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DarkwingDuck
n00b
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2004
- Messages
- 47
For the longest time I've held off on making a topic about this cause, I know in the long run it'd not help anything at all and just be me ranting. But after a while, and the fact I've kept up with Blizzards problems in WoW, I started to think WoW players have it easy in some aspects compared to this.
Now I know some have played Neocron 1. If you aren't familar with this game, Neocron is an MMO set in the future in a vast post apocalyptic world. It's a mixture of fantasy, cyber punk and general roleplaying. Some of the cool aspects of the game are its large faction system, the FPS style combat (real time not point click or turn based), vehicles, and large clan battles, and more guns than the matrix.
The awesome features it offers are greatly offset by this games horrible producers, Reakktor (fan dubbed "KK") a subsidary of 10tacle Studios. If you've played the game you have to admit it has potential, especially in the very limited cyber punk scifi MMO genre (which basically consists of Planetside an AO).
Reakktor (KK from here on in) have to be the most moronic company I've had the pleasure of giving money too. I never played Neocron 1, I started with the "expansion" (more on this later) that is Neocron 2 which came out in late September 04.
At the beginning of September that year, KK started an open beta of Neocron 2. For one full month you played it for free. And despite hundreds of players telling of them of the fatal flaws in the game (more on this soon), they went gold that month. By gold I mean, you could download the official game client, make an account and play. It would take an additional 8 months for the game to come out in box form....in Europe. KK is a German based company who have/had a large following at some point, in Europe with a decent player base in North America as well.
People in WoW site the server queues, the lag from so many people, and other things as it's downsides. WoW has 400,000+ people playing it. There are a grand total of 4 Neocron 2 servers. 2 German, 1 "International" and 1 French. The international server (Terra) has an average of 20-30% players on it during peak weekend times. The servers have a cap limit of 1000 players, so at peak times on a weekend we're lucky to get 300 people on one server. 300... Now take into account KK advertising their game as an MMO "a fun cyber punk adventure online thousands of other players and you see where their bull**** begins. If you add all 4 servers populations, at peak times, on weekends, you might get 700-800 people. I don't know about you but when I read the word "thousands" I'm thinking at least 2000+...
When WoW people log in, you have a server full of people. When we log in, we're lucky if we encounter other actual players. Sure you'll find some activity on the various chat channels for trading and your faction here and there, but with the low population there are few areas with actual people. WoW has a problem holding hundreds if not thousands of players in? A Neocron 2 zone crashes if there are more than 80 people in them. So server wide events are forced to be kept small, though it's rare that even close to 80 ever show up.
WoW players, some at least, are up in arms over the new Honor system right? No such thing in Neocron. We have a point based meter for how much you're killing others. Somewhat similar to how UO did with "murderers". Except if someone choose to ally kill others in your own faction (which you can do) it's simple to reset this meter to what its normally at by doing a few quick missions, in a safe zone where you cannot be attacked. While this may not seem that harsh, the one thing Neocron has that WoW doesn't is when we die, we lose items unless we go back to try and recover them. So you can see how something unchecked as the current system is can suck if you're ally killed. Some say they enjoy the risk of losing stuff, I do as well, it adds inscentive (sp?).
Now those are just some comparisons to the huge problems in WoW that are polar opposites to some of Neocrons. The real problems lie within the company itself. Their unreliance to admit their mistakes and lies is amazing:
- 2002 when Neocron 2 was being developed, it was supposed to be an expansion to Neocron 1. This .plan file lists this as being a FREE expansion. 2004 rolls around, the game is "released" as Neocron 2 and it was not free, at all.
- This thread by a staff member of KK stats that people upgrading to Neocron 2 (after it was said you'd have to pay for it) that had Neocron 1 would only need to pay one time for the upgrade (you can transfer characters from NC1 to NC2). So if you had say 4 accounts, you'd pay 1 time for all 4. 2004 rolls around, and guess what? It's $19.95 per account to upgrade, plus purchase the game. (ALOT of players had at least 2 accounts, some even more) so you can see how this one hit the community hard.
- The game has several game halting bugs. One is the "fatal run time error" which is basically a fancy crash to desktop. The development team can't narrow down the cause, even though there's a proven and obvious memory leak in the game. The game has a requirement of 512 MB ram, plenty for this really small scale MMO. People who inquire about these on the official forums are told to simply upgrade their computers (and even people with MONSTER computers, get these all the time). I'm sure WoW players have had their share of crashes.
- The other game stopping bug is improper zoning, or "synchronizing" as it's called in Neocron (their fancy word for zoning). Alot of times you'll log in and you are unable to move. You have no items, no stats, no money. You cannot move. This is be proven and obviously, a simple connection problem between the client and the server. People with the best connections money can buy, get these all the time as do others. Again inquiring on the official forums has staff telling you it is your connection that is faulty and that your ISP is having problems.
- There are massive coverups about things. Two come to mind. The first was close to the European box release, many of the popular PC game magazines in Europe (mainly in places like the UK) started giving their reviews of the game. One magazine gave the game a fair score, of 28%. And most fans agreed with that score. When the review was posted on the official forums, staff members quickly responded with "well he's not reviewing the current version of the game" or "he's playing an outdated version where X bugs still exist that are currently fixed". In reality where everyone else lives, these magazine reviewers were playing the same game build as the rest of the community, experienced the same errors and problems we did, and scored it appropriately based apon this. A small controversial part of this was, one staff member who is the "community liason" for Reakktor, lashed out at this journalist calling him a "pussy mmo player" and basically degrading him. Several people questioned Reakktor's judgement in allowing it's staff to publically say such things (imagine EA calling Sony a bunch of pussy mother f***ers in a press conference, it just doesn't happen).
- The second "coverup" if you wanna call it that was the "newbie" experience. In one the recent patches (which are FEW and far between) some content was added for low level players in preperation for the box version release in Europe. A new player after playing for a week or so registred on the official forums and posted his experiences. From crashing moments after first creating his character, to not being able to even zone in properly when you first log in (as said two of the main game engine flaws). This new player had a list of problems that he/she had when playing that we all have experienced. He posted this in a polite manner, just to discuss the problems. Staff were quick to lock the thread, and ban this user inciting that he was trying to demean other new players from playing citing false information he had given. In reality they banned him and locked that particular thread to keep it from being seen by others. Some say a good move, company wise. How long till they have to do that on a regular basis from new players?
- Reakktor are the most hypocritical company there is. In America, games are rated by the ESRB system. In Europe and some other areas games are rated by the PEGI system (same thing basically). One of the delays for the box release in Europe was Reakktor was unable to get the rating they had for Neocron 1 and thus had to redo box art and magazine ads with the new 16+ age rating. Now you ask how did they achieve the new rating? In-game content, in the form of player names, were heavily cracked down on. No profane words were allowed in player names. Even things as tame as the word Penis or Masturbate were not allowed. Now you say "well thats normal for alot of games"; go look at screen shots of Neocron 2. This game is very cyber punk. You can walk through the cities and view NUDE NEON SIGNS of women, you can talk to NPC's who would make a sailor blush from their use of profanity, you can go into strip clubs ingame and watch very scantly clad (not totally nude but close) NPC women dance. Hell there is a location in the game (a strip club) called The Pussy Club. Apon asking about this on the official forums, players were told to simply "deal with it, as the ingame enviroment does not give players the ability to use such things in their name" which in other words meant Little Timmy can go watch naked woman on posters and s***, but he can't use the word Penis in his name.
- Neocron 2 has two ways to pay for it through two companies; Click2Pay and PayByCash. Now PayByCash didn't come as an option until 2005ish so players for a good portion so far in NC2's life were forced to use Click2Pay. Note, Click2Pay happens to be a large shareholder in 10tacle Studios stock. Click2Pay is a European based paypal-type system of online commerce. Now their biggest thing is overseas alot of people use Click2Pay to pay for online gambling sites. Alot of banks (European AND American) denied players the ability to use their credit cards or bank accounts because they do not support online gambling sites and have such businesses like Click2Pay black listed. Those that had a bank/account that would work with Click2Pay had a 50/50 shot of making an account work. Alot of times Click2Pay would deny you for some unexplainabl reason; your card is expired...when it still has 3 years left on it, your card has a spending limit too low..even though your card has X amount of thousand dollar space free, etc etc etc If you managed to get an account working fully to where you can actually give them your money and play, you often had other problems such as;
-- Your default spending limit (within the Click2Pay company) was $25. Now since Neocron is foreign based, us Americas and Canadians have to convert our US dollar to Euros. So whichever payment plan you chose was almost always over $25 due to conversion. When it came time for them to take your payment, they couldn't cause they set their own limit to low. Which meant you had to play the email tag game with them or call them to finally bump you up to the point where they can take out enough money to pay themselves...
-- The biggest gripe some of us have is, Click2Pay are info sellers. Many times lots of users have gotten spam in their inbox from various online casinos. Apon investigating these casinos you often found trails leading back to Click2Pay and their affiliations. Click2Pay has yet to comment publically on this and KK just gives their typical PR response of "we'll look into it". The spam still comes in now and then (though I've blocked most of it).
- Click2Pay problems aside, KK has to be the worst company ever. Instead of fixing the two major game crashing bugs, they instead try to divert attention by adding small amounts of new content. A few new items here, a couple new zones/areas there, nothing major just small amounts. And they do it in as long a time as they can, WoW gets a patch what every month at least? NC2 gets a patch on average of every 2+ months. And even then these patches don't do anything to stop the game crashing bugs that are so obvious and proven.
Now you're wondering, why am I saying all this? Cause I'm still paying money for it. The game has enourmous potential, it's unique. I love a good sci fi rpg especially in MMO form with guns in a FPS real time combat system. But its not enough. It's just sad when theres talk of closing one or more of the games servers cause they can't bring in enough revenue from players to justify the bandwidth and server costs. Its sad that people are banned from their official forums every week for pointing out Reakktor's obvious bull****, their lies and their coverups.
Now I know some have played Neocron 1. If you aren't familar with this game, Neocron is an MMO set in the future in a vast post apocalyptic world. It's a mixture of fantasy, cyber punk and general roleplaying. Some of the cool aspects of the game are its large faction system, the FPS style combat (real time not point click or turn based), vehicles, and large clan battles, and more guns than the matrix.
The awesome features it offers are greatly offset by this games horrible producers, Reakktor (fan dubbed "KK") a subsidary of 10tacle Studios. If you've played the game you have to admit it has potential, especially in the very limited cyber punk scifi MMO genre (which basically consists of Planetside an AO).
Reakktor (KK from here on in) have to be the most moronic company I've had the pleasure of giving money too. I never played Neocron 1, I started with the "expansion" (more on this later) that is Neocron 2 which came out in late September 04.
At the beginning of September that year, KK started an open beta of Neocron 2. For one full month you played it for free. And despite hundreds of players telling of them of the fatal flaws in the game (more on this soon), they went gold that month. By gold I mean, you could download the official game client, make an account and play. It would take an additional 8 months for the game to come out in box form....in Europe. KK is a German based company who have/had a large following at some point, in Europe with a decent player base in North America as well.
People in WoW site the server queues, the lag from so many people, and other things as it's downsides. WoW has 400,000+ people playing it. There are a grand total of 4 Neocron 2 servers. 2 German, 1 "International" and 1 French. The international server (Terra) has an average of 20-30% players on it during peak weekend times. The servers have a cap limit of 1000 players, so at peak times on a weekend we're lucky to get 300 people on one server. 300... Now take into account KK advertising their game as an MMO "a fun cyber punk adventure online thousands of other players and you see where their bull**** begins. If you add all 4 servers populations, at peak times, on weekends, you might get 700-800 people. I don't know about you but when I read the word "thousands" I'm thinking at least 2000+...
When WoW people log in, you have a server full of people. When we log in, we're lucky if we encounter other actual players. Sure you'll find some activity on the various chat channels for trading and your faction here and there, but with the low population there are few areas with actual people. WoW has a problem holding hundreds if not thousands of players in? A Neocron 2 zone crashes if there are more than 80 people in them. So server wide events are forced to be kept small, though it's rare that even close to 80 ever show up.
WoW players, some at least, are up in arms over the new Honor system right? No such thing in Neocron. We have a point based meter for how much you're killing others. Somewhat similar to how UO did with "murderers". Except if someone choose to ally kill others in your own faction (which you can do) it's simple to reset this meter to what its normally at by doing a few quick missions, in a safe zone where you cannot be attacked. While this may not seem that harsh, the one thing Neocron has that WoW doesn't is when we die, we lose items unless we go back to try and recover them. So you can see how something unchecked as the current system is can suck if you're ally killed. Some say they enjoy the risk of losing stuff, I do as well, it adds inscentive (sp?).
Now those are just some comparisons to the huge problems in WoW that are polar opposites to some of Neocrons. The real problems lie within the company itself. Their unreliance to admit their mistakes and lies is amazing:
- 2002 when Neocron 2 was being developed, it was supposed to be an expansion to Neocron 1. This .plan file lists this as being a FREE expansion. 2004 rolls around, the game is "released" as Neocron 2 and it was not free, at all.
- This thread by a staff member of KK stats that people upgrading to Neocron 2 (after it was said you'd have to pay for it) that had Neocron 1 would only need to pay one time for the upgrade (you can transfer characters from NC1 to NC2). So if you had say 4 accounts, you'd pay 1 time for all 4. 2004 rolls around, and guess what? It's $19.95 per account to upgrade, plus purchase the game. (ALOT of players had at least 2 accounts, some even more) so you can see how this one hit the community hard.
- The game has several game halting bugs. One is the "fatal run time error" which is basically a fancy crash to desktop. The development team can't narrow down the cause, even though there's a proven and obvious memory leak in the game. The game has a requirement of 512 MB ram, plenty for this really small scale MMO. People who inquire about these on the official forums are told to simply upgrade their computers (and even people with MONSTER computers, get these all the time). I'm sure WoW players have had their share of crashes.
- The other game stopping bug is improper zoning, or "synchronizing" as it's called in Neocron (their fancy word for zoning). Alot of times you'll log in and you are unable to move. You have no items, no stats, no money. You cannot move. This is be proven and obviously, a simple connection problem between the client and the server. People with the best connections money can buy, get these all the time as do others. Again inquiring on the official forums has staff telling you it is your connection that is faulty and that your ISP is having problems.
- There are massive coverups about things. Two come to mind. The first was close to the European box release, many of the popular PC game magazines in Europe (mainly in places like the UK) started giving their reviews of the game. One magazine gave the game a fair score, of 28%. And most fans agreed with that score. When the review was posted on the official forums, staff members quickly responded with "well he's not reviewing the current version of the game" or "he's playing an outdated version where X bugs still exist that are currently fixed". In reality where everyone else lives, these magazine reviewers were playing the same game build as the rest of the community, experienced the same errors and problems we did, and scored it appropriately based apon this. A small controversial part of this was, one staff member who is the "community liason" for Reakktor, lashed out at this journalist calling him a "pussy mmo player" and basically degrading him. Several people questioned Reakktor's judgement in allowing it's staff to publically say such things (imagine EA calling Sony a bunch of pussy mother f***ers in a press conference, it just doesn't happen).
- The second "coverup" if you wanna call it that was the "newbie" experience. In one the recent patches (which are FEW and far between) some content was added for low level players in preperation for the box version release in Europe. A new player after playing for a week or so registred on the official forums and posted his experiences. From crashing moments after first creating his character, to not being able to even zone in properly when you first log in (as said two of the main game engine flaws). This new player had a list of problems that he/she had when playing that we all have experienced. He posted this in a polite manner, just to discuss the problems. Staff were quick to lock the thread, and ban this user inciting that he was trying to demean other new players from playing citing false information he had given. In reality they banned him and locked that particular thread to keep it from being seen by others. Some say a good move, company wise. How long till they have to do that on a regular basis from new players?
- Reakktor are the most hypocritical company there is. In America, games are rated by the ESRB system. In Europe and some other areas games are rated by the PEGI system (same thing basically). One of the delays for the box release in Europe was Reakktor was unable to get the rating they had for Neocron 1 and thus had to redo box art and magazine ads with the new 16+ age rating. Now you ask how did they achieve the new rating? In-game content, in the form of player names, were heavily cracked down on. No profane words were allowed in player names. Even things as tame as the word Penis or Masturbate were not allowed. Now you say "well thats normal for alot of games"; go look at screen shots of Neocron 2. This game is very cyber punk. You can walk through the cities and view NUDE NEON SIGNS of women, you can talk to NPC's who would make a sailor blush from their use of profanity, you can go into strip clubs ingame and watch very scantly clad (not totally nude but close) NPC women dance. Hell there is a location in the game (a strip club) called The Pussy Club. Apon asking about this on the official forums, players were told to simply "deal with it, as the ingame enviroment does not give players the ability to use such things in their name" which in other words meant Little Timmy can go watch naked woman on posters and s***, but he can't use the word Penis in his name.
- Neocron 2 has two ways to pay for it through two companies; Click2Pay and PayByCash. Now PayByCash didn't come as an option until 2005ish so players for a good portion so far in NC2's life were forced to use Click2Pay. Note, Click2Pay happens to be a large shareholder in 10tacle Studios stock. Click2Pay is a European based paypal-type system of online commerce. Now their biggest thing is overseas alot of people use Click2Pay to pay for online gambling sites. Alot of banks (European AND American) denied players the ability to use their credit cards or bank accounts because they do not support online gambling sites and have such businesses like Click2Pay black listed. Those that had a bank/account that would work with Click2Pay had a 50/50 shot of making an account work. Alot of times Click2Pay would deny you for some unexplainabl reason; your card is expired...when it still has 3 years left on it, your card has a spending limit too low..even though your card has X amount of thousand dollar space free, etc etc etc If you managed to get an account working fully to where you can actually give them your money and play, you often had other problems such as;
-- Your default spending limit (within the Click2Pay company) was $25. Now since Neocron is foreign based, us Americas and Canadians have to convert our US dollar to Euros. So whichever payment plan you chose was almost always over $25 due to conversion. When it came time for them to take your payment, they couldn't cause they set their own limit to low. Which meant you had to play the email tag game with them or call them to finally bump you up to the point where they can take out enough money to pay themselves...
-- The biggest gripe some of us have is, Click2Pay are info sellers. Many times lots of users have gotten spam in their inbox from various online casinos. Apon investigating these casinos you often found trails leading back to Click2Pay and their affiliations. Click2Pay has yet to comment publically on this and KK just gives their typical PR response of "we'll look into it". The spam still comes in now and then (though I've blocked most of it).
- Click2Pay problems aside, KK has to be the worst company ever. Instead of fixing the two major game crashing bugs, they instead try to divert attention by adding small amounts of new content. A few new items here, a couple new zones/areas there, nothing major just small amounts. And they do it in as long a time as they can, WoW gets a patch what every month at least? NC2 gets a patch on average of every 2+ months. And even then these patches don't do anything to stop the game crashing bugs that are so obvious and proven.
Now you're wondering, why am I saying all this? Cause I'm still paying money for it. The game has enourmous potential, it's unique. I love a good sci fi rpg especially in MMO form with guns in a FPS real time combat system. But its not enough. It's just sad when theres talk of closing one or more of the games servers cause they can't bring in enough revenue from players to justify the bandwidth and server costs. Its sad that people are banned from their official forums every week for pointing out Reakktor's obvious bull****, their lies and their coverups.
