I wanted to comment on the EVE thing in that A: The Titan nerf (though I too have never seen one) sounds like a needed one since the DD weapon is a large reason fleet battle including Titans scare me now :P and B: The fighter-bomber would be a seriously good way to (not that they will or have any plans to) introduce actual player-piloted ships, like from inside the cockpit a la Black Prophecy (or Wing Commander if you prefer).

I know people are very fond of the idea and frankly, the way EVE is set up right now it wouldn’t really work anyway, but imagine launching a fighter bomber in a fleet battle and when you do it basically puts you in a (dare I say) mini game where you are to pilot the ship to the target capital ship, download the schematics to find the weak points, target those weak points and unleash hell in the form of bombs, then get back w/o dying. Maybe they could even put in a fighter escort :P

I’m not saying anything needs to be changed in EVE at all. I’m just looking at how things could be done instead of the standard “click to target, press Fx to launch bombs, then orbit while your ordinance is deployed” scenario.

Polished is good, without question, but the number one aim of ANY game should be FUN. Is it fun?

I like Aion, Aion is fun for me. It would be fun even if it weren’t so polished.

Though if you’d had our brave paladin facing off against a master mind flayer that would have been a very different screen… hehe.

In Shards of Dalaya those zones are better exploited. The SoD guys couldn’t use all the expansion zones (for technical and “severe understaffing” reasons, I guess), so they made the most out of the Classic + Velious zones, plus a select few from other expansions. The result is that there isn’t a single zone that is completely useless, and that the average zone always has a few people in it. The game feels much more alive that way. Even live EQ with 200 more players per server didn’t feel this alive.

I tried WoW twice, for 30 days each. This is not against WoW in particular, just an observation: I was alone most of the time in the classic zones, and most of the people I met were only passing through. No groups at all. It’s such an empty world if you’re just surrounded by NPCs.

In other news (related to this post): Why can’t some people see that there are multiple ways to do things, and none of the ways is the “right” or “better” way? You could criticize DDO’s controls for “not being like WoW”, but if DDO’s controls were like WoW’s, when does DDO stop being DDO and become WoW?

“Only WoW does it right and everyone before and since has and will do it wrong, because they don’t do it like WoW” doesn’t even make sense :P Some valid criticism came off those articles, but I’d prefer them with less attitude :(

(Disclaimers: Yes, I also like to read scientific papers. That level of dryness please, when discussing such topics. There we go.)

I guess that the thing that WoW has going for it is that even though EQ/EQ2 are bigger, WoW is “big enough” for most people, I would say that it is a nicely polished and fun fast paced game to play, and even though it can’t match subscriber count of a freebie like Maple Story, it does have PLENTY of players. So it hits all the bases at once. When both WoW and EQ2 were new, WoW was, IMHO, clearly the most accessible and fun to play MMO out there. Blizzard did a great job of nursing their baby into the juggernaut that it has become. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed early EQ2, but it ran like crap on my PC and I hated the zoning and instancing at the time. It made me constantly aware that I was playing a computer simulation of a fantasy game … at 10 frames per second.

These days, for whatever reason, the zones of EQ2 don’t bother me nearly as much. In fact, I like the EQ2 community a lot more. I think that when it comes to player base, that quality matters a LOT more than quantity. I would rather interact with the same 10 awesome, friendly players, for years than have my pick of a million douchebags to choose from, you know?

C out

- too true, I know exactly how that feels. I like to wander from game to game depending on where my mood takes me, and finding a guild that is sympathetic to that and understands can be daunting to say the least.