There are probably as many MMOs out there that are “free to download, free to play” as there are ones that require you to pony up, if not more. Many times, this ends up making the game more accessible to all, however these games have their own set of challenges, all which contribute into how “Free-to-play” MMOs are run and the community that plays them.

That being said, I’ve been playing various MMOs for close to five years now, and I have my share of good and bad experiences. This list covers some of the more apparent bad experiences that you’re likely to come across. Hit the jump to find out what they are:

1. Whiners
It’s really hard to come in as a newbie and start reading forums, only to find the long-time vets complaining about a skill, job, weapon, etc… that was nerfed, or that their favorite “cash shop” item was removed or made more expensive. Or, maybe they’re just complaining that there’s not enough cake. F2Pers have this odd knack for just finding the most random thing to complain about and threaten things like cash strikes, sit-ins, or to just plain quit. (Good riddance) If it isn’t a trivial thing, it’s something that probably needed to be done, just like MapleStory needed to add a cooldown to a certain skill and add stat penalties for non-light element wands for the grossly overpowered bishop class.

2. Cash Shops
It might be free to obtain, free to play, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways to spend money on these games. In order to generate revenue, these games usually run on a microtransaction business model, which allows you to buy certain items for a small cost that can get you anything from a simple costume to an exp. bonus. These things can typically cost you in the range of a buck to around 20. However, most of these games have made it so that people who spend money in the game have a clear advantage over those that don’t or can’t. (Some games, however, allow you to trade or sell these cash-bought items in game, which eases this a bit.) Sadly, there are some publishers out there that put their efforts solely into generating revenue, and so most updates seem to simply just be cash shop additions, leading to gripe #1.

3. Griefers, Trolls, and Drama Whores
Griefers and trolls, in my opinion, have no place in a video game, on the Internet, or anywhere else for that matter. That won’t keep them from trying to make your experience a living hell, though. They will go about their business, try to stalk and harass you, steal your mobs, pretty much do everything that the “MMO bible”, also known as the “Terms of Service” tells them not to.  Most tend to not care if they get banned as they can just create a new e-mail address or a new account, and the publisher can’t stop them from making a new character on a second account. Ah well… that report button would come into good use. As far as drama is concerned, don’t even get me started on drama.

4. Hackers
Unfortunately, many F2P games tend to become a breeding grounds for hackers, not afraid to get banned since they won’t be losing any money by doing so. Most F2P games tend to have anti-hack solutions such as GameGuard and Hackshield, most which only seem to become effective at blocking legitimate programs from running and with hackers able to bypass them within hours of an updated version going up. Still, developers won’t come around to developing their own anti-hack solution and go with these third party ones, resulting in people messing the game up to the point where the game masters have a hard time keeping up with them. Some of the more popular games go through mass hacker crises on and off while some of the smaller ones tend to not really have hacker problems at all, though, so this happens more on a game-by-game basis.

5. Broken English
The majority of F2P games usually come from South Korea, the so-called Mecca of online gaming. Obviously when they come over here, they have to be translated, right? Usually when a new game enters the beta stages and starts to go into its early official service, it tends to contain a whole slew of grammar gaffes that can only remind us about Zero Wing sometimes.

6. Bugs
For some reason, there’s always two departments that seem to be lacking in F2P MMO’s. The first of those seems to be quality assurance. Although some are better than others, there isn’t an F2P out there that, at one point it’s been crippled by a bug in which the game has needed to be either brought down for an extended amount of time or rolled back. Some games have various major bugs pop up almost every patch, others every once in a while.

7. Lack of Presence From Game Masters
Companies hire GMs to promote and moderate the game. Most players see them as a PR person and usually base how they’re doing with how much they interact with the community at times, though it turns out that the job description of the game master is more than just hanging out in-game and banning the evildoers.  Some of these duties tend to leave the game unmoderated and things tend to get out of hand, and after constant problems with this the community starts to lose hope.

On the other hand, some publishers are really good at having their GMs respond to issues on the official forums, or by spending some time with the community that they’ve been hired to take care of. In other cases, publishers have created volunteer programs as well to recognize outstanding players and to provide a “player contact” for some of the more simple things, such as Nexon America’s “Maple Watch Leaf Brigade” for MapleStory, or Aeria’s “Game Sage” program across all their games.

8. Scammers
Scammers can pose a real problem. Fast. although I’m sure P2P games have this problem on a large scale as well, it’s a fluctuating issue in the F2P realm, especially with the playerbase usually being quite a bit younger due to the game’s availability.

9. “Update Lag”
Going back to the fact that I said that most F2P MMOs originate from Korea, the most advanced versions of these games are usually overseas as well. In just about every game there’s at least a small community dedicated to figuring out what’s happening in these Asian versions of the game in order to see what we may get. The only issue is… when would we get this content? For many games, it takes months or even more than a year to get that content out in the American versions, and usually that leaves the community in a shroud of pessimism.

Still, though, a few months isn’t all that bad, given the time it takes to localize a game for the western market to begin with. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise sometimes.

10. Customer Support
Customer Support is that second “lacking” department with many publishers that I was getting at before. Don’t get me wrong: Many publishers like OGPlanet, Aeria, and GamesCampus have excellent support. (All of which I’ve had to deal with at one time or another) However, there are horror stories with other companies who seem to have left customer support out of their budget. Automated replies, extremely long response times of weeks, even months or even not at all, and replies that have nothing to do with the issue are all things that we see in the F2P world.

On the contrary, the community does bear slight fault to this, as I’m sure each publisher gets a handful of tickets that are either hard to understand, don’t have enough information, or is for something that they can’t do. (Usually dealing with people who lose their accounts because they forgot their password and the e-mail they associated to it, but that’s why you only keep one e-mail for personal stuff, people!)

All in all, these gripes are all a collaberative effort: Some are the fault of the community, some of the publisher and even the developer. Keep in mind that this doesn’t reflect on any publisher out there. As I’ve said a couple times there are some good publishers. Don’t take this is a “F2P MMOs are bad” kind of thing because a lot of them are actually pretty good. How do you think MapleStory got so popular despite the shortcomings of its developer?

So, go ahead, find a good free MMO you wanna play. Just beware some of these things if you know what I mean. You’ll have fun.

There’s only a handful or so games that I actually do finish; Midway through one game, I find myself jumping to another newly acquired game.  It’s been something that’s been happening since the days of the GBA for me.  Games for me come and go way too quickly and I find myself changing games faster than some of my friends change girlfriends. (I seriously wish I was joking about that… Fortunately those people don’t visit my blog… yet.)

So, let’s very quickly go over 10 games that I haven’t beat and should go back and finish.

10. Pokémon Diamond (DS)
I loved Pokémon. I loved it so much it was almost like a disease. My red version logged countless hours, well over 100, of playtime and my gold version even more.  Ruby didn’t go so well; I got right up to the end and I just lost interest.  Diamond took even shorter to fizzle out.  I’ve had this game since release and have only gotten about halfway through it.  I keep telling myself that I’ll get back to it if I ever find myself not wanting to play anything else on my DS, but I never had.  One day this will get beat. Once you’ve caught ‘em all, you don’t go back.

9. Megaman 9 (WiiWare/XBLA/PSN)
As a retro gamer, I feel ashamed that I had never played through an old Megaman game. It wasn’t until the crappy GBC Megaman X games that I really got a taste of how the series was like.  I had played some of the later ones (and of course Megaman Battle Network and Starforce) and had my fair share of frustration over the difficulty.  I decided that with Megaman 9 I was NOT going to miss out on.  After a lot of practice I managed to make it up to the third Wily stage, and then I just stopped.  I haven’t really touched the game all that much since except to do a quick endless mode run.

8. No More Heroes (Wii)
You can probably count the number of hardcore games on the Wii with two hands, but make sure you count No More Heroes in that count.  Not only does it feature some good waggle usage, a storyline that will make your brain implode, and a protagonist that is pretty much the king of otakus, it caught me off guard when the game’s first F-bomb occured not even three minutes into the game. (On a NINTENDO console, even. Moreso that a lot of people think that Travis’ “F**khead!” line is the best in the game.)  Sadly, I dropped this game just before the rank 3 stage and have yet to beat this game and its absolute greatness.  I guess Bishop really was telling the truth when he said that “a lot of gamers out there don’t have much patience.”

7. At least one Fire Emblem
At one point or another I’ve owned every Fire Emblem game to have come out on American soil… but have I beaten any of them? Nope.  I guess part of it is the fact I’m not that much of an SRPG buff, and also the sheer difficulty that this line of games is known for.  I definitely do have a thing about Fire Emblem though… It’s too bad one of those things is actually beating one of them.  Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon or Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword would be the two I would likely go after.  Maybe I outta take on this instead of Pokémon.

6. Megaman 2 (NES)
Just a bit before Megaman 9 hit WiiWare, I acquired Megaman 2 on the virtual console.  With 2 being called the definitive point of the whole Megaman series, I had to take advantage of it when it came around.  To be honest, I found the game to be quite simple for the most part (Heck, I even beat Airman with the megabuster.) until I got to Wily’s castle.  I had gotten all the way to the boss on Wily’s fourth stage but hadn’t taken it any further than that.  Maybe I should dedicate some time to finishing off both 2 and 9 on the same day? Who know.

5. Kirby Super Star Ultra (DS)
Ah, Kirby.  Kirby’s Dream Land was the first game I ever finished; And then after that I finished it again… and again… and again. All in all it only took about 15 minutes to beat KDL… Or about 5 minutes if you’re playing Spring Breeze, the abridged version of the original game as it’s seen in Kirby Super Star. Now, take note of the fact that I said Kirby Super Star Ultra. Having passed Milky Way Wishes, I’ve practically beaten the original KSS; Now I just need the motivation to get through the last few games.  Let me tell you, though: The arena is pretty tough.

4. At least one Grand Theft Auto game
I use to be a bit skeptical about the GTA games, as I might have said in my GTA Chinatown Wars impressions, and so I stayed away from them for a long time.  One day though I bought GTA: Vice City Stories on the PSP and thought it to be okay.  I was lucky enough to find out that I could get a good chock of the GTA series at the time (1, 2, 3, Vice City, and San Andreas) on Steam for 30 bucks, and so I went for it. I definitely wasn’t disappointed after all the time I spent playing Vice City and San Andreas, but I never really finished them.  It’s true that I’m still working on Chinatown Wars but not as fast as I want to be.  Maybe I’ll pull through eventually and get to finishing at least one of those.

3. Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)
What is wrong with me? Seriously.  I’ve had this game nearly as long as I’ve had my Wii and I’ve only completed… two galaxies?!  Super Mario Galaxy is said to be one of the best if not THE best mario game to have hit since Super Mario 64 and it just sits there on my shelf collecting dust.  It’s not like I have anything else to play on the Wii that I haven’t beat, other than No More Heroes of course, but if anything finishing this game at least once should be mandatory.

2. Mariokart DS
I got so close to finishing this… and then I just stopped.  I don’t know why but 150cc got really frustrating once I got to the Special Cup.  I only have two more cups to go (I can’t remember if there was a mirror class) but I just cant get around to finishing things up.  Ah well. I’ll get it done some day.

1. Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES)
Probably the most sacrilegious thing in the video game industry; I had this game when I was a kid. I could get up to Bowser’s castle and for whatever reason, I never wanted to finish it!  Man… I was a weird child.  I would seriously just waste my lives on the first status because I didn’t feel like fighting bowser. Even in later days, when I had Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 and even today on the virtual console, I can’t see myself to beat it. (Although this time I’d actually do it if I could.)  One day, Bowser. One day…

So, those are only a few of the games I have yet to beat.  I can name off a whole bunch that in my collection that remain unfinished to this day.  Will I be able to get through this eventually? We’ll see.

Unfortunately, too many of those names are based off of well-known fads. These names are usually taken by people that have no sense of netiquette and in some cases only want to cause problems.  Of course, not all are like this and they don’t influence my list in any way, but after seeing so many names of the same, it starts to get really annoying.

This is a list that has been done by people before.  Some of mine might be similar to those lists with a difference: This is my list.  The following ten IGN fads are all things that I think need to be put to rest ASAP.

10. Names that start with numbers
This is one that I can probably safely say that we all, including myself, are guilty of.  Everyone knows the feeling; You’re signing up for a game or website and have thought about the absolute coolest name ever, so you fill everything in and what happens when you click the register button?

There was an error in your registration: That username is already taken.

Not wanting to think of another one, we put a number, sometimes a long one, in front of it just so we can have it.  Most big-name websites such as Yahoo! commonly used the same username suffixed with a number as a suggestion to an alternate nickname as well.  Nowadays, though, having a number in front of or behind your IGN shows unoriginality, and has been around for so long that we can only hope that it’s put to rest.

9. Names of celebrities
Sometimes coupled with #10, I can’t think of anything more unoriginal than seeing a character stroll buy with the name “BradPitt” or “Lindsay_Lohan”.  No celebrity is safe these days. I can almost guarantee you’d find a few “Bono”s and a whole game world full of “BarackObama”s.

I don’t see the point. What are you trying to imply?  That you’re Brad Pitt? (In some games is grounds for an impersonation ban right there) That you’re a fan of Soulja Boy? (No comment.)  That you want to be like the US’ newest president? (Though I don’t think I’d blame you. He’s pretty cool.) When I look at it this way, maybe they should’ve programmed another sort of unacceptable type of name into their games and/or websites much like #10′s:

There was an error with your registration: That name is already taken in the real world.

8. “Area Code Pride” names
In today’s age, it’s no doubt that you’re going to see some quite… geeky names, but this takes the cake.  Well… maybe it’s not so geeky because it’s not uncommon to use this three digit number as a way of saying where you’re from… if you’re a rapper. (I come from the six-oh-four, y’all!)  But why oh why does a crap…er…rapper thing have to be pushed over into video games?

For some reason, this seems to be something I see a lot from Hawaii-based gamers.  I most certainly need more than my hands and toes to count the number of names that I’ve seen the number “808″ in.

7. Names that should’ve never been mentioned outside of the user’s own dirty mind.
Chatting dirty in games is, unfortunately, something that’s inevitable no matter how much the developers try to alleviate the problem by banning the super-perverts or censoring just about every sexual term in the book, but whenever I have to see a name based on some dirty slang (sometimes prefixed or suffixed with 69) I wanna hurl.  Now, believe me, I have quite the dirty mind myself, but there are so many of these dumb names that I have to wonder if maybe the ESRB should start taking this sort of thing into account with games that have online capabilities.  I just know that if I had kids, I probably wouldn’t let them play any game online, even E-rated games, simply because I’ll know they’ll run into some sort of inappropriate name such as “69ImSoHorny69″ (This being a mild example of course) somewhere in the game.  Leave your dirty minds inside your head, you perverts.

6. The letter “X”
This could be another example of #10, but it’s annoying to see people decorate their names with funny combinations of X on either side.  Once again, it’s another display of unoriginality by turning a “UberGamer” name which was already taken into something like “xXxUberGamerxXx” as a way to get around it.  Pretty much everything I said about numbers applies here as well.

5. Names of popular Video Game characters
If I thought about this more, I might have ended up switching #5 and #9 up, but it doesn’t really matter to me.  I will admit that this one doesn’t really bother me as much as one that I have listed later on, if not because of the number of names this applies to, but the fact that I’m a gamer more than I am a… whatever is coming up after this.  The fact that I’m always seeing names like “Sephiroth9032877″ or “Sora3897234″ is a sign, though.  Square Enix needs to lock these names down so they can’t be used as freely anymore.

4. Pro-substance abuse names
This one isn’t so common but it’s really annoying about how some people can show just how much of a druggie they are just by saying something like “DopeMan420″.  If you have a name like that, you belong in a rehab centre where you’ll be slapped around by being so dependant on that stuff that you’ll never want to get within ten miles of it… or the character you created with that name… ever again.  That’s all I have to say about that.

3. Names that use “popular” Japanese words
Stringing Japanese words with English words has always pissed me off. It pisses me off more when I see people running around with names like “8KawaiiDesuNe8″ (Which means “Cute, is it?”) and might not even know what it means. (In most cases though I’m sure they know.)  Anything that uses the words “Kawaii”, “Baka”, “Desu”, “Tenshi”, etc… (“Cute”, “Dummy”, “Is”, and “Angel” respectively) needs to be de-Otaku’d because, if you really feel the need to do that, you’ve probably been watching too much subbed hentai.

2. Names prefixed with “i”
Apple, please copyright this.  I see way to many names out there like “iRock” or “iShoot” to know what to do with.  I’m about the only one that hasn’t given into the iMadness that started with Apple’s iMac in 2000, then went on to the iPod, the iPhone, and probably one day the iToilet.  There probably hasn’t been one word in the English dictionary now… maybe even some of the Japanese dictionary too (iDesu?) that hasn’t been prefixed with a lowercase “I” at one time of another. Please MAKE IT STOP.

1. Names based off of popular anime characters
I don’t want to offend anyone by this.  I will admit that the average user that abuses this type of name is better now, but five years or so ago when Dragonball Z and Inuyasha were popular, just about anyone with a name coming from those two animes could be summed up as someone who LYKS TO TYP IN ALL KAPS N BROKN INGLESH LIKE DEY N EVR FINISH’D ELMENTRY SKUL.  Of course, the “anime username = supreme idiocy” stereotype for me is no longer there, but in an Internet now filled with Narutards and otakus, the anime character names are reaching overwhelming proportions.  I’m at the point where I can say I think I’d love to go back to the days where everyone had “Cloud” or “Sephiroth” in their username.

Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, Sesshoumaru (had to put something in there so I wasn’t singling out Naruto) and many others come to mind.  Thankfully, there are anime characters whose names I never would want to see online that are fortunately not popular enough to be “usernameworshipped” which for me means I can keep my sanity. Don’t ask.

And now, for some user interaction. (If there even will be any.)  You’ve seen my ten wishes for usernames that don’t exist.  Do you have a certain type of username or IGN fad that you wish you’d like to see fall off the face of the Internet? Feel free to leave a comment below.