I think the OP is missing the point some have tried to make. While you think its the best idea since sliced bread others, like myself think its a stupid idea. Blizzard is about making money. There new cash shop proves that. To make money they have to please the largest mass. The way they do patches now does that. Why try something new when the same ol same ol is making them more money than any one of us could ever comprehend.

Truth is if you want to know how to make the most gold watch the gold farmers. There is a reason they farm a ton of saronite. Even though its only going for 16-19g on my server there is always a ton of it and its always being sold. I was recently hacked (2days ago) and they where stupid enough to leave my main in there hackers guild AND he had access to there guild bank. All tabs full with saronite except a half a tab of titanium.  After completely clearning that bank and vendoring the saronite I went to the AH  and bought nearly 60 stacks of saronite they had on auction and a couple stacks of titanium. They had NOTHING else on the AH.

So yea, herbs might make you some gold but I think its safe to say, at least on my server Saronite ore/bars is the way to go. Gold sellers are out to make the most possible gold in the fastest amount of time before they get caught on the current account(s) they are using. All of these "get rich quick" posts are fine and dandy but if you really wanna know the truth on how to make money fast do what the gold sellers are doing. They have it down to an art.

Originally posted by philipzam

I am very surprised to see that Final Fantasy XI Online was not mentioned.
It may not be the best mmorpg of all time, but it has been around a log time and set quite a few standards.

Whats you comment on this?

If you read what the list is about again maybe you could awnser your own question.

Tier1 is hella fun. After that the game is junk. Thats right junk. I was one of the biggest fanboys pre-launch on these forums and it sucked eating crow but lets face it. They took a great concept and implented most of it verry poorly. To thoes of you still enjoying it good for you. You are the minority though.

Originally posted by oakthornn

I'm so relieved to hear it gets harder and harder as you level! That means all the WoW kiddies with no patience will quit by the time they hit 26. What's even better is all the, complaining, idiot griefing fans of CS, Halo, etc will quit even before that!

The grind doesn't bother me at all. In fact, I welcome it.. Aion already reminds me of old style EQ where it took a LONG time to reach 50 back when the game was first released. You think 8 hours to level is bad??? Try a week of 6hour + grinding each day during hell levels just to go from 30-31,,,,, 35-36,,, 40-41,,, 45-46,, etc! I kid you not. It took me a good week to level one level during hell levels which basically took you twice as long to level than other regular levels. Even the non hell levels took a good 16+ hours of nonstop grinding to level!

This is one reason why only the dedicated true hardcore fans of EQ reached max level. These same people understood what  respect, honor, and kindness meant to one another.  You didn't see a bunch of us running aroud trying to steal mob kills, roll on rare boss loot they cant use out of greed, nor did you see them ks someone's camp. The types of people who do this won't be the ones playing Aion past 25. And I say to you mmo killers, don't let the door hit u on the way out.. 

 

I'm here to stay :)

Grind does not = hard stop fooling yourself. A person either likes mob grinding or they dont. My first MMO and just like most there first is there favorite was asherons call. I know all about grind and it didnt bother me in the least but that doesnt mean it was hard, it just means it took longer to level.

I would have but I wasn't paying much attention to CO till today really. Finances have changed and I can once again join the MMO world lol.

Thank you for the reply. This by no means is a deal breaker for me I was just wondering :)

I read a review and it mentioned there will be microtransactions in CO. I have looked through a few pages and have seen no posts on this so it may be old news but honestly I am just now looking at CO. I just want to know if they are, or aren't. Don't need to know what they plan to put in these or anything else.

One way or the other I really don't care. I do have to laugh at "lore this and lore that" though. Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't blizzard make the lore for warcraft? That would mean they can change the lore to however they see fit. Not to mention I didnt see ANYWHERE where World of Warcraft was going to follow the lore directly from Warcraft1 all the way through 3. Get a grip nerds.

I'm looking forward to it. I am kind of hoping that you can eventually in time have one character able to do it all. This all depends on how they impliment it of course. I am a wierd kind of gamer. I love my solo time but verry much enjoy grouping. I have the time and generally do play a "hardcore's" hours but would concider myself a casual in that I take my time, sometimes just sitting and chatting with friends for a couple hrs while maybe killing a total of 10 mobs. Personally I would love to see a system where you can level say 3 "jobs" (counting crafting/fishing/cooking as a job) at a normal pace but each job after that suffers some kind of penalty making it harder and take longer to advance. Maybe even up to a point where it takes 5-10 times longer to fully advance the last job you decide to work on. Only time will tell though :)

Honestly if your highest level is 14 you are facing a lonely path to 70ish. After that there seem to be a fair amount of people in northrend. Your best bet would be to find a guild so you have someone to chat to while you level. On the bright side leveling is extreemly fast and you will be 70 in about 20hrs /played if this is your first toon. If its not  and you know the quests you can easily get to 70 in about /10hrs played.

You missed Asherons Call, while not as popular as some that you mentioned it definitly deserves to be on that list lol.

Its hard to explain why it was such a good game though. The community was awesome. It was full of great players. Even the not so great got by. There was no ! for quests. There was the talk to every npc and see what they got for you. There was no "Hey idiot go here" kinda help. Info was shared by the playerbase ect. I remember on my old comp desk I had sticky notes all over the place with coords to certain places. Notebooks full of info for what I found and where ect. Feeling involved no matter what my level was. For example during the Shadow invasions they added dungeons that higher levels had to rely on lower levels and vise versa to finish. Thats another thing AC did well. There where HUGE story arcs. Usually involving devs playing massive powerfull mobs leading up to a final fight. AC also had one of the best MMO writing staffs ever imo. There lore was there own and they did an amazing job with it.

Since you know wow, i will try to compare this exxample to tie into AC. In AC the major tradeing towns where Arwic (sp) and I honestly cant remember the other name off the top of my head. Anyway we knew it was patch day. It was during the shadow invasion story arc. Think of Arwic as say Iron forge. Always a massive amount of people there haggling and trading goods. Looking for groups ect. (there was no global chats at this time). Portal storms where your worst enemy on a mule. If to many people where in the area you where portaled out of the area which usually ended in a corpse to get back to. Anyway it was patch day. Time to log in. Logged in and you hear "Have you been to Arwic yet? You gotta go its gone!"

Believe me, there is nothing like logging in and seeing the shadows had destroyed one of the places near and dear to our hearts. If your mule was in a house upstairs and you logged in, it was dead. Arwic was a Huge crater never to be the same again.

Sorry I know I'm rambling but there are so many great memories from AC. Shadow invasion. The hope ender. (I think that was the name). Believe it or not, dropping loot on death. Full loot. Bodies decaying after a time during a PvE death and losing items. It was all great. I remember you could get married in the game. At one point Player helpers or Devs actually did the marrage for you. Anyway I worked for nearly a month to put togeather (through trade and luck) a white suit of celdon armor for the girl I was marrying (hey it was fun!). A couple weeks later she died and lost 3 pieces. Part of the fun of the game was trying to replace that armor.

Anyway, WoW was fun for a while but it will never hold the memories AC did in its hayday.

Originally posted by Jackdog

I guess a lot depends on why you play these games.

I am not a huge fan of Moria either, I finallt capped my minstrel at 60 yeserday, he does not don't own a single piece of radience gear and he does not have a LI item. But  on the other hand I enjoy my kinship, I enjoy the graphics, I enjoy toodling around middle earth. I enjoy the updates and am looking forward to playing in Rohan, Mirkwood, the Long Lake, Helms Deep, and the rest of Middle Earth.  I could nitpick the game but for me it is overall  the best game and best community out there right now. Will I play forever, nope just till something better comes along and so far it hasn't.

I agree completely with you. Alot of people still enjoy LOTRO. I also intend to play when another expansion releases. I couldnt not buy it if I wanted to. It is middle earth afterall. I applaud you that you arent even using a mini LI book. Its an enhancement to your toon but if you can live without them more power to you. You wont need to feel the hatred for the LI system most of us do :)

Its good to see I'm not the only one not wanting to continue with the way its currently going. Maybe if enough of us speak with our money they will finally realise they screwed up and start taking the game back to the times of SoA. Sure SoA had its issues but the end game content was fun and there was more than 1 option.

Originally posted by junior3000

how that? 1 euro = 1.40 almost it is stupit to let europe player pay more than usa players or any ather players in the world.

 

How? Because if our economy finally grows again....eventually......someday........ it could easily turn to 1.40 USD = 1 euro. If that would be the case as it has in the past (the USD being worth more than the euro) we would essentially be paying more than you.

Right now your right, you are paying more. Just a few years ago however we where paying more by dollar value.

Originally posted by Mrbloodworth

There is a great blance of quest gear, and crafted gear.

This was true in SoA but not anymore. No you dont need to craft and as of right now its a complete waste of time to do so unless you just enjoy crafting and dont care if the items you make are worthless (in most cases). As has already been stated take explorer for money making. The most usefull one for actuall crafting IMO is tinkerer (I think it was) for jewlcrafting. Your best bet though is to take explorer and just buy what you want that your not getting from instances. As it stands right now quested gear is good enough to get you started on getting instance gear or any soloing your going to do. In most cases your quested gear is better than any crafting gear you will get except for maxed crafting crit gear. If you get all your instance gear your better off than max crafted crit gear.

Now if they ever fix crafting to what it was before Moria its worth having. The max crit gear was subpar to raid gear but the dropoff was verry minor.

Edit: Pointing out which part I said was false. The rest of his statment is true.

It just makes me sad reading the changes in book 8. I left in lothlorien because while everyone else seemed to think it was great looking ect, personally I thought it looked awefull. Yes I was playing in dx10 maxed so if the looks where there I would have seen it. To me all it was, was a bunch of generic tree's with a couple funny/well written quests and twice as many lame, time sink boring quests. What got me the most about Lorien was the fact that they had been working on it for SO long. It seems most people forget that it was in development alongside moria as it was sposed to be part of the expansion. Hell the content was finished in a week or two tops for alot of people and with that being mostly a rep grind I truly ask where the content was.

The biggest plus of book 7 was the epic book itself. While it lacked any real combat ect it was verry verry well written imo for that timeframe in the books.

Now enter book 8. Back to moria. Back to combat. Thats great right? Well yea...I guess. Depends on if there is a new zone in moria or not. If it was like the rest of the books in moria (with the exception of a few that where the best epic stories ever told) it was alot of running back and forth all around moria. Utterly bland. Add into that the poor implimentation of the LI system and Moria, while verry good looking and feeling like I thought moria would felt dull in a sense. After you saw Moria it was grind LI's and hope you got the legacies you wanted. Everyone whines about rep grind in WoW and its timesinks. The LI system is exactly the same yet even more lame.

This brings me to first age LI's. At first they where raid only. I dont want to get into the whole raider vs. non raider debate BUT Turbine always said LOTRO would NOT be raid focused. They lied. But wait! in book 7 you could grind out items to get gift boxes that could verry, verry rarly give you a 1st age weapon. Even though it was a verry low rate and the other rewards you could possibly get made alot of people view it as not worthwhile the fact remains it was another option at getting a 1st age item. Better than nothing if your not a raider right? So what does book 8 do? Says FACK you non raiders. BTW I did raid so I am not whining at not getting the chance at 1st age. I did. Thats not the point. I like options. In book 8 these boxes will not only no longer drop 1st age items but now, in a level 60 zone, also have the chance to drop lvl 58,59 and rarly a lvl 60 2nd age item? A big middle finger to you turbine. Not only from myself, but from all the casual non raiders out there you just decided cant have 1st age weapons.

OH and lets not forget the cookie they tossed the raiders. Now you can barter your tokens for a 1st age item. Great right?! Dont let it fool you folks. Most raiding guilds have there group A, group B ect. So you will be getting 1, possibly 2 tokens a week and only then if/when others in your raid group get or already have there 1st age items. Plus you STILL get to play the legacy lottery. So yes, the 1st age grind lottery is still there. They just want you to think your going to get it faster. The only diffrence is you can pick which weapon type your going to get screwed on (unless your luck and if you are, odds are you already have your 1st age).

I love the fact that middle earth has come to life to see. I have every intention of picking up the next expansion to see/experiance the new content/area's that I have missed since I left 2 weeks after book 7 went live. It is Middle earth afterall. However after reading the test patch notes (yes I know they arent set in stone but I have played Turbine games long enough to know it pretty much is regardless of what they say) for book 8 I am glad I havent spent money hoping they actually fix the grindfest that has become the moria expansion. I wish Turbine would go back to pre-expansion ideas. Rethink how they did LI's and impliment it right. Fix crafting ect.

Anyway, thanks for reading my rant. It makes me sad to see what LOTRO has become and the direction its going. However I will see you all in the next expansion. Hopefully by then it wont be as big of a joke (to me) by then as it has become recently.

I couldnt give 2 shits less about a new "king" of MMO's. I just want a solid MMO that I enjoy to play that has a solid enough community to keep it running.

Seriously people most here whine about how everything is a WoW clone and how much you hate it. WTF do you think a new "king" would cause? Say it is Aion. Guess what. For the next 10 years all we will see is Aion clones. Is that what we really want? Or do we want all the newer MMO's to stop being a pile of garbage and be decent games so we see more companies willing to take risks and give us NEW idea's and games?

I have to agree as well. Though I personally like how Asherons Call did it on there PvE servers. Even if you die to an npc you drop your stuff on a corpse you have to get. To PvP you had to do a small quest (verry quick, verry easy) to turn yourself "Red". Once red you where PvP all the time, anywhere in the world. You had loot drop on death and a 5% reduction in stats (which you had to PvE to clear the stat reduction but it was easy and the PvPers all pretty much agreed on spots that where "no kill zones" to work it off).

I liked that way because it gave the PvE'ers and the PvP'ers the WHOLE world to play in and do what they chose to do. For the most part everyone got along. The only trash talk that usually happened is when a non red dot would mouth off about how they would beat the shit out of the PvPer and that was few and far between. Where AC screwed up was putting in PKlite (pink dots that when they got killed didnt have any DP other than rebuffing).

The great thing was the better PvP guilds always ran public events in the world and it ALWAYS got the non pvpers to go red and join in.

Originally posted by stillkillin

aoc will be shut down by the end of the year that much is clear

Clear to who exactly? I really enjoyed my first month though dont plan to continue playing. However there is still a solid enough fanbase to keep it running. A blanket statment like this is stupid.

funCON is losing players left and right and the 1.05 patch is still months away from being done

Who knows how far out 1.05 is. The newsletter said a few weeks. Should we believe them? OFC not. But for someone who doesnt play the game you sure like throwing out statments you really have no clue about.

really i think shutting down aoc is one of the best things that will happen it will show that we gamers do want to be spoon fed this lame wow clone and we will get more pre-cu swg skill based games

Again another retarted statment by someone who never played the game. AoC is not a wow clone. Saying it is just proves to me you never once played the game regardless of if you say you did or not.

All that said the 1yr thing was pathetic and part of the reason I dont plan on continuing to my subscription now that my free month is nearly up. Any company that is so inept that they cant pull off even a small celebration for the 1yr anni gives me no faith they can pull off such a large update as 1.05. The concept of AoC was great. Its even playable now and rather fun for a short period of time. Then you realise there is no reason to PvP, the raids are a joke, and there is absolutly nothing to do at end game but these 2 things. I really enjoyed getting a toon to 80 and another to 60 between the free trial and the month from purchasing the game but its easy to see there is no reason to keep playing.

Give me Asherons Call with updated graphics. Not AC2, AC1 and I will forever be a happy man.