Concidering the millions of ways to have these kind of events occur, its interesting that they focus on 4 events that involve online games.  I think if we as a comunity could get the road toll down to 4 in 10 years people would be dancing on the street.  Because it involves computer games its news worthy - and if its news worthy you know its a random, rare and interesting event...(unlike the amount of people who die on the road each year)

Next they will be warning about pixilated pornography while allowing the web/news agents etc to be stocking endless supplies...

Fox is such a good news site ....

Mylin

I just wish they did their downtime slightly later, 2am = main play time for me. And 1 hour break is just a pain.

I hate the p&c and i dont play a game to be a cluster of players,

i play the game for my enjoyment - i love grouping and i dont mind soloing but to have a 3 person team and then remove the need for any social interaction other than pvp seems to remove the fun of mmorpgs.  I'm yet to find a p&c style game that has any depth and any that come close to being a full mmo.  I wish some Asian games came out with some decent character structure and game play - i guess as these constant meh games point out, is too much for someone to achieve.

And I love anime and I do not live in America.. but nor do i think there is anything wrong with not liking anime and living in America...

No matter how much you argue about it these games lack the quality of WoW or other style of games.

Mylin

Normally I hate pvp but I thought i would give a game a go where it was the pure focus of a game...and I had a heck of a lot of fun in closed beta - I made a healer class, low dps, group buff focused (I’m a sucker for punishment) and even that worked surprisingly well - even in deathmatches..sure i didn’t win them but i was 3 or 4th on several occasions - and that being a pvp bunny..

I was most surprised by the game, well worth giving a look in when its released imho

Currently I am playing EQ2 and vanguard.

I play EQ2 to hang out with my good friends, work on our guild and to play our fae alts through the new EoF content (yeah its not so new anymore but we are a casual bunch)

You play EQ2 so you know the good, the bad and the ugly of the game..

Vanguard to me is a very interesting game that hasn't got me hooked yet but is a nice break from EQ2.

Its quest system is much more like WoW (i have a wow account i like to much about on too) so in that way its got a more accessible feel to it than EQ2 which tends to leave you a bit lost beyond lvl 10..

Starting zones are very varied, some seem to be oozing with style and substance (high elf springs to mind with the songs through the trees etc) and others seem to be a hack job (the cat race caves i thought were horrid) most being somewhere in between -
Vanguard breaks somewhat from traditional races - setting their dark elves outside in a desert etc but doesn't stray much further.

The three spheres seem an interesting concept, I've been baiting my GF with the concept of a game she can play without violence (diplomacy) she isn't into hacking rabbits apart for some reason..

The world seems much more like a real world (if you forgive the strange geology you sometimes encounter) and there is a neat feel to run or ride for a while and see the landscape change and the things in the distance draw near etc..after a while of playing vanguard ive found the zoning in EQ2 to be tiresome..even though vanguard has its invisible zone lines (some hidden better than others) the seamless world attempt is a good one.

That being said on the downside you get some great scenery and some random mobs scattered about in it for no reason - i guess you have to have something to kill but there is a glaring lack of ecology in the mobs compared to the world.

as a old EQ2 player I'm use to that with EQ2 but for a new game to have the same mobs randomly scattered about  it smacks as a missed opportunity to get the worlds flora and fauna meshed into a vibrant ecosystem.

Each race as a limitation of the class they can be, coming from the freedom of EQ2 i found this a bit annoying - it was one of my grumbles with EQ1 and I was disappointed to see them continue it in vanguard.  I could understand it if each race was isolated from each other but with the constant interaction there seems little reason why their is a race/class setup.

On the upside, their is a good investment in some of the races lore and overall feel - some are definitely better than the others for this.

I gave vanguard a 6.6 rating after a week or two of play - Its risen to about 7 on my scale which shows its heading in the right direction.

I started with a pre-release because I had a station access account and $50 dollars to play for free was the right cost as far as I was concerned. If i was playing a monthly fee, Im not sure I would play right now.

Crafting appears to be a long grind to get anywhere, after working on a armorsmith in EQ2 to 65 I'm finding it harder to get to lvl 7 in vanguard /grin.
the gear you make though is better than any ive seen drop so for now crafting appears to have a strong place in the world..that being said EQ2 crafting was the best gear you could get upon release - and it was a general outcry from a vocal part of the game that appeared to successfully get this changed, EQ2 crafting is mostly a joke now.

All of the above is of course IMHO

Mylin

As i said on my first post:

Can anyone shed some light on what they have done different to the failed EQ2 experiment?

Thanks for answering that question, makes me feel a lot more happy about the game. 

Mylin

The biggest thing that went "wrong" was the lack of replay.. if you really only have 4 classes to play around with it gets really really dull redoing the same stuff over and over again to get to the final class..

that and once you know the game you want to jump in and start the action..

personally I dont want to spend 15 hours each alt going through a solo game to play a mmo...

I use to Imm on several MUDs , those weird text based things that surprisingly are still around, lurking in the backwaters.. We had an insect race which had 4 limbs, balanced by the fact it had next to no hitpoints on each one, so yes in battle its offense was great, if you hit it you almost always cut of a limb..was mostly balanced and kinda fun to have to flee from battle carrying your legs in a sack..

The next lot of MMO's seem to be starting to take their influence from the asian myths (a lot of vanguard races look like the Japanese’s spirits etc) as our various cultures mix and class it seems that the next generation may depart somewhat from the Tolkien model. F

or better or for worse..
I think as humans we are taught that having 2 legs and 2 arms and walking upright is the best thing you can be.  So its natural for us to assume races that mirror ourselves are "better" than a quadruped or serpent bodied creature..
 
On a pure work note:
Getting armour and weapons that work with extra arms, snake bodies, four legs means a lot more work has to be done in the game..
I remember when NWN came out they only had rangers with 1 weapon because the overhead of making each model carry the mixture of each weapon meant the overhead was too high. Now I’m sure that new mmo's have a better system than this but even games like Everquest 2 admitted it was having trouble with creating new gear because of the 16+ different models (est) they had to create for each item..

Mylin

if I read it correctly on their site that you get an archetype at level 5 and a class at 20?
After the EQ2 experience with this concept it makes me less than interested in playing this game.

Can anyone shed some light on what they have done different to the failed EQ2 experiment?

IMHO DnD is all about a party working together to overcome a quest of some kind.

when I did the trial of Dnd online the parties I went in were extremely chaotic - most of the time different people ran off in different directions to get chests or kill x named..it was a zerg shambles - In EQ1 or EQ2 or WoW etc etc if you entered an instance dungeon and split the party you would all be dead..DnD had so little challenge from its mobs that it encouraged this divide and conquered "tactic"

I also hated team speak with a passion

I think DnD was a good enough concept but pales when compared to a "real" mmo