You've described most mmo's post wow. 

That being said look at runes of magic or rift for class/role swapping. 

Eve, althought not browser based I know quite a few people spend 80% of their time online trading, 19% bragging about being rich and 1% trying pvp but getting bored. 

You use to be able to turn the background into something completely static while docked but ccp removed that and now the best you can do is have a movable rendered ship in the background.

The game suffers and enjoys being a hybrid. The combat is bad for a shooter, amazing for an rpg, the gearing up/roles are amazing for a shooter, meh for an rpg. 

Aimbots aren't that game breaking because the slow pace means "good" players don't miss all that much and alot of builds rely on aoe type effects that don't need much aiming anyhow. On the other hand there are alot of rpg/mmo players in the game who can't aim and classes who are balanced around the ability of your average person to NOT consistently land all shots. 

If you don't plan on ava (alliance vs alliance land wars) realize the game forces you to pug to prevent farming. (max of 3 people in a team for 10v10 matches) This leads to alot of frustration with the quality of your team mates. The different "roles" you can play are well done but have a distinct rock paper scissors which makes teams who don't cooperate a nightmare.

Lets look at your average losing side:

If your a poison medic you can do massive amounts of damage and heal well, unless the enemy team has robo's keeping med crates up (they instantly remove your dot), or medics spamming nades and healing waves that remove poison.  You don't have tools at your disposal to properly kill a healing medic in a group or clear a robo's nest to keep him from instantly curing your poisons. Tought break, rage at your team and be useless. 

Meanwhile there is an assault who is spec'd to tank. He doesn't quite do much well besides throw people off the point and shoot out consistent dps while never dying, provided he's being healed. If his team isn't finishing off the people he's applying dps/knockbacks to (lack of spike damage= lack of killing competent players under a medic). He's not getting what he needs to shine and does nothing but grind his teeth on the point while it slowly gets capped. If he's not getting healed he doesn't even get that far and gets to spend his time looking for a medic crate or medic to heal him while the enemy caps the point np.

Meanwhile there is a robo who keeps trying to make a nest. If he gets his nest setup he can deny huge areas. Unfortunately he gets gang raped by 4 people every time he tries because his team doesn't step in to help him. Oh well he gets to  rage at his team and stay useless. 

Recons? Well its impossible to kill stragglers when the entire enemy team is sitting on the point. Its hard to clear robo nests when the entire enemy team is ontop of the nest because the nest is on the point. If your teams fighting hard you can break the cliche without a problem. Unfortunately your team is probably running into the above problems and blaming you.  Sniping is p.cool until you realize your getting eaten by all of the recons designed to kill stragglers as they can't find much else to kill because your team is getting mowed down at this point.

Average winning game?

Medic: got all the assists because everyone got healed by me, I was never in danger because I was always in the center of a group. I might have done more damage than the entire enemy team because their medics and med crates died to fast to cure my dots.

Assault: stood on point never died shot everything on the enemy team that came within range of it and they died quick because all of my team was shooting them too.

Robo: built on point unharashed, and when I was attacked by recons they got raped by the medic+assault combos two feet away

recon: sniped constantly and killed people running to the point because they were constantly disorganized and split up. Often finished off people who barely got away from the main group after they barely got away from the other 9 members of my team.

Check out

http://www.agendastats.com/

for game stats and "competitive play", its pretty cool when they start accurately predicting which team will win. Its even cooler when some maps had +20% to defenders expected contribution to keep accurately predicting which team will win. 

Originally posted by RefMinor
Perpetuum, EvE meets Mechwarrior

Perp is really small, for a game about economy you end up doing tons of things yourself because no one else plays. Or you join a corp and get everything handed to you because what am I going to do with it? Sell it? 

Game has tremendous potetial squandered by the number of players. 

If you want a game where everything comes from players, people shift their play style during inflation, and people making billions off of candlecarts eve is for you. Sadly nothing comes close. 

The hard rock paper scissors (+100% dmg to x class really?)  is lame but the pvp can be amazing for groups.

There is no real reason to level solo on a pvp server because you can switch between pve and pvp at will. As a group running over pubbies and getting rewarded for it the open world pvp is pretty fun and gets intresting quick when the rival faction's group rolls up.

Originally posted by mgilbrtsn

I get the impression that CCP is a pretty good company.  They are continually trying to improve the game and when they go off track, they are willing to say so and try to compensate.  Very professional IMO.

They didn't give more then lip service to "going off track"  until they had to close some of their offices because they were losing too much revenue. Also they didn't improve the game more than maintence for ~18months~

Professional is a very intresting word to use, only caring about  the bottom line is very professional.

Originally posted by Yalexy

 

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Originally posted by Shakesphere
Check out Perpetuam Online:  http://www.perpetuum-online.com/
It's a ground-based mech game, but it obviously took Eve as the model to follow when they designed it.
-Shakesphere

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PO is total crap and nothing like of EvE, allthough it has copied alot of EvE.

PO is great. Main problems being its about as far into development as 2003 eve. Before they advertized because they had to get their shit together while still collecting a paycheck. Afaik  PO is just jumping into the advertising/free trial post paid beta stage.

Also because eve exists the playerbase of PO is tiny. After the large "exodus" from eve slowed down the playerbase went back to 300-400 daily peak user count. Killboards, fittings, economy, are all gimped by the number of people playing. Like early eve communist leaning corps are pretty prevelant because of low pop/small market.

If you get a hankering for needing to use excel instead of a fitting tool and exploring pve without it being spoiled by tons of guides and stats already recorded on the subject. Then PO is your game.

As for other "eve like" games, darkfall, mortal online, and perhaps others I haven't heard of. I have very little experience with those two beyond disliking the combat system and hearing the horrors of bad design and developers almost intentionally trying to kill darkfall.

Originally posted by Gdemami

Acknowledging blaster issue after all those years? How many more years they will need to find out what the issue actually is and that flat numbers boost isn't a solution?

Sorry to tell you but those guys at CCP have no idea what they are doing - at least when it comes to balancing...

 

The entire game is flat numbers...

The main problem with blasters was no being able to track within the ranges they had to operate at and fitting issues. They also had the issue of being too slow to utilize their range. These are being adressed.

If your talking about pve balance... who cares. If your talking about fleet v fleet, the rokh would outplay the maelstrom with the new stats if people had it trained. (go find the change dump in sisi and import it into pyfa or w/e) Blasters work fine as solo/small group gank platforms that do or die by range dictation. Rannis/myrm are pretty high on the list as solo gank boats and the diemost is a hard to fly but very rewarding platform.

Between time dialation for large cluster fuck fights and completely reevaluating a weapon type, adding t2 links, boosting dessies across the boat, almost all gallente's agility, and adding an new ship whose sole purpose is to die terribly in the hands of bad pilots (no tracking or ehp) combat will be a bit different. Also removing insurance payouts for suicide gankers seems to effect high sec a bit.

Sorry if its the same game, if you don't like eve this won't help, but its the first decent expansion since apocyphta

I think the f2p trend is a great improvement over previous buisness models that are designed to make a profit on release then die slowly while sucking subscriptions. It beats the hell out of most types of "free trials". The game trying to sustain itself instead of boom and bust (see the release of warhammer, aion, aoc, etc) forces a massive improvement in quality and continuous updates.

On the other hand the microtransactions model is poorly implemented in many games. Pay2win is more common than pay4convience/pay4aesthetics. Underhanded tactics are also pretty common.

The last trend was unfinished wow-like games that required $50 for a 15 day trial then a monthly sub to play. The new trend is wow-like games with constant easily produced content and ads for microtransactions. Oh yeah and the grind is harder/easier depending on your prefrence and wallet size.

meaningful pvp?

eve, perpetuum, mortal, darkfall

Don't think there are others with real item loss on death, non-instanced, territory owner ship etc.

Judging by the refrence to wow in the title you definition of meaningful pvp is probably pretty different. Seeing how the last time I told someone wow isn't a good example of a sandbox game I got my post deleted I think I have to put a disclaimer in this post.

Its good for the industry if it makes the world realize the 4rd incarnation of a reskinned cod4 shouldn't be worth money.

Character customization isn't the primary function of rpgs, its the primary function of a dressup game.

Roleplaying games are about assuming a role in whatever world and being imersed in your character.

Originally posted by Yalexy

Perpetuum isn't a copy of EvE, even if people like to call it that way. Perpetuum simply lacks 50% of the features of EvE, basically PvE is non-existant but that's needed to run a game like EvE.

Perp is eve at launch. My grips about the game being small is the lack of targets, the terribly unseeded market (with game features fighting against something like jita ever appearing).

Oh and all of the players act like the retarded under 6 month old eve players because they haven't been playing perp for more than 6 months. There are alot of people running around who are still believing how they want the game to work is more true than how the game actually works. They're funny to fight in pvp but maddening to see on your squad.

Examples: light bots being useful beyond scout alts with t4 detectors(this does not include ewars! that cost the same as a cheap fit mech), the most remote outposts having the bonuses to industry doesn't hurt the nooby islands being seeded, beta corps don't hoard the beta only mats giving them an even bigger advantage than having the best manufacturing (have characters in the two bigger power blocks and they do). Oh yeah and the minerals you mine are free.

I'm looking for economy based game where everything comes from players, full loss/looting on death, open pvp, perferably dev's that support theft and meta gaming(spying).

Quit eve because the developers killed my hope for the game's future, it will be two expansions before I consider going back. Darkfall gets crossed off the list for the same reasons. I also dislike the combat system in darkfall, its innovative but not for me.

Tried perpetuum, game was too small and community was too under developed to support my style of pvp (roaming solo/small gang). Getting no action/constantly blue balled and being on the top of the killboards because I was getting the most action that month really told me not to resub for another month.

Mortal Online runs crappy on my computer, has the tiny population problem of perp, and the great aim(lag based!) combat system of darkfall.

The only thing I know about Pirates of the burning sea is its an old game run by soe (bad sign) that hack eve players moved to for a while before returning when they forgot how bad they were at eve.

Hopefully you guys can find a game I missed.

I hate that mmo's have become multiplayer race to max level and best gear games rather than worlds.

I can count on one hand the number of online worlds. Player driven economy, skills > levels, non-linear gameplay these are concepts thrown away by the industry and many people on this site.

Could be worse, I chose human and got nuked the second I started exploring Caprica.

Originally posted by Morden

Who cares? CCP is a company. Companys find ways to make money. There is nothing wrong about turning a profit. Get a job...

The problem is that ccp is very likely adding pay for advantage to eve and that the money isn't going back into eve but instead going into other games for development.

Dust, Incarna, World of darkness, all are getting more of ccp's money then the parts of eve players actually participate in. It took 3 years for them to create a single box you can walk around with your avatar in when since the begining players have been saying they don't want it.

Every expansion is still incomplete when the next one rolls out.

We're waiting on engine trails, cyno effects, a gallente cosmos arc, two unfinished pirate epic arcs, Faction warfare to be updated so it isn't based on grinding lp with a dram+ bomber, a response to the caldari FW side winning and having 100% of the territory(beyond the hotfix to just reset control), two classes of T3's that were planned for expansion release about two years ago. CCP rolled back a chunk of the changes in dominion because they were poorly implemented, PI has 0 interaction with other players on planet, no conflict or scarcity assosiated with it despite that being planned for release. Incursion was a decent expansion, just straight copy paste sleepers to known space and change their skin to a skin that's old. Oh yeah and incarna is a single player box.

Depends wildly what you want the merc group to do. If you trying to attack a competent pvp group they'll probably enjoy the wardeck. If your trying to get carebears to stop mining the same belt as you they're good. If your trying to get revenge on former corp mates they're good. If your trying to deny an alliance a market hub there are better choices.

On the flip side there are plenty of up and coming merc corps who will work for literally nothing compared to the intel you give them and a wardeck fee.

Originally posted by VikingGamer

"The Gordon Gekko Issue" ???

And you are buying this as legit?

Your first clue should have been the first page.

Dude, you have been hit head on by the troll train.

Go read the actually pdf and maybe the eve-o thread?

Their internal newsletter and all the ones that were released usually have a comedy title like that and are brutally honest on how they feel about the playerbase.

If you had been following the last leak over the last summer you would have seen the part where they said they wouldn't be focusing on core game features for ~18 months~ and there was a huge public outcry and dip in subscriptions.

How about the quote about how "the data does not support the assumption that polish features sell better than a constant stream of new content?

Yeah I do mean loot dropping as prizes sorry. In the origional ones they were drops as well. Isn't it the same thing when ccp spawns a fail-fit ship that's a loot pinyata?

The terrible incharacter/out of character part I was refering to was from the two live events I actually went to this year. They were among the first ones done so it could have gotten alot better.