Freedom from day 1.

Then you must have not wanted to make money.

AE made it easy to max level a toon in 3 hours

There were glitches in the walls in Bloody Bay where you could afk farm for PvP IO's and get 3 - 4 a day.

People bought SGs

WW was easy enough to minipulate and if you knew what to roll with AE tickets and what to flip onj WWs you could hit the inf cap in an hour.

All of this translated in to real money.

The game was fun though. I can see why someone might play it just for fun. I like money though.

I did play for fun occassionally. I had tons of 50s. My favorite was a MA/SD scrapper.

There was a lot to like about it, the powers and their progression, the awesome player control, the art style, avatar customization...

But the game had zero player based economy, which in my book is what makes or breaks a game that calls itself "massively multiplayer". The amount of interaction between players is paramount to a good mmo. If you don't really enjoy fetch quests, go kill 10 baddies, or very short dungeon style boss raids, the game isn't for you, as there is nothing else to the game.

Pretty though, and fun for <2-3 months. Similar, but slightly better than, age of conan.

Task forces were pretty dynamic sometimes, like Terra Volta. The graphics were also very good for it's time(not really relevant now). I thought the mission variety was tolerable but it's all the customization that made it best.

TV dynamic? You just went in to a room waiting for the same 11 waves of Sky Raiders to come out every time.

The orbs, the dot damage, the difficulty. TV was extremely difficult in 2004 when the best enhancement you got was SO's. You seem to forget this was at a time when raid bosses in MMO's consisted of spam damage abilities(it was before/around the time of WoW's release).

The customization was, and still is, unparralelled how good it was, but that cant carry a game. The graphics are still fine because they went cartoony like TF2, which ages alot more gracefully than realistic.

Im tired of "missions" in mmos, fetch quests, go kill ten bad guys.... Im really more into the "legit"/ ingame player economy. Everyone can fight the same instanced "Ice Demon #6", few can make a billion+ bucks and actually impact the server you play on. That's "end game content" for mmos in my book.