Entropia Universe has a very interesting concept, but it's currently got a LOT of problems.  I've been playing it since 2007.  It's been in the Guiness Book of World Records a few times for the most expensive virtual items being sold in it. 

The concept behind the game is that it's a virtual world where the game cash is tied to real world cash in a 10:1 ratio, so one US Dollar = 10 Game Dollars (Project Entropia Dollars, PED).  100 Project Entropia Cents (PEC) = 1 PED.

I first got in to it back then because I'd read about how Deathifier and Neverdie made back their money in a couple of years with the huge purchases of a virtual astroid and island.  You can read about that on the wikipedia entry about the game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropia_Universe

It was a pretty pricy game to get in to, and I played it a couple of months on and off. Then they did some upgrades on the server and my old computer could not play it anymore since it was too much for my graphics card to handle.  About 9 months after that I came back in to the game after I got new hardware, and have been trying to participate in the game a bit ever since doing various things.  Right my avatar owns 3 apartments and a shop and shopping booth in the Delta Tower at Omegaton West Habitat.

Anyways, back to why I started this post...

The Cryengine 2 was put in to the game at Version Update 10 in August of 2009.  Ever since then a LOT of various systems in game have been offline or not functioning right.  Taming, an old system where you use a whip to tame a creature that you can make walk around and do things as a pet has been offline all this time.  Hangers, the system of spaceships used to move between planets and astroids have been halfway offline until yesterday.  It's actually still offline as the ships themselves are not back yet, just the buildings.  My booth is not currently working right nor are the booths for a lot of other folks.  That has been going on since the first week in December this go round, and from August - December in 2009 when vu 10 first came around.

There's just a LOT of problems... A lot of promises made years ago that have never seen the light of day... a LOT of money assets in game that people have already paid real money for that's been sitting in the lala land of limbo for all this time.  It's not fun having to wait this long for the fixes.  The problems are not being fixed as fast as they should be.  It's a huge bunch of problems that are amplified by the fact that this game runs on a system based on real cash that people have already pumped in to the game years ago. 

I recently started a blog about some of the problems over at
http://entropiatrash.wordpress.com/

I don't put all the problems in game in there, but when there's some big issues going on I'll list them there.  I used to put them in some of my other blogs, but the problems just kept getting to be bigger and bigger so they were taking up too much room in my other blogs and the topics... 

I'm posting about all of this here since I sent an email to Jack Thompson a few weeks back and a reply email said that I should check this site out or get in to to contact with the folks that run this site...  so I joined the forums, and I think this is really my first entry here.  Might post more in the future. 

It would be nice if there was some sort of consumer protection agency that could make this sort of thing get resolved faster, but as things are currently, it does not seem like that's possible due to the terms of the eula...  people are stuck and their money is already spent.  Things that once worked are now not working.  I've only spent a handful of cash vs some of the people in this game.  There is possibly literally millions of dollars tied up in this thing.  First Planet Company was recently bought by SEE to form See Digital Studio.  That purchase basically bought the entire Planet Calypso along with the people and servers running it and cost 6 million bucks!!!