avidlurker

@(Unverified)
Oh, do you mean those guys that only use the one mathematically superior build, as crunched by some spreadsheets?

Those that skip over as much as possible to rush to endgame as quickly as possible and in doing so devalue all the journey that goes before the level cap?

You mean those guys, right?

@(Unverified)
I don't agree with the competitiveness thing.

I don't care about competition at all, yet would like to play the game's content to the fullest, in time.
I guess you'd label me as "semi".

However, wanting to clear the last bit of content has nothing to do with competitiveness once you don't care about when you do it. It's more about completion than competition at that point.

And personally I believe competitiveness in mmoRPGs to be a misguided notion anyway. Ideally an mmoRPG should be about having adventures and enjoying the storyline/world with like minded people.

They are an extension of pen and paper RPGs after all and (should) not be simple level oriented video games.
If you rush through the game just to hit your "in two weeks" deadline for completion, for the most part I believe you are ruining your own game.
As long as you ruin it only for yourself that's fine, of course, I just don't like the rub off it has on other peoples game.

@edgecrusherO0

May I also extend your tirade to players that use "dude", "bro" and "lol" in a completely unreflected way, possibly as every other word they utter?

I hate being adressed as "dude". For some reason that particular word grates on my nerves like 40 grain sand paper.

I've never played any SOE game but to me reading about it Fan Faire was simply the gamers convention SOE held...

My first thought was that they dropped all pretense this convention is for the Fan and instead for SOE ;-)

Sort of like the attention seeking child putting himself into the middle: me, me! ;-)

@Ebaon

Ah dreads would make sense I guess. Gives them another reason to be used.

Citadel torpedoes and cruise missiles are the dread class missiles I believe and are used by the caldari one exclusively and I believe by the naglfar as a split weapon next to projectiles.
Ofc at least the caldari dread I believe had real problems with popularity and for many "dreadnought" meant either the Revelation or the Moros (for station games that one; I hear things have changed a bit)

@Maseno
Well, what did you expect?

CCP wants to be able to run a successful game with Dust.
IIRC it's to be free to play with microtransactions, that means people have to continuously play and pay for the game to run successfully.
That means ground battles have to be fun to play.

CCP corporations/alliances/coalitions/blobfactories want to hold a planet and don't really care about Dust.

If BSs were able to unleash the power you seemed to expect, there would be no Dust battles at all.
Probably a spreadsheet pusher would determine (or anyone who did any amount of PI) that, if possible, it probably would be far cheaper to even just obliterate anything on the planet instead of financing or allowing any sort of ground battles to be waged.

Just park a well sized battleship or tier 3 battlecruiser fleet in orbit and pound everything on the plant surface into oblivion. Then rebuild your infrastructure.

What do you think that would do to the economic success of the game Dust 514?

This certainly looks interesting.

I'm assuming it's limited in some ways? You do know how EvE players like to optimize warfare to death and a blob parked in orbit could well lead to a disappointing game play for one side if there are no limits.

Also is there any word on prerequisites for the ship doing the bombardment?
Things like required range, ship class, perhaps a fitted module (ground coordination nexus, as a random name for it)?
Are there relative performance differences in damage on ground between lasers, railguns, artilleries? Can missiles be used?

This is a very interesting experiment in linking of games, at least for the uninvolved observer =D

Interestingly I think I'm the opposite of your hidden leader.

Once again I have taken up a game, entered a guild and was more or less pushed to an officer spot.
All I want is to be a helpful and useful guild rank member...

It's late and I've only quickly skimmed your article but I do believe you have explicitly named a few points that I have always felt I'm at odds with and that have made the officer position difficult for me.

Hopefully we find a bunch of people that do have those qualities and that can grow into officers, then I can hopefully step back and be happier in what is supposed to be a leisure activity after all...

@GW2waiting
I was actually hoping GW2 could be the type of game you describe.

I guess I've just become cynical and pessimistic about how it will pan out in practice.

@jeremys
Sorry, purified fusion stones are not convenience at all.
They are power.

An XP pot that makes gaining XP somewhat faster is convenience if you place no value in the journey.

An item that allows you to tune your equipment to multiples of pure strength by applying pure stats to it is probably the purest form of power.

Ofc it's not a stand alone item, but an essential part of making "proper" gear.

Do please compare the power of a character in dirty stated gear to one in nice clean pury gear and tell me it's not a pure power difference.

The cash shop items and their rather high price (I consider it high for the high end stuff) actually increases pressure on powering up.
Those with high power gear can farm high level content faster to get desirable items to trade for the needed cash shop items after all.
This pressure also works to obsolete earlier gear.

The worst part imho is that it costs the same RL cash to mod up pretty much any piece of item, regardless of it's level. The higher level refinement stones are somewhat more expensive, but the costs for the purified stones make a good chunk of total costs and are the same for all levels (at least they were when I played. Did anything change there?)

Result is again further pressure to skip over as much as possible to rush to high enough levels to farm the most lucrative items.