That makes game development impossible. You cannot isolate and test every mechanic before putting a game together.

CanDre, your primary flaw (aside from overgeneralizing, making appeals to an authority that doesn't exist, being presumptuous about what others want, and a host of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors) is that you do not account for the fact that Perpetuum is a niche game. Perpetuum is not made for people satisfied with WoW. Perpetuum is, by its nature, a game made to appeal to a minority of players who do not have trouble with at least occasional PvP being forced on them.

I may be incorrect--I don't know what the devs want out of the game's design--but from what I've seen the message is pretty clear: Perpetuum is made for a small population of dedicated people who like a living economy and a PvP-rich world.

1.) If vertical character advancement lasts no longer than the time it takes the newb to get familiar, I'd say that's an appropriate length. Beyond that, getting better at the game should be the only way to advance. Otherwise you just have additional grinding. If you have vertical character advancement beyond that, you're just asking for it to take the players longer to feel like they're playing the "real game".

I'm not a fan of mechanics that approximate doing little more than transferring player time into character power. I'm also not a fan of the idea that a player should have some kind of "main" that they spend all their time working on--but that's for a different discussion.

2.) When you develop a reputation among other players, you won't want to arbitrarily reroll. If we're going to endorse "main" characters, I don't think you should even be ALLOWED to have multiple characters--perhaps players shouldn't even be able to reroll without GM approval. If you let players reroll whenever they want, you're allowing players a "get out of jail free" card to play whenever they do something naughty. If you let them off the hook so easily for breaking norms among their peers, you are basically giving them carte blanche because there can be no social consequences.

3.) How does vertical character advancement provide a clearer goal than the mere acquisition of wealth and power? If the player is incapable of entertaining themself in a sandbox world without sweeping character advancement, I don't see how they wouldn't find a world with such advancement equally unappealing. Players who need to be guided by the nose around the game world don't actually enjoy sandboxes to begin with.

Why should I have to do activities that aren't fun in order to get to fun activities? Why can't I just log on an hour a night and have some fun? Maybe I just value my time higher than other people. If a game isn't going to give me interesting things to do within the first 10 hours, I have trouble justifying spending so much time on it when there are so many other great games around to occupy me to much happier ends.

Why should there EVER be grind, though? Why can't the game be designed to be fun end-to-end (or as close as you can come) instead of requiring you to do repetitive, boring tasks. I don't play games in order to "zone out", I play them to have fun and be entertained as well as to be mentally stimulated a bit.

I'm saying that people vote with their feet. They would prefer not to be bothered with the ganking and histrionics.

Popularity doesn't mean much. But this genre has been around for over ten years now and no one has made a game that has truly succeeded on a large scale without turning it into at least a partial themepark/safe zone? As it stands now, it seems that sandboxes that focus on open-world pvp are basically inferior products. Design hasn't progressed as it has in the themepark realm.

I don't understand your aversion to calling Darkfall a sandbox. It's clearly a sandbox when compared against industry standard games like WoW. It may not be AS sandboxy as Wurm Online or EVE, but that doesn't mean it isn't a sandbox--I guess you could say DFO just has less sand.

Here I disagree. Stone age tribal societies are nice in the beginning, but for how long is brutal coercion by force as the default a fun way to live in a virtual world? I think we should have better tools for building and maintaining societies in-game so we can get past hitting one another with rocks as the main way to solve problems. Of course combat should still remain important, but it should be relegated to specific purposes like outright war, sparring, and fighting criminals/bandits/pirates/rogue AI.

I don't see how global banking makes a game less of a sandbox. I'd think that not being able to build wherever you want would make a game less of a sandbox. Local banking would make the game more realistic and perhaps more fun, but it doesn't seem to contribute to the game's sandbox label.

DFO does have character specialization now, to some extent, though I don't think they did a particularly good job with it.

"Sandbox" is merely a descriptive term for games that, relative to the industry standard, let you go your own way and forge your own fate. "Sandbox" means notably less directed than average, not "realistic". (At least in common parlance it's used that way.)

It was a "this genre is broken and this game isn't doing enough to fix that" post. There's a reason why most EVE players stick to empire space and Darkfall hasn't increased its sub numbers above (IIRC) 30k. Open world PvP is a very small niche and for a good reason.

I also was not talking about "instant escape". If someone is capable of assessing the threat level posed by an enemy force, he can easily pick to avoid all fights but those in his favor. I'm not sure what mechanics Perpetuum has in place to avoid this situation, but if it isn't avoided most of the PvP in the game will be ganking. What mechanics are in place to prevent you from accurately estimating the power of your enemy and just avoiding all fights you won't obviously win?

(Notice: I'm not making a point that Perpetuum is broken because of this, I'm asking what mechanics does Perpetuum have that prevent this. I'm not speaking out against the game, I'm wondering if it gets around a problem I see in other similar games.)

Actually, an hour or two in Perpetuum worked hard to convinced me that the game "is just like EVE". It seems to have copied much of the style and interface of eve with only minor alterations. The easiest way to have people assume (erroneously, in this case) that you are a clone is to clone immediately visible and prevalent parts of the game, like the interface.

Perpetuum certainly has plenty of its own mechanics and ideas. It's not an EVE clone, it just borrowed heavily from parts of EVE. It's good that there is another game that aims to be as deep and involved as EVE.

Please make an actual argument or do not bother to post. There's enough trolling/flaming/general idiocy on the internet already.

Also, it's "crock" not "croak". If you're going to waste everyone's time, at least use your insulting metaphors correctly.