Strumiker

Gingerbread Man head all the way :D

Definitely a tough one for me. I like the concept of dungeon crawling that DDO offers. LotRO is much more of a traditional mmorpg offering more of a well rounded experience.

Soooo - for me it's LotRO because they offer so much in Lore, quests (even if they are yer typical mmo quests :P) and size.

Massively - Daily News About MMOs. More of that please. If I wanted to read opinions, I'd go read some forums.

I ran a guild for over a year in EQ2 on Lucan Dlere. You did hit the nail on the head that the demographic for players has changed a lot from when I started mmo's when EQ1 first came out. With the popularity and incredible ease of mmo's now, it's as bad as this Facebook phenomenon. When my wife and I ran the guild, we invited everyone who was interested. We had an open door policy and we actually did run events and dungeon runs for all levels. Our website allowed people to setup and join these events very easily. Our people were happy, granted my wife and I sacrificied doing anything for ourselves for that year since we mentored down all the time to do whatever everyone was doing. We noticed a trend. Each time and expansion came out or a free weekend was going on, population shot up. Month later, it was only a few people left online. It was like clockwork. Casual has gone from simply playing consistently for a handful of hours a week to playing a weekend or two each month of a particular game.

After a year of trying, only 5 people out of probably 100 invited were still on with active accounts (thanks to sony's website, you could kind of keep tabs on people). Needless to say, putting up with this trend wore us out and eventually we just quit being helpful to everyone and just helping out those who would stick around. After talking to other guild leaders, we weren't the only ones with this problem. There are a couple good guilds on Lucan, but I'd bet the majority of servers and games have this problem.

From this point forward, my wife and I tend to stick with a couple of real life friends to game with. It's simply too hard (and unrewardeing) to deal with other people.

Update 2: Holy heck guys! I hit over 500 e-mails in 20 minutes. Looks like I have my 100 participants! Thank you for your interest!

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Guess you underestimated the power of the internets!

Do I get a cookie for getting the subject line correct the first time if I don't get in the first 100? I even included the period at the end! ;)

I was just thinking the other day that we need more of these kinds of mmo's...

Moooooo!

Instead of being lazy and making yourself look foolish here, take your epic Crusade of Hate towards these people and the company TO them. Posting here over and over about how much you are a genius because you saw it coming or have been burned by them due to a loss of a few hundred bucks will not do anything aside from making you feel better because you are jumping on the bandwagon with everyone else that hates them. These MMO's, even WoW are so small in comparison to other things people should be this passionate about in the rest of the living and breathing world. I know this is obvious, but it would be nice to see discussions about the relevant article instead of whining about the same thing.

I can hardly wait to see another 40+ posts of "Cryptic sucks and just wants your money".