This is mostly an as-short-as-possible overview on WoW, WAR and RoM MMOs that I've posted on the RoM topic of the MMORPG.com forum.

About WoW. WoW is the best fantasy MMO currently in existence. It does miss a lot of features, and it does have a lot of problems which can be pretty frustrating at times, but it is just the best thing out there, and until something better comes along, it will remain the best. During the years I've played a lot of MMOs and taken into consideration every aspect of a MMO, they all fell short from WoW. Yes WoW can get a repetitive but so does every other MMO. Life itself is repetitive, and I'm pretty sure there will never ever be a game that doesn't feel repetitive at a certain point. If a game that is not repetitive would ever be created, then we would all just play that for ever and ever and all other game developers will stop making games because nobody would ever get bored of the non-repetitive one. Well you get my point. Again, to underline what I'm trying to say, WoW is not by far a perfect game, but it is, overally, the best fantasy MMO out there at this time, even though it's quite old. And the huge amount of users that WoW has prooves that point, not to mention that even though it's an old game, with a massive bank of users, it STILL gets many new subscribers every month, enough to maintain itself on a positive trend, and that says a lot about the value of the game.

About Warhammer Online. I was expecting a lot from this game, so it was a very big dissapointment for me when it came out, as I'm sure it was for many other people too. I've played WAR for about 6-7 months, was one of the founding leaders of the largest guild alliance on my server with over 500 active players, we did a lot of keep conquering, lots of PvP, leveled the guilds, dinged level 40, and got really depressed. And we totally disregarded the HUGE technical problems the game had in the first 6 months from its launch (I think it still has many of those problems even now, but back then, it felt like an early Beta release). So, totally disregarding the technical issues, (put them in a bag and thrown them away), considering purely aspects of the game, WAR sucks on so many levels I can't even list them, so I'll only list the good things of WAR since they are so few. 1. PvP matches (battlegrounds equivalent of WoW) are fun even though in this game, not having an organized team of players, or people not knowing how to play their classes, has an even greater impact on the outcome of the match than it did in WoW. But if you got a good guild and form premades then it will be a great PvP experience. 2. open RvR is also really fun from an action point of view. 3. the guild advancement and alliance system is also very good and achieves its goal of uniting people. And that's about it as to what's good about the game. Do not go playing WAR if you want a full MMO experience, cause you won't get it. I honestly belive that this game would be much better off if they would just scrap all the quests, get rid of the character development element entierly, just have everyone start at level 40 with a premade spec, and pretty much get rid of everything that's not part of ORVR and "battlegrounds".

About ROM. Runes of magic is a mediocre game. Why?

1. It has really crappy graphics even though it uses up a lot of system resources. (it actually has an engine that's at least 4 years newer than WoW's, which uses up much more resources than WoW's engine to delivers a worst graphic that WoW). Graphics is not about the number of polygons you can render or the number of particles you can spawn, if you don't have great graphic artists, 3d modellers and animators, and level designers your graphics will suck. And as an addition to this graphic aspect, the 3d model animations are way out of sync and lack diversity. This is a really big deal because at this point, the game looks and feels close to something I used to play back in97-98 even though it uses an engine that's 10 years more advanced.

2. It doesn't have a subscription system. I mean, the game gets most of its user base from the fact that it is free. But the lack of a subscription based system is a really big turn off for people that would be willing to pay that fee. I don't want to be forced into buying diamonds for every damn feature of the game that I want to enjoy. Just name a damn monthly price, I'll pay that, and go enjoy my game. But this is tricky, they can't add a subscription based system because that would remove all the diamond-buyers off the market, which subsequently will remove all the diamonds that are available on the market, which subsequently will remove any possibility that free users have to farm items, sell them for diamonds, and then use those diamonds to pay for the non-free features of the game, meaning the free users, which form the most of the user base, will be denied access from most of the game features, which would probably piss them off and make them leave, and that would lead to the closure of the game, because the game itself does not have enough value to draw enough subscribers in order to meet the upkeep costs and actually generate profit. Because of this "lockdown" situation, the game will never be completely free, and neither will it be worth an investment from users willing to pay for it. It will continue to live off those very few that are dedicated fans and buy diamonds and those very other few that are not dedicated but maybe spend a few bucks once just to try out features and either leave the game after a while or become dedicated fans. Bottomline, it's never going to overcome this problem, it will never generate a reasonable profit to motivate the devs into making a good game out of it, and once the developers run out of ideeas to add to the game and the hype goes down, new user flow will go downhill and the game will eventually die out or remain in a "dormant" state with a very low user base, and just enough profit to keep the servers up but not enough profit to do more dev.

3. The game is a freaking pile of junk. The only way the devs can keep the user's interests up and the new users comming in, is to add new features to the game all the time. They added freaking everything to the game and they did it without any consideration to the overal gameplay and without spending any time into polishing or balancing the added features. You just don't do that with a game, unless you don't really care about the game, you just want to add features to it so that you check them on your "we have it" list and hope to draw users with it.

Overal report on RoM. If you don't have a problem with mediocrity and are really really poor or really really cheap and at the same time you have a lot of time on your hands (to grind for items/valuables to sell for diamonds to pay for locked features), OR if you go beyond the mediocrity of accepting poorly implemented features and don't really care about any features at all, you would prolly find it a good alternative to WoW or any other fantasy MMO, since it probably integrates every single feature that was ever present in other MMOs. If you don't fit in the category mentioned above, you will probably just play it for curiosity for a few days tops and then uninstall and go play some serious MMO.

uff, that was a lot of typing for not so much said