An odd question.....but for the first month, sure!  After that'd it'd depend on how much fun I was having.  I'm hoping GW2 will be good, but we'll see.

I'm not exactly poor, so $15 a month isn't too significant for me.

The more important "investment" in a game wouldn't be money for me, but time.  MMOs are really quite a cheap form of entertainment compared to others IMO, barring someone going completely nuts in an item shop!

As for quality, from what little I've played so far, the game is able to stand on its own merits, and the lack of monthly sub isn't a significant motivator for me.

(Voted yes, btw)

Well.....played it in the 1st beta, uninstalled....now have reinstalled, tried again, and uninstalled, sadly.

I like AoC (shocking, I know!), but TSW just didn't cut it for me.

+ve

I like TSW's idea of investigation missions - damn smart idea, even if it will be easy to google solutions or look them up on a wiki eventually

The minecraft-like crafting is a really nice touch

It's good to see an MMO try to break away from the normal fantasy tropes

-ve

The animations are poor IMO

Combat felt dull and uninteresting, but I didn't unlock many of the higher tier skills, so may not be judging on all the facts here

The feel of the world doesn't quite gel for me...whereas a genuine Call of Cthulhu setting would feel menacing and scary, this felt somewhat ridiculous.  I think  I see what they're aiming at, but to get the right feel would require more stage-setting, I think.   I would have preferred it had they made magic and the occult far more mysterious and alien (and yes, this is one of my complaints re AoC too re the magic)

The voice acting - both in quality, and in the silence of the player character - the latter makes it much less immersive (...what am I...a mute?....or just the strong, silent type?).  As regards quality, although I found much of it lacking, I did like the Prophet in the templar starter area - that piece was really good quality.  To be clear, what was lacking wasn't so much that the voice actors themselves did a bad job, but more that their lines tended to be written badly.

Other

IMO, there's a disconnect between the freedom of the skill system and the level of immersion required to "get into" the world and get the horror aspects of the setting working well.  Being able to switch between being, say, an expert shotgun user, a blindingly fast swordsman and a tough-as-nails chaos mage makes it harder to identify with one's character.

Tough call.....my main will still be mesmer (love that class!), but I found the necro a lot more fun this time than last BWE.  I still want to spend a bit more time on engineer - don't feel I've really done the class justice with my goes at it thus far.

Edit : Should say, I found the necro more fun when going with a staff/scepter-dagger setup and focussing on wells....got a bit more used to the crowd control options, which was fun, and also toggling death shroud.   The previous time I went with axe and tried minions (not so fun for me)

Re the OP, yes, I have high expectations about the release quality of GW2, and they sure can't be let off the hook with an excuse that release was rushed due to financial constraints, as some other MMOs could be.

That said, from what I've played, everything has seemed very smooth, so I doubt I'll have many issues with it.

You have a point....as it's a self-selected sample, one's not entitled to take it as necessarily representative of the viewpoint of the gaming community as a whole.

I enjoyed the beta.....but I'm one of that self-selected sample group ^^

Originally posted by Lucioon

Double Tap a button to Dodge....since NES, no one has ever thought of putting it in an MMO

To me thats is ground breaking, who the hell would have thought that Double Tapping works in an MMO, just like Jumping, who the hell thought after UO that jumping would work in an MMO, how about Swimming, such an simple concept, who would have thought that it would work in an MMO.

Ideas after its implemented is easy to look at and said it was easy and done before. But actually thinking that lets do double tapping in an MMO is totally thinking outside of the box. The BOX of an MMO Genre.

To be fair, it's been in Age of Conan for 4 years, so it's not quite as groundbreaking as you say....though the double-tap dodging is both more meaningful and fluid in GW2

Having tried the beta (several times now!), it's a "no" for me.

Edit: To clarify, I mean that I'm not intending to subscribe.

Right?  Wrong? I'm sure you know that these terms don't really apply too well to subjective preferences like this...

Anyhow, on topic, I quite liked Rift's dynamic events when Rift released, but GW2's impressed me a lot more.  After 6-8 weeks play in Rift, the zone events felt quite repetitive....I'll have to see how things work out in GW2.

One of the big pluses that GW2 has is the level-scaling thing whereby a high-level character will get autolevelled down in a lowbie zone, meaning that the event can be a challenge for them too, though rewards could be an issue for some.

In Rift, it also felt like one was competing against others for one's tier (& rewards) in a DE, but in GW2, getting gold level feels easier, so GW2 may lead to more genuinely cooperative play...so I'm wonderin if GW2's setup might actually lead to more community-building.

I'm looking forward to GW2, having enjoyed the beta (I played GW1 for about 2 years or so).......but I only managed 6-8 weeks in Rift....it just never really grabbed me (though chloromancer was fun).

Pretty much, yeah.  And no, you weren't doing it wrong.  However, an assassin can do OK in the daytime as long as you use crowd controls and other tools right, but it is certainly far easier for a 'sin at night.

I rolled an assassin character for that purpose - to try the whole sneaky sneaky stabby stabby thing.

By and large, in the daytime & outside, stealth is pretty useless (though has some uses for rangers), though there are a few spots offering a little more cover e.g. the shade of trees, or up against the edges of some areas.

I learnt to do 1 of 2 things when soloing on my assassin - either do his levelling/questing etc at night, or if I wanted to play during the daytime, not try to stealth, but instead shoot them with my crossbow to pull (it's surprising how much an assassin can do with an xbow).  Indoor instances of course don't suffer from the day/night thing, but one has to be careful in some areas depending on how much light is around.

I'm also perhaps lucky as I have several characters I enjoy - if I want to do some solo stuff, I sometimes play my assassin if it's night, or play something else if it isn't.....probably not the answer you want.

I guess it's realistic that someone can't sneak around in broad daylight in the open and not be seen, but it does mean that the opportunities for the stealth-style gameplay are quite limited.

One thing which AoC never implemented (but should have, IMO) is some kind of facing system for mobs, and determining whether or not the mob sees you based on that.

Well, as a player of AoC, I really enjoy the combat system, and find it by far preferable to other MMOs I've tried e.g. Rift (though I did like the interrupt-based gameplay of some classes/setups in GW1).  IMO the casting system could do with some added complexity (would love to see spellweaving made harder).  The lack of global cooldown is also something I like.

Graphics/animations - yeah, I think it's great, although it still demands a good PC to play it, and although Funcom have made great progress in reducing system load, there are IMO still some issues such as memory leaks (but much milder now) to deal with.

As far as why people left at the beginning, it's tough to recall exactly (yeah, I was there), but the game was pretty buggy back then.  Many also felt that Funcom had made promises but failed to keep them (the poor implementation of city sieges was a big let down for some of my friends).

Some poor decisions re balance didn't help (the gems era, for example, re PvP).  Many people had a good 1st impression of Tortage, as I recall, but the world after Tortage was thinner on voiceovers and content, and that put some peoples' backs up.

Funcom have sorted out some of these issues (to varying degrees), but I suspect that it's not even on some peoples' radar as their memory of it from near release is of a buggy mess.

There's been some info announced about it today in the monthly development update at

http://www.ageofconan.com/news/monthly_development_update_february_2012

 - goes into some depth, but it's a way off yet.

Once.....just *once*, I'd like to see people pay attention to the semantics of the term "success"...and how success is related to a goal.  People will have different criteria for what is to count as a success as they have different aims in mind.

Without a consensus of what would constitute success, people are using the term in wildly differing ways, rendering discussion of whether or not SWToR is a success....well, really pretty meaningless.

I believe that the OP is posting the thread in this way purely to elicit a response.

If the OP really wanted feedback on what should be added, a better question would have been something like "Now that you've played it for a month (or so), what would you like to see next?"

From what you write it does sound like the DT or guardian would suit you well.

Guardians are indeed able to take a ton of punishment, but the sword/shield spec (juggernaut) has very low damage.  They also have no selfhealing per se.  If one wants to do better damage on a guard (and sacrifice some of one's aggro tools and a little survivability) polearm is good....however, that won't suit the look you want.

Dark Templars take a little more damage from opponents but have more tools to counteract damage (e.g. lifetaps, soul barrier, or a dread shadow).  With the right spec and good gear they can also put out very high dps. They have some healing abilities (lifetaps, martyrdom - a "green" heal that requires that the DT damage themself, and perhaps even dark hand).

One last option would be to go for a dual-wielding carnage conqueror with some defensive feats, but this isn't as solid as the above 2 choices.   Where the other 2 above can main-tank, a carnage conq is better thought of as an off-tank (or outright dps depending on setup).  One can solo ok due to a balance of dps and mitigation.  Conquerors do have a half-power "green" heal coming from a banner that they can plant.

As regards the feel of the classes, guardian is a classic armoured soldier - all physical stuff, with no magic, rock solid; DT is a warrior who gets by with a combination of swordsmanship and dark/blood magic; conqueror is mostly physical, but has some (very) minor elemental magic aspects, and some group-affecting buffs - the original concept of the conqueror was a "commander" type.

Congratulations!  That's one really nice screenshot.  But remember, a vicious, attack-trained wolf is for life, not just for Christmas

Re the PvP on Illum, it sounds just like the screw-up made by Funcom in AoC's Bori.

I really wish that developers would study a bit of game theory to try to model players' likely behaviour in advance when developing PvP situations involving rewards.

Just a basic understanding of situations like prisoners' dilemma and the like could provide some insight.

Sounds like you had high expectations which the game didn't meet.  Whose fault is that?  Perhaps the game's, or yours, or more probably a bit of both.   Hope you find something you do like.

Aside : Even if the game doesn't suit now, see how it sits with you later perhaps (money and/or special offers permitting) - the expectations may have paled by then and you may perhaps like it then.  But, if not....not!

OT : So, if you don't want this (rather divided) board to call you a "hater" - how about a "disliker"? :P

GW2 sounds like it's the closest thing to what you may be looking for, although some of their ideas come across as hype to an extent.  GW2 might be what you want, but I'm really not sure - depends on how is meaures up on release.  There are anime influences in their art, I believe, but it's meant to be an option of some kind (?) (Disclaimer : I dislike the art style of anime)

Other than that, you could try games like A Tale in the Desert, but that's very far from anime, has a niche population, and may be too sandboxy for your taste.   Eve Online could perhaps float your starship, if sci-fi is your thing.

One last thought....meant in all seriousness....have you tried tabletop RPG?  The kind of consequence you're looking for is of the *really* permanent kind, and a tabletop setting could cater to that  (I understand that this option may well not suit)

Best MMO of the year?  Sure, I can go for that....but the bar isn't too high IMO - e.g. Rift...not a bad game, but not a strong contender by my reckoning.

Best *game* of the year?  Heck no!  Skyrim is leagues better.  Deus Ex : HR is also better as far as I'm concerned.

Human...just because of GW1, and because I like the style of the race

That said, I plan to make an alt charr engineer, and the Sylvari do interest me - they seem like a slightly different take on elves - much like the Aldryami of RQ2 (happy days a long time ago...)

Firefly

Call of Cthulhu

Mass Effect

Conan (would prefer Funcom's version to be lower fantasy than it is, but meh)

With all the above, a lot would depend on implementation, of course.