Dalantia

I am actually going to apologize, rereading back on the thread. I misread your post as a declaration of fiat that WoW was flatly a horrible grind at all times instead of a "This is what I experienced when I played the game" post.

My experience with both Cities and WoW was radically different. In the name of full disclosure, my first 50 (blue, obviously) was roughly in the I6 era, and I started that character during the head start. My second (a red) was after Weapon Customization. Conversely, in WoW, it took me relatively little time to go from 1 to 70 (I played during BC), especially compared to Cities - roughly 6 months real time, and that was with frequent breaks to level professions, RP (oh no I'm from Virtue run!), and the like, and at that point, I still wound up doing server firsts (our server opened with Burning Crusade). The grind showed up in spots (30, mid-50s) but never so bad that I was tempted to quit. I was foraging for quests in places, but I never had problems finding groups when I wanted them. I was also fairly well connected, though.

I find that even as Cities has improved its leveling curve, so has WoW, though in different ways and different places, but this is my opinion.

At the time I was grinding to 50 as a major thing, the Kheldian unlock was at that point and I was interested in the new AT. (Yes, I am aware it is changing.) The other time I did it as a major thing, it was the VEAT unlock. Beyond that, in general? It's the next power, the next thing to slot, the next minion, etc, or merely just the act, the zen of the unfocused grind that all MMOs can be and Cities often exemplars, especially with newspapers - achievement and socialization, mowing through critters with shiny powers, talking to compatriots and watching numbers increase.

I will object to referring to a discussion thread as a poll. It's a discussion thread, it isn't a concerted effort to garner opinions from the playerbase as a whole. Yes, the people that frequent S&I took sides against it, but that's just a very, very tiny subsection of a self-selecting group of people.

I didn't miss the nerf. I'm pointing out that if you're applying the same standards to Cities, people hate the early and midgame just as much here as they do in WoW. I'm also adding that the Cities devs will wait for a while in order to get their own patching process done instead of bringing servers down for a hotfix, unless something is exploding the servers.

QQ is intended to be the face for tears, I believe. In general, these days, it's apparently used when mocking someone who is complaining about/disagrees with someone, no matter syntax.

Call BS if you like, but it is what it is. Unless you're factoring PLing into the equation, at which point you're skewing your statistics so hard in Cities' favor it's not even funny (and even going so far as to compare apples to oranges - while Cities devs are great, they don't kill 1-50 in 4 hours exploits nearly as quickly as Blizzard does, because Blizzard has a habit of bringing servers down for that level of exploitation, last I checked). Of course, it could pretty easily be argued that comparing newspaper grinds to WoW questing is also apples to oranges.

And why would you call BS on the Dungeon Finder? It exists, it works, and I've found it to be handy for when I want to team, even on the legion I have sub-60.

WoW's grind is a lot, lot shorter than the average character's grind in Cities, actually, and with the Dungeon Finder, teams pop up a lot more frequently..

Or tag the portal (which had roughly boss-level HP), and kill the Officer (who was squishy). the portal despawns, you get the xp for it, you disengage from the spawned critters.

The Madame has -huge- resistance to everything that isn't the Psychic cleaver. otherwise, she's a Dark Mistress with her stuff scaled up to EB/AV.

Inherent +acc and more varied damage types, AoE, and area control than Archery (the nearest comparison), from where I'm sitting.

So, basically, you don't get it and from your conveyed tone, are unwilling to get it. That's fine, but say so.

I'm going to try to put my feelings into text, but I'm probably using wrong words, but I don't have a thesaurus and dictionary handy and it's late enough in the evening for me that my vocabulary is not going to be subtle. Bear with me.

I would mostly lose trust, I suppose. Considering how they've stated that the stuff in the vet rewards would remain exclusive to them, and that they had no plans of pulling the plug on it anytime soon, I'd most certainly feel like I'd been bait-and-switched considering that a lot of my plans to cancel even back when I was primarily playing other MMOs were shrugged off by the vet system: "I'll be back someday, and I can afford it. Might as well hang on to it."

It sounds like exaggerated gravitas, I think, but that's not the feeling I'm trying to convey. (I told you my vocabulary was hostile to my ability to convey my feelings. *laugh*) It's more like "Okay, so they don't care about the vet program enough to keep what they have flat-out said (direct dev quotes have said that vet program rewards would only be attainable through that system) would be exclusive, exclusive. What else gets removed next, or are they just going to kill the entire thing and take it away? Either way, might as well kill the sub for now. I can always start up again when they bring something new, and I won't miss anything anyway." (I also don't believe that they'd do this as anything except a prelude to dismantling the entire system, to be honest. And no, I do not believe they would hand out all the powers and the like to everyone in the process.)

People stick around for different reasons. For me, the rewards, and the fact that those rewards -are- going to continue in that vein, is a lot of it. If I don't really need to worry about the rewards, I don't see the point in maintaining a constant subscription and in essence, (joke and a smile goes here) helping to subsidize the dev time and patches for those who play a lot more than I do. And the fact that I do do that indicates the system works - to decide to start taking out the pieces and handing them out to everyone would indicate, to me, that they were going to kill it.

(In the most entertaining of fashions, I actually should, from a strict monetary standpoint, be on your side. ;p I'm mostly pointing it out from the NCSoft business standpoint and from the perspective of someone who actually -does- keep subscribed for the vet rewards. Your problem is that from where I'm sitting, the system does precisely what it needs to - it keeps people subscribed when they're at a point where they'd probably start cancelling and dropping in for new content, which was apparently a more common problem Back In The Day - people would buy the game, play for a while and complete most things, then subscribe only for a month when issues dropped. It was a lot of churn, but less retention during dull periods, and this is from a game with a really high retention rate.)

(Also, I think I said everything three or four different ways. This amuses me in only the way a man who is coming up on midnight can be amused. Also, this was about six times longer than it needed to be. I "talk" too much.)

Because I wouldn't want to keep subscribing if I get nothing out of the deal.

Vet rewards - costumes, powers, perks, and all - help keep players who are having waning fun levels from cancelling. You may think I'd lose nothing, but I'd most certainly look long and hard at my recurring billing during periods of boredom if/when I suspect that they'll kill the system, or even start gutting it a bit at a time (what you want them to start doing, from your posts).

Separate styles of things that are mildly derivative but not nearly the same? Go ahead. The vet reward pieces need to remain vet rewards, though, because that's the incentive to stay instead of just doing the drop back in for a month when issues drop kind of thing.

Not a ragequit.

People would feel no incentive to stay when bored. It's less "I HAET YOO AND WANT YOU TO DIE" and less "Meh, I'm bored. Won't lose anything by quitting and will save money, so plug pulled."

Speaking personally, I'm one of those that only plays occasionally, for fits and spurts. If there were no vet rewards, I would probably cancel during those month-long forays away from the game, and not really think too much about it, maybe even never come back at all or just drop by every few months when an Issue drops.

Vet rewards provide an incentive that causes people to forgo that kind of behavior. It retains the cashflow of players who enjoy the game and the rewards enough to not quit at the drop of a hat, instead of letting them sever their ties and roam off to other pastures, perhaps never to return.

'Proper' use of the system would be crippled or destroyed by adding names to the tags. The anonymity is what makes it relatively workable.

The sentiment in the first post explains exactly why.

(My personal sentiment is that the system needs to go entirely.)

It sounds a lot more like people don't want to play with -you- than there being an actual problem. I don't know why that would be - bad reputation, unpleasantness with people in the past, or your overall attitude, but it does sound like the problem exists more between your chair and keyboard than in the game.

Conquest looks interesting, though I'm pretty certain that characters might want to set different goals and ideas for what the "turf" concept does.

The other? No. LGTF and the Zombie Invasion are enough for that style of event, especially one that's tailor made to intentionally disrupt a zone. The costs to Everyone Else being higher than the benefit to That Guy make that a non-starter, in my opinion.

The point of the forum is to get feedback on your ideas. If you don't want feedback on them, PM them to a dev instead of exposing them to others for criticism.