Just read the article and I was pleasantly surprised for the most part. Aside from fucking up and cramming 34 classes into 9 classes and taking the sandbox idea away, some the changes sounded a lot better to me, actually. They removed alot of the grind factor and focused more on the twitch or player SKILL factor. Man, I guess I should have read up on the game more when the NGE changes came out. If I would have known they went ahead and focused more on twitch and skill instead of auto-lock and auto-fire features, and took away some of the grind, I would have re-installed the game.

Some shitty things, though: Taking away creature handling was a step backwards, so was the betrayal that SOE pulled. I think if a focus on player-centric skill and character-centric innovation would have been the focus from the get-go, rather than the grind; none of the mess would have happened as drastically as it did.

Now auto-fire and target locking are re-introduced to make players happy again? How about left clicking the mouse to fire and using some manual dexterity to stay on your target without relying on a game mechanic to do it for you? It's becoming more and more apparent to me that a decent portion of the MMO community prefers to have it's hand held where skill is involved, and would rather grind instead using auto attack features and other mind-numbing principles. I still don't get this trend...maybe I'm just a born pnp AD&D guy who fell in love with FPS games and sees potential between combining the two; rather than through mindless grinding for ways to compensate for lack of skill...

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