What is Reddit's opinion of PlaneShift?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

There are actually several open source MMOs. The two that immediately come to mind are Planeshift and Ryzom. Planeshift has always been open source. Ryzom was only open-sourced a couple of years ago.

Open source games have trouble because it's difficult to coordinate efforts enough to produce a complex game like an MMO in a reasonable amount of time. You need people basically working full-time to ensure that the game doesn't turn into a smoldering ruin. There are so many people to coordinate and most of them will be unreliable and only participate on occasion.

PlaneShift has been volunteer created since 2002. I remember playing the barebones version of it in 2003 when there wasn't even combat while looking for free MMO's that weren't Runescape. Were slim pickin's back in those days.

I quit PlaneShift within a year or two ago. And boy, can i tell you that it's not worth touching. It's been a technical demo (prealpha) since long before I started back in 2008. To my knowledge it's gone through 2 maybe 3 versions since. Very low quality game with a player base of about 30 concurrent users on a good day.

Ignoring the terrible graphics/low polygon count models, it's a heavy grind and RP focused MMO (to my knowledge, no one plays on the non-RP server). They tried to do a classless, skill based system akin to runescape, and succeeded in creating a system with tons of skills that only level when you specifically practice them, then require that you train them, which costs XP, a load of money, and a secondary point system called Practice Points. Essentially, you earned PP from gaining XP, and it served as a secondary limiter to how far you could train your skills.

I should probably mention that very few of the skills actually level together--that is, if you're making leather armor, you will train ONLY leatherworking. Many other skills simply do nothing, and have never done anything, as the mechanics that they are tied to are not implemented in the game. Gross mismanagement on the behalf of the dev team's lead is also something i recall; that and many pointless bans of friends.

After playing PlaneShift for significant number of years, I'm very sick of overly simplistic, low graphic/polygon count MMOs. I want something that looks like a game that was made this decade.

My biggest concern for the game itself is that it will look like an extremely dated game. There's no reason for it to, and I'm not asking for this to look like the next Transformer's movie, full of scantly clad women and explosions. Keep spell effects gorgeous and minimal, and make it look like it was actually made in 2015.

Here's my reasoning, outside of my own preferences--graphical fidelity is like the cover to a book. As much as you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, the cover is the first thing that will catch your eye. As a sub based MMO it needs to be able to grab the attention of potential new players in a glance. As it stands, most would laugh at it if it looked like what you think is perfect. And while it could be argued that WoW still gets subs with a very low graphical fidelity, it has over ten years of millions of people who loved that game and could see it do no evil. That's all the publicity it needs.

Now, personally I want it to look great because my PC could run it at 60+ FPS with much better graphics, even if it ends up looking better than in this video at 50:30. Thanks /u/SkulkiBones for this video.

Australia isn't that far south at all.

Have a look at this map - you can see the latitudes are similar to North Africa. In fact, they're also quite similar to Southern Africa too.

http://www.planeshift.it

http://eternal-lands.com

These are the lowest spec MMOs you can play on your potato and still have a good time.

Even older games like Lord of the Rings and EverQuest will tax your PC in raids, dungeons, and popular towns.

I understand that it may not be plausible to upgrade, but it might worth an investment in the future for at least some more RAM.

This looks like it's in pretty active development too

http://www.planeshift.it

And again, there is a long list on that site. Sometimes I'll spend a Saturday just looking through games and installing/revewing them. There is ALOT of utter crap out there, but every now and then you hit some gems. Took me a long time to get over battle for wesnoth (check this out too).

I think it makes sense to have different licenses for program and content, and as long as you separate the two, they shouldn't infect each other. I know PlaneShift did something you're suggesting. Maybe you could ask them about their experiences.

I actually played DAOC a bit on a private server. Not quite my cub of tea. Leveling up means you just start killing mobs and that is about it till level 20 and then you get to either PVP or do more of the same until it is 50 and at 50 it is all PVP.

> http://www.planeshift.it

Now that is a game I haven't tried in a VERY LONG time. Last time I did it was very clunky and buggy. I think I spent a couple of days and got bored as it tried to do so much but had no to little resources.

Did you play it?

Like I said, Pantheon or Ashes seems like the best choice for you right now.

Unless you want to pay to sub to Dark Age of Camelot.

Try this. It has pretty much everything you wanted.

http://www.planeshift.it

I mean both the client and server open source, but yes. If you choose GPL as a license your "competitors" need to contribute changes back into the project. So you probably just end up with a bunch of forks. The assets could be used to "differentiate yourself", for service providers that don't want to change the project.

These guys are already doing it: http://www.planeshift.it/ You could setup your own server and ask your users money (or do the old community build -> payed migration trick alla silkroad). They did make the assets proprietary.

I used to play Planeshift

Its free to play for ever, graphics are ok and it has a quite small user base. Its been around for around 10 years and not that popular compared to the biggies likes WoW etc.

If you are into role play & not that bothered about excellent game graphics, give it a shot.

Planeshift. Haven't played for 8 years now and it still appears to be the same. More of tech demo than a game, but the element purely focused on roleplay which, was surprisingly fun at a times.

Minecraft? It's technically first-person, but not a shooter. It may also be set to creative mode where there's no restrictions on what can be done.

Terraria may work too. Recommend something creative as a goal, although overcoming the early world may be a challenge.

MMOs tend to be designed for this too. However, some MMOs have a party-size limit, or require a paid subscription that isn't suitable for single-shot play. However, there is a free MMO called Planeshift - It's still a work in progress, but you can see how it plays out.

I dislike most MMORPGs. Most of them are nothing more than leveling up to show off some sort of e-penis. Some people even make it into work where they have 24 hour grinding sprees. If grinding is boring why are you doing it? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a game (to have fun)? Yet so many people do it anyway.

Planeshift is under development and progressing slowly, but the developers emphasize actual role playing. They even disallow player names with numbers in them. It looks like a game I'd really enjoy.

In general, these sorts of games simply don't exist.

Buying advantages is one of the few ways to be able to afford programming an F2P MMO.

Sure, some are done open-sourcely, but even so, you need to be able to afford a server.

The only exceptions I can think of are things like:

• http://www.planeshift.it/ - I have no idea how they afford anything
• http://www.getcontinuum.com/ - It's just on the border of "MMO" and "regular multiplayer", so servers are lightweight enough that they can be run out of fans' own pockets
• WoW and RuneScape - where the free version acts basically as a 'time-unlimited trial' for the paid version, but are run on separate servers so the other people on the server are still on even footing with you