Bleach: The Beginning is in my humble opinion, the best Bleach experience on the web. It saddens me that it also happens to be the WORST mush I've ever played. I started playing the game about a year back, but had difficulties with staff. They have a tendency to masquerade as power characters and give themselves every possible benefit while looking down on new players. That I didn't mind. It seemed typical after years of playing that staff often fell off the scales of equality and justice. That's just how it is sometimes. But eventually the illusion of teamwork between staff began to crack and fall apart and the game was split into two obvious factions: Staff A and Staff B. The two groups hated each other like the Montagues and the Capulets and it was really starting to tire the player base. The Head Wiz was powerless because Staff B, although a rowdy and unlikeable group, worked hard to do staff-like things and power-game for the benefit of us all. He was partial to Staff A and that provoked team B just enough to storm off taking half the wizard power with them. But in the darkest hours even there is a ray of light. The people that had been offended by the old staff, and left with equal amounts of storming off, returned. I was one of them. Things were slow, very, very slow, but they picked up and things seemed to get better. There was just one small problem, Staff A still remained. Now free of the overshadowing presence of pure vanity, those with slightly lesser egos began to form self-delusions as grand as those that came before them. (In the absence of a super predator, the unmolested scavengers are free to climb to the top of the food chain.) A person who was once an assistant staffer became a staffer and then became trouble. Most of staff A were builders and coders, but some of them were eager. The eager assistant was hungry for power and his ego grew day by day until his head cracked like an egg from the pressure of all that grandeur. It came to a head for me when that very same assistant jailed me for having a character with similar characteristics to his alt. He said the names of our weapons sounded too similar for his taste and then he levied a veiled threat to have me killed. In the series of private messages between us, I told him he was being rude and disrespectful. He then began to boot me. He booted me out of a scene that coincidentally he was running as an NPC. I logged on once more, this time quite put off. When people asked me why I was booted I told them what happened. And then he jailed me. I lost my cool at that point. And I was baited into a banning. Such is life. Needless to say my stretch at Bleach: The Beginning has been fraught with hardship and regret. If I wasn't battling Staff, and leaving and returning like a victim of domestic abuse still in love with the RP genre, I was battling boredom. Many of the players aren't aware of the fact that Bleach is supposed to be an RP driven game. They treat it like a God Wars build and hack and slash without much hope of offering any substance. Ten words does not a proper pose make. Staff can show strong Player skills at times and there are a couple exceptional PCs on the grid, but overall the game fails at eliciting any drama, plot, or character growth. Right about now you might be asking why I stayed for so long if I was so upset with it. Well, to be honest, the combat system is actually quite addictive. You design your moves or pick from a list of premade faction skills. From there you grab your sword and get into a fight. The lack of quality RP is bad, but the actually fight is amazing. The dice rolls have you hanging on the edge of your seat praying to the gods of fortune that you out roll foe based on a multifaceted criteria of attribute placement, power level, stance, and technique. Every week XP comes in like Christmas morning and you can't wait to spend it on skills, moves, and items. I'll miss that well-thought out, heart thumping part of the game. The rest of it is just kind of 'Meh.' I'm not saying don't connect and create a character, it IS the best Bleach experience outside of the console games, I'm just saying that after a long and tiring venture there, it just wasn't for me. I'd say give it a shot for the fighting alone. But after a few rounds, you might see just how hollow the experience can be. Get it, Hollow? Like the villains in the anime/manga. Get i - - Aaawh, forget it. -BleachedNoMore