Nah, if I were on that server I would already have been banned.

Hey, would you mind giving me your impression of WoW?  What do you find interesting and why do you play?  Just a couple of sentences - thanks.

Thanks for taking the time.  Hmm.... I was turned off by the noobie task - kill big cats.  I don't like shoot-'em-ups.  I suck at it and it just doesn't appeal.  I researched and found this web site:

http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2005/08/designing_rewar.html

They know not only how to design rewards to maximize your addition, they also know what reward to assign to which type of player.  Don't know why I was surprised, the goal after all, is to get you to spend your money.

Woh, cool. You seen any good articles on this kind of research?

 Well, what I can say about WOW is that I left the game at the end of my free two weeks. It just never grabbed me. It took me about two days to reach the point where I was grinding for XP. Now all games have grinding but the ones that are worth sticking with are the ones where you get stuff fast enough during a grind that you don't much mind. Games like WOW, on the other hand make you hunt tiny animals just to rack up points but with very little payoff each time.

If you want a better MMO, I can't say enough good about EVE online.

First off, there is only one server. It has a whole galaxy modeled on it and there is very little difference between PVP and PVE areas. If you do PVP too close to the center of the galaxy, the in game police (called CONCORD) will off you and you will wake up wherever your clone is stored. But hey, if that is what you want, the devs are fine with people trying.

The closer one gets to the edge of the galaxy, the less strict they are about PVP. But also, the PVE is still there and becomes progressively more dangerous as well. Honestly, the edge of the galaxy is so dangerous from the PVE, that the PVP is, if anything, far less as only the most advanced players can survive out there.

They even made an unkillable BOSS out on the edge. It is called MOTHER. MOTHER is actually a colony of self aware drone ships that have docked together. MOTHER is actually far larger than the death star. In order to keep supplied with the consumables that it needs, there is a constant army of drones swarming around docking and undocking. If you even try one shot across the bow, you will be autotargeted.

You will be followed anywhere, even into the core where CONCORD is the strongest. Sure, if you make it that far (and I don't think that anyone ever has) CONCORD will destroy whatever shoots at you but you will still be marked for death.

Midway between the center and the edge is the area where most of the cool PVP action really happens. Each group of players has to defend themselves from other groups and wars often break out. Smaller groups often commit piracy. Occasionally, larger groups will go head to head for a big war. A couple of times, one of the larger groups has committed industrial espionage and stolen the assets of another large group.

One famous case was where a group that was originally about a hundred players did not notice that they doubled in size over a couple of months. Heck but they let a few of the newer players have more advanced roles in the group. That was really stupid of them. They were being colonized by another group of similar size and once they were fully infiltrated, they were rendered bankrupt in less than an hour. They had been depending on the ability of the various members to provide enough income to keep the group together. Sadly for them, part of what was stolen were many of the very ships that were essential to keeping the income level high enough to remain in existence.

Without those ships, they could not produce the income needed to hold together and since the bank accounts had also been raided, they did not have the cash reserves to buy more of the ships that they needed.

Since this was done in a lower security solar system, the devs ruled it valid PVP action.

Also, you simply cannot max out a character. The skill tree is so large that it would take over twenty years to master every possible skill. Thus every character is specialized for, at most, two or three roles. Even three roles would take like a year or more to fully master.

Then, there is the economy. The devs have pretty much prevented gold farming by making everything possible for real players who want to do something in particular. Not to say that someone is not trying it all the time but it is kind of pointless as there are so many players doing each possible job as to make the deal not worth the hassle.

Heck but if you want to pay for your game time with the in game currency (ISK), you can do that. Not as a noob. Game time is so expensive that you need to be a fairly advanced player to do that. Pretty much, if you want to do that, you need to plan on being in game for a couple of hours a night for a year just to get to the level where you can afford to do that. Even then, you would have to remain on the two hours per night deal in order to make that kind of cash.

Actually, most people do not do that as there are plenty of expensive things to spend your money on. If you can afford to play for free, then you could also afford to be the sole owner of a permanent space station large enough to collect docking fees that almost pay for the station. Mind you, you will not get those fees unless you set up in an area where there are good enough reasons for real players to want to use your facilities.

Mostly, the privately owned space stations are really done by groups of at least five players and are rather more modest as far as station facilities are concerned. Typically, there will be a basic frame with a module or two for each player, selected by the skills that that player has. Also a group hangar for ships that players are willing to share and a group storage module so that each player can share resources based on the specific skill profile (for example, I am a great miner but a lousy refiner).

Yea you have to play a while to get what all you can do. I had a friend try it and quit in 5 mins saying it suk'd. It's like watching the opening credits to a movie and walking off. If you had waited 10 minutes you might have been interested in the show.

I ran across a grandfather, father son group the other day. I have personally know an "Everquest Family" Mom dad and 3 kids all played everquest together.

I knew a little old lady thay played Ultima Online years ago, she was in a wheelchair but said that playing the game made her feel like she could do something. She basicly hung around this cliff area with some snake mobs and healed people while conversing.

I am a bit anti-social and since I discovered mmo's I have also saved a lot of $.

15$ a month is very cheap entertainment as compared to buying dvd's, ps3 games bar hopping etc.

     That is a very good link,on that page, I followed another link that is called "What is game addiction ? ",from the International Hobo -- blog.ihobo.com/2011/01/what-is-game-addiction.html

That was not actually the one that I had in mind but it was epic in it's own right.

What went down was that there was an alliance that had more like 3,000 members and many of the game devs were part of it as well. It was always suspicious that they had devs among them and all the best gear in the game but nobody could get a hand up on them because they were too big to take down.

Eventually, they tried to declare war on any player out on the edge of the galaxy. The war went on for a couple of years with the enemies being thrown out of their home star systems and having to fight to get them back.

Along the way, BoB had to switch alliances around a few times to make sure that they did not lose too much territory themselves. Eventually, BoB was actually pushed out of the region they had started in and were, in fact, pushed half way around the galaxy. Then they fought back and eventually got back to where they had started.

Finally, one of the groups in the war figured how to finish the whole mess. Actually, it was one person from that group.

So what happened next is that this guy created a second account so that the devs would not see him as anything but just some really ambitious player. He built up the character and moved out to the edge of the galaxy right in the area where BoB was active. He asked to join the parent group of the alliance and was accepted.

After that, it took several months of stealth playing but he kept getting promoted. Eventually, he got to the top rank possible and struck. Using his position, he was able to disband not only the main group but all of the sub alliances. He transferred as much cash as he could and when the alliance was destroyed, they lost sovereignty over the systems that they controlled. Then he registered a new player corporation called Band of Brothers with the same stock ticker symbol, thus preventing the name from being picked up by any of the survivors.

Along the way, a lot of people lost a lot of other investments. The people who owned the largest ship yards got screwed out of a lot of cash as you basically can't build the largest ships unless you own at least sovereignty over your local star system. Thus, all the hulls that were in progress were automatically mothballed. Tens of billions of ISK (game cash which is the international symbol of the Icelandic Kroner, which is where the company is headquartered) were lost just on the capital ships under construction.

Playing and chatting in game I actually see some hope for the youth. A lot of people on wow apparently don't believe in a god and write it off as stupid and not even worth discussing. Perhaps this is the attitude that will work out better in the end but I still like to rag on the religious.