1st of all. I love the new Quarry and i think it's design has made it the ideal place for people to hang out trade and craft and auction. A place for newbs to get to go sweating and find a mentor. I think we should just keep on making that the sort of central place. One thing i always hated about Calypso since 8 years ago was that Hadashiem was this great big awesome city to walk through with all these little bars and shops and stuff. BUT NOBODY EVER WENT TO IT. Except for Hadahseim C because it had the storage terminal but it wasn't really in the city. I fear that Celest Harbor city is turning into this, but i dont think it makes sense for a place as complex and beautiful to become the central place becasue it creates lag issues that we dont seem to get as bad at the Quarry. So my solution. What if Celest harbour was kind of like a mission hub. What if it was filled with lots of npc characters so when you walked around it didn't feel like an abandoned city. You wouldn't need to make all of them mission brokers or even talk. It would be cool to have like some bars and maybe like some mission you'd have to meet some guy at a bar to get some info. What about if we get mission tokens we had shops for those. We could also put player run shops in there also. Also make the PVP ring also an event area for pvp battles. and maybe some other sort of event areas in there. I dont know what do you guys think?
Well the big problem I have with Celeste Harbour is lag. Yes I could upgrade my graphics card but thats not the point. I would rather trade almost anywhere else than there.
Harbour will be fine . I still see plenty of folks there, and once shops and condos open, more may hang around.
Once Celeste Harbour gets its shops and apartments and more mission brokers it will be fine. We do want to establish multiple busy areas on the planet. So yeah it will in essence become a kind of mission hub, a place that quite often will be the start point of chain missions.
I think there's a constant gap of understanding here between dev and your "average" player. If all of the particle and "glow" effects stay in place, i will continue to have to lower my graphics level to play there, and getting a lot of avatars onscreen is going to add to the issue. It's nice that the game engine offers you "cutting edge" features however constantly using "just a little more than the average PC can handle" doesn't brand you as a premium gaming experience, it brands you as a game that "normal" people can't play. The end result is really, primarily, wasted work for you guys, and a slight feeling of animosity. There's no benefit for most players or enjoyment of the work because they turn it off, or in some cases just avoid the place entirely. It does make for some great looking promo screens and moves off of the high end machines though. I personally think you're just kicking yourself in the rump on this one. Even though there's not a complete set of terminals anywhere on the planet (outside of a command post) Celeste Harbor was my favorite place to "hang out" and do my crafting. It still is, it's just that now since i have to turn off particle effects and post processing, it's a much duller place than before.
The graphics load keeps me away from CH most of the time. Even on low, 10 fps makes it not so much fun.
I'm not privy to the challenges faced during graphics compatability development, but I think its safe to say the current detail is being built to stand the test of time, for years to come. I built my current pc a year ago for $700 usd. By today's tech progression standards, it will be a dinosaur in 5 years. I'm unable to grasp how the devs are supposed to support 5-10 years of graphics backwards compatability.
My laptop is 2 years old and struggles with some parts of EU graphics on non-high settings. I will be looking to replace it sometime in the next year. I dont think 3 years is unreasonable age for a pc or component, and game developers should be expecting machines of that age. What they choose to do about it is another thing altogether.
2-3 years would cover me. The platform offers features that are intended to drive a very intense, high end gaming experience. But this is not what an MMO audience is comprised of. Many players are not even looking for "backwards compatibility" at 1-3 years since their computer purchase. They just don't want to have to constantly stay ahead of the curve. In another 2-3 years, they could turn on all that glow and sparkle, and a commodity machine will be able to handle it. And if they did that (in 2-3 years) they would be seen as freshening up the place and improving the experience a bit. However at this time it requires a higher end machine to handle it because those sort of graphics processors are not yet common. It's not about RAM or the speed of the computer's main CPU. It's about software-rendering "high end" graphics destroying the computer's ability to process the other aspects of the game. The CryEngine offers a lot of toys, and it can basically "crush" any computer's ability to render at usable framerates. Excessive use of those features while trying to attract a broad range of people who often don't consider themselves "gamer" or often even computer literate (much of your MMO Audience) to the platform is, well, sort of like trying to water your garden with a fire hose. The remembrance of years of distateful lag at the harbor will be around long after everyone's commodity video cards have embedded shading engines and whatever else is required to give us all a playable framerate.
I love the Harbour,it's spacious and I have NO lag issues there at all.The only thing I really miss is a Society Terminal, TKoC are accepting Recruits all the time. But I have been TP'ing to The Quarry to do this, it's no biggie though,and I can get to say hello to people at both TP's
