I was surfing the net this weekend and ran across the news about the Tera open beta. The part that interested me was the mention of "big-ass monsters". That got me to thinking. Every MMORPG I can think of with combat has players fighting monsters or gods bigger than any single player can defeat. Players have to band together to fight the giant, whether it be Onyxia or Deathwing in World of Warcraft or Nagafen in EverQuest 2. Raids are the name of the end game and big raids call for big-ass monsters. Well, except for one game.
That's right, Eve Online is the only MMO I can think of in which the developers allow the players to be more powerful than the most powerful NPCs. Some might dispute that is the case in Eve. But the Jove never interact with the players unless a dev is behind the controls of the ship. And as for all-powerful CONCORD, they only punish. If a player is willing to pay the price and knows what he is doing, even CONCORD can't stop him.
In fact, the devs sometimes have to protect the NPCs from the players. Without the cyno jammers that accompany incursions, the null-sec alliances would hotdrop the Sansha NPCs with capital and super-capital fleets. While the Sansha have the Revenant-class mothership, Eve players have access to titans, the biggest and most powerful ships in the game. Even the super-carriers available to players are more powerful than the Revenant. In Eve, killing the biggest and baddest monsters involves killing players, not NPCs.
