The primary difference between a cult and a religion is simple. If someone leaves a cult, for whatever reason, the leaders encourage the remaining members to ostracize that person and their family (if they left as well). A religion generally does not and should not follow this pattern.
I suppose this wouldn't be as much of an issue if Verant designed the game with a more functional economy, which has gotten better, but also it is still absurdly expensive to buy items from NPC vendors and some items are also impossible to get due to the spawning of the creature that drops the item. Verant has made attempts to fix this, but there are still many things wrong. I suppose my greatest peave is that there are many good solutions for these problems from the EQ community but Verant doesn't seem to want to implement them. Ultimately it is the player that decides how the game is run, but Verant seems determined to run things their way regardless of how people feel. While it hasn't cost them much, as soon as another game comes out that is better and pays more attention to the player, people will leave faster than rats on a sinking ship. Just ask anyone that came over from Meridian 59.
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The primary difference between a cult and a religion is simple. If someone leaves a cult, for whatever reason, the leaders encourage the remaining members to ostracize that person and their family (if they left as well). A religion generally does not and should not follow this pattern.
I suppose this wouldn't be as much of an issue if Verant designed the game with a more functional economy, which has gotten better, but also it is still absurdly expensive to buy items from NPC vendors and some items are also impossible to get due to the spawning of the creature that drops the item. Verant has made attempts to fix this, but there are still many things wrong. I suppose my greatest peave is that there are many good solutions for these problems from the EQ community but Verant doesn't seem to want to implement them. Ultimately it is the player that decides how the game is run, but Verant seems determined to run things their way regardless of how people feel. While it hasn't cost them much, as soon as another game comes out that is better and pays more attention to the player, people will leave faster than rats on a sinking ship. Just ask anyone that came over from Meridian 59.