As a heavy crafter in SWG, I found Vanguard's crafting system to have promise.  However, as far as I understand there are no factories and no harvestors.  To be quite frank about it, I like exploring to find high quality resources, but I do not like having to sit there and harvest the resource myself for hours.  That's what made harvestors in SWG so great.  Call me lazy, but at least to me sitting there for hours harvesting some resource is simply not fun.  Then of course we get into the lack of factories to make your items for you in bulk.  There are some professions where factories are not required, so I don't expect those people to understand.  But as an SWG architect, let me assure you that in many cases factories are not simply a luxury, they are required.  Can you imagine having to make every brick for a building yourself, spending a few minutes on each brick?  Sorry, but that is just plain unfun to me.

So there's the main reasons I don't find Vanguard to be an acceptable replacement for SWG.  If I am incorrect, please let me know.

Does this really come as any sort of surprise to anyone?  When I was selling D2 items, I had a HUGE customer base.  Heck, many times people would buy things from me ingame without ever visiting ebay or any other auction site.  It amazes me to this day that despite the HUGE demand for virtual items that there are still anti-ebayers who seem to think they are in the majority, and that the activity should be banned despite the MASSIVE market for it.  You guys just don't seem to understand that your view does NOT represent all gamers.  Those who wish to engage in purchasing or selling virtual items don't have to make ANY excuse for it or justify it in ANY way whatsoever.  The market speaks for itself. 

If the virtual market is such a terrible thing, then why does half the population still participate in the activity?  Have you anti-ebayers ever thought for just one second that maybe, just maybe, you might not understand the situation completely?  That maybe, just maybe, you are going overboard with your opinion and that in fact the vast majority of people realize that the secondary market in an MMO is not nearly as bad as you try to make it out to be?  No, I don't suppose you do.  You guys are so stuck in your mindset that no facts, figures, or simple common sense will change your mind.

Maybe some day you'll realize that one of the reasons MMOs are so big is BECAUSE of the secondary market.  Maybe some day you'll realize that when people can't save a few days of farming by coughing up a few real world bucks for some virtual currency that they'll just cancel their account cause farming simply isn't fun.  Maybe you'll someday realize that not all people find mindlessly killing mobs for in-game money as fun as you do.  I know that I no longer play MMOs because of the backlash against the secondary market.  And I know I'm not the only one.

Most of your article was spot on, with the exception of one very important thing.  You claim 2 years worth of material from this expansion.  :)  Ah, I remember your optimism the first time I loaded the beta client.  I was all charmed by the Burning Crusade all the way till 70.  Then, I realized I had nothing to do.  Well, not exactly nothing.  I mean, I could grind for faction.  I could grind the pvp arenas for the best pvp gear.  I could even grind the endless array of raids for bind on pickup gear which lovingly greet you at 70.  I could even take my brand spankin' new uber fast flying mount out for a ride.

But in the end, it's the same old wow.  Nothing really new, creative, or unique.  Leveling up is an absolute blast, but even the slowest player will get to 70 in six months, 3 months for normal late bloomers, 1.5 to 2 months for the "average" gamer, 2 weeks to 1 month for the stereotypical raider, and under a week for the red bull charged psychos out there.  Sure, raids are 25-man now rather then 40-man, but there's not much difference.  Even the supposed savior 10-man raid is a pure joke compared to the real raids.  Crafting has barely been expanded upon, and of the new recipes, they're either bind on pickup (Yes, you now can use your TRADEskill to make bind on pickup gear), or so worthless that you can't sell.  Heck, level 62 greens are better then level 70 crafted items.  It's real bad.

So enjoy leveling as much as you possibly can.  Besides the always stunning artistic work of Blizzard, leveling is the only real redeeming quality of this expansion.  Enjoy!!  :)

Thotbot has a little teeny tiny link called beta just under the search box.  Click on that and try to search again for the info you need.  Although I quit playing about three weeks ago, it was very well updated for BC when I was participating in the beta.

A word of warning, though.  BC is nothing new.  It's just more of the same.  Have a blast leveling to 70 and then raid or die for bind on pickup gear.  I suppose you can enjoy the flying mounts though.   They're a neat novelty for a few minutes.  :)

I think that when you start taking away aspects of the game that encourage virtual item/currency sales, you are at the same time canabalizing the very things that make these games fun.  I'll take wow for an example, as they have implemented bind on pickup and even bind on pickup crafting.  This approach destroys treasure hunting, which is a key to subscriber retention and overall replayability.  In addition, it greatly marginalizes any crafting profession, as it becomes a secondary approach to the game in any position.  There is no such thing as setting up a shop or creating a business empire.

This is just a small example of certain aspects of gameplay that are unavailable due to a specific attempt to minimize virtual sales transactions.  Is it really worth destroying some of the fun aspects (and in my opinion, CRUCIAL aspects) just to stop gold selling?  It's like the people against virtual sales are completely blinded to what they destroy in order to prevent gold selling.

Eve has some good points, and it's very easy to like it at the beginning.  However, it's skill advancement system is a double edged sword.  It levels the playing field because no one can "grind" out skills 24/7 and completely outplay a normal gamer.  However, even the normal gamer comes to realize that if they have a large block of time available, they won't get ahead either. 

You will soon come to realize that unless you take the time to get your training skills maxed, you are in essence hurting yourself by training anything else.  I went ahead and got some basic skills leveled to get in a semi-decent ship, and be able to mine.  However, I've spent the past four months training only my learning skills, and have basically quit playing the game.  Still paying for it, and leveling those skills, but I otherwise have no need to play except to farm credits. 

In addition, EVE is really quite boring to fight in.  You just press a few buttons and pretty much sit back and watch your ship fight.  Hopefully, fighting may be a bit more complex in the later stages of the game, but for a new player it is quite boring, and extremely boring when compared to the combat interface of wow.

So, I honestly don't get what is so special about EVE.  It is definately pretty, and for crafters, explorers, and particularly hardcore pvp'ers, it holds high potential value.  But getting into the game is really tough, mainly because you have to go through a large period of intense boredom before you can actually start enjoying the game.  IMO, this is the major flaw of this game and the primary reason why there are very few subscribers in relation to blockbuster MMOs.

It's because everyone has their own opinion on what is fun to them.  For example, the best game I've ever played, by far, was Diablo 2.  Now, I know this game is not an MMO in the strict technical sense of the term, but it did have many MMO concepts, such as persistent characters and loot variance.  To me, the most exciting part of the game was building my character with the best magic find builds and equipment, then to go treasure hunting for gear which I then sold on ebay.  It's the most fun I've ever had, but to others, this is a great sin to them. 

It's funny, though, to look at the next game I played, which was SWG.  Coming from D2, with such loot centric and treasure hunting gameplay, I found myself a bit turned off to the player economy.  However, I gave SWG a chance and ended up having a complete blast building up an architecture business to the best on the server with multiple accounts, multiple harvestor fleets, and an intricate supply chain and distribution system.  It sounds a bit wacky, but it was robust enough so that you needed a bit of intelligence to pull off the operation as well as lots of time gathering the resources, grinding the skill requirements, and timing the launch of the business. 

Since then, I have yet to see a game available which meets the complexity and fun I've had in the two games mentioned above.  Wow implemented bop, which made it worthless to treasure hunt, and wow minimalized crafting, so there was no way I could set up a business.  So to me, I get a bit touchy because Wow has set the standard for dumbed down MMOs, and I'm concerned that I will never again have the opportunity to build up a great business, or make the best treasure hunting character you can make.  To me, those are two vital activities in an MMO, so I find myself very turned off to the current offerings of MMOs.  However, there's also lots of other people who are ecstatic that people with my interests are no longer able to enjoy these games because what I find enjoyable causes them anguish.  Therefore, I will often be at odds with other players since our motivations for playing these kinds of games are drastically different.

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Originally posted by Nierro
I won't, and i'll never play any movie/T.V. show themed mmorpg themed show it just sounds to nerdy for me.

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910 posts on an MMO forum and you talk about others being nerdy.  /boggle 

One thing's for sure; they will be guaranteed to at least get me to buy the basic software and a month.  I'll judge it a few months down the road, but I'm a guaranteed sale.  :P

That being said, it should be very interesting to see how they develop this game.  It has an off-shot at being a good long-term MMO, but I think the odds are against it simply because of the setting.

I would play on a pre-cu server, especially if it is fresh for the most part (e.g. no money/item transfers from existing servers).  It's always been a bit of a dream of mine to play on a new swg server with the crafting knowledge I have (high volume architect).

Alas, this has been a rumor for well over a year now.  I don't see it happening.  I hope that I'm very wrong though.  :P

edit:  read the rumor more carefully and saw that they would allow existing characters to be transferred.  If this rumor were true, then I would not play this game.  It needs a fresh pre-cu server.

Gamer V17 is correct.  In leveling to 70 on the beta server, I made about 1500 gold.  In addition, at the beginning there will be high demand for items such as motes of water/fire/mana/etc, and their primal counterparts (10x mote = 1 primal).  I do think it will take a bit longer to save up 5k gold then 1k, however.  Who cares, though.  It's all up to the individual.  If their pleasure is in grinding gold and working the economy, they'll make enough money to get their mount.  If they don't wanna waste time with that and would prefer to just buy their gold so they can pvp/instance grind/etc, then that's cool too.  I don't care if someone buys gold, and anybody who does has personal issues they should attempt to resolve.

Also note that there are two different flying mounts, just like regular mounts.  One low cost and slow, the other higher cost and fast.

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Originally posted by redavni
Brad is the obvious winner of this debate. It was fun to see the gold seller stoop to name-calling, and whining.

Honestly I don't care if people buy gold, just not on my server. Go do it on your own server where you can play with all the rest of the people who don't see the value in achievement.

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Wow.  What article did you read?

Heck, Brad is the one who used the lawsuit card instead of actually coming up with a thought-provoking argument.

Clearly, Brad was owned.  Big time.