Ahh, I understand now that I read your thread on their forums.

MMORPG games are not, typically, used with a browser. In fact, they use clients that get installed onto your computer like any typical game. In fact, browser-based games are the exception when it comes to MMO games. X-Wars does allow for many people to play at once, but it isn't really an MMO in definition.

For starters: MMO's are real-time and in first or third person. You are directly controlling whatever it is you are: a ship, a medival avatar, whatever. That is something that good MMO games simply cannot do in a browser, although some have tried. You are not controlling units or buildings or whatever that's in the action; YOU are IN the action. It's much more personal.

MMO's play exactly like any other video game would play. For example, take Bridge Commander, put it in a persistent universe where tens of thousands of people can play at the same time, and you've got something that plays a lot like EVE (but with several differences of course). EVE is a full-fledged MMORPG.

This might also relate to why you don't want to pay for games. Games like X-Wars, quite literally, are not worth paying for. The gameplay is strategic in nature, but it's still rather bland and you are removed from the action. Meanwhile, EVE puts you square in the middle of the fight. You have to monitor your shields, your hull, your weapons, your armor - and you only have one ship that you can control at a time. But you are there up close and personal going toe to toe with someone else. He might be pounding your shields with heavy missiles while you fly circles around him (literally) straffing his hull plating with your rail guns, blasters, lasers, whatever.

MMO's typically add their own levels of strategic play as well. For example, combat isn't all about dealing damage. There's also ways to control the opposition to influence their decisions by removing some of their available combat options. You could simply trap them and prevent them from fleeing, you can disrupt their targeting by using electronic warfare, you could sit back and support your friends by increasing their targeting ability, replenishing their shield strength, reparing their armor plating, etc, etc.

So... I'm writing a lot, heh. To make a long story short, MMO's (note: not games like X-Wars or other browser games) are, quite literally, the most complex programs ever offered to consumers with only operating systems being more complicated. Excellent MMO's requires years of development from a team of programmers. But, they also tend to push technologies with graphics, algorithms, gameplay, content, and processing optimization as much as possible. And this is why you pay to play MMO's each month. The language used by web browsers is simply not capable of fully supporting what MMO's try to do.

Holy Cripes! thats a ton of info for sure.

got to chew over all that for a bit..

You and I seem to disagree often. Allegiance is an MMO, and I will stand by that.



Again, I disagree. Excellent MMOs do not require years of development by a team. They do if your starting from the ground up, with code, graphics, etc. made by scratch.



Guild Wars... Runescape...



I beg to differ. Look at Runescape. They have how many members? Hundreds of thousands? Sure, thats 3rd person, and whatever, and java, but still.

Even better. Look at Allegiance. Well, dont look at it now, cause the screens that I have in the forums are 4 months old and look like crap. Look at the new stuff that I'll be releasing in a few weeks, and then tell me to my face that it doesnt have



sure, it doesnt 'push the bubble', but its still an MMO, and it still has all those qualities, even if its not 'pushing the bubble'. You dont need state of the art code made by professionals who do it for a living to have a game that has all those things.
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An MMO is quite simply a "Massively Multiplayer Online Game"

I see no reference to it having to have 3d graphics, or be downloadable, or have to be made by a huge company with a team of dedicated developers.

You can call those expensive MMOs something else, and you can call browser based games like Allegiance and X-Wars something else, but in the end, they are both Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

Now we're just getting into details. Guild Wars doesn't charge a monthly susbscription because they release a new expansion every other month (some sarcasm btw). GW and WoW came out around the same time and how many expansions is GW up to?

The money needs to come from somewhere in order to keep developing. Plain and simple. It's a business requirement and has nothing to do with software engineering. You can do it by 1) releasing more expansions 2) charging a monthly fee or 3) release brand new games. The money to pay the bills has to come from somewhere. The developers need to be paid to keep programming (and part-time programmers means part-time or part-finished content updates and fixes who probably needs another job to pay his bills.) In the end, if you want to play those games, you are going to have pay money somewhere. And I think Runescape uses advertisements, correct? How often does Runescape update their content? I know little about Runescape because I personally thought it was a pretty crappy game, heh.

As for MMO's themselves from a main-stream point of view... simply because a lot of people play the game doesn't make it an MMO. MMO's are typically games that are played in real-time that involves thousands of players. X-Wars isn't really an MMO because you set units to go do something and then check tomorrow to see what happened. You don't play the game in real-time. Not to mention you are completely removed from all of the action. It just happens to be a game that a lot of players play like a MUD (which is also not an MMO even though it more closely resembles MMO games than X-Wars ever will).

I would argue that Allegiance is not a MMO either for most of the same reasons. Let me be clear: I'm not saying that X-Wars or Allegiance isn't some crap-game because they're not. I played tons of MUD's and browser games in my lifetime. But the only thing they offer that fits the main-stream MMO template is offering gameplay to a bunch of people (is there a player limit to Allegiance ?)

I'd also argue that a persistent world is a necessary element. For some details, I'd reference this article on Wikipedia which would have a better explanation that is not of my own opinion. :p It's a more mainstream, trimmed-down definition. The article winds up branching out to more specific MMO types later in the article. But again, we're splitting hairs at this point on the techicality of a word when I was really talking about Infinity so we're completely off topic now. To make a long story short, when someone says "MMO", people think of games like EVE, WoW, SWG, EQ, DAoC, etc.



And since this thread is about Infinity, it is prudent to point out that the programmer is starting from scratch. In fact, my entire post was in reference to Inifinity.

By the way, at this point... whenever I see you post in a thread I've been active in, I'm pretty much going to assume it's to disagree with me :p I must say, you did a good job picking apart certain sentences to disagree with and ignoring the rest of the sentences that were in the same context. :p I actually had to re-read my post. I actually touched some of the points you were bringing up.

By the way, this is post 420. I find that amusing.

It would be more amusing if it was post number 42...unless that's what you mean, Azhdeen.

I had noticed that you and Nem had a bit of a thing for disagreeing with each other. Here's something that will really get you going: which one of you likes Trek the most?

Guild wars came out in late april 2005. WoW came out november 2004.

Guild wars has... 3 expansions? Which isnt bad, consider games like WoW (swg to be specific) has... 4?




by definition it does.



Maybe for a certain few games like X-Wars, but let me say this right now. Allegiance is real time. If I want to go destroy Matress_of_Evil with my fleet of ten galaxy class starships, I can, and there is no waiting period. For resource generation there is a waiting period, but that in the long run is unimportant.

Thats real time enough for me.



Removed from the action? Some say that playing table top games that simulate battles takes you 'away from the action'

There may not be fancy graphics, but in Allegiance, YOU will be making the decisions that determine the battle. And when i say this, i mean it - YOU are in the middle of the battle, even if there aren't 3d graphics.



And I highly disagree with that statement.



I'm glad think that. At least we can agree on something



I agree, the majority offer that and that alone. However, Allegiance should offer a good amount more. It is an MMO, and I stand by that.

And no, there is no player limit. The server should be able to handle everything. Plus, if I realize there is a limit, ive got a solution that will fix it, resulting in multi galaxy worlds.



Agreed. Allegiance does have a persistent world (well, until you win )



Wikipedia is not a good 'accurate' reference. I could go in there and make it say that Allegiance has 200,000 players.




I dont.

Sure, most people do, but thats why I'm here




I remove the parts that I feel are not necessary, and I only use the quote tool to 'reference' the topic, rather than actually quote it in full. I dont want my posts being ten pages long.





why?

MMO by definition means massive multiplayer online. So i would call allegiance a mmo because when finished it will be host to a persistant universe with "we hope" thousands of players online at roughly the same time. With battles, movements, messageboards in realtime.

Anyhow. You get what your givin. Its free so stop complaining. :p

The difference between wow and allegiance, is that its based on different interpretation of a mmo. WOW went for 3D and a game to buy in a shop. Allegiance went for easy access browser technology instead which doesnt need a client to run off. There very different yet very similar in design at the core ideas.

It all comes down to what ppl want. If they want to play a browser based mmo then let them. If they want flashy 3d gameworld etc then let them. At the end of the day your getting the same experiance. Albiet in different forms.

Honestly, he probably does. I was never really sold on TOS as it was before my time. I haven't seen any of the TOS movies from start to finish. I watched TNG religiously in middle school. I watched most of DS9, but my interest in Trek dipped when TNG ended. From there on, I saw random episodes of DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise.

And just to clearify... WoW has one expansion: The Burning Crusade which just came out a couple months ago. And this proves my point. For a game that you pay for, you get TONS of FREE content patched into the game fairly regularly because the developers are paid regularly with expansions only containing major content releases... as in... whole new worlds, completely different gameplay options, etc. Meanwhile, the Guild Wars model is vastly different. Since there is no monthly fee, they need to make money by releasing expansions so they crank them out as often as they can. GW is about to release their fourth expansion in two years while WoW has released one expansion in 3 years.

SWG has been out for eons. I didn't even get into SWG until 2002 and it had already been out for some time by then so they'd naturally have a few expansions out by now. And then you have games like EVE that don't even sell expansions; they're all free content downloads that are part of your monthly fee.

And I sourced Wikipedia simply for a third-party perspective on the, for lack of a better word, "debate". I know it is user-edited and I understand what that alludes to.


Exactly. In fact, that's what I've been saying the entire time. Who's complaining?

I don't really know how this conversation ended up where it is. Either way, I'm done with it because it's completely off-topic now. I've been trying to refer to the Infinity game the entire time, not get into a discussion about the definition of an MMO in a technical sense or main-stream sense.

well, *I* was just defending the term MMO, which my game is classified under.

Strange, how we do argue over a lot.

we should probably let this get back on topic.

I would argue your second paragraph, but I really have coding to do.

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And im not going to go into "Who Likes Trek the Most", cause I probably do

(not TOS)

I would probably also include 'Persistent'

I can only speak from actual game play of both Games (X-Wars) and (Alligence) Yes Both are MMO's.

Infinity is also an MMO, just with a huge budget and many developers etc.

Nems game is created and still under development by 1 person. X-wars was created by I think 3 devs, but am not sure.

Truth? I look forward to Infinity, to give it a try. But for real time I'll take my Alligence any time! ! !

And to speak my mind, X- Wars is crap! Also they did charge to play and you got a few extras. Bad thing was NOTHING was fixed. Now the Devs are back in control of X-Wars and it is a bit better but is still loaded with problems.

I think the game was rushed myself ( talking about this round) Not enough bugs were fixed.

Alligience is Real time. Yea I do not se 3d graphics. but I wonder if I did if it would not ruin it's total hold on me

Thats something that concerns me with Infinity. the 3D could in a way kill the RT play of it. Plus when it is released how many of us are going to be able to play it without purchasing whole new systems or components?

Also I worry about a balanced game. Alligience is Balanced! X-Wars meh!! kinda ( if your under attack protection but that just my thought)

If we think about it.. Even Strobel's game could fall into the MMO catagory in a manner of speaking.

Overall , I'm addicted to Allegience plain and simple.. And at least with Nems game There will be almost ZIP for bugs..

The testers (At last test) were slamming hard on that. I know I'm of of em! and I wager Nem's hair almost turned white when we all pointed out problems! lol

With regard to Infinity, as it is still what 2 years out? I'm going to watch for updates, but am concerned it wont even make it outside the gate.
like so many others that looked great then died on the operation table.

At least with BOTF games were here to cattle prod the Devs if need be to keep em rolling. ( That was a figure of speech by the way! No insult or bodily harm intended! lol )

Thats all I got to say.

Well, most of the nukes seem to have already been launched, but I'll ring in.

In my occasionally faulty memory, the term 'MMO' did not exist (or come in to popular use) until it started, at first, to describe Everquest, and then in a much larger way later, SWG. Browser-based games had existed for a long, long time, and MUD's since probably around the time I was born. The fact that popular culture spawned the term yet didn't attach it's use to those games such as X-Wars and Federation (MUD I played back on AOL, those were the days!) suggests to me an obvious conclusion; rightly or wrongly, the term was not meant to apply to them, for whatever reason. There also seems to be a player requirement; Freelancer multi-player servers can and often are persistent, and your character's state is preserved after you log out just like, say, EVE, but there's a solid limit on the number of players. While still fairly large (at least with somebody hosting on an uber-computer from a university connection), it's never garnered the MMO title either.

The socialists on Wiki can debate it all they want, but the masses speak fairly clearly, or seem to at least.

As an aside, I can't recall the name of the now-defunct game, but it involved establishing a base in this world where most of the world had disappeared except for some floating islands of rock. It was partly a strategy game, but persistent and real-time, almost like an a huge version of Homeworld, and it was considered an MMO. But again, the masses have determined that it's disctinctly different from browser games.

For the record, I don't always agree with the masses, but the masses determine all things by their overpowering will, so I merely submit to their oppressive rule.

Oh, and the Allegiance thing with fixing a player cap with multiple galaxies -- thats one thing I hate about several MMO's, but EVE refuses to shard (except for their China server, which is understandable). But, I've become an EVE fanboy, and it's destroying my education, so I won't rant on that.

^
^
What he said.