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@Todeswulf

Spot on. It has been a LONG TEN YEARS of watching the MMO industry people just suck at their jobs. Not all people by any means - in fact, I point the finger at the minority of business people involved with developers as they always wield huge influence over the course of the industry, and they never, never have a clue as to why people play their games in the first place. They have produced a 10-year streak of /facepalm decisions :(

@avarice
You're working from multiple false premises. The first is that competition belongs in an MMO environment. By nature, MMOs were designed to be COOPERATIVE gameplay, not competitive. People getting together into groups to accomplish things they could not do alone is not competitive behavior.
The second is that the majority of people are competitive and the minority cooperative. Umm, no. A tiny minority of people are competitive and the VAST majority cooperative, collaborative and constructive. However, we always seek out groups of people like ourselves, and since our perspective is limited and subjective, we start thinking that because most of the people we interact with are like us, that must be what everyone is like. Add to that the fact that those competitive people are far more likely to act as a "vocal minority", toss in websites' ability to mass publish those vocalizings and keep them forever, and you've got a situation where the minority can really skew perceptions over time.

CCP stands for Crowd Control Productions. To be clear, they are alluding to herds of sheep as the crowds and wolves as the controlling element, not velvet ropes and polite directions. And they set the game up deliberately to cater to those of like minds.

However, I don't know why the Eve population, being of like mind and all, hasn't yet grasped that as far as CCP is concerned, the entire population of their game are sheep to be raised, fattened and fleeced for their profit. As a guy with lots of game experience, I'm kind of ashamed that they got me with their system for whole months before I figured out that instead of playing a game, I was being played by the game company :(

Yup, guess I have to keep playing Left 4 Dead 2 instead of their game :( Be interesting to see how they roll a console MMO though - who is going to own that world? Can't be for all 3 consoles at once, their networks don't talk to each other.

Actually, developers ARE trying to make the best game possible. Game company executives and publishers are trying to make the most money possible, and putting the two together does not in any way "balance the scales". The devs have to do what the suits say, and that's never good for the game :(

The game subscription is supposed to pay for ALL of the game, not just some of it. RMTs in F2P games is how they pay salaries and provide a cost comparison against buying a full subscription for the customer- which worked incredibly well for DDO. They doubled their full subscription numbers over what they had had as a sub-only game, because hey, free to play draws people in to play, and many of them don't hesitate at 15 bucks a month (and wouldn't at 20 either, but that's another story).

But double-dipping a subscription and RMTs as well is just being greedy and stupid. There's a complete winning model out there in DDO's way, but large-in-charge suitmonkeys are ignoring it in favor of inventing their own inferior model so they can try to claim credit - and stock options- for any short-term gains they can get.

Fortunately, gamers have the ability to punish greedy, stupid companies by just playing something else until the suitmonkeys wake up and get with the program. All you have to do is, instead of picking your game based on what you want to play, pick one based on the model you want to support, and let them know that on the forums and on their polls and surveys.

hmm, while it's great to be able to have a lot of looks, isn't the mechanic kind of - way artificial? Hey, look, my role playing character in the fantasy universe of LOTR can have lots of clothes - except they're really just virtual copies and not the actual clothes?

not feeling the immersiveness :(

In the McMMO world, Cryptic is the Hamburglar :\ Well, there's always Secret World, SW-TOR, GW2, Black Prophecy, or a bunch of others to play, and that's not even counting the decent titles going to F2P like LOTRO.

Let me know when they make SWG free to play. I've been wanting to try Jump to Lightspeed (and nothing else) but after feeding SOE money from the launch of EQ1 to the Kunark expansion of EQII and watching them mess up pretty much everything I liked, I swore I'd never give them another dime.

Yeah, me too, sadly. I can only conclude CCP likes metagamers and rule exploiters. I dedicated my first Eve char to being a scientist/manufacturer, because you "could be anything you want". Sh'yeah RIGHT. Even back in the day, every manufacturing slot in safe space was bought up to prevent someone else from actually manufacturing something. I did find a lowsec station and got some few things done, but it wasn't long before someone else jacked those slots too.

Tolerance of rules exploits and metagaming are what takes a game and makes it crap. Want to keep me from manufacturing stuff? Have a resource war or something. Try to kill me when I'm moving goods. But don't just exploit the slots system - that's just lame.

Add in the paid-wardecs-for-no-reason and open tolerance of suicide ganking, both of which are also super lame exploits, and Eve - the only real space game out there, and a sandbox to boot - just isn't worth putting time into anymore for me.

Bought a gaming notebook with an 8800 GTS and jacked in a T9300 2.5ghz CPU. I turn off shadows, specular and run 2x AA and everything looks and runs just fine at 1680x1050 on an external monitor. If I use the laptop LCD at 1400x900, it runs even better.
Next upgrade will be a new notebook, when the technology improves enough to make the purchase worthwhile. I will easily be able to sell the old one for reasonable money and have all of the new, cool upgrades like USB 3.0 in one shot.