TheClaw

@KvanCetre - there's talent trees.. and then there are talent trees where each class has three trees, each of them with tiers that you need to invest 5 points in to access the next tier, seven tiers deep so the capstone talents require 30 points invested in the tree, with most talents being 3-5 points, but with the 11, 21 and 31 point rows each containing a talent that only costs a single point but adds a new ability rather than modifying an existing ability or stat, with that 31-point talent being the only one on the 31 point row.

Sounds familiar? That's a description of WoW 1.0, Alganon and SW:TOR. You can try to handwave it away with glib crap like "Holy crap - an mmo with talent trees?! Next you'll tell me there are dungeons and raids!" but you're being deliberately disingenuous if you do.

@KvanCetre : the ironic thing is, a keyboard turner might take 1.25 seconds to do a 180 degree turn in-game, but it only takes them 0.00000001 seconds to take violent offense at any suggestion that they might be a better player if they made a small alteration to their use of the controls.

Frankly, there are a lot of people on Massively who have been irritated (and rightly so) so many times by elitists who think they are superior human beings due to their gaming skillz, that they taken the opposite point of view to an irrational extreme.

Here, not only does being good at a game not make you a superior human being; it makes you an inferior human being. Even _wanting_ to be better at a game makes you an inferior human being. The righteous path is to revel in your poor skills, because that is the mark of a "casual", and casuals are the most superior human beings of all.

Needless to say, how that attitude responds to a question like "do you think MMOs should be harder?" is fairly predictable.

@DerpMchurson : who says modern games need to be easily be picked up with little to no up-front cost? Not just Garriot and Zynga.

Games that can be picked up with no up-front cost aren't just horrible Asian grinders and failed subscription MMOs any more. How about wargaming.net (World of Tanks) and Riot (League of Legends)? Two games that have been extremely well received.

@Fakeassname : you want some Alganon? Look at SW:TOR's talent trees. They're as blatant a copy of WoW as anything Alganon did (right down to cloning it to the tiniest detail, and then turning the tree upside down in the hope we wouldn't notice it)

I must have missed the opportunity to vote, but if I had seen it, I would have voted Lineage II.

It's one of those games that I've heard so many references to over the years.. but know next to nothing about. It's foreign and exotic, being so immensely big in the east, but virtually unplayed in the west.

@aurickle : "the revised FAQ also states that there will be no "grace period" after launch to enter your serial number"

I guess that's an improvement over the way EA handled WAR: flat-out lying about the grace period in their FAQ, saying that there would be one and then cancelling it, locking out heaps of players.

@Eamil : "I won't be posting on their forums right out the gate, that's for sure. "

Have you considered posting on their forums in the manner of an adult with a civilized tongue in their head? That should keep you pretty safe from the banstick.

@fattoyow : maybe if you'd actually tried following the story in other MMORPGs, like those of us who care about story do, instead of skipping the text and clicking "ok", you would have found that many of them do actually have interesting stories.

@fattoyow : he didn't say he didn't care about story in an MMORPG. Nothing of the sort. He said that the story in SW:TOR added nothing to the game, and that it was a cliched rehash of Star Wars.

Not liking a story that you personally like =/= not liking story at all.

@Buhallin : "Bioware added something new to the MMO genre - a true focus on story throughout the game."

Ever played LOTRO? OK it's not fully voiced (not that I thought TOR's voice work was very good) but the LOTRO epic quest chain is currently 29 books adding up to something like 300 quests, all the way from level 1 to level 75, taking you all over Middle Earth and interacting with numerous characters from the trilogy.

Now, you could certainly say "that's just one quest chain, TOR has one for each class", and that would be true. You could say "TOR's storyline is better", and that would be personal preference but a valid claim to make. But I don't think you can say that a focus on story throughout the game is something never seen before in the genre, not when LOTRO came out so long ago.