Norrec

I wanted to post and say,

1) I agree with you that players lie about what they want. They'll say they want instantaneous travel between areas, but then when given it they'll complain the game world is too small. They'll say they don't want forced/encouraged PvP and then complain that it's dead. I'll accept that sometimes it's two different groups that will never get along, but I think theres also a large percentage of people who think they'll like something or want to like it but really don't.

2) I can't agree with your comment about inventions costing 100million. By level 27 I was able to have all my slots filled with basic inventions for damage/resists/accuracy and what not that did not have to be replaced every level. However this was accomplished by making a million or two influence on the auction hall. It was easy enough to look at what items had high numbers of bidders but few being sold, take my one of those items, place it up for a high price, and wait a hour(or day) for it to be bought.

3) The game does have a built in system for finding a group. You click, "Team", click to set yourself as "Looking for any", and set your message. The problem is a lot of people don't use it or forget to set themselves for what they are looking to do(missions/patrol/task force/any/pvp). I think this further supports that people don't always want what they think they want. You said the game needed a system to find groups, it has one, it just doesn't work because no one uses it.

The rest of your review I thought was accurate. The missions repeat themselves a lot, there isn't much difference between fighting a minon and fighting a boss besides health, and the enhancments needing to be replaced every 3 levels(which only takes a group or two) seems unnessessary. I think you could have afforded to talk up the positive features of the game though. Such as the ability to group with anyone of any level at any time using the sidekick/exemplar feature. If there are only 8 people on the entire server, those people can group, no matter what level they all are, and still be an effective team. This should be a standard feature in MMO's to prevent friends from being unable to play togather.

I'm playing a Fire/Dark Melee character right now and a few times my group has commented on my 'great build' after I survived some difficult situation. I like fire because you have consume to keep endurance filled up early on. Post-stamina with endurance reductions in my 3 attacks I haven't gone below half endurance bar in a week. You might not be the toughest tank but with healing flames you can keep yourself alive easily enough. I put one invention I found into it and now it heals 302hp every 30(recharge reducer) seconds. Thats a big chunk of HP when I only have 808.

With Stamina I can run Fire Shield(49 resistance to lethal/smashing), Plasma Shield(47 resistance to energy/negative energy) and Blazing Aura(DoT that I use mainly to aggro mobs that no one else is attacking). I do have to use health inspirations sometimes but then who doesn't? With this character I frequently 'ride the edge' of red-bar HP and come out alive.

I'm only level 23 though.

So since I've been back after years of inactivity I've found myself making good use of the group search thats built into the game. It makes finding people who want to group easy. Currently upon setting yourself to "Looking for X" you can set a message so when others see you on the list they know what you're looking to do. I think it'd be good to reverse this and let a party leader send a message along with his invite.

So say you want to invite Bob2.0, you send him an invite and the message pops up,

"Joe3.0 has invited you to join his team! Joe3.0's message is: 'Hey we're doing missions in Steel Canyon if you want in.' Do you accept Joe3.0's invite?"

Would save on having to tell new members what the group is doing every time someone gets invited.