Xarrayne

Fear not, between the lawyers and the business owners and the finance investors I'm pretty sure the median income of Winterblades members is closer to six digits than not

Yep, and I think that objective perspective you brought is valid; thank you for also considering my points on the importance of subjectivity. I respect that, and I think you were correct in highlighting what was missing from this review - I only wanted to highlight what I saw as the point/validity of a subjective review, not to argue against your points. However I feel like this conversation isn't real because we never called each other names u suck

TL;DR, my review of Crowfall (and also of this review):

Yes, it is important to look at the objective truths, such as that objectively the game systems can be fixed, but that the Devs have struggled over the years thus far to do so. This review was extremely subjective and presented hardly any facts about the game at all, that is an objective fact, but the review was not without useful information. I am aware of the flaws in both this review and this game, but these facts do not exist in a vacuum. People are prone to subjective thinking and bias even if they actively work against it, and while we should not obfuscate the objective facts to exploit that weakness we should also not discredit the fact that the subjective, emotional response to a piece of entertainment is incredibly important. This response is a result of events and facts that are universally knowable and true, but the way that any individual is going to receive, process, and then express their experience of those events and facts is not something that you can claim to fully understand nor call true or false. As I said before, other reviews have covered the facts about this game and even the way they personally felt about this game, and done a much better job of informing their viewers, but I enjoyed watching this video just as much as any other and I learned from both it and this thread. That's all.

It doesn't, and one of the points I was trying to make is to say the exact opposite... While there certainly is correlation between polish and enjoyment, enjoying the content of a game isn't necessarily or wholly dependent on the polish of that game.

Enjoying such vastly different games may sound contradictory but they aren't mutually exclusive - in this specific example I personally loved WotLK, and I love CF too. Sample size of one, but if you think about it I'm confident you'll realise a lot of games you've played and enjoyed are more different than you realised, and that you enjoyed them for different reasons. This review overall was quite flawed and so is CF, I won't ever deny either point, but they're both plenty good for me. I'm not really here to convince you to see my point either, I just want to provide insight for people who have not yet made up their minds and I think that's what Qwan wants to do as well.

Qwan was definitely very liberal with his 10/10 ratings, but you guys are kinda missing the point IMO... If you paid attention to what he was saying about "Gold Standards", and the screenshots from the game he referred to as his Gold Standard for PvP MMO's, you'd realise that he doesn't give a poorly made dergs about whether the UI and visuals are pretty or even user-friendly. The whole point of the Gold Standard is that you recognise what he does and does not care about, so that you can compare that to what you care about and understand whether or not you would feel the same way about any given game. If you disagree with him that's fine, but this video is his opinion piece and it is not intended to be viewed as gospel truth. Next point; the important functions and features in Crowfall might be rudimentary but they are fit for purpose, and the things that aren't fit for function can be fixed... Other review videos have already covered most of those points anyway, so to re-tread them in detail would be boring to watch at this point. At the end of the day whether a game is fun, has character, and makes you wanna come back for more is way more important anyway; it's cliche, but it's true. Finally, and most importantly... I believe that Qwan's general message is that, forgetting the game as a program, the game as a place to co-operate with and compete against other people is downright amazing and no amount of Bezos or Blizzard money is gonna capture that. The way that the game encourages you to seek out other players to work with and stick together with for progression is sorely missing from the market right now. The way that fights have a direct and meaningful impact on both the world and the individual player is very satisfying, and there is never a shortage of events and ideas to talk about with both your friends and your enemies. In most online games currently available you rarely see or hear of most of the people you interact with more than once, and I dunno about you but that's not why I choose to spend my free time playing multiplayer games. There are a lot of holes to poke in the implementation but you cannot deny that people who play this game for anything more than a month get to know each other very well, and are very emotionally invested in the outcomes of PvP... And that is the itch that this game called Crowfall aims to satisfy.

In a sense yes, there will be less macro-movement between siege objectives, but there's other important things to do in the game - outside of the usual PvE stuff outposts are surprisingly a large portion of the Conquest points, and are often contested on every tick, so there's still some macro-movement decisions in where you move the "spare" forces On a mostly unrelated note, I like the whole "freedom of choice" aspect in not doing slot reservation or capping guild/alliance sizes too small, in theory, but in practice it just means people are gonna bring as many bros as possible and scum people out of zone slots because that's what you have to do if you want to have a good chance of winning those fights... And that definitely feels bad more than getting wins because you moved better feels awesome.

I believe that we are going the wrong way with the zone caps and scales of engagements... Making a massively multiplayer game at 100+ on each team with semi-detailed graphics and hit-scan targeting is just too much of an ask tech-wise, because each player added exponentially increases the demand on both the servers and client computers. There's even a paper written about the subject, I just can't seem to find the right words to Google the topic. At any rate, here are the advantages I could think of for decreasing the possible scale of combat closer to 50 players a side, at least during important fort/keep siege windows, with notes: Improved client/server performance in any given fight; Fewer players and spell effects to render Increased sense and necessity of personal contribution in any given fight; At smaller fight sizes any individual then represents a larger percentage of the total force, and thus their input matters more More room in the meta for specs that aren't mostly focused on AoE damage/healing output Similar reason to the above point, assassinating one player becomes more impactful and there's fewer bodies to throw AoEs at Lowers barrier of entry for newer guilds trying to get into the end-game of economy, conquest, and territory building; Guilds don't need as big of a player base to compete Allows for multiple "big" events to be happening at once at lower population levels; Each server doesn't need as big of a player base to feel well-populated, and if population explodes you simply add more servers or create the next generation with more zones Larger guilds don't feel obligated, and simply can't send their whole force to win any given engagement; Again helps the "little guys", but also means that if a large guild has a quiet day/week they don't have to give up on achieving objectives We do lose some of the sense of epic scales of combat, but given how even tab-target large-scale PvP MMOs have struggled with increasing numbers and finding ways to solve the problems it brings... I just don't think it's worth catering to 100v100 slideshows in a semi-action combat game for the sake of seeing larger digits on YouTube thumbnails. I'm sure there's both more advantages and more disadvantages I haven't thought of, but that's why I'm making this a separate thread rather than posting it in Feedback where Devs like @thomasblair and @jtoddcoleman are much more likely to receive this feedback, directly or indirectly. We are also still left with the problem of how to enforce even scales of combat outside of hard limits and zone slot reservations, but it seems we may have to bite that bullet either way given how warm and fuzzy people feel when they get zone-capped out of a fight...