WoW's financial success can be easily surmised in one simple article: 5 Creepy ways video games try to get you addicted. Their formula is simple: Lower the bar as far as it can go. Make the game so brainlessly easy that a small dog can play it. But wait, you say, if it's so easy won't people get bored and quit? And that's where the addiction trickery comes in. They make up for mindless grinding with... well, more mindless grinding, but in an addictive manner. Gaining levels is just food pellet conditioning. The other trick WoW does is stack all their "real" content in the End Game - meaning people who are max level. That is why in WoW there are only really two levels - "Max" and "Noob" Anyone who isn't Max is a Noob, because they can't participate in the End Game yet. So every Noob has one singular goal - to grind their way to Max so that they can join in the End Game, where all the meat is. The End Game, of course, is nothing more than another level of grinding to get the exact same uberloot as every other end game player, so that their identical characters can all have identical items to go with their identical skills & powers and go around looking completely identical to each other, then go through the same identical boss raids over & over using identical macros to handle combat for them. Eventually, though, even this gets boring (when there's no uberloot left to find then the pellet dispenser runs dry), which is why every now and then Blizzard releases some new content pack to keep the End Game crowd from unsubbing. As for the Noobs, well who cares about them? We've already got a formulated addiction system to keep them subscribed. Now some games will, when feeling particularly lazy, will decide that rather than adding more end game content, the best solution is to just drag out the time it takes to grind to the end game. From this comes the trope of the "Korean Grinder" game, and Lineage is no exception to that, either. Note that at no point does "fun" enter the equation. "Fun" is a volatile concept, subject to a player's own whimsy, and not easy to quantify or - more importantly - predict. Addiction, grinding, and the addiction of grinding, however, is predictable and profitable; simply for being so time consuming if nothing else. There is also e-peen insecurity, which is where uberloot comes from in the first place, of course. But that's another story...

Would that issue be: WoW sucks?

But Star Wars had chat bubbles since it first launched back in 2003?

I'm sure a quick trip to the Tailor and/or Image Designer of your player city can fix this problem easily enough, although to be honest, any respectable Armorsmith would be more than happy to craft your custom spec armor in whatever color you like in the first place.

Nailed it on the head, here. And for those of us who despise WoW, there really isn't a whole lot left for us in the MMO market because everyone is just making cheap WoW clones now. It is truly sad.

Welcome to EA Games.

An in-depth review of how this score was determined

Given a choice between the two, personally I'd rather just play KotoR Online over WoW. Then again, I'd rather wipe my butt with a cheese grater than play WoW. But that's just me. I fear the developers at Bioware are of a quite different opinion. Sadly, that would pretty much include nearly every every MMO out there. It's simple, really. Companies are run by their accounting departments. Accountants, as we all know, have all sense of imagination & inventiveness surgically removed at birth. So whenever a bright, young game designer comes in and says "I have an idea for something completely new and original!" the accountants just look at him coldly, turn back to their charts showing the difference between their subscription rate and WoW's and reply "That's nice. Now how can we make our game more like WoW? Because WoW makes lots of money, and we want to make a lot of money too, so clearly the solution is to be as much like WoW as possible without getting sued for plagiarism." It's not just games. How often have you seen a McDonalds and Burger King within one block of each other? Some accountant said, "Hmm, that place sells a lot of hamburgers. We want to sell a lot of hamburgers, too. So obviously we need to put our burger join as close to that spot as possible. Never mind that there are other neighborhoods that have no burger joints at all. We don't know if putting one there or not will make money, but we know that this spot makes money because there is already a burger joint there. We just have to steal all their customers with our utterly indistinguishable product. Why is our product indistinguishable? Didn't we just explain that?" And so it is with MMOs, too. They look at WoW's 10+ million subscribers and say "Clearly that formula that works, so let's be just like them. It's a lot less risky than doing anything original. Original is scary because it's untested. Why risk failure when you can just copy someone elses' success?" It's everywhere, now.

*chuckle* I recall once there was this guy, some Teras Kasi Master and a host of other melee skill trees to boost it up even further, whom had also mastered Cooking at some point in life and thus still retained his "Master Chef" badge/title. So he'd be hanging out with "Master Chef" over his head, plain clothes, and there would always be some idiot bounty hunter or general PvP obsessed noob would challenge him to a duel... and get subsequently splattered in five seconds flat. PvP was always interesting back then because without levels or color coded threat indicators or any of that other care-bear stuff you could never really know what the other guy was able to throw at you until it was too late. Heck, even PvE was more challenging: You just had to use the common sense of "Womp Rat Easy, Kryaat Dragon BAD" in picking your fights. Am I really up to this challenge? Only one way to find out...

Forums will get a lot smaller then...

Ah yes, Mission Terminals... and Artisan terminals, Entertainer terminals, Explorer terminals, Bounty terminals, Faction terminals... and the terminals were just a supplement to the classic NPC quest givers. And even that is just assuming that you even bothered with them in the first place. I never did. Neither of them was truly needed to succeed in, well, whatever you wanted to do. Hmmm, I like the sound of that: Whatever you wanted to do. Ah, nostalgia!

http://news.softpedia.com/news/More-than-1-5-Million-Gamers-Playing-The-Old-Republic-During-Pre-Access-241826.shtml "He added, 'We note that EA gives players the first month free, so ‘players’ does not yet signify paying subscribers; however, our estimate does at least signify the number of people who have bought the game (and thus far, includes only a subset of those who pre-ordered the title).' " http://www.gamespy.com/articles/114/1147365p1.html " 'At half a million subscribers, the game is substantially profitable, but it's not the sort of thing we would write home about,' Riccitiello said" So basically they need at least 2/3rd of the people who bought the game to continue subscribing. Otherwise... well, I won't tell you, because your mind won't accept it.

"WoW Clone" didn't make the Top 10 list? Surprising. Actually, not surprising, since that can't be easily countered, and is thus an issue best left unaddressed.

Well you see, son, there is this thing called "capitalism" and this stuff called "money" and people called "developers" who want to make money but for that they need this thing called "subscribers." Am I going over your head, yet?

"SWTOR is Best SW!"