infinite time in it. I'm picky, and even when I find a game I like, it's over far too quickly (Golden Sun on game boy advance comes to mind...). I end up having to keep buying and renting and selling and buying and renting and borrowing, struggling to find a game that fits my criteria. With an MMO, I just play it until I'm exhausted with it, take a month or two off to explore other things, then come back. No having to experiment because I already know it works. The time I save alone is worth the money each month.

It's rather silly to use my illustrative examples to try to disprove my own theories... I suppose if you wanted real numbers, you could have just asked.

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Originally posted by Tranderas:
my Brink preorder won't be here on release day (today). I fixed it, and got a $10 gift card from them for their mistakes on two consecutive orders. I'm watching a stream of Brink right now, and it looks pretty solid. It's like Team Fortress 2's class structure and fast pace with Mirror's Edge's movement. I encourage you guys to at least give it a try.

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Originally posted by Tranderas:
I played Morrowind for 400 hours for $60. I did not, however, note how much I've played WoW and Runescape.

In the past two days I've played Runescape more than my conservative weekly estimate I used to illustrate the value of MMOs. I don't keep exact tallies; but I can extrapolate based on my experience gain in the skill I'm working on during any given day.

It's rather silly to use my illustrative examples to try to disprove my own theories... I suppose if you wanted real numbers, you could have just asked.

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There's also a points at which these calculations become silly.

If we do a rating based on hours played/cost of the game, you might find that some RPG where you have to constantly farm monsters for levels for hours on end gives you more value, but spending 20 hours per level to get to the point where I can play with non-AI characters (would those be NNPCs?) isn't indicative that the game is more enjoyable and fun, just that you have to spend lots of time grinding. Meanwhile, Portal 2 just came out and from what I hear from my friends is that the ratio of hours spent playing the game to cost of the game is extremely low, but very few regret buying the game because every hour is really fun.

I spent over a thousand hours on Advance Wars for the DS because I wanted to get every single medal and a perfect 300 rating on every map in the war room, but that doesn't mean that this game is far superior to FF3, which I've played far fewer hours, but spent relatively the same amount of money.

Also, if we start counting games like League of Legends, you could spend no money playing the game and even if you only played one match, you'd have an infinite rating under this system (or inversely, if we made a rating of money spent / hours spent playing the game, we want a ratio as close to 0 as possible. You could achieve a perfect rating of 0 if you never bought any riot points).

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Originally posted by yakusoku:
There's also a points at which these calculations become silly.

If we do a rating based on hours played/cost of the game, you might find that some RPG where you have to constantly farm monsters for levels for hours on end gives you more value, but spending 20 hours per level to get to the point where I can play with non-AI characters (would those be NNPCs?) isn't indicative that the game is more enjoyable and fun, just that you have to spend lots of time grinding. Meanwhile, Portal 2 just came out and from what I hear from my friends is that the ratio of hours spent playing the game to cost of the game is extremely low, but very few regret buying the game because every hour is really fun.

I spent over a thousand hours on Advance Wars for the DS because I wanted to get every single medal and a perfect 300 rating on every map in the war room, but that doesn't mean that this game is far superior to FF3, which I've played far fewer hours, but spent relatively the same amount of money.

Also, if we start counting games like League of Legends, you could spend no money playing the game and even if you only played one match, you'd have an infinite rating under this system (or inversely, if we made a rating of money spent / hours spent playing the game, we want a ratio as close to 0 as possible. You could achieve a perfect rating of 0 if you never bought any riot points).

That's only using comparable games. I could compare World of Warcraft and say that a teenager playing non-stop on the weekends and every day after school until he goes to sleep will never get the kind of return that a secretary in an office gets by playing Freecell during her lunch break with NO monetary investment. I don't think anyone is going to argue that Solitaire is superior to all other video games because it's free.

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The point is, MMOs are a bad deal relative to other games, not relative to free games. Especially when so many of them are grind-heavy.

Or look at Blizzard games. Free online multiplayer, even if Blizzard.net is wonky for older games. Now we've got EA talking about charging an additional fee for online on top of the XBOX monthly fee.

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Originally posted by shaselai:
i rented brink today and gonna try it tonight. So i played it and dont like it very much. The gameplay reminds me of MAG but single player is horrible with the bad AI. On some "fetch" objectives my members go off and capture/recapture command bases instead of helping me so i end up having to fight 4-5 guys who are guarding the object and after i kill them and try to run out i get shot by the respawns and rinse repeat. I think the respawn rate is way to high that some of the objectives are very annoying to accomplish...

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Couldn't agree with you more. The customization for your character is amazing, and i hope more fps games take note of this, but the actual combat gameplay is very much lacking. Add in blah environments, and how engineers are OP in general, and you get an unbalanced game. I also HATE the "fast running" for the light characters. Half the time I am sprinting it is between cover, and most of the time I end up leaping onto and over the cover because of their stupid "smart" movement system.

I also wish it took more than 1 hour to unlock every single gun and attachment... they just feel like the differences between them have little to no impact on the game. The audio is also completely glitchy as well. A bit more polish, intuitive level design, and balancing would have made this game far better.

The gameplay is reminiscent of TF2 in a good way. That medics give downed players a syringe to heal themselves instead of auto-reviving them is smart, as an over-eager medic could kill your KD and your chances of winning the game by reviving you against your will in BC2.

More games need to incorporate unlocking items for use online in the offline game modes. Challenges are fun, although not terribly challenging (the exception being the Objective This! mission, where on two stars I was totally unable to hack the hack box as there were four enemies camping the box and my AI teammates wouldn't attack them). Parkour was a wonderful idea.

Malice, do you know you don't have to use SMART to sprint? Just tap the SMART button and you'll run without using SMART to hop over everything (in fact, the instruction manual says that with practice, running/ducking/jumping yourself is faster than using SMART; i can't see people ever taking off the training wheels though). I didn't run into many circumstances where I wanted it off, though.

i wouldnt give 8/10... i prob give 6/10. If they actually had "orders"(why they didnt is beyond me) where your guys can flock to objectives then it might be more enjoyable but now it isn't especially with the high spawn rates. This is really a game meant for human teammates not AI.

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Originally posted by Thanos:
PSN back up today...finally.

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Lol i was playing xbox live all week

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Originally posted by stu55:
I have the slayer role for my call of duty games with my 2 teams, and man, after the past few days, it felt good to put 4 games in a row with a 2+ KDR....ran it down from like 1.75 to like 1.4 over the past few days since the network went up...it was bad

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Originally posted by stu55:
I have the slayer role for my call of duty games with my 2 teams, and man, after the past few days, it felt good to put 4 games in a row with a 2+ KDR....ran it down from like 1.75 to like 1.4 over the past few days since the network went up...it was bad

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dang son...

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Originally posted by Malice327:
MLG teams stu, or do you just play the slayer role on a team with friends in pubs? On MLG, a 1.75 or even 1.4 kdr is good against competative teams

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Its pub right now, I think it isn't higher because of A) My refusal to use Reflex over Red Dot scope and B) Having a low sensitivity setting.

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Originally posted by joz:
dang son...

thats some low KDR, I was hitting 3.0+ with a shotgun!

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LOL... yah... in what, 1 or two games on maps like summit where shot guns are actually decent?

Stu specifically stated that he plays the slayer role on his "team". Teams don't use shotguns... shotguns are for pubs and scrubs matches where you're just looking to dick around. Anyone can corner hump in kowloon with a silenced spaz, which on TDM might be ok for your team, but for any other game type, not really. I am assuming that if stu is playing the slayer role, that 2-3 others on his team would be doing the same, and at least 1 or 2 as Obj. The BO team that won the last MLG event, or even the Halo Reach team, if they go positive, and win, then good. No one tells anyone in optic (3rd) or Quantic Leverage, or status quo, that their 1.2 Slayer KD was bad.

@ Stu do you normally have a preference for reflex over red dot? They don't do anything functionally different. Some guns I like one, some the other, as depending on the gun, the site can have more or less mass on the scope obscuring your vision when ADS

After B is captured, A moves up and B dies to set up better classes to defend...usually works out well.

Thoughts?

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Originally posted by Malice327:
[B]LOL... yah... in what, 1 or two games on maps like summit where shot guns are actually decent?

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BFBC2

http://bfbcs.com/stats_pc/Jozy/history

Which doesn't show the last week were I started shotgunnig elusively for 3+kdr

but whatever. p.s. I uninstalled the game last night cause it has to many hackers now.

I'd also like to point out how much of a boost in my gaming skill a monitor can make (11-25-10, to 11-26-10)