Let's say it all goes down hill and Allods is put to it's grave than what?
Looking for a new MMO, I could go back to World of Warcraft but I really can't do it anymore. It's not burn-out I'm just done with the carrot their offering. My idea MMO isn't going to be made because I don't have the experience to do such a thing. No MMO is really catching my eye, TERA looks good but I can't help but feel to good to be true. Aion proved beautiful graphics wouldn't keep me as I hate invisible walls. Aika could be good but do I really want to it? Gpotatoe isn't thought highly anymore since this Allods Online. Than again they don't control the developement of the game. Though Gpotatoes other games aren't bad with the cash shops just none of them interest me in anyway. The nothing hurting me from trying Aika being a F2P where as TERA will be P2P, I need to save to move out with my girlfriend, a friend and that friends older sister. So it looks like I'm keeping my eyes open in the F2P market for a bit while I wait for Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, and Final Fantasy XIV. Only time will tell.
Let's see how this Allods situation plays out, I will be there to the end if an end is what happens but it won't stop my wondering eye.
Enter Pulse, the Elf Priest. Not my first character but the first one I'm going to blog about while leveling. My projected talent build and Ruby trees are in this link. I'm going for Pure Healing. I want to increase my healing amount and increase the range as far as I can without losing the effectiveness of my heals. You can find my link here. My Stats for the first 4 levels through the tutorial have been all put into Luck. This is mainly my OCD kicking in. I like Luck a lot, especially in the term of healers. For this healer my points are looking to be broken down like this -
1-4 : Luck
5-10: alternate Faith and Wisdom
So far this is my plan. I want a low change of a glancing blow and I want my heals big. After which the Faith plays into key cause I want to be able to heal big and make sure it heals the target. From levels 5-10 I'm going to be given 5 points. This doesn't break evenly so I'll have 3 in Faith and 2 into Wisdom. Intelligence and Perception are what I'm gearing for and not so much going to stats I'm going to throw points into, at least not yet.
I'm no stranger to the Free to Play Market of MMOs. My first MMO was infact a free to play called Knight Online. My childhood best friend and Warcraft 2 team mate and clan mate showed it to me which he learned from a friend from school. This lead to me trying over others with him including Risk Your Life and brought me and him to runescape which we played for many many months. Fast foward to my freshman year of high school and I was giving up time with my than girlfriend to play a little korean ginder at the time called Conquer Online. I never bought anything through the cash shops cause of me being so young and for the fact I had no idea what the point was of them to begin with. Sure I looked through the shops and sure the XP bonus potions always appealed to me. I didn't know how cash shops have worked till I was older. Plus I never stayed to long in any f2p game to make the cash shop worth it in the long run. I never stayed long enough for myself to make the money seem worth it. By putting money into the shop, I'd give my money to the developers or the ones hosting the game and that means I've made a commitment to the game, personally so to put in money I'd have to make sure the game was worth the time.
Enter Today. I'm still playing Allods for the fact that it's a great solid game with potential. I'm not going to boycott by logging in and I'm not going to rage quit over the recent news and rumors about the devs purposely bombing their own game for finical reasons because frankly it doesn't make sense.
I'm not boycotting by not logging in and I'm not going to quit over this frankly, bullshit. I'm not a fan boy that's going to give you a copy and paste listed of restated reason on why not to just trash this game. I'm a pretty level-headed guy and I'm going to give it as straight as I see it. The fact is this game is only Open-beta here in America, so bugs and kinks are going to need to fixed and straighten. I'm not going to not log into an enjoyable game because of the cash shop being so high in price if it isn't a bug and they say it's fixed and these are the prices for the cash shop I just will not buy from the cash shop. Free to plays make money through their cash shops. If no one is buying than the developers are going to say - "We're not making any money, we either shut down and consider this a lost and deal with the money all gone in the project or we lower the prices down." If the entire community doesn't buy into the cash shop the entire community is on the same playing level. Things like the death debuff will totally suck and people will get very frustrated. However, if the company sees all these people play and downloading the game and their not making money there are going to break and say you know what maybe we should lower the prices, this people rather sit for 2 hours and wait for a debuff than pay X amount of money for just one pot to eliminate that for convince. I will log it and I'll prove to the company that I enjoy their game so much I'm willing to play it, hell if they switched to pay to play I'd pay a month subscription for this game but, I will not pay more than a monthly subscription in a cash shop just to play for a month. I'll sit through a 2 hour bebuff to prove to the company when your lower your prices I will pay. Till than I'll make my own enjoyment in the game at level cap. I'll host raffles and in game event like races for other players. I'll start a guild to help other people leveling toons or complete quests.
From a business sense, I'm not a business man but I have plenty of business course in my past two years gaining my associates in Computer Information Systems to have learned no company is going to, as the rumors say purposely destroy their own game. The just got it to open beta in America, even if Allods is tanking in Russia you just opened to a huge American market. If it tanks is Russia sure you lost that money but you still can have a thriving player base in America. From what I've learn yes, businesses do cut things if they are putting more into a product than their earning back however, they aren't going to just cut something in a board meeting.
"Oh this Pen compnay we bought for X amount dollars is making us more debt than profit."
"Well sir, you know we could always try and find out why and maybe turn it aroun..."
"OMG NO! It's worthless cut it we'll make it up by making more erasers next year"
They are going to say
"Sir, we aren't making any money off our recent investment on the video game Allods Online."
"Oh well why is this?"
"Well it's an Massively Multi-player Online game, where people take on a character they create to complete quests, fight monsters and play with other people. It's free to play but we offer a shop for them to spend real money to gain things they couldn't in game."
"Okay what seems to be the problem, we recently did a count on accounts and we have plenty of accounts to make well over our initial profit."
"Well that's true Mr. Biz however no one seems to be buying anything."
"Do we have any information why no one is buying anything?"
"No sir, we've made sure to take the time to make items that people will want or need available through the in game store. We have been receiving a lot of complaints through the department that handles the forums and it appears players are a bit upset with the prices. We've been having people not access their accounts or others playing without buying anything."
"Well Mr. Lacky let's collect some information on reasonable prices people will be willing to pay, let's see if we can get an increase in revenue by next quarter. If we don't see a rise will weight the options on what to do next"
"We'll get started As soon as possible..."
the meeting continues and they focus on other aspects of their products.
The bottom line is don't stop playing a fun game because you don't agree with psomething. In the post World of Warcraft Era of MMOs. Many people new to MMOs have only played World of Warcraft and they don't understand the process of MMOs and many of them are not F2P players of the market and they rather cut off their nose to spite their face. If you don't want to pay high-prices we as a community should stand up and respectfully ask for a change because a large united group of people makes other take notice.
The last thing I want to state is Free to Plays make money through their cash shops. For people to not play a game because you need to use the cash shop are just being ignorant. They brash reasoning is that buying from the cash shop shouldn't give an unfair advantage and I agree to a certain extent it shouldn't give an unfair advantage but the company isn't going to make anymore if the cash shop isn't going to offer anything no one is going to buy. Costumes are a good thing but a company can make enough money to live or offering just comestic items. Games like Maplestory can because it's more so a game for social activities than anything else despite the ability to do high level dungeons and get gear if you have every even logged into maple story or wonderking you'd see in the first town with people a ton of people with costumes.
Games like Allods and World of Warcraft wouldn't be able to get buy with just that if they did the updates would be slows tremendously. Personally, I'd accept a cash shop that charged me the subscription fee for items I would need to play for that month.I would pay 10-15 a month to buy items to allow me to play for that month. That way if I don't get logged in or I'm taking a break I'm not being charged that monthly fee if I only logged in for a total of 20 days that month. I was still charged that standard 30-31 day fee. If I take a break and say I bought some pots to keep the FoD debuff in Allods off me for 3 weeks. I only logged in 2 weeks and went on vacation for another two weeks when I come back I still have that 1 week of pots. What I don't agree with is a huge unfair advantage or paying more bucks a month to make sure I have items to cover me for that month. I rather pay a subscription fee because it would be cheaper in the longer run.
Than again I don't think I should be charge a monthly fee period. In World of Warcrafts case I don't agree paying 30-40 dollars an xpac and than be charged another 15 dollars for the month. Especially if you going to keep me running for a carrot, but that's for another article.
MMOs are ever changing creatures and their development time can be up to 5 years. The market now a days seems a little bit more cut-throat than the passed years. It seems MMOs today come on the market and blow people away or we see what has been happening, a massive flood of people to only leave a month later. Tabula Rosa died this way. This is what I do not get, if given time MMOs become proper. It's not going to be WoW at launch, that's unrealistic and you my friend are crazy to even think that it would be. So many time do I read numerous forum post on dozen of MMO boards about how newly released games suck. This can be all blamed of World of Warcraft. WoW has 11 million people and a lot of them aren't from the MMO genre so to them everything is a clone of the one and only game they played. This isn't a WoW sucks post, because Blizzard as brought a huge market into the playing field and we are getting tons of new games to create a life in and run around in. However WoW has made 11 million people into a WoW player and not an MMO player and changed Making an great MMO has become making a WoW clone that doens't appear as one.
Truth be told I got the solution for this problem. Developers should never promise or mention anything. Keep your mouth shut. Like a good crime let your work do the talking. Now what I mean is before the developers start telling players all these sweet features they are putting into the game they should instead work on the core game. And never mention any features besides the core game. What the story is, what the setting is in game this is what should be talked about. Classes, races, places but nothing should be said a long the lines of "HUGEE 1k VS 1k FPS style PvP!" "HUGE CASTLE SEIGES!" "EPIC RAIDS!". SHUT UP!
How could you talk about features you don't even have? If you game levels you 1-50 than all content and polish should be on 1-50 till it's just about where you need it. After that work on another part End-game. Don't tell your fans anything until you know the feature is set in stone. Don't just throw shit in than brag about it and when players actually see it, they know it's horse shit.
Lastly, listen to your community! I can bet you a million to you if you implement something the community wants your going to have players stay and invite their friends. Their voice was heard and players just want to know that they are heard. Doing stuff for the community, will make the community do stuff back, and that's pay and play your game. After all, you never hear what blizzard is doing in their MMO cause they know to keep their mouth shut till they know it's there for good and that people like it.
Now if only developers could understand that if this is a virtual world than things need to happen. For instance, seasons could reflect months of year. Like Blizzard when they added Stormwind Harbor in, it just wasn't in leading up to Wrath they had NPC Peons working on it. That's making a world seem real. I want on my world to change after all I am paying you to continue the game. The game doesn't have to go up. You could be sitting in a city and you read patch notes about content being added. Your sitting and boom out of no where you can see mobs running into the city destroying guards. You didn't expect this, no one did, they thought it was more content. The mobs kill everyone in the city. When you get back to your body you know see your city is in ruins and you have to go take sanction in another races city or another cities of you race. The walls are in ruins and now it has become an end game instance. What was once your races main city has now becomes and end game instance.... immersion my friends and a creative and realistic way to introduce content. Now your races new main city is a bit bigger and has more thing to say sorry for taring down your old city. You have now added more depth to lore in your games story, players can say remember when we use to all be in the City of Glass? Yeah! before the raiders came. I don't know bout you but I'd give my $14.95 to any body that could do that in a game.
