periastron

@Graill440 "Most would rather play a maint mode game than go outside and do volunteer work or the like, sad."

If we're going to judge how we spend our discretionary time by those criteria, then we shouldn't play games at all--we should be out in the world, making it a better place for all. While you're at it, why don't you excoriate every person who wastes time watching television?

I play games for fun and relaxation. If a game I love has gone into maintenance mode and I still get enjoyment from it, what difference does it make? It's not like new content produces any sort of meaningful achievement in the real world, any more than the old content does.

Not everyone will agree to paying a monthly fee for a game without new content, but they can vote in the way that matters: By quitting the game and taking their money with them. If a game falls below viable subscriber numbers as a result, pull the plug. Otherwise, what harm is there in keeping it going?

S-E seems to be fixated on providing a single UI for both platforms. The problem is, they implemented a clumsy, inconsistent, compromise UI that doesn't work well with *any* of the available control systems. Not even the gamepad!

Just one example, of many: Any window that contains tabbed panes is a mess. With the gamepad. you need to move focus around with the menu buttons (usually mapped to the d-pad) until it's on the tab you want to switch to, then press the "do it" button to select that tab. If the focus is near the bottom of the screen, that usually means having to scroll up through an entire list of items in the tabbed pane before you get to the tab itself. S-E thinks this is the same as the corresponding mouse operation, but it's not: If I'm using a mouse, I can just swoop up with the mouse pointer and click on the tab--I don't have to select every little thing in-between. If the UI instead used the shoulder buttons to switch left and right between tabbed panes, it would immediately make this example much more efficient. Likewise, there needs to be one or two pane selection keys on the keyboard.

Nothing I read in this article gives me any hope that S-E will see past their well-known design tunnel vision and implement any sort of significant UI overhaul. At best, I expect to see superficial band-aid fixes that do little to address the systemic design issues that plague this game's dismal user interface.

Children don't need more legislation: They need their parents to step up, do their jobs, and assume some responsibility for the upbringing of their offspring. That includes paying attention to what their kids are doing and providing the appropriate guidance (and discipline, if necessary.)

I'm tired of living in a nanny state because people want to dump their personal responsibility onto others.

Final Fantasy XI, since North American launch in late 2003. I guess we'll see what happens when FF14 hits the bricks. :)

In total hours played, second place would probably be WoW, followed by LotRO... but neither comes remotely close to the amount of time I've burned in Vana'diel.