...So long and thanks for all the fish, sticks.

My position on the future of this game is well known, and I find it lacking. However, I am going to go through the pros and cons of the game in hopes of outlining the issues that are driving me, and perhaps others, away and what are the best features of the game that should be focused on. I care nothing about bugs or content gaps. Those will be fixed, I assume, though they will be mentioned in the cons section but not for their own sake.

Pros

• Character Creator: The character creator in this game is extensive, varied, and unique. The chances that two people making unique characters ever created even the same looking character is remote. This adds alot to the game and definitely encourages people to make alternate characters thereby adding replay value and an incentive to buy character slots to have more unique characters. It also encourages people to make theme guilds with unique but related characters.
• Open Quests: Though I here this was scrounged from Warhammer, it is still an excellent feature. Gives people something to do when flying around the city, and an award for doing it for all parties involved.
• Crises: I havn't seen the Lemurian one, and probably won't but I will assume it is similar to Monster Island. The Monster Island Crisis has an enclosed map where every action has a definite purpose and there is an epic conclusion. Both the Canada and Desert Crises are like this, but far more spread out though they do have the epic conclusion and the lead up to it. They are isolated, independent, all inclusive quests which definitely add to the game and make you feel like you are an important hero.
• Nemesis: The Nemesis system plays off of the character creator to make your counter part that proves something to keep you playing. The random attacks that drop clues to the next evil things to be done? Good idea. You are compelled to play to keep finding out what is going on.
• Crafting: Simple and fairly useful.
• Training Room: An instanced area to test powers without committing to them.
• Random environment quests: Flying through the city and picking up a bank heist or saving a citizen and getting a quest adds a sense of immersion to the game.
• Non-party friendly: If you arn't in a group but are involved in killing a mob, you get credit. Though I guess this is a necessity for the open quest system.

Cons

• Unfinished Character Creator with Inane Limits: I saw when designing a character for the contest that some items arn't even named. Not only that, but there are a number of glitches when designing increasingly complex characters - the graphics flashing on and off. Not only that, but there are a number of creation limitations that if Cryptic is lucky, there may be eventually enough people making enough characters to notice. Why can't animals or gundam heads wear hats? Why can I have cowboy boots with jean patterned tights but not with actual jean pants? Etc. While the unfinished parts may be fixed, I suspect the arbitrary limitations are things that were not originally designed for and much of it likely can't be fixed.
• Lack of Replayibility: This is part of lack of content. The crises zones are entertaining, but there are only 4, and only the Desert and Canadian Crises provide alternating content. Once you get into your 20s, you are doing every quest on every map to continue leveling. No one is going to want to do this over and over for little reason. The quests arn't compelling and there is no compelling reason to do them other than leveling up. While the character creator encourages multiple characters, with each one made, there is less reason to play the game with it. Is this game worth $15 a month for a character creator?
• Extremely lacking Crime Computer: The Crime Computer is of course the quest finding system; however, only once have I found it remotely useful - sending me to the Stronghold in the desert when nothing else was sending me in that direction. It does not point you to the random environment quests. If I am checking the Crime Computer, I don't want it to just point me to stationary quests - other people should send me there through the course of the game. I want the Crime Computer to tell me about bank heists, citizens with purses getting stolen - "Hero, there is a bank heist near the City Hall!"; "Hero, there is a reported robbery in Psy district!" There is no way to find there other than pure chance otherwise. You may find some citizen quests by saving them from a mob you have to kill anyway, but otherwiseyou have to be at ground level where they can run up to you. The problem with that is all but three travel powers put you in midair almost all the time and you miss all the idiots running up to you.
• Ridiculous Environment quests: How did a citizen on the west edge of a map see a crime on the east side of the map? Sure, you are given plenty of time to get there such that even the slowest travel power could likely make it, but why? It breaks what little immersion the quests give you - the flying across the map, not the plenty of time to get there in case developers get confused. Since the quests appear to be fairly random anyway, citizens should always point you to the closest area.
• Nemesis limits: Similar to citizens, I see them only appearing if you alight on the ground. Which is a stupid idea for multiple reasons. Since the majority of the powers are flying, people are rarely going to be on the ground so the spawn triggers will rarely occur. But if you stay on the ground, they occur too much. Not only that, but if you are on the ground as a flying character, you are more than likely engaged in battle and therefore the Nemesis system overloads the already wound-too-tight player vs PvE balance. And then there is the problem of having to get them to drop a quest item to do the next thing. I have no idea if this is just drop rate based or level based, but either way, the previous issue mentioned seriously hurt the finding of them. I don't know what to do about Nemesis spawns. Perhaps the random attacks and quest item drops should be replaced entirely with the crime computer telling you of Nemesis activity in a specific place. Or perhaps any creature could give you a Nemesis clue. Or maybe they show up in your mailbox.
• Arbitrary Crafting Limits: Why is your crafting level arbitrarily limited by your character level? Why should I have to be level 31 to have more than 300 crafting ability? I could have 400 crafting at level 1, but it is impossible for it to be overpowering because even the CONSUMABLE items have character level limitations. Sure, keep the cost to level it up, but remove the character level requirement. Increase the cost even if you have to.
• Party unfriendliness and extreme exclusion: Teaming has only been developed to the point that people can form teams and.. well that is about it. I would suspect that even that aspect wouldn't exist if not for instanced dungeons ("lairs"). Teaming has no more benefits than running around killing things with people you don't know other than the ability to enter instances together. And by extreme exclusion I mean no damage = no credit. Even if you are doing a quest and the NPCs kill the quest target, YOU GET NO CREDIT if you did not hit it. It's completely absurd and poorly done. This extends to team healers. Though there is no real reason for dedicated healers to even exist but some people want to do it and doing so get no real credit. The teaming system needs to be finished or overhauled. There is no excuse for its current state.
• Elitist Community: I am sure the replies to this thread will make this point better than I ever could.
• Unfinished Auction House: It might as well not even exist. It is even worse than the teaming system, it should not have made it into the game the way it exists. It either shouldn't have made it in at release or they should have finished it. Only displaying 100 items with no way to view any other than searching specifically by name is horrible. There isn't even a search by stat option.
• Management: This really overrides every other issue and because it controls every other issue and the future of the game. This contains multiple but related subpoints:
  • They appear focused on continuing to develop the game how they want to develop it regardless of any other input. Everyone has been talking about the out of proportion retcon system. The economy was fairly evenly balanced but the retcon system didn't even meet their own expectations of how it should be priced but instead of fixing the one item, they change the entire way the designed economy runs in a seemingly stubborn attempt to not change the retcon system out of what could easily be construed as spite.
  • They seem to only fix inherent issues after initially screwing them up and having the full weight of the community come down upon them. The "we don't need to test" patch on the first day of release makes EVERYONE mad and they make a public, easily joinable test server.. then largely ignore it until they introduce another patch a few weeks later that only went to the test server seemingly only for show. People come down on them again and they apologize and promise to listen to test feedback now. The problem is, they should have been doing that in the first place. They were simply placating the community.
  • Lacking patch notes are another example. They have yet to implement full and correct patch notes. Likely because even THEY don't know what a change does or doesn't do. That last sentence should scare anyone with even the remotest amount of understanding. They have been improving it, but only at a crawl and at community outcry with every lacking patch.
  • Untested changes. Sure, things are fixed in patches, but often they are not patched. Several quests in Millennium City were bugged and patched... and are still bugged. Not only are they still bugged but bugged IN THE SAME WAY THEY WERE BEFORE. I find it very unlikely that every, single bug they fixed was replaced by a bug that did the exact same thing. Combined with lacking patch notes and inability to describe what their fixes do, this is evidence of a very amateur effort. Even if the entire development team left the old Cryptic for Paragon, they old management should have been able to direct the new development team to at least semi-professional output, but that isn't the case. I also suspect that the old management is a cause of the stubborn, if not spiteful, resistance to changes.
  • Lacking community relations: Sure, we have Daeke and occasional comments from the dev team, but anyone seen a GM helping in game? How many times have you seen "dev post" in a non-spam thread? They now have rules against spam threads, but hell, they had the highest ratio of dev posts. Apparently devs are very concerned about people's favorite foods and less so about their game experience.

Yawwwwwn. Adios.

Cool beans fella, had a feeling you might be going, still thanks for the memories and the feedback.

Good luck with whatever game you end up playing.

Dissertation on why Cartigan is quitting bores you for over 9000 damage.

Can I have yer stuffs???

If we have to have goodbye threads, at least they could try and be bit more like this.
Seems a bit more even handed naming the pro aswell as the con, rather than spewing nothing but bile.

Happy travels Cartigan.

I'd rather there be none at all. Anybody leaving this fast isn't going to be happy by anything other than the next Blizzard blockbuster with 5 years of development behind it.

I read that and must say from then on my opinion of this post was rather tainted. Can anyone say 'self important'?

I neither know who you are or your opinion on the game, and frankly i dont much care to find out.

Apart from the ridiculous contradictions within your own self important wall of text, you also list a number of things which arent accurate and number of things which are blindingly obvious to most people.

Im sure you are a very intelligent man, you must be after writing such a huge ego stroking wall of text as though anyone really cares or any of those points are remotely original or insightful... assuming thats the case (that your intelligent) pray tell why you thought it would be of any use to anyone to tell people you were leaving? Trust me despite what your might like to think, cryptic arent now running round the office panicking at your announcement.

Yay, we can finally have that "Hooray, he's gone!" party.

In this case, it's true. He's gone on and frigging on, over and over and over and over about how disappointed he is in pretty much every aspect of the game. It's gone on and on and on for weeks. Pretty much since beta.

But, just for the record, I'm not actually criticizing you. Your observation that his posts are absurdly self-important was uncanny.