All Story Arcs give Souvenirs.
To unlock Auras, achieve level 30, and talk to the City Rep in City Hall. She’ll give you a mission set to achieve it.
30, right.
Pretty much. I definitely didn’t get a strong sense of what money was even really useful for in the game. Granted, again, this was beta, and I had maybe a month of testing the game.
EVE, on the other hand…I can’t explain it, but mining ore from asteroid belts (the equivalent of working harvesters) is actually fun. Then there’s playing the market, trying to find the best prices for your shipment. You know your work isn’t simply a pointless, because people are buying these materials in mass quantities in order to produce ships, ship components, ammunition, and so on, which they then put back on the market to sell. It’s all very interconnected and really makes you feel like there’s a point to what you do.
EVE also has a unique method of handling skills. Instead of allocating points from a pool, which so many games tend to do, it’s time-based. You can have as many skills as you want, as long as you’re willing to take the time. Rather than juggling skills around when I want to do something new (something Planetside and SWG both do), I just have them. So when I’m finished with a mining run, I can just load up my destroyer and go pirate-hunting and have a completely different kind of fun there.
It could simply be that EVE is a mature game, where SWG was just barely learning to walk when I saw it. But when sitting on your duff in a cargo ship mining asteroids is fun…makes me think they’re doing something right. Either that or I’m a very boring person. Either way. 
Easy, go to the Kingdom of Loathing of course.
An Adventurer is You!
Five weeks ago, I’d never played a MMORPG. Some friends convinced me to try WoW… and I love it. I don’t like grouping at all, so I picked a class (paladin) where I could solo my way to the top. I’ve never been bored, and am constantly challenged by the difficulty of the quests.
Has anyone mentioned Side-Kicking yet?
CoH has the wonderful device called Side-Kicking. It lets a higher level character temporarily raise the level of another character to one level below. So a level 30 can bring his level 14 friend along as a level 29. And the opposite is possible too, the level 30 can play as a level 14 with his friend.
This means you can basically always play with your friends, no matter what your levels are. So don’t worry if your friends out-pace you. You can still have fun with them.
Haha, just wait until you try fleet PVP! Eve has the most adrenaline pumpingly exciting PVP in any MMO I’ve played. Not least because dying can hurt pretty badly and battles over territory or markets really make a difference in the gameworld. I love the strategy involved too; spying on your enemies to approximate their setups and countering them. Damn I love EVE.
I’m actually not a PvP-centric person, because it’s usually a game of keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, even in a strategic game like EVE, and that’s just not how I play. I like going at my own pace.
Course, I just know one of the guys in my tiny little corp is eventually going to piss off someone in a much bigger corp that can afford to declare war. So I’ll have to face up to it sometime.
Since nobody else has mentioned it, I hereby endorse Final Fantasy XI. I haven’t played any other MMORPGs, but I can say that I enjoy this one immensely.
While you do have to form parties for most levelling (except as a beastmaster, which is designed for soloing) and many quests, you don’t have to commit to a static party if you don’t want to. Until the really high levels, it’s quick and easy to join a party of people you don’t know. By my way of thinking, if you just want to solo, why play an MMO in the first place?
You can switch jobs freely. If you play a Paladin as your main and want to try playing as a black mage, you can start levelling as a black mage as the same character. No going through the same storyline multiple times in this game.
While there is a fair bit of level grinding in this game, it’s actually a pretty social thing. I’ve spent most of my time in parties chatting and joking around; either with the rest of the party, or my linkshell.
I enjoy the crafting system, too. While some streches can get a little frustrating, I don’t have to spend hour upon hour “farming” for money.
Overall, there’s a LOT to do; both solo and in impromptu groups.
Less cynical reason: I don’t just want to solo; I do enjoy running around in groups. But I want to be able to effectively solo, and I don’t want groups to be so important that I find myself scheduling my damned life over what my responsibility to the group is. I do not want to be in this position.
More cynical reason: There are non-MMO RPGs out there?
Gah! Forgot to say: all comments, even on non-CoH and WoW games, have been greatly appreciated.
I ended up getting my own copy of CoH last night, if only because I was sick of being bumped off of my friend’s account. (Bastard wants to use his own account, like I wasn’t more important or something. 
)
But I’m still mulling over WoW. I may give that one a try once I feel bored with CoH, or if more of my friends wander over to WoW. The fact that I know 8 people who play CoH semi-regularly, and 0 who play WoW… that kind of leans things heavily.
But again, thank you for all of the information and opinions.
In the beginning, there was Katja Niboe and her pals… actually there may have been something before DIKU, but who cares?
check out Mudconnect and Top Mudsites
A lot of the text-based muds are very hack-and-slash, some are 100% scriptable (I’ll never see the fun in those, it’s not like my computer gets bored).
My favourites are all 100% free to play and RP exists but is not enforced. In strict alphabetical order: aardmud (sequential multiclass, you learn skills partly from points and partly from practicing, nice pick of classes and races, initial stats are random but don’t really mean anything since you will buy them as you level); medievia (good economic system, the coded lag bites ass, single class, each char of each class begins with the exact same stats); slothmud (simultaneous multiclass - you pick four initial classes and get a fifth in due time, stats are determined at level 8 and you can spend time in reroll hell if you don’t like what you got, which skills you get and when depends on your classes, very newbie friendly except for the occasional imbecile, most of the descriptions aren’t just in English but in Good English - ok ok I happen to like mine which is good since I wrote them).
If you go to Sloth, make sure to pick Newbatia as your starting place.
I haven’t had much of a good experience in the MUDs that claim to be “roleplay enforced”. That usually means that I’m told how my character must act and there is little room for creativity or imagination - if I want to have a Happy Dwarven Warrior, I can have a Happy Dwarven Warrior and it ain’t no DM’s business to come and tell me all Dwarven Warriors must be Grumpy!
Yeah, that’s often in the back of my mind. I’m not a person who makes friends easily, and the concept of thrown-together groups just makes me cringe. I often wonder why I play MMOs in the first place.
Honestly, the traditional games don’t do much for me. You must have friends to enjoy those games, even if you prefer soloing, and as I have few friends that play most of those MMOs, I tend to get bored of them very fast.
The two games I play right now, Guild Wars and EVE Online, I’m sticking with for different reasons. A bunch of my friends play GW, and so groups are actually fun there. Plus there’s no subscription, so I never feel like I’m wasting money if I put the game down for a long period of time.
EVE, on the other hand, has a market where people can put up things for sale, place buy orders (equivalent of want ads), and overall directly influence the economy. That is the kind of interaction I really enjoy. Case in point: lately I’d been getting a little worried at the price of minerals in my region. It’s become a very popular area, and so many newbies and other people are taking up mining, as it’s a very easy way to make money. The heightened supply of minerals is driving prices down to the point where it’s becoming worthwhile to travel to a completely different region with better pricing. But overnight, someone placed an incredibly high buy order for millions of units of minerals at top or near-top prices. It’s a worthwhile offer, one that I want to take advantage of. That’s the kind of thing I like: the existence of other players has an influence on what I do, one that’s not so direct as a group camping a spot your group wants to fight in.
Besides that, there’s just…no games like EVE out there. Sure, there are RPGs. On consoles. Very few for the PC. And there’s no single-player game that’s anywhere near so magnificent and open-ended as MMOs tend to be.
FFXI is another good MMO, yes, with its own flavor. I personally enjoyed it, but once again, I didn’t have a lot of friends on there and I just kind of stopped playing.
Guild Wars, sort of–it’s only MM in certain places and even then not all that MM.
In the strictest sense, that’s true. The only times you ever see other players are in towns and other safe havens. All other times, when you’re out in the wilderness, the only PCs that exist are you and any group members. It’s more like Neverwinter Nights or Blizzard.net, where you meet up with other players in a chat lobby before beginning the actual game.
Make sure you drop CECIL a line. That’s the Doper supergroup on Virtue, and the related global chat channel. A lot of us spend most of our time on alts now, but we stay in touch on the global channel.
Not to take away from the CECIL supergroup but of my alts on Virtue has a supergroup that’s sorely in need of members, if a group of two can be called “super”.
I never should have read this thread. I tend to stay away from MMOs because my propensity to let it interfere with my life is very high.
I made the mistake of checking out the EVE online homepage.
Heaven help me.
You don’t have to PVP to enjoy EVE, but don’t just mine. Despite what some people think, you can make a BIG profit producing tech 1 components. The BS sized stuff has the best margins, siege launchers, heavy NOS and the like. Invest in a few blueprints and go to town - or buy some BPC off escrow if you just want to try the waters. But always get your minerals from buy orders - you can typically save 10% that way. You need high volumes to make the billions with tech 1 so every % counts.
Giving up one addiction to acquire another, eh?
Remember: They don’t call it EverCrack for nothing. (“First week’s free, kid!”)