Welcome back, me! It’s always lovely to return from a weekend away from internets and twitters and bloggies to find 555 posts waiting to be read and a whole firestorm of controversy that popped up most likely because I wasn’t there to settle everyone down and read them a bed time story. People! Just because you don’t get your milk and cookies and Amelia Bedilia doesn’t mean you can riot!
Without further ado, BLOG RAGE!
Keen! Petter! MMO Misanthrope! Mind Bending Puzzle! Tipa! Kaozz! Zubon!
Anyway, it’s just weird to see Allods suddenly on the receiving end of a hailstorm of unhappiness. The game’s had a LOT going for it, a tremendous buzz, a few bloggers that made the game their Valentine’s Day date, etc. And now, its “soft launch” seems to be covered in poo.
In regards to their bizarre (and what I’d like to think of an accounting error) RMT prices, I’d just like to say this:
Dear Developers,
RMT and microtransactions may be here to stay, but that doesn’t mean you get to act like off-the-wall robber barons and gouge us with obscenely ridiculous prices. Players won’t stand for it, and they will turn on you if you’ve taken your cues for pricing from airport food vendors. Keep the costs low, friendly and competitive, and we’ll be loyal customers. Gouge us, and you’re going to wonder why we’ve all fled to other games.
Sincerely,
Syp
Bio Break 
Thanks for the outward links too.
Hmm… every time Syp goes away for the weekend, the whole MMO blogging world goes crazy.
It’s such a complete foobar I don’t understand it. I was WAITING for this game. Left the CB to enjoy its goodness live. The one thing I planned to buy immediately was bag space. Oh I know they need to encourage you to buy it. I WAS GOING TO BUY it. But $20 US for 6 spaces – spaces???? I closed the shop and didn’t look at another item.
Honestly, even with all the daily quest items in ROM I never rented back space – ever. Two large bags by default in you pack, 1 large bank slot and a free small trunk in your house was plenty. From the shop I bought 4 permanent trunks and that’s all she wrote on space. I never needed more and I was harvesting like a demon from the early levels. Bur Allods??? They’re on crack. I was waiting to give them some money but now they got nothing.
Whatever the economic rationale behind this it is clearly a PR disaster for the game. In a strange way the game is even a victim of its own success. If the game hadn’t generated so much positive pre-launch comment and if people weren’t so hyped up about it these moves might just have sneaked in under the radar.
The really sad thing about all of this is that indications are that Allods might be good enough to make it as a subscription game. It certainly built up a cohort of loyal fans before this issue blew up.
I would have played it as a sub game. I refuse to support the microscrewyou model.
I was gone this weekend and I have to catch up, but my initial thoughts so far have been:
I can still play without the cash shop.
And its still beta (meaning I give them the benefit of doubt to test pricing, but still think its a dumb idea to charge real $ in a beta phase).
Thank you for taking the time to be condescending.
Amen! And that goes for all games!
I mean, it’s been proven countless times that the “free now, and then we think of a way to earn money later when we got customers” process works.
Games, especially MMOs, always start crappy, and via patches become better. It seems obvious that the price should relate to that. Free/dirt cheap now, more expensive later when we got a product worth the dime.
I could still play free, heartlessgamer, but I like supporting games I enjoy. I enjoy buying things now and then in DDO. I don’t see any problem with the wow pets or services. I get that free to play buy as you go is a valid model, but everything being over $1 means they’re no longer micro-transactions. If I can buy lunch with it, it’s not micro.
So, sadly, I’ve had to abandon the game and stopped recommending it. I hope they get prices in order, because I enjoyed the game and the atmosphere, but I can’t support something so insane.
@heartless You better do some reading up, you’ll quickly find that not only does the end game force you to spend in the cash shop, the future patches coming soo nstrip some of the most popular skills like speed boosts, so that mounts will be viable use for all classes. But what do mounts require? Food, which must be bought in the cash shop. FoD gets increased to 2 hours in patch 1.7, and healing classes with res can’t remove this debuff, which REQUIRES you to buy perfume from the cash shop! Also it is assumed the grind has been doubled in later levels, as patch notes reveal levels 20 t o40 now require more experience to reach. People were already complaining they ran into holes around level 30 and other spots in later levels. The game is money hungry, and Russian players are reporting the recent patches are beyond our worst imagination. There is even talk now that the original dev team at Astral abandoned the game when they merged with Nival and another game company, so the ones running the game now are not the original who created the vision of the game. That became apparent here recently from closed beta to open beta, it is a totally different game now. This game is screwed, no doubt about it. Such a shame, this game could have had great success if managed correctly, I would have happily subscribed to it had they offered that chance to me. I honestly didn’t think we’d ever have an MMO fail as hard as Age of Conan, Warhammer, and Aion have, but here we are again, this time with a “free” game.
I hope the Allods dev team put a google alert on the keyword phrase Allod Cash shop because I think they would see how big the outrage really is.
I plan on sticking it out myself, and seeing it first hand myself before writing it completely off.
I am surprised there is such an outcry over the price of the bag because a large number of WoW players (100,000+) bought two non-functional vanity pets for $20, and very few bloggers criticized this move from Blizzard.
I believe the timing was wrong on the publisher’s part. It might have been better to introduce a 2-additional slot bag for a small price (say $1 or $2), and then introduce the biggest, baddest bag for $20 a few months down the road for those hooked on the game to be able to make an informed decision as whether they are worth it.
One of the problem in my opionion, is the difficulty in assessing the “real value” of such an item so close to launch.
The outcry over the price of perfume I can easily understand; a game is only F2P if it does not require you to purchase items from the Item Shop.
I cannot speculate on how the Allods team devised their pricing scheme, but I think we all agree that the prices are a bit out of whack.
There was a lot of hype to this game, and having played the beta myself, and being currently engaged in the “Open Beta” I find the game has a lot to offer and know a lot of other people do too. It feels a little knee-jerk to me to simply bail on the game because they made a bad business decision. We, as players, have a right to demand fair pricing schemes and that’s what we should continue to do instead of just bailing on it. Hopefully the dev team will come to their senses and adjust the prices. By clearly demanding better prices in a sensible fashion and by not buying items at the current prices the team should get the picture. If not, then they have lost touch with their player base and that is when, in my opinion, they have lost me as a player.
I don’t fault anyone for their reactions, as this was a slap in the face, but for anyone who really does enjoy the game, I think we owe it to ourselves to continue to clearly voice opinions and affect change. Taking some cues from DDO/Turbine would be great (as you mentioned too Syp)…as they need to find the balance of making the game truly “Free-to-Play” while compelling players to use the cash shop instead of forcing them to use it.
Hugmenot is right too, as its hard to place a real value on many of these items at this point as well.
Here’s to hoping the team will listen…otherwise they will find their promising IP floating in the Written-Off Sea.
Hug, it’s really simple: people don’t care if you throw money away on stupid, useless crap. You want a Core Hound or w/e for 20 bucks— fine. Allods wants a rather tremendous amount of money for stuff that you NEED to play the game in any sort of efficient and fun manner. It’s not just an expensive bag. If Keen is right, you need cash shop items just to get rid of the death penalty— so every time you die it costs you 50 cents at current prices. Or you can wait two hours! for it to fall off on its own.
Thanks for the finger in my direction hehe.
>.< Rage!
I’m with hug, I don’t get the responce?
It’s not just “Oh, hey, people might not spend this much” it’s like they have personally offended you and others by doing this.
Adding a high price is not an offense. It’s not even bait and switch – you can see this price upfront.
Is it because ya’ll were playing the beta for awhile, thinking it’d go one way, then the cash shop shows up indicating it’s gunna go another way?