Meanwhile

Yikes this is one of the most random, rambling, awkward creation myths I've seen. It's pretty apparent that someone handed some hapless writer a pile of unconnected game elements and said, "Here, write an intro that mentions all this stuff."

Also? The verb "burgeon" is not transitive. I don't know what these people think it means, but I do know it can't be used the way they've tried to use it. It means "to grow and flourish." An adventurer can't be "burgeoned" any more than he could be "scampered" or "fussed."

EQ2 is most certainly NOT the only game that allows you to turn off XP. City of Heroes has had this feature for quite a while now -- I believe even longer than EQ2, if memory serves.

I couldn't even grind my way up to the previous cap before canceling due to the mind-numbing nature of the quests.

Dreadfully tiresome, that game.

How do you know they are including those in the count? If you have proof, it would behoove you to include a link alongside your accusation.

Otherwise, you're just a troll with a conspiracy theory.

It seems far more likely to me that a large portion of the registered accounts are people who tried the game and may never return, much the way Second Life touts a much larger player base than it has any right to. Any free-to-play game is going to experience something like this.

Regardless, the fact remains that they had to open up several new servers within the first couple of weeks. Interesting, as this does indicate a large influx of people actually playing the game, not just dormant or fudged accounts.

Why would I be interested in a game that is bsically admitting that their low-level content is too dull to sit through?

I play for the journey, not the mythical destination of "endgame nirvana." I'm never in a hurry to level up, and if the developers want to foster the mindset that faster leveling = more fun, then I've got no use for them.

Too little, too late.

Just the latest example of the neverending cycle in which this team has always operated. Hatch a hare-brained idea to try to attract players with as little actual work as possible ... Be warned by wiser players about all the different ways the plan will negatively impact the game ... Ignore the facts when testers confirm aforementioned negative interactions ... Release the patch ... Blame the players when it all blows up in their faces ... Release a quick fix and a halfhearted apology ... Announce the next big Issie and repeat.

I'm not saying farmers are innocent. But when your game has been plagued by a certain type of "aberrant behavior" since the day it was released 5 years ago, you have to be a special kind of idiot not to plan for that behavior in your ongoing design decisions.

I can't believe they think they an expansion will keep them afloat. Not only are there several more modern superhero MMOs in the works, but the NCSoft team itself has just proven -- yet again -- that it is simply not capable of running an MMO with any degree of competence.

It is worth noting that the minimum system requirements for Aion are slightly lower than for WAR. This may not make a difference for a lot of people, but it does for me. WAR was just a tiny bit more than my system could handle, and that's the main reason I had to quit. Of course the game suffered from poor performance generally for most users, which did not help matters.

IF Aion avoids the performance pitfalls and IF the game is truly playable at the advertised minimum specs, it has a far greater chance of attracting and retaining a solid player base than WAR. That's a lot of ifs, but I think there's a pretty good chance they'll pull it off. For whatever reason, Asian companies don't seem to have quite as much trouble with technology as developers in the US and Europe -- or perhaps they are just less sloppy about releasing games that are unstable.

NPCs are a bad solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. When ANY content becomes unplayable because there isn't enough player interest to support grouping, that content needs to be retooled as solo. If you build the game so that the masses outgrow certain areas, you need to own up to that shortcoming and provide for the people who can't or won't keep up with the masses, or who arrive later.

A better model would be to give people reasons to go back, not so much that it becomes repetitive, but enough perks that it becomes worthwhile. Maybe an item with a stat or power that gets charged up only by visiting a certain lower-level place and adventuring there as a character of the specified level.

It has always been a tremendous flaw in MMOG design to have two vastly different games mashed together, masquerading as a continuous arc.

Say what you will about CoH's lack of "endgame," that so-called lack is exactly what keeps people creating alts and running through various bits of content that they've missed or want to see again.

If developers would stop training players to believe that all the fun comes AFTER the level-up process, there wouldn't be so many people skipping all the content the devs work so hard to create.

Then again, it's refreshing to see developers admit that the pre-endgame grind can be unnecessarily tedious when you've set the advancement rate at such an obscenely slow pace as in EQ.

Guild Wars has a pretty good model here: speedy leveling-up that you can skip if you want to, but that you won't want to skip if you want all the goods at the end.

However, I'd much rather see a model more like 4th edition D&D: you know that the story is going to be over shortly after you hit level 30, so you might as well do your best to enjoy the ride. A big part of this is that there needs to be an extraordinarily wide field of possible game experiences available at all stages of the level arc so that replay becomes not only viable, but desirable.

@Zensun: I think you are making a lot of assumptions. I really doubt you'll see the @xxx portion of a character's name in most cases. It will likely only be used in chat, not in the floating names or in the team interface.

There will be plenty of unimaginative copies running around, to be sure, but I don't think the "surname" part will be as obtrusive as you fear.