Cinnamoon

As someone else put it, EVE is the kind of game I'd love to love. I love sci-fi (major Star Wars geek, I swear I kept Dark Horse in business in the 90s), I love capitalist crafting and trading games, I love sandboxes, I love PvP. I love being surrounded by men. I like kickboxing. I also like clothes, flowers, and interior decorating. So what? Pandering to a demographic as large and undefinable as "women" is just laughable!

Here's why EVE has never kept me: the crafting is boring, the resource gathering is mundane, trading is tedious, PvP is annoying, ganking is frustrating, the UI looks like some Terminus-style browser game, the UI is not designed for efficiency or user retention, skill leveling puts me to sleep and puts newbies at an endless disadvantage, I hate being "just a ship", it takes forever to get anywhere, paying for a new avatar is crap, it costs too much for what you get (compared to other MMOs), and, above all else, the game caters to pricks. CCP has abrogated their responsibility to their customers by *encouraging* them cheat and scam each other in ways that have real-world consequences. It's just not FUN for people who don't enjoy scamming or being scammed. All that on top of the game being a glorified spreadsheet! I would have put up with that in 1997, but now, when I have hundreds of choices? Not a chance. My time is too valuable to waste it away on a game without any GAME in it. Been there, done that. Next.

I don't think any of those reasons are because I'm a woman. It's because I am an escapist, and EVE -- as well as some of its more aggressive and misogynistic playerbase, a sprinkling of whom we see here in the comments -- just reminds me of reality.

*shrugs* Some people juggle geese.

Massively declares day of oppression, closes all thinking venues

This isn't just a free market issue, this is a free speech issue, and an issue of simple civil liberties, regardless of the activity being banned. This is pure statism, pure authoritarianism, and sadly, pure China. Mourn or else -- close up shop or else -- go home or else -- or else what? Or else they'll ARREST you by FORCE. If our government did this, used force and dictated our day for some arbitrary reason to flaunt their control and power, we'd be outraged, and for good reason. Please, spare me the inane cultural relativist's argument. Facism is fascism is fascism, and the Chinese people deserve to be free of it without some spoiled, entitled Westerner casually suggesting that the loss of basic civil liberties isn't such a bad thing after all.

I'm _disgusted_ that some random author here would suggest the staff of Massively approves of this kind of oppression, would speak for the whole magazine, and say such a stupid and loathesome thing OUT LOUD. If that is true, it's time to find another magazine. If it's not true, Massively needs to find another writer.

Fortunately, unlike you, most of your readers saw this for what it really is.

"People who play F2P games" is a category of folks self-selected to either be counting their pennies, or expecting something for nothing. "People who play sub games" is a category of folks self-selected for ponying up digital cash. Those in the overlap zone nevertheless are predisposed to different expectations depending on the type of game in question.

Where you live will change your opinion of money too. I've lived in cities with incredibly low costs of living. Then I moved to one of the most expensive places in the country. Think of nothing of paying out the nose for even fast food. It's like paying airport food prices all the time. What's $25 anymore?

Even people who are fine with microtransaction content in principle judge every one individually. Purely cosmetic upgrades -- like this mount -- are exactly right for a sub game. Games that leave out critical gameplay content so that they can charge for it? Yeah, they raise my eyebrows. The taste scammy.

I think the horse is gorgeous and I'm considering it the next time my gaming and gadget budget has spare coin. Why not? It'll be fun, and unlike the latest half-arsed big-screen movie or pizza delivery, it'll last more than two hours.

DISMANTLE!

I love this entire campaign, it's really revitalized my interest, and it really suggests to me that NCSoft/Anet haven't lost their touch. Even the Official Wiki is slathered with propaganda! It's a great ramp-up into the anniversary as well as GW2. Good show.

I loved this game back in the day. Graphics are too eye-bleedy now, but the basic mechanics were a ton of fun. It really was the superior game to EQ1 at the time, and I really loved the mixed-culture fantasy they had going, as well as the UO-esque-but-different skill-based character development.

I suspect it is LOTRO and DDO who are currently funding this little pet project of Turbine's, but I don't mind a bit.

I love CoH, but sadly this isn't new. They've been swinging the nerfbat at AE since last year when they launched it. And story arcs always get smacked hardest.

Look, Paragon Studios. Players are going to farm. Whatever you do, they will find a way. You can't really stop them. There's not even anything inherently wrong with wanting to level efficiently -- most people are leveling their 100th alt and just want to try out new powersets. The best thing you can do is give your players a reason to do something other than level quickly in AE. Wildly swinging that bat makes you look erratic and incompetent. Spend more time developing the rest of the game, and stop spending all that dev time making AE not worth the bother.

@Blah: The fundamentals as defined by *whom*? If we want to go back to the true "fundamentals" of the MMO genre, we have to look back at UO, which for its first several years didn't have groups or grouping at all (heck it didn't have guilds for a month or two either). If you want to look at the majority of games of the modern era, you notice that most games are attempting to support soloing *in addition to* grouping. In fact, aside from competitorless EQ and a very small handful of unsuccessful clones in its vein (Vanguard), very few games were or are entirely group-centric. So it's really a willful fantasy to call enforced grouping a fundamental of the genre.

As for this article, several of the systems outlined aren't unique to F2P games, nor to these games, nor to the genre itself. As mentioned by other posters, "dress to impress" and "stitch" (basically the same concept) aren't innate to CoS and Wizard 101. LOTRO has it, SWG has it, and really we'd best count both CoH and CO since they go a step beyond tedious duplicate costume mechanics and just detatch stats from gear altogether. Even WoW's said to get a version in its next expansion. DDO's hirelings aren't a new idea either -- UO invented them, classic SWG got them, Guild Wars honed them to perfection, Sword of the New World (etc) copied it, and of course LOTRO has a much better version than the one Turbine gave to DDO.

Really what this article did for me was illuminate how F2P games aren't innovative at all, but are in fact even more derivative than their subscription cousins. I guess playing in a risky business like F2P, lacking the same start-up funds, etc, means you can't take chances on *new* game systems, so you'd better steal all the good stuff from the actual pioneers.

I hope Bioware bucks up and puts in all kinds of romances, gay, straight, biologically-impossible aliens (/Garrus). They won't be as good as actual RP with actual people (and let's hope Bioware doesn't forget that) but there are several gay relationships in the SW expanded universe, all approved by Lucas himself, so it's not out of line with Star Wars at all.

I think Bioware should treat the homophobes exactly as they treat those offended by interracial relationships in game: as if they don't exist.

No one used the words holy trinity, tank, healer, or crowd control back in UO, either. Nor in classic SWG.

Perfectly fine with mature content, so long as what is meant by "mature" isn't actually "immature", and unfortunately that's usually the case -- rated M for imMature! Nudity, for example, isn't innately mature or immature. But games which use one-sided nudity to trashily appeal to a certain demographic lose my dollar. Sex in games is great. Female rape, though? (Hi, Conan.) Games which make the female characters run around in skimpy outfits while NOT doing the same for the men? (Hi, most games.) Games which turn sex into a cheap card game and a point system to see how many girls your male hero can deflower? (Hi, Witcher.) That might be "adult" but it's absolutely not "mature".

I'm looking for deep and heady escapism, not an excuse for cheap sexism.

Interestingly, most games which address other "mature" topics (racism, classism, slavery) do so with care, even with a strong slant towards denouncing the practices. Volumes could be written on the industry's reluctance to treat sexism the same way. To say nothing of violence itself.