The first rule of a sandbox game is the exclusion of level differences (levels could be introduced ,but let's say a lvl 1 player still has a chance to take down a lvl 50 player,lvls being more like ranks,etc.),second you arent forced on a linear path of questing/exploring,exemple "at lvl 5 you need to either go threw Cookiecutter land or Carebear Heaven to continue lvling.Third is the posibility of a player to truly affect the world around them threw their actions,exemple you decide to attack a faction and destroy it,this will cause other factions to become implicated and might cause more wars etc.

   The best exemple of a sandbox mmog I can give is eve online,and please avoid the misconception that a player with 1mil SP cant take down a player with 10mil SP.The best sandbox mmog of all times imo WAS SWG,check for pre-CU stuff on SWG to get a view of how sandbox played out.

  SOE's way of fixing SWG was nerfs ... instead of trying to balance they just nerf everything and ofcourse those werent small nerfs they were huge,and by nerfing X ,Y would become overpowered ,then they would nerf Y and X would become overpowered.It was extremly stupid,and alot of nerfs were pointless ,abilities that were truly balances were nerfed for the sake of nerfing.

Originally posted by joegio13

I have stated this before, but I think it is just as much blizzards fault as it is the sellers fault.  I have played with players that have paid for PL services or bought gold over the internet.  And no one in the guild was pissed.  Why?  cause they are usually 30 year old men with wife and child. that can only play maybe 2 hours a night.  So we out lvl him and out sell heim and just make more money and xp then them.  Now he is not a 19 year old kid that played 14 hours a day and is still buying gold to feed his respec addiction.  This is  a man that is playing a game specifically designed to be a time sink.  Will he ever have epic gear NO, but if he can get to 70 and have alteast half way decent gear.  he wont need the gear, but atleast he can play with his friends.   YOu probably have a friend like that.  One that ask you to help him in Scarlet Monastary and your like, "dude, i am way over lvl for that"  Hes not asking for a PL, he wants to play with friends that aren't noobs is all.    WoW and all MMOs are broken upon release.  They are not casual player friendly, not in the least bit.  So that just pushes casual players into buying money and PLs just to be able to "keep up with the jones's".  I know LOTRO was going to impliment an offline xp feature that lvled your character according to how old your account was.  I don't know if they ever introducted it but i thought that was great.  Help out all the casual players and in turn remove some value away from PL services.

  Being older than the other players isnt a excuse to buy ingame curency/items for real money.Buying ingame curency ruins the game's economy,and ofcourse I bet alot of people constantly heard people from their guild bragging about their items and gold (that they bought online),the bragging wouldnt bother me if they truly would have worked for it,and I mean working ingame.Also from personal experience most soo called older people are very arrogant and sneaky,wont go into details but there was alot of drama when my guild found out that a guy was buying stuff for RL and was bragging about it constantly.

 Well if you played PRE-CU on servers that said medium and then played on NGE servers that said heavy you would know the difference unless people on the heavy server are all hiding somewhere (i checked out all the places on the soo called heavy servers and there were what 10-25 people,half of wich were spam bots for various sites).Dont call me a liar as you are one ,tell me how much is SOE paying you ?

  I went back on trial 4 days ago,I gave up pretty quick after the first day.All I saw (made a char on almost all servers) was tons of credit sellers (atleast 5 at each populated SP,tho it has nothing to do with pre-CU,back then it was soo fun expecialy without the sellers).

  Most of the population I saw were either credit sellers or people on trial,the game is pretty boring for me expecialy that it is a shade of it's former self,the fact that bothers me more is that they still havent gotten rid of WoW cloning and stupid,pointless click to shoot (seriously worst combat system I ever saw for a MMOG,if it was something like AoC's combat system were clicking actualy counts and it isnt a stupider auto-attack)

Well this is my oppinion ofcourse,get the trial and see for yourself.

P.S people who say the game is getting populated again are pretty wrong,first SOE can set their servers to sho "heavy" if only 20 people are on (pre-CU when servers where showing medium there were about 100 people just in coronet aka corolag,not counting the others running around and the ones in mos eisley).Second the only reason SWG still has abit bellow decent subs is because of station pass.

 One thing I dont understand about sellers is the fact that they make soo many chars to spam the same message.Ok soo they got blocked by X people,the people who blocked them have no intrest in buying ingame curency etc. ... yet the sellers make another char to spam the same message to the same people,im pretty sure people wont change their mind if "sadjhasufia" tryes to sell them ingame curency rather than "dskakfkwq".It's very stupid ,and I question the inteligence of gold sellers..

Originally posted by Eichenkatze

What in god's name is SOE offering that has so many of these companies signing up!?

 They are offering the devil's contract...

  Does anyone else blame WoW for the gold farmers,bots and such.Before WoW came out I played quite afew MMOGs ,for exemple SWG,and didnt see 1 ingame curency seller or item seller.I am aware that items were sold on ebay but there wasnt any ingame publishing ... after abit of time since WoW came out we started seeing fluxes of bots and sellers spamming everywhere,wich ruined the gaming experience ... i play MMOGs to relax and have fun not to block a gold seller each 10mins.The problem is that to my knowledge only 1 MMOG has tryed taking some action agaisnt sellers and that is EvE online wich allows trading of GTCs for isk and it reduced the population of ingame curency sellers quite abit.Soo why havent other MMOGs tryed to stop ingame curency sales by adding some form of legal way for people to waste money on a virtual item (wich I think is stupid).

Originally posted by SonofSeth

 

Originally posted by airstrike

 Go back too WoW before your brain implodes out of the complexity of eve.

Have fun with mindless PVP and grind gear all day long for no purpose either than doing mindless pvp.

haha, yeah, EVE is complex, but not in such a way that it requires inteligence, just time, where in other games you grind for gear that is easy to identify, in EVE you spend time time doing nothing, but looking at charts and figuring out what to put in

 

See, chess is complex, and faaar beyond anything EVE could ever dream to be, and yet, you see one game of chess and you can play it, but the diference between a noob and a veteran is not in the pieces he uses, but in the way it uses them, and untill games, not just EVE keep going more towards more choices and more freedom, and less towards amassing progressivly useless pieces of byte we'll get dumber and dumber games

Only thing you need to play EVE is smug, often thought off as inteligence, but not realy.

 Dont need inteligence to play EvE ... hmm ok you get in your most expensive ship and just fit random stuff on it and go to 0.0 and then whine on the forums how you got wtfpwned soo we can have a laught at your inteligence.

 Go back too WoW before your brain implodes out of the complexity of eve.

Have fun with mindless PVP and grind gear all day long for no purpose either than doing mindless pvp.

 pinaple vs rum,wich is best???/1//1/1111oneoneone

 10 reasons why not to play ,I can only find 1 reason to play...

1.Comunity is the worst you will find in any MMOG ever and that is not because WoW has a huge population but because 90% of it is composed of out gold famers,immature kids and more importantly immature adults.

2.Boring grind ,takes ages to lvl to 70 (60) if you dont play 24/7,once you have grinded 1 char from side you will get extremly bored if you try to make a new char and lvl it on the same side (horde/alliance).

3.Repetive quests,well most of them.I agree some of the outland quests are cool but the rest are either kill X creatures and/or get Y items from creatures + some running around quest ,talk to steve right behind me and tell him he sucks cause im too lazy to turn around.

4.Worst thing about WoW,gold spammers ... everywhere ,ive being to 10 different servers lvled to 15-25 on all of them and I got a gold sell message every 10 mins and atleast 5 gold spam mails each day.WoW is the cause of ingame curency selling market boom.

5.Grouping is horrible most of the time,im reffering to PUG ,you have a 95% in any PUG to pickup a underage brat,a ninja or a asshole who wants to ruin your instance run/quest.

6.PVP is pointless,yes it may be fun for a little bit but has no point.No loss vs reward : You die,you wait 10 secs,you respawn,you die again etc.You can get some pvp items wich become obsolete after awhile.

7.End game is unpleasent,you have to raid 2-6 hours each day to get a piece of armor or a weapon.

8.Class imbalances ,yeah you are going to say all mmogs have imbalances ,well not realy like WoW,there is always a favoritism for classes.Just remember when warlocks where almost imba and everyone complained for awhile before they got nerfed.

9.Sometimes when someone's server goes down,most of that server's population will all go make alts on a specific server and spam,try to make life hard for those on the server or try to crash the server.

10.Game with the most ebayers running around,on the top of my head here are some of my experiences with ebayers:

- Group to ramparts ,lvl 64 paladin asks our priest for water and starts complaining that he doesnt want to give water and he is a asshole and starts bragging how he has a lvl 70 priest and he can make water ...

- Group to scholomance ,warrior asks the group how does he equip shield and how does he add spells to hotbar (no he wasnt joking)

etc... Imo stay away from WoW if you are intelligent and want to keep it that way ... or go back if you have a kiddie free guild you can join (that some of your friends are in)