I chose this first because in my eyes it's not only one of most important parts of a game, it's one of the most common parts to change.

When I find out about a new game from another source, one of the first things I look at on the website is the features page. Normally companies try and fill this page with anything that applies to the title, and rarely do I see some real innovation in this section. But this section is always different. Some games have the most basic features ranging from player vs. player combat in battle arenas, to the ability to use skills, oh my! But then there's games that take these to a new level, with the ability to fight other players in large-scale territory battles in order to gain control of areas and earn profit from it.

• Pass: Perfect World is a good example of a game that did this well. Although PW didn't get immensely popular, this is one aspect it would get a good score in a review from me on. The unique flying system, the territory wars, all the types of player vs. player combat, the guild aspects, etc. Basically, this game had endgame content from the likes of the World of Warcraft available as early as level thirty when it came out (Probably around level 50-60 now, if not higher).

• Fail: Scions of Fate is an example off of the top of my head that dropped the ball in this area. The highlights of the features offered by Scrions of Fate are the enchanting and enhancement systems, both of which are very basic and reduced to the likes of talking to a NPC and dragging items into slots after purchasing them from a seperate NPC. Then you'll see houses, now that sounds fun. I love having my own house to invited my friends such as Guild Halls in Guild Wars. Well, it's not what you think at first. The house system is basically another name for the always-evident guild/clan system. Then there's battle arenas, oooh, innovative!

• The company interaction.

          A big part of every website in this industry is the forums that go along with it. It is here that most of the companies interaction with the community happens, and believe it or not, this is usually a huge indicator of whether or not a company is going to succeed with their game or not. This is mainly because a lot of gamers hate it when a company cares more about making money then about the gamers and the product they are playing. This is always the case, but it's more along the lines of when the company makes it so obvious that things don't go so well. Company interaction can be as little as the community manager participating in the forums thanking players for their suggestions or giving a weekly update, or as much as numerous contests and events as well as things like IRC meetings.

• Pass: Rohan Online has had a great company interaction with the community throughout the duration of the CBT, and it is extremely evident now that the OBT is coming near. They've released information on several features that they have added due to overwhelming demand by the community such as key-mapping so you can use WASD controls instead of the standard point-and-click controls. YNK has gone above my expectations in this field and gets a great score here if I was reviewing them for their work and dedication to make the game as good as we all hope it can be.
  
• Fail: Seal Online completely failed this category, which is ironic since the same company was behind the Seal disaster as is behind the Rohan success, YNK Interactive. Perhaps they learned from their original mistakes on Seal and improved on Rohan, or maybe the team dedicated to Rohan is just more interested in the community and keeping their jobs. Seal Online did terrible in this field mainly because not only did they have a terrible forum setup to keep us informed and involved during the testing periods, but they hardly ever even made news announcements. They delayed the game's CBT a couple times, once without any explanation or excuse at all. They just took off the news article saying the 20th of August or whenever it was, and replaced it with another news article as if the previous article never existed. Sorry Seal, but you didn't even come close to the benchmark in this category!

• The Balance.

          Balance is an important factor in games because without it, the game has almost no replay value, and without replay value, an online game has no point really since the storyline is usually mediocre. Who wants to go back and play a game when there's one class that's extremely overpowered, and the rest are completely useless and weak. When classes are balanced and each one has its own unique role against another class, the game runs smoothly. From competitive player vs. environment times such as boss raids and large-party grind sessions to player vs. player combat such as guild wars and territory wars, a well-balanced game is necessary or else the game has a dark future.

• Pass: Guild Wars is probably the best example I could put here without diving into my original thought of Team Fortress 2, except for the fact that TF2 is not a MMOG. In Guild Wars, it might seem like some classes are more powerful then others, and the fact is, you're right. It's very hard to do more base damage then a maxed out fire-nuking elementalist. But the fact is that each class is balanced so well, it doesn't even matter. The reason this game did it so well is because they included the feature of having two classes, and they managed to keep it balanced still. A necromancer might seem pretty useless in a lot of missions, but they come in handy when you need enchantments from corpses or tanking minions. A mesmer might not be too great in a one on one match, but in a team they can help out with their assist magic to weaken opponents while strengthening teammates. Every class plays a huge part in the game, especially when you get into guild wars and all of the strategies that can be used there.
  
• Fail: Twelve Sky would be one of the few games that couldn't handle this task very well, althought it very well might have changed since I lost hope in it. Back when I used to be quite active in the game, I loved the clan of Jinong and had all my friends in it as well. When I finally hit level thirty, I was excited to head to the first battle arena and try out the player vs. player combat. Well, when I got there, it turned out that the game had no way of regulating the amount of people in each clan. Thus, Jinong and Guanyin had very few people in the battle, while Fujin not only greatly outnumbered us, but they where a higher level and much stronger as well. You see, Fujin relied on equips a lot more then other classes. With a good weapon, they could deal more damage than any other class at the same level. There AoE spells because much more effective, and they leveled up much faster, which also lead to better equips. They dominated the player vs. player arenas not only because of that, but because the base amount of players in that clan had the Jinong and Guanyin clans outnumbered 2:1 each. No regulation on that meant hell for us, which ended in a lot of Jinong friends of mine changing clans.
  

• The Customization. 

          Believe it or not, this feature alone is enough to make a lot of people not only quit a game, but not even give it the chance it deserves. From the ability to choose your characters face, hair style, colors, armor, and even the tatoos on his arms, customization in a MMOG is a must for the community. No one wants to run around town seeing one hundred characters that look just like them. A lot of games have failed in this aspect by allowing minimal choices for each body part, as well as having no choice in armor except whether or not to get the armor for that chunk of levels, normally done every ten levels. Then there's all the players that have had it with gender-locked classes. Players want to be a magician, but don't want to be forced to be a female character when they are male and wish to play as a male character as well. It's not too much to ask for some customization, is it?

• Pass: City of Heroes and City of Villains are the all-time top-dogs of this section. I could have mentioned Perfect World since you can make your character look almost exactly like a specific person, but to be honest I was way more impressed with City of Heroes. City of Heroes didn't give you the option to change every aspect from position of the cheek bones to the amount they stuck out like Perfect World did, it made it a whole lot simpler. It gave you hundreds if not thousands of preset body parts to choose from. You could be anything from an alien with spiked shoulder pads to a darth-vader look-alike. This game gets near-perfect marks in this section, mainly because during my free trial I spent more time making characters then I did actually playing the game.
• Fail: Two Moons is a great example of a more recent game that flunked this section, and you all knew this game had to be mentioned at least once in the fail category. While a lot of people love the game, myself partly included except for a couple things about it, this is one of the things I despise. You can hardly customize your character at all. There's very little, if any, choice in armors. Mainly the option to skip a set of armor or mix-and-match. That's probably the only way you'll look unique. Then, to top it off, the game is gender-locked! Terrible, I know. If the lack of customization in character, clothing, and even gender wasn't enough, there's almost no customization in skills either. You'd think a game that failed to have character customization would at least have skill customization by giving you a lot of options, but in 2Moons the only real option is what to put more points into. You'll have all the skills probably, especially since you only get a skill every ten levels, but which is the strongest out of the twelve or-so total you have is the only real customization between players.

• The Hype.

          I left this factor for last on purpose, because I figured it would be the most surprising element in the success of a MMOG, and it is also an element that I will investigate in-depth at a later time. The hype for a game can either kill it, or make it a huge success. You need to have a good balance of hype for the game, and the company really needs to do a job and regulate this. Some companies release videos that could be easily considered machinima, which a lot of gamers feel is what the experience in-game is really like. Sadly, it's not the actual gameplay or anything near that. When the game is finally played, all that's left is dissapointment. At the same time, other games generate a good amount of hype for new features that they actually live up to. The word gets around on these games because of the hype, increasing the popularity, and then increasing the overall success of that game. The fact here is that you can't have a game overhyped, or underhyped, otherwise it'll be a disaster. You need the perfect amount of hype, and it has to be for something actually in the game, not some fake/overexaggerated feature. For this feature, I can't simply use a pass/fail example, so I'll spread it out a little more.

• Overhyped: Age of Conan, sorry, but it had to be said. This game generated so much hype that can be seen just be the sales during this previous week, sold-out collector's edition and tens of thousands of pre-ordered copies, or was it hundreds of thousands? The mainy reason is because Funcom made a critical mistake, they overexaggerated their 'unque combat system'. Sure, it was pretty unique with the shield and everything, but Funcom made a lot of hype around their game by using this feature because of the overwhelming complaints by gamers of the same-old same-old 'point, click, eat a sandwich' combat controls. They should have played it down from innovative/revolutionary to just plain old new. They should have released more details about it, including more videos so we could see what it really was. Let's face it, sure it got them a lot of money from all the gamers that bought the game only to be upset, but in the long run it will cost them. The game is great, but when our expectations were so high we can't help but be dissapointed. It was almost impossible to fill our hopes and desires for the new combat system and all the new features. I am still going to be playing the game, and so are thousands of other gamers. But so many quit because of the dissapointment, now they're moving on to the next big thing. Funcom made money off the initial purchases, but they lost the subscriptions of thousands of players who thought the game was fun, but not what they expected.
• Well-hyped: Rohan Online has a great amount of hype. You don't see people spamming message boards with requests about it, but people are talking and spreading the word that YNK wants them too, mainly about the features they added specifically for OBT. The game has generated enough hype for the word to be spread and the anticipation to be built up to the point where hardcore guilds are already forming, but hasn't overhyped it to the point where we can't help but cry when we don't get blown away on day one. The company has set the foundation for growing and evolving the game into an even better product, but the base is still stable enough to support gamers until those future updates come. People are preparing for the next phase of testing, but aren't going nuts over it.
  
• Underhyped: Kart Rider was extremely underhyped and it was not a case of the gamers anticipating the title not spreading the word, but the companies terrible decision making skills. They delayed the game for so long from CBT to OBT, and even from development to CBT. A lot of the time the case of an underhyped game will be the fact that there wasn't enough time to hype it, such as the case of Holic. It was released fairly quickly, and the company didn't leave enough time for the hype to build, thus gamers didn't get a good jump and fell behind in the grinding rankings and had no competitive drive to keep them going. However in Kart Rider's case, the company left way too much time for the game to be hyped because of their terrible work. They put hardly any fixes and updates into the game from CBT to OBT, but it took numerous months on top of the average time a game takes. Now it's in development again from OBT to commercial release, which is a joke. When the game is spread out like this, such as the case with Pi Story now, the hype comes for a little while but dies out because of lack of updates and news from the company. If Nexon had teasers and updates weekly, or even every half-month, perhaps they could have kept the hype. But this game is doomed to be nothing more then a time-passer that few pay money for. Sorry Nexon, but you and Kart Rider have scored way below average in this area, better luck with Combat Arms!

Thanks for reading.:D