Originally posted by Ruviane

I'm happy about the free to play because I can finally play LOTRO with my family without having to have four accounts.  We have three people in the family that will play together often, so we have the start of our own group.  ^_^

 

Ruviane,

I'm happy about it too. I have a Lifetime, going VIP. It will mean a lot more fun for some of my family, as we will now be able to play together.

- bpc

Maybe Blizzard is just trying to help the competition... beef up the player base in LoTRO and EQ/EQ2 so they don't end up getting labeled as a monopoly. ;-)

Agreed, F2P done right would be the only way to save this game; short of selling it for pennies on the dollar to a developer house that was actually interested in promoting, publishing & maintaining it. Even then, a solid F2P model might do it the most good.

Who knows what Sony will do for it anyways. They shoulda made EQ1 F2P a long time ago and they are letting it linger on, hanging onto the coattails of EQ2. It'll be interesting to see what happens. :-)

Awesome article - I have to agree with you on the Death Knight as being awesome in World of Warcraft. However, I have to add the Retribution Paladin to the mix. Yes, its a little harder to play, the dice are stacked against it at level 80, but man is it fun.

My other three would be The Warden in LoTRO, The Paladin in EQ2 & The Paladin in EQ1.

 

Great article, keep up the great writing. :-)

I came in well after Luclin, but had fun with my guild & friends & such. They really made the game for me. Even with the quest tools like Allakhazam.com friends and guildies would all know the broken quest lines, help past the hard parts on the epic quests, or help out with the grinding for items or show the good areas. Hours remembered of playing EQ are really about silly stories, chatting while grinding XP and such.

 

So, I miss EQ & wish they'd drop the charge to something like $5.00/month and I'd make it my 3rd, I'm never gonna cancel you game. It would come after my WoW and LoTRO Founders account and before Guild Wars.

 

Gratz EQ & Sony on your 10 year anniversary!

At a friends request I tried this game for about 2 weeks off and on. It was so broken, so laggy, so cludgy I cancelled.  Got a character to level 22-23 in that time. It really needs to get out of beta before people pay for it.

He cancelled before me too.

We had high hopes for it, but they were dashed.

I currently use the 1720 black ~ Awesome notebook. I went ahead and got the camera option and have found it a nice touch. I've had it for over a year (running almost all the time) with no problems at all. I use it a lot for working on the road and at customer sites and have had a lot of compliments on it.

 

 Loved your review! Did wish there'd been some pictures, I'd love to see the Green Skin outside of the Dell site.

 

Waiting for your Alienware notebook review! 

 

Keep up the good work!

I don't know. I've been trying Vanguard in beta and the lag and sound looping effects are so bad that it's annoying to even run. I got to the point where I had to turn the audio off. Every patch I try to log in and see how it goes, but so far... not well.

Maybe there is a good story hidden there somewhere, and maybe the wide open exploration thing'll be fun enough to ignore the huge amounts of lag and crappy sound.

I'm actually pretty bummed about it, I thought and hoped it would be a lot more playable.

Since you asked, I do feel slighted. I didn't win an XPS Laptop in the last drawing. It really bums me out.

 

The old honor system with rankings was cool.    I think WoW should do their own thing instead of trying to mimic the Guild Wars Ladder system. 

The ability to buy items with your "Marks" was a very nice touch though.

Let's see, my first was a Space MUD on AOL. (Think I did the Zork stuff before that.) Then an attempt at the first release of EQ. Couldn't get past the graphics myself there, then Asheron's Call, then back to EQ, DAoC, CoH, Wish Beta, Irth Online Beta, a little bit of Horizons Beta, Matrix Online Beta, EQ II, WoW beta and then WoW final.
(Edit: Oops, forgot about Star Wars Galaxies in there, such potential that lost players to vast, empty worlds with epic grind after grind and a hidden story out there, somewhere, in a galaxy even farther and farther away.) Edit 2: Oops, almost forgot that Guild Wars account I have sitting out ther too.

For me, the plainest way to explain how or why I enjoy WoW is that it's like reading a really well written story. When you start playing, even from level 1 you get drawn into this story of trying to solve problems right in your world and little quests that tie into them. It just leads you further down the road (for my main, Anvilmar to Kharanos to Ironforge) starting you out with this cool introduction and small contained world and over the next hour or two introduces you to a huge world fulll of this ongoing story and mysterious roads that lead to another adventure and another then flying over unknown zones on gryphon's seeing glimpses of mysterious zones and huge dragon-people and unknown Ogre's sporting skull and and crossbones that mean certain death if you go there. And you want to go - and find out what adventure is there. And then it's the little things, leaving footprints in the snow, rain, mysterious music and unseen danger as you fly over Duskwood for the first time. Venturing into the jungles of Stranglethorn Valley for the first time, barely escaping a tiger as you run to the first Alliance camp to get the little bit of experience and look to see if the quests there are "really" too high for you.

If your on a PvP server, the first time you run into an enemy and you don't know if that level 60 is going to gank your level 14 or 15 but back to the graveyard.

They put so much story, tongue in cheek humor, and little things into WoW to make it come alive that you really see the developers loving that game as they wrote it, and having fun writing it too. And all those little touches that don't seem like a whole lot, leaves drifting to the ground, footprints in the snow, duststorms and fog and rain and snow just make you want to read more.

Then they add a little more story and life with a carnival that makes it's rounds from month to month, special battleground awards/bonuses and quests week to week. Holiday events so that your experiencing Christmas and Easter and Halloween and all these things with a twist that they aren't "really" the real holidays but just a fun poke at them, but enough to make it feel like an extension, or part of the "real" holiday fun going on around you.

Those seem to be most of my reasons. Funny, I thought I would get more into ease of interface use and mechanics, but that's not really what sucks me in... it's that contiguous, fun story thread that pulls you out and into adventure and lets you wander off the story line and into other story lines, like from the dwarf and gnome story into the night elf or human stories and then pulls you back to the main thread, allowing all of you to round out toward the culmination of battling world dangers like Nepharion and Onyxia.

Anywho, I ramble, I just have a blast playing, hope this helps as to why. :-)