Out of Pod Experience

This has actually been 2 issues that I've had with the games in the past years.

Missions usually come in a handful of flavors; Kill, Collect, Courier, Escort. You can use one of those for X, Y being the number of, and z being the target (creature or character) and you just made all of your questing for levels 1-50. Even Eve follows this stigma which is why mission running gets very boring after you have ran the same dozen missions 1000 times.

For this I wish that more companies would follow eve's route and give control to the players and let them create the story rather than being led by the hand from 1-50 and asking what now at the end of the road. I thought that DAOC had a pretty decent concept with the frontier allowing players to actually lay claim to the keeps and towers and it really gave them something to fight for. I never got a chance to play shadowbane but giving players the abilities to build their own towns I thought was simply incredible, and from what a friend told me they saw something similar to what we see now where 3 major guilds had teamed up and powerblocked every one else on the map. Some people call it broken mechanics, I call it team play and strength in numbers. And AOC didn't do too bac on the concept although I didn't really much care for the fact that the bases were out of the way as far as the game goes and that there were limits to how many people can actually invade at any given time.

Mythic also managed to do a few things right in WAR as well, one of them being that you could level entirely off of pvp, a wonderful gift for those of us who can't stomach the idea of fetching 12 flowers and killing 4 sinister black bears in a field loaded with mean black bears.

The second part doesn't bug me as much though it is still a nuisance. What really gets me is when item collecting ties into a quest and the items in question don't make sense as to why so few drop from one mob. Say like a quest giver asks you to collect 8 crocs teeth for whatever foolish reason, well you know that you are going to have to kill anywhere from 4 crocs up to who knows depending on your luck because as we have come to learn, crocs along with other critters never drop a full set of teeth. I mean I would think that one croc would be more than sufficient but instead I'm forced to wipe out an entire species as they try to gum me to death.

And then you get the animals who are packing gold, weapons, and armor. What that wolf is doing with a helm of strength is beyond me. And then we get to the junk that you mentioned. One of my favorites was in Rift with the soiled shorts. Now why in dear gods name would my warrior decide that stealing another mans **** stained shorts was a profit gain and why do vendors find these **** stained short to be so valuable? Furthermore, why am I stealing **** stained shorts when I just killed a man wearing full plate armor and carrying a claymore? One would think those items, even as something to be melted down, would be far more valuable than the man diaper. Why do we pick up useless **** and not be allowed to strip our opponent down to their bones such as we can in Eve.

I don't know, I've had a lot of ideas that I think would make for a far better sword n board mmo (which is what Star wars is when you think about it, just fancier swords and boards). And just when I think that there may be a light at the end of the tunnel when a new name shows up it turns out that its simply another copy of what we just went through.

True, but it compels the question:

Why spend USD 300mn on such a game (IIRC the figures being bandied about)? You can surely make a good game of that type for a lot less.

Yep, too true.