Armegeddon

Amen. Agreed 100%. The older you get, the better things used to be. After the initial rush of nostalgia, it is largely a hollow experience. You can't get time back.

We can all guess (know) who will have a ton of "crafted vessels" to kick off the campaign with. When a certain "Faction" rolls out with "vesseled crafters" and stacked toons, we'll all just have to play catch up. GG ACE!

All I hear is bitching.... log out, come back .. or don't. If you are burn't out and not willing to play, by all means, here's a bag for your marbles. First world problems...

Grobold....

Wolfpack Studios created their own engine, The Arcane Engine for ShadowBane. There were no "middleware" or adaptive third party engines back in 1998 (Big World, Unreal, Unity etc). IIRC, a Chinese company called Chang You purchased the rights to SB, not to ever revive or market the game, but for the sole purpose of studying the Arcane Engine's Archetecture. Unfortunately, the rough launch may have sunk the project. Three to four years after launch, once the bugs were worked out, there were "banes" with 3-400 participants at one location. It was, tab target as well of course. Even the emulators have had success with launches of 1200 people and 300 man banes. Eventually... the Arcane Engine was actually pretty good..... for it's time of course.

"What happens if one <DESIGN>team rises above and beyond all of the others to the point that they are insurmountable, causing other players to quit due to the custard grind given poorly made socks content?" Fixt! I used to have great faith...... that is about done now. It's painfully obvious that no one in the company has a clue.... or they don't care and are working to pawn it off. No one actually plays the game. 20+ million dollar budget, 60 people playing 4+ years in development. .. spin it any way you want.. this is becoming a failure.....there needs to be a shakeup in design and direction. Think of it, If I would have asked JTodd and GWalton if they would be happy with 60 people playing four years in, they would have looked at me like i had a third eye in my forehead. Truth. Every change that comes down the pike is viewed as negative..... I don't know what you are hearing in the private contributor forums, if it's an echo chamber of the entitled, or if they are bitching as hard as me.. but... I feel like I'm watching this project go down the tubes at this point because lesser people with no grounding or understanding have been entrusted to make decisions that are above their level of competency. Every bad review or experience spreads exponentially. Great patch guys!

Your changes basically custard suck. I'm done playing, basically because, despite my time and investment (7 accounts + cosmetics), you are starting to make this too painful to log in to. Please, as a custard team, log in and play together.... mine the ore stone, leather, wood, bodyparts.. craft the vessels, gear.. and for custard God's sake Runes now.... ask yourself then.. "how anyone will sign up for this....?" You've got a great concept, but whoever is designing this for the masses is poorly made socksting the bed. I'm not lazy, but i promise you this, you come to market with this durability, this grind, this amount of painful gates to a mediocre experience.. even Shadowbane will have looked like a success to what you are offering..... which is all the harshness of SB gated behind the worst Korean grindfest game the world has known. TLDR: What in the actual hell were you guys thinking in your design team meeting with these rune changes given the grindfest this game has become?

To a good extent, you are right. But, don't mind this little fishbowl. There are gaming communities out there that could bring more people alone than we have playing collectively amongst the entire population... then i guess it doesn't give a damned who you piss off. Right now, emulated games have higher pops. If this is the way it stays, then we will all looking for another game. If it doesn't, and pop does come... a lot of people wil be changing their mindset.

I see you post.. but I have never seen you in game. At least on this account. I would suggest you spend time to train...get dust or embers, craft (I have 7 accounts) Yes... factories, sounds great! who is going to farm all the resources. Who is going to have the skills? What happens when your city is ripped down when you have no stations to craft with? The point I was making was, in a two hour seige, if you are outnumbered, all of your gear, the time to craft, the time to gather, can all be undone, months of playing by dozens of people, on an equal playing field.... not to menttion if you are outnumbered two to one..I don't se how people do not see this coming.. never played shadowbane.. let me fill you in.. I will gather a force, through alliance or sheer number, I will dominate the resource spwwns, I've got a three hundred man roster (imagine when Winterblades and House Avari were dominating things). If I call in I can get 150 on in a night... easy. I get geared faster, I start tearing down cities. An alliance forms. I ally people (easy, everyone jumps in on the winner). I'm better because ive got more resources and numbers. You have two choices at this point. Cede your city to me or come out time and time again until no one in you guild has any gear left, and then you are broke and I get everything anyway. Tomorrow, I take your other city, or your allies city, and stockpile gear...factories won't solve that poorly made socks. People will stop logging, and I'll just take more....snowball... Uncle Bob. That is what will happen. Full loot doesn't help "small leet PvP groups", because the minute you do that, I'll show up with 300 and rip down what has taken you weeks or months to build, take anyone's gear that is foolish enough to face my numbers, and make you homeless just for the simple fact that you rolled my farming groups.... I've seen it happen in games.. Factories will help ZERGS btw, how could it not? Think about it... So, when your guild has no guild city left, and all your gear is looted out by a three hundred person horde, your player base is demoralized facing hours upon hours of regrinding mats in the current format (that is not going away, that is Blairs design), tell me how you will get the troops to not uninstall...? You wont. Again, I warned you(full loot)

Good luck. We'll agree to disagree. Hope you don't have a city. Because your "Small, coordinated, skilled, and constantly out killing people" group will be homeless looking for a sub, I promise you.

Try to make a confessor book, or a bow..consider we are at 3X training not 1. You want to see this game fail?.... institute full loot... or see Mortal Online.. which has a much less intensive crafting system. lets face it, everyone knows where the hot spots will be at, Wherre the Mob Bosses, R10/R9 nodes ate at etc. They will become funnels for people to tear gear away from people. I'm not a pixel hugger, but I know time to harvest and craft. It will be untenable. Imagine (don't roll your eyes) Shadowbane seiges when you had 250 vs. 250. Or worse 250 vs 100... You may die three or four times fighting outnumbered.. or more. Longest seige I participated in was right at 12 hours. But even at a two hour max here? What will that cost you? A city and all the guilds crafted gear. Forget your "Zerg Mechanic", lol. You won't be running out naked to defend.. you will have lost your city and more... everything on a prosecuted seige by enemies with superior numbers. Full loot won't work. IIf you institute full loot, you will see a "arms race" for numbers like you have never seen. Untl people quit playing and the game dies. For any old SB players, look at CN/Pac-Rim. You want to create "Uncle Bob".. institute full loot. Don't say I didn't warn you. EDIT: If you want to dumb down crafting/harvesting to where you just need resources and and anyone can create their own gear it will work.. until ACE abandons that part of the game it will not. EDIT II: Imagine "Server Wars" where there are multiple seiges every night....

With the current crafting system, full loot will kill the Dregs, I don't even think that is debatable. There will be a time when you will see 100 man guilds here, not alliances. Trolling zones with 20 man groups collecting gear from noobs or the outnumbered will go over like a lead baloon. If I'm wrong and the pop isn't there, this game will have failed anyway. Full loot is only good when gear is disposable. That is not the case here.

On one of my accounts (I've got 7), I cannot log in, it repeatedly just cycles who won the campaign, as soon as I check the acceptance box, it recycles again and again... constatnly. I can't even get to training. I tried restarting.

Amen.. other than the "High end forums" that the plebes aren't privy too.. we get no direction (and, from what i have heard, even that is suspect). The lack of communication by this team is custard unbelievable...I've been here since it was a countdown timer, so don't tell me about patience. Community management here .. custard sucks. What if.. We had an active community liason that gave direction, pointed corporate/development/investor directive and encouraged people to follow the actual custard lead they wished us to follow?.... and encouraded it?.. that was active and engaged? No matter what anyone says (and I'm in for the long haul, I've got 7 custard accounts), this team is poorly made socksing the custard bed. .. Perception in today's gaming ADD/ADHD gaming reality is truth. GET A custard COMMUNITY MANAGER FULL TIME THAT KEEPS PEOPLE ENGAGED AND INFORMED. For 20+ million dollars raised (I don't want to hear about pulling dollars from development, that's a crutch), ...designate ONE person worth their salt to keekp the community engaged... Dev Tracker.. dead..... Twitter or Social media announcements.... poorly made socks. YOU HAVE A MULTI MEDIA PLATFORM AND YOU SUCK AT GETTING OUT INFO OUT OF EITHER LAZINESS, ANTIPATHY OR SECRECY. WE NEED ONE PERSON TO KEEP THE COMMUNITY ENGAGED.... Throw some Austin intern 16K to spam content.. We get poorly made socks from you guys (except a video once a month!). I love this game, or the idea of it. But You're poorly made socksting the bed....20+ mil and we have 300 max playing the game (On a good day,.....warning bells?)Community Mangement and interaction was always bad, but it has now become teh absolute suck... @Tyrant@thomasblair@jtoddcoleman TLDR: Find it in the budget to pay Some UTA intern a pennance to keep us involved.... because... you're failing.

As painful as it is currently.. I'd be gone.. for a while.