Facility Hub YES - Town Network NO

I thought the addition of the facility hub and the quest bonuses were a good addition to the game - optional and only slightly hand-holdey.

Town network = I like the convenience of it but agree with many other players in that it deincentivized exploration and drew many people indoors. It was great in some regard for PvP as it forced many people through a bottleneck, but bad in the hand holdeyness of it all.

I think there is a balance really: I'm not a "hardcore" type that thinks that making the game easier and adding quality of life changes "ruined muh AC" but I do think that the town network was just a bit too "casual" for my tastes as well.

I would have liked to have seen the facility hub expanded all the way to 150. Some older MUDs had a quest chain for leveling purposes and done in such a way as to be a built in tutorial for the content that followed.

AC had a tendency to show you a few things in the training dungeon and then just dump you in the world to fend for yourself, especially in the early years.

I know there are people that hate any kind of in game rails, but these things, as long as they aren't mandatory, aren't necessarily bad things.

You can't make the game unfriendly to new players. I know PvPers hate that mentality but as I said in the other thread, I would rather have a server filled with 1000 dumb asses than one that only has 20 "hardcore" players. It's too late in this game's life to be an elitist about who should and shouldn't be playing and not catering to numbers.