NBarnes

Great Comics That Never Happened: Ben Grimm and Santa Claus vs Nazi Grinches.

Frankly, the archetype system has single-handedly taken me from interested and curious about CO going F2P to 'meh, maybe I'll try it if I get bored'. Which I doubt is precisely the attitude Cryptic was trying to inculcate in me.

I have to figure that there are other pieces of the game that they can clip and sell in the cash store other than THE BEATING HEART OF THE ENTIRE GAME, neh?

After playing MMOGs for over a decade, there've been plenty. But I always come back to two experiences that really defined class balance, or lack of it, to me.

The first is playing an enchanter in raids in Everquest. In a single group, enchanters were awesome. But you really, really didn't need more than one in a raid. Your job was to keep everybody buffed with mana regen and attack haste. After that, you have some really bad nukes you can cast, but that's it. And by really bad, I don't mean WoW era complaints of 'OMGZ we do 15% less damage than this other class, we're useless!' I mean, you did less than a quarter of the DPS that real DPS (real DPS == rogues) did. SOE's response to this was to make more group pulls that were all immune to an enchanter's crowd control, ensuring that the major reason to have an enchanter along in a group was negated by designer fiat.

The other was early Everquest druids in groups. Druids were considered great because, unlike the majority of other classes in EQ, they could actually solo. But once you put them in a group, they promtly became one of the worst classes in the game. And the ability of druids to solo was used as the reason to deny druids any real group utility for half a decade of EQ.

Yeah, EQ. I played it for a long time, but, Goddess, that game had bad class balance.

My theory is that the Joker just hands out candy for Halloween. And if anybody asks about that being out of character, he just smiles and says that he hasn't decided how to properly observe the holiday yet, so he's just phoning it in until inspiration strikes.

That'd be 'best', rather than 'worst'.

I wonder if Liefeld's got any Batman sketches out there on the intertubes.

The real answer; 'Any of them when drawn by Jim Aparo.'

I'm pretty sure I can get Sims to back me up here.

I'm just going to put it here and hope Sony sees it; if EQ went F2P, in the DDO/LotRO model, I would buy every expansion they release. No joke.

If they haven't shut down EQ1 by now, they're not going to do so until the economics of it completely fall apart.

Good premise for a DotA / LoL / HoN clone. Screw genericFantasyHero01. I want to gank people in the forest as the Lord of the Vampires!

If they were looking to get some publicity via nerd rage, they picked the right target. EVE"s a great game, but, IMHO, has the lowest sense-of-humor to player ratio in all of MMOGdom.