Ravven

Horrible article. Griefers on PVE realms make the Firelands dailies even more of a chore.

Be careful about pre-ordering if you live in the UK. Presently a lot of UK/EU players are blocked from the game due to Trion deciding to use a port range which a lot of ISPs associate with P2P.

Earlier betas have run quite smoothly, though, so hopefully they'll decide to fix this and let us play again. :)

That is wonderful news! I hate GOA with all the intensity of a thousand suns. As mentioned above, they offered nonexistent customer service, that broken joke of a website, and constant account problems...it will be so nice to not have to deal with them. I may even re-sub, as even with all of the flaws and the irritation of having to deal with GOA, the game was damned fun. If they ever do go truly F2P, it will be wonderful.

I would think that they'd address these issues as a reputation management issue (if they don't care about the impact on the game, or the players). The two main negative things that everyone wrote about prior to closed beta were "it's going to be just another Asian grindfest" which turned out not to be true, and "Lineage II had more bots than players, and constant goldspam and Aion will too" - which is at least partly true. If a company has a bad reputation for customer service, being friendly to goldfarmers and botters, and basically not caring about their players, I think it affects sales/subscriptions on current and future games.

They're not being honest about "game masters are working around the clock to identify and ban gold spammers", you know. On my server (Spatalos EU) the same goldspammers have been happily ruining every channel since the game launched, unmolested in the slightest.

All it would take is for a GM to log into each server for a couple of minutes, pick the names out of the rolling wall of goldspam that is every single channel, and ban those account. Move onto the next server, rinse and repeat.

Very good article, with an unfortunate use of the terms "raider" and "casual". As other posters have said, perhaps the terms good raider and bad raider would have been more appropriate. Aside from that, I'm really shocked at the level of nastiness in the comments. Obviously this article hit a sensitive spot...but show a little respect, people.

Responsible raiding has nothing to do with the amount of time that you spend. As someone pointed out, there are a lot of "casuals" who spend many, many hours levelling alts, etc. What responsible raiding means is that you log in early, repaired and stocked with potions and flasks, that you research new encounters, that you don't go afk for dinner in the middle of the raid, and that you stay to the end. Anything less is a hardship on 9, or 24, other people who did act responsibly.

There is casual raiding, where people will understand if you happen to not show up, or if everyone needs to wait for fifteen minutes for you to wolf dinner or do chores. Where you all do the best you can even if people have crap gear, or if no one knows the encounter. That is different from what the article refers to as "hardcore" raiding, and there is a place for both.