Still a major pay-to-win game, none of these changes address this major problem.
Pay to win means you buy things with real money (outside of the game) to purchase things that make you win, beat, conquer, achieve things in the game that you could not do without the RL money sink.
This is not the case with SotA. You BUY the game, like any game and then you play it, for free.
Nothing you can buy at the store will make you better at PVP or killing monsters or doing quests or anything else in the game. Therefore, it's not "pay to win."
(...)several of the things you mention have been fixed in past releases(...)
A fully locked deck has no access to combos. As for the cooldown, I'd like to quote from the Dev+ forum, but I know I'm not allowed to (here in the public), so I'm simply going to not comment on that part.
(...)Spell weaving can be done with a locked bar as long as one card is dealt(...)
Since you have been using the sports analogy (racquet-ball), I'm going to use the music analogy. If you'd try to sell a guitar where I'd have to use one randomly shifting string in order to play an accord, explaining that this ain't an issue, given that one can still play with the static strings and if one really wanted to play an accord, one could always use the random string in addition, I doubt I'd be the only one to give you a queer look.
Unless you can use TWO (or more) LOCKED GLYPHS to create a combo, the locked glyphs are not going to be equal in power.
I'm kind of curious to see if certain skills are used more often one way or the other, and if that suggests anything about the skills or how people play.
You might want to search some of Chris (very informative and nice) postings in certain restricted areas. You'd be astonished on the information you could find there! Chris certainly loves graphs and numbers just as much as I do.
EXCELLENT write up. Thank you for covering this game. As a long time backer I have not stayed very active, but as of R21 I'm REALLY turned on to the direction we're heading and the content we're seeing. Thanks again.
Edit from Column:
Backers in the Dev+ community have a lot more clout than you’d expect to see in any project under development, and the team at Portalarium takes their community very seriously.
This is probably the biggest drawback in the game's development and the direction it is taking.
It's a small core of Backers (some Large $ backers) that seem to be in a little world of their own, when all the focus is what will make it better for them it doesn't matter about all the other backers or people they hope will buy the game at launch, which is now delayed, and no mention of an Alpha date.
Lum (developer) From SotA forum:
I don't think it would surprise anyone to learn that there is very little chance we will launch the game/finish its content in the next 3 months.
Lum, Today at 9:20 AM
Looking at the forums its seems a lot of Dev+ are so called RP'ers, but want to be transported into a Fantasy world with all the trapping of a 21st century property magnate with a truck full of rares to sell.
When they walk up to bridge in OWL's HEAD the guard should bow to these Lords & Ladies, not call them outlander's and bar their way. So immersion breaking.
Time for RG to draw a line on any future wants/suggestions from Dev+ tell them EP2 not before, and get the game finished or EA will have a chance of Launching a UO2 before this even hits Alpha.
Not to enthusiastic/fanboyish for KB
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