I think this discussion is really interesting and Sius is asking the good questions.
He's somehow right when he say that there is a lot amount of time spend in the game that is not "enjoyed" by players or at least not enough "rewarded". One of the main problem comes from the idea of not allowing the players get too much stuff too early or too easily.
In fact, i think what i found interesting in "good ol' time" versions of the game, and i'm also talking about pre-OBT 3 and pre-"2238", is the fact that the game wasn't limited like now. I'm not only talking about level cap, it's also about weapons category. At start you could get some guns really easily, and i'm really surprised that a lot of people are shocked when they find some p90 and H&K CAWS easily in encounters near NCR. It's fascinating to see how people are talking about "imba power" when they have one, because these weapons were really really crap during OBT2. The fact that you can get these so easily was normal and balanced by the number of bigger weapons you could get later on.
There were different categories of weapons, and the "starting" weapons were cool, but the best weapons were really hard to get and also very important when you was like level 30. in fact, you really needed one of those if you wanna kill some real high level player. So it was different in term of balance, and it was nice to see people always with some guns, and you were less afraid in loosing your stuff. It brings more crazy actions, more fun, and less frustration when you died etc...
I think it could be a very good idea to reintroduce bigger weaponry, and some kind of "stage 2" or "stage 3" gears. And i know that you are already doing it right now with some gauss on militias, "red" combat armor, etc... But there is still a lot of work to do in this field.
Lexx is also right, you can't work on a game mod that is so ambitious without huge amount of time trying to test and balance game mechanics. The point is that the town control and the factions abilities are by far the best we have seen so far. Crafting system is also very very well done and interesting to play. But i
already told you about it I think you are on the right path, and you feel sometime very exhausted, because of the numbers of hours spent in developping and that's totally normal, but one point that Sius told that was very important is what about just asking for help ?
Why don't you ask people to help you in quest/dialogue writing, for the numbers of guards and npc placement in towns, in timeouts balance, and some other "light" stuff ? You will of course keep the "deep" game mechanics for you and you could focus on adding new features, while these guys will just do the really time consuming balancing job, according to what people reports, what they like/dislike etc..
For me Fallout Online 1.0 will be ready when FOnline would have implanted at least
all the vanilla stuff, and here i'm also talking about highers perks like "sniper" and "slayer", PAs and APAs, very high level cap and high level PvE areas etc.. Of course it will need a lot of time before finding a good balance for every "stage 2" or "stage 3" stuff and having everything working together in a consistent fashion.
