Just poking my head in. Still crazy hardcore, and by crazy hardcore I mean you can't do clever things to have extra fun times. Which is why my interest in MMOs has steadily dwindled in recent years. If I'm not herding everything in a zone for purposes of crowd surfing, giving fake-quest notes to level 1 mobs as a prank on the next newbie who kills the thing, leading an orc into my house and surrounding him with bookcases to keep him as an ornament, or kicking guys off the side of a mountain pass with a horse, well, the game just missed the point for me. I miss the kitchen sink approach to MMO design, which was more a lack of design than anything. Throw a bunch of people and a bunch of toys in a room and see what emerges. Then throw in more toys to keep it interesting.
But increasingly the focus has been on confining players to a straight and narrow path of progression, and when punishing them for deviating from it didn't work, more effort was put into making deviation impossible. Deviation, however, is the essence of adventure. If forced cooperation and measured progression were rewarding enough I wouldn't need escapist entertainment.
I was watching Gilliam's interpretation of Barron Munchausen the other night. That's what I like to do in these things. Get dropped into a ridiculous, artful fantasy, and then ride a cannonball across a battlefield full of people who didn't realize you could do that. And I guess the damn thing of it is that after years of finding new ways of riding cannonballs, they've nearly all been nerfed out of everything. They've become safe, but less exciting worlds for it, and I'm starting to feel old.
