Back then you couldn't take cover anywhere, you had to find something to hide behind, or a wall to stand against. I'm guessing when they changed it to a "cover anywhere" system, they got rid of wall cover.

Did you ever try There.com back when it had a pretty big player base, or SecondLife? Those are straight sandbox games: no quests, no levels, no XP, player built structures and content all over the world. There.com had racing tracks and pretty good physics on the vehicles, but like with every sandbox, when the playerbase starts to dwindle, so does the content, since it's all player driven. They closed down a few years ago, and just recently started back up with an invitation only server. Theme parks give players direction and objectives. They guide you from point A to point B and give you something to accomplish and shoot for. They are also a big draw for the solo players, since it's tough to solo in a sandbox that's player driven. I'm still thinking a good mixture of sandbox and themepark is necessary.

Yeah I agree with that as well, I played GTA4 for quite a while, and 90% of it was just driving around, running people over, seeing how many cops I could fight off, driving motorcycles into buildings, you know, the typical GTA stuff. I don't think that sort of gameplay would translate very well into an MMO, I think that's what they tried to do with APB. Never tried it though, so don't quote me on that.

I agree, but a large part of the modern MMO community "grew up" with WoW, it was their first, it's what they expect. Some may like it, but I think it would be a small percentage. Now if you dropped someone into a sandbox who has never played an MMO before, I bet they'd love it.

Exactly how Zynga works, except with micro transactions. OT: Nope, sub runs out tomorrow, don't plan on coming back

True sandbox MMOs are "Player Driven". They require a thriving community of players willing to sponsor events and keep the economy in check. All gear is crafted, all quests are made up on the spot by the players (Lets go kill <some named mob>), the reward you got was having fun hanging out with your friends. Today's MMO player can't handle any of that, they need to be told what to do and where to go by NPCs. They need instant gratification and shiney loot for completing a quest.

IMO, gear shouldn't make that much of a difference. It should be enough to make me want it, or grind for it, but it shouldn't be a vorpal blade that beheads other players with one swing. It should look awesome, and make other players go "ooo what is that?", because you know, it's rare.

I miss rare random drops. Everyone has to have that rare random drop of course, so they go grind some mob for 20 hours straight until it drops, which causes massive complaining in the forums by people who don't have 20 hours to grind on a mob, which causes the developers to introduce a bartering system.... The drop was supposed to be RARE in the first place, meaning it's original intent was that only a few "lucky" people would have that item.

And of course, 90% of all facts are made up on the spot. I'll admit, I'm a part of the "mmo hoppers" who go from one MMO to the next, there are quite a few of us. I subscribe for one month, and play the game until I get bored with it. In all honesty, I played for 2 weeks, didn't even make it to level 50. The rest of my sub time has been used to browse the forums and see what's new. That's just wrong IMO. I spent almost a full year playing LotRO before I got bored with it. Spent 6 months playing Rift, almost a year in AoC, a year in Vanguard, forever in EQ and SWG. I'm not bashing the game, telling people to leave and go back to WoW or whatever, I'm just enjoying reading the forums. Some of you guys are pretty funny.

As the previous poster mentioned, ALL MMOS ARE TIME SINKS. Some are just more "lively" with it. The time sinks in this game are boring...ZzZzzz Even something as simple as gathering crafting materials can keep people around, I want to see flashy lights and colors when things happen, maybe something other than a tricorder that scans all harvestable nodes. I want some sounds that don't cut out everytime I move 2 inches in one direction. P.S.> Where's my damn crafting workorder quests?

I tried the Tera closed beta last weekend, it was fun and all, but they had it capped at 22 with no PvP allowed. They had 2 servers up with a limit of 1 character per server. Hard to say if I'll like it or not. I've beaten the D3 beta on every character class, it's fun for a bit but I'm looking for a new MMO home, so I don't think I'll be buying that one. I'm really interested to see how GW2 pans out, it looks good, but looks can be deceiving.

Same here, I think it was a bad decision to release an unfinished "Legacy System". Why roll alts now when we can roll "Legacy Characters" once the system is in place. My sub runs out tomorrow, so I'll just check back from time to time to see what they added. Plenty of other games out there to play until then.

It's not just a river in Egypt.

I was about to mention this too, Ensign Temple says that she used a force trick, she's just powerful enough to get in trouble. "If the Sith knew, they'd have her killed."

I have seen that, you have to have your weapon out to get some animation going, otherwise you look like a statue.

Oh yes, of course, and the game has cross server LFG tools, it's called a forum.

Aion for one, you can buy custom idle animations from a vendor in that game. Rift has random idle animations, as well as Tera and LotRo, I'm sure there are plenty others.

/who Fleet doesn't do anything, in fact /who <name> doesn't do anything, /who just pops the box up, you have to type fleet up in the text box at the top of the Who window.

Unsubscribed

Simple MMO programming logic, they probably changed the code to adjust how speeder bikes look, which of course affected stripper poles.

Haven't reached 50 yet on any of my characters, highest is level 39, but I'm bored with the gameplay. I thought Tera would be fun (tried the closed beta over the weekend), since the combat has collision detection, but the quests are pretty much the same as every other game. Kill 10 X, collect 10 Y. I think I'm bored with MMOs overall. Still looking for someone to bring something new to the table, other than the same type of gameplay with a fancy wrapper. In the end, I just want to have fun playing a game, and I haven't found that here.

TOR will be another LotRO, or Rift. Good games, but no where near the subscription base of WoW. WoW is a strange beast, people have so much time invested in it that they don't want to start over with a new MMO. It's not that other MMOs are bad, it's just that WoW was the first theme-park MMO with mass appeal. It would be interesting to see what would happen if Blizzard decided to turn off the servers, I wonder which game people would gravitate to, or if they would just give up on the MMO genre.

I don't have any overall "numbers", but in my experience, the guild that I started playing this game with last month are no longer logging in because they are bored with it. We haven't even made it to end-game, our highest character in the guild is level 40. I don't know, I want to enjoy this game, I really do.

I would have said Yes up until about a week ago. I am currently the only person online in my guild, everyone else got bored with it and just quit playing. So as of right now, my answer is No. I'm not really sure why that is either, I really want to enjoy this game, but I find myself cringing at the thought of rolling another character and going through those questing areas again.

I started playing last month with a group of friends, we created a guild, made a group with all 4 classes, and we made it to level 40ish. As of about a week ago, I'm the only one left playing. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's because I don't feel like I've had to invest time or effort into my character at all. I wanted to level a crafter and play the auction house, but with abundant commendations and no one using the auctions, there's nothing to do there. I tell my guildies, "Hey I'm making us all new armoring, I just need a little more material", and they reply "Don't worry about it, we already bought armoring with commendations, as well as barrels/hilts/mods/enhancements" Anyways, this game really isn't that fun when playing solo, so I'm probably just going to take a break until next patch or something when my guild decides to start playing again. Hopefully BioWare devs read some of these posts and figures something out to keep people playing this game.