Why? Because, as far as I can tell, I’m playing a single-player game. I see other players’ cars cruise past once in a great while, I’ve met a few people in towns, and I got invited into a guild by a guy I haven’t seen since. Once in a while I see something said in chat, though I’m usually too busy making things blow up to reply. But other than that, my server (Carnage) seems to be empty. I’m not paying fifteen bucks a month to play by myself.

There seem to be two major things missing: One, the chat is in a microscopic font, there seems to be no way to make it not fade out and need to be re-clicked, and it tends to get flooded with game messages. If there’s a fix for any of this I haven’t found it yet, which means that neither will a lot of other players. Two, there seems to be no viable player market system, unlike WoW’s Auction House, DAoC’s vendors on every porch, even Shadowbane’s town merchants. So, I either have to use items myself or sell them to NPCs, and so does everyone else. No communication and no economy makes it hard for a community to coalesce.

All in all, blowing things up is fun, the quests seem to be fairly entertaining, and if it was a single-player game, especially a PS2 game, I’d be happy as a clam. But a multi-player game with very few other players, interaction with those players seemingly made as difficult as possible, and no economic system to speak of, feels like it has gaping holes in it. Player perception? Probably. But damn, it seems empty in there.

I’ll probably wander back to WoW eventually. Yeah, PUGs suck. Thanks to my RL commitments and schedule, no raid guild would have me — they want people who can, y’know, be on for raids. So I drift around essentially guildless, joining the occasional PUG, saving my money to hire a raiding guild to give me a tour of MC some day, and wishing that Blizzard had lived up to their promise of not just making EQ with the serial numbers filed off.

Well, that and some version of not being evil. I’ve got issues with a game company that will forcibly rename a character named Artorius (a friend of mine) but leave all the Chuck Norris clones, DBZ characters, and random strings of letters used by the non-English-speaking gold farmers intact … or, for that matter, allow those farmers to farm unimpeded for months on end, but ban legitimate players for minor rules infractions. And yes, there’s the incident that Freakazoid referred to. I was on the server that got the unwelcome … gift. What Blizzard did wasn’t the worst part — it was the way they lied about what happened, why it happened, and what they were or were not going to do about it.

Hey, Scott, can you make them fix AutoAssault? I’d like a resizable chat window, please, a larger font, a way to turn off the text fade, a “scroll all the way down” button, some kind of market or merchant system, and some reason for housing to exist other than to be able to stand in an empty room and look confused. Maybe we could buy an extra locker to put in it? Oh, and a pony.

How did you fix your video card problem with Eve? It’s happening to me too and I’m trying to get all I can out of my free 15 days (only 7 left!).

Oh, and there is no joy in BRD. Ironically I’ve enjoyed my solo experiences there (Plugger, Burning Essence, Incendius), but otherwise there is nothing to be found but frustration and sorrow.

I suppose that’s more polite than “selfishness”, which is what it really is most of the time. I can understand if there’s an emergency of somesort, but selfish reasons like stopping before you level to 40 just so you can pwn in 30-39 BGs is not something you want to happen when your goal is to work together to finish a quest.

I blame humanity for being cruel, heartless beasts. But I also blame developers equally for not even trying to work around our evil nature.

Sunken Temple is not aimed at high 40′s players. More like low to mid 50′s. If you couldn’t clear this dungeon until level 57, with what sounds like 4 pimped out level 60′s holding your hand, maybe it is yourself you are describing with “People in \’e2\’80\’9cpugs\’e2\’80\’9d simply don\’e2\’80\’99t know how to play. I mean, they\’e2\’80\’99re so bad at the game that *I* know that they\’e2\’80\’99re bad at the game.”

I’m fairly certain it involves bunnies in some way.

This describes my mmorpg philosophy right down to the T. But add to the mix jumping from one game to another and then back again. I have so many low level characters spread out over so many different games it isn’t funny. I’ve only made it to the “end game” in one game ever. In EQ I rolled a cleric because my new guild on the new server of Stromm only had one. I was needed, so I leveled up. I made it to 65, got many AAs, made it to 70, got more AAs. I still raid with her today. But my other time is spent trying to unlock the secret formula for true happiness…..