This would be the absolute end of pick up groups.  If the quest for the faction or item reward is one that can be permanently failed then nobody will attempt it without having the dice utterly stacked in their favor.  This means set guild groups only. 

I saw this happen in timed quests as well.  If the timer was long enough then NOBODY would do it outside of a guild.  IE you want greater wards and the quest is every 5th day?  Nobody is going to risk it with a random, ever.

Do NOT play a templar.... 

Seriously I know you like playing tank classes and find mage classes squishy but NO do NOT play that templar.

Play a sorc.

Open world vindictus would be a good beginning for a game.  I played tera, C9, Dragon's Nest, BUT the best combat was the simplest combat...  Vindictus.  It was all timing and a couple of buttons. 

I also liked Cabal's combat system, at least the combos as opposed to where it ended up. 

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OTOH I also like strategic combat systems but not 123456789 systems.  I liked the disciple class of vanguard from early beta before they changed it.  It was a flowing combat system that did not rely on mana etc.  You chose the ability you were going to use thinking about what ability you wanted to be able to use three combat ticks down the line. 

The swordmaster in warhammer was interesting that way as well as what you did now could influence what you could do later.  Plus I loved some of the special moves etc.

Before that I liked my shaman from everquest 1.  There were times when I literally saved the party from what would have been a wipe had they had a different shaman.  There were just so many things you could do in a clutch situation.

I think that is the point though -- people want the ability for talent of one sort or another to be able to win over equipment.  Other people at least want the illusion of such. 

The problem with crafting these days is that the whole mmothink is that group activities produce good items and solo activities produce awful items.  Hence they see crafting as a solo one-off activity and hence crafting tends to make items that are not as good as "camp this monster" will get you.  At best they end up using things like raid drops as components.  But that is more an augmentation system than a crafting system.

In my opinion you will not see the next jump in crafting until you see GROUP crafting.  Have a dynamic system where you have multiple crafters working together co-operatively where any one of them can mess up the item and you will see items worth crafting.

I have paid $15 for meh games.

I would pay $29 for a game that was simply very good -- at least until I hit endgame.  I would even keep playing it at endgame if the endgame were good enough to keep me playing.  In essence for any AAA I felt like playing, this level would not impede my play.

I would pay $49 for a game that was excellent and had good service.

I would pay $99 per month for the ultimate game, assuming a free month came with the box price -- It would be hard to get me to shell it out as an initial investment. 

Losing exp -- ok so long as it is not over 2 hours of grind for a single death.

Delevel -- fine.

Corpse Runs -- Only if Daoc or EQ2 as it released style(soul shards).  I do not want to have to have secondary sets of equipment banked and have to run naked to a corpse if I die twice or have to hire people to try to get my corpse.  Or worse lose it entirely.  That is the way out of a raid guild -- oops you lost all of your raid equipment and now you are back to tier 1 -- cya.

The main reason is that AC is presently a car with wings and an exo-frame and a tail and another set of wings....

It simply is too many things layered onto the original frame.

There needs to be a new game similar to AC not more extensions to AC. 

The secondary reason is the been there done that thing.  I played a lot of AC a long time ago and some a moderate time ago.

War was in many ways a great game.  I truly enjoyed the scenarios and the back and forth of the zones.  Unfortunately the fortress battles were a real mess, and the city battles stank. 

The big problem was population inbalance though.  I ended up in a merge situation where I was placed onto a server with a HORRID inbalance of population.  This ended with me just having to quit -- having them invade your capital FOUR TIMES in a day just isnt fun.  I actually moved my alt to a different server but what was the point really -- I found I didnt want to do the PVE to get PVP grind again(going from 40r63 with mostly superior wards(silly 1/5 day dungeon)) to what ended up as 40r40 or so with no wards was -- well I didnt want to run the dungeons again.

I have considered coming back a few times just to see but I figure now I would be so very outclassed (the difference between 40r63 and 40r80 with gold gear is just too sick) and for all I know the inbalance may still be there.  Plus my characters are scattered across servers.

TSW has everything that Tera does not, and Tera has everything that TSW does not.

If you combined the strengths of Tera and TSW you would have a game that would sell many millions.  As it stands though -- both games are in the death spiral because they are in a lot of ways half-games.  They needed each other badly.

I don't know -- I mean if someone came out with an asheron's call three with very similar mechanics to what they had in AC1 along with better graphics etc and followed it up with true monthly updates like they used to have, I think it would do well -- not WoW well, but I think that kind of sandbox done right could hit the million mark in today's market.

I always cringe when I see someone use AC3 and they mean assassin's creed.  It is trampling on memories.

Yes they do cut key features near the end -- but the very worst is when they ditch some major feature near the end and replace it with something cobbled together at the last minute that is at best blandly standard.  When you throw out something major and then end up rapid-coding some filler to take its place -- it always ends up longing. 

When the decision for any feature is "This isnt going to work" or "We simply do not have the time now to finish it so yank"  near the end, disaster always seems to strike.

Usually it is a last minute feature change or activation...

For example -- you might be able to jump to Height X during the beta -- then near or at launch they decide to enable the obstacles they had by lowering the jump Height to X-1.  Now all of a sudden things you could leap over are now obstacles you have no way to get over.   A huge annoyance factor is added and this picks apart the game.

They could radically change the way things work right near the end.  I have seen this as well, where they have a fun mechanic that works quite well but they percieve it is "too difficult" or "has the potential for being too unbalanced if played well" and they up and change the mechanic.  All of a sudden the gameplay becomes tremendously different.  If you prefered the old mechanic then the game could no longer be fun for you.

They could radically change things for balance.  A game could have a tank class that can actually put out a little dps and in the end they decide to clamp down and make them no dps at all like in most games -- or they could remove the armor factors from the priests, or they could do all sorts of nerfs that would make riots if done when the game was launched. 

They could add obstacles -- faction requirements and level or quest requirements to access X content, or add in artificial stats to block your progress for fear people will get to the end too rapidly.  A lot of times this exposes a weakness in the game as the game might have been fun played straight but when you have to do questline X , well questline X wasnt as fun as the way you would have played it otherwise but you have to do it anyway changing the whole experience of the game.

They could massively simplify crafting right at the end, or make crafted products go from being utterly useful during beta to utterly useless upon launch. 

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Typically any last minute change made in the beta cycle has been a disaster from my standpoint as a tester.   There just isnt enough time to find all of the implications and ramifications of the change unlike if it were done say 6 months+ before release.

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Oh and one other thing -- in an early beta or alpha they seem to think more of the players than later on.  They tend to make the games require more grey matter to play them and then dumb it down with time till the game is more populist/lower common denominator.  I have seen tons of really neat ideas get flushed down the toilet.

At least for me, I tend to have the most fun playing a good MMO 9-15 months before it is released in the strictly closed beta timeframe with the strong NDA intact.  This is from all standpoints from the community to the dev access to the true mechanics as envisioned before they get hyperbalanced and watered down.  The devs also tend to be "playful" which is really quite an experience.

Usually when I am truly wronged in an MMO -- whether it be a nerf to my character that ruins its character conception -- or a thing in a guild like the time I was docked 50 dkp for following orders -- I do a self enforced 1 week vacation from the game.  About half the time I return and half the time I do not.  Some games have had multiple moments like this but never more than three. 

I have also had other times where I have left a game simply because it is no longer fun, the endgame is not anything like the game before it, the realization that good items will only drop for other classes and never your own by design(divina) where I knew when I stopped playing that I was not coming back -- in some cases that I was not coming back until an expansion or significant change to the game.

It almost needs a few monickers.

I mean there are games that are "Free to Lose" meaning a pvp game where you will be slaughtered unless you pay money.

Then there are "Free to Try" games where it is perfectly fine to play for free for the first 30% of the game -- then the mechanics shift and if you either can not procede (games with lower caps for f2p) or you are slowed to a snails pace if you don't pay or it becomes really BAD if you don't pay.

Then there are "Limited Free to Play" games -- where you get to pick 4 classes out of 20 and can't use any items that you would want to use -- or where boxes drop with uber loot but the keys you have to purchase from the cash shop to open them... but you can if you are willing to deal with it, make it to the end.

Then there are the normal old-style free to play games -- where you actually CAN play free.   You might have is fewer bag spaces, gain a little less exp (say 20% less), and other little things to annoy you -- but it doesnt significantly hinder you at the end.

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Any game where paying over $100 per month makes you godlike compared to people paying $20 per month should also get the monicker P2W (pay to win).

The raids of today have nothing on the raids of old.  You had times where you had to keep a raid going for like 6 hours of 72 people to pass the thing and if you botched you lost.  Really though some of the old Everquest I raids were kind of brutal, but getting used to 72 person raids means that the current 20 person raids seem and feel more like group content. 

I am a lot less of a raider though in the current games for more reasons than that.  Raids have become a lot more cheesily technical.  Cheesily technical means boss does instakill move -- everyone has to take a synchronized step left -- NOW when the person says so on ventrillo.  It isnt so much playing your class well, but doing the press X not to die at the right time.  Time was it mainly just took everyone playing their class well as opposed to the current method which revolves around voice chat.

Old raids had better tactics in my opinion...