Waxil

This is a game where they're excited to have 500 people online at once. Good idea, noble effort, and hell maybe one day we'll see a big budget version of this that works - until then though meh.

Lots of people say they want RP but then what invariably happens? The RP servers are just trolled (and if game mecahnic allows ganked) by people who don't understand RP or deem it solely for nerds/geeks.

Even of the group who said they wanted RP you end up once they are actually in the game an oddly large number of them seem to roll as xXx_1337JEDI66_xXx and start calling you a Jewish homosexual and teabagging your corpse at every opportunity.

Basically RP is never going to really work on the scale of mmos.

@Raffi256
Uh I can't think of a single MMO which is any more than that really.

Okay so here's the thing - if it's a wow-esque themepark then who cares?
If it's closer to a proper sequel to UO then.. unless you can play 18 hours a day to keep up with the kiddies/griefers/gankers/macroers/botters/exploiters.. again, who cares?

A lot of the people who claim they like things like permadeath and full loot you will generally notice what they really mean is that they like causing these things to other players - aka they are griefers. This is not always the case as some people enjoy the added risk, but for the most part it does seem to be true (hell I enjoy the adrenaline of the risks myself.. but as a casual player the reality of it just means my character will never really advance)

I mean really, there's always going to be one person or a band of persons who are max level and gear floating around killing everyone lower than them in mmos.. and this is why any sort of severe system can not really work.

Yet the developers want more money so they put in other time consuming systems instead.

What exactly did you think would happen once F2P/freemium/MT came to the west and developers realized the potential? All it does is encourage them to make playing the game for free as tedious as possible so that people pour in far more than $15/month in micro-transactions.

This is the fault of gamers for supporting this model though, by continually showing them that it works and is profitable you are slaying one time fee and subscription games and telling developers you will reward them more for producing worse/more tedious/more imbalanced/etc games.

if you are playing the same game even an hour a day you will eventually run out of stuff to do. With mmos some people play 4+ hours a day . Eventually you're going to get tired of running/grinding the same stuff over and over.
All mmo transients do is say "look, some of us are willing to take our money elsewhere", which frankly is a good thing. If enough people did it maybe quality would go up and we'd have fun mmos rather than merely addictive-dopamine releasing timesinks.

"It's his belief that the market for online gaming is poised to expand tenfold with the rise of casual-led, virally-spread, free-to-play titles."
The tragedy is he's correct, hell it's already begun. I understand that the majority of the market, especially casual, is willing to pay a fortune to freemium titles and thus it makes sense to develop those. It's just sad that the rest of us gamers get screwed as developers increasingly decide it's no longer profitable enough to make solely one-time fee or subscription titles. It's okay to have some MT titles, it just sucks when everything - even SP games - is tending towards that model.

@Waxil
Meanwhile kudos to blizzard for actually taking some firm action. I know of countless people who have botted/scammed/cheated/hacked/exploited (even as far as items with impossible stats) who at most got a temporary suspension. Nice to see them swinging the permaban hammer for once.

On one hand .. as a company stop making games and game mechanics which are not only easy to bot but so dull and tedious that they practically require botting.

On the other hand, as a gamer.. stop playing games that fit this description. Or in this case if archeology is that boring for you then don't take archeology.

It's not like it takes that long to get to 85 with decent gear from scratch these days. Buy yourself another copy of the game and stfu.