Since this is supposed to be stuff OTHER than MS..

What, in your opinion, is the best game you've ever played?
-The catch though, is that it has to be picked from games that you thought would have sucked, but tried them and they rocked.-

For me? Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for the PS3. Got a whole knights of the 9 order behind me now

Mabinogi,turned out to be one of the best

Maple Story o.o And Ragnarok Online. But Ragnarok Online turned out to be my perma-ftw-game. o.o

KartRider (Played AirRider at Korea)
Counter Strike Source
Starcraft (Both played and Watched at Korea)

How i watch Starcraft in korea: they have competitions there.

Flyff-Gpoptato
Halo 3 -Video Game
MapleStory

Never happened to me. I never waste my time on games I don't think I wont like.

you should try out some other games sometime

Yeah; I have a blast playing Oblivion even though I thought it'd fail due to my past experiences with Elder Scrolls...

I forgot to mention StarCraft. It was my first game i tried playing. I thought it would suck HARDCORE. But in the end, after 5 years, im still playing it. There is somthing I do all the time. I play a game for 1-2 weeks and I love it, but after that its uninstalled.

I usually have the same problem unless there's a single thing that clings me to it; usually in MMORPGs it's being the head or high up in a guild.

No not really. The thing I hate about MMORPG's is like everyone has uber stuff cuz they payed for it like you pay normally for Nexus Cash. Alot of people in every MMORPG has it and like when you think you're doing good, you just see someone passing by with like uber stuff, 1 hitting everything that takes you forever to kill. It ruins the game. Why cant there be 1 freakin MMORPG that dosnt have stuff you could buy.

Heh; There's a few out there but they're fairly rare. Pi Story has >JUST< clothing items in-shop, and Dungeon Fighter Online will most likely just have MINOR enhancement items.

I do agree though that P2P users do get alot more than the F2P users, and that's probably one of the main reasons why there's so many hacks and private servers out for so many games.

Actually, there's only 2 main reason's why people make private servers. 1. Because its really not balanced. If you pay you own. If you dont your worst then dust. and 2. Because the leveling rates and well any rates are low. Take iRO for example. (International Ragnarok Online. The real game.) People HATED it because the rates were 1x/1x/1x/. And to explain what that means its 1x Job Level, 1x Base Level and 1x Drop. So its pretty low. Same thing here. It takes too long to level, so people try and make there own server so they can play with happyness and not spend there entier lifes trying to get that last job change.. I imagine how the players of WoW are... :O And as you said, there's RARYL any servers out there that arent money-hungry. Even if you have to pay for only cloths, its still gay and unballanced. If you know a game, any game that does make you pay for stuff, please post it here.

Well I knew of two games that didn't need cash at all for you to kick total ass in them.

Gunster: Rain of Bullets(IJJI hosted)(2-D Shoot-em-up)-Shut down late 2007 due to people hacking it anyways because they couldnt buy uber-powerful weapons, so they hacked it so they could wield the BOSS weapons with infinite attack speed. Things in the cash shop were pretty much just different chars with different skills. Both F2P and P2P players were equally balanced in all aspects, and it was nice both in multiplayer co-op and PvP.

Survival Project 2(Forget who hosted it)(2.5D Strategy/Action)-Shut down sometime in 2006 I believe.. Fairly sure it was because the company couldn't afford to keep the server up. It was a fairly balanced game where strategy truely mattered, and P2P only had a minor advantage over F2P; it was hardly a difference though if you know how to use strategy correctly.

Not sure of any other current games that have the cash shop having things that dont really affect the gameplay at all.