Cav's Place

It doesn’t look like I’m going to be sleeping, so might as well use the time to write this. Kept putting off another personal post for the past two days anyway, thinking I’ll somehow manage to write something else first, but now this seems required. It may well prove to be nourishment for the bridge dwellers, but they’ll just get ignored. Hardly in a state that’d allow me to discuss anything with anyone even if I wanted to anyway.

I’ve been using an UPS for my computer for the past six years, if not more. It became necessary while living with Andra due to frequent power fluctuations and the fact that the “normal” voltage we were getting tended to be quite high, constantly above 240V, and I always keep the computer on as well, starting back in 1999, when I started having it work on SETI@home, so that puts it even more at risk. As a result, after I thoroughly analyzed the options, we got a Mustek PowerMust 800, which did its job really well while I lived there. The poor thing actually was in AVR mode nearly constantly, seeing as that triggered whenever the voltage was outside the 198V-242V range, and the battery had a fair amount of work to do as well due to the fluctuations I mentioned.
She kept that one after I got kicked out and I got a new one of the same model, which once again did its job really well for some two and a half years. However, that ended in the second half of 2008, when the battery died. I believe it first kept my computer up for several minutes because the power went out when I was taking a shower and I couldn’t immediately rush to turn it off, but then never recovered after that effort, even though the monitoring software was listing the charge as 100%. The next time there was a power failure, I got the “battery low” warning after about a minute, though it held until the computer shut down. The next time after that, the warning came up the moment the power failed, and afterwards it was completely dead, so my computer just turned off the next time the power failed.
By then it was already three years old, which is the amount of time these batteries are supposed to last anyway, so I replaced it with the next model, PowerMust 848, seeing as that one was discontinued. It actually arrived on April 1st and now it would appear that the joke really was on me.

I first noticed an issue when it kicked in Sunday morning, at around 5:25 AM, when I was in bed but still awake and heard it activate. Seeing as the power wasn’t off and it wasn’t beeping anyway, I got up to investigate and saw the voltage above 254V, which is when this model goes in AVR mode, having the standard set at 230V. I also saw the battery drain to 63% very quickly, though I assumed it was because it needed some time to adjust after I had turned on the monitor as well while it was busy adjusting the power, but it was a sign of things to come…
After I woke up that day and saw the battery only at 79%, even though the voltage came back within more reasonable levels at 7:32 AM, I started checking the log more thoroughly and noticed that the battery never recovered full charge, which is 13.6V, ever since June 2, when there were two power failures within hours of each other. Until Saturday morning the drop was minor and it held steady at 13.5V, but then it dropped to 13.4V and later that evening, so only hours before the event that made me check it, it went all the way down to 12.9V without any reason whatsoever. Then it had apparently recovered to 13V and then dropped even more, to 12.8V, when I noticed that 63% charge. Afterwards, it held at 79% charge for a couple of days, then started trying to go higher but never managed to hold it.
The first attempt to increase the charge got to it 84%, and 13.2V, then it fell straight down to 52% and 12.6V on its own. Haven’t seen any such drops after that, but the pattern seems to be the same. It struggles to get to 84%, stops there for a while, then very slowly loses the additional charge until it settles back down to 79%. After a brief “rest” at that level, it once again gets to 84% and the cycle repeats itself.

Now it wouldn’t have been that much of a problem if the battery would simply have lost some maximum charge. It would have been a little early, since they are supposed to last three years, as I said, but probably manageable for a while longer. However, this morning it just decided to turn itself off, obviously also turning off my computer in the process, which means it really needs replacement.
I think I was just asleep for a few minutes when I woke up quite confused and I needed just a moment to realize why: The computer was off. Now I don’t know if the UPS actually beeped once first or the silence was what woke me up, but checking the log afterwards proved that I woke up just when it turned off. So I got up, figured out what happened, checked the UPS and saw that it was indeed off. Pressed the power button twice, since it was still in the “on” position, and it turned back on well enough. The charge is also still listed as 84%, where it actually managed to stay for the past three hours, and there is no log entry about any event that might have caused it to turn off. It is possible that there was a brief power failure and it was completely unable to switch to battery, so it turned itself off without managing to log the event first, but I can’t know that and either way it doesn’t matter.

I wrote a long note and left it on the kitchen table for dad, but have no idea what I’ll be doing now. Warranty expired in April, so I guess it’s time for a new one, quite some time earlier than expected and even a few months sooner than the previous one started experiencing issues. However, that implies interacting with dad in some way when I’m so scared of everyone and everything, and especially of him, seeing as he can do things that can have major and immediate effects on my situation… It may also imply, if it’ll turn itself off again for no apparent reason, having to do without an UPS for some time, until the new one will arrive. I do have the normal power cables, so far unused, but it will first require moving some things around and then I’ll be at the mercy of the power fluctuations, which hasn’t happened in a long time, plus that rather frequently getting over 250V early in the morning is rather worrying without an UPS as a safety net in case it gets too bad… Sure, lots of people manage it like this, shrugging off the reboots when there happen to be power failures and possibly not even being aware of the high voltage issues, but I’d really prefer not to risk it!
Then again, it does seem to be a rule, doesn’t it? Something failing in or related to my computer when I’m really out of it. Could even say that it took its time right now, because I’ve been in this state for a couple of months already. There have been times in the past when being very angry or scared immediately caused temporary computer problems, and it only took a couple of weeks after I bumped into Andra again that time towards the end of 2007 for the HDD I had at the time to fail, so it was unfortunately expected… Now I guess I can only hope there won’t be even worse problems, though I did see some new bad sectors on the HDD as well…

Note: Edited in the afternoon after noticing that it was in fact bought in 2009, not last year, so warranty did just expire…

I named this as the first part of a series because there’s a lot to say about this issue and I think it likely that I’ll get back to it at some point, not because I have any plans to do so in the very near future. For now, it’s just what I came up with while struggling to look for a topic to write about this week. Interestingly, I thought of this shortly before noticing that a certain event that has something to do with the issue is taking place here just this weekend, so it can be said that the timing is quite appropriate.
Don’t expect links or anything particularly thorough in this post. If I’ll get back to the topic, that may happen, but right now I’ll just be giving a little overview of the issue and a few suggestions, some of which I’m sure I mentioned before as well, as part of discussing other potentially related issues. Seeing as cities have been planned like this for a very long time, the suggestions may sound unusual or even harmful to “normal” people and they will certainly be very difficult to implement under the current circumstances, but when did you ever know me to be interested in what “normal” people think or how things currently stand? Being “normal” is what got us into this mess, after all.

The basic idea is that humans, just like all terrestrial mammals, are usually born with these things called legs, which are actually quite effective in helping them move from one place to another. They cause problems when the distances that have to be covered are great, but reasonably healthy specimens who are not hampered by great burdens or a complete lack of exercise should easily be able to use them to move even several kilometers at a time, which should be enough in itself for cities that have up to several hundred thousand inhabitants and a great help for the bigger ones as well, though a very solid public transport network is absolutely necessary in those.
However, cities are usually built for cars and not for people, so pedestrians usually find themselves at a serious disadvantage. Residential and commercial zones are often entirely separate, many things are concentrated in only a few areas, sidewalks are often the first that get sacrificed when some work needs to be done, plus that they’re usually blocked by parked cars and various other obstacles, and in general the road network, in case it is planned at all, is meant to help motorists, not pedestrians, reach their destination. Not to mention that said motorists often seem to think that they have the right of way simply because a car is much tougher than a person, so the person will move out of their path if they don’t stop, no matter who actually has right of way in that particular situation.

My point of view is that personal vehicles should be meant for people who are sick or old, emergencies and times when a person has truly heavy, bulky or fragile items to carry. At all other times, the choice should simply be between walking and using public transport services, which obviously need to be accessible and very well developed everywhere, for both short and long distances. This would greatly reduce pollution, including noise pollution, the need for fossil fuels and many risks. It should also make for much nicer and calmer cities, where the inhabitants won’t be nearly as stressed as they currently are, in part because such a lifestyle would need to have a much slower pace than the current norm in the developed world.

Some of the measures necessary in order to get to that point are extremely difficult to implement in existing cities, particularly in the big ones, but they should be kept in mind whenever a major project is started, so new cities will be built like this and existing ones will gradually change according to this format as much as possible. I’m talking about splitting cities into many smaller areas, each of which placing the zones and services people need in their daily lives within a reasonable walking distance. Granted that the industrial area would need to remain at the outskirts and certain important administrative buildings, as well as a small number of commercial ones that must be placed in such an area for objective reasons, would most likely still be situated in the city center, but there would be far less traffic to and from these areas and a carefully planned public transport network would handle it without problems.
Yet that’s neither the only thing that can be done nor enough in itself. Projects meant to encourage walking and using the public transport network and discourage driving must be set in motion everywhere. Such projects would use the typical “carrot and stick” approach, on the one hand greatly improving the public transport services and reserving lanes only for these vehicles, clearing and widening sidewalks, giving pedestrians priority over motorists more often and even designating certain areas as off limits for personal vehicles, while on the other virtually ensuring traffic jams for those who insist on driving, adding significant taxes for those who use their cars too often, reducing the number of parking spaces and increasing parking fines.

Any such measures will be met with firm opposition, of course, but so are many others that get implemented anyway. The difference between these and most of said others is that the end result of such a plan would actually be beneficial for both humans and the environment, so those who actually use their brains to think things through have every reason to push such an agenda forward, by any means necessary if need be. Granted that it will be an uphill struggle, seeing as the vast majority of people do not use their brains to think things through and something like this neither lines the pockets nor increases the influence of those in positions of authority, but nothing worthwhile’s ever easy…

Yes, I’ll have a personal first post of the week once again, which doesn’t bode well. Keep having big ideas that I’ll never get around to writing, so this will have to do for now. Spent three and a half hours putting some 500 words into something else yesterday anyway, which is a whole lot for one day when it comes to that, so really don’t feel like staring for several more hours at the screen today as well, hoping that something would come to me.
Should get around to writing at least an overview of those big ideas someday, though. The fact that I’ve been having them for years and never did it would indicate that I never will either, but at the same time it should say that I should keep trying, at least occasionally. In fact, I should perhaps take advantage of these weird current circumstances, just in case they’d happen to bring some readers to the posts I actually want people to read. After all, after hardly averaging one person initiating contact with me per year so far, I’ve had several deciding to do so out of the blue within days of each other lately, the last of them appearing particularly, shall we say, dedicated these days, so why couldn’t someone interested in my non-personal posts just happen to pop up as well?

Otherwise, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger seem to dislike each other even more these days. Not that interoperability wasn’t always a problem, but there usually was just the occasional message sent from WLM that didn’t reach me on YIM. There was one other evening, also when I was trying to talk to Tiel, when lots of her messages were failing to reach me and even a couple of mine failed to reach her, but now the situation seems to be even worse and has lasted for some two days already. It feels as if more of her messages get lost than reach me, so trying to chat is an exercise in frustration, and she seemed to be missing a few of mine as well. Really annoying!

Under oddly enough, I thought I should mention that I’m noticing an increasing amount of spam in Romanian. At first there were broken translations, so nothing notable, but now I’m seeing messages that actually seem to be written in Romanian, which is certainly new. Does it mean there are some new developments on the spam “market” or just that the bots have just figured out where I’m from? Or would it have something to do with the increased amount of traffic I’m getting from Romania, due to some of the people I mentioned above?

Guess that’s it for now. Hope I’ll manage to think of something non-personal to post by the end of the week… And that I’ll start playing something as well, for that matter, since I haven’t touched anything in the ten days since I stopped playing Forsaken World, just like I feared would happen. It’s a little annoying…

It would appear that, in between long stretches of time spent simply thinking in the dark and silence, I’m somewhat unusually productive tonight, so let me try writing this now as well instead of waiting for next evening as it seems to be the rule lately. Oddly enough, though I was far from certain that I’ll manage it, I actually was planning to write a post to file under Health this week, so it adds up, even though this was really not what I had in mind.
Sleeping on issues is generally a very good idea, but this could very quickly and very easily become too complex if I dwell on it, in which case I’d end up setting it aside and then possibly never get around to writing about it, so better throw something out here while it’s still fresh. For full disclosure, I probably should mention that this train of thought started after I learned this evening that my uncle was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Connecting that to the fact that my grandfather was also diagnosed with cancer last year, that I may have heard of one or two others as well shortly before that, though I’m not sure where they fall on the extended family tree, and that there have been some other recent scares related to that as well, this paints a very suspicious picture when you take into account the fact that cancer was nearly unheard of in this family until now despite most members that I know of living past the age of 80.

One needs to wonder why are we not only allowing but actually encouraging this to happen these days. I mean, from my point of view, bar a few truly terrifying brain conditions that reduce a person to a mere shell of themselves, cancer is the scariest and worst illness I can think of. It’s not just the fact that it’s often deadly and always painful, nor that subjecting yourself to the existing treatments for it may well be worse than dying, particularly if it’s not caught early on, but also that it implies that your body has simply decided to destroy itself.
Granted that certain autoimmune diseases, those that make your body literally decide to destroy certain parts of itself that it still needs in order to function, are worse and more unusual in that aspect, but the truly serious ones are also far less frequent and can often be traced to certain conditions or flawed genes, whereas cancer looks more and more like a worldwide epidemic that few can consider themselves safe from. And it certainly looks like we’re determined to pour more and more substances into the world and into ourselves and use more and more devices that are at least suspected to increase the risk.

There was a piece in an old article from National Geographic Magazine where someone was saying that, while it’s true that the incidence of cancer and heart disease has tripled over the past two centuries, the average life expectancy has also doubled. I really don’t find that an improvement. I’d much rather have 50 years of perfect health and then quickly drop dead from an injury or a massive infection than somehow have my life stretched on to 100 years but need to struggle with all sorts of treatments and keep going through hospitals starting in my 30s, and even earlier for some unlucky souls.
Seeing as all of us usually have a certain number of cancerous cells inside our bodies, due to various errors our bodies make while growing and repairing themselves, it could be argued that those errors accumulate and therefore cancer is an unavoidable outcome past a certain age. However, while that is quite true, there are plenty of young or relatively young people affected by it and the increased average life expectancy is far from sufficient to account for the rest because it’s largely thanks to far fewer children now dying at or soon after birth, modern warfare claiming far fewer lives and certain parts of the world where disease and poverty were historically rampant benefiting from some medical services, so you may well find that, if you’d adjust for those factors, the real increase in life expectancy hasn’t been all that significant. Besides, while it admittedly is not a new problem for old people, the incidence seems to have significantly increased among them as well in recent decades.

In general, it seems to me that animals with much shorter life spans and much more rapid metabolisms are more prone to developing cancer, which should make it highly uncommon among humans, considering how long we live compared to most other species. That even makes perfect sense, assuming you consider it to be just an accumulation of errors and not something caused by external factors as well, because it’s much more likely for a rapid metabolism to generate such errors, just like it’s much more likely for a person who rushes to make mistakes. However, considering the current rates and, more importantly, the estimates for the future, that hardly seems to be the case…
Interestingly, what we’re doing to our metabolisms can actually play a big part in this terrifying outcome. After all, the human body isn’t exactly meant to always be active and burn through sufficient amounts of food on a daily basis, but mainly, like most other animals, to alternate between periods of intense activity and long periods of rest, periods of plenty and periods of dearth. Yet modern society, particularly in the developed world, has taken that away and forced people into this highly unsuitable rhythm. And let’s not even mention all the attempts many make to hasten their metabolism in order to lose weight…

So what do we have in the modern and more or less developed world? Unsuitably high and constant demands from our bodies, unsuitably high supply of nourishment, dangerous substances all around us and dangerous devices frequently in use. It’s no wonder we’re ending up here! The question is only what are we going to do about it.
In the end, the powers that be probably do not mind reducing the population in this manner instead of the far more difficult method of drastically reducing the number of births, no matter the pain and suffering caused, and the pharmaceutical companies make too much money from treating this veritable plague of our age to be particularly interested in preventing it either, so it’s all down to us, the regular people. Who knows, if logic, reason and ethics are obviously not enough, perhaps fearing their own death and suffering and the death and suffering of their loved ones could somehow make enough people act before it’s too late.

Forsaken World is meant to be Perfect World‘s new flagship MMORPG, replacing Perfect World International (Perfect World II for Asian markets) even though, oddly enough, that game also had a new expansion released only a week before the launch of Forsaken World. Judging by what I see on the forums, but also by how the number of visits to my Perfect World International Information Dump post plummeted but has been more than made up for by those to my Answers for the Forsaken World Searches posts, I can say that they were successful in that, at least for the moment. But I somehow don’t think this success will last…

The first good thing that can be said about this game is that it’s free. Yes, cash shop items can have a significant impact and unless you purchase plenty of them you won’t have much of a chance to win in PvP, not to mention to top any rankings or, if the rumors will prove correct, to become a God of Eyrda, but if you want to simply play the game, you can do that well enough even without spending a single cent, particularly on the PvE servers.

At a first glance it seems to look and play extremely well for a free to play game, what the developers managed to squeeze out of such an old engine being quite amazing. The world looks nice, and later on you’ll see that it’s quite diverse as well, the character models are well made (though, from a developer with the insanely complex Perfect World International character creation system under their belt, I certainly expected far more choices) and the equipment design ranges from nice to truly outstanding (with particular care paid to female gear, though the amount of skin revealed by it bothers even me, and I’m a heterosexual male)… However, the engine’s age will quickly become obvious, even more so if you have a 64-bit operating system or any version of Windows 7, which seem to significantly increase the risk of encountering glitches that can go all the way to making the user completely unable to play or even start the game. Fixes exist and they’re occasionally compiled into more or less official forum posts or even a couple of knowledge base articles, but they’re mainly discovered by players through trial and error, therefore sometimes being quite unusual and far from guaranteed to work.
Even if you do manage to get the game to work on such a system, whether because you were lucky enough not to experience these issues or because one of the fixes worked, you are quite unlikely to be able to properly enjoy it simply because, certain laptops aside, having such an operating system usually implies that you have at least a reasonably powerful computer and this old engine won’t know what to do with it. Or the computer won’t know what to do with the engine. This is certainly the kind of game that will generally perform worse the better and newer the hardware it runs on is, as you will likely experience massive performance degradation, to the point of being unable to play on any but the lowest settings in some extreme cases, if your CPU has more than two cores, while a particularly new and powerful video card is more likely to just increase the number of potential glitches and crashes than improve the performance, as most video processing is done by the CPU as well.
(I must note that this entire section is written as a result of reading enough forum posts, including some official ones, to know that these issues are real and very frequent in the listed scenarios. My computer has a Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU (3 GHz, dual core), 2 Gb of RAM, an 1 Gb GeForce GTS 250 video card and runs 32-bit Windows Vista (Service Pack 2). As such, being below the “problem” threshold in every aspect, I have not experienced any major issues and the game ran well on maximum settings, with the exception of Freedom Harbor, where I experienced the expected frequent frame rate drop.)

If you get past all that and start playing, you’ll find plenty to do and enjoy, at least up to a point. The starting areas are pretty well done, teaching you the basics about the game without quite feeling like a tutorial, and as soon as you reach Freedom Harbor you’ll be overwhelmed with how much you can do. Side quests, daily quests, the main quest, jobs, exploration, your first instance once you hit level 15 and so on. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be going in circles, from one new and interesting thing to another, and reach level 20 before you even know it, possibly without even starting the Kalaires Plain portion of the main quest. Then you’ll take a breath and try to figure out what you actually mean to do with your character, in part because you’ll finally be able to assign talent points and the talent trees are made in such a way that it’s not only impossible to reach the most powerful talents unless you put every single point in the same tree, but also because even if you do that you’ll hardly be able to get even half of the talents in said one tree and it’s quite hard (though thankfully possible) to obtain a talent compass and reset your talents without purchasing one from the cash shop, so changing your mind can be a costly affair.
While there is little reason to dawdle in Kalaires Plain more than you need to, that will appear to change once you are able to go to the Sea of Oblivion. You’ll suddenly have another new area to explore, a new array of quests to do, plants and minerals to gather, elite monsters to kill for gem shards and crafting materials, instances and, if you’re so inclined, even world bosses to beat and so on. For a little while you’ll feel as if there couldn’t be enough hours in a day to tackle all that you can do even if you’d do nothing else but play this game. Which may, and in fact should, make you start thinking more about the path you want to take for your character, not just in terms of talents but in terms of how you actually want to play, what your role should be in Eyrda. Will you look for a guild and do guild quests in order to try to make it one of the best? Will you instead do as many instances as possible in order to obtain good gear and other rare drops? Will you be a gatherer? A crafter? A shrewd merchant who’ll somehow manage to earn large amounts of money without actually producing anything? Will you simply try to level up as fast as possible and worry about what you actually need to do after you reach the level cap? Will you play with or against others? Or will you try the path of the lone wolf instead? For a moment it will seem as if this is a game for everyone and you couldn’t wish for more.

That won’t last, however. One moment you’ll feel as if you’re cheerfully and tirelessly running through a beautiful meadow on a perfect day, the next you’ll hit level 25 or so and that nice pond in front of you will suddenly turn into an increasingly deep swamp that you’ll find yourself needing to wade through. And then you’ll hit 30 and it’ll feel like coming to a halt against a wall. (Others put this at around level 35, but it was 30 for me.) If you want to keep going, thinking it will get better once you’re on the other side, you’ll probably pull out a spade and start digging a tunnel through the mud. Then, slowly but surely, that spade will bend and eventually break, so you’ll be pushing on with just the handle, then a rusty bucket you found nearby, then a bent spoon, then your boots and your bare hands, yet you still won’t find anything better…
Now I’m hardly a person who rushes and in fact very much prefer the slow and patient approach, where being in each place and at each level has a point… But that’s just the problem here: There is no point to be at any level or in any area other than because you’re on the increasingly tedious way to the next. Now I stopped playing when my characters, a human mage and a kindred vampire, were only level 48, but I have experienced quite enough to know what I’m talking about and have read others’ experiences at the higher levels as well, so I have specifics if you want them:
Want to just gain levels? You’ll be doing God’s Trial every day, because early on it gives so much experience there’s little point in looking for it anywhere else, but hit 30 and it will become less and less relevant. Hit 45 and you’ll be wondering why do you even bother, so you’ll be grinding the same daily quests every single day on top of it in order to actually get anywhere, even though you know very well that this will also be a case of diminishing returns.
Want to do instances? You’ll be doing the same ones every day for the same completely random drops that are unlikely to be what you want anyway. That’s made even worse by the fact that instances are only available through the instance queue system while you’re in a given level range, so once you exceed the maximum level you will no longer be able to look for random groups, though you’ll still be able to enter the instance if you find your own group. What’s more, though a player that is far above an instance’s recommended level range could take it as a challenge to complete it alone, that’s impossible because you are not allowed to enter instances unless you’re in a group of at least three and if your other party members leave and you are left alone inside an instance you will automatically be thrown out of it after 30 seconds. And then there’s the regeneration and mana use issue, but more on that later.
Want to simply quest? Well, quite frankly, you won’t be able to. I read that the main quest quite abruptly ends well before the level cap, while I know that you’ll be finishing side quests far faster than you’ll be able to level up enough to unlock new ones if questing is your focus. With few exceptions, these quests are nothing to write home about anyway, but the fact that, at least after level 40 or 45, you will simply run out of them all too soon and need to go right back to grinding the same dailies more and more makes it a lie when someone says that this game is “quest-centered”. No it’s not, it’s daily-centered!
Want to be a crafter? Good luck either gathering insane amounts of common materials and the required very rare ones or doing some other tedious chores to earn the money required to buy said materials from gatherers who are willing to put up with that for a decent profit. Then good luck with the actual crafting, as the item attributes are completely random, so the result is not only highly unlikely to be what you wanted but also quite likely to be a piece of trash that you’ll get less for than you spent on the materials required to craft it, if you chose to buy them. And you may often need to buy them, seeing as you can only have six of the 12 optional jobs active. But perhaps the worst problem when it comes to crafting is that high level recipes and materials can only be bought from guild bases, and currently only by the players who belong to the respective guild, so if you are not in a guild that’s strong enough to obtain and maintain a base, you simply won’t be able to craft for too long. And the highest level recipes and materials are only available for the best guilds, so not even simply having a base is enough.
So you’ll want a guild with a base, right? But a base is first expensive to obtain and then tedious to maintain, people estimating a need for some 20 to 30 very active members that will do guild quests, so even more dailies, in a sustained manner only to maintain it. If you want to improve it, you’ll need far more than that, and then it’ll also cost more and more to maintain, which tends to encourage a “slave driver” mentality in guild leaders and generate a lot of conflicts.
Want to engage in PvP? Seeing as a few players spend quite insane amounts of money on cash shop items, unless you’re one of them I sure hope you enjoy them wiping the floor with you just about every single time, because that’s almost certain to happen. (Then again, I have plenty of things to say about those who want PvP, all of them bad, so… Serves you right.)
Want to be a lone wolf instead? Oh, believe me, I tried! But first there’s God’s Trial, then there are items that can only be obtained in instances and perhaps from the cash shop, achievements for pretty much every single thing done in an instance and nice things you can obtain once you have a certain number of achievements, this need to rely on others for your jobs and, perhaps worst of all, the need for a solid guild if you even want to be able to continue using your jobs past a certain level!

Yet, besides all that and all the bugs, which in “good” Perfect World fashion are generally fixed at some point between too late and never, you know what I found to be the most annoying “feature” of the game? The health and mana regeneration, or more exactly the lack of it, coupled with the insanely high mana cost of skills! As somebody put it, though of course I have no intention of verifying, it takes somewhere between two days and a week to fully regenerate normally, while if you mean to use skills all the way you’ll use up most of your mana in order to kill one enemy of equal level. It’s even worse for the game’s flagship class, the vampires (that don’t sparkle), for that matter, as they can literally burn through half of their total amount of mana in around ten seconds if they go all out.
The game assumes that everyone will always have huge amounts of food and potions on hand, many players claiming to go through at least 30 or even 50 potions in each instance and some, particularly the top priests, saying they don’t go anywhere without a few hundred of them on hand because they know they’ll need them. Everyone is pressured from the beginning to get the botanist, alchemist and chef jobs, in order to be able to make their own food, drinks and potions, though you may choose not to get them, in order to keep job points for the other nine optional jobs. But whether you have those jobs or not, it still means that doing something properly implies a lot of grinding, either to gather the ingredients or the money required to obtain the huge amount of supplies you’ll need. Though it’s very slow and makes things even more tedious, it is, admittedly, possible to do most things without using potions or food as long as you play by yourself, and that’s how I usually played, but in instances you’ll have a serious problem if you try that because the other party members most likely will not share your view, instead going through potions like crazy and yelling at you if you don’t do the same and as a result don’t quite keep up.
In fact, though I generally say that I play alone or not at all and there were moments that certainly proved my point, I found that I could occasionally do some instances, at least enough to get by, until I hit this issue simply too many times. As I said, it’s possible to slowly do most other things without insane potion use if you’re careful and tactical, but instances will not work that way, partly because of how they’re designed but mainly because of the other players, who in the end behave just like the game encourages and even pressures them to, being apparently just its target audience. If you don’t like this, you’ll be missing out on what can be obtained from instances and need to rely more on other tasks… Which would be all right if said tasks wouldn’t be so unbearably tedious and generally pointless anyway. Yet they are, which means that they sooner or later become utterly impossible to put up with if you refuse to play in this idiotic manner the game tries to force on you.

In the end, I can say that this game at first appears to cater to everyone and be unbelievably well made, considering that it’s free to play, but after a while it’ll show its true colors and you’ll realize that it’s far from being as well made as it first appears and in fact it doesn’t really cater to anyone at all. Except perhaps to gatherers, who know what they’re signing up for, “slave driver” leaders and wealthy players who don’t mind buying large amounts of cash shop items meant to simplify the game, which in this context means bring it back within manageable levels. The rest will simply keep doing the same repetitive tasks for little or, all too often, no gain until they’ll either get bored or actually become unable to keep doing them for the reasons I mentioned above, at which point they’ll give up and move on to greener pastures.
You have little to lose if you play it for free for a while, until it gets boring, but you’d probably need to purchase cash shop items to make it bearable, not to mention truly enjoyable, past a certain point… And if you’re willing to pay, there are far better games out there for you.

But, of course, I play alone or not at all, so MMO games are really not for me. Yet I played it for over three months, so it must have done something well… For a while…