You are more than welcome to your opinion obviously, but it is mine that Matt Firor is a douche. That's the opinion of a lot of folks in the industry. His ideas are stale, his mechanics are worse, and I am sorry but if he hired folks on the buddy system, which you also have posted (Hand picked I believe is the word) that should spell out a few things. Again, relic designers that should be out of the industry and get some fresh blood in. Yes, the game has had three stop starts. It is on it's forth incarnation. This isn't anything new for the genre or the industry, but it also spells out how games can ship incomplete, buggy, rushed foresight development; which results in, typically, a poor game. Yes, it's been in true development now for 18 months. (Maybe a little more. Late Summer of 2011 was the last stop start) and has been a horribly mismanaged product the four years prior.
Paul Sage is, quite honestly, one of the worst deflectors of pointed questions in this industry. Almost as bad as James Ohlen. At least Ohlen hasa credible history of designing games - which is really, where he should have stayed.
Your explanation of Cyrodil is spot on. Pardon me as I will not be excited to partake in an RvR 3 faction war which is supposed to impact the world, statically, which will be nothing more than a spin off event with a loot carrot on an instanced shard per server bringing a 3 hour Call of Duty match to the game. (To be fair, pretty much everything is like this - but at least the majority of them are static to the server and not copied instances. But Firor doesn't care about that. He is too stupid to design around it. As is his crew. Which as of now, is locking guilds to a specific instance, regardless of what the player wants to do independently. This also doesn't touch on locking players out of content for 2/3rds of the game based on faction choice. Which quite frankly, players are tired of.
ToA and New Frontiers was univerally panned and as such, a shit ton of subs fell off. The scapegoat obviously being World of Warcraft, saturation in the market, and the ever so nicely put, end of the cash cow at the cliff of a product life cycle. It brought forth changes no one wanted. I would be curious what you thought was great about ToA and New Frontiers from a bullet pointed microview of it's features. Becfause it took me about 4 seconds to see this on Amazon. Of which 16 of 17 people agreed. Which leads me to not rescind my earlier comments about you schilling. However, this guy said it best in my opinion.
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Age-Camel...owViewpoints=1
With ToA, what Mythic has done is to force players who want to be competitive in RvR to endure a HORRIBLY time-consuming process of getting 'master levels' and insanely powerful artifacts that unbalance the game even more. It's Everquest tedium all over again to get the latest, greatest ML or item, with the exception that the PvE fighting is much, much worse. Now DAoC consists of a crazy arms race with two categories of people: Powergamers in large/elite powerguilds who can devote hundreds of hours a month on a computer game, and casual players who play when classes/jobs/social life allows. Casual players are leaving the game en masse. Playing DAoC now necessitates a huge time commitment to PvE in order to enjoy the RvR element which is what most customers enjoyed. DAoC has an environment now where the uber players rule and casual players drool. Elite powergamers will stick to the party line of "Oh you don't NEED to do MLs and artifacts to compete", because they like having people around to slaughter like cattle. Unfortunately, this situation isn't much fun for the cow.
The new timesinks involve camping the same monsters for hundreds of hours to "level up" items, waiting for hours hoping a certain monster spawns, and hoping you can get into trips with the power guilds for hours at a time to complete stages of quests.
Did I mention that ToA has more bugs than most beta tests? Practically daily, Mythic publishes patches to problems in ToA rather than making fundamental game changes that customers really want.
Mythic really slit their own throats with this one. Save your money for a computer game that can be enjoyable, rather than a second job that you have to pay for.
New Frontiers was heralded the same. So I am not sure if your memory is fuzzy, it's been a while.
With that said, Bethesda didn't even want this game introduced. And unfortunately, Zenimax forced it down. I apologize as I do not have much faith in anyone that hires not only Matt Firor, but then goes on to hire Rich Vogel of all people to head up Battlecry Studios. The decision making process aside from Bethesda Softworks who they typically leave alone (Thank God) is horrid. The fact that Paul Sage and Matt Firor are behind this title, speaks volumes. It is a good thing they built around Hero Engine (Which is another hilarious side step from these mouth breathers) because they are going to need to shit out content at an enormous rate since they plan to ship in October.
As with everything, we will see. But the fact they are also planning on charging a sub fee with a plan of pay to play (Buy the box similar to Secret World) within the first year of the launch date (This is not known out in the wild yet) is nothing short of amazing given the market curently. There is absolutely no reason to be fired up for this title. It's a mix of WAR, DAOC, and SWTOR full voiced acting which is sinking their development costs (Aside from Firor having no clue and tanking roughly $45 million in vapor money fumes for 4 years prior to 2011) And this launch will most definitely not be pretty. Ofcourse, it will ship. And that's all Zenimax wants at this point banking on the IP to sell the boxes and recoup their horrible investment and belief in Firor. What astounds me is the hiring of Vogel after his disasterous blow out of $300+ million with SWTOR. But hey, it shipped right? That's all that counts any more.
Obviously, for your sake, I hope I am wrong. But it doesn't take a crystal ball here to predict otherwise.
Edit: Also, for your information, a majority of SWTOR was developed by contractors.
