marymac

The first trip I took out there I found six frozen corpses drifting quietly in the void of the empty system. There was something beautifully macabre about it.

Good riddance. I un-subbed a few months back having played since Beta, and this news doesn't surprise me at all. Rarebit knows the game is dying, and he's retreating to a safe distance to watch it burn.

I'm sure Rarebit is a nice guy, but his attempts to "expand" the matrix only woudn up driving the game further and further away from its original intent. That is, to make the players a key part of the story, with the real ability to affect changes and outcomes. Instead he turned the story into a farm-fest, putting emphasis on items and gear that only served as a means to keep people busy between paltry Live Events. The majority of the community is content to put up with this stuff because they desperately chant the mantra of "It's better than nothing." Yet in the same breath they will all agree that this is no longer the game they originally signed up for.

Though the fault is not on Rarebit completely. SOE bought the game from Monolith, then failed miserably to do anything with it. Month after month it was nothing but staff cuts. The game had real potential. It could have been the quintessential cyber-punk MMO, truly driven by player action, reaction and interaction. SOE was simply not willing to allocate the time and funds necessary to make a great game. Now with Rarebit gone, the dubious "development team" consists of maybe two QA reps and a Community Relations Manager.

Hopefully now this game will die completely and we can all stop kidding ourselves.

Resource gathering in The Matrix Online (Data Mining, as it's officially known) is actually really fun. In the game's early days, Data Mining was pretty much pointless. It yielded experience and game currency, but the payout was pathetic. To see someone with the "Data Miner" tag was actually a game-wide joke in those days.

Nowadays, Data Mining yields some heavy duty enemy spawns that drop the resources necessary to craft some rare and powerful gear. Some of the spawns can be solo'd, but the worthwhile ones require a team. And the spawns are on a timer, so if you want to reap the rewards you need to work fast. It's insanely fun when done correctly.

I agree with offday. Re-creating is fun for about an hour, just to see what twisted interpretations Spore is capable of. But the real fun comes in creating something that is truly your own.

A presentation device that isn't wireless? I'll trade it for a regular old wireless mouse. Being able to move around the room can add that little something extra to a presentation.