Mukanda

Ouch, difficult one.
I'd say My Fire/Mace Tanker in CoH, since it's my oldest character in this game (back in '05), but that would be forgetting my Iksar Shadowknight in EQII or my Black Ork in WaR? Aah, I'd have to say : "All my tanks". :D

In CoH. When those know-it-all "I am teh master of teh numbers" repeatedly said "No Fire Tanker can main tank the STF. No. Never. They can't.".
Well guess what : It could, with nobody dying. How I laughed. :D

Oh. So, that's what they call "corporate suicide".
Well, if they wanted so bad to bury their game, they should have bought a shovel. Far less expensive. Much more efficient.

EvE, by far on all aspects. Lineage II for the "massive epic factor", Warhammer for the fun part and Guild Wars for coordination.

I'm happy people like Infamousbrad and Superfan exist in these forum. They seem to have a far more objective and accurate view on CoX than the author...
I am positive that Positron did NOT do a "wonderful job" running CoX : he did virtually nothing to beef up content and absolutelly nothing concerning high level content.
That only made many EU players leave the game (and I'm not even talking about the horrible customer support we have this side of the Atlantic).
I'm very happy Bianco takes over, she actually did a "wonderful job" revamping Faultline. Hope she'll be able to do the same with the game in general.
City of Heroes deserves a much better attention than it has been given since 2008.
Hopefully, GR and Issue 19 will be the things we've been waiting for a long time.

Craptic doing Neverwinter? Oo
Guess it will be Neverplayer for me...

[quote]First off, Seraphina, if you are going to write a story about people exaggerating their rants about games and developers please don't so the same thing in your story, but in the opposite direction.

I think it's an exaggeration to imply that 1) players think making MMO's are easy, or that all developers are stupid, or that none of them play MMOs. I guess maybe you were just going for drama? /shrug just as bad.

Secondly behind the vast majorty of these gamer rants are important kernels of truth. Behind implied criticisms and true constructive criticism.

FFXIV is a perfect example.

Here's a game where it's clear to anyone with half a brain that the company (SquareEnix) is developing in a vacuum. The vast majority of the community shares a common complaint with the game, one that was shared on FFXI I might add, and one that is mostly ignored by the developers, the combat/interaction/ui models. Just about everything other than the games graphics and sound.

Now when developers ignore complaints for long enough they turn into drama ridden flame rants. Why? Because the customer isn't being listened to or worse they are being listened to and ignored because the developer thinks they know best. And guess what, they don't.

Let's take Blizzard as an example, WoW specifically. WoW is the most successful MMO in history by a significant margin. And guess what most people might not know about the game. Blizzard hired the top gamers in the MMO scene at that point, from EQ, to build the game. These included Kaplan (Tigole, leader of Legacy of Steel), Alex, (Furor, leader of Fires of Heaven) and Rob Pardo (also a former LoS GL). THIS my friends is development done right. Not only does the company listen but they also hire the people who DO know best, not the programmers, but the players themselves (at least very intelligent and creative types).

The long and short of it is that many gaming companies make the mistake of thinking they DO know best (when they demonstratably don't) and because of their ego and inability to escape the trap of becoming enamored of their own cleverness... they fail realize that at the end of the day what is important is how the customer feels about the product, not the developer. MMOs are not art that simply hang on the wall where those who care can decide if they like it or not. MMOs are products for sale where the customers enjoyment is paramount.

Developers take note and don't let this blog post above convince you that customers have nothing of value to add, they do, and you really should listen.[/quote]

This. A thousand times this.

I am very disappointed with CoX nowadays : always focusing on polishing things (which is good of course) and adding powersets but always failing to deliver enough new content to keep players -apart from the fanboys of course- playing... when will there be something to do with my eight Fifties except grinding a few TFs and rolling many many many alts?...
A 1-20 expansion? You gotta be kidding... I won't come back and spend 20 bucks for... what? seven hours worth of playing?
Geez... back to EvE I guess.

Never preoder a game before trying it. Never.
I'll wait for a beta to make up my mind. As anyone else should...

"> Lineage
> Tabula Rasa
> Aion
> NCsoft
> Korean

Is this article trying to stuff as much as possible negative keywords into 3 paragraphs of text?"

This.

Both Lineage games are a grindfest, TR one of the biggest failure in the MMO genre, where everything that should have NOT been done HAS BEEN done.
One hell of a resume indeed...