Shadowbane

[WrrLor]

Hey, just got into this game with an old friend. Wow, what a fantastic game.....old but still good. Free now, so can't beat the price. Anyone still messin around with this game, or have any info about it. Why did it never take off, or did it and I just missed it?

Good fun though in any case.

[Paragon]

Shadowbane , i remember reading the promos on it , and it looked very attractive. at the time i think i was deciding on trying Shadowbane or something else and the something else won out. Darn if i can remmeber what it was that won out ...???

say WrrLor , how does EVE , compare to other space games like Earth and Beyond, the space part of SWG, or say the stand alone PC game FreeLancer, if you happen to know any of them?
or
if anyone else can send me a opinion of EVE to the games i have mentioned plz send your feedback TY, Paragon

[Ijs]

Originally Posted by Wrrlor

Hey, just got into this game with an old friend. Wow, what a fantastic game.....old but still good. Free now, so can't beat the price. Anyone still messin around with this game, or have any info about it. Why did it never take off, or did it and I just missed it?

Good fun though in any case.

Ok, why didn't Shadowbane take off? Good question, and something that has been much discussed over the past few years.

1. Time in development
Let's just say that its five-year development, including 2 full years in beta, cut into their fan base.... and dated the graphics. They did upgrade graphics early in beta, but they were still subpar.
Believe it or not, this game was supposed to release around the same time DAOC did.

I remember joining the community in Sept. 02, supposedly a couple weeks before it was finally going to release. It was delayed, after they gave a concrete specific release day, until March 2003.
At that time, SWG was heading for release (April 2003, pushed back to June 2003).

The pre-release guild I joined apparently died out after the first year in beta. I heard many guilds suffered in numbers because of the delays.

2. Bugs
Yes, bugs. Not just some bugs, but one of the buggiest games of all time. Monumental .exe desktop-crashing bugs. If you went into a large siege (50-300 people) you could expect it to slow down to a snail's pace, and crash every 20-60 seconds.
You'd swing at someone, and 3 minutes later, if you didn't crash, you'd be dead because you were swinging at someone who had left your range 2 minutes before you initiated the swing. Lag was colossal.
The first few months were horrendous. It got better, barely, by the end of the year, but sieging was still a nightmare.
The stack. OMG, the stack. That was brutally effective, because of the lag.
Basic bugs that should have been caught years before were still in the game a year after release.

3. Related to lag... rubberbanding. How frustrating is it to (think you're) running 10-15 minutes, then rubberband back to your original spot. Then run 5-10 minutes, bounce back, then....

4. Duping. Enormous sums of gold were being routinely duped on several servers. I don't think they ever did figure out a way to prevent duping on the original servers. I know for a fact many people left because of the duping. It destroyed economies.

5. Loss of cities. I know the whole theme was Play to Crush. Which was great. I love pvp. But there were also a lot of people, who after a month or three of building up their city (ranking times were different back then for vendors and trees) did not appreciate losing it overnight, or in a week of overnight raids. The game released in March 2003, by June-July the overnight raiding (coinciding with kids out of school) was rampant. Your guild was expected to have a sizable force online 24-7, and that just wasn't going to happen.

6. Login problems. I know of a couple guild leaders in my Mourning nation who quit because they couldn't log in for 2-3 weeks straight in April-May 2003. Can you imagine being locked out of a game for 3 weeks while they're "working on a fix for you". Meanwhile, your guild is being destroyed, your assets erased, and...

7. Treeless guilds. Another Play to Crush idea. Errant guilds, with no fixed assets, did terrifically well, destroying guild after guild, nation after nation. There was no way to fight back. They had nothing you could destroy.

8. Server migrations. Once they started allowing migrations, the populations took another hit. A couple big guilds would leave, the old server would die. Many just left the game rather than migrate.

9. Games like WoW eventually showed up, thinning out an already thin player base.

10. Did I forget anything? In a nutshell, the bugs, lag, duping and loss-of-assets caused the game to freefall from 10 decent pop initial servers to limp along at three.

All I can say is, if you're having fun, go nuts. A lot of people still consider it the best pvp game out there.

It was my first MMO, so it will always be a special game for me. Those first few weeks on Mourning in March-April 2003, and the rush to grab property were unforgettable. But after 11-12 months, I was done. My third guild was dying, and it was just time to leave.

[Paragon]

say Wrrlor which server in shadowbane are you on ?

[WrrLor]

Well, just to respond to Ijs's 4 page post....heh.....I do like it, it is free, and I have payed for much, MUCH worse. I can see where all that could be seriously annoying though, but the same sort of things happen in other games....cough....EVE....anyway.

I am playing on the loreplay server mostly with a friend of mine. Human and HG guild. I also have a Centaur toon with another bunch I met in game. Also on vindication. I have nothing over lvl 22 yet, so still a newbie.

Paragon : I have only played EVE and SWG out of what you mentioned. Eve is a completely different beast than SWG. To be frank, I am about to leave EVE, either for a long break or for good. The "over night seige" thing is even more drastic in this game. It is either a love it or hate it game. I really loved it for about 6 months, then realized that I would have to dump nearly all of my free time into it to ever get anywhere. I am way to casual a player to do that. I like to jump around from game to game as I see fit, and it just is hard to do in that game. Give it a go though, you may like it. Free 14 day trial account keys are easy to get. Gimme a jingle if you are interested.

[Ijs]

Originally Posted by Wrrlor

Well, just to respond to Ijs's 4 page post....heh.....I do like it, it is free, and I have payed for much, MUCH worse.

Well, the game is three-plus years on the market. You may have played much worse than SB's current state, but there were few games to match SB's shoddy release.

(I've heard Anarchy's Online's release was also 'rough'. Never tried it though).

I know someone who went back to SB a few months ago, and absolutely loved it. Said it was much improved from release, something about windows of opportunity, and it's harder to destroy city assets, new races, new classes, etc, etc. Pvp is still it's greatest strength.

And it's free. Hard to beat that lol!

But many people find it hard to go back to a game that was so disappointing at release, or after some major upheval. (See SWG, AO, Horizons, etc.)

[Valdis]

AO had one particular patch near the beginning, 12.1 or something like that, that should be legendary. Installed on a friday afternoon it was a patch that would often say, "take it easy" when you tried to attack. So you'd pull a mob or be half way through killing one, and it'd tell you to "take it easy" while the mob beat you to death.

Funcom did nothing until Monday. It was one very bizarre weekend since you couldn't be sure you'd actually be able to kill a mob you tried to attack. AO had other problems too, but that patch was definitely the worst.

[Morlak]

I think i may give this game a shot. I remember this game from a long time ago but i nver did try it. Any advice (race, class, etc)? What server lore play or vindication (was kind of confussed here)? Any help would be appreciated.

[WrrLor]

At work for now, I will respond better in a bit.

Lore play is only on one of the servers. That server is named Vindication.

Loreplay = guild requires all one sort of race, or race restrictions.

The window of oportunity thing. I think you can only attack at a certain time, but I know there is an announcement of sorts. When they place a spire, you know that at some certain time they can start attacking.

More later.

[Karmajay]

PM Delim, he is a skilled MMo warrior and I know he plays this game. I'm sure he could get you into a good guild for the time being.