"They killed EQ2, I liked it but a patch that increased running speed also increased the running animation. It looked like a Charlie Chaplin movie."
Wow. No complaints about nerfing or bugs or the usual stuff. Just didn't like the run animation. Oh well I guess not being able to jump over a one inch obstacle killed Guild Wars for me. Each to his own.
"the fact that SoE has started to embrace real-world sales of in-game items just further cements this."
Station Exchange auctions are only on SPECIFIC EQ2 servers. If you don't want to buy/sell items and gold for real money play on the normal servers. In fact there are only 3 Station Exchange servers and they are prominantly labelled as such in the character creation screen. Playing on a normal server means no selling of items, accounts or gold except through the usual grey market (ige.com, ebay etc.) EXACTLY the SAME as WoW or any other MMO which prohibits this behavior. Arguably it's a better because people who want to spend real money for virtual items have a server to go and do it on. Meanwhile I can play on a normal server and not have Station Exchange affect my play at all.
No it isn't. You make the base texture with a painted on "bra" rather than nipples. It isn't an extra layer. This is exactly how the normal "naked" textures in WoW work - the nude textures were user creations for that game as well.
Yes they are both graphic novels by Alan Moore. I agree that V for Vendetta (although one could consider it fear mongering) is absolutely relevant today, just as it was when it was written. I suppose OP might consider 1984 to be outdated as well, but I believe the basic story of a government exerting total and brutal control over the population is a timeless warning message.
"I thought that everyone was too busy playing WoW to care about any other mmorpgs?"
You would think that from the press. However there are a lot of relatively sane people who left the game (and more every month). I know some friends who still play who have 3 or more level 60 characters. Others play but only at scheduled raid times. I loved WoW, but now I'm glad not to have to deal with the bs (instability, needs for ui mods, repetitive end game) any more.
I could go on and on about game mechanics I'd like to see implemented in MMOs - some realistic, some pie in the sky but that would ramble on forever. Some areas I would like to see improvement:
More meaningful PVP. Definately a hard one. Turbine looks like they might pull it off with Warhammer (building on DAOC's realm vs realm).
Improved Guilds. I think EQ2 has made some strides with guild leveling and status rewards as well as the recently released (and still somewhat broken) guild recruitment screen. If guilds need systems like DKP, there should be methods in game to easily track it.
Less need to repeat dungeons/instances. Sure I enjoy running a dungeon zone 2 or 3 times maybe even 5, but 20+? Hell no! WoW's run this zone 20 times to get an item so I can run the next zone 20 times to get an item ad infinitum approach to the end game leaves a lot to be desired.
Someone please get NPC faction right. I haven't played a game that does it well. Kill 900 million Furbolgs to get faction so I can buy a recipe. No thanks.
Rethink the combat. A lot of MMOs use a very conventional breakdown of class roles in combat. Fantasy, sci-fi and superheroes all implementing the standard class rolls of tank, melee dps, ranged dps, healer, buff and crowd control. I actually enjoy this structure (well hell I must or else I wouldn't play MMOs) but I'm sure there are other takes on MMO combat that could work well.
Better quests or at least more variety. EQ2 has a few quests that involve puzzle solving that are pretty neat. There has to be more than just kill X number, fedex, find the clicky item or kill X to get a drop. I realize these are done so often because they are easy to implement. Obviously puzzle quests or quests with scripted encounters take more time to develop.
In terms of straight up genres here's some stuff I'd like to see:
A Sci-fi MMO done right. Oddly enough SWG is probably the best mix of space ships and ground action except for the fact that it is so broken. Eve is great but I want to be able to land on planets and walk through alien cities.
I'll second the call for a Fall out style post-apocalyptic MMO. Auto Assault is neat, but once again I want to be able to get in and out of my vehicle in the main world. I'm looking for something that evokes the sense of loss of civilization in the same way as Charleton Heston screaming at the Statue of Liberty in the end of Planet of the Apes. I really believe a setting can be emotionally moving and still involve weird mutants that eat only human flesh.
A genre mashup like Shadowrun or the old roleplaying game Torg would be cool. Even something like the Chronicles of Amber.
An MMO where exploration and colonization are the focus. It would be cool to do a "new world" type of MMO where you could actually carve player cities out of the wilderness. Doing colonial imperialism in the historical sense might not be politically correct, but sci-fi colonization of a new planet could be. And if they added in methods to contact and cooperate with natives rather than just slaughter them that could be cool. The colony could start out in the least hostile part of the planet and as it "leveled" could expand to the more hostile reaches. Implementing things like terraforming would be difficult, but if someone could pull it off it would add a whole new dimension to the game.
A non-kiddie non-Disney cartoon MMO. Something like the pen and paper game Toon. Wild flexibility in character creation ala City of Heroes. Bizarro cartoon physics. Not anime, but more Warner Brothers meets Cool World with all of that over the top cartoon violence. Quests could involve vignettes playing on the recurring themes in cartoon shorts.
Just a few thoughts off the top of my head.
It's nice to see that we'll be getting Pirates based MMOs and Africa as well. I don't know how successful they will be but at least it's something different.
For games like WoW, I'm inclined to agree. For something like Second Life or Project Entropia real world cash made is certainly taxable income. It's not a far stretch to make the transaction that turns your virtual money into real money taxable just as any other Internet sales transaction is potentially taxable. The same goes for Sony's Station Exchange service. The real weirdness would be something like property taxes in Second Life. The total valuation of virtual property would have to be a hell of a lot higher for the IRS to actually consider doing something like that.
More mainstream. So like maybe BusinessWeek running a cover story on virtual economies? With the magazine cover being an image of Anshe Chung, one of Second Life's biggest realtors? The real question isn't the IRS's awareness - it's the amount of virtual money being turned into real money. I doubt you will see taxation of in game transactions, but sure real world money earned through virtual sales is taxable income. In the case of something like Second Life or Sony's Station Exchange you could argue that any state or federal Internet sales tax should apply.
"On a side note, notice how all of those games are FPS?"
Rise of Legends (RTS) is supported, as is City of Villains (MMO). I guess they figure the FPS visuals are probably a better showcase for the demos. Blammo! Crap flies everywhere. There was one tech demo that showed a game where throwing objects around was an inherent part of the gameplay. Kind of like Half Life 2 deathmatch on steroids. Interesting.
Why not just mod the Xbox and play NES, SNES games on there? Oh you want a legal way?
I'll be getting a "Wii" at some point and I do hope that Nintendo doesn't price gouge on the old games. Good N64 emulation would be cool but not if the games cost $30+.
"its fairly trivial to duplicate all of the elements of this hardware with fairly cheap off the shelf equipment."
I'm sure you can. So why not show me exactly the hardware and software components you could use?
"Spend some time build your own, dont speend that 100k because someone sells it well in a glossy mag"
Time = money. You spend money rolling your own in staff time. Then you need to maintain it. Rather than have a single source for support you have multiple vendors or open source software components to maintain. Something breaks and you don't have a single place to go for replacement parts or troubleshooting. Depending on the company you may not have staff to support an in house roll your own SAN solution. And you aren't looking at $100,000. I priced a 6TB SAN at $32,000 including a year of support. Apple's XSAN for a 3TB system runs less than $20,000.
The last storage proposal I heard was from Lefthand Networks for their iSCSI based SAN systems.
They basically sell a stack of drive arrays which you can configure as volumes as you see fit. Some notable features:
Ability to configure multiple RAID types within the stack. So you could have RAID 10 and RAID 0 within the same stack of drives depending on if you need speed or redundancy. The ability to stripe the data and parity across units in the whole stack (RAID 10 level 2 and 3). So if you have 3 4 drive systems in a stack a volume can be spread across the entire stack so that even 2 drive failures in a single unit of the stack cause no data loss or downtime. Storage provisioning that can grow and shrink (thin provisioning I think is the current catch phrase). So if you allocate 100GB to a department and they go over, you get notified but they don't get a disk full message. The storage is allocated automatically but can be reduced back down. Snap shots of changed data. You can set it to create a snap shot of the data at certain times of day allowing an employee to retrive a file from earlier if they accidentally hose it without the need to go to tape. You can even snap shot your data to a non-RAID volume (to conserve space) just to be used during a backup to tape. The snap shot is backed up and you don't worry about open file backup since the live volume is not the one being backed up. You can also do bit level replication over small data pipes to other location. Great for transfering data from remote offices back to a central SAN for transfer to tape. Also useful for offsite backup for critical data. Because it isn't doing full file replication you can do this over a T1 line. Another cool thing is that you can add on additional units to increase the overall storage capacity, but you don't need to create new network shares or volumes. You can expand your existing volumes so that it is transparent to the end user. Plus each unit is running 2 gigabit Ethernet NICS together increasing stack performance as you scale the size of the SAN. From the latest benchmarks I've seen, iSCSI appears to be getting pretty close to 2Gbps fiber channel in performance, and you don't need a special switch for it. In general iSCSI is starting to push SAN technology down into the small/medium business space. It definately isn't cheap but it is cost comparable to the 4TB of NAS (2 mirrored 2TB units in RAID 5) we had put in for our last round of storage upgrades 3 years ago - and has a ton more features. Lefthand definately isn't the only company in the iSCSI space by a longshot - but I did really like the feature set. The only thing I have a real issue for is the apparent current lack of an iSCSI iniator for Mac OSX. I'm still researching but I may have to lose some features and go with a fiber channel XSAN on the production side of the business.
I like CoH, but yes your points are valid. It's a pretty simple game and the fun comes from the combat. If you don't like the combat, well better not play because there isn't really anything else. I like WoW too but for reasons so many others have gone over in this thread I quit a few months ago. I spent a couple months in CoV after leaving WoW and it was refreshing to just log on and bash stuff up. I didn't have a lot of game time due to some big projects at work so I can't say I missed the deeper aspects of the genre.0 There are other MMOs out there that have a lot more depth however. I finally ended up in EQ2 after trying out several trials. The game has changed quite a bit since launch and I've been enjoying it a lot. Crafting certainly has more depth than in WoW and so does the guild structure (i.e. guild levels, banks, status rewards etc.).
"Blizzard, you executed very very well on game content by effectively removing much of the grind that other games are plagued with"
Definately true up until about lvl 55. From there on out it gets pretty repetitive. After all you'll need to repeat instances over and over to get your tier 0, then do the same in MC etc. Also if you want to do any high end crafting you'll need to grind for faction.
1. technical problems on my server 2. long queues even during non prime time playing hours (30-60 minutes) 3. lack of anything beyond scheduled raiding after hitting 60 (PVP at 60 is really only viable if your equipment is up to par)
However, I get a little sick and tired of people treating certain companies as being almost "beyond criticism" on Slashdot - Apple seems to be one of those, Blizzard appears to be another.
I agree completely. Somehow people get so caught up with something they like that they take any criticism as some sort of personal insult. I like a lot of Blizzard's games and enjoyed WoW quite a bit. I quit WoW because of the very real issues (both technical and game play) that it has and that Blizzard has not been able to fix.
"City of Heroes/Villains has TERRIBLE mapserver disconnects..."
At launch and after the first big patch that was true with CoH. Not true for CoV or CoH now for me. So you see just as with WoW there are a certain degree of these problems that are caused by the route between your computer and the server over the Internet. I consider CoH to be one of the stablest and most bug free MMOs I've played and encountered very few problems with lag (I'm also on a cable modem). But I don't doubt that you had problems that I didn't. I had quite a bit of problems with lag in WoW although bugs, server crashes/slowdown were more common issues for me than connectivity.
"but what you're looking at is the fundamental flaw in all current MMORPGs... they leverage a small amount of content with a gigantic dollop of tedium to keep people online as long as possible"
The interesting thing is that with an MMO like WoW (not just WoW, there are others similar) you actually get quite a bit of content in the lower levels. You then run into this brick wall. It really starts with the tier 0 sets in the level 55-60 dungeons. You get to spend a couple hours for an 8% chance for an item that you might have to roll against another player to get. The first couple of runs through an instance can be good fun. The 20th run usually is not. And that is just a prelude of the still to come ZG, MC, BWL, AQ experiences of the end game. I had 6 out of 8 pieces of tier 0 gear and had done some ZG runs when I decided to quit. The game that to me was great from lvl 1-60 (ok well maybe 1-55) offered nothing but huge, boring and repetitive time sinks. I really enjoyed exploring WoW and think it's a great game - but I'd rather be exploring new content in some other game than going for my 30th run in Undead Strath hoping that the Baron will be wearing my pants tonight.
"They can control the people creating accounts and logging on, but they never will actually disallow logins or signups."
Actually they did do this on the high pop realms that were the quickest to complete the AQ dungeon world event. The server I used to play on (Doomhammer) had this restriction imposed. At the time I quit the restriction was still in place. I have no idea if they removed it - I would imagine so. The server population was full and at the time I left you could expect a 30-60 minute queue wait (weekday 9pm Hawaiian time, so well past prime time on the East coast).
"After donating 100 hours of your life, nay, your leisure time, to WoW you are reluctant to simply walk away because of server issues that "might possibly someday not to far into the future maybe soon" be fixed on blizzard's end."
Too true. And it isn't just the technical problems. People keep playing despite gameplay issues. I know many people who hit level 60 and weren't hardcore raiders who kept rolling alts and running through the same content over and over again. Some of them eagerly reading each patch notes in hope of something else to do after 60. I know hardcore raiders that are pretty much the same way. Some of them play other games and only log on for the raids. Most of these people really don't sound like they enjoy it anymore. I think mostly what they do enjoy is the community. It's amazing how people can end up feeling "guilty" for leaving a game, not wanting to let down their guild mates. I enjoy MMOs but have learned to quit when the fun stops. Your time with an MMO is NOT an investment towards something that has a conclusion. There will always be something else you could do but the higher end stuff are usually just time sinks completely lacking in fun. For me the journey is the fun part and when I hit that level where the effort is greater than the entertainment I get back from it - I quit.
Slashdot Mirror
"They killed EQ2, I liked it but a patch that increased running speed also increased the running animation. It looked like a Charlie Chaplin movie."
Wow. No complaints about nerfing or bugs or the usual stuff. Just didn't like the run animation.
Oh well I guess not being able to jump over a one inch obstacle killed Guild Wars for me.
Each to his own.
"the fact that SoE has started to embrace real-world sales of in-game items just further cements this."
Station Exchange auctions are only on SPECIFIC EQ2 servers. If you don't want to buy/sell items and gold for real money play on the normal servers. In fact there are only 3 Station Exchange servers and they are prominantly labelled as such in the character creation screen. Playing on a normal server means no selling of items, accounts or gold except through the usual grey market (ige.com, ebay etc.) EXACTLY the SAME as WoW or any other MMO which prohibits this behavior.
Arguably it's a better because people who want to spend real money for virtual items have a server to go and do it on. Meanwhile I can play on a normal server and not have Station Exchange affect my play at all.
I just want to know how Samus stuffs all that hair in her helmet.
"Because that's one more layer being rendered."
No it isn't. You make the base texture with a painted on "bra" rather than nipples. It isn't an extra layer. This is exactly how the normal "naked" textures in WoW work - the nude textures were user creations for that game as well.
Yes they are both graphic novels by Alan Moore.
I agree that V for Vendetta (although one could consider it fear mongering) is absolutely relevant today, just as it was when it was written.
I suppose OP might consider 1984 to be outdated as well, but I believe the basic story of a government exerting total and brutal control over the population is a timeless warning message.
Agreed. Everytime they run an Escapist article someone posts a response like yours. At least they do have a text link on the page.
"I thought that everyone was too busy playing WoW to care about any other mmorpgs?"
You would think that from the press. However there are a lot of relatively sane people who left the game (and more every month). I know some friends who still play who have 3 or more level 60 characters. Others play but only at scheduled raid times.
I loved WoW, but now I'm glad not to have to deal with the bs (instability, needs for ui mods, repetitive end game) any more.
"looking at porn until first pull"
You stop looking at porn after the first pull??? I usually wait until the last pull before turning it off.
I could go on and on about game mechanics I'd like to see implemented in MMOs - some realistic, some pie in the sky but that would ramble on forever.
Some areas I would like to see improvement:
More meaningful PVP. Definately a hard one. Turbine looks like they might pull it off with Warhammer (building on DAOC's realm vs realm).
Improved Guilds. I think EQ2 has made some strides with guild leveling and status rewards as well as the recently released (and still somewhat broken) guild recruitment screen. If guilds need systems like DKP, there should be methods in game to easily track it.
Less need to repeat dungeons/instances. Sure I enjoy running a dungeon zone 2 or 3 times maybe even 5, but 20+? Hell no! WoW's run this zone 20 times to get an item so I can run the next zone 20 times to get an item ad infinitum approach to the end game leaves a lot to be desired.
Someone please get NPC faction right. I haven't played a game that does it well. Kill 900 million Furbolgs to get faction so I can buy a recipe. No thanks.
Rethink the combat. A lot of MMOs use a very conventional breakdown of class roles in combat. Fantasy, sci-fi and superheroes all implementing the standard class rolls of tank, melee dps, ranged dps, healer, buff and crowd control. I actually enjoy this structure (well hell I must or else I wouldn't play MMOs) but I'm sure there are other takes on MMO combat that could work well.
Better quests or at least more variety. EQ2 has a few quests that involve puzzle solving that are pretty neat. There has to be more than just kill X number, fedex, find the clicky item or kill X to get a drop. I realize these are done so often because they are easy to implement. Obviously puzzle quests or quests with scripted encounters take more time to develop.
In terms of straight up genres here's some stuff I'd like to see:
A Sci-fi MMO done right. Oddly enough SWG is probably the best mix of space ships and ground action except for the fact that it is so broken. Eve is great but I want to be able to land on planets and walk through alien cities.
I'll second the call for a Fall out style post-apocalyptic MMO. Auto Assault is neat, but once again I want to be able to get in and out of my vehicle in the main world. I'm looking for something that evokes the sense of loss of civilization in the same way as Charleton Heston screaming at the Statue of Liberty in the end of Planet of the Apes. I really believe a setting can be emotionally moving and still involve weird mutants that eat only human flesh.
A genre mashup like Shadowrun or the old roleplaying game Torg would be cool. Even something like the Chronicles of Amber.
An MMO where exploration and colonization are the focus. It would be cool to do a "new world" type of MMO where you could actually carve player cities out of the wilderness. Doing colonial imperialism in the historical sense might not be politically correct, but sci-fi colonization of a new planet could be. And if they added in methods to contact and cooperate with natives rather than just slaughter them that could be cool. The colony could start out in the least hostile part of the planet and as it "leveled" could expand to the more hostile reaches. Implementing things like terraforming would be difficult, but if someone could pull it off it would add a whole new dimension to the game.
A non-kiddie non-Disney cartoon MMO. Something like the pen and paper game Toon. Wild flexibility in character creation ala City of Heroes. Bizarro cartoon physics. Not anime, but more Warner Brothers meets Cool World with all of that over the top cartoon violence. Quests could involve vignettes playing on the recurring themes in cartoon shorts.
Just a few thoughts off the top of my head.
It's nice to see that we'll be getting Pirates based MMOs and Africa as well. I don't know how successful they will be but at least it's something different.
"Apparently a server can handle up to 40 realms"
Hmmm. I'm not sure I agree with your usage of the word "handle".
My experience would suggest this slight revision:
"Apparently a server cannot handle up to 40 realms"
Notably Second Life, Project Entropia and Everquest 2 servers that support Station Exchange.
For games like WoW, I'm inclined to agree. For something like Second Life or Project Entropia real world cash made is certainly taxable income. It's not a far stretch to make the transaction that turns your virtual money into real money taxable just as any other Internet sales transaction is potentially taxable. The same goes for Sony's Station Exchange service.
The real weirdness would be something like property taxes in Second Life. The total valuation of virtual property would have to be a hell of a lot higher for the IRS to actually consider doing something like that.
More mainstream. So like maybe BusinessWeek running a cover story on virtual economies? With the magazine cover being an image of Anshe Chung, one of Second Life's biggest realtors?
The real question isn't the IRS's awareness - it's the amount of virtual money being turned into real money. I doubt you will see taxation of in game transactions, but sure real world money earned through virtual sales is taxable income. In the case of something like Second Life or Sony's Station Exchange you could argue that any state or federal Internet sales tax should apply.
"On a side note, notice how all of those games are FPS?"
Rise of Legends (RTS) is supported, as is City of Villains (MMO). I guess they figure the FPS visuals are probably a better showcase for the demos. Blammo! Crap flies everywhere.
There was one tech demo that showed a game where throwing objects around was an inherent part of the gameplay. Kind of like Half Life 2 deathmatch on steroids. Interesting.
Why not just mod the Xbox and play NES, SNES games on there?
Oh you want a legal way?
I'll be getting a "Wii" at some point and I do hope that Nintendo doesn't price gouge on the old games. Good N64 emulation would be cool but not if the games cost $30+.
"its fairly trivial to duplicate all of the elements of this hardware with fairly cheap off the shelf equipment."
I'm sure you can. So why not show me exactly the hardware and software components you could use?
"Spend some time build your own, dont speend that 100k because someone sells it well in a glossy mag"
Time = money. You spend money rolling your own in staff time. Then you need to maintain it. Rather than have a single source for support you have multiple vendors or open source software components to maintain. Something breaks and you don't have a single place to go for replacement parts or troubleshooting. Depending on the company you may not have staff to support an in house roll your own SAN solution.
And you aren't looking at $100,000. I priced a 6TB SAN at $32,000 including a year of support. Apple's XSAN for a 3TB system runs less than $20,000.
The last storage proposal I heard was from Lefthand Networks for their iSCSI based SAN systems.
They basically sell a stack of drive arrays which you can configure as volumes as you see fit. Some notable features:
Ability to configure multiple RAID types within the stack. So you could have RAID 10 and RAID 0 within the same stack of drives depending on if you need speed or redundancy.
The ability to stripe the data and parity across units in the whole stack (RAID 10 level 2 and 3). So if you have 3 4 drive systems in a stack a volume can be spread across the entire stack so that even 2 drive failures in a single unit of the stack cause no data loss or downtime.
Storage provisioning that can grow and shrink (thin provisioning I think is the current catch phrase). So if you allocate 100GB to a department and they go over, you get notified but they don't get a disk full message. The storage is allocated automatically but can be reduced back down.
Snap shots of changed data. You can set it to create a snap shot of the data at certain times of day allowing an employee to retrive a file from earlier if they accidentally hose it without the need to go to tape. You can even snap shot your data to a non-RAID volume (to conserve space) just to be used during a backup to tape. The snap shot is backed up and you don't worry about open file backup since the live volume is not the one being backed up.
You can also do bit level replication over small data pipes to other location. Great for transfering data from remote offices back to a central SAN for transfer to tape. Also useful for offsite backup for critical data. Because it isn't doing full file replication you can do this over a T1 line.
Another cool thing is that you can add on additional units to increase the overall storage capacity, but you don't need to create new network shares or volumes. You can expand your existing volumes so that it is transparent to the end user. Plus each unit is running 2 gigabit Ethernet NICS together increasing stack performance as you scale the size of the SAN. From the latest benchmarks I've seen, iSCSI appears to be getting pretty close to 2Gbps fiber channel in performance, and you don't need a special switch for it.
In general iSCSI is starting to push SAN technology down into the small/medium business space. It definately isn't cheap but it is cost comparable to the 4TB of NAS (2 mirrored 2TB units in RAID 5) we had put in for our last round of storage upgrades 3 years ago - and has a ton more features.
Lefthand definately isn't the only company in the iSCSI space by a longshot - but I did really like the feature set. The only thing I have a real issue for is the apparent current lack of an iSCSI iniator for Mac OSX. I'm still researching but I may have to lose some features and go with a fiber channel XSAN on the production side of the business.
I like CoH, but yes your points are valid. It's a pretty simple game and the fun comes from the combat. If you don't like the combat, well better not play because there isn't really anything else.
I like WoW too but for reasons so many others have gone over in this thread I quit a few months ago.
I spent a couple months in CoV after leaving WoW and it was refreshing to just log on and bash stuff up. I didn't have a lot of game time due to some big projects at work so I can't say I missed the deeper aspects of the genre.0
There are other MMOs out there that have a lot more depth however.
I finally ended up in EQ2 after trying out several trials. The game has changed quite a bit since launch and I've been enjoying it a lot. Crafting certainly has more depth than in WoW and so does the guild structure (i.e. guild levels, banks, status rewards etc.).
"Blizzard, you executed very very well on game content by effectively removing much of the grind that other games are plagued with"
Definately true up until about lvl 55. From there on out it gets pretty repetitive. After all you'll need to repeat instances over and over to get your tier 0, then do the same in MC etc.
Also if you want to do any high end crafting you'll need to grind for faction.
The three reasons I quit:
1. technical problems on my server
2. long queues even during non prime time playing hours (30-60 minutes)
3. lack of anything beyond scheduled raiding after hitting 60 (PVP at 60 is really only viable if your equipment is up to par)
However, I get a little sick and tired of people treating certain companies as being almost "beyond criticism" on Slashdot - Apple seems to be one of those, Blizzard appears to be another.
I agree completely. Somehow people get so caught up with something they like that they take any criticism as some sort of personal insult.
I like a lot of Blizzard's games and enjoyed WoW quite a bit. I quit WoW because of the very real issues (both technical and game play) that it has and that Blizzard has not been able to fix.
"City of Heroes/Villains has TERRIBLE mapserver disconnects..."
At launch and after the first big patch that was true with CoH. Not true for CoV or CoH now for me. So you see just as with WoW there are a certain degree of these problems that are caused by the route between your computer and the server over the Internet. I consider CoH to be one of the stablest and most bug free MMOs I've played and encountered very few problems with lag (I'm also on a cable modem). But I don't doubt that you had problems that I didn't.
I had quite a bit of problems with lag in WoW although bugs, server crashes/slowdown were more common issues for me than connectivity.
"but what you're looking at is the fundamental flaw in all current MMORPGs ... they leverage a small amount of content with a gigantic dollop of tedium to keep people online as long as possible"
The interesting thing is that with an MMO like WoW (not just WoW, there are others similar) you actually get quite a bit of content in the lower levels. You then run into this brick wall. It really starts with the tier 0 sets in the level 55-60 dungeons. You get to spend a couple hours for an 8% chance for an item that you might have to roll against another player to get. The first couple of runs through an instance can be good fun. The 20th run usually is not. And that is just a prelude of the still to come ZG, MC, BWL, AQ experiences of the end game.
I had 6 out of 8 pieces of tier 0 gear and had done some ZG runs when I decided to quit. The game that to me was great from lvl 1-60 (ok well maybe 1-55) offered nothing but huge, boring and repetitive time sinks.
I really enjoyed exploring WoW and think it's a great game - but I'd rather be exploring new content in some other game than going for my 30th run in Undead Strath hoping that the Baron will be wearing my pants tonight.
"They can control the people creating accounts and logging on, but they never will actually disallow logins or signups."
Actually they did do this on the high pop realms that were the quickest to complete the AQ dungeon world event. The server I used to play on (Doomhammer) had this restriction imposed. At the time I quit the restriction was still in place. I have no idea if they removed it - I would imagine so.
The server population was full and at the time I left you could expect a 30-60 minute queue wait (weekday 9pm Hawaiian time, so well past prime time on the East coast).
"After donating 100 hours of your life, nay, your leisure time, to WoW you are reluctant to simply walk away because of server issues that "might possibly someday not to far into the future maybe soon" be fixed on blizzard's end."
Too true. And it isn't just the technical problems. People keep playing despite gameplay issues. I know many people who hit level 60 and weren't hardcore raiders who kept rolling alts and running through the same content over and over again. Some of them eagerly reading each patch notes in hope of something else to do after 60. I know hardcore raiders that are pretty much the same way. Some of them play other games and only log on for the raids. Most of these people really don't sound like they enjoy it anymore. I think mostly what they do enjoy is the community. It's amazing how people can end up feeling "guilty" for leaving a game, not wanting to let down their guild mates.
I enjoy MMOs but have learned to quit when the fun stops. Your time with an MMO is NOT an investment towards something that has a conclusion. There will always be something else you could do but the higher end stuff are usually just time sinks completely lacking in fun. For me the journey is the fun part and when I hit that level where the effort is greater than the entertainment I get back from it - I quit.