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Fundamentally flawed...
willo248
Member Posts: 346
Ok I played this game for about a month and I have came to this conclusion. The game is fundamentally flawed. NO matter what you do and careful you are you cannot possibly gain or even retain your extremely precious PED. Some players would argue that this is incorrecct as you can partake in other activities such as trading, between mining/hunting runs to keep your PED balance up. I tried this and it took hours of anguished spamming the chat in order to gain 1 or 2 peds, and more to the point who wants to trade? Because I would much rather to be hunting.
As far as I could tell in my one month The only way you could play the game without depositing money each month is if you already deposited a good 5grand to get your skills up so you can be economical at what you do. TO be honest i'm not prepared to pay that much to play a game.
This brings me on to my next point MindArk charges you for absolutely everything you do. You are charged for rediculous things such as putting on and taking of armour.
However this is not the main reason for my quitting the game, and to be fair despite these things I was moderately enjoying my time on planet calypso. However eventually it dawned on me that i could be having the same amount of fun in many other games without having to worry about every last thing I did. This was the game breaker for me because I realised that I could simply log onto to any P2P game pay my monthly sub, and simply play for a month without having to worry about stretching my $15 over a month, and I can simply play the game.
Comments
Some people enjoy playing with money and that 'flaw' in the game.
I'm not arguing that the real cash economy is really the flaw to the game. In other rpgs you can use money to make money. In Entropia it next to impossible to make money in the purely in the game, by using money from in the game. What ever you do mindark are practically forcing you to lose your ped.
Mindark claim that they have a real money economy that acts like a real world economy. No it doesn't. In entropia your money is permanantly been sucked out to an external place, be it repairing decay, taking on and off armour. In a real economy money would circle through the players/people. This is why destroying money in the real world is illegal.
Another gripe that i have with the game is the fact that the crafting is just rediculous. Because mindark are constantly trying to make you lose money, and deposit more, the chances are that when crafting before you are uber you will lose money.
This makes it seem to me that there is no point in playing other than to get higher skills.
The flow of ped in this game seems to go like this more often than not:
-> Buy mining gear ---> Mine ---> attain resources usually worth less than amount paid for mining gear --->sell to crafters
---> Craft items worth less than the resources.
This seems completely defunctbecause why do anything when your only going to lose out?
Yeah, I'm sorry....... it sounds more like you spend a couple days gathering sweat, made a enough ped to buy some ammo for your rookie gun then blew through it in 15min and got mad. Because the things you say are just completely and utterly untrue. It's like saying you can go into Space in WoW.
Below, you can find my mining statistics. $20 deposit over 2 weeks ago. If you truley played the game, then you should be able to know what those sizes mean.
The game is very social too btw. I haven't really done much hunting, but I did max out the Opalo and get up to a Breer M1a. I found that hunting in a group is quite a bit more profitable than hunting by yourself.
I mean yeah, the games not for everyone. That's something you'll hear in every niche game out there. But, there is no reason to blatently lie about things.
it's not a lye, to take of unlim armour their is a charge for putting it on...
I have armor, full set of unlim pixie. I take it on and off all the time. There is NO charge.
Here is the proof. This is me, just made it for you and this thread.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gEPlhQIRR8
It may take a minute for youtube to register it.
you will need to look closer on your armour m8, it does decay, cant remember if its when you take it on or if it were when you take it off....other than that yep it is hard to retain money on your activities....and do see the flaw in connecting the USD to the ingame economy, but also ofc this is a draw for alot of people to atleast try the game....would prefer if it hadnt been, but would like to see a game with the same need to think of how you spend your money
Yeah, there is decay. There is decay on everything. But, my armor seems to decay slower than everything else I have, including Limited Items. I may be wrong and it may be because I'm not into combat, though I do get hit and die alot as a miner.
You can see my armor % in the vid. I've had it for over a week and have died a good 5 or 6 or more times a day in it.
I mean when you take your armour off or on it decay, cant remember which one it was
Holy crap, you're right. I never realized that. Don't I look like a fool? lol
I'm willing to bet that has something to do with combat related stuff, to keep people from switching out armors and what not too much.
lol, that's where the dissapearing ped has been going...
I can understand why people enjoy it. But when I went into it thought that I would be able to make ped from the ped i invested, by crafting etc. I was having a blast until I realised that MA had made it sadistically hard to actually gain ped, with all the decay and what not.
This game sounds like a scam.
My gaming blog
It's not actually a scam. There is a player whos making like $20grand a month however he invested like $1million lol.
You should check it out it's an iteresting concept just poorly executed.
Well, sorry about earlier. But that still goes back on what the title of the thread is.
To be fundamentally flawed, you would have to make money. Since everything in the game is given a constant value, to keep things on a somewhat normal level and all player bought items are based on the Markup from the Trade Terminal..... that right there is doing something right.
If PED was easy to make, such as in other games where in game money has no real world value, then you would have never played this game. It was launched in 2003 and it would have been bankrupt and forgotten by 2004 if the average player didn't constantly lose money over the long term.... unless they were lucky. The way they have designed it, they have designed it for you to be able to stretch that money out quite a distance.
During my short time in combat, almost every run was only a small loss. I hardly ever made a profit on solo hunting (I did on almost every group hunt though), but I really didnt' lose much and the times that I actually made a profit offset those losses quite a bit. Compared to mining where I can lose $5 a run, this isn't that bad. Ofc in mining I can also gain $50 in a run (as I recently did and posted a screenshot in my thread) unlike in combat, but the losses even out in mining as well... usually.
Ofc, you can also reduce your losses in both mining, combat, and even crafting and turn them into profitable ventures by doing your research and planning things out before you go. I enjoy this in the game. (profitable as in game profitable, real world profitable I could work at McDonalds and make 100 times more :-D but I like the game and am not playing to make real world money)
I'm slowly raising my crafting skill with what I have mined. I'm doing this with components, because they are by far the cheapest. I very very very rarely make a profit crafting components at the moment, but I invested around 20 PED in a Basic Filters Blueprint that was 75 Quality. This has reduced my losses DRASTICALLLY and has paid for itself several times over. This is research. Basic filters are the cheapest thing to make and I find quite a bit of Oil and Lyst mining. There are resources out there that will tell you how much things are to make and you can figure out for yourself what would be the cheapest for your level. The same principles can be applied to mining and combat. From what I understand, combat probably has by far the most research to do before you go out and start killing crap......... at least once you get past the initial newbie stage, which doesn't take nearly as long as it does in Mining or Crafting. Some of my combat skills are still above some of my mining skills and I've easily spent 20 times longer mining than I have in combat.
You see I believe that this real cash system of running the game is where it is flawed, because the company has to turn over a profit and prvent becoming bankrupt, it is very hard to make a profit doing the professions in the game. This means that I always feel as if I might as well not do anything if i'm only going to lose out at the end of the day.
If the game was simply bassed on a subscription I think it would be more succesful as it is the only game of it's kind and depth.
Well I have a rule about F2P games and that is: Can I spend a maximum of 15 euros/month and still enjoy it?
If not then I will just stay away from it and from what I have heard, from multiple sources, is that you need to spend significantly more to be competetive. And then you are kind of playing with your wallet rather than with your skills and that is a big no no for me.
My gaming blog
Nope, operating as intended. Maybe not best for the player but it was obviously set up that way. Some people make money and most people lose money, thats how its supposed to be otherwise they would have to shut down. And to base this game on a SUB would basically call for an entire rewrite of many core systems. I dont think that would work.
While you may have made the smarter choice to simply not do anything, others dont make that choice, thus the compnay makes money.
When i try this "game" 5 years ago i only see a "online casino" with some kindo of a mmorpg skin.
That's exactly what it is everything you do is in the balance, every shot fired at monster will it hit/miss, will it no loot, if it loots how much loot will you make. I just found that I might as well go play online bingo, pretty much the same just a smaller client...
What I'm most interesting in is the question if the game would be sub-based (despite the fact that it wouldn't work in your opinion) would you still play it then? Or in other words: is the game fun enough in itself or is the real money currency a vital part of the fun?
Absolutely. It's the closest thing I've ever found to Pre-NGE SWG.
If the game was easy I would not play.
What is the point in playing something that isnt a challenge? You may as well play solitare
The consistant ped drain is what pays for the game development as well as what makes it so challenging and fun.
IF you tried to convert it to a subscription model then there would no longer be a challenge and it would be like any of the other bajillion games that I read all the ADD game hoppers going from one to the next every couple of days.
I like the system in place, I played successfuly as a non depositer for 6 months and had a blast. I have since then been playing as a depositer for the last 3+ years and have had even more fun.
The variaty in options as well as the upcomming updates have me pretty excited. With 4 plantes and space already and another 3 about to be released in the comming year (one is any day now,) There is more gameplay and areas to explore than I will be able to keep up with if they maintain this pace of updates.
What I see in this thread is a very classic example of the two types of people who try the game out, and given what they put into it (energy, research, attitude) it is easy to predict how they will end up both in terms of success and in terms of enjoyment.
Player 1 expects to play for free and make money and ends up pissed off and dissapointed. (not saying the OP is that extreme but its the classic example)
Player 2 expects nothing back, puts in a little with expectation of loosing it for entertainment, and does a ton of research realizing it cant be played like the other childrens games out there. He enjoys it and playes forever or untill it interfeers with his family/work life and has to slow down for a while.
Having just finished a 3week long event in the game, I am representing the second catagory :P and need to slow down now that its over, my wife and I will both continue playing a few hours each day untill I get into hardcore mode again sometime.
Loving the game and it keeps getting better :P
narfi
Playing with Real Money: Colonizing Virtual Worlds
I definately had to chime in on this one. Im going to put it in very simple terms. MA is doing it right. EU is nothing short of hardcore, and by that i mean, just about every mouse click involves risk. NFC (not for carebears)
Ive been "participating" in EU on and off for years now, close to 5 i believe. I deposited 50 USD in the first month, just to give it a good trial period. One thing you must understand is that it is pretty much impossible to gain a return from MA, and not doing so will spell doom for you from the start. I can happily say that i did infact gain a return, but this was only from other partipants. Over a years time, on and off, i eventually pocketed 500 USD. My enjoyment comes from interacting with the "real world economy". On top of this, especially with cryengine implemented, the world is extremely engaging and immersive. People will always label anything and everything, but it is yourself who must decide if these labels are justified.
It takes a certain kind of person to enjoy the fact that everything you do in this world has a price. MA has provided a foundation that allows its participants to make their own entertainment. The community has not only survived, but thrived. And with almost no marketing AFAIK. It is what you make of it, except when you expect to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.
The armour 'tax' was introduced to 'prevent perople from lagging down others by constantly changing their armour'. It was a typical MindArk solution to solve a minor issue
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