Unfortuantly this issue seems to have real world impact, for example here in the State of Colorado where I live, there is a effort underway to introduce legislation that would put a TAX on anything online, users playing a MMO online would be forced to pay a TAX, Users selling or buying any sort of online gold be it by honest means or by gold farming would be facing a TAX.  The tax would be part of the STATE INCOME TAX structure. 

Did some checking, Colorado is not the only state that has tried this and it has been defeated, even the US Congress tried this route only to be defeated by big giants like Microsoft, Blizzard, Electrontic Arts threatening to moving thier operations overseas and thereby removing billions of dollars of revenue from the US Government.  

Seems to me that companies like Blizzard are somewhat hypocritical when it comes to gold farming, they turn a blind eye since it increases revenue for them and yet put the smack down on the US Congress when someone there tries to Introduce a ONLINE INCOME TAX due to gold farmers and buying and selling of ingame money which is currently TAX FREE. 

The European Union and the United Kingdom already has something similiar but it is part of the VAT.  If you look at it closely, the USA has the highest number of gold farmers in US based MMO games then in the European/UK based MMO games and you have to wonder why and see that it makes perfect sense why the US Federal and State Governments have been trying to impose a similiar "Internet TAX".

There is a drawback to having beta testing, you get the bad apples. Often times people who are cheaters, exploiters, hackers will use a MMO Beta Test to find bugs and exploits and use them on the live servers and they find it funny to ruin the game for everyone. They think it is cool to use bugs and exploits from the beta on live to get ahead.

The Dragon Age game must have been made for a high end system since it would not run on my system Intel Dual Core 3.6, Nividia 9800, 4GB Ram, Winxp SP3. When I contacted Bioware support, they suggested I upgrade to a faster system using Windows Vista or Windows 7.  If I had the money to spend would upgrade, stupid bastards. 

More and more, JGE is looking like a EVE clone.

Everytime you bring out massive PVP you going to end up with people whose only purpose in life is to exploit and cheat thier way to the uberness of all. EVE is a pvp haven for cheaters and exploiters and they do not care as long as you pay them the monthly fee.

JGE I feel is heading down that path as well. 

With the Lawsuits and Federal Investigations for Fraud, Security Exchange Fraud and people wonder MGM is still supporting them?  They should just throw the towel and get the devs to work on other projects.

The current season of Stargate Universe is a piece of crappy trash, the game itself is dead. They should let it die. MMORPG.com needs to stop bringing it up.

After looking at the site, it looks too cartoonish to me to be a proper MMO. They would be better off making it a FPS for teens. 

When I see a nerf in a MMO that am playing, I tend to cancel my account and give reason of you nerfed the game making it unplayable.

If more players did this then the trend of nerfing will be be reduced in such a way that it would be a wakeup call to the devs. Without a subscriber base devs have to go look for work elsewhere. Also devs with a reputation as nerfing devs are usually not hired at all. No big name company wants a dev on the team that has a rep of being a nerfing dev. 

Originally posted by MikeB

Did we (meaning our site and all the many other outlets) make a mistake in our reporting that "Beta" sign ups had begun yesterday for Star Wars: The Old Republic?

I'm not so sure; but it appears BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic Community Manager, Sean "Ashen Temper" Dahlberg, is making a distinction between Game Testing and Beta Testing in a post on the game's official forums, pointing out that BioWare has not announced anything on "beta testing" yet:

I would like to point out that we are doing Game Testing sign-ups; we have not done any announcements about "beta" testing. As specified in the original article, the Game testing for Star Wars: The Old Republic will be rolled out in several phases over an extended period of time. These test phases will begin with smaller, tightly focused test groups, and later tests will expand.

It looks like there is a distinction between beta and game testing. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

The original post can be viewed here.

Hell yes you did. Was in middle of posting on the official forums when everything crashed. From chatting on IM Chat it appears that server crashed due to extreme high volume brought on by the reports from MMORPG dot com.  You folks should be more careful when you report things, matter of fact do not speculate, wait until Bioware makes an official announcement before going off half-cocked...  

There is no beta testing, never will be any sort of beta testing. I remember quite awhile ago the main reasons that Bioware did not want beta testing was to prevent cheaters, exploiters and hackers from getting thier source code.... 

I dare say the actions of the OP will have negative consequences for the foreseeable future.

People who buy and sell gold online are nothing more then CHEATERS AND COWARDS.  Plus people who visit gold buying sites 200% of the time will get a Trojan Keylogger on thier system and not be aware of it until their accounts gets banned due and then they complain they were hacked when it is thier own stupid fault for visiting a gold buying/selling site. 

SOE has legal means of buying gold via thier own store.  Not many are willing to do this, SOE has to pay taxes for every gold or item sold. 

If you want to be a cowardly cheater and do things the easy way, stay away from the servers I play on. We do not need your type of morons online. Wait a minute I no longer play World of Warcraft due to those same stupid XXXXX cowardly cheaters who buy online gold.  

And with the rising costs during the recession or any economic downturn is going to further increase the gap between those who cannot afford to keep playing online games and those who can afford it. 

Guild Wars has a hugh sucess because not only they are F2P and have store but they have zero tolerance for cheaters and exploiters. Zero tolerance for gold spammers and scammers. 

EA and LA are in the business of making money, they do not care about the subscribers, as long there are games being made, online games to be played they will keep the cash flowing regardless of how the subscriber thinks or feels.  The scammers and gold spammers will never go away while you have cheaters and exploiters doing thier thing and companies that encourages such things. 

Regardless of what happens in the near future, the business of online gaming will continue until people had enough and stop buying and paying. But that will never happened, only time they go out of business is if we go into a global depression, nuke war, or the government becomes a police state.  

My understanding that STO is going to be a high end graphical game requiring a really fast expensive high end system to play on. I remembered reading a FAQ put out by Cryptic that they recommended players use either 64bit WinXP or Vista 64 bit systems, broadband connections, at least 8 GB of RAM, Video Cards with 256MB or higher.

I rechecked Cryptic site and noticed they removed that FAQ, but the damage has already been done IMHO.

This is one Star Trek Fan who is NOT going to sign up for the beta or buy the game due to it's reputation as being a high end graphical game. 

Is this some type of sick joke... 

Just what we need, another stars wars mmo from the morons over at SOE/Lucas Arts who came up with the NGE/CU crap. 

Personally I think this is thier effort to draw players away from Bioware's upcomming SW:KOTOR MMO. 

If I  had to make a choice between the two, I  pick Bioware's SW:KOTOR MMO over anything coming out of SOE.  

The most notable problem with WAR as with many other MMO's that have PVP/RVR is the extreme high numbers of cheaters and exploiters.  Seems game devs either do not care or they just ignore it but IMHO a game that fails like WAR is from those who cheat and exploit.  I also unsub from the game back in April due to players cheating/exploiting the game during RVR/PVP.

Complaints went unheard or gotten the standard stupidity crap from the over worked CSR's (those whom were left after the massive layoff's).

Plus we must keep in mind that we are also in the middle of a recession so it makes a big impact on the market. I seemed to remember EA canned Earth and Beyond when it went below the 300K subscriber mark. 

Is WAR still a money maker? I think time will tell if they can make it to the end of this year.  I would not be suprised if WAR is shutdown in 2010.

If done right PVP can be enjoyable experience. But alas in the real world we have pvp gankers, pvp griefers and other players who pvp to make other folks quit playing games. We have pvp guilds whose only purpose is to own the server they are playing on and prevent others from partaking of the experience. 

Since we are so hot about pvping and even lawyers and criminal analysts and courts are taking a closer look at this as well.  I recently heard of a study that showed proof that pvpers who gank, grief, who are hard core pvpers are 90% more likely to commit violent crimes including up to murder and terrorism. 

The negative aspect of the pvping is more then the positive aspect of it.  PVPIng brings out the worse in players and those who thinks otherwise are morons and fools and have no real understand of human nature. 

For example why do you think the PVP servers on World Of Warcraft are so low in population compared to the PVE servers?

EVE has open PVP and yet they have a problem with cheaters, gankers, exploiters, terrorism and so forth.

Warhammer Online also has this problem as well with its RVR aspect. Hard core pvpers, griefers, gankers, accusations of cheating and explotiation on both sides. (I cancelled my account on WAR over this very issue).   

Any MMO that has pvp is going to have these sort of problems in either the short term or long term. They going to have to deal with the griefers, gankers, cheaters, exploiters and other rifraf that comes down the pike.  Some of us who are called carebears are actually the honest pvpers who do not grief, gank or other dishonest activities and we are in the minority.

As long as there are pvp type games, there will be griefers, gankers, hard core no life morons who play online 14+ hours a day and think they can be dishonest because they can get with it and yes they do get away with it because MMO companies prefer these type of pvpers since they bring in the most money while the rest of us quit paying them by cancelling accounts. 

What would be even of interest to see is Blizzard allowing players on PVE servers factional means to be neutral or even friendly toward the other faction.  So  if players what to do pvp they have to pay to move to actual pvp servers where the cheating gankers are located....  

I  used to play with a international guild in World of Warcraft, well it was mainly UK based with members who were from the UK/Scotland/Ireland/North America before Blizzard broke up the guild and force seperate servers on us based on region. 

Reason they gave was that the EU put out a VAT internet Access Fee that every member of the of the EU had to pay to access the internet including playing any online games. 

They also claimed that if they allowed North American players to play on the EU servers we would have to pay more then $25 a month just to cover the VAT access fees that blizzard would have to pay for every north american player to play there. 

I think this is bullshit, Blizzard really drop the ball on this.  They became fearful of the VAT and the costs of doing business. 

Regional servers hurt in the long run. We in North America were not allowed to buy access to the EU/UK servers and EU/UK could not buy access to the North America Servers. 

I  missed my friends from the UK, we had good times. I still have access to my UK guild forums, they complain that the server they play on is low population and nearly dead.  Blizzard Europe has servers setup for different countries in the EU  and sometimes based on languages. 

We are talking about Microsoft aka Microcrap who have a bad track record when it comes to operating systems.  Lot of you people have short memories, look what happened with Vista and you want to buy Win 7 at release.  Personally I wait until a year has passed. Plus with the recession in force in lot of areas, not everyone is going to be abled to afford WIN 7 or the hardware required to run WIN 7 if WIN 7 turns out to be worse then VISTA and we all know VISTA is a resource and memory hog. 

Also what burns me is that Vista users get FREE COPIES OF WIN 7 while those of us who are still using XP have to pay full price for WIN 7 which is quite expensive and especially after reading the recommended specs for running the OS one has to get a high end system to run it. 

Maybe when the economy recovers and when are out of the recession, I might consider getting WIN 7 and a new rig to run. 

As usual they come up with a good thing and at same time made it impossible for new players or players who do not have tons of plat to throw around.  IMHO will not bother to reinstall and get the expansion due to the high costs of hiring merc's.

Sorry to hear about that, majority of MMO's have that sort of restrictive restrictions via the Terms of Service.  Your best bet would be to get a lawyer to explain it to them regarding your household and teens. 

The game will be released when it is released. :)