5. Babylon 5, with JMS as Executive Producer and integrated real physics space combat for the starfuries.

4. Dune, and release the hounds if Brian Herbert goes anywhere near it.

3. Larry Niven's Known Space, especially Ringworld.

2. Classic Traveller.

1. Barsoom, with designs by Michael Whelan.

Originally posted by sonicsix

Meh...  might be worth a look if I don't feel I have to compete against other players for anything.  Hopefully there will be no forced grouping and all content will be available to the solo player.  And please dear Lord, let there NOT be any PvP.  The IQ level of the player base drops by 100 in every game that has PvP in it.

sonicsix, please don't take this the wrong way, I mean this as a legitimate question. Why are you even visiting mmorpg.com at all? Haven't you just listed pretty much all the significant features of an MMO? I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm genuinely curious.

Originally posted by Szark

Starting this Friday, City of Heroes and Villains will be holding a double experience weekend.

There's something seriously wrong with your email. You sent this out on the 5th, and it just arrived today, the 23rd. That's not very newsy, or alerty. Here are the headers, slightly elided, so you can debug:

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Originally posted by HandsomeRob

No MMO goes out flawless, and problem free. Just as no person doing anything for the first time is an expert. Funcom may have had problems with the AO launch, but at least they have a track record, and a little experience in this market.

Hey, you're mis-characterizing what I said. 

I was in EQ back in December of 1999 when EQ frequently consisted of three or four hours in the pre-world chatroom complaining about the server being down. I'm not criticizing AO for having technical issues. I hate Funcom five years later  because of their crappy attitude and mismanagement. They were compulsive over-promisers, they ignored the playerbase including their player bug-testers, they showed favoritism to their buddies and they changed the theme and feel of the game from sci-fi to fantasy.

Those aren't technical problems or bugs. Those are profound attitude problems on Funcom's part. If you reread my 2002 comments, you'll see that bugs were a small part of why I left, in the context of the poor handling of the problems.

And to be absolutely clear, I say this about a world that, to this day, I still think of as remarkably beautiful. I've never since been in an MMO that had the huge and gorgeous environments AO had.

But I will never trust Funcom.

Originally posted by Zorvan

 

Ao has lasted more than six years.

 

It now has brand new servers, is getting a new graphics engine  with all the bells and whistles within the next year, and new updated graphics are inline after that. All of this provided by work done on AoC, which happens to be one of the most anticipated mmorpgs coming out. The World is also currently in development.

Perpetual couldn't even get their first game ( already 85% complete) out of the starter gate. Success on making good on a Star Trek mmo, one of the most prolific IPs ever, is highly doubtful.

So, which one is on crack, now?

Are you actually defending Funcom? Then the crackhead in question would be you.

AO was totally buggy for a year after launch, the devs ignored beta testers begging them not to go gold, the devs completely ignored hundreds of reports about the double armor bug, the only time a quick patch came out was when Yalmahas were dropping in chests at an ultra-high rate, and they only saved the game as a commercial product by adding the fantasy-looking Shadowlands. The adding of yet another fantasy realm was the clincher. If I wanted a fantasy game, I could have stayed in EQ.

As I wrote in 2002 on the many, many, many reasons why I left.......................

No Linux version. This was one of the reasons I came to AO from EQ. They just dropped it.

Bugs. See the official bulletin boards—if they haven't been erased yet—for a complete listing. My favorite was the one where you would get disconnected deep in a dungeon, relog, and find out that every mob in the dungeon had respawned.

Early release. The beta testers begged the devs not to release the game in it's buggy initial state. Anarchy Online isn't ready for retail now, and it sure as hell wasn't ready then.

No xp payback from bugs. If bugs were few and far between, I could rationalize this, but ARKs would tell you to your virtual face that Funcom knew there were lots of problems, but it was against Funcom policy to reimburse anything.

No guild support. A lot of cool stuff that should have been in from day one still isn't in. Guild housing is still absent, and the bank was added only recently. Part of what makes AO a bland levelling treadmill is the lack of support for guild customization, guild housing, et cetera.

No apartment upgrades. Same idea. If the devs would have fixed the stupid 10-item bug in the apartments, I would have spent time customizing my apartment when I got bored with killing yet another Omni stooge.

No character customization. We were promised "head shops" to change the look of our characters. Not even mentioned since beta.

Illuvatar. They couldn't even keep their stories straight when a friend of a dev got to move his character from RK1 to RK2.

Minimum damage bug. They were being told about this forever, and ignored the reports over and over again. Finally, months later, they admitted that the AC of the mobs was being added in twice.

Adding deliberate timesinks. From the beginning, the devs thought that, unlike every other MMORPG, no one would level really fast the first few monthsin Anarchy Online! Because the devs got the levelling curve all wrong, they started adding mob debuffs to add downtime and adding mob hit points and nano to slow us down. The effect is that everything in this game is severely underconned. At level 64, I had to kill 120-140 mobs to level. Compare this to 40 mobs around level 20.

Erasing of beta boards. To cover up the buggy state of the retail release, the devs erased the beta boards, including the bug reports, the posts by testers begging them not to release, and statements from some of those who had been waiting the longest time that they were leaving.

Bugs reported on test making it to live. This is just insulting. The 13.8 patch didn't even fix the minimum damage bug! That had to wait until 13.9, and I remain convinced that the only reason we saw 13.9 so quickly was that 13.8 was giving out lots of Yalmahas in the mission chests. All this happened despite the fact that these bugs and many others were reported by the 13.8 playetesters!

Adding more dimensions instead of folding existing ones. One of the reasons I moved from EQ was the fact that EQ didn't follow through on initial plans for long-term effects of player actions, like taking over territory. One of the reasons this couldn't happen was that there was no way to coordinate a story line over 30 different worlds! Now, instead of folding up the ill-begotten and misconceived Rubi Ka 2, the devs have added a new dimension! I interpret this as meaning that there will be no storyline ever.

Asking money for an expansion. The initial release isn't even debugged and balanced, effectively being in a player-paid beta mode, and they have the nerve to ask for more money?

Soloing not supported. The devs claimed that you would be able to solo. Technically you can solo, but the rate of xp gathering between soloing and a team of six is running about 10 or 12 to 1 at level 64. Soloing is theoretically possible, but not even remotely practical if you HAVE A JOB!!!

Originally posted by Dillig

Perpetual you all have now officially made it clear your one step above the DL makers but 3 steps behind Funcom.

You're holding up Funcom as a standard? You're on crack.  Two words: Anarchy Online.

Originally posted by LethalTalon

This post is a little old (like a week) as the date posted on official site was Oct 1st and www.startrek-online.net had it posted a week before that.

Thank you for also pointing this out. Is this late news a new problem, or just something I've never noticed before?

Issue 10 was weeks ago.