Some good points mentioned there, Infinus. Some of which I also mentioned missing from "the olden days of PE".
it's like the different between driving a light, tight sports car with no power steering and then going to a clunky SUV with such an overly-designed steering system that the whole thing feels numb.
Yep, just look at the vast profusion of weapons and items, wools, extractors, refiners, fragments, blah-blah-blah...I've said before, do we REALLY need all this shit??
It is also hard not to miss the old feeling of unity during both planned and surprise events. Seeing the community unite to combat robots sieges of cities with both fresh noobs and skilled vets fighting side-by-side and working to down threats is something that you just don't get anymore. Seeing people mass in a city when the sirens went off was something amazing.
I don't know about you, but I remember those 'events' as places to avoid; *IF* you could manage to TP into one of those places, the game was a Powerpoint slideshow of lag. And then you'd CTD. That was a lot more common than seeing large masses of players all having a ball.
The world is also so silent now. Gone are the days of the jukeboxes, continuous playing background music (I loved the old music, glad I have it all on mp3s), and most of all for me - the jibberish being spoken by characters while you were typing a message. Hit "Enter" and your character would begin speaking and gesturing, just like in real life conversations. As is a somewhat common saying - the silence is deafening. The music and the avatar speaking made the world feel organic, truly alive, and now it is gone.
Agreed, I do miss the avatar gibberish...since you mentioned it, I'd totally forgot about that! Wonder why it was removed?
Also, the deafening silence you "hear" now is to a good extent a result of your next point: auctions. Now, instead of having groups of players meeting up to negotiate trade deals, you get a clusterf*ck of deaf-mutes gathering like flocks of silent sheep around auctioneers.
Auctions killed the traders and it is a death they did not deserve.
I don't know about your suggestion that auctions caused the inflation we're seeing now, I might disagree with you on that, but it's definitely true that auctions killed the trading profession. It was a worthwhile method of earning some PEDs--a LOT of PEDs if you were one of the few that were really good at it--but things will never be the same now that we have the auctions.
Finally, I miss the old run speed and hunting methods. You know, when you used to able to outrun most stuff and shoot, run, turn, shoot, run, turn, shoot, etc was a viable hunting method.
Again true, and even the ones you couldn't outrun, you could extend your last moments of life before getting eaten, and MAYBE sprinting to the nearest turret in a last-ditch attempt to survive, by jumping strategically over humps and bumps in the terrain, as those bumps slowed down the mobs chasing you because they couldn't jump.
Great post, brings back (mostly) good memories.
