To clarify... they didn't make the new Hoary Robes ugly, they made all Hoary Robes ugly. It's because of the higher res textures. They're flat and low-contrast across the board. Lotta pieces of armor that looked shiny before don't anymore. The devs actually apologized for this because a lot of peoples armor went from passable to clownsuit across the release.

But the PPGSA... that's a different discussion, and oh ho holy **** am I salty about it.

Know who got the original pre-patch GSA? High level folks who could play more. You know, the people who got all of the quests and new content. The people whose adventures the normal, casual majority of players were already subsidizing. By the time a normal person could have feasibly collected enough shards to make GSA they'd already removed the original armor from the game.

It's okay to **** up and make overpowered items, just fix the ****ing items when you do it. Don't leave them all in, like Turbine did. Don't spackle over the problem by blocking new players from getting them, because it doesn't fix the real gameplay harm the items caused. It actually makes the gameplay problem far worse because now the only people who have the overpowered items are the people most likely to exploit them. And absolutely, no matter what you do, do not design new content that is balanced against characters who are equipped with those items. Not unless you want to beat Turbine's record for worst player attrition rate in MMO history.

Rolling back the nerfs and making the new GSA ugly wasn't "cool", protecting the value of deleted items isn't "cool", it's "****ed up". It's bad enough that power gamers were the only people who got to enjoy the content, and got a free years-long power advantage from the devs from their temporarily unbalanced equipment, but giving them a permanent economic advantage on top of that is straight up ****ed.

Oh. Yeah, then **** Turbine. The ToD textures are terrible. Everything looks faded. It's not an improvement of the graphics at all.



Yeah, I'd still insist it was cool. I didn't perceive the whole thing through the paradigm of income inequality, so it didn't bother me that much that I didn't have PPGSA. :p

Haha burn. In a PvP scenario it would make sense to be pissed. But in every other server, who cares if someone has something more powerful than you? Like... the entire time I played that game most everyone always had stuff more powerful than me because they played more and went after that stuff. They spent their time grinding so they could get it. I didn't, so I didn't have it. I wasn't pissed, it didn't cause me any issues whatsoever.

The fact that they were balancing all new content against XP chaining characters with broken equipment didn't bother you? Never being able to complete a quest you paid for $ because it was only available for one month, didn't bother you? The ****?

Because new content was balanced against players who had those items. How long did you play the game? Did you even try to do the new content they added?

Game designed by ****ing ******* anarcho-capitalist libertarian ****wit Brown freshmen who'd never read a real economics book in their lives but had strong opinions. ****ing ****ers.

Here are just a few problems that might have been solved had anybody at Turbine bothered to talk to an actual economist:

1.) The magic "economy". Durr hurr hurr let's disincentivize players from sharing spell formulas with their friends by making magic less powerful when more people use it! You know, just like how nobody litters in public parks, because people enjoy public parks and the park's not as nice when it's full of garbage. Idiot idea from an idiot nerd kid who thought Tragedy of the Commons meant you were too poor to build a good Magic deck.

2.) The pyreal "economy". Hyperinflation due to accelerating supply, not a practical store of wealth (coins and promissory notes occupy inventory slots), not an effective medium for exchange/not legal tender, not an accurate unit of account (good items are worth insaaaaaaaanely more than their appraised value). Basically, pyreals are in-game "money", but they aren't money as far as players are concerned. Developers tried to mitigate this by making players dependent upon NPC vendors for consumables, but exponential costs => logarithmic character progression => logarithmic consumption growth. So pyreals at least weren't totally useless, but they weren't really worth anything either.

3.) The XP "economy". i.e. monarchies and XP chaining. The devs literally and intentionally designed monarchies as a pyramid scheme. There's a reason this **** is illegal IRL. The players at the bottom don't see any benefit unless they can recruit more players under them, which means an equitable distribution of benefits relies upon infinite growth which is impossible. It distorts the economy by generating extreme, artificial inequality. Now, you might be reading this and thinking "hey, wait, even though the players at the bottom don't benefit from the monarchy XP bonus, they're still gaining XP and getting ahead", and you thought that because you're a dip**** who doesn't understand economics. The developers rebalanced existing areas relative to the average level. When you have an XP pyramid scheme, the average level is wildly outpacing the majority of the people playing, so in a real sense you are losing ground. In other words, you're paying in, but you aren't getting anything back. And the result is literally and demonstrably what happened in the real game. If the developers geared the content toward the kinds of casual players who were paying the bills this wouldn't have been a problem, it would have only been a problem in PvP, but that's not what they did.

4.) The item "economy". Efficiency loss due to barter system. Snore.

5.) The company might not have tanked.

And just to be totally clear, I'm not making this **** up. The devs said when they designed the game they were anarcho-capitalist libertarian Brown freshmen. The in-game economies weren't just ****ed up by accident, duders.

lol look at this ****lord sad sack, harshly criticizing a game through the lens of economics like some commie pinko. Super rare unbalanced items, and invitation-only quests for high-level monarchs didn't stop me from grinding tuskers, and if I didn't notice a problem, that means there wasn't one.

Oh, except I quit playing AC. Because I got bored. You know, bored of the huge world, with an endless amount of stuff to do, and the monthly expansion pack-sized content updates. Yep. I played WoW instead. I mean, a game that had literally none of those imaginary economic problems this idiot pointed out. But that's just a coincidence, right? I mean, it couldn't possibly be that economics is a framework for analyzing and discussing human behavior within a resource constrained environment, and even people who don't consciously understand economic concepts are affected by them...? lol, how could that possibly be???

Well, you're exaggerating just how much of the new content was pitched towards higher level chars. Sure, some of the most celebrated things that happened in game were. The defense of the shard of the herald (or whatever it was called... the thing everyone is talking about on reddit) was a quest that only happened once, and I wasn't high level enough to participate in it at the time. But no, I actually thought it was a really cool feature of this persistent world that there were events only happened once, and never happened again. It was exciting that there was an evolving story that had ramifications for everyone who played, in the same way that historical events do: individual, unique events that have enduring effects on what comes after. (We'll ignore that they were all scripted and happened in almost the exact same way on every server.)

But as I said, I think you're exaggerating how much of the game's content was reserved only for high level characters. For many of the monthly patches, there were monthly events that had tiers for three distinct ranges of levels (15-30, 30-45, 45+?), that all had to be completed for the story to progress. I did actually participate in one of those. But yes, I did feel like I was getting my money's worth. Aside from the monthly events, there was also a *lot* of content that was introduced from month to month that I was able to use, even as someone who stopped playing AC in sometime in 2002 (or something) with a level 56 character, when that was a mid-level char. (Composite bow? Virindi masks? Mage armor? The Lugian Citadels? Atlan weapons? Not to mention GSA and Matty robs? These things became totally iconic, and they were all added in monthly patches.)



From what I read in the AMA you posted above, the purpose of the patron/vassal relation was to incentivize higher-level, experienced players to interact with and help lower-level, inexperienced noobs, and to promote socializing in general through the allegiance system. It *could* work like a pyramid scheme, as it did when players learned how to exploit the allegiance system and create highly efficient exp chains. But the original intention was that higher-level players would give their vassals sweet gear that they wouldn't be able to acquire independently (because of their low level), thus benefiting the vassals so that they'd be able to level faster, and, in doing so, in return, they'd give their patrons exp. But aside from the transactional component, the relationship also provided noobs with guidance from their patrons, which was useful -- and maybe even necessary -- because there was a lot to learn about the game. It wasn't really an exploitative relationship. In my own experience with the game, it worked well at doing what it was supposed to. Vassals who felt like they could get more out of a patron could break from their patron and find another one.

But I basically agree. By the time characters started hitting the max level 126 (which they were able to do because of exp chains), the game had long before lost its luster for me. It did create a big problem, because at that time, there wasn't a very efficient way to level once one got to high mid-level. If you wanted to be high level, you either had to find your way into an exp chain (which generally had relatively stringent requirements. You had to generate at least a certain amount of exp, or they'd kick you out. Grinding wasn't fun; that wasn't my idea of a good time). It had something to do with why I left the game. That, and most of the people I whom I played the game with, and who made playing worthwhile, were growing up, and were getting on to other things in life.

To my mind, the worst part about the rebalancing had more to do with how they redistributed the mobs. Before the rebalancing, mobs were indigenous to certain locations; there were all sorts of creatures that you could only find in certain locations (e.g., there were lots of critters you could only find in the dire lands, mattekars could only be found in mountain regions, etc). When they rebalanced, they completely changed the geographical distribution of mobs, so now the entire world basically looks the same, except for some exceptional, small locations (like Valley of Death). You can find tuskers, shadows and virindi in almost every single part of the world. It makes the world much more boring, and less life like.

No, I don't think I ever played enough to benefit from the stuff they kept adding. I did go to some new jungle islands they made and I really enjoyed the hell out of it with my new double-attack sword thing. You're probably right about everything but it didn't mean I had less fun.

Man... does it actually hurt you to be alive? I mean like physically cause you pain? I'm sorry for that.

Well, of course I'm exaggerating! If I wanted to write a boring, emotionally-detached analysis of Asheron's Call economy, it would be a research paper. It wouldn't be an angry rant on a Star Wars video game forum.

Yes, they tried, and yes, those are iconic items. You've even missed a few.

N.B., though, that many of those iconic items had level-tiered variants. In a lot of cases that meant doing the iconic item quest at a lower level was a total waste of time, better to be completed once you've spent another couple of months in BSD grinding. What exactly is the point of stacking ****tier quest rewards on top of a ****tier character, other than to punish players who prefer questing instead of grinding?

Yeah, that's kinda my point. The developers intended it to be a pyramid scheme, because they thought it would encourage the best kind of player organization and support structure, but they weren't learned enough in economics to predict what was obviously going to happen. Nobody was cackling like a supervillain, saying "heh, I bet this will really ruin Jon's day!" They thought all of these decisions would work fine, and by all accounts were very surprised when it didn't.

Yup. It was no fun. And, of course, XP chains were another thing they removed from the game long after the exploiters benefited from it, but long before they added any way for casual players to catch up.

Yeah. WoW, for example....



10/10 agreed. The devs generally did a great job ****ing up the game world and turning it into an eyesore, just a straight up cacophony of monster types, ugly textures, cottages, and ruined landmarks.


I really hope AC is open sourced some day. A lot of the stuff I've complained about in this thread is easily fixable.

Nope! Dissecting **** and making fun of it is a blast. It's a great way to pick out what makes some products work and others fail. You should try it some time.

The only thing you should be sorry about is that you're not laughing with me.

The Vesayan Isles are actually a great example of a patch going badly wrong, and I'm glad you mentioned it...

The short version, basically, is that they very badly ****ed up the Magic Defense for everything on those islands. Spec War/Life or spec Critter/Life with VI skill buffs, and it'd be doable. But that doesn't describe the characters most people were playing back then (i.e. the characters that Turbine told people to play via the new user experience). Melees on the other hand tended to have much higher base skills due to more favorable skill formulas, and they had shields which were always insanely overpowered. Just a case of the developers not really understanding how most people were playing the game.

One way to fix this would be a less ajudiciously chosen opposed skill check function, based on percent difference instead of difference. But simply level balancing the creatures would have been sufficient.

To date, I've never actually explored the Vesayan Isles. Maybe I should before the game ends! Although I'm playing a mage again, so it might not go well.

Not exactly a response to your point, but something they've done to make the game worse in my opinion is make it so most quests have exp rewards. That means that you can grind by doing the same quests (the exp rewards have a 20h timer) day after day. That has the effect of turning quests into errands, rather than adventures. I haven't played many MMOs aside from AC, so I don't know many of the conventions of the genre. But I've heard some described as "theme parks", and this change seemed to have the effect of turning AC into one of those.



There's this idiotic "Save AC" Facebook group that you might've heard about. They've submitted a business plan to WB to try to lease back the Asheron's Call IP. If it works out, which seems unlikely, although feasible, they'll purportedly be able to open source the game. But the people who're running it seem like morons. I have good memories of the game, but I'm suspect that anyone who cares enough about it to do something like this doesn't have very good judgment. And maybe the game has recently caused some former players to think about it a little more, but there's only a very temporary flare up in interest that will die down very quickly. After the official servers are shut down, there won't be a large enough community to make playing AC enjoyable.

I don't actually mind the quest XP rewards, but my general school of thought w.r.t. XP is "anything is better than tuskers".



Oh yeah, I have.

Aside from the feasibility discussion, I'm withholding judgment of SaveAC until I see how they are going to raise their startup capital. One of the main SaveAC people has the stated intention of running the game like a business through his game server hosting company, charging players subscription fees and for private server hosting. I'm fine with that, as long as he pays the seed capital out of pocket. But if he wants (non-equity) crowdfunding for his startup costs, and then he wants people to pay a monthly fee on top of that, he can **** right off.

On the other hand, if SaveAC open sources the server and puts the data files up for download... uh... where's their revenue gonna come from?

Yeah. The fact that they've released "statements" with glaring inconsistencies like that, without even acknowledging that they're being inconsistent, makes me think their puppy-dog enthusiasm exceeds their ability to pull off the project. Sometimes fewer statements and less communication with your fan base actually makes you look more professional and is better in the long run, even if your fan base is composed of gamers, who supposedly want to feel included and desire transparency.

But if the scheme is like what you described, it does seem fairly sensible.

Are their statements inconsistent? I haven't paid attention to them specifically, only from second-hand sources.

If they are being deliberately evasive about how they would facilitate player-downloaded, open-sourced servers, I'd probably assume they're leading people on until the crowdfunding is over.

You should just convert gorc into an mmorpg engine and we'll design the entire world with jed. And cog.

A dead game genre implemented in a dead engine using a dead language by a dead community. It's perfect!

Well, they said they 1) were going to make AC open source and 2) license the IP from WB. I'm not saying that that's impossible (I don't know much at all about these things, especially, I'm sure, compared to others here). But without any explanation, it would appear to a person who isn't familiar with these matters there's a tension there (and many people, it seems, have thought these things contradictory). The widespread confusion could've been avoided if they'd written a little more (or less).

Open sourcing the server isn't incongruous with raising revenue from paid subscriptions, because the server software is worthless by itself. The real value is the server-side content. If SaveAC hoarded that content, you'd still have to pay them to play the game.

Well, with regards to that point, they appear to want to do private, user-run servers, and to make them open-source.

"private servers" isn't the same thing as "private, locally-hosted servers", though. Like I said, one of the main SaveAC guys wants people to pay him to host private servers. If paying him's gonna be the only way to get access to the server data, then, well, paying him's gonna be the only way to play AC.

Yeah, realized I'd misunderstood what you said after posting the message. Oops.

SaveAC failed.

I'm hopeful that an emulator community will arise in its place. I've thought it may even be preferable to SaveAC. If WB doesn't step in and shut it down, perhaps it will give devs even more latitude to do whatever they want (like roll the servers back to patches from 1999-2003).

All of the quests, NPCs, random spawns, portals, dungeon doors, etc. are all stored server side. The data from 1999-2003 was lost forever, and there isn't even enough time anymore to get the most recent data. On top of that, the only complete cell.dat files (containing dungeons + terrain) are from the retail disc, AC:DM, and ToD. The rest are partial and are gonna be full of holes.

So, basically, if all you want to do is explore an empty AC:DM heightmap, Asheron's Call Emulators will be able to set you up. Otherwise you're SOL.

Players have been collecting data streaming from the server from the moment the closure was announced. So there may be time to collect a sufficient amount of data to recreate with relative ease a server that reproduces the state of the game in its current iteration.

But as far as reproducing older iterations of the game: aren't there other ways to recollect the data, other than the ones you mentioned? A lot of this data is also online, on websites. I'm sure it's a non-trivial problem, but can't a lot of that data be collected from the web through data mining, parsed, and then programmatically added to a database, to reproduce things like spawn points?

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of game assets are lost to history. But through some effort (and, admittedly, maybe so much effort that nobody will do it), can't a decent amount of earlier versions of the game be recreated?

I know players have been packet logging, I am one of them. There's a Trello board. There isn't enough time to get the job done. There are too many people talking about how others are going to fix this and not enough people actually working the problem.

A lot of the older versions of creature stats, details about retired quests etc. were never saved and have probably been lost. But sure, with an extremely detailed wiki and a few people with eidetic memory you might be able to approximate the original game. But it ain't gonna be the same.

Might as well play WoW.

Some updates:

AC shut down yesterday at noon, EST. PC Gamer posted a video about it. Watch until the end.



Data capture picked up a lot during the last two days, which is fantastic. We only lost about 130 dungeons out of more than 500. Here's a coverage map one of the ACEmulator people generated:



The red dots in the ocean are dungeons.

Dang, wish I'd been able to collect packets. Unfortunately I was only able to play the game on a mac using an emulator, which expired a few weeks ago. I did a *lot* of running in random places in the wilderness, too, during the time when I still had access to the game. One day I ran all the way from Holtburg to Qalaba'r, then to Tou-Tou. Another day I ran from Ayan Baqur to the northern-most part of the map. It would've only been a few more lines going in random directions, but it would've been nice to have contributed.

Emulator time! What data do we have in the red parts of the map that we don't have in the other parts? Know if they need someone with about a year of Node.js chops? lol

I watched Immortalbob's twitch stream during the final moments. It was surprisingly moving, even if a little more restrained than that video. Still, would've been preferable to have been in-game to see the game off, and have saved one of my toons for posterity in one of those group shots.

The non-red parts have terrain and permanent objects only. That means things like trees, rocks, houses, and dungeon geometry, but nothing you can interact with.

The red areas contain data on everything the players saw and did: e.g. if a player saw an NPC, the NPC will be present, but if the player never talked to the NPC, we won't know what that NPC was supposed to do. It's too early to tell how complete the red data is.

No idea, sorry. You should ask on http://acemulator.org.

I hope you're able to find a role there. I don't have time to volunteer further, but I'm looking forward to re-playing all of those quests I rescued.

This SaveAC thing is a little silly, no?

They're looking at 5 years burn up, maybe doable with $10m dev budget with great people and low expectations, but for a modern game you'd need to go north of $50m. Add QA, marketing, and operations ramp-up on top of that. I'm not sure who they have with business or project management experience. Rocky Batton might be a good IT ops guy, but he's going to be dead weight for the first 4 years. Not sure what the other two people have done before. Plus, given the market right now, even if they did succeed at raising seed capital and launching the game, they would never break even. They would probably never even get cashflow positive.

So yeah, you could say that.

1000th post! had to get it in in the AC thread. :p

Apparently the map I posted before only had one person's data mining work. Here's an updated map:

Looks promising.

I've been keeping track of some of the Discords of the emulator devs. About the progress, I can also say:

Looks promising.

Yeah, it's coming together a lot faster than I expected.

Which Emulator's progress are you following? I've been following PhatAC and ACEmulator.

Both, but not at all closely.

Edit: Nevermind. ACE has been crushing it, but it's not that visible if you aren't on Discord. Bet's off.

Looks like Nexus Armor is finally within the reach of the common player. http://www.phatac.com/?s=changelog