Shadowbane

[Caohmin]

Routehero asked on the SB board if this game was worth buying:

http://vnboards.ign.com/message.asp?topic=51050911&replies=62

Not too many positive replies. I bought the game a while ago and have been waiting to see if it was ever going to improve; so far, no joy.

Guess I'll wait a couple more months before I check it out.

[Zutroy]

The Shadowbane situation kinda reminds me of what happend to Anarchy Online. Both had huge problems at launch and are gonna suffer forever because of it. SB will probably still be around for awhile because it does seem to have a fairly loyal player base, but it'll never see the numbers that DAoC has.

Also I heard there was some huge hacking problem about a week ago that basically had people running around in god mode. Once something like that happens, I'm not sure you can ever convince people its "safe" again.

[Caohmin]

Apparently they left some God-mode commands in the client. A guild hacked the client and gave themselves God-mode and then ran amok. Kinda funny; they were teleporting people to some underwater city.

I think the single biggest complaint is the login servers suck and are always going down. Not really conducive to a new game trying to build a player base.

[Axecleaver]

I beta'd it and decided it wasn't for me. Axe likes a little carebear with his PvP.

I think you gotta have friends ready to help you when you start playing, or you're in for the pain.

The hacking thing was pretty funny... what idiot leaves godmode stuff in the client ffs... first thing you check on that routine is "is my IP address internal?"

I beta'd Anarchy, but it had such hungry memory holes I didn't feel I got a fair look at it. Played it for 3 weeks and decided I'd had enough. There were so many exploits and problems at launch that people had hit the level hardcap in about 10 days.

The pvp was by zone, and you basically had no viable pvp going on. All of it was occurring at the zone lines, and it was just duels basically. Both sides would come hang at the duel site, and every now and then someone would fight. Sucked.

unknownplayer.com had some great articles about some of the exploits that happened there, including black snow interactive, remember those guys? The company interaction with them made me never want to try the game again.

[Malison]

I played Anarchy Online during beta. Axe was dead on about the memory holes.  That and the lag pretty much ruined any chance of it having a good launch (they went live and said "it'll be fixed we promise")

The armor and weapons were neat, and the classes were somewhat interesting.  The tech wizard classes were all boring though. Coming from EQ, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how you could get away with only have 4 types of spells.  DD, regen, and shielding and root.

Of course, then I came to DAoC, and saw their wizards were about the same, which is really really sad.  At least a cabalist has a big variety of things he can cast (now.)

Shadowbane looked bad, had crappy lag, and seemed like a gankfest.  this is from watching my friends play/sit at logon.