I detested forced grouping in FFXI. Waiting around with my LFG tag on for 1-4 hours depending on if it was "peak" time or not is not my idea of fun gameplay. It's another of those awful, blatant timesinks FFXI is notorious for.

Make grouping optional. Give it some perks that soloing doesn't have, but to force people to group to do anything? That game model is way out of style these days and appeals to a very small crowd.

I just hope they improve on the many  mistakes of FFXI. I played that game a year and got to the point where I just couldn't stand a few major issues and had to quit. Attempts to go back have left me really bored.

1) Having to sit down and wait 5-10 minutes to "rest" your HP and MP. UGH. Most blatant time sink hook I've ever seen in a game.

2) SLOW SLOW combat. REALLY SLOW. I wouldn't mind turn based but the game was so damned slow I could sit there and read a book inbetween swings. Just speed it up a bit !

3) Mixed Asian and NA servers. Bad idea. Hostility, unrealistic expecations from NA players at launch, lots of miscommunication, made the economy just a terrible mess...

4) The good old Asian-Grind factor.  Give some damned quests to lighten the load of ...literally...having to beat on pugils, crabs, beetles, rabbits and goblins for 75 levels non-stop.

None of the things above add to a game's "difficulty". They just add to the time-sink gimmick to make people HAVE to play several hours straight at a time to get anywhere. There's nothing difficult about FFXI, 99% of it was just waiting around WAITING. Which bored me to tears. I might still be playing otherwise, because some aspects of the game were nifty.

I never called WoW PVP-Centric. I said it was WoW that made me sick of PVP because I participated in the PVP aspects of that game so much I'm not really in the mood for a game that IS PVP-centric. And I've played AOC, actually.

I could say I've a degree in psychology. I could type here that I own a fortune 500 business. I could proclaim across the internet that I invented the television and the gasoline powered engine. It hardly makes it true. Anonmity turns people into liars and jerks, that's just how it is - so you'll have to excuse me if I'm not very impressed with anyone who brags about how great they are over an MMO forum in a thread asking about an aspect of a game. It has no relevance. And if I missed the snippet in the sticky-thread about this aspect - meh. Sue me. It's so the end of the world, right? If it makes you that irate over a silly question about a silly game... go preen over your degree, real or imagined, and stop wasting your time being a troll.

Onward - I prefer a PVE game right now. I don't find it boring and if others do, that's their right. I enjoy PVP but it'd have to be completely optional and not such a core part of the game that it's all but necessary to go to a FFA-PVP zone to level or acquire decent gear. It's just not interesting to me at this point in time. As said, I'm fairly burnt out on PVP atm.

Of course no game is "forced" upon you. But if you choose to play the game, certain aspects of a game are likely to be "forced" or be such a large part of that game that if you choose not to participate in them, you don't advance in the game and are stuck rolling alts to level 20, rinse and repeat.

I'm not suggesting this game become PVP-optional; I'm just saying now that my question has been answered it just occurs to me that it's probably not going to be a game I check out. If others are for the PVP-FFA thing, that's fine. Just not my thing. Doesn't mean I'm a lesser gamer or a "scrub" (I really do think it's silly to base how important a person's money they pay to an MMO company is on how 'leet' they are in some given area. Really.  I've had epic characters before. It doesn't even matter that much in the long run. ) or should go play Hello Kitty Island. Just means that I'm not interested in this game because of some aspects.

In any case - this thread seems to have brought out the trolls and flamers, so I'll bow out. My question has been answered and I see no purpose in trading remarks and insults with people who apparently get their kicks from acting like poo-flinging monkeys on the internet. Again - I appreciate the civil replies and opinions and suggestions, but I think there's not much more to be said here from my part.

Originally posted by kaishi00

You can get to max level without ever going into the abyss. That's your choice, how is that forced. This information can be found in numerous threads if you weren't so lazy to look for it. Good thing you won't be playing, I hate dealing with people like you.

The search function doesn't work for me, thanks, and I wasn't about to spend 3 hours sifting through a few hundred pages of threads.  As for "dealing with people like me"... how astounding you can make a judgement on my personality based on several short sentences in reference to a question about a game!

In any case- I've had enough of the PVP loot grind in WoW and now am not particularly interested in doing it again any time soon. It's not a quesiton of "omg afraid to PVP!" it's more a matter of "not really in the mood for a PVP-centric game".  It's not for everyone, and if the "best" way to enjoy this game is through PVP, then it's not for me.  If the only "real" way to gain reasonable progress in a game is by PVP, then ...to me... it is a forced-PVP scenario. That's just how I see it.  I'm not in the mood for big guilds and PK'ing madness right now, and that's just how it is. This game won't appeal to everyone, and to expect it will is a bit unrealistic.

I wanted to know if what I had read was true, I asked, and since it was... I'm probably going to skip this game and look for something more suited to what I feel like doing in an MMO right now. I'd like to find a really nice sandbox MMO but they are very limited at this point in time.

Thank you for those who were civil and mature.

I didn't know it was supposed to be a forced PVP game, hence the quesiton.

But yeah I'll be skipping this one then. Oh well.

I read somewhere that you will basically have to go into PVP free-for-all areas to level in this game. Meaning gankfest city. I've had one too many bad experiences with free-for-all PVP servers and forced PVP in games, I prefer the option to PVP when/if I feel like, not when/if the game devs say I have to in order to progress a character.

So was this misinformation or is this a forced PVP game?

It's a fun game. There's really not much "new" it brings to the table, but it's at least something different to look at as a distraction, and nowhere near as awful as the forums made it seem. Of course, from what I understand it had an awful launch, but I also understand some months back they fired the old lead Dev and got a new one.  The game seems fine to me, I like the graphics as a nice change from cartoony or overly-plastic, and while there are some flaws with the game and it's a bit linear, I don't think it's nearly as sub-par as people try to insist it is.

Maybe at launch it was, but now it seems like a solid MMO.

I tried the AOC trial and ended up buying. It wasn't anything "new" in an MMO, but at least it wasn't the same old few I'd been playing the past 4 years. They seemed to have fixed a lot of the launch issues at least, and there are a good number of people in the newbie zones trying the game.

I don't really fall hook line and sinker for Xfire numbers but eh, I think there is some increase due to the trials. Some of those people are bound to enjoy the game and subscribe to it.

There's lots of things I'd like to see improve in the "next generation" MMO.

Sandbox: For the love of whatever powers that be, I'm so sick of games that have nothing to do but raid or PVP at endgame. I'm sure if you got some creative devs together they could come up with a few other interesting things to do either at level cap or along the way so you don't feel like you're being herded down the same old path of grind, grind, grind...get loot...go grind for more loot. Boring after playing a few dozen MMO's with that forumla. Make it so there are many paths a person can take at end game.

Graphics: Sick of cartoons. Sick of plastic. AOC almost has it right but then even that is a bit plastic looking. I want some gritty realism without the elves and faries and animal people and without looking like the next greatest Saturday morning cartoon show.

Have a game that actually SUPPORTS RP rather than discourages it. That sort of goes back to the sandbox concept. Also all those RP rules that the MMO's put in place? Be great if some of them started enforcing those rules on the RP server instead of ignoring it like a redheaded step child. There's a good many players out there that are just as interested in the story as the loot, but current MMO's hinder the creative urge rather than nurture it.

Character customization: CoH was only "ok" in my opinion for this. I would really like a game where you literally would never see another avatar that looked like yours.

Weapon customization and sheaths: I'm really sick of watching a generic looking sword float on my back.

Exploration: Needs to be improved in most games. I don't mind "zones" so much if they're well done and SEEM mostly seamless (yeah.... WoW did this fairly well) but I also would like a game where you could, you know, climb mountains rather than magically get stuck on a 45 degree angle incline. If you can see it, you can get to it, so to speak.

Grittier MMOs that magically don't attract morons - Probably this is just wishful thinking. Probably this has more to do with the state of the current "young" generation than anything, but it would be heaven not to have to be in an MMO where all you see are idiots flaming each other on the general chat, telling Chuck Norris jokes and finding ways to troll people. Strict punishments for people who actually break server rules? I'd be all for that MMO, and I wouldn't even care a bit if that MMO never reached 200k subs because of it. If it's niche because of it, that's fine with me.

I'm not seeing this when I Hide/Sneak. Either I'm bugged, it's hidden somehow or I'm just obliviously looking at the wrong spot on my game window.

I'm on a trial account currently so I'm very new to this game and how the UI is set up. Anyone out there that could point me to what I might be doing wrong in terms of not seeing this damned Light Meter? It really is essential as I'm playing an Assassin and all.

Qeynos looks like something out of ..... the cheesiest kids high fantasy movie ever created.  Everyone is walking around waving and all "  :D OMG SO HAPPY SPARKLES!"  You'd think the world would be a little more gritty considering it came out of a major catastrophe and several wars not so long ago.

You'd never know it by how happy and sparkly everything is though. Guh.

I've gone back and forth between several MMO's, because trust me......I'm bored to death of WoW. EQ2 I played quite a bit, but honestly I dislike the game itself for several reasons (that made me decide the last time around was...well, the LAST time around)

1) Too cheesy. Yeah, that's coming from someone who has played WoW with all it's toliet humor. But c'mon... everything is so sparkly happy that I feel ike I'm playing a game made for 8 year olds. It's rated Teen, and yet I have never seen anything remotely "mature" or "adult" about the game's theme.  So many of the quests were:

"Oh no! Mr. Whiskers lost his favorite bag. We'd better help Mr. Whiskers get it back from those bad old slimes! Let's enlist the help of the Fae! They giggle!  This sort of "cute" is not for me. Maybe if I was still in elementary school. Even the "bad guy city" is so .... :p Walt Disney villain style that it ruins any potential interesting Lore.

2) Ugly. UGLY. I don't care if it has a billion polygons. The art direction, models, and landscapes are HORRIBLE and look plastic. Proof you can have the best engine but the game will still be UGLY if your art team sucks. I saw more shades of brown in that game than I ever thought possible. And the armor design is horrendous.

3)  Bad launch. I tried it at launch. Definitely catering to the "group all the time for every single thing" crowd at that point. Some may argue that's how an MMO is "supposed" to be, but frankly... the market has moved beyond that, and any game designed with that theme is going to see low subs and low interest. Grouping optional, solo-content there, smooth launch, lots of content at launch = good "first impression", and those mean a lot in this industry. While EQ2 has fixed many of those issues, too little too late.

4) You need a monster rig to run it at decent settings. The computer I had when this came out was, for its day, a pretty beastly machine that could run all the other current games just fine. But not EQ2. Between "we designed this for future hardware! lol!" and memory leaks ... it ran (and looked) like mud. While my (and many) current computer can now handle it all right, it still has performance issues and doesn't run as smoothly as most other games.

5) Piss poor community. Yeah, that's right... the community on the servers I played on were pretty bad. Granted those were the RP servers where ...for some weird reason... the RPers loved to create drama amongst themselves dappled with the elitism of the big raid guilds... I think I had fewer good experiences with the community there than even on WoW. And that's bad, because WoW has a pretty bad community base as well. But EQ2's was just -toxic-.

6) Boring classes. The only class I ever enjoyed was Brigand. Of all the other classes they offered, most felt generic and dull. Huge variety does not always mean fun playing. Having 6 different types of something...especially when they have almost the same spells (different animations = different skills!! no. ) is unnecessary and makes for a watered down feel.

7) It's SOE. Horrible customer service, long track record of breaking their games or duping their customers, and terrible devs and method of implementing game play.

8) WoW came out. All those reasons have been listed. I'm far FAR from a WoW fankid, but it is the better game all around (or, at least, was at the time by far). Easy to jump into , easy on the computer, easy to group or solo, low polygon but good art direction = success.

None of those games.

LOTRO, while it has pretty environments ( the avatars themselves are pretty awful, as is the armor design. Everything looks like skin-tight badly dyed leather) is a bit dull unless you're really into Tolkien stuff. Feels slow and a bit clunky to me. Not enough classes and certainly would have been a heck of a lot more interesting if you could actually play the "bad guys" outside the pseudo-PVP that is Monster Vs. Player. I tried this game several times and it just could never hold my interest.

EQ2 - Mixed about this one. UGLY game. Sorry, but it's a fact. The art direction is aboslutely awful - whoever is designing the armor and models in this game must be legally blind. And it's a beast to run. It does have a lot of content, and the crafting was (for me) the best part of the game. However, it's underpopulated, the community is ...as one poster put it...toxic and elitist, and the whole "sparkly goody good" feel, even in the "bad guy " towns...makes it far more cartoony to me than even WoW is. And it DID borrow a lot from WoW after SOE realized it was losing most of its player base to that game - made more casual friendly, more solo friendly, etc. However, it's SOE, and their lame attempts at a clone...I dunno. Feels even more corporate and crappy than even WoW. I played this on and off up until last year since its launch, but I've lost all desire to go back to it. It's just a bit too ugly and too kiddish.

AOC - Horrible launch from what I understand. I'd like to try it, but I'll wait for a free trial. I've heard things have improved but how much of that is just fanboys and how much is actual improvement, I can't say.

WAR- tried it. Took me all of 5 minutes to get sick of it. It's WoW with a more "pvp" tone, but at the end of the day, it's a pretty shallow game. And the community is even worse than WoW's, hard as that is to believe.

With the utterly awful and rocky start of this game and despite hearing it has improved, I'm not going to just rush out and buy/subscribe to it without trying it. I heard rumors there are supposed to be free trials sometime in the first few months of '09. Any official word on when?

Thanks all for the replies. I'll continue to do a little research and if the majority of what I find says the game is decent, I'll pick it up this weekend. I'll also continue to check back on this thread to see if any new input is added :)

And yeah, the forced Arena thing in WoW killed that game for me. Seriously, not all PVPers want to roll a rogue, druid, or warrior and go play in a box :p I think they're just mad that Arenas failed so badly and seriously messed up the class balance in that game so now they're trying to make everyone do it so they can pretend it was a good idea to include Arenas. Lots of very unhappy folks over on the WoW forums right now, and despite there being a lot of idiots that play that game that will whine about the dumbest thing, when your entire General board is spammed with angry posts...that's usually a sign you did something pretty wrong.

Anyway! /goes to read reviews

After being burned by Vanguard, Tabula Rasa and LOTRO (sorry, I know a lot of people think it's a solid game but I found it pretty dull, truth be told)  and being utterly sick of EQ2 and WoW (just cancelled my WoW account after I learned all PVPers will be forced into LOLARENA! to earn any rewards in WOTLK...no thanks. ) I'm looking for a new game.

I know AOC just tanked big time, and I'm sad about that because I followed it pretty closely for about half a year before it launched in hopes it would be a real next gen game, or at least something fun to play for a while. I learned my lesson from VG, LOTRO and TR though, so I didn't buy it on release and I'm glad I didn't. Same with WAR.

Now I will admit, I wasn't all that interested in WAR until WoW just announced their "you will Arena or you will get nothing!" changes. I'm a fairly casual player, I dislike raiding just because killing the same trash mobs week after week to -maybe- get something decent IF you're lucky at an end boss doesn't appeal to me. I enjoyed BG PVPing, I put effort into it (never AFK'ed out or went and hid somewhere for free honor) but I dislike Arena...which to me is pretty much glorified dueling in a box (doesn't work for the class I play either. Hunter is notoriously bad at Arena :p I have no interest in rolling a rogue or a druid just to "win"... no point in winning if you dislike the class you're being forced to play).  So there's that.

Now I'm looking at WAR as an alternative, but like so many MMO fans that have been burned in the past by crap games released too early, I'm cautious about spending 100 bucks (one copy for me, one for my spouse) on a whim just to find out the game is either very bad or not really what I'm looking for. The above probably gives a fair idea of what I AM looking for - I've limited play time, but when I do play... I want to have fun, and that fun hopefully doesn't include raiding or dueling. I don't mind PVP (as I said) and I don't mind solo or small group quests. Basically I just want a solid, fun game that's interesting enough to keep my attention without it feeling "forced".

If anyone could point me to a good, honest, and professional review of WAR or offer up one of their own, I'd be grateful :)

Well, I tried DDO waaay back at the tail end of open beta and didn't really enjoy it too much.

But heck, that was 2 years ago, so I figured I'd give the trial a shot and see if it catches my attention this time. I've played LOTRO, WOW, EQ2, FFXI on and off for the past couple of years, and AOC is looking more and more like I'm going to just wait a few months after release until all the bugs and issues are worked out.

Now, my confession; I've only played the P&P version a few times back when I was a kid. I did the whole Baldur's gate thing and Icewind Dale, but will someone who hasn't ever "delved" into D&D be able to play this game? Honestly my main reason for never playing the table top versions much was ...basically...no one around here plays RPGs at all.

Also - I do tend to solo a bit, mostly because I've got a crazy RL/job that often drags me away from the game without warning, though I may be able to convince my spouse to come play if the game is decent.

thanks for answers in advance

How's soloing and small group content in this game? I like to play with my husband, but we work a lot so play time is sorta limited...can't really afford to play a game like FFXI where you have to get a full group going for every little quest or bit of exp.

And I'm sick to death of WoW, so please don't reccomend that game