Bivin

Listened to the whole of the interview and must say that I, too, am encouraged by how emphatic he was that there WILL be challenging death penalty and group content. I guess we will have to hope these ideas dont get slowly worn away through the development phase.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gameon.cfm/cast/61 (Note especially Dave G.'s comments between about 17:40 and 24:00. Very encouraging.)

Now we have a v.large number of people playing MMOs, but a plurality (heading towards a majority) have been brought up on ever-easier games - particularly F2P.

If EQN is unable to resist these forces (and here it is the backers who will have the final say, no doubt) then which game will ? SWTOR failed to resist, NVN failed to resist, AoC failed to resist, even TSW failed to resist :(

There used to be a disconnect between 'early adopters' (UO/EQ1) and 'those that followed' once the concept of MMOs came into the main. In those initial days it was not much of a problem until WoW opened it's doors. Not because WoW was a *bad* game, but because it was money driven above all things else. This meant pandering to the 'casual gamer' over and above any 'vision' the original developers may have had.

An idea to your separate server bin:
Ask SOE not to list your immersion server(s) along the common ones, unless the player willingly cheks something in a distant menu.
Or else you'll end up with what happened to RP servers in WoW - tonns of people that came to your server not because they loved immersion - but because it was the lowest population one. Needless to say how bad it would be.

You and I seem to be pretty like-minded on a lot of these posts. At least to a fairly decent degree. Obviously this means we are both very intelligent and debonaire individuals.

Thanks for the invite to your poll page on limited travel. I had actually found this yesterday from another of your posts, but I'm very flattered to be asked to join your discussion. Great posts Bivin and nice to meet you. :-)

I think right now, I want to wait and see what SOE does with their own ideas before putting extra pressure on them. I am certainly on board with many of the proposed systems, but before I assume that I will not be able to coexist with the large population, I want to see what the finished product is like. Right now, I am going to continue to have faith that normal servers will be able to offer a great experience.

Posting it in my signature.