After many months of travel and a river of blood splilled by me and my foe. After tracking down ancient texts which reveal the secrets of a treasure beyond compare. After days unending, in the deep dark lair of the most fearsome creatures. At last I possess the item of my legendary quest. I hold in my hand a sword forged from the most magical of elements, a blade so sharp, so strong that even the the Gods fear its bite...

...your sword of amazingness has deteriorated and must be repaired...

Gold selling companies in Asia have been known to have ties with organized crime, believe it or not.

LoL, My name is Spanky Lo, I'm got my hands in Pimping, Gambling and WoW Gold Botting. I enjoy long walks in the park and a glass of wine on the beach at sunset.

I'm not a Grandmother, but I play one in Aion, and it gets my approval as well...

huh?

Aion looks snazzy. Its not super innovative but its got alot of elements that lack in the current field of MMOs. It does seem to be missing some standard features, but it seems that they are rolling out more of those as time goes by. Will it fall into the Warhammer trap and drive players away with meaningless end game PvP? Hard to say.

AC2 was the biggest blunder that Turbine ever made. No, wait DDO was...? Hmm seems as though AC1 was the only thing Turbine ever did right.

Regardless, AC2 took AC and dumbed it down and oversimplified the interface and skill structure and essentially killed itself. IF Turbine had half a brian collectively they would have re-created AC1 in all its success and glory in the AC2 Engine. But instead they created arguably the worst 2nd gen MMO ever.

Honestly, how many of you out there that played AC1 from the beginning would have rather seen AC2 be a revamp of AC1 in a newer and more modern game engine? Hell, even EQ figured that out when they made EQ2. UO will allways be my first and most treasured MMO love, but AC was the game that made me an MMO fan and I played that game every single day until AC2 came out. At which point Turbine broke my heart and I moved on to DAoC and Shadowbane.

Casual, Hardcore, Fans, Instances, PvP... Its all comepletely meaningless if the true essesense of Star Trek is not present.

"...to explore strange new worlds, too seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before!"

Where is that in this game? I don't know how better to put it. A Star Trek MMO should have us doing those things and all the other things that the series and movies have shown us over the years. Exploration seems to be present, but it aslo smacks of a single player mapquest pleasure cruise. Why not allow players to form crews on a starship and go off on thier own 5 year missions? If that not in from the start then how can you really create an immersive experience for the rest of what should be in game. Away missions, player driven story, galactic politics, etc.

Perhaps I'm asking for too much from todays creative minds and technology. However, when I think Star Trek and MMO, I'm thinking that I become a character in one of the series, and I get to do the things I watch Kirk and Picard do. Instead I get to upgrade my ship/avatar until I have enough firepower to not die quickly in a instanced pvp starscape that might not even be in three dimensions. Don't get me wrong, some sweet 3d space combat action set in the Star Trek universe would be awesome. I just can't accept that this is what a ST MMO boils down to at all.

I'll wait and see, and hope.

I played in the last beta, and just out of curiousity, I wrote some very simple kill/loot macros using an off the shelf macro tool. Aion actually makes it super easy to accomplish this. The controls allowed for looting and targeting etc lend themselves to macroing (and full on botting as well). I managed to level a toon from 1-10 overnight with only a few prods from the keyboard. It made me very sad, as this is something I personally destest. When a game actually facilitates the use of macros and bots I usually choose not to play. Soo, unless they implement some major changes to the game interface I don't thinks this problem going away, and any server you choose will more then likely be a Bot-haven, thus ruining the RPG experience.

p.s. the whole player store thing is annoying as hell too. They should restrict where people can set up shop. When I teleported my first time out of the starter zone, expecting to see something new and amazing, all I saw was a sea of charactor merchants. Talk about lame.

Everything I've seen so far from Cryptic would suggest that this is just another MMO. But we are talking about Star Trek here. Its first real MMO should raise the MMO bar a little bit, but instead it just seems to being playing it safe. Besides, Cryptic has missed the essense of what Star Trek is all about. 4000 varied starships flying about the alpha quadrant is NOT Star Trek.

While this game will probably look cool, and might even be more entertaining then EVE or any other recent Space MMO it will lack the true Star Trek soul I think.