Yes, the Warband Saga post was a lie. But I can explain! Basically I’m on day 173 in my game, which means I’m beyond the intro phase and well into the mid-game. The post I started to write was first way too long, then way too high level, and ultimately not very good. My bad for playing way more than I intended, I blame PoP. So I’m scrapping this version, and have a plan for something else. No timetable on that since anytime I set one, I blow it.
Free transfers coming to Rift. Oooh. Ahhh. How truly benevolent of Trion! /sarcasm
Listen, if you are cheering because Trion has decided not to punch you in the face (charged transfers), you need to reevaluate your expectations. You pay that $15 for a reason, and it’s not (unless we are talking SOE) just to keep the servers online. Free transfers are, to me, about as special as a monthly content patch. It (should be) expected.
I bought Cities XL on a Steam sale. After about 10 minutes I was left wondering what I ever saw in SimCity to begin with. Kinda confused as to why it did not grab me in any way, as at one point I loved SimCity. Or maybe just the thought of it… it’s been a long time since I actually played a city building sim.
Hardcore Casual 
Well the thing with SimCity was you’d get little popups, WE DONT LIKE YOU, FIX OUR POWER PLANT. Now we’ve got twitter and facebook, so you’re just building a city. Plus the only reason you build it is so you can destroy it with disasters and see if you can rebuild it again.
Server transfers SHOULD be a part of our subscriptions, but until now, they simply haven’t been. You can golf clap it all you like, but when every major server-based game charges you up the wazoo to do a server transfer it is unusually customer-friendly for Trion to give them without additional charge. And not just once, but once a week. That’s a $100 monthly value! (per Blizzard’s bend-over pricing plan).
:P
Yes, we live in a day where doing what seems reasonable is no longer expected or merely “reasonable”, it’s exemplary.
‘We want the shard you select to provide the best experience possible. It is important that there remains a balance between Guardian and Defiant players and to that available shards do not become too over populated or unbalanced. For this reason you will only be able to move to specific shards we’ve selected to accept new transfers, please note the shards available for transfer may change over time.’
So, pretty much what WoW has already been doing for however long.
I wonder how long it’ll be until they introduce transfers to any server? For a fee of course, we wouldn’t want people using it too often would we?
Cities XL is terrible, which is why it probably didn’t grab you. The developers went out of business while there were still gamebreaking bugs. New developers were brought on for Cities XL 2011 but they didn’t do any work on the previous game.
I was in the beta for Cities XL when it was meant to be a big online world where you shared blueprints for buildings and you could walk your avatar into other peoples regions. Of course no one wanted to pay $10 a month to do so, it had less features than Sim City did (public transport was almost non-existant) and the game died a painful death.
Carlos nailed it. Cities XL was touted to be the next coming of the city building genre with MMO type elements built in to boot, but after being invited into beta i quickly realized the game was a shell of what the Sim City franchise was (Sim City Socities not included).
So many features were either broken, unavailable, or being tested internally. The game really was very vague on how to accomplish certain tasks and more than anything it never really felt “fun” for me. Tried to give it chance hoping that getting into the latter stages would make the game shine, but it never reached it’s potential and really bombed at launch afterwards.
” Free transfers are, to me, about as special as a monthly content patch. It (should be) expected.”
Maybe that is why people are cheering. How often lately do we get what we think we should for our subscription fee? It seems more and more lately we are told we have to pay a fee or visit a cash shop.
Couple ‘o questions: what’s the main feature that you think makes PoP great? All my time is being eaten by EVE and Starcraft 2, but I’d like something to play in the future when one/both of them get old.
Also relating to M&B: are you planning to buy the new one (I think it’s called With Fire and Sword, but don’t quote me on that) and see what that has to offer, or just sticking with Warband for the time being?
And nice to see you not chest-thumping at how awesome Trion are for offering select character transfers. Some of the people on Massively are just incredible considering when it comes to Trion fanboiism.
With Fire and Sword is pretty good. I’m not sure it’s worth buying another full price game, but it does change game play in native mode significantly. I’m sure it will lead to some interesting mods. I haven’t looked for any yet though.
I’ll do a review of PoP at some point, but I’m still only mid-way through my game atm. If nothing else it’s super clean and error-free, and still plays like M&B but with enough changes to make it seem like an expansion.
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yeah so…. after making my blog post I realized afterwards that I had mis-attributed this blog to Syp not Syncaine. Edited but too slow for the trackback :)
Many apologies, what I get for reading a bunch of posts in a row.