Robbie's post is in no way reflective of the general consensus of FOOM, nor FOOM's wishes.

FOOM's issue with living on beta was actually not the PVP experience, no matter what certain egotisticals seem to think. We lived in far harsher climates in that other game for far longer and did just fine, thanks.

It's simply that the hassle factor wasn't worth the benefits at our EP level. It doesn't matter how good the pilots are - when it takes five or six of you to clear a roaming spawn of Superior Observers, because none of you can drive a heavy mech, and your normal mech pilots are mediocre in their bots, that's a hassle. When the roaming spawns cruise by every two hours, that's a significant pain in the ***. Lump in with that the distance from Laosura to any off-island teleport, and you either get to piss money into the breeze on teleporters (which have their own issues) or set up the longest friggin Sequer chain ever. (We're only now getting into the Lithus realm, and we're already seeing that they're insufficient, as well.)

What Robbie's talking about is his own thing. We learned a lot from the beta experience - which was all we were really ever after; to find out WTF goes on out there and what we'd need to make a proper go of it. We were frankly pretty amazed someone didn't just come by and take the place, but the reason no one did, we know now, is ultimately the same reason there are so many vacant outposts and islands: it's just not worth the hassle. You either have to have stupid numbers of player (at least at our EP, though I suspect that only mitigates slightly over time) or you have to have an immense amount of tolerance for hassle, and we have neither. So we left. When, not if, we return to beta, we'll come back quite ready for it, but the Laosura Experiment (that was our in-house name for it from day one) was pretty much completed when we got to see how the intrusion protection system worked last week.

(Seriously? You don't even get a notification mail when someone registers to take your outpost? And they don't get one when you throw the protection card down? Seriously?)

Anyhow. My own opinion of things is that I think the newer entities ought to get together on an Alpha-2 (they have more interesting terrain, IMO) and all show up in lights/assaults, flag themselves, and have a lovely battle royale once a week or so, and then talk about what they learned with each other afterwards. If someone else shows up and flags in something bigger, the two scrimmage-sides put their differences aside and go for the third party until that's resolved. If a large third party shows, we leave the area utilizing speed and terrain until our flags wear off.

Random multi-topic post ended.

Don't doubt it.

We came to the same conclusion. Not worth the effort yet.

Losing is fun! This is my Dwarf Fortress instilled mantra. Seems you guys picked up the same thing.

Not really interested, but I have a feeling some NEX guys would be.

Arena pvp has never, outside of Guild Wars, been a big draw for me. GW is different because holy hell is their pvp well designed, PROT MONK 4 LYFE, but that's neither here nor there. Half the fun of being a newbie running around on beta with a few duders is the chase and the flight and the hunt. Kinda like trawling for booty, the end result is nice but the real fun was working through the obstacles to get it. You're looking for the small subset of things you can kill and avoiding everything else, ideally without them ever noticing you. Difficult, but totally worth the payoff -- especially when you take down a sequer full of goodies!

So that's why it'd be no good for me. But I understand that people enjoy 1v1s and arena stuff, so PM me next time we're both logged on at the same time and I'll look into getting it together on our end.