'hat's off' are you guys joking and is Massively losing all of it impartiality, I thought you were with us on the AoC hate train?

There is only one thing that I'd like to merge the AoC servers with, and that's a sledgehammer.

Why on earth should people who play MMO's as a recreational activity have to put up with 'difficult times', something is seriously out of wack here. Every time I hear this type of sob story, the developer asks the customer to shoulder some of emotional burden too.

Games need to be fun, run more professionally and developers need to take a good hard look to whether they can supply the goods, rather than just jumping on the bandwagon pumping out a "triple A' title and watching the money roll in.

I'm especially pissed off with these recent tales of woe from MMO companies, lest we forget that they shook us down pretty damn hard for collectors editions and pre orders as well as subscription rates that never fall below around $15 regardless of running costs.

No sympathy from me I'm afraid. I totally support effectively run games (LOTRO, WoW and EVE Online), with clear channels of communication (you don't get lies, you might not get any information, but no lies) and people need to see that these type of games are a great way of spending fun time, rather than worrying about the bottom line of a company run by a bunch of shysters. We keep hearing about business decisions dictating direction, you know what, I play games to relax, not to hear about other peoples problems.

All this is going to achieve is to reduce hardware running costs for FunCom, nothing more. Players will see more instances open up when higher player volume dictates and there will be little increased benefit to players. The inconvenience of having to rename characters or the downtime largely outweighs the benefits of server consolidation in the short term, and players will simple decide to move on.

FunCom had their chance and blew it, there are no do overs in the MMO world after the NGE, sorry.