Shenny

There are a few MMOs where race does matter. My first mmo was some f2p Korean grinder called Rising Force online where there were 3 factions; a robot race, a magical race and a hybrid race that could ride in mechs and use some magic. Each race had a unique class: the robots had "Strikers" which turned their scout class into an gun turret with massive spike damage but have to root themselves and slowly deploy. The magic race had summons ie pet class, and the hybrid race had their Armored Riders (could ride in mechs) and had the only true healers in the game.

This sounds like a much more elaborate and fleshed out version of Rising Force Online's political system which has me very excited since that was one of the most unique and fun features of that Korean grinder. Modern MMOs like Wow and Rift lack this leading to a far less engaging experience IMO.

RF Online was an RvRvR open PVP MMO with 3 daily world PVP events called Chip Wars every 8 hours where each race would muster all of the players it could to either attack another race's Control Center or defend their own from the other 2. It is like a RTS where each player is a single unit and is follows the orders of the "Archon" or Race leader.

The Archon is elected.. weekly IIRC, it has been a long time since I played. Candidates have to be in the top 30 PVP ranked players and have to pay a chunk of cash to get their names on the ballot. Archons can wear special armor that grants massive stat bonuses (think Aion's Abyss Guardian transformation power but 24/7) but costs an obscene amount of money and usually takes a large guild at least a few days to farm the money for. Obviously this makes the position very desirable.

Any player over lvl 30 can vote and in order to win the candidate usually has to both curry favor with the large guilds with back-room deals and gain the support of the average players. They usually do this by killing enemy gankers running around the low level zones, "cleaning" a mid-leveling zone by going through and killing any enemy players so their race can have all of the prime leveling spots to themselves, and of course counter cleaning by killing enemy Archons and getting the prime spots back. Archons do all of this with the help of their officers.

Half of the officers and the 2nd - 5th (?) place runner-ups who have lesser versions of the archons stat bonuses like only increased attack, increased def or a massive buff that effects all nearby players of the same race but drains mana like crazy. The other half of the officers are appointed by the Archon, usually as a reward for getting their guild member's vote.

Archons also appoints "honor guilds" to the top active guilds who get a percentage of the tax money from the auction house. The archon also receives tax money and can raise or lower the tax rate.

I loved this political system, it created a true sense of community because it gave a huge incentive for aspiring wannabe archons to make a name for themselves by actually going out and killing gankers. Aspiring guilds would want to get become known by doing stuff like blockading the spawn points to the prime leveling zones and only letting their race through and slaughtering everyone else. Archons who wanted to keep their jobs would answer called to break the blockades, causing the enemy races to call out their honor guilds and archons for pure PVP mayhem and FUN!

Nowadays MMOs seem to be mostly solo affairs where you can just be involved with your guild and not give a rats ass about anyone else, no sense of community. This makes me much more interested in Terra if it can recreate something like what RF Online had.

Flood, nasty little beasties.. like cockroaches who can jump

Wow what an interesting way to get traffic to this site, worked on me (:

GFW Radio is quickly necoming my favorite video game podcast
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Dx6p-QnLaqg

http://youtube.com/watch?v=kYXfnWovAGU

GFW Radio's latest intro, pure effing genius! Go listen to the entire podcast, you'll thank me later

lawl at the melty blood reference ^^

The relatives had fun do doubt, but did they have enough fun to go out and drop $250 for a wii and $50 for a game? Or are they going to bug you to bring over your wii whenever the holidays roll around and forget about the wii for the rest of the year.

I wish reporters would actually ask deeper questions then "which was more fun", of course the wii is! But will that translate into more converted gamers and $$ for Nintendo, now that is the real question.

Just mention 8.8 and lets see if the Nintendo fans will remain so nice :p
I also wonder if nintendo gamers be so loving towards each other if there were only 300k available and cost a fortune like the ps3. Somehow I doubt it

Isn't GoW's 10 the same reason the Nintentards have been jizzing over the Wii.. pure fun? Sure the game isn't perfect if you analyze it to death, but it sounds like the amount of pure entertainment the game offers outweighs all the minor imperfections. Take a break from all the Fanboy Wars and go enjoy being a gamer