Firan at one time was a wonderful and exciting game that I would have encouraged everyone I knew to come and check out. The players were great, the staff was unbelievable and the plot was stunning. Over the past two years or so though that has begun to change and more often than not, you are dealing with constant angst, problematic plots and a very, very slow response from the staff.

I blame most of this on staff burnout which the game owners have failed to address. It's no surprise when you're dealing with 150-200 individual players a week that you would burnout over time, but the players should not be punished for that burnout. However, right now they are being punished for it. For example, a time sensitive plot may require a response from a wizard but due to them all feeling burned out it does not happen in a timely fashion and your character or someone else's character is killed/hurt/punished for something that may have been preventable had you received an answer to your question.

Their own ingame statistics ,which they publish, confirm it and show that the average response time to answer @requests (their question system) has grown from 2.5 days to over 5 days since January. On a game that relies heavily upon staff intervention due to the depth of the theme, its almost impossible to survive without timely responses.

The problem with this is that they're never too burned out to work when they feel like running a plot to have an invasion happen or have some building burn to the ground. It's very selective burnout.

Another major problem is the fact that they definitely gear the game toward the success of staff played characters or characters played by friends of people on the staff, which I suppose is their right to do as they're running the game; it's just disappointing for those not within their inner circle. I doubt this will ever be addressed and I believe most people just cope with it now. For some people these things may not be a big deal and that is fine, for others they definitely take away from the overall enjoyment of the game.