Kualtek

@Faith The thing with 'just give it another 6 months!' is the company hasn't budgeted for it. Unless the game won't sell (and it obviously did) on the set release date there's few ways a project director is going to convince them to give another 6 months of expenses for an un-researched amount of increased sales.

This is why I continue to play EVE. No other MMO can give you the same sense of freedom over my own actions. It's not about the skill points it's about what you want to do with the universe you have been given. That said, EVE has a lot of issues that will need to be tackled if anyone wants to see the kind of subscription numbers WoW or Rift currently enjoy.

Rift started to reach for a type of 'dynamic content' but the world is too small and they did not reach far enough. Trion played it safe in the WoW model and it's disappointing. The rifts have no lasting effect and do not permanently change the players landscape. On the other side of the coin, the players can also not affect the world in a lasting way. You gear and level up and kill a giant baddie and go back to a main city to run in circles on the roof of the bank.

When I was younger the "crave the gratification and reassurance that dings provide." fit me like a glove. I was only interested in the next tier of gear. I would be looking up the next tier even before I had completed the current content. It's a soulless experience and games can provide better content if they want too.

@Dblade

I agree when this is the case. It feels like companies don't understand that the extra time in open/closed beta fixing bugs and making their game better will give them extra resources to make new content to sell new copies or DLC for their game.

Interview with increasingly irrelevant man saying he will change everything. So....hard....to...click....link.

@Birk You pinned me exactly, Birk. I follow much the same pattern. Sometimes I try and legitimize this habit as being competitive. Other times, I wonder if I got my competitiveness by playing these games with restrictive rules over how a 'good' player should act.

I think that these exclusive clubs of high-end raiders are something many of us (and by us i mean geeks who were generally unpopular during grade school) want to be a part of. From what I read in the article and what you said, I think this allows us to be 'better' than others when we may fail at articulating ourselves in life. It also lets us feel like we belong to a club few others can be a part of.

If anything, a beta can make me want the game even more, or it can turn me off completely.

I've played a lot of MMO beta's, even more now that the genre has taken off and there's a new one every other month. The one thing that sticks with me is that 'you are going to get what you see now in retail'. Now, this rule is obviously made to be broken. I'm sure that a company will or already has completely changed a game from the beta stage. That said, in almost any beta I've participated in, the only things that really change are balance and bug fixing. If you have an issue with the games core mechanics or art style nothing is going to change there.

I constantly see people saying 'ITS JUST BETA!' but the fact of the matter is by the time it gets to beta testing phase, most of the games core values have already been set in stone. These things are not likely to change and if you have issue with them, it may be time to look elsewhere for your MMO fix.