cpeart

P.S. there is a rating system built in. You rate each mission as you finish it. When others go to play missions you can search by ratings (as well as author etc.). The mission selection screens are very well thought out. The whole thing is put together exceedingly well.

The player created content in City of Heroes is amazing, and it is still early days. The missions so far have mostly been excellent! From serious to campy its been a happy ride for me.

PvP doesn't belong in most of these games. Characters balanced for PVE always get trashed by PVP re-balancing. It is a constant tug of war between the two types of gaming.

For games designed to PVP the forum whiners hate them because they suck on a level playing field, so they want to run around being overpowered in some game with tacked on PVP and feel like testosterone man (teenage boy using mommy's credit card) and ruin it for everyone else.

In PVP optional games, you get forum whiners whining because most of the thoughtful mature population wish PVP would just disappear and quit wrecking the PVE game balance for PVP reasons. SO there aren't enough players doing PVP and the developers spend more and more time trying to make PVP more popular and dump all over their core demographic making most of the population madder and madder. Lord of the Rings Online! I am looking at you. Though there are many examples..

Go grind mobs that drop 15 or so silver a pop along with reputation items (sell on auction house) and vendor junk. Boring but quick.

Hey, I think Turbine (with Lotro at least) did quite well on release! Very few bugs, and most of those were with very complicated Boss Mob scripts. Yeah they tweaked some classes after, but not really serious bugs.

Also I think Cryptic did a fine job with City Of Heroes release too!

I was in those beta's and the beta for WoW and for AOC and Tabula Rasa, and yes I bought the Release of all those. AOC and Tabula Rasa were very flawed and I no longer play either of them. I think WoW had more problems on release (which was fairly smooth) compared to Lotro and CoH (surprisingly smooth)..

Other companies besides Blizzard can execute excellent releases! These loser companies really are below average.

so at 80 when all your attacks take 6+ keystrokes, in your randomized system a single mistake wastes the power's stamina requirement and its cool down, whereas a mage clicking just one button would have an even greater advantage in speed and the ability always fires instead of pecking at random keys? Carpal Tunnel Syndrome for the lose.

better to have everyone sharing the same system. hey, finger wigglers should have to make mystical passes with their arms and hands too!

why not just have a response system similar to DAoC's or LoTRO's? If a mob attacks you with a certain type of attack, you have a timed response window-of-opportunity to fire off an opposing attack/ability/chain that is only available in those circumstances?

After playing both a melee and a mage type up a ways in AOC the mage will always have a decided advantage in both speed and not failing combos over a melee. Hence my decision to quit paying for this game. (That and females melee does even less damage than males, lol).

I was a seer in Ultima Online, a lot of my friends from the seer program did go on to become game developers. Most of my game time for about a year was playing as one Main NPC and roles as NPCs in other seer's quests as well. It was mostly fun except people continually tried to Grief us. I also helped develop the GM tools eventually given to the seers to help us deal with the griefers and to do other jobs easier (spawning real npcs for players to fight, that sort of thing).

Many people took the Ultima Online server emulation code and developed their own games based on it that UO clients could log into and play. It seems a lot of people like to develop quests play as NPCs for others.

but are click through eula's actually legal contracts in the United States of America? hmm.. ever tested in a court of law? didn't they hold the accounts hostage before the change anyway? isn't this the American way now? To ignore the law and imply that whatever they 'say' in a eula is the law?

as much as possible i, for one, will no longer be sending money to linden lab. fortunately my business model allows me to reduce expenditures to them a great deal :)

Yes, I did that in Ultima Online. Was a fun job.

So, comments working yet? Somehow I doubt it.