That Blizzard has a policy forbidding players from allowing their *spouses* to maintain characters on the account for even the most casual dabbling pretty much negates any claim they have to moral high ground on anything. This is a part of life in which WoW, Blizzard, the law, and the public have no authority and no right to consider, comment, or enforce.

Everyone should read these guidelines carefully. They are a bizarre insight into a dangerous hubris that could one day spell the death of the game - and they are a very strong argument for looking the other way in the face of any offense.

How mature is a person who looks at a cute game and says it's for girls or kids or whatever based on its cute factor? What do these people think of Mother/Earthbound or Animal Crossing? I think I was in fourth or fifth grade last time I witnessed someone seriously complaining about this sort of thing.

I've only put a few hours into the game, but so far my impression is that the game is for kids because you don't really do anything but hit stuff.

I don't have to make decisions, I'm never afraid for my character, I never regret something foolish I did or something unfortunate that's happened to me. The most complex, challenging, and satisfying quest I've encountered involved collecting pieces of a map from two people and taking them to a third person for assembly. The most engaging storyline involved killing 20 monsters so an NPC would no longer be afraid to cross a bridge. The best dialogue had a girl calling me stupid and a coward after I turned down a quest I had already completed.

I'm sticking with this game because I want to know what goes through the mind of a person who claims it becomes fun after you've put 20 or 30 hours into this pointlessness, but my hopes aren't high for the standards of people who value their time so little.

A lot of people try the game on friends' recommendations, and they sure as hell aren't quitting because they're surprised by the graphics.

What's needed is modern camera control and keybinding options. I played this game for a year or so back when and loved it, but when I came back to it after spending time in newer games the control, while not quite aggravating, was tiresome enough that I'd usually think about AC for a minute then decide to play something else.

The launcher is also a dinosaur. To require anything more than one mouse click, a password, and two keypresses (a 20 second process at most) before you are in control of your character is unacceptable these days. If you're used to it you'll probably argue it's not a big deal and there are worse things happening in the world, but problems like server crashes & accounting mistakes are just as petty in the grand scheme of things if you take that view.

All this minor irritation and familiar clunkiness piles up against AC in a form which has become very efficient, slick, and easily customized in the years since its launch.

Probably more important is the fact that there wasn't anyone to play with at the low levels. The answer to this isn't a marketing push hoping to coordinate a big influx of new users, but free play for 20 levels or so and a compelling reason for veterans to make new alts. More character slots, high level drops from low level missions, xp bonuses for their other characters.

It's unfortunate Turbine would never consider anything like this without severe restrictions that would punish curious new blood and negate the benefits, because the people at Turbine clearly don't play MMOs for fun or know very much about what fans of the form enjoy or expect. If anything they often seem openly hostile to those preferences and expectations.

I'm going mainly on my gut reaction to the temperament and maturity level of the posts in that forum by users who claimed to be in the know, but I'd bet money it's the real thing.

It's not really fair to call such an endeavor illegal, as there's no court precedent about the reverse engineering of server software for a canceled online-only game. An *unauthorized* server may be a EULA violation. Whether violating an EULA is illegal also remains fuzzy territory, moreso where the game is defunct. If anything, the special status of games like AC2 and E&B - and the fact that the individuals who made them are almost certainly forbidden to discuss the situation - ought to swing our assumptions toward the favor of free speech and artistic preservation.

Some of you are carelessly swinging around professional legal opinions about something we simply don't yet know about. It's disrespectful, it's inconsiderate to the entire MMO community (fans and developers alike) since this may someday be a far more widespread problem, and it's dangerous because it encourages liability-wary websites & forum administrators to silence discussion.

I haven't had these problems in Firefox but in Opera there are some minor aggravations I thought I should mention here. Some of this only applies to game-specific forums linked from the games' individual pages, as I don't think I've used this main forum before. However I ran into some problems while editing and posting this message, so I thought I should include those as well since they are probably Opera-specific.

Usually I don't bother logging in, and only log in later if I feel I think I might want to post. Also, when reading a forum usually I'll open new tabs for all the topics that interest me, and become interested in another game before finishing, so these problems might not affect many other people.

* After I log in, the other pages I've already already opened still behave as if I have not logged in, even if I reload them. Often, reloading them takes me back to the Game List.

* That wouldn't be such a problem but there are further random things that happen. For instance, I just closed all my tabs in the Flyff forum after logging in. Opening some of them now takes me either to the Game List or to a page that incorrectly tells me I have cookies disabled. Specific problem threads for me this session: 82946, 94478, 96126, 85425, 89007. Some other threads are behaving normally.

* It's often impossible for me read the forum for a specific game while I still have tabs open from another game. I even experience these problems while trying to view screenshots or other info about the second game starting from the Game List page. Just now I tried to reproduce this by opening pages for Asheron's Call, but they opened successfully. However, clicking a topic on the Flyff forum, or reloading an open topic, now takes me to the Asheron's Call screenshots page.

* Based on how the editor is acting, I'm pretty sure this post is going to be full of unintended line breaks. They are forced on me at unexpected points while editing. Other times the editor refuses to wrap until the 200th or so character.

* Clicking Preview or Post here gave me an error box asking me to "complete the message field". (This never happened in the game-specific forums.) I picked the option to stop executing scripts on the page, and my post came out blank. (I'm now editing this in Firefox.)