I don't know about that.

The early game of TOR is pretty great.  I stopped playing when I got to 50 and slammed into the massive gear wall in PvP, then breezed through an endgame raid with greens and blues from leveling.  I did okay in PvP, I knew I had small numbers and I took actions to accomodate that, but it was still kind of a fuckin' nightmare.

It's endgame was awful.  It's PvP gearing 'system' is an -absolute joke-, to the tune of 'I made a 61-page thread about how bad this is'.  Seriously!  I'd link it but it's kinda beating a dead horse, and now they have a whole new gearing system they're gonna use, which is... -really- nice, to my mind.

I might go back for 1.2, just to PvP and get some real gear.  Maybe other returnees will be enough to do some operations with.  We'll see.  I haven't entirely decided, but the changes they made to the PvP gearing alone is enough to make me wanna try it again.

Disdena sort of has the right of it here.

That said, you could also co-opt  things like ductility and conducivity if you have a crafting system in the appropriate genre, or if you allow similar metals sourced from different areas in the world to have different stats.  When I was playing SWG, I got the best possible CDEF pistol reaction chambers from nonferrous conductive metals on Corellia... finding the best ferrous framings that kept my guns sturdy, I had to go  to an entirely different planet for.  So sci-fi has a place for things like ductility or hardness or what-have-you.

That, and the methods of -creating- iron or steel weapons are very different.  You could conceivably take iron, charcoal and coke straight up to Damascus, but it's quite ordinary for folks to just make regular old steel out of the stuff, and how much carbon you get into your steel makes a big difference.  That said, what if carbon is a magical insulator?  What is a good, high-carbon blade doesn't hold an enchantment well at all, so you're forced to look to platinum or gold or meteoric starmetal to get the kind of magical capacities you'll need for an endgame item?  Do inlay.  Make pommels and hilts and crossguards out of less high-impact-resistant metal while the working surface is all that great, high-carbon steel, and the spine of the blade is a more flexible, lower-carbon sort with inlay?

There're lots of things you could do.  I like the idea of having analogues to real crafting methods in games, although I also kinda like the idea of having sympathy or aether or other properties attached.  It's possible that those properties would be more obvious (read: viewable) to folks who knew what they meant; blacksmiths see ductility and carbon content, enchanters see aether, sympathy, or equilibrium.  Jacks-of-all-trades perhaps see a less informative version of each; maybe skill in particular areas improves your ability to assess the content of the things you're looking at in one context or another.

My problem with ME3, and with EA in general, is not the quality of their games.  I was gifted a copy of Battlefield 3 and I installed it and play it to date!

My problem with EA is the fact that they've taken issue of some kind with the service that I use the most... or that service has taken issue with them, which is more likely considering their underhanded, money-grabbing practices.  EA and Steam had a big fight, and frankly, I figure Steam won.

I don't know one PC gamer who has ME3 on their PC.  I have the original and ME2 on Steam... and now, since EA and Steam had a little tiff, instead of having a single library with all my games on it, I now would be required to start an entirely different digital delivery service, sign in with a different username and password (because good security demands that I don't have the same password everywhere) and manage an entirely different library of games, friends list, and systems to support all of these things... and for what?

For me, it's for nothing.

For me, Origin is a crappier, newer, less-polished, less-stable, more-likely-to-fail-and-be-shut-off version of Steam.  None of my Steam friends are there.  None of my settings are maintained.  Origin -frequently- dumps all of my settings and makes me replace them.  Inviting a friend who's just hopped in to join my game is clunkier and less obviously accessible through Origin's systems.  The hotkeys are all different.  It is very different, in short, from industry standard, and from a system which I've been using for many years, am comfortable with, and which recieves -loads- of attention and modification from its team.

So requiring Origin for ME3 means I have to jump through all kinds of hoops not only to add all my friends... oh, wait.  None of my friends use it.  Because they all hate Origin, and they aren't interested in the multiplayer like me; they just want to play the story.

So they pirate it.  And they play it with their old games.  And they get a very engaging story and they don't have to start Origin or jump through any hoops to make it happen.

EA is making it harder for me to play their games instead of easier.  For the first while, Steam did the same things, but they grabbed themselves by the balls and got all the kinks out of their system; I hardly ever curse Steam these days, and own hundreds of games through it.  And I have no desire to own hundreds of games through Origin.  Why split my library?

So I'm finished paying EA for games until they decide to patch things up with Steam.  I really hope they do.  I'll buy ME3 for $60 on Steam even if it's $40 on Origin.  I do not care.  That twenty dollars would be worth it to me just to never have to start Origin up and fuck with its stupid, often-buggy, broken interface again.

I've been using Steam, I'm invested, and I don't want to split my library, my friends, or anything else.  I have no further interest in EA's games; I'm not even pirating ME3 for the singleplayer.  I think it's disingenuous to vote with your wallet and still benefit from others' hard work.

If EA comes to their senses on this point, and God I hope they do, 'cuz I love Mass Effect and played the ME3 demo for -hours-, I will pay them money and buy their game.  Before then, I'll just live without it.  It's worthless to me if I have to jump through hoops to get it.

I miss crafting that requires research and understanding to get the most out of, but is simple enough to do for anyone who has the werewithal to run around and search for resources for ten or fifteen minutes.  Accessible for most but with deep customization options and even more available for those who decide to do the research?  Way cool.

I also miss economies that work.  I like EVE Online a lot, and their efforts to have a working economy have been reasonably successful, but I'd like to see it in a context that feels more connected.  EVE's combat and the combat in a game like TOR are worlds apart, and I like to feel like I'm fighting rather than fiddling with knobs and dials while the ship does my fighting for me.  A step further would be Vindictus, but that's a lot to ask.

It seems like all modern crafting systems are dumb-kid math.

I'd like a crafting and economy system that are interesting.  EVE's is great but their moment-to-moment crafting gameplay is a bit unsatisfying for me; no real differences in terms of materials used, no way to use research to make a better Thrasher.  A Thrasher is always just a Thrasher.  I have no love for that.

The problem with UO's ecosystem is that it was totally nonscalable.

Also, there were only a  certain number of resources in the world; once all the iron was gone, it was just GONE, which led to assholes doing nasty things like mining all the iron, making an absolute pile of daggers, and just filling their house with iron daggers and selling them at a tremendous premium because no one else in the region had any iron.

Bad player behavior always trumps neat design.  Still, there are ways to work around things like that.

The thing you need to do with Metacritic to use it and use it well is use it as a resource to find reviews that make sense.  Find some great ones, some middling ones, and some bad ones. 

READ THE TEXT.

Then decide if you feel like it's worthwhile to pick up a copy for yourself.  The reading is the important part; I've seen plenty of reviews that were at a 3 or something and the person admitted, in the text, that they hadn't played the game.  I've seen 10 reviews that hadn't played the game.  I've seen reviews that sounded generally quite positive and then ended with a numerical score of 5 or 6 for some reason I could not understand.

Read about it.  Find consistent up-and-down points.  Lots of good reviews say combat is a little stale but the story is great.  Lots of bad reviews really rail on the combat but grudgingly admit that the story is great.  Lots of middling reviews say meh, the game is fine, but the emphasis on story isn't right for the genre.

You can make a real opinion of a game by using the reviews on Metacritic to find out what people like and don't, and get a good feeling for the game by doing so.  The numerical scores are nearly worthless; you have to read if you want to gain the kind of real value that Metacritic is good for.

And Metacritic -is- good.  Just don't read the numbers and pass judgement based entirely on them.

Serious personal bias is a -huge deal- in reviews in general.  I've heard folks talk about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that abhorred the book because it has some very bizarre sexual abuse situations in it; the book is good, I had a great read and am reading the second, but people discount the entire book based on the fact that it contains some very uncomfortable material.  I like uncomfortable, personally, but a lot of the bad reviews aren't bad at all; some folks don't have the stomach for Lisbeth's past and it shows in reviews that call it pornographic or disgusting or rate it as low as they can.

This stuff is all over the place in every kind of review out there.  Judge by the reviewer's words, not by the number they slap on the end.  Numerical scores are arbitrary and silly and often inaccurate, but what the body of the reviews -says- has real value, and allows you to pass a much more reasonable judgement.

TL;DR: Learn to use Metacritic for what it's good for, not for what is most obvious.

I think there needs to be a cross-server dungeon queue.  People WILL get left on dead servers and they WILL be locked out from content without it; no other MMO in history has managed to do what WoW has done, which is 'not lose tons of subs in the first month and continue to slowly tail off'.

That said, I also think that there needs to be some way to get back at folks like the I'm-going-to-be-a-healer-and-screw-folks-on-purpose guy, above.  I figure he should be barred from using the tool after a certain point.  Hell, I think people should be punished, and harshly, for leaving a team for any reason.  Leave a Warfront?  Drop a Dungeon?  You lose all the gear and XP you got, and it's distributed amongst the folks you were there with, including the stuff that upgraded your gear, whether or not they can use it.  Drop a Warfront or get AFK-kicked?  You can't queue again for an hour, and you lose a full bar of XP, plus a delevel if possible.  This would be a last-stage thing; you'd have a percentage of drops and grace periods to return, and your team would be able to forgive you, aka 'holy shit my dog is siezing please kick me so I can go to the vet', etc.

I honestly don't care what assholes do until they start wrecking my own experience and driving people away from games I enjoy.  Trion would absolutely lose subs if they started punishing people for being dickheads, but they'd lose subs that poison big hunks of the fanbase, and I think it might be a positive enough influence when folks actually have to behave that they'll end up maintaining more good subs and losing only subs played by folks whose only interest is griefing others.

I'm in blues and some purples at 19 on my Beta warrior.

How much you get and what that is depends strongly on how you spend your time; doing a lot of PvP will do you very little good until 25, at which point there are only a few (good!) PvP items to be had.  That said, crafted gear is often a fair step ahead of quest gear at any given level, and instances are just now adding random drops as well as boss loot.  Even just running through Realm of the Fae or Iron Tombs, I've gotten several different drops from each boss; you're just having very poor luck.  Also, if you can find them, the puzzles and Cairns can have great gear rewards; there's a skeleton at the bottom of what is essentially the Marianas Trench down south of Freemarch, so deep underwater that you take damage even if you dive in and come right back up... that skellie has gear on it.  My roomie got a purple bow, level 15, 10.8 DPS or something ridiculous like that.

There are all kinds of ways to get neat items in this game.  That's not even mentioning Notoriety vendors, crafted recipes, rare recipe drops from bosses and in dungeons, and the like.  You're just having cruddy luck, I think; I even get a few blue Essences and one blue gear upgrade from straight-up Major Rift loot.

For the 'casuals do nothing for the community' crowd:

CASUALS MAKE THE GAME FINANCIALLY VIABLE.

If you don't have enough casuals playing the game, you're playing Tabula Rasa.  That is to say, occasionally tossing a longing glance at a box on your shelf that will never, ever be playable again.

Every hardcore player like you or me and -all of their freinds together- make up max, MAX, 5% of any online game.  We're not the part of the community that keeps games like this open, the casuals are.  Deal with it.  We appreciate it more and we care about it more, but money talks, and there are just -lots more of them- than there are of us.

Anything that makes Rift stay open for long, long years is good with me.  If it's making it cater to casuals, that's fine.  It'll stay open and that's what I care about.  I'll still rarely use the dungeon finder 'cuz I have a bunch of guildies I can run stuff with.

Is no one going to be the voice of reason here and mention that open-beta crowds have a lot of folks who are interested only in ruining games they've decided they don't like?

There are tons and tons of folks playing this game right now, as well as loads of preorders who are holding off so they won't burn out pre-launch, like me.  I'm helpful, I tend to talk a lot but not rip into people for any real reason, and I try to give back to whatever community I'm part of.

These people are not the playerbase.  These people are in open beta; what happens to the community when sixty bucks' worth of entry-barrier goes up is anyone's guess.

Also, as a final point, you're kind of on the Internet.  Expecting everyone to be polite is doomed to failure; they're anonymous, they can do what they want, and ignoring them (not with /ignore but just by ignoring them) is the best way to go about things to my mind.  Don't let them hurt a good thing for you.

CU/NGE happened.

This update (and expansion pack) does a lot of neat things.  Thanquol's Incursion, the new dungeon, is for 65+ only... and it's got some -very- valuable loot inside.  This is perfect mainly because it will bring a lot of those catastrophically powerful 40/80s out of the zone and get them gunning for some new weapons.  It only happens once in a while, but when it does happen, the lower-rank characters can be reasonably sure they're only fighting other lower-rank characters.

There's also a sliding bonus to Renown, which means getting to 80 will be quicker and easier.

Also, the RvR mechanics in general have gotten a huuuuuuge overhaul; the system is completely different, with zone locks happening the moment the enemy keep is captured rather than being controlled by some strange VP system that essentially forces outpopulated realms to retreat from a zone in order to protect it.

FOLKS WHO WANT THREE FACTIONS:

Games Workshop says it cannot happen.  It cannot happen.  Mythic asked and they were told two factions or no game.  Cannot, will not happen until Games Workshop gives the okay; if you want to talk to someone who can actually help you, talk to Games Workshop, not Mythic.

FOLKS WHO WANT NON-LINEAR RvR:

Go play basketball on a court with eight baskets, four end zones, three goals and five buttons distributed around the court that makes you gain one point per minute when pressed.  That'd be a fun game, huh?

People on the Internet are stupid.  Calvinball is fun with a few folks who are friends.  Having clearly-delineated goals is -highly- beneficial when dealing with the gibbering masses out on the Vast Interbutts.  This way, thank fucking Christ, there's a shadow of a chance that people who don't understand the game or don't care will be in the right place doing the right thing just because it's The Place To Be.  Keep battles are fun.  This system is more fun -by a lot- than the old system, and it takes the steam out of folks who like to leave zones when they're outnumbered!  

The underpopulated realm gets a percentage bonus to renown gain (Against All Odds), and the zone lock XP/RR/Influence SCALES with this bonus; if you're fighting for your life in a keep with 300% AAO and the enemy locks the zone after a long fight, they get 60% of the XP/RR/INF pool and you get 40%... which is then multiplied by 300%, so you actually get -twice- as much as the enemy did.  Even if you only get one tick of VP, that's 15%, which works out to 45%; if you dug your heels in at -all-, you WILL get rewards for staying put, especially if you are vastly outnumbered.

It fixes so much shit I can hardly encompass it in English.  I can't -wait- for this patch to drop.  There're gonna be issues with the new stat scaling and stuff, but that'll get worked out as time goes on; it needs live time to get real testing and metrics gathered.

Anyway.  This is a great patch.  I've been testing it like crazy and I'm -very- happy with the results.

I think a system like this could be interesting if it were done right.

It'd be kind of neat for any particular class or species to have a few different 'sets' they could go through as they level up.  Warhammer's White Lions (the lion, not the class) go through several iterations on their way up through the tiers, more or less one per tier, until they get their big armored selves at the very end; something akin to that, only with choices, would be neat.  Most smaller characters being younger or more fresh-faced, with an ever-expanding option for things like frost at the temples or craggier, scarred-up mugs or any number of other things.

It'd be interesting to see who stays young throughout and who ends up all scarred up from battle.  It'd be equally interesting to have a title or achievement system hooked into different looks all the way up the ladder; died 100 times in battle, get a particular kind of jaggy scar or bloodshot eyes or whatnot.

Just making it so people naturally progressed a little (like WAR intended to do with Black Orks, etc.) would be neat, too, but I think some choice would be necessary.  I don't mind playing a craggy old greyhair but I certainly wouldn't want it to be everyone!

I wouldn't mind trying again now that it's out of beta.

Have they done anything about the control lag or the performance in general?  I've got a -big- machine, but even on low settings it tended to chug around a lot, and it took my cursor with it.

If only that could actually be done?

Well, if you'd rather not give it a try, I'm not sure what else to suggest.  Very few other games do the active combat system thing and actually make it remotely enjoyable.  You could do something like Dragonica, which is very cutesy but hearkens back to the old X-Men/Simpsons arcade standups, despite being a bit grindy and thoroughly Asian.  I had a decent time with that for a while, but it's not use-to-skill like Mortal or UO or something.

Age of Conan, if graphics are important to you, is F2P for a generous portion and has more skill-based combat than some games.  Combo system, too, which could have been better but still isn't horrendous.

If you could do the spaceship thing, Vendetta Online has been going for a while, has a generous trial, and is twitch-based space combat.

There're a couple things out there, but I don't really know what your criteria are.  If it's great graphics... good luck, especially if you're looking for free-to-play games.

Not really.  Sorry, dude.

If you want to move it to C, you're probably going to have to format your C drive (Which will destroy all your data, in case you don't know) and then reinstall it on the freshly-formatted drive.  That said, with both drives running, you can always copy all your data and such to D to preserve it.  You'll have to reinstall most video games, but all your documents, pictures, and other stuff from C would be safe so long as D is a separate drive/partition.

There aren't a whole lot of games like Mortal, sadly.  Nothing that I know of is free -and- has active block/parry combat systems in it.  You can get some similar stuff in lobby-based MMOs, but they're not my favorite in general.

I think the closest you're likely to find is DDO.  It's free, with the right skills and equipment you can block and parry and work with timing instead of just mashing buttons, and in general I have a lot of fun with it.  Also, its implementation is significantly better than Mortal's; Mortal has technical problems out the wazoo, while DDO's been around a while and was pretty stable and playable even at launch.

I don't think the concept of hit points is killing innovation in MMOs, particularly.

I think the current iteration of design as pertains to hit points is.  There are a lot of interesting things you can do with hit points, but unfortunately not a lot of folks are willing to use them.  Personally, being a medieval reenactor, I feel that an emphasis on standing there and taking it is vaguely ridiculous; I certainly don't just hack away at someone and let them hit me back 'til the end of time.  Fighting isn't about taking hits, it's pretty specifically about -not- taking hits, or mitigating as much of the hurt as you possibly can.

So working hitpoints in as a last line of defense, or as a thing that needs to be maintained and controlled, seems like it could be interesting to me.  Considering it your health instead of just how much you can take before you have to pop back to town could be a lot of fun, with an emphasis on keeping as many as possible rather than on just barely scraping by and getting big XP from monsters that can allllmost kill you.