Shadowbane

A great game, but ruined by a chinese company who doesn't GAF about the players or the game itself. It's down about as much as it's up. 'Maintenance' happens during NA evenings and nights. Bots have over run the game too. The game is so good, but just destroyed by this garbage company. Hopefully this gets remade, or a fresh emulator server comes up again. Also they seem to mine, and sell your data. Read their EULA. Here is just one thing you agree to by buying the game. Scary stuff. Avoid this game as it stands unfortunately 2.1.7 Advertisements CHANGYOU uses third party ad-serving technologies that may collect information to provide behavioral and non-behavioral advertisements within our Services. The information collected and used for the targeted advertising may contain the following, without limitation: age and gender, number of views of an advertisement, device unique identifier or other device identifiers and settings, information about your use of the products and Services, other sites (including third party web pages and mobile Internet sites) you have viewed (as well as date and time viewed), advertisement(s) served, the advertisement(s)’ in-game location and length, and your response to the advertisement(s) (if any). The analytics tools and ad serving technologies may use server log files, web beacons, cookies, tracking pixels and other technologies to collect this information, and may combine the information collected on other CHANGYOU Services with information collected from other third party websites, products and services and with demographic, advertisement, market and other analytics surveys. Standing alone, this information is not personal data; however, if CHANGYOU combines any of this information with personal data, CHANGYOU will treat this information as personal data pursuant to this Privacy Policy.

Yes, it is the old shadowbane. Unfortunately, the pay to win shop that they implemented is unacceptable.

[h1]A Flawed Gem Gets Worse[/h1] The problems started out of the gate. [b]First up[/b] was simple server stability - the typical growing pains people could roll their eyes at, vent about or laugh off, but mostly have just come to accept as a part of any MMORPG launch rush. Pings were also terrible (400ms+) for NA users, but then it's literally on the opposite side of the world. It was accepted as a necessary evil, what was important was [i]real people[/i] were actually playing! [b]The second red flag[/b] was the cash shop. Everyone saw it coming - it's an Asian MMORPG in 2021. The shop was full of grossly overpriced rare goods, from crucial runes used to complete builds to the strongest weapons in the game - except these "glass" weapons deteriorate and can't be repaired, eventually permanently lost. Everyone rolled their eyes, but there wasn't a subscription fee anymore, what'd you expect? And all this stuff dropped in the game. Nothing was actually gated behind a paywall, it wasn't pay2win, it was pay2notfarm. [b]The third red flag[/b] was the experience rates. The emulator had greatly streamlined the leveling process because the PVE is easily the worst part of the game. Of course, now we were back to Live rates, and those actually were kinda slow, remember? Well, yes, but as it would turn out, not [i]this[/i] slow. Presumably because of the well-known grindiness of Asian MMOs, XP rates had been halved. But it was worse than that - not only were the rates halved, the double XP for certain servers that was eventually on all the time by the end of Shadowbane's life was gone too. So XP rates were actually a [i]fourth[/i] of what they were on live, but, strangely enough, the cash shop didn't include an option to buy an XP bonus or max-level character. Was it really not a cash grab? Players responded exactly how you'd expect: automation and multi-boxing. Automation has always been a part of Shadowbane's history, being publicly accepted by the live team. Multi-boxing was another story. Common on live (hey, another subscription!), it was outright banned with aggressive enforcement on the last emulator left standing. ChangYou's stance was - and still is - simply unknown, but they began to issue IP-level bans without warning or notice to some multiboxers and not others. In the push to bypass the simple methods in place to prevent multiboxing, exploits were discovered, including ones that allowed people to log onto accounts that weren't actually even theirs. Oops! This was rapidly patched out, which actually gave the community hope that ChangYou might care about the game. At the same time, they removed an easy means of multiboxing on a single system. The typical arms race of cheaters vs development ensued, in the race, item dupe methods were discovered and rampantly abused. ChangYou actually contributed to the abrupt inflation from duping by blanket issuing large "compensation gifts" for the increasingly common extended downtimes. [b]The fourth red flag[/b] was resource mine and bane (city siege) Windows of Opportunity. If a Chinese guild attacks a guild based in Eastern Standard Time, the latest the EST guild can set the Bane defense for is usually around noon Friday (which would be midnight Saturday in China). One's dead in the middle of a work day, the other is a little late on a weekend. Guess which has more people show up? ChangYou says they thought these windows were 24 hours long, so defending teams, regardless of geolocation, could pick a time their guild could actually log on to defend. They aren't, and ChangYou has done nothing to change them. [b]The latest red flag[/b], and first blatant cash grab everyone was dreading, was rune drop rates. Remember how you could farm everything anyway and the game wasn't really pay to win? Out of nowhere, that abruptly became less of the case. Stat runes, key components to every character build, suddenly stopped dropping as much as they used to. Guess what you can buy in the cash shop? There's also the standard accusations of favoritism and GM corruption, rampant often seconds-long lag, random restarts during NA primetime, maintenance windows during NA primetime, and a host of sub-problems that come from those problems (good luck playing a melee character if you can even log in). The NA population continues to drop by the day and is a ghost town compared to even three weeks ago. I doubt ChangYou has a single full-time resource allocated to this game, and they definitely don't have any resources allocated during non-Chinese hours. They bought this license, didn't know what to do with it, and got tired of just sitting on the bad investment. [b]This is not a real product the publisher cares about or wants to succeed beyond getting their investment money back.[/b] [h1][b]Please come back SBEmu! It's been several months now and ChangYou has proven they're predatory, incompetent, and by and large disinterested in the project![/b][/h1]

Shadowbane, when owned/managed by Ubisoft/Wolfpack studios, was the greatest MMO of all time. This sorry bastardized version is a far cry from the glory it once was. Locking up Concentration Potions and many other items behind a newly implemented cash shop is disgusting. It's sickening to see an option for a "market" now, where there never was one. The original game was magnificent. Truly a unique MMO experience that to this day, I have yet to find. This version is gross. Don't waste your time. If you want something that better emulates the classic experience, just look around, it's out there.

It's old, it's clunky, and still has the best character building options outside of Dungeons & Dragons.

As many have mentioned SHADOWBANE seems to define "flawed gem". Prior to playing playing original SB in 2003 I had played dozens and dozens of RPGs of various styles but had not done an honest attempt at MMOs. SB was to become my first real MMO and in the long run after years of playing a dozen or more high profile releases it is still my favourite. SB was a much heralded release back in the 2nd Wave of MMOs (2003) and implemented concepts that were waaaay ahead of it's time. Not just the much talked about open PvP, with no safe areas beyond the tutorial island play. A much bigger plus was the fact there were several layers above and beyond the deep-deep PvP play, such as: - Of course most already know the number of race, sub-race, class, profession, discipline, weapon type/style, armour type, and starting runes that tweak your abilities, talents and resistances etc etc are so numerous it's hard to calculate the number of character types you can get from just a single race or class. Essentially here in an MMO was more in-game choices on how to build your character than in most any single player game you could name. Lot's of people would already know that these myriad choices of course made balance a very difficult thing that took a few years to get right. - Beyond all the choices above, one factor of player customisation I loved that modern games are just starting to return after several years of dumbing down the RPG market is; after each level you get to individually choose where to put your earned attribute points and training points, so that even if your character is the same race, sub-race, class, profession, discipline, weapon and armour type as your friend's, your character can still play and fight really differently based on attribute choices, training choices, armour or jewellery types, - The vast majority of cities and services in the game are all player built, player owned, player ran, so the "Play Your Own Way" tag that many modern games try to tout was baked into this game 19 years ago; so you could just play as a merchant forge runner and re-seller in a PvP-centric game, - The political layer; where not just individuals, groups or guilds matter; but also cities, provinces, nations are owned by a guild or alliance of guilds. Yeah, actual political nation building like the birth of a nation concept that happened in the birth of Germany and Italy in the 1800s with the piecing together of a greater nation province by province. A period where large states, small states etc had to court the numerous tiny city states to accrue the money, resources, manpower to piece by piece build actual nations out of areas that were prior often only in loose cooperation or maybe all out war with another. So according to me the basic game concept was GREAT... ...So, how then did they screw it up and not become a long lasting institution like some other games released about the same time? Here is where comments on both the historical game and present game start to merge. -- Server lag, server down time, rubber-banding, server glitches; all existed in the old game really killing the momentum of the original release. It did get better over time and was "ok" by the time UBI then WP shut down the old servers. Unfortunately "ok" for 2008/9 is really sub-par for 2021. The current owner seems to have put only a marginal effort into correcting the historical server problems, and still has to shut off servers for about 24 hours every week for maintenance. In this day and age, that's really unacceptable unless it's a private server game ran from your buddy's basement. ---- Cheating, duping, bots, multi-boxing. These factors were rampant on the original servers. Multi-boxing seemed to actually have been encouraged on the original servers as the population decreased people would just buy several accounts to play a whole group simultaneously - once the game went free it was so rampant maybe 1/8 of the players you would encounter would be live and not multi-box bots. The modern game seems to officially discourage multi-boxing and bot play, but only selectively. So it seems to be enforced only sporadically but of course still exists and leaves a real uneven playing field with unequal enforcement. Tacked onto this, unfortunately there is quite a strong element of the old-school SB hardcore crowd that will say "if you're not cheating you're not trying" and still rush to exploit these situations. - - - But can anyone explain when and where that this attitude has lead to a healthy or growing population in any game - ever? - - - The nature of the game itself. At the outset many (myself included) loved the high stakes multilevel play where it's not just about PvP but also guild, city and Nation building. But as time went on and people saw they could lose not just a PvP fight, but have their personally owned city that took a year + to build and 10's of millions of resources to develop and maintain -- burned to the ground in a day... It drove some players away, even those that loved normal PvP. For those who haven'y played SB, think about how in some games people whine about getting ganked and losing some gold or XP and having to repair their gear. In SB that is often a 10 times a day event for newer or mid-level players; then on top of that your veteran players who have levelled several good characters can have their entire last year of guild / nation building taken away in an instant. --- Again some loved this, but play stats and games sales over the life of the game say the vast majority of RPG players were not ready for this type of play in 2003 and most players no matter how competitive of personality and how much they like PvP are still not ready for this. --- Lastly, the 800 lb gorilla in the SB closet. The negative and intolerant player base. It seems in every version on SB I've ever played (original UBI servers, SBEmu, Magic Bane, and now on STEAM) there has always been a large element of intolerance towards different race, language and gender players. Maybe it's an offshoot of the ultra-competitive nature of SB that the player base becomes quite negative towards new players and any change of any kind. However it seems that this still exists in the new game. As well it seems quite OK to bash players of other nationalities, have blatantly racist character / guild names etc. and both the past and current owners do nothing. ---So overall SB is a game that I still like, it begat so much that many modern games are still trying to get right decades later - - but the game and it's community has it's flaws - - so it's a true "buyer beware" situation, if you can handle the downside, you might be in for a fun ride. (I don't normally have "Comments Off" on a review but I have no wish to debate whether there are any racist guilds in SB with all the usual suspects.)

In game cash shop allows you to buy all the gold and end level stat runes and equipment you want. Completely destroys the economy of the game. Sad to see such an amazing IP now controlled by an overseas company and repackaged with a cash shop. Also the servers are overseas as well, so the rubber-banding is even worse than it was back in the day. The chat filter also makes communication impossible. The letters "ay" or "ye" is filtered, just to name a few. The word "yes" is censored...

This is a game that is allowing key cloning and does nothing about the cheating. One person with ten accounts logged on and using one keyboard to target and attack with all ten tunes at once stacked on top of each other. It is not worth playing.