Trials of Atlantis rendered a huge amount of armour and weapons entirely useless from the original version and the first expansion, thanks to their overpowered nature.  Catacombs comes along and it had some of the best areas to level up characters in – until they increased the bonuses for other areas making it entirely pointless.  The more recent Dragon’s Revenge updates makes the older armour less useful, so everyone changes to the latest and greatest.  Certain things tend to remain useful for quite a long time if there isn’t any better alternative, however once something better has been added the players will flock to it.

Why does it bother me?  There is a lot of quality content in the game which people won’t touch and will avoid as much as possible because newer things are better.  Why would I bother doing the very old quests which give virtually no reward?  Instead I can do the latest expansions quests and get 500 gold just for completing one of steps.  Many hours must have been spent on the design, the coding, the graphics, the storyline and everything else involved in an expansions content – yet a few updates a year later will render that content pointless.

I’d like to see more MMORPGs updating their older areas at the same time as working on their expansions.  This is something Mythic has been doing, although it has only been a fairly recent and minor effort.  Update the stats on drops for old items, though not retroactively as to encourage people to go back for the new bits.  Add more quests and content to existing areas instead of putting the entire focus on new areas, maybe more of the old content could be updated to point to new areas within the storyline – instead of just having a portal to switch to new bits.

Players like to reminisce about the old days, take advantage of your old content and update it slightly to make them think they’re still playing the game they once loved.

Don’t leave registration to the last minute. GOA managed to utterly fail the open beta release as their system couldn’t cope with the large numbers of players trying to register their open beta codes.  Apparently it was an unforeseen problem and they did test their systems beforehand, however this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if they spotted this a week earlier by letting players register in advance.

Don’t open your servers in the afternoon. As with all MMORPG games you need to kill something in order to gain experience to advance your character, this is an absolute nightmare if you’re fighting with hundreds of other players in the starting zone.  If the servers were up at around 6AM then the hardcore players would’ve been able to rush through the starting zones allowing other players who get up at a more reasonable time to get started with a zone which isn’t so busy.

Don’t launch with a limited number of servers. Players with the collectors edition or standard edition who ordered from certain retailers were able to get head start codes which allowed them to play 3-4 days earlier than those who didn’t pre-order.  Certain servers became overpopulated rather quickly, as players who didn’t pre-order wanted to join their friends in guilds on the servers which were open for head start, instead of the newer servers which were open on the official launch day.

The entire point of all the different head start dates for collectors edition, standard edition and the official launch should’ve allowed GOA to spread out registrations and people joining servers – however if they leave everything to the last minute then disasters are bound to happen, and they did.

Overall I’m enjoying the game quite a lot, there are various concerns I’ve got with various aspects of the game, but for now I’m having fun!