Looking for a new MMO...

[Andrew B.]

I play Eden Eternal, which is free-to-play. The game is decent, but Kara might have a problem with it because it's an Aeria game. I will mention that most of the item mall is cosmetic, rather than a nessicity, though.

[AccountingDrone]

AD - I last played Aion in Spring of this year. Still buggy as all hell, and NCSoft was still living up to its reputation of pretty much ignoring anything the US fanbase had to say. Sad, as it has a lot of potential. As for the flight timers -- you just gotta upgrade your wings as you go along, and grab/craft potions that increase your flight time & chug them as needed. There are also ways to move faster in the Abyss, the one (massive) area where flight is actually required to get around the zone, rather than just "something cool to do" or a shortcut.

One of the reasons I no longer beta for NCS is the nonresponse to bug reports. Can't remember the name of the location offhand, but it is where you get your first pair of wings, and one part is flying to the top of a gate, there was a massive bug where you would fly over a particular spot, and the wings would vanish and you would fall. We bugged it at least a dozen times over almost 2 months and they never fixed it. Sort of makes me want to make an account and run through until I hit that quest to see if they ever fixed it.

I have to say, I loved the graphics for it. There were some lovely areas and creatures in game.

Crafting, atrocious. Not able to gather any materials from monsters once you hit a certain level because ten levels past the monster's level you got NO DROPS (except maybe quest ones if you had the quest to do it.) With all the freaking fluxes you needed it was impossible to make yourself anything, coupled with the "Oh, if you don't crit you get complete and utter crap" and then tri-oupled with "Oh, and by the way, in order to make the good stuff, you need to crit on your basic mats recipes."

Deity, I hated that crafting system with a passion. It's so nice that TERA, which had the same exact crafting system as Aion in Korea, took it for the US/EU release and--- did absolutely NOTHING to it, despite it being pretty much one of the Top 5 things that people complained about in Aion and told TERA devs about. *ugh*

Crafting is one of the areas that either a game gets right or it is horribly wrong.

I'm ... going to say I'll never play GW2 or Aion, because NCSoft is in the process of "sunsetting" City of Heroes. ;_; Great game, big audience, still profitable after eight freaking years, and they trash it so they can focus on games that attract their Korean audience. I sort of don't trust them to not pull the rug out from under me, you know?

I'm getting into WoW. I love being a goblin.

I have to wonder WTF they were thinking with the CoH thing . That seems to have a serious number of gamers seriously pissed off. Even if it isn't making huge profits, as long as they are breaking even I don't see why they needed to drop the game at all. The more games a company has running that people like tends to make a gamer look at other games that company has that they might like to play.

I liked WoW, it was the jackass morons playing it that drove me away. I can only take so much barrens garbage, or attemtpting sexting or other forms of abusive play.

I did notice that I am now getting diablo phishing attempts, which is always funny as I have never played diablo at all, and have never had an account to compromise [though apparently I am trying to sell this nonexistant account!] Funky thing, it is coming to an account totally unrelated to the account I game with, so there is no link between this account and the one I register on forums with.

[EricKei]

"sunsetting" City of Heroes. ;_; Great game, big audience, still profitable after eight freaking years, and they trash it so they can focus on games that attract their Korean audience.

Case in point. See my previous post regarding how they treat the US audience. I haven't played any of their games in some time now.

I simply deal with it by giving what money I *do* spend on MMOs to other companies.

For the EVE players -- have any of you tried DUST 514? (it may still be in beta) -- It's a PS3-only free game that lets you (literally) play as a fighter pilot/trooper in the EVE universe...As in, Eve players can hire you/your corp for missions and you actually have direct control as if you were both playing the same game, what you do directly affects the fights they're involved in, etc. I plan to look into it once I get my PS3 fixed, I was just curious.

The FtP model it uses apparently uses both ISK (which you earn in-game and can bs used much as it is used in EVE), and Aurum, or store credits, which are purchased with with cash but can only be used to buy cosmetic gear.

[Aethian]

One of the reasons I no longer beta for NCS is the nonresponse to bug reports. Can't remember the name of the location offhand, but it is where you get your first pair of wings, and one part is flying to the top of a gate, there was a massive bug where you would fly over a particular spot, and the wings would vanish and you would fall. We bugged it at least a dozen times over almost 2 months and they never fixed it. Sort of makes me want to make an account and run through until I hit that quest to see if they ever fixed it.

BTW...they didn't.

[AmbrosiaWriter]

Well, the important thing to remember about NCSoft is that they published Guild Wars 2, but they did not develop it. They also don't handle bug reports and fixes.

It's ArenaNet. They've already been on the ball fixing all the bugs and exploits that have cropped up with the official launch. Bugs I've heard of or reported (along with other players I assume) have been fixed within a few days, at the longest a week if it was a troublesome. They do keep the playerbase informed about what's going on though.

I believe with Aion, NCSoft didn't only publish it, but had a team of developers working on them as well. (For Westernization.)

Also, I've been trying to find hard numbers where CoH was still profitable until the end. I find reports of sales but that's not necessarily profits. It could very well be that, although popular, it wasn't profitable anymore. Or, it could be that CoH had a modest profit, but Paragon Studios (which was the development team working on it) wasn't profitable at all, perhaps chewing up all of CoH's profit and requiring some money sink.

It was a fun game, but I'm not finding the numbers or evidence that it was profitable (or profitable enough) to keep it running.

Edit to Add: NCSoft is a crappy publishing company, I will admit that. They really drop the ball when they have any kind of hand in the actual development or path the game will take (like taking Korean MMOs and "westernizing them.") However, I don't think they are stupid enough to close down a game that is still making them profits. :/

[Andara Bledin]

Honestly, this is a lousy time to shutter a game, what with the economy basically flat for the last couple of years; if the game wasn't a huge money-sink, they lost a huge amount of player goodwill by dumping it.

Also, I honestly think they mismanaged the monetization of it; they could have dropped the subscription price to something nominal, like $5/month or the like and made bank just on the people who wanted to play with the character generator and RP at the club. Speaking of, I am going to miss the character generator the most - 11 years later and I've still yet to see anything even close.

^-.-^

[Fire_on_High]

Otherwise, I'm back in to playing WoW. Again. With yet more new characters. Nekojin and I have a pair of Pandaren monks named Pankration and Pandacea; he's going with the DPS spec, and I'll be taking the healing spec.

That...is freakin awesome. Sheer brilliance.

I played it straight on all 3 of my monks simply because I knew everyone and their cousin would be doing pun names. Just had to be the oddball, really :-)

Now for the OP...if it wasn't going under, I'd recommend you look at City of Heroes. If someone picks it up, which at this point admittedly would take a miracle on par with the Second Coming, give it a go. It's MMO done juuuuust right.

WoW is good also, but lately people have been utter douches, even on "the nice servers". Kinda mind boggling, but you've seen me rant about it on FB a time or two.

Not an MMO, but tried Minecraft? It'll suck your soul, and might appeal to the explore/achieve drive, if that's how you work.

Also, I've been trying to find hard numbers where CoH was still profitable until the end. I find reports of sales but that's not necessarily profits. It could very well be that, although popular, it wasn't profitable anymore. Or, it could be that CoH had a modest profit, but Paragon Studios (which was the development team working on it) wasn't profitable at all, perhaps chewing up all of CoH's profit and requiring some money sink.

It was a fun game, but I'm not finding the numbers or evidence that it was profitable (or profitable enough) to keep it running.

Edited to add: Server pops plummeted hardcore after the announcement and they cut off the cash shop. We have been halfway expecting they'll point to the time AFTER the announcement as proof of non-viability.

[Andara Bledin]

That...is freakin awesome. Sheer brilliance.

I played it straight on all 3 of my monks simply because I knew everyone and their cousin would be doing pun names. Just had to be the oddball, really :-)

A large percentage of our MOG characters have horrible groaner names.

Mine are usually more references than puns, his are more towards the punny. His main in CoH was a huge model stone/stone tanker named Edifice Wrecks. One of my upper villains was a rad/rad corruptor with a fae look named Polonium Pixie. Our paired characters are almost always the worst. In WoW, we have a Gnome duo named Pixelline (mine) and Voxelline (his), with him using the line, "Just call me Lady Vox for short. Cause I am." That, and the characters we have for the purpose of collecting battle pets (our main server is PvP - Chromaggus, so we have pet hunting alts on a PvE server - Doomhammer) belong to our own guild, called the Gilneas Gym; I wanted a Pokemon reference that wasn't too obvious.

^-.-^