Clb

When will you fire Bill Roper?

I got heavily involved in the hype before the game was released; read every bit of HGL info I could get, contributed to fansites, played the beta heavily, had everything planned out... I took a week off work starting the day it was released, got it the second the store opened, got home, went to go online and ... spinning-loading-screen-of-death. Went to the forums and joined the others with the same problem.

After a week of waiting I got sick of it and gave up; went back to EVE. I checked in about a once a week on the forum thread for months and finally after many months a Ping0 rep said they were looking into it... and a week later Flagship sunk.

The game was great, the mechanics were great - the company making it wasn't; same areas, same enemies, same bugs throughout the entire game. WTF where they thinking? The fact that a huge number of people couldn't even get online in it (the afformentioned spinning-loading-screen-of-death problem) shows the level of quality control and testing that went into it.

However, now that Flagship and Bill Roper are out of the picture (Roper is now wrecking Cryptic and making a mess of Champions/Star-Trek Online) and a competent developer has taken over... I may give Hellgate another shot.

Or maybe I won't, I don't think I could bare to have my heart broken again :-(

I got one of these a few days ago, only mine had better grammar :-/

Screenshot: http://theintersect.org/images/aionscam.jpg

As you can see Gmail would have culled this if I didn't have a filter that stops everything being sent to spam*, and it detects that it's a fraud anyway. And if that wasn't enough ... I don't even *have* an Aion account.

* This email address never, ever got spam up until about a month ago and now I'm bombarded with WoW and other MMO account scams almost daily. It's weird.

I've always been a bit miffed about Eve University. I like the idea of a corp designed to teach new people how to play but seriously, their rules (http://www.eve-ivy.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ivy_League_Policies) are completely draconian. I've never joined because I pay $15 a month for my Eve account and I'm not letting a corp take away my right to post on the forums (as just one example of something they prohibit).

I don't understand why so many people join, perhaps they see it recommended by other players and don't read their rules first?

Someone donates $5 = $5 goes to Haiti
Someone spends $5 at the SOE store = $10 goes to Haiti + person get an item

"Other lifetime subs:

Hellgate London
Champion's Online
and now Star Trek Online"

I feel sorry for all the people who bought lifetime subs for Hellgate London. Flagship Studios went under before the price of the sub was offset by the number of months they got subscriber benefits for.

And given that Bill Roper now works for Cryptic there is no way I would risk buying a lifetime in sub in any of their games -- or buy any of their games at all, I still have a HGL disk that only ever made a good coaster (thankfully I never got the lifetime sub).

"they could care less about the time people spend in their game"

I'm sorry but this is really starting to bug me, with the number of people who keep making this mistake; there's a person on the next page who did the same thing.

It is "couldn't care less" -- /couldn't/ is the operative word here. It means that they could not care any less than they do.

"Could care less" means that it is possible that they could achieve a state of lesser caring, which is the opposite of what you want to say.

See also: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm

/endrant

(and I am aware that I invoked Muphry's law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law)