Have to throw in another vote for Auto Assault.  First MMO I knew of that used Nvidia's PhysX. 

Could have been awesome if NCSoft wasn't such a crap company. 

Bet the "solution" is to wait for the proper driver and crossfire profile from AMD to support the game....

It is for previous players who quit. They are implementing totem decay and unlocking containers out in the open world. Up til now you could safely drop a container and noone else could get into it, thats changing. This gives folks a chance to see the changes and if they want to keep thier tribe and/or retrieve thier stuff out in the world they can. Otherwise everything becomes lootable.

I think it's less of an IQ thing than a matter of tolerance.  Us oldbies were okay with having to actually play the game, i.e. "work" for stuff in-game.  We tolerated slower advancement, corpse runs, and possibly losing most/all our gear every now and then. 

Nowadays, if players don't see the end-game and uber-gear in a week they move on to another game that does give them instant gratification.  Developers see this and know that they can make more money off the 500k GOTM players in a month or two than the 50k of us who would actually stick around for a couple of years, so its obvious which class they will cater to.

Having been a player, builder, and admin on ValhallaMud back in the the day, I find that my experience has colored the way I look at MMO's today.  Back then if I saw something bugged, or overpowered, or exploited, or if struck with sudden inspiration for something cool, I could dig up the zone file, fix it, broadcast a message that the game was going down for a fix, and do a shutdown reboot.  3 minutes later the game was up and all was well again.  Today as an MMO player, if I see something wrong I have to log into a clunky bug reporting system, try to give details about a mechanic that the developers have purposefully obscured, and then hope and pray it gets looked at sometime in the next 6 months..all the while paying a monthly sub.  Drives me bat-shit loco sometimes.

Look at the graphics and sound of those old games...pretty laughable, eh?  And yet they gave us some of the most innovative and fun game mechanics and stories ever put out on a digital medium.

Look at today's games...near photorealistic graphics, 7.1 surround sound, made available by hardware that can render Toy Story 1 in real time on your desktop.  And we get the most unimaginative, dumbed-down, cliched stories and gameplay in computer gaming history--and these are the AAA games by major studios.

The Bane of EA (and almost every other major game studio/publisher conglomerate) is the wholesale shift from digital art to digital entertainment. 

My only complaint so far (yes I know its still beta) is that while the female avatars have tons of customizations (and boob physics in the creator) male characters are stuck with very few options..gay, gay with a scar, and flaming gay with make-up.  Yes, I am exagerating to make a point, but if you laughed, it was made :p

Really hope they give more customization options to the guys.

I will take gameplay over graphics any day.

There is one big caveat, though.  Just because you don't have a AAA art department doesn't excuse you from having a non-top notch tech team. 

I am already getting tired of games that promise "great gameplay" that must be played through a browser or as a Java app.  Enough with D3D9 already, lets see something that uses tech that isn't a decade old.  Can we get some freaking multi-CPU support for crying out loud, or at least a client that utilizes LMA?  How about a 64-bit client?

Just really tired of software that is stuck in 1999.  Hardware and OS features and graphics API's have advanced so much, yet the devs are stuck programming out of Windows Games for Dummies from the last century.

But, I guess if they did, it would be much harder to port to the Playstation *sigh*.

Just hope the server isn't run out of one of the devs dorm room...*cough*H&H*cough*.

The same argument can be used for any posting in any forum: "Why did you post that?  I don't care what you did or think!"

Why would anyone post that they are having fun, or graphics issues, or problems with finding players to group with, or that they like X or Y feature?

If you don't want to read about something, don't read it.  That goes for pro or con or neutral posts.

If all you want to see are posts blowing rainbows up your butt about how great the game is so you can nod your head like a Steve Jobs lackey, well, sorry it don't work that way.

Just realize that you are going to be replacing your SSD's at a faster pace than a standard hard drive. The memory used in SSDs curently has a limited lifetime, measured by the number of writes it can handle before the cells start degrading.  Its similar to a CD or DVD-RW, you can only write over the same space so many times before the media itself degrades to the point where it can no longer reliably hold data.

Don't panic, it isn't like its going to fail in a couple of weeks or anything, but instead of a new HD every 5 to 7 years, expect to have to replace it every 2-3 years, possibly sooner if you do a lot of writing to the drive.  Btw, never assign your SSD to hold the swap file (if you haven't disabled that feature entirely).

I think the model will break for the niche, indie, less than AAA companies who could before get away with unpolished, bug- ridden crap "with potential" because, "hey its free!".

With big studios who have large, dedicated programming teams and corporate licenses to major game engines and IPs now going F2P the bar is raised significantly.   At least, I hope that is the case and not the reverse.

I would submit that we already had such a person  : Raph Koster*.

Unfortunately the big money grubbers at EA and SOE didn't want anything to do with innovation and immersive gameplay; they wanted tons and tons of button mashing zombies paying a monthly fee.

* I mean this in the spirit that the OP presented, not the literal reality of Steve Jobs' management and "innovation".

OMG this screams MST3000!

My idea of an endgame (and there is no game out there that does this) is leaving the adventurer grind mostly behind and shifting to an entirely new playing field.  This would be something like Empire building, or working toward immortality and "managing" your own religion.  Anything besides just bullying your guildmates to log on Friday at 6 pm for a raid or else they risk being thrown out of the guild.

What kind of lawsuits would ensue when they decide to balance an item or class, devaluing it in real cash terms?  Does allowing us to "own" our stuff also obligate them to preserve said stuff's value?

I don't see what the big deal is all of a sudden.  For years (before all the F2P junk) people gladly paid 50 bucks for a game client that was totally useless without both internet access and a paid subscription.  What were those games called again?....Oh yeah, MMORPG's.  I guess noone who visits this site has ever had any experience wih them, though. :P

Hate to sound like a douche, but they really need to hire someone to work on spelling and grammar and just basic English structure if they intend to target any primarily English speaking regions.  If it is just a poor localization for English, I can understand, though.

Astoria pretty much covered it.  Unless you have 100 different skills at the start, players are going to quickly figure out the optimal builds.  As you tweak them, the players will continue to reoptimize, hence the FoTM phenomenon.

The trick is having a skill system where every skill is just as valuable and desired as any other.  If any are even a tiny bit less valuable, you eliminate them from the meta-gaming pool, reducing the work needed to optimize an "uber build".

A couple of pitfalls of balancing can be too much synergy, basically forcing a set of skills on anyone who wants to take a particular role, and exclusivity-- limiting via skill points or other mechanisms a skill so that it is impossible to take on another role (you have 10 skill points and "magic" and "melee" each cost 6 points.)

One particular trap you have to try to not fall into as a developer is justifying your bias toward an "awesome" skill or set of skills by fooling yourself into thinking you will make it "harder" than other skills to play.  You may try making it cost more outright (SP or gold cost) or by the old D&D method (mages are weak and pretty much crap to start but end up being the most powerful later on.)  In the end, though, the hard core players and meta-gamers will blast through your hoops and end up dominating the game (and will post the exact plan to follow for everyone else to get to god-mode with the least pain possible).

It seems balance in all its applications is the holy grail of the genre.

Raymond Feist's Midkemia (Riftwar, etc) or Kelewan (Empire series)

Lin Carter's World's End series