AC2

Tabula Rasa

The Matrix Online

My list (in order of least to worst):

AoC

The Matrix

SWG

Sort of funny how many people were disappointed in LOTRO because "it's a WoW clone" and they expected more. I guess for me it's just the opposite since I have never played WoW... I love LOTRO.

1. SWG NGE - I was having a blast with this game before NGE came along. What a huge disappointment to lose the skill trees, pets, and multiclassed combat/crafters. It disappointed me enough to leave the game forever.

2. Tabula Rasa - Played during beta. Hated the instancing in the world areas, what a PITA to get your group in the same place. Poor UI. No crafting. Replayability was pretty low for me, I had no desire to roll another character and go through those boring areas again. Way too many bugs during beta for me to even consider a purchase.

worst to least:

1) AoC

2) DDO

3) PoTBS

1) Vanguard....  we all know that story

2) DDO,,. i dreamed this would not suck... then i woke up

3) EQ2, as an old time eq1 player, i was hoping this one would bring back the same excitement.. it didn't

others that  had potential but failed:  LOTRO, Ryzom, Horizons, AoC,

currently i am still playing WoW, not because it is a great game.. there just has not been anything else out that has sparked my interest..

Worst 3 MMOs at Launch?

1. Vanguard- It has come a LONG way in a yr and a half and it is a pretty decent game now, however at launch it was horrible. Most people couldnt run the game and the people who did get it to run claimed that it was so choppy that it was very difficult to even play.

2. AOC- At launch, this game was a piece of junk. Graphics were great but gameplay was extremely lacking or missing entirely. The game did run on some computers but was very unstable and/or choppy on most. FC intentionally mislead players about the game's content. The game seems to be getting under control now but after losing over 600k players, it will be hard to be more than a niche game. It has gone the same route as Vanguard.

3.- DDO should have been a console-only game at launch. It ran smooth enough and had decent enough graphics but the content that it launched with was very tiny. The guild I was in quickly played through the entire game content in about a month and then all we did was farm mobs, hour after hour. The problem was that my old guild wasnt even a hard core guild and we beat the game very quickly. Best thing about DDO is that it introduced ingame voice chat.

1.) Hellgate London

2.) Vanguard

3.) Age of Conan/PotBS (tied)

This is based on launch btw. 

1. Vanguard

2. Warhammer Online. Not a bad game, it's just...well, half a game.

3. Can't decide, either LOTRO or Anarchy Online.

hmmmmmmm

1 Tabula Rasa

2 Vanguard

3 PotBS

I love WAR and LOTRO not even close to being a dissapointment for me.

i dont know why people dislike lotro so much. i thought it was better than WoW. although that is my own opinon. my rankings:

1.vanguard

2.tabula rasa

3. AoC

1. AoC

2. Phantasy Star Universe - seriously, wtf sega? PSO was A W E S O M E... all you had to do was update it with a new graphics engine, more items, more areas... hell, just a graphics engine update would have been enough for me :-(

3. LoTRO

I laugh at those who expected The Matrix Online to be a good game.....

Oh and.... my list

1.  Age of Conan

2.  RF Online (i have no idea why i thought this might be cool)

3.  WAR

It whas, i acturly enjoyed mxo than wow in its early days.. but after soe took over, i quited it forever.

1. Age of Conan

2. Lord of the Rings online

3. Tabula Rasa

1:  AC2

2:  Horizons

3:  DDO

1. SWG - Hands down the biggest disappointment for me.  It was like they only scratched the surface of what was truely accomplishable by the ground work.  This game alone has inspired me on so many levels of design and theory, it's incomprehensible.  It was basically my bible on what to do and what not to do.  A lot can be learned by this game's failures and it's very hidden successes.  The theory was sound, and I think perhaps it could have saved itself if they had just spent a little more time making the game look more like Star Wars.  Aside from a few things here and there, nothing in the game even resembled Star Wars.  It was and still is, sad to see this title in action.
2. AoC - When I first heard about this game (so many years ago...), it sounded like the only hope anyone had for a realistic approach to what a Sandbox title could be.  Not only that, but they were going to completely reinvent combat.  It really was glorious to behold what we were told, and all of it sounded completely plausible.  The idea for seperate PvP and PvE leveling, builds, and gear.  The idea of directional combat to perform combos.  Gone would be the days of clicking on hotbars for skills.  Viable crafting that hadn't been as important in a game since SWG Pre-CU.  True next-gen graphics.  It was just about the best a Level Based system could be, and had all the right ideas in place.  The game we got, basically had none of this, and it seemed that the design had been completely changed.  Most disappointing of all was the combat system.  It was exactly like combat had always been in an MMO, except it was perhaps a little worse.  This game was and is a mess.
3. Tabula Rasa - I got interested in this game after they revamped it to the Post-Earth, Freedom Fighter-esque design. The things they were promoting for this title seemed like exactly what I wanted from an RPG. But, then it was released, and it wasn't even a shadow of what I was expecting. The framework wasn't even there, much less the things that would have made it great. I don't know what happened to this title, or where it got off track, but it was surely a waste.

1. Vanguard- could barely run it on solid PC, world was too big, too many bugs, terrible launch, bad decisions, etc etc etc

2. EQ2/LotrO - Its hard to beleive EQ2 was the sequel to EQ1.....I would have liked it more at launch when it was a little tougher.....When I finally got around to trying it the game was basically dumbed down so much it was an insult......LOTRO should have been alot better....i can only kill so many wolves and boars before I cant quest anymore.....The game ended for me when I literally was doing nothing but running cross country from one NPC to another to do quests......Became a major league borefest after level 35.

3. DDO - was very disappointed, this game was good in theory only

1 Warhammer

2 LOTRO

3 Hellgate

1. Vanguard - Unfinished game.

2. Dark and Light - It became legend.

3. Age of Conan - Terrible management and horrible patches. No Endgame.

EQ2 - It was supposed to be better than EQ1 and failed in comparison both in real game quality and financial return for SOE. They have been changing the game mechanics and dummying it down since release trying to make something work without success.

Vanguard - Brad screwed us old school players looking for another classic EQ format game and duped us by releasing an unfinished, bug riddled product. It's clear he was just lying to everyone for a quick payday. SOE has taken control and dummied the game down so it doesn't resemble anything that was originally promised.

Pirates of the Burning Sea -  The game had so much potential. It was a fresh concept for MMOGs but instead of making a real immersive historical sailing and pirate game, they chose to dummy it down and deliver a WoWed version with instaporting and speedy travel in an 1800 Caribbean setting. Amazing.

1. WOW

2. AOC

3. GW

1. World of Warcraft

2. Anarchy Online

3. Everquest 1

Originally posted by lornj

i dont know why people dislike lotro so much. i thought it was better than WoW. although that is my own opinon. my rankings:

I'm not sure people hate the game, but they were let down by it, because it was just a whole lot more of the same.  Personally I think it is a great game, but I get the feeling I have already played the entire game before I even left my teens.  

Originally posted by Daffid011

Originally posted by lornj

i dont know why people dislike lotro so much. i thought it was better than WoW. although that is my own opinon. my rankings:

I'm not sure people hate the game, but they were let down by it, because it was just a whole lot more of the same.  Personally I think it is a great game, but I get the feeling I have already played the entire game before I even left my teens.  

I don't think people "hate" the game. IMHO it just turned out to be more of the same and its performance supports that. Simply put, there is nothing special about it. It is exactly the same as dozens of other fantasy grinders out there.

On top of it many people followed it when it was originally "Middle Earth Online" which was more of a sandboxy format and then they did the old switcheroo to the linear WoW format.

1. AoC

Given the hype and supposedly 'next gen' mmorpg, the lack of innovation was vastly dissapointing to me. A huge let down when I realised that almost everything AoC had to offer was generic quest-based content.

2. SWG

While SWG had very many interesting features at release (yes, bugged and inbalanced to death, but still...), the direction SOE took with especially the NGE was such a let down I could not believe it when I first saw it. The new direction feelt as if it was based on what the developer team could achieve and not on what the players wanted. They where not good enough to get the sandbox model going well; all they where capable of was the generic, linear quest model. And how bad SWG was even at that.

3. EQ2

At release EQ2 was terrible - not very buggy, but terrible in many game design aspects like locked encounters, only group buffing, instanced zones, linear world (tier-based) etc. EQ2 was sadly no where near the rather free world of EQ1, which I thought it would.

- AoC

- DDO

- Tabula Rasa