As tad mentioned earlier, and if this is possible, the most exciting element of SB to me personally is positive interaction with Monster factions.
IDGAF about player-races. Hopefully I gain faction via training.
I hope this is possible too, but I think there might be some embellishing going on in this here thread. Not much has been revealed about Story Bricks or the way the AI in mobs--as opposed to NPCs--is going to function. The one example they keep using is orcs. Orcs, they say, will like gold, hate cities, and like lonely roads. I don't see how any of those would allow a player to build a good reputation with orcs.
I anticipate SB will turn out to be much like the other features of EQN: it will push the genre ever so slightly toward "next gen." A lot of the revolutionary game design that is being discussed here and in other forums is the creation of the players' imaginations and not based on anything that has been revealed. You won't be able to make friends with mobs; they are mobs and they will always hate players. You won't be able to dig down in any location that you want to find a neat dungeon concealing a powerful mob; there will be specific locations that serve as the entrances to these dungeons. Rallying calls are not an opportunity to change the story; they allow SOE to release the game before filling the world with content.
I'm not trying to say EQN is going to be horrible. I look forward to playing it, and I think it is going to be fun and different. It's just important to keep in mind that SOE is playing the same PR game that every MMO with loads of money behind it has played in the past. They get your imagination running wild with all kinds of meaningless claims: "biggest sandbox ever," "emergent gameplay," "next generation," "revolutionary AI," etc. The players then run rampant with speculation and throw whatever they personally want to see in an mmo into the EQN stew.
All you have to do to see that EQN is not going to come close to meeting these expectations is look at what has happened thus far. The developers hyped up the reveal by talking about how much they can't wait to talk about the game, then the reveal was 75% "we aren't talking about that yet." Smedley has literally promised every niche mmo player exactly what they want out of EQN. The developers cushion the information they do reveal with phrases like "it would be cool if..." / "we would love to see that" / "we promise when we reveal the part of this aspect of the game that we aren't talking about yet you're going to love it."
As if these cautionary tales aren't enough, what they have said about beta/release in the past should be enough to make anyone skeptical. "You're going to have a version of EQN by the end of the year, and we don't mean beta." -> "Well, by a version of EQN we mean a game that is not played at all like EQN, but you can use it to help make us content, and it will release this winter." -> "Well by 'we don't mean beta' we actually meant beta and by 'it will release this winter' we meant the beta will start this winter."
Bottom line: temper your expectations.
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