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Topic: Farm Online

In my most humble and personal opinion this games system has so much potential for interesting, challenging and even meaningful pve, yet all we have is meaningless repetitive boring sh.. farming.

You farm npc spawns.. yay! They keep spawning and I keep shooting and looting and they keep spawning and I keep shooting and looting and they keep spawning and I keep shooting and … finger cramp.

You do assignments.. yay! I took an assignment to A and went there to press button and since I was cunning I took another assignment to B since it was close by A and went there and pressed button again. Now to receive my reward and see what they want me to do next.. hmm.. They want me to go to A and B again to press the same button.. brain melt.

What is this line of Sequers!? Maybe transportation is fun since half of the population seem to be mechatruckers.. lets give it a try! I put on my Geysier-Kronwerk cap and these four whatever things to my cargo hold and off to the teleport I go. And at my destination I deliver and get my rewards and take a new hauling adventure, so off to teleport I go and to my destination to deliver and pickup and deliver and.. why am I looking for a self-destruct button?

Thank god we have mining! I get to earn nic (to fund my pvp losses) without my brain screaming mercy since I can do it mostly AFK!

Am guessing that trading and manufacturing are quite ok means to get your nic if such activities happen to be your thing.. but I guess those are not really pve to begin with.

I can understand how some ppl enjoy finding the most effective way to do X and optimizing their nic/h or finding a way to deal with very difficult spawns.. but how long can that keep you entertained?

Does anyone even agree with me?

If so, how about we try to come up with ideas to put this games amazing potential to good use? All this farming is making baby arkhes cry rusty tears.

Am worried that lots of potential players are lost because of fail pve. On other hand if pve was challenging, interesting and even meaningful, it would make people want to stay and bring good reviews. I do realize that this game has just launched so there is an excuse for lack of content, but imho when mining is the most entertaining (pve) thing to do.. something is seriously wrong.

I will be posting my own suggestions how to make pve better later, if am not booed out of my own thread before I get around to do that.

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Re: Farm Online

The low level pve is mind numbing. The problem lies in firstly how long the transition from lvl 1s to 2s lasts and secondly how it is still seemingly more profitable to stay on low level assignments.

There should be no comparioson in nic/h from doing lvl 1 assignments as to lvl 3s, and the jump to beta assignments should be a gigantic leap in income. There is no other way to make the pve/assignments a meaningful and enjoyable experience.

I can assure you that doing anything on beta is more exciting from the simple addition of extra danger, but until the risk vs reward balance is tweaked, there will always be threads like this.

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Re: Farm Online

My issue is not nic/h.

This thread is (was) not about risk vs. reward.

The extra danger that comes with farming in beta has some value I guess, but it doesn't remove the fact that all pve is boring repetitive farming.

I just feel that this system could be utilized into actually interesting and engaging pve.

Easy way would be to bring in instances, but some people for some reason fanatically support open world pve and won't even consider anything that is instanced. So sorry in advance to those of you whose pulse just rose and veins on their forehead began to pulsate. But still.. instancing could give us assignments like:

"Hello Agent. We have discovered activity in a Pelistal Empires base that we thought abandoned. We need you to go there and hack into their satellite link system directly using the hacking interface module that will be provided to you. Department of Federated Industry loves you."

You are transported (I guess airlifting would not brake the lore?) to an instance similar to bases. You would need to sneak past patrolling and working Pelistalites towards your objective. Lots of options how you could tweak the mission.. maybe every time you are discovered and had to rely on blowing stuff up counter would tick and after certain limit your mission would be a failure.

Hacking open entrances to make the job easier. Hacking some defense systems to cause turrets to start shooting their own. Gaaah.. got stuck with hacking stuff, but you get the idea?

Other types of (instanced) assignments could be something like:

Convoy Escort: Sequer will be following you and you have to lead it through several ambushes. You have an option to command the sequer to stop so you can scout ahead and take care of the ambushing bots, disarm traps/mines. Find shortcuts.

Blow stuff up: Attack bases/Convoys/Patrols/Camps/Buildings .. Several maps with varied enemy placements. You would often need to choose between direct assault and fast escape or sneaky approach and surgical strike or just overwhelming firepower (for you farmers).

Defend the (supersecret) outpost: You, with help of some static defense turrets need to fend of waves of enemy attacks. Shootshootshoot, I hope you packed enough ammunition.

Etc.etc. And of course all could be done in teams. Some of this sorta stuff could be even done in open world pve, if we had some sorta Adventure Island (tm). Large enough so you could discover and do stuff/these sort of assignments there in relative peace. Might even make it pvp (low-sec style?) island, but finding pve.rs to blow up should require enough effort to not make it a happy gankland.

Several maps, several/or even random enemy placements, several difficulties for solo & team -> not so repetitive pve anymore..

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Re: Farm Online

If you're not worried about nic/h then I implore you to get a few friends and haul your *** out to beta and fight a higher level bot spawn.  They are much more interesting, although repetitive all the same, and require much more coordination and tactics than anything on alpha.  It is still quite profitable if you can avoid pvp, and is certainly much more entertaining.

Mech spawns are easily much more profitable than any noob spawn, but we just havnt seen a large enough proportion of players in mechs, or supply of mechs in general, for large group mech farming to be needed.  Most are still doing bot/small research as well, so there just isnt the demand for mech kernals so much just yet either.

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5 Reply by C C (edited by C C 2010-12-19 14:16:28)

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Re: Farm Online

......

6 Reply by BigCountry (edited by BigCountry 2010-12-20 14:19:52)

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Re: Farm Online

+1 good post OP.

Myself included, I have lost a lot of interest in the PvE lately. PvP I cannot afford. So afk mining (while playing other games) is where I am getting most my "value" atm.
lol
sad

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Re: Farm Online

Petteri Petraaja wrote:

My issue is not nic/h.

This thread is (was) not about risk vs. reward.

The extra danger that comes with farming in beta has some value I guess, but it doesn't remove the fact that all pve is boring repetitive farming.

I just feel that this system could be utilized into actually interesting and engaging pve.

Easy way would be to bring in instances, but some people for some reason fanatically support open world pve and won't even consider anything that is instanced. So sorry in advance to those of you whose pulse just rose and veins on their forehead began to pulsate. But still.. instancing could give us assignments like:

"Hello Agent. We have discovered activity in a Pelistal Empires base that we thought abandoned. We need you to go there and hack into their satellite link system directly using the hacking interface module that will be provided to you. Department of Federated Industry loves you."

You are transported (I guess airlifting would not brake the lore?) to an instance similar to bases. You would need to sneak past patrolling and working Pelistalites towards your objective. Lots of options how you could tweak the mission.. maybe every time you are discovered and had to rely on blowing stuff up counter would tick and after certain limit your mission would be a failure.

Hacking open entrances to make the job easier. Hacking some defense systems to cause turrets to start shooting their own. Gaaah.. got stuck with hacking stuff, but you get the idea?

Other types of (instanced) assignments could be something like:

Convoy Escort: Sequer will be following you and you have to lead it through several ambushes. You have an option to command the sequer to stop so you can scout ahead and take care of the ambushing bots, disarm traps/mines. Find shortcuts.

Blow stuff up: Attack bases/Convoys/Patrols/Camps/Buildings .. Several maps with varied enemy placements. You would often need to choose between direct assault and fast escape or sneaky approach and surgical strike or just overwhelming firepower (for you farmers).

Defend the (supersecret) outpost: You, with help of some static defense turrets need to fend of waves of enemy attacks. Shootshootshoot, I hope you packed enough ammunition.

Etc.etc. And of course all could be done in teams. Some of this sorta stuff could be even done in open world pve, if we had some sorta Adventure Island (tm). Large enough so you could discover and do stuff/these sort of assignments there in relative peace. Might even make it pvp (low-sec style?) island, but finding pve.rs to blow up should require enough effort to not make it a happy gankland.

Several maps, several/or even random enemy placements, several difficulties for solo & team -> not so repetitive pve anymore..

I like the PvE ideas. The squad based combat and team play options sound like a lot of fun.

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Re: Farm Online

agreed.  The content in this game is awful.  just terrible.  The mechanics, the economy, the potential for greatness, is all really good.  But the actual content, is just so freaking boring. 

they really need a pve update patch before they do player structures.  As much fun as pvp is, you need to do pve in order to afford it.  But the pve sucks.  sucks really bad. 

Randomly placed spawns that just sit there and respawn quickly when killed.  Thats it.  Thats all this game has.  Its damn near the year 2011, mmo's had better content back in 1998. 

The sand box nature of this game is great.  But the game requires you do something boring.  thats not a good idea.  mine, harvest, or farm npc's with the horrible content.  I expect mining and harvesting to be boring, but pve is suppose to be at least semi-entertaining, at least a little.  But its not.  Want to make some nic?  Then choose how you would like to be bored to tears!

Please devs, less farm more fun.  Even something as small as the chance for a respawning mob to come back as a named boss mob would go a long way to helping the problem.  At least until we can get some sort of scripted content.

9 Reply by franko (edited by franko 2010-12-21 08:44:08)

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Re: Farm Online

Hadouken wrote:

agreed.  The content in this game is awful.  just terrible.  The mechanics, the economy, the potential for greatness, is all really good.  But the actual content, is just so freaking boring. 

they really need a pve update patch before they do player structures.  As much fun as pvp is, you need to do pve in order to afford it.  But the pve sucks.  sucks really bad. 

Randomly placed spawns that just sit there and respawn quickly when killed.  Thats it.  Thats all this game has.  Its damn near the year 2011, mmo's had better content back in 1998. 

The sand box nature of this game is great.  But the game requires you do something boring.  thats not a good idea.  mine, harvest, or farm npc's with the horrible content.  I expect mining and harvesting to be boring, but pve is suppose to be at least semi-entertaining, at least a little.  But its not.  Want to make some nic?  Then choose how you would like to be bored to tears!

Please devs, less farm more fun.  Even something as small as the chance for a respawning mob to come back as a named boss mob would go a long way to helping the problem.  At least until we can get some sort of scripted content.

+1 its even worse that there is no purpose in farming npc, you cant spend that nic on something better than assault + t4 modules that are few % more effective.
There is such potential in this game, but there is no content...
In eve you can buy game time for game currency so if you like to farm mobs you can play for free...

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Re: Farm Online

Hadouken wrote:

Randomly placed spawns that just sit there and respawn quickly when killed.  Thats it.  Thats all this game has.  Its damn near the year 2011, mmo's had better content back in 1998.

I don't know, I have yet to see a mmo do it any differently.

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Re: Farm Online

At the moment the content is in the PvP, if you don't PvP then I'm not surprised it feels like a grind and you have nothing to do with the NIC. The PvP really underpins the entire game and gives it purpose. Bots are very cheap to produce for a corp, build some with your friends and go blow them up. All the other stuff is just there to support the player driven content.

Try not to fall into the NIC per hour trap. I've seen quite a lot of people boiling the game down into how to make NIC fastest and then saying they're bored. It doesn't really matter how much NIC you have what's important is having fun. So long as you have spare bots and fittings then you really need very little actual NIC.

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Re: Farm Online

Kroth wrote:

At the moment the content is in the PvP, if you don't PvP then I'm not surprised it feels like a grind and you have nothing to do with the NIC. The PvP really underpins the entire game and gives it purpose. Bots are very cheap to produce for a corp, build some with your friends and go blow them up. All the other stuff is just there to support the player driven content.

Try not to fall into the NIC per hour trap. I've seen quite a lot of people boiling the game down into how to make NIC fastest and then saying they're bored. It doesn't really matter how much NIC you have what's important is having fun. So long as you have spare bots and fittings then you really need very little actual NIC.

The problem is, you can't just do pvp. You'll go broke.  At some point, you'll need to go back to farming. 

And what happends when no one is pvp'ing at the moment? Or your too out numbered to even bother and you can't get enough to come help even the odds? 

Good pvp is few and far between.  The problem is, there's nothing fun to do when you can't get that good pvp.

13 Reply by franko (edited by franko 2010-12-21 14:03:45)

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Re: Farm Online

Kroth wrote:

At the moment the content is in the PvP, if you don't PvP then I'm not surprised it feels like a grind and you have nothing to do with the NIC. The PvP really underpins the entire game and gives it purpose. Bots are very cheap to produce for a corp, build some with your friends and go blow them up. All the other stuff is just there to support the player driven content.

Try not to fall into the NIC per hour trap. I've seen quite a lot of people boiling the game down into how to make NIC fastest and then saying they're bored. It doesn't really matter how much NIC you have what's important is having fun. So long as you have spare bots and fittings then you really need very little actual NIC.

But there is no content in pvp too, there are no rewards, no pvp standing only simple list that can be abused by arkhe killing.
No fighting for territory no bounty hunting... whoever have more people will win.
There are no rewards for pvp only griefing. Few teleports that have pvp corp "elites" that you will blow you up or login spawn... or 2 accouts one in arkhe and one log out and spawning when there are something to kill.
Whats the difference between eve and PO ? in eve there are hundreds of star systems in PO you have 6 small islands with few teleports.

Find me someone that is pvping in mech...and find me arkhe on beta...
Its game with potential but should be in  open beta state (free) because of lack of content.

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Re: Farm Online

Duncan Blackmoor wrote:
Hadouken wrote:

Randomly placed spawns that just sit there and respawn quickly when killed.  Thats it.  Thats all this game has.  Its damn near the year 2011, mmo's had better content back in 1998.

I don't know, I have yet to see a mmo do it any differently.

Is this the only mmo you've ever played? 

Dungeons and Dragons Online has some excellent scripted dungeon crawls.

Warcraft has decent dungeons and really good raids.

Warhammer online has those public quests.

Eve has scanning, wormholes, plexes.

Even Everquest 1 had better pve content at release.

The assignment variety in Perpetuum is nice, except none of the assignments are actualy fun.

Perp's pve boils down to, either be much stronger then the npc's and walk through them, or out range them and kill them easily taking zero damage by kiting.  There's no boss mobs. There's no raids. There's no dungeon crawls. There's no quest chains with interesting plots. There's no scripted events. There's no npc bases to lay siege too.  Nothing to defend against Npc attacks.  just slaughter and kiting the same randomly placed group of quick respawning robots, just in different places.  Your doing the same content now, that you were at day one. 

This game has the lamest pve i've ever seen.

Its PVP all the way in perpetuum for sure.  But I like said in the post above, you need to do pve in order to fund the pvp, unless you can get people to pve for you.  And if you can, thats great, except, there isn't always pvp available, how often do two groups meet in pvp that are close in power to have a good fight?  Its usually one side getting creamed.  I'm all for open pvp like this, but there's gotta be something fun to do in the mean time. 

The game is going to need more, and soon, if it wants any hope of growth let alone survival.  It won't survive on the shoulders of the hardcore pvp'ers alone.  You need the carebears to pay the bills, keep the servers running, and to supply the pvp'ers with bots in game.

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Re: Farm Online

Hadouken wrote:

Is this the only mmo you've ever played? 

Dungeons and Dragons Online has some excellent scripted dungeon crawls.

Warcraft has decent dungeons and really good raids.

Warhammer online has those public quests.

I found pve mind numbingly easy in all the above games. Sure they might be nicely packed in some silly instanced dungeons, but the mobs are still just standing there waiting for you to kill them. And even in the off chance that they should kill you, you loose nothing.

At least in perpetuum you risk something. And that means a lot. But sure, I wouldn't be opposed to more stuff to do of course. And i'm sure they are working on something they think will be great.

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Re: Farm Online

Big +1 on the lack of PvE content and it's priority over player build structures and terraforming.

I really wish the devs try to cater what will become most of the playerbase -the carebears-, before trying to add more PvP options.

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Re: Farm Online

franko wrote:

But there is no content in pvp too, there are no rewards, no pvp standing only simple list that can be abused by arkhe killing.
No fighting for territory no bounty hunting... whoever have more people will win.
There are no rewards for pvp only griefing. Few teleports that have pvp corp "elites" that you will blow you up or login spawn... or 2 accouts one in arkhe and one log out and spawning when there are something to kill.
Whats the difference between eve and PO ? in eve there are hundreds of star systems in PO you have 6 small islands with few teleports.

Find me someone that is pvping in mech...and find me arkhe on beta...
Its game with potential but should be in  open beta state (free) because of lack of content.

I guess we just look at PvP differently. The thrill of a good fight and the fun of the teamwork is the reward for me.
I've had plenty of small fights often with equal numbers, a few 1 vs 1 duals, a fair few ganks too and some of the horrible blob fights at weekends. The best fights are the 10-20 per side range and we've had a good number of those. Personally I've not seen any log in traps in the time I've played so you must have been unlucky if you think that's the norm.

I'd have classed holding an island and its outposts as territory control. The rewards for PvP are outposts which give you lower production costs for your stuff so you can PvP more and mine less. If you live on the islands as a corp the fights come to you, mine/farm in the quiet times, dock up and get your combat bots out when there is stuff to shoot.

I'll agree that there could really do with adding more islands so more groups can form up and make a presence in PvP zones and that the arkhes should definitely be removed from kill counts but I cant really agree with your view of the PvP content in the game.

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Re: Farm Online

Kroth wrote:
franko wrote:

But there is no content in pvp too, there are no rewards, no pvp standing only simple list that can be abused by arkhe killing.
No fighting for territory no bounty hunting... whoever have more people will win.
There are no rewards for pvp only griefing. Few teleports that have pvp corp "elites" that you will blow you up or login spawn... or 2 accouts one in arkhe and one log out and spawning when there are something to kill.
Whats the difference between eve and PO ? in eve there are hundreds of star systems in PO you have 6 small islands with few teleports.

Find me someone that is pvping in mech...and find me arkhe on beta...
Its game with potential but should be in  open beta state (free) because of lack of content.

I guess we just look at PvP differently. The thrill of a good fight and the fun of the teamwork is the reward for me.
I've had plenty of small fights often with equal numbers, a few 1 vs 1 duals, a fair few ganks too and some of the horrible blob fights at weekends. The best fights are the 10-20 per side range and we've had a good number of those. Personally I've not seen any log in traps in the time I've played so you must have been unlucky if you think that's the norm.

I'd have classed holding an island and its outposts as territory control. The rewards for PvP are outposts which give you lower production costs for your stuff so you can PvP more and mine less. If you live on the islands as a corp the fights come to you, mine/farm in the quiet times, dock up and get your combat bots out when there is stuff to shoot.

I'll agree that there could really do with adding more islands so more groups can form up and make a presence in PvP zones and that the arkhes should definitely be removed from kill counts but I cant really agree with your view of the PvP content in the game.

Of course its true. You can have fun in this game too. Its not a pile of crap, there is potential here. But there no content for me that can make me pay 10$ because there is lot a f2p mmorpgs that have more content... there is eve that have much more...
Pvp there is a big risk (if you die you are losing everything) and no reward other than little fun. And after death you need to farm pve, that is lacking badly... So lets sum it pvp - fun but very risky, and not rewarding and pve that is grinding same mobs for weeks, lvl1-lvl2 mobs because that is most rewarding nic/h.
In game there must be pve or pvp content/rewards in PO nothing is rewarding like it should be.

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Re: Farm Online

The game is still new. The upside is that you get to be part of the building process of a sandbox game, the downside is that you have to be part of the building process.

If growing with the community and the game is not to your suiting, that's ok the rest of us will continue and we'll welcome you back later after we have built a dynamic and exciting world; and the devs have created more PVE for you. You will be far behind the curve though, so if you do leave it will take you a lot of PVE to get to the point where you can come PVP on the player owened areas...

You could choose to make an investment in the future by continuing your subscription, in which case you'll have the EP when you come back, and maybe get in with a good corp that has its own POS structures!

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Re: Farm Online

Some people like it.
Some hate it.
Some tolerate it. 
Some ignore it.

I think most of us at least agree that it could/should be better.

Maybe the most productive approach would be to start thinking about features and ideas that would make it so. Devs are the ones making the game and we can hope that they listen to us who are playing their game. Maybe we can come up with something that they like enough to implement.

Also it's good that we keep voicing our concerns over the game content. Some may say QQ and to each his own, but nothing will be fixed if it's not known to be broken.

Who knows what they have cooking right now. I do feel that they should actually reveal at least some outlines of their plans and open them for discussion before they go ahead and just implement them.

Even the pvp-side would improve hand in hand with actually interesting pve.

Good pve brings in and keeps players.
More players = More money to develop the game and more pvp action as certain percentage of players is always and surely going to venture into pvp islands and corps. (as slaves to statistics we are)

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Re: Farm Online

Lets just change the name of the game to PerpetuumVille.

I am Perpetuum's Most Dangerous Agent and an equal opportunity troll.
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22 Reply by franko (edited by franko 2010-12-22 07:18:30)

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Re: Farm Online

Neoxx wrote:

Lets just change the name of the game to PerpetuumVille.

There is long way to be like ...ville game.

Number of FarmVille on Facebook Hits 81 Million Users and Counting
It took CityVille 8 days to reach 6m players.

Or maybe you want something like that ? PO its on this direction now.
"A large, urban sandbox sounds simple enough, but things just didn’t pan out for APB. Players were asked to pay upfront for an unfinished game, then they had to buy hourly or monthly game time. With broken gameplay mechanics, and a lack of direction, its little wonder that APB didn’t command the audience the developers originally expected. The launch was supposed to give them an injection of cash to buy time to patch the game, but players quickly lost interest. Less than three months after its release, APB was scheduled to shut down."
Sounds familiar ?

http://mmohut.com/editorials/the-biggest-mmorpg-flops

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Re: Farm Online

Heard all these exact same arguments about Eve when it launched, PVE is boring, mining is boring, there's no content and so on. So long as the Devs continue to improve the game whilst keeping their running costs low then they'll be fine. They're not after 8mil subs in weeks they're playing the long game. The development costs of this game were TINY compared to most MMO's they don't have big name publishers and investors demanding multimillion $ returns right away.

I'm sure they'll add better PvE and more intresting game systems, its just going to take some time. What they have launched with is very solid, the rest will just take time to add.

24 Reply by Andronius (edited by Andronius 2010-12-24 09:18:59)

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Re: Farm Online

franko wrote:
Neoxx wrote:

Lets just change the name of the game to PerpetuumVille.

There is long way to be like ...ville game.

Number of FarmVille on Facebook Hits 81 Million Users and Counting
It took CityVille 8 days to reach 6m players.

Or maybe you want something like that ? PO its on this direction now.
"A large, urban sandbox sounds simple enough, but things just didn’t pan out for APB. Players were asked to pay upfront for an unfinished game, then they had to buy hourly or monthly game time. With broken gameplay mechanics, and a lack of direction, its little wonder that APB didn’t command the audience the developers originally expected. The launch was supposed to give them an injection of cash to buy time to patch the game, but players quickly lost interest. Less than three months after its release, APB was scheduled to shut down."
Sounds familiar ?

http://mmohut.com/editorials/the-biggest-mmorpg-flops


Wonderful post. I can't seem to muster the motivation to play anymore because of how poor the PvE is. Please see my topic for more ideas on how to liven things up. http://forums.perpetuum-online.com/topi … signments/
We should post as many ideas as we can, polish existing ones and hopefully speed the process up for the Devs or they'll never get it fixed. Making their biggest priority hiring coders to bring the existing ideas into reality should be a big focus for us, even if it seems like they should have done all this to begin with before launch. I certainly wasn't expecting such an unpolished game when I logged into my paypal account to buy game time.