I am a bit disappointed to see ArenaNet following in the Blizzard tradition of granting access to selected guilds, already creating somewhat of an elitist's club before the game has even launched. Not everyone who plays cares to be part of a guild, big or otherwise.

ArenaNet, people are already excited about the game, you don't have to give special treatment to guilds and fansites to generate interest. Your best feedback is going to come from the people who just play the game, without having a major vested interest in it.

As if I needed another reason to quit and never look back. I love the characters I've created over the years, but there's not much of a game here anymore.

I'm sure xXHoBBiTdOODXx and Gindalf will love it as long as it's free. It's not? Prepare for the wailing and gnashing of teeth. I have a Lifetime sub, but Turbine's seen the last of my money.

Typical Trion, like headless chickens. What do you "fans" think they are going to eventually do with all those servers that become underpopulated by the free transfers? Say what you will, but Trion is a company blown by the wind. They have no clue what they are doing from one day to the next.

PvP itself is a design crutch, intended to substitute player conflict for actual content. The longer you can keep players banging heads with each other, the less real content the designers have to develop. PvE-focused games don't do well? You really mean that? WoW itself was always a PvE game with PvP tacked on. For that matter, Everquest was a PvE game, as the name suggests.

 Factions is an artificial way to distinguish who the enemy is, usually because designers lack the drive or the imagination to break out of that box. Creating distinct races within those factions enhances the automatic distinction of friend or foe.

While I have no love for PvP because of the excessive "rebalancing" it requires and the negative impact it has on community, I can appreciate a system where no artificial barriers are installed to create an inherent conflict. Pre-NGE Star Wars Galaxies was much like this and I think it made the world itself much more immersive.

All this will do is saturate the existing servers with people who are too cheap to invest in the game, forcing the existing player base to deal with them. If they really wanted to attract a better, more constistent playerbase, a good starting place would be to break out of the $15 a month mold and reduce the sub rate to $10.

As Turbine did with LOTRO, this is just a slap in the face to the people who already love the game by opening the Hyborian kingdoms up to an invasion by the worst of the WoW "community".  Good luck and godspeed.

One good thing you can do is set up a separate email account that you ONLY use for your WoW account. I did this and have never received a phishing email on that address. It makes it pretty easy to separate the fakes that way.

I'm pretty sure that when Emmert pitched selling Cryptic to Atari, he pointed to City of Heroes and claimed he could do the same thing with another superhero MMO, just with a quicker development time. Kind of like Mark Jacobs did with EA when he sold them Mythic. It doesn't seem that these big companies do any real homework before they buy these indie companies saddled with management that says, "We're experts. We know what we're doing!" and then can't deliver a full-featured product.

It's bad enought already, but if something happens that GW2 and SWTOR don't create a renewed interest in players, developers are going to have a hard time getting investors for much of anything.

Can't wait to see how RedBana handles this. Hellgate: London was one of the biggest missed opportunities in gaming.

Many thanks, Victor, for the info!

Here's hoping that whoever buys Cryptic the next time around insists on removing Jack Emmert from the company as a condition of sale. I think a large part of Cryptic's problems are because of Emmert's influence and decisions.

In all fairness, Trion spends a lot of effort keeping thier fansite base stoked up and pumping out PR. For my money, this was a completely unnecessary article and perhaps the author should have been encouraged to post it on her own blog. Basically, it just reads like another Rift apologist trying to rally the masses again. With the current recruitment promotion, there certainly is incentive.

After playing extensively in the beta, I finally picked up a copy of Rift a month after release - and quickly got just as disinterested in it as I did during the last stages of the beta period. With a few weeks left on my Rift account, I resubbed to World of Warcraft and am enjoying myself trying a few things I hadn't done before.

Rift is only a very shallow imitation of what has gone before. It's as though the developers were less interested in creating a fully fleshed-out world and focused more on making a "good enough" game. I don't care much for what has been done with the core gameplay of WoW lately, but I do enjoy the "world" feeling. Trion has to resort to frequent "events" to keep people interested.

What kills "World PvP" is PvPers. The "Red means dead" mentality (when, of course, YOU  feel like it) makes most people not want to deal with you.

Congratulations! You are your own worst enemy.

Originally posted by kilun

Originally posted by SteamRanger

This has become standard procedure for Trion:

1.)  Trion rep makes a poorly thought-out decision and posts about it on the forums.

2.) Forums erupt in a firestorm.

3.) Scott sails onto the forums and retracts much, if not all, of what the original staffer said.

4.) All-around backslaps and kudoes to Trion for listening to their playerbase.

 

Spare me. I don't care how much collective "experience" the Rift development team allegedly has. In the final analysis, they look and act like a disorganized pack of rank amateurs. Once a well-implemented AAA MMORPG is finally released, Rift will be buried so fast that it will be little more than a memory.

 We've both been on these forums for a while, what game do you think is going to fit that criteria anytime in the next 10 years other than "maybe" Blizzards next MMO.

 From what I've seen, I think Guild Wars 2  and possibly Star Wars: The Old Republic stand a good chance of overshadowing Rift very quickly. For my money, Rift is a very shallow experience chock full of glaring shortcuts where the devs said "good enough" for the sake of expediency. Heck, I wound up re-subbing to WoW this week and it still has a deeper sense of immersion even after Ghostcrawler got finished with it. I've seen too many people who have said they bought Rift just as filler until something else comes along. That doesn't bode well for any hope of longevity to me.

I had honestly hoped Rift would be a worthy competitor to the Blizzard Behemoth, but Trion simply doesn't appear to know what they want the game to be, let alone where they're going with it. Your mileage may vary, but I find it hard to even login to Rift after a very short time. 

This has become standard procedure for Trion:

1.)  Trion rep makes a poorly thought-out decision and posts about it on the forums.

2.) Forums erupt in a firestorm.

3.) Scott sails onto the forums and retracts much, if not all, of what the original staffer said.

4.) All-around backslaps and kudoes to Trion for listening to their playerbase.

Spare me. I don't care how much collective "experience" the Rift development team allegedly has. In the final analysis, they look and act like a disorganized pack of rank amateurs. Once a well-implemented AAA MMORPG is finally released, Rift will be buried so fast that it will be little more than a memory.

A lot of the posts on this thread are more disturbing than anything this moonstruck romantic did. Some of you pillars of society ought to find out what a pedophile is before you start slinging the word around.

But why? It's only the internet and none of it counts anyway, right?

I bought one. No regrets.

A hobbit running around named RipperX, huh? And people wondered why some of us thought this whole "You shall not pay!" business was a bad idea. It may make handsome profits for Turbine and Time-Warner, but the game has lost all dignity.

Originally posted by Blutmaul

If "Live Services" have the meaning that he will get a GM-Entertainer-Avatar and dance for the audience in the cantinas everything is plain right...

 Actually, I think I saw him when I played SWG. He was in an isolated corner dancing in his skivvies. Looked just like Jeff. I tipped him some credits so he could buy some clothes.

I like Scott, but in all fairness, he was pretty passionate when he was the Lead on Everquest 2 too and that title still languishes as a bloated mess with problems that will never be addressed. Scott changes his mind in response to whatever criticism might threaten Rift's bottom line. This would help explain why Rift's developers have lacked a sense of where the game is going. Rift suffers from identity crisis and Scott's letting the winds of player favor blow the game wherever they will is a big downfall.

Trion doesn't listen to its customers, it just reacts to them. There's a difference.