(rhetorical question, of course)
I would like this spot to just be a place to post the things that we really like about vendetta online.
This is both to remind the devs of what the things they've done well are without pressuring them with totally awesome, yet broad and big, suggestions, as well as to inform newbs (such as myself) of some of the things to look forward to.

While this community never really has this problem, please leave out complaints or negative comments about another persons post.

side poll: how many of you really like ion storms, and how many find them kind of cool (or profitable, for pirates)

As always with my threads, side polls are yes or no, please don't go into extensive detail, and make sure to give an answer to the original question

One of my own personal favorite moments (being primarily a miner) is the times when I explore an asteroid field and find a rock with high% of heliocene, xith, or other rare minerals, and find that it is at a sweet 10.0K, because that shows how the universe is so big that even with tons of players (although a low number of them miners) it is still quite possible to fund a relatively untouched goldmine in totally non-dangerous space!

(this is not intended as a "layout" for posts here, feel free to put yours totally differently)

One of my own personal favorite moments (being primarily a pirate) is when I find a miner on an asteroid with a high % of heliocene, xith, or other rare minerals.

The best part is when I warp into the sector in a Hound and vector in on my target, only to suddenly see movement...someone is actually trying to get their laden Heavy Mining Moth out of the roid field before I reach them?! Watching the sloooow contortions of their bloated vessel, I wonder WTF the pilot is thinking he's going to do in an unarmed ship that can barely get out of the way of a lazily spinning 'roid.

Then he explodes and I claim his ores :) And on occasion, I get to boom some silly [VPR] type who thinks he's going to intervene :P

lol and one of my favorite things to do is find a rat doing that to a miner and surprising the hell out of said rat

also I lover to mine in hive sectors,fight and mine at the same time, really gets your blood flowing :) BTW use a tuar for that, 1 AGT and 1 hd beam and a he beam.. try it sometimes its really fun

My favorite moment is when something happens and its fun.

@ Dr.Lecter

For this very reason I stick with a Revenant, or later a Centaur (once I have it unlocked, cause I am THAT new to the game), no Behemoth for me, damn thing is begging for a fighter to fly circles around it and blast it clean open, even probably just with the basic plasma laser, what with how much time you could get from the speed on the thing

Alright, my 2nd-most awesome moment in this game:

After yet another fun-tastic [IA] vs. [BLAK] furball in B8, I managed to respawn in Latos N-2 and catch Gavan warping out to an "empty" sector in Latos. This is before any of the built-in tracking stuff that we have now, so I was able to sneakily find out which sector he'd warped to.

I wait a minute or two after relaying this info to [IA] guild channel and warp right back there to find Gavan, tumblemonster, and Martin hanging out motionless (probably chatting). I go in guns blazing and blast tumblemonster to bits as he's busy yapping, I turn my guns on Gavan and he's half dead before he manages to get back at the controls, at that moment guild buddy Holdan warps in and wipes him out, and Martin WARPS AWAY. Presumably because he was so busy laughing his ass off from our sneak attack that he couldn't fight.

The fact that afterwards Tumblemonster took to 100 with his butthurt verbal rampage just made it all that much more sweet.

The 1st most-awesome moment was the whole "Jallik to Odia Samoflange Challenge Run" where [IA] told [BLAK] exactly where and when we were going to be piloting a mothload of samoflange thru grayspace to Odia M-14, and dared them to stop us. Both guilds showed up in force and it was nerve-wrackingly intense, fun, and (almost) very rewarding. I was the 'moth pilot and I ALMOST made it. After a furious set of standoff battles clearing wormhole after wormhole, I finally made it to Odia and we thought we were home-free as we warped into M-14. Only 3 [BLAK] members opposed us, and even though my Behemoth was down to half armor after the journey we decided to push on through. I turboed through heavy fire and had made it to the docking bay, but a navigation miscalculation of a fraction of an inch caused me to bounce off the docking bay. I died scant meters from my goal to Borb's flares, the last remaining combatant in-sector.

Moral of the story: Samoflange-laden Behemoths are hard to turn around when you miss your docking bay run.

One of my most favorite days on VO (I'm not sure I have an absolute favorite moment) was a three hour buswar involving over a dozen people, preceded by a packed NW and a two hour furball involving another dozen people. I ended the day with 192 player kills. It was exhausting, but a six hour rush. VO is the only game that can capture and hold my attention like that.

1) Awesome PvP:
The first win in 1-vs-1 PvP over a vastly superior pilot: a glimmer of light at the end of the newb tunnel. You may still lose 20-1 against them, but that ratio starts shrinking, and it begins with that first win. Reversely, the first time you lose to a "Padawan" you've been training up. Makes me so proud... *sniff* ...My little newb is all grown up and killing people!

2) Awesome Roleplay:
Patiently pulling strings behind the scenes of 5 or 10 guilds over months and years to play out a grand VO theatre-of-the-mind that almost nobody recognizes as such, especially when it derails one of TRS's similar (but dastardly) plots :)

3) Awesome Mining:
Yes, I said awesome mining! My favorite operation was 5 ORE pilots pulling over 6000 cu of lanth out of a bot sector in about 90 minutes.

4) Awesome lists on the forums

5) Awesome Manufacturing:
OK, manufacturing is still a heinous grind, but dammit, first Player Trident is still pretty cool to claim. However, the awesome thing about that whole ridiculous build was that most everyone in vo, in one way or another, helped me and ORE do it. Which leads to the #1 most-awesomest thing about VO:

6) Awesome Community!!!

the awesome flight physics. That you can do those awesome 'I swing myself around by 180 degree and fire that guy on my 6 to ashes', as it's done in BSG. I love it. Also, of course, being able to communicate via voice with other people in a fight group.

Also the fact that I can do all this stuff natively on Linux.

Drawing a bead on a retreating figure who has just swarmed and is running away, nailing him with two sequential advanced rail shots, and watching him explode. I felt like Clint Eastwood.

Getting to the point where my adrenaline no longer always pounded in my chest when I was drawn into PvP, and I began to tame my nerves and just relax, letting my reflexes do the work. Beginning to learn how to strike at different ranges and at different angles with different weapons. Watching strategy flourish across guilds and players over years. Finally learning how to overcome a tactic that has been used against me to great effect. Training with wingmates to the point that I know almost exactly where they are and what they are doing without saying a word.

Lastly, getting owned by some newb I've never heard of.

1- The 1st time I launched. Got hooked since then.

2- When a mentor (Neon Black) teached me to configure my playstation 2 joystick and gave a few tips to use it in PvP w/o FA. We did only 3 short PvP duels, but I lasted much more than expected.
At that point, I saw that with a long time and hard training, I'd be able to compete and survive. I realized that it would be worth the time I'd spend learning. I felt really good that day.

3- My 1st Nations War, witch my team won. I didn't do much, but survived almost to the end. And others shared the reward with me. :)

But the best part of VO, is the direct relationship between the Devs and the comunity. They are clear and honest about almost everything, specially about the main directions of the game, and about the implications and issues about some player sugestions. Never saw anything similar in any other MMOs.

I'm still new to the game, and don't play as often as I'd like to. And hope to have similar epic moments that some vets put in here.

Definatly the time TRS, myself, and another pilot (I've forgotten who, but I think it was Mr Spuck) did a Levi hunt in a crazily short time (like 40mins or something) including getting all the crit queens. Everything just went like clock-work. We driopped all the crits in no-time flat, jumped to the Levi sector, butchered the groupy queens, and dropped the Levi's shields in a single, 3 pilot "synchro-stack".

The swarm trails were like a beautiful blue arrow pointing towards Levi-destruction.

Good times.

Faille.

@CD:

I would love to know the juicy details of that guild thing against TRS, sounds so mysterious

Getting my master prospector badge after a pretty insane week of scanning..

Doing the cross-universe levi run with CD and spuck so thoroughly for a period that players started to complain about the lack of hive bots..

Various PA group activities over the years

Cool community

1. The multi-layered environment that allows traders, miners, soldiers, pilots, pirates, griefers, palladins, mercs, bounty hunters and newbies to share the same space, and crossovers resulting.

2. Free the space of all Leviathans in a single session. Did a few times, with large teams of 6+ players, some unable to enter Serco or Itani... so for a few hours the universe was free of pesky bots in ion storms...

3. The great balance in realism vs. gameplay on most aspects of game simulation

4. Frequent small releases, "release early, release ofter" dev model

A) use different list markers so TRS gets mad

Back when SVGs had infiniboost and flares had 16 in the tubes, Icarus in his dual flare SVG was near impossible to catch. He would zoom in, flare bomb you and then warp out if the situation turned against him. His favorite spots to hang out were in UIT space booming traders.

When I was a wee noob, he killed me as I was trading up in UIT space. Instead of whining on the forums about how the game should prevent this sort of thing (like certain people nowadays), I learned how to fight and spent the next 2 months tracking him down.

This involved cruising through UIT space and learning his usual hangouts. Anytime I heard a trader complaining of being attacked by a pirate on 100, I would msg them and ask if it was Icarus and where they had seen him. This lead to a number of near misses where sometimes he would kill me (I was still learning combat at this time), but sometimes I would get the drop on him and almost kill him, but he would always jump away in the nick of time. (This was also before the current jump animation. When you warped out of a sector, you just shot straight out so there was no time for anyone to kill you as you were jumping. It was MUCH easier to run away.)

This went on for 2 months without me managing to kill him once. When one fateful day, there was a large furball that broke out in Sedina B8 over some CtC cargo. Itani and Serco were trading losses back and forth. Icarus was doing his usual flare bombing and retreating throughout the fight. Since you could literally warp out in the middle of combat with no risk, he was near impossible to finish off.

When a brief respite came around, I asked the other Itani in the area to leave B8 and group up in a nearby empty sector. Once we had sufficient numbers (about 8-10 of us) we jumped back into B8. The Serco had also grouped up and 8-10 of them were waiting for us, Icarus included. The two groups met in what at the time was the biggest furball I had ever seen. I set my sights on Icarus and waited, maneuvering around for a good shot and holding my fire so as not to tip him off that I was there. I waited until I saw him slow down to line up a killing salvo of flares on one of my wingmen and hit him with 4 quick gauss shots in succession. It was just enough to finish him with his existing damage. He exploded in front of me and the bounty of several million appeared in my credit total. I typed "ICARUS DOWN" in group chat to the cheers of my allies.

After that, my love of this game was solidified. I have never found another game that has given me that kind of experience.

Wow thats a great story ghost

Events.
Dev Participation.
Furballs.

Yes, I like ion storms they look cool

-Asteroids look great
-All the graphics are really good
-The ship movements are great
-Supported peripheral devices along with being able to combine and/or use multiple devices to make your own custom configuration is awesome.
-Worm hole graphics are great it never gets old looking at your ship or others jumping through worm holes
- I'm not a miner but mining was interesting too. Mining looks and feel good the weight of the ore in the ship effecting the controls are very cool
-conquerable stations are cool too would like to see more of them
-faction topics for different areas are cool I like that too

It's hard to pick one favorite, but also the backstory I like too.
I know it's similar to many others but hey it's space, ships and aliens ? What else do you need to know.