First off;
This post is not affiliated with any person, persons, groups or guilds.
These are simply my personal views and opinions of this game as it stands.
This is NOT a whine, flame, cry, preach or even a quit post.
Nor is this thread intended to attempt to change views / policies / decisions regarding this game.
This should not be taken as anything other than a personal view.
No offence is intended at any players or at CodeMasters.
If you cannot accept and remember these points, please, stop reading now.

A couple of points, I have played all three races and tried to various degrees each class, and have been online during and after a CW at least once per race, and been present during regular hours (read; at least 1hour from an impending or finishing war).
My main is a 47 Bellato AR on Novus.
I claim only to have mass experience with Bellato and limited experience with Cora/Accretia.
I have been active at various levels since approximately March 2006 (shortly after retail launch).

From what I can tell there seems to be a growing sense of discontent surrounding the game in its current state. While it seems that for the most part Bellato are at least the most outspoken about this, (whether this is due to numbers or individual players is neither here nor there), the main issues affect all three races relatively evenly.

The main complaints boil down to one of three things; RMT, Client issues, Player Relations.

  1. RMT
    1. Bots
      While everyone agrees that once a game goes Free2Play, it inevitably becomes hard to control the bot problem, what CM (the GMs) have tried to do has worked to a certain extent (wide scale banning will always be problematic), the main problem lies with continuing use of RMT sites to buy money from the bots.
    2. AH
      The auction house, is by and large the best and easiest way to trade good between players, however as time goes on, the prices become ever more ridiculous. This is by and large a result of point a) and I understand WHY this occurs. The problem this makes is that it creates a ’the rich get richer’ scenario within the game, making it all but impossible for the average player to get a hold of goods without paying massively over the odds.
  2. Client Issues
    1. Client hacks
      We all know they’re out there, and we’ve almost all seen some in action. There will always be players out there who hack, it’s the nature of gaming. The problem arises when the hacks become widespread. Whilst Bells seem to be most outspoken, but this does NOT mean that they are entirely innocent. There are likely as many bell hacks as there are cora or accretia. There are two issues at play, one that the code has not been protected better, and two that the more people use them, the more other people will join them.
    2. Client Glitches / bugs
      The infamous ‘blind’ or ‘ghost’ bug. We’ve all had it, we’ve all lost to it at some point. Much speculation has gone on around what causes it. Most of which is totally irrelevant to the end result, the bug exists and has existed for some time, and we know nothing more, which brings me neatly to the last point.
  3. Player Relations

    1. With CMs and the GMs
      There seems to be a great deal of unpleasantness aimed at the GMs or CM from the players.Here’s how it pans out as far as I can tell. CM enters talks with CCR, come to and agreement, and licence the game for use in US/EU. CCR write the game and provide CM with access to it. CCR receive feedback from CM and its player base to fix bugs and provide more content / tools. This worked great up until Episode 2. At which point it seems the GM team either stopped, or more likely, lost access to tools to allow them to pull off events.This has had a knock on effect to the GM team, as all they can do is ‘maintenance’ style tasks (bans / kicks / limited fixes) and to CM, who seem to land a lot of the blame for this, rightly or wrongly, I can’t tell.
      The other issue that comes up here, is the flow of information between CCR - CM - GM and player. While I’m sure there are many, many issues behind the scenes we aren’t privy to, and the GM team are always going to be busy, a post here and there telling us that you know about something, or keeping us up to date on something, would go a long, long way toward making people happier.

    2. With each other
      Drama… there doesn’t seem to be a day go by that someone will make a remark about something, and another loud-mouth will come along and yell at them for being stupid. It generally goes on from there to become a full blow battle of 3 syllable words back and forth between camps. Few people seem to put thought into the things they say. (Yes, I’ll be first to admit I’ve probably done this myself). It would be nice if players started to take into consideration that not everybody is in YOUR situation and has had YOUR experience. (This works for both sides btw).

      A major chunk of this happens during CW, when archons attempt to rally troops. So far I believe the worst of it occurs on Bellato (either because I play there more, or the numbers of players actually on). Most of it seems to spill out from players not taking part in CW. Yes, it’s a PvP game, yes, CW is the major focus for the race. However, not everybody plays for that reason, nor can everybody that is on actually manage to perform during CW. Before you skip straight to ‘post reply’ hear me out.

      I have the utmost sympathy for the Archons attempting to make what is basically a rabble of people bad together into an effective military force, and I have great respect that they manage to pull it off three times a day. However, the bands of players who feel the need to jump on /Sell, /Buy or /all and berate every single player who doesn’t show up for CW, is possibly the most single and short minded act that occurs.

      Let me use myself as an example;
      I connect to RFO on what is normally a flaky connection (1Mb or 100kb/s at best usually). I will always put in a show at the start of the CW when I’m present. During the noon UK CW things normally work out okay, and I can get to the chip and DPS with the BMAU.

      However during prime time CW to stand a chance of getting through it, I need to turn the lighting, shadow and view distance all down to their minimum settings, which effectively means if I stand on the centre of the CMP I can see the turrets and nothing more. And even with these settings if I get close to the main mass PvP I can all but guarantee that I will get hit by the ‘blind bug’. This obviously makes me somewhat limited in use s I content myself by playing rear guard and dropping chipgaurds as they spawn to keep them off the main force.

      Second to this is when playing as Bell, we are a highly dependant on buffs to increase our effectiveness in combat, and not having access to them when returning to CW causes a lot of players to not return any further than the CMP.

      Aside from people with bad internet, there are those with slow PCs, or low characters. So jumping on whatever channel and telling us that we’re disloyal, stupid or worthless, does little to actually encourage those of us who are limited as to what they can do during a CW, or are trying to better themselves so they can take part later on down the road.

      That said I don’t have sympathy for those that CAN do something during CW and choose to openly boycott said event. If you don’t want to go, fine, do so quietly, rather than make noise on the chat channels, which move fast enough as it is during a war.

    3. The other part of this, is the lack of help that players put out toward each other. There are a lot of people that don’t get to play for very long, and spending that time constantly shouting out for a group to join is not the most interesting use of free time. I see the need to get a certain layout of classes for the standard party, but once that criteria is meant, you shouldn’t just start grabbing high level DPS to make your parties life easier. It has the knock on effect that a lot of characters stagnate at certain points, as it becomes very hard to grab groups. In my experience (that of an AR) this happens at the points where you level past a ‘bracket’ and into the next without gaining anything of much influence. In my ARs career this has been 41-42 & 46-47, but I’m sure this occurs to all classes at various points.

Spending half the time online calling for a group, then getting rolled, then chewed out for being unable to roll in CW, calling for a group again and being rolled once more, isn’t exactly the most enjoyable experience for a game. It would be nice if more people were mindful of others, but that’s pretty much a pipe dream, both in game and out.

That’s all I really have to say at this point. If you managed to read through all of that, thank you and please remember, as stated at the beginning, this is not meant to be anything other than a set of personal opinions.

Comments can also go here

I am simply using Merc’s forum as a place to hold comments, this is in no way Merc’s view on things.