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I think it really depends what the glitch is. I know more than one game in which a glitch of some sort actually becomes a legitimate part of the game -- if it takes a significant amount of skill to master, and it doesn't really offer that huge of an advantage, what's the harm? Indeed, in some cases, I would argue fixing the glitch would actually result in a worse game.

A few examples:

The weird physics in Quake, especially Quake III, if I recall. Rocket-jumping, bunny-hopping, etc. These lead to things like the defrag mod, in which exploiting these borderline glitches becomes a sport.

Then there's the sword glitch in Halo 2. It's entirely possible to defend against, and it does take some amount of skill to execute properly. I can see where it might screw up the balance enough, but they deliberately left it in single-player.

Probably the best example is also the most obscure I can think of: In Nexus TK, a 2D for-pay MMO that I'd be very surprised if anyone here has heard of, there's the weird property where if a character is healed by any amount at the precise moment they've died, no matter how much they were overkilled by, they'll still be (barely) alive -- but the actual behavior is a bit more complex, tricky to nail correctly, and unreliable.

This means you can have one character being chased around by a sizable group of others, taking more damage than their maximum health, and if they time their self-heals properly, even the very weakest self-heal that everyone has, they can stay alive much longer than they should be able to. The Barbarians have even made this into a game, with in-game prizes -- put a group of people together, and I'll spare the details, but the goal is effectively to try to kill everyone else in a situation where everyone will be incredibly low health, and thus the only way to win is to constantly "heal out" -- as in, heal out of death.

Of course, there are glitches which completely ruin the game -- so long as I'm talking about Nexus, its entire in-game economy had to be reset once because of a gold-duplicating bug. But not all bugs are bad, and sometimes "hey it's part of the game" is legitimate.

I think mixing subscription play with micropayments is sort of double dipping that players won't appreciate.

It's not so much that as that it slowly erodes the actual gameplay, let alone the immersion. I play this game, and ever since they've added an item shop, people are wandering around Ancient Korea with sunglasses, because they can charge for them (useless item, pure decoration) in the item shop. The idea was that this wouldn't affect gameplay, but of course, it creates games all its own -- there's now an official runway competition to decide whose avatar has the best style, which inevitably entails lots of item-shop items. They've also recently (and kind of inevitably) introduced things which directly affect gameplay, like extra storage for crafting items...

Now, the problem is, I don't know if this actually makes a difference in the business sense. I mean, as a player, I absolutely appreciate what you're doing, but I'm also going to keep playing Nexus because of all the stuff I have there, and the community I'm involved with -- basically, because of network effect and a strange sort of lock-in that all MMOs inherently have.

NN generally doesnt mean the end of QoS and throttling for technical reasons (putting priority on VOIP and gaming and putting torrents and ftp to bulk).

Yes it does, and that's most of the point.

Instead, it means ending throttling and QoS for BUSINESS REASONS.

There are always business reasons.

For example: Suppose Verizon unilaterally declares VerizonVOIP, their own, proprietary protocol, to be "the standard" voice over IP, and give it priority? Or suppose they only prioritize SIP and not Skype, or vice-versa?

That is to say, Comcast isnt going to put Vonage VOIP into the bulk category because Vonage competes with their own VOIP service.

Great, they won't do it to Vonage, but what will they do about Mumble? Will they prioritize things by default? Then VOIP won't be getting the advantage it "needs". Will they "bulk" things by default? Then Mumble will suffer.

And how, exactly, do they detect "gaming"? Do I have to attach a "gaming bit" to every packet sent? Great, now all the torrent clients will start doing that by default, long before even half the games I want to play have patched in support. Short of that, they'll have to recognize specific games and protocols, which means WoW will be fine, but, say, Nexus TK will suffer.

In other words: The very large groups in need of real-time traffic will be fine. Everyone else will be worse off than we are now. Congrats, you just raised the barrier of entry to any low-latency app.

The point is that the network should be entirely neutral with respect to the bits being sent. If I want to add that kind of QoS to my own router, that's fine, but you do not get to apply it at the ISP level. If that's a problem, maybe it's time to stop claiming "unlimited" usage and such high bandwidth, and start giving me a realistic amount of bandwidth that I can use as I please.

I mean, this isn't complicated. Go back and read their statement, vague as it is:

The 'Net should operate as a place where no "central authority" can make rules that prescribe the possible, and where entrepreneurs and network providers are able to "innovate without permission.

If I have to get permission for my homebrew VOIP protocol to get priority, the network isn't neutral. If someone is arbitrarily deciding that my neighbor down the hall chatting with her friend on Skype is more important than that Linux ISO I needed 10 minutes ago, the network isn't neutral.

If it doesn't mean the end of QoS at the ISP level, it's not network neutrality.

They've worked on cutting out the boring parts of MMOs (grinding mobs, long travel times, waiting on health/mana, spending an hour looking for a group) so that focus can be on actual play.

I play a 2D MMO -- it's been going for over ten years. The only one of those problems that exists for me is "grinding mobs". There's a huge amount of soloing possible, everything's in the same server so it's not usually difficult to find a group, there's teleportation, and if I can't find a player, there are still NPCs (or, hell, potions) I can use to restore full health/mana.

I doubt very much that WoW "innovated" these things.

I'm going to chime in with everyone else and point out that while instantaneous teleportation to anywhere probably wouldn't work -- it would make the world feel smaller, and make it much more difficult to build any sort of a decent dungeon -- having some sort of teleportation is just useful.

Teleportation in Nexus TK works like so: At any given point, you're either in Vortex (high-level hunting area), or you're in one of three kingdoms. In each of these places, there are four gates -- north, south, east, and west. And you have a spell which takes you to these places, instantly.

There's also your home point -- could be an inn, your house, or a subpath area. Use a yellow scroll (costs one coin; absurdly cheap) and you teleport there instantly. That's not a homestone with a 60 second wait -- that's an instantaneous effect, zero cooldown spell.

Travel between kingdoms is usually a few steps (no more than a 10-20 second walk) from the North Gate of a given kingdom, and maybe another ten seconds to switch servers. That same system also provides shortcuts to specific places within kingdoms.

All of this is in the large, registered player, post-level-50 content. They recently added an area (Tangun) for level 50 and under, where players are essentially trapped in a single large map. Yet even here, teleportation to the "home point" within this map is possible, and you can pick up a horse at about level 2, and it'll take maybe five minutes to ride around that entire map, if that.

Hell, even clans have crafting areas, and often various instantaneous portals from the clan hall to various points of interest.

Now, it's not WoW, but I honestly don't see the point in it taking 20 minutes to get anywhere, unless the act of getting there is somehow part of a quest. Whether the world feels small depends mostly on what you do in it -- if you're always going to the same places, yes, it seems small, so stop doing that.

The way to make your world seem larger is content, not gimmicks like slow portals.

the way these games are designed is so they dont.

I suppose it depends which game.

I play a much smaller one: Nexus TK. That would be way offtopic, except that it's about your worst nightmare. If there ever was a level cap, it's gone -- you level up to 99 the normal way, at which point, you can trade experience directly for mana and/or vitality.

The limit to how much experience you can carry is the size of an unsigned integer -- around 4.2 billion, or about twice as much as is required to progress from level 1 to 99. There is no known limit to how much mana/vitality a person can have.

Most of my characters have around ten thousand vitality. The majority of the population seems to have more like fifty, a hundred, or two hundred thousand.

And then there's Blason, who has five million.

Now, I'll spare you the complexities of combat, but I can say that at Blason's stats, the main way he's going to deal damage is through a vitality attack, which takes some percentage of his current health and turns it into damage against a given target. He'll usually try to surround himself with Poets (healers) to keep himself healed...

I haven't killed Blason. I have, however, killed people of similarly absurd stats -- certainly, I've killed people who are at least four or five times as powerful as me.

Hell, in the simplest sense, being absurdly powerful balances itself in that you're now a target.

Or, take the "Achilles Heel" to an extreme -- Blason's most powerful attack will leave him with ten vita -- not ten thousand, just ten -- meaning if anyone hits him with anything at that point, he's dead, all you have to do is time it right.

Or for that matter, if you time a heal just right, you can heal yourself out of death to very, very low health. If I'm doing that, it can take several attempts by several players to kill me, even if I'm absurdly underpowered.

With regard to playing the market that comes back to the time vs skill. I'm going to guess this is based around Eve because that has the deepest market I know. But again, to compete in any real terms with an experienced player is almost impossible if they have spent a few months 'investing' points in skills to help them playing the market.

Well, again, I'm talking about Nexus -- in this game, pretty much as soon as you "graduate" out of the newbie area (which, comically, lasts until around level 50), you can pretty much work with whatever you have.

All time does at this point is give you more capital -- and that's if you've invested your time "farming" or crafting. But you absolutely do play on a level playing field, and it is the brutal playing field of capitalism with other players.

NPCs do factor in, but they tend to have fairly static rates, and they always buy for half the price they sell the same item for (if they sell that item). The majority of valuable items cannot be bought from NPCs, however.

Let the player be the barrier and not some bullshit counter to drip feed me false reward.

I like a balance of both.

Put another way: Why shouldn't I get some kind of reward (false or not) for killing fucking Blason and his five million vita? Even Counter-Strike awards payment for kills, which can be used to purchase new guns.

Skills may count more than stats, but it's still nice to, say, make a sword out of Nngh'Zan's tooth to say "Yeah, bitches, I killed Nngh'Zan. Fear me."

Plus, it does simulate what you've described. Older players are likely to have both skills and stats; newbies are likely to have neither. But that won't stop me from killing Blason.

But, meh, to each his own. I like a balance. Some people probably do like sheer rewards for wasted lives -- like "Make Love, Not Warcraft", the person who kills the most boars wins any fight. And you like games that rely on skill, period.

Background: I play a small, 2D MMO. I'm going to try to provide as much context as I can, since I doubt anyone else here plays it. Also, I don't play WoW, so if I'm describing things that other games already do, sorry...

First of all, WoW recently got "achievements", which I believe are like the Xbox Live or Steam "achievements" -- they don't get you anything except a little badge that says "I did this." Nexus has had these for pretty much as long as it's existed, which is over ten years -- they are called "Legend Marks".

This game has four main paths -- I believe WoW calls them "classes" -- Mages, Poets, Rogues, Warriors. However, each of those is split up into four sub-paths. One of those is "NPC", as in, just a quest like anything else, and in return, you get some new spells.

The other three sub-paths -- per main path, so twelve sub-paths, total -- are very much roleplay-oriented, and player-run.

Each sub-path has its own unique spells. Some are useful, some provide a real advantage, and some are just fun. For example, the Barbarians have a "push" spell, with which they can shove other players around.

Each also has a number of roleplay requirements. For example, to become a Geomancer, you must be knowledgeable in Taoism, Feng Shui, Elementalism, and a number of other things. To be a Muse, you must keep a journal, and occasionally write stories, poems, plays, etc -- indeed, the Muses often host a Dinner Theater (in-game). To be a Spy, well, I can't help you -- to even know what you have to do to become a spy, you'll have to do some information gathering on your own -- in other words, spy on some spies.

Each can also give legend marks -- for example, "Scouted with the Rangers" might be desirable, while "Disruptor of Balance" wouldn't be. At the moment, nearly all clans and subpaths will reject people with negative legend marks like "Disruptor of Balance" or "Angered the Horde".

Finally, each subpath has their own unique areas -- both a path-only area, and an area open to the community. Barbarians often invite people into their cave to drink brew, to train, to brawl...

What am I getting at here?

It's a nice balance, I think, between the two extremes you're talking about. It's not just "roleplay for its own sake" -- while there is plenty of that, many players do see that as silly, with good reason. After all, if roleplay was all we wanted, with no "physical" consequences, why bother with a game? We can do that on IRC, or on a tabletop, for that matter.

On the other hand, people who are just in it for the loot aren't likely to get far. This is a lot of work, and it's completely different work than just grinding. Even if they're very good actors, and simply pretend to enjoy roleplay just to get the item, they may well find themselves enjoying it anyway.

And if they don't, I'm not sure I care too much. If they can manage to actively roleplay as a part of the community, no matter what their real motivation, that's a good thing for those of us who do enjoy it.

The game designers absolutely have a reason to reward roleplay, in this case, because they've managed to carve out a niche for themselves in a very crowded market. Some people come for other reasons -- some hunt to millions of points of vitality (there's no level cap), some do nothing but play events (elixir wars are fun) -- and some come for the roleplay, or even for a sense of community that's missing from many larger games.

Personally, I find real games boring for precisely this reason.

Even so, all the sports you mentioned require a certain amount of skill. In a game, to a certain extent, you can buy skill.

A company has a decent plan to try and level the playing field and get farmers out of games

I fail to see how this "levels" anything. In fact, it creates exactly the same problem for "fairness" -- it ruins the in-game economy for attempting to sell things to other players (since other players can simply buy those items outright from the in-game store), and it creates the same problem of newbies buying their way to the top, while a legit player struggles.

In fact, it brings the whole class system in the real world into the game, which just sucks. What makes the game fun in the first place is that it's not the real world.

I have seen this happen, in a few limited ways. I play Nexus TK, which has only recently begun to follow the Korean business model of giving the game away (or at least, of keeping it at the same $9.95/mo), and selling other things. Most of these other things, I have no problem with, as they're purely decorative. A few are actually useful.

They do try, however, to prevent these from affecting the in-game economy. They cannot be dropped or traded in any way.

Even so, the very existence of that shop has impacted the economy in a few ways. The most obvious are the Equipment Restoration items. Some players can repair items, and they charge an arbitrary fee. This fee halved when people could simply pay a few pennies (of real money) to repair their items -- the demand had simply dried up overnight.

I've greatly simplified the above for the purposes of this comment, but the result is the same.

I played an online MMO that had something similar to this. There were a few laws that were written when the game began and it was up to player elected judges to enforce these laws. For example, one of them was no swearing. You could usually swear and get away with it, but if a judge saw it, he'd transport you to court, and usually jail shortly after. Jail in this world consisted of a 6x6 tiled room with a bed and a talking stone. You had click on the stone a variant amount of times (depending on the sentence) and retype the message it says to get out of jail. The messages were along the lines of, "I am a bad person for committing a crime and will not do it again."

If you spelled a word wrong it would start the counter over. :)

It was pretty damn effective, since it was a pay to play game, it really sucked if you got your character stuck in jail.

Not only would you have to spend an hour talking to a stone, it also left a "red branding" on your characters viewable profile. This had a pretty big impact on your characters reputation.

For those who are curious, the game is NexusTK by Kru
( http://www.nexustk.com/ )

You can have a completely different style of gameplay depending on what class you are. Skills don't often create that. Classes create limitations which can make gameplay more interesting.

The most interesting gameplay I've ever seen in an MMO was Nexus TK. Four classes: Warrior, Rogue, Poet, Mage. Warrior and Rogue are fighters, and early in the game (before level 99), they are useful for completely different things. Rogues can "ambush" around creatures, and can thus charge straight past a huge hoard of enemies and kill the boss. They can deal the most damage, but only to one target at a time. Warriors deal more net damage, but they take much more damage, and are really only effective against large hoards. Poets deal almost no damage -- they are healers. Mages can heal, but not as well as a poet, and they can paralyze the room.

So, you have your two basic classes: fighter or caster. Then you have your main paths: Warrior, Rogue, Poet, Mage. Then, to make it more interesting, at level 99, you're able to trade experience for individual stats, so the main difference becomes what kind of items each class can use -- except, if you're obscenely rich, you can almost always find ridiculously good armor.

There's still plenty of creativity. There is real roleplaying, there are all kinds of ways to use your class, and plenty of things to exploit. For a long time, Rogues could skip fighting the Forever tree, which is required for certain levels much, much higher than 99, and requires a good few hours to kill, no matter how strong you are. There is no upper limit in strength, and the strongest character in the game (last time I played) was a Geomancer (Mage), which makes him much better at hitting individual targets -- high-level Mages can throw spells at any visible target that deal damage proportional to how much mana is available, and with several million Mana (level 99 is only a few thousand Mana), he could one-hit most people.

Sometimes I think the game seems to have settled into a WoW-like grind, only never-ending, because the most powerful people we know about only have around 2 million mana/vita, and the only cap is technological, based on the size of an int -- that's about 4.3 billion. But every time I think that, I see something creative and new to do with some aspect of the game. And a small, finite number of classes -- even if I count all 16 possible subpaths -- makes the whole thing go round.

(I could point to crafting skills as an example of a "hybrid", but while there are a few shared skills, even the crafting is something you have to choose (can't be a smith and a carpenter) and it doesn't affect fighting/hunting at all.)

Are the OS-agnostics saying they don't know whether or not an OS exists?

You didn't get it at all here. People are not OS-agnostic. Programs can be, among other things. And yes -- a Java program, for instance, does not necessarily know whether it's running on an OS at all. I'm pretty sure the JVM can be run without an OS, and that this is what people run on their phones, and Lego Mindstorms, and so on.

Even a C program can, at least in source code, be OS-agnostic. You can compile Hello World to run on boot, without requiring an OS, if you so desired -- not to mention any OS in the world.

Anyway, you're right, it may not be quite accurate there. I was just pointing out that it's used enough that when I say I'm agnostic, most people at least know the word, and almost no one misses the point.

It is still just "atheist" although some make the distinction between 'strong' and 'weak' atheists.

Which is as useless as the distinction between "black hat" and "white hat" hackers. Most people will already have that cyberpunk image in their head as soon as they hear the word "hacker", and that makes the word fairly useless when I have to explain it every time.

This dovetails into what I have found to be a more practical definition of the agnostic: one who doesn't know what they believe. A great MANY people fall into that camp. They are wishy-washy with their beliefs all over the map based on whatever.

I have fewer beliefs, and more assumptions, and I explained that earlier. Anyway, it is hard to know what to believe, isn't it? Perhaps it's not logically sound, but looking at the inherent order in Nature, it's hard not to become religious in Einstein's sense: "I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." He has a lot more to say on the subject; check WikiQuote.

Anyway, I see nothing wishy-washy in deciding not to waste my life trying to find the meaning of it, and I wouldn't want to believe an easily disprovable assertion, such as "There is no God."

Another motivation for term agnostic seems to be a desire not to offend the true believers. "Atheist" is a (well-needed) slap in the face. It closes the door on Mormons. People 'get' it. "Oh, you're not buying, I'll stop trying to sell you."

That's not often my motivation. Entertainment is my motivation -- you might also call me a hedonist, but I have a conscience. So when someone knocks on the door trying to sell me something, I have fun with them. I make sure I know my Bible, so I can quote the raunchiest parts of it, and the direct contradictions, and maybe convert them, but if not, at least I had fun.

My roommate had even more fun -- he was also agnostic, in about the same sense, but he'd been playing Nexus TK as a Geomancer, a subpath (think "clan", but more fundamental to gameplay) which was Taoist. So, regardless of whether anyone believed it, everyone had read the Tao Te Ching, and he understood it fairly well. So when the campus Christian people came around, he was able to attack their religion and claim to be a Taoist, a completely different religion, fairly unknown to most of the Christian West.

"How do you know my religion's evil or wrong when you don't know the first thing about it? Maybe they're both true! Maybe Christ was an incredible Feng Shui master!"

Unfortunately for me, I was gone at the time, because they never came back. Atheist, and they might think they can still save his soul. Geomancer agnostic, and they leave wondering if they're losing theirs.

So no, I'm not afraid of offending the true believers, I just like to be more artful about it. And by artful, I mean much, much subtler and more painful (to them).

An MMO I play, Nexus TK, had a serious bug revolving around event wins.

Specifically, I was able to give myself an unlimited number of Elixir War victories. Now, an Elixir War is an event held maybe twice a day, if that, in which players are split into two teams, play a sort of paintball/freezetag game, and at the end of three rounds, the event hosts summon an NPC near the winning team's base. Clicking him gives the player a choice of prizes, and selecting a prize gives the player a victory and teleports them back home.

The prizes are just dye potions, which change the color of your clothing. The reason you go is to get a victory mark, of which you need 15 to get your Sam San spells. So, this is something players would be jumping all over.

Let me just say: It was a ridiculously easy bug to find and exploit, and ridiculously easy to explain to other Nexus players, but would be several pages to attempt to explain to someone not familiar with the game.

Immediately after receiving my free win, I reported the bug directly to an Archon (GM) who was on at the time. It was obvious I could've gotten as many as I wanted, until the free-for-all ended, and it was equally obvious that I hadn't, because I only had 4 wins out of some 15 attempts.

Well, I got my free win -- that was it. I don't remember getting any additional compensation, and what's more, I was told to keep it to myself. No pat on the back, no reward, just a good laugh with the friends I trusted enough to explain this to.

To this day, I wonder if they've fixed it. It's entirely possible that they haven't, because to exploit it, you need two things: Your home server must be down (I live in a house, other people live in towns...), and you must win some sort of event. You may then collect the prize an infinite number of times, until they shut down the game server.

Would I report it again? Hell yes, I think people should earn their wins, and I think I earned my one free win by finding the vulnerability. But that's the only incentive I have. As many others have said, reporting a vulnerability only leads to cold suspicion, no congratulations.

I'm not bitter, really, I'm leaving that game for entirely unrelated reasons. But, this attitude needs to change. Even some recognition would be nice. And if you wonder where we're poking, and what else we could be doing, remember that anyone in the company could be doing the same thing, but those of us who choose to advertize our technical skill and actually report the vulnerabilities are probably at least being honest about it.

Rather than ban the player for seven days, send them to a prison where they're released once they perform boring, repetitive tasks until they earn their freedom.

Hey, sounds just like the jail in Nexus.

Hmm, actually, I guess that basically describes most of the MMORPG experience, so nevermind.

No, that describes the RPG experience.

Some people will never actually get the MMO part of it. There are communities, they are persistent, and they always have the game world and gameplay as a metaphor and reference point, which helps a lot for an online community. The only other such communities I really see lasting are the ones which are based around something like software development.

A community cannot last long if it literally has nothing to do but sit around and talk. I suspect it's got to do with having something to gather around. Physical communities are usually about location (towns/cities), or a campfire. On the internet, it's generally some sort of shared hobby. And while I do like to program, sometimes I want to just take a break and go kill something.

But, the game itself isn't that bad, and I really don't know how to fix it. Honestly, most of the RPG elements have to stay, even the ones everyone hates.

If Planetside was that good, they should've left it Planetside and left SWG as SWG.

Treat your fanbase with respect. Make upgrades incrementally and sanely.

Here's an example of when another game tried to pull this, and failed -- I hope I've got my history right:

Nexus is a very old game, even claims to be the first MMORPG. It's 2D enough that I wouldn't be surprised. After awhile, the company decided to make a new MMO, and wanted people to start playing it -- I think that was called Shattered Galaxies, but it might have been one of their other games. One of the things they did was to stop working so hard on Nexus -- for instance, to effectively make theft legal before implementing a proper exchange system. The reasoning was, when you drop an item, it asks "Which item do you want to drop and no longer own?"

It didn't work. They still probably have enough people playing their other games to pay for them, but people refused to leave Nexus for their other games. Instead, they simply left Nexus for awhile, until enough people were leaving that the company realized that giving customers what they want is a good thing.

So, they implemented the Exchange system, which makes it possible to buy and sell items without them being stolen. People came back to Nexus, and it has a pretty stable community now. People leave for months at a time, even years, but they always come back.

In Nexus, Rogues are the most overplayed class for completely different reasons.

First of all, it sounds cool, especially when you go and read in the description: "The magical fighter, unmatched in single combat."

Rogues do the most damage to a single target, knocking it down twice to three times as fast as a Warrior can. This is balanced by Warriors being capable of hitting in all four directions, and being able to actually take quite a few hits.

Rogues don't get hit much. When they do, it hurts a LOT, but usually they just don't.

Interestingly, Warriors are the ones who can detect traps, and there are a lot of them. However, traps are flawed in that most of the time, you can simply beat your way out of a trap. In fact, since most traps are ambushes, where a player gets surrounded by creatures, and Rogues have an "ambush" spell which teleports them to the opposite side of a creature, Rogues simply don't care about traps.

No, the time you want to detect traps is not to avoid them -- useless, because they can't be disarmed and only the Warrior can see them -- it's when you want to spring them, intentionally, to get a particular creature to spawn, or to get lots of creatures to spawn. For instance, the fastest way to collect Ambers is to take a Warrior into the Mythic Rabbit cave, have him (or her) find ambushes and spring them, and immediately slaughter the four creatures which spawn to surround them -- remember, Warriors have a four-way attack.

And the reason you want a Rogue in your group is to take care of single creatures, and because they aren't much of a burden -- lower max HP means it's easier to die, but it's also much easier to keep the Rogue healed, especially because if they get in trouble, they can jump out of the combat and wait for a heal. But you also want a Warrior, because they're easier to keep alive, even if it takes more mana to keep them healed, and they utimately end up dealing more wholesale damage. They also, typically, are the ones with the Taunt spell.

A full group works like this: a Poet and a Mage are up on a ledge which has only one way in, and the Poet has summoned a pet to block that way. Creatures won't aggro the pet, so it's effectively a wall, so your warrior doesn't have to taunt things away from the casters -- which is good, because Mages are at least as vulnerable as Rogues. Your Warrior is down in the pit, with a massive crowd of Mythic Rat Sentries attacking them. While there are subtler skills to being a Warrior, most of your time is spent simply holding spacebar (attack) and watching your health, so that you can use a Yellow Scroll to teleport you home if your Poet is about to let you die. The Poet and Mage usually cooperate on keeping everyone's Armor, Sanctuary, and Valor buffs on -- anything else is path-specific and entirely up to the fighters. The Mage's main job is to paralyze all creatures in the area -- which wears off after awhile. The Poet's job is to Scourge all the creatures, which doubles or triples the amount of damage dealt to them, and to keep everyone healed. And the rogue is running around the outside of the mob attacking the warrior (or not attacking, since they're all paralyzed), contributing damage and killing the weak rats (who run away) or any that get too close to the casters (since the pet won't last forever).

You can form a combination of just about any number of just about any of these, and it'll be effective. The MOST effective is a group of all four classes, but you can get away withoout a Poet if your Mage is good enough (they have their own heal spell). Rogues are nice to have around, and they're best for taking on a boss, but they're no substitute for a Warrior taking on a huge mob. Then too, Warriors can get surrounded, Rogues can't, and while the boss isn't dangerous at all, it's slower.

To me, that's good balance. A skilled player of any class is valuable enough in a unique enough way to feel worthwhile. I like the idea of TFA,

If you are looking for online gaming, there are a few smaller MMORPGs out there that have few controlls. There are several 2d ones out there that only require 4 directions, and left/right click.

Here are several of them:
Realm Online
http://www.realmserver.com/

Graal Online
http://www.graalonline.com/

Nexus: Kingdome of the winds
http://www.nexustk.com/
I am not sure the ease of use on all of them, but the first one in the list is point and click with turn based combat.

We bickered for a while, as opinionated gamers often do, until he realized that he basically agreed with me; the reason he preferred 2D was that he couldn't find a 3D game that was as high quality as some games like Nexus.

Nexus isn't very pretty(AT ALL. Massive amount of screenshots here.), so if graphics is one of your top needs in a game, it's not for you. BUT, it's well managed. The economy is perfectly balanced, the community is excellent, and the game is fun. Player and dev run events like carnages(deathmatches), elixir wars(capture the flag with bow and arrow), foxhunts(surround the fox on horseback), and a lot more, plus a huge cultural element including fanfiction, poetry and improv.

Nexus is probably one of the best MMORPGs out there; it's been around for awhile, but too few people have heard of it.

I, for one, am all for sweet, sweet simplicity.

I would so like that to be seen in the real world. I remember playing Nexus TK back in the day and the EULA was evil, basically said they could kill your account for no reason. Also, my yahoo junk account that I give out to websites when i sign up for stuff yesterday had zero bulk messages, today it had 62. I would kill to have this be real cause I dont want spam and I want to get back at evil compaines.

the best multiplayer game ever i think is QUAKE but i have fun with NEXUS too try that for RPG lover only =)

Still, at least it's better than the game the lets you cook

-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!