Originally posted by MMO_Doubter They already got a lifetime sub out of you. That's probably more than they figure the average player will pay them. My question to you is: will you ever buy a lifetime sub to another MMO?
I like the general concept of the lifetime subscription. I mean look at something like LoTRO. If I had subscribed to that when the game started, and was still subscribed today, I would have saved myself a pretty penny. The thing that bothers me and throws up HUGE red flags is when a company only offers lifetime subscriptions for a limited time before the game is even in retail and stops offering it shortly after the game goes live...
------------------------- "Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places..." ~ H.P.Lovecraft, "From Beyond"
All I know is with Cryptic adding a zone to there item mall that you must buy I don't want to hear one more complaint about DCUO being free to play XD. At least they won't have a monthly fee on top of the asinine item mall lol.
I like the general concept of the lifetime subscription. I mean look at something like LoTRO. If I had subscribed to that when the game started, and was still subscribed today, I would have saved myself a pretty penny. The thing that bothers me and throws up HUGE red flags is when a company only offers lifetime subscriptions for a limited time before the game is even in retail and stops offering it shortly after the game goes live...
It boggles the mind that players don't see that as a huge warning sign.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
This company boggles my mind. CO is only losing people since launch so instead of trying to gain some back with new content they make people pay for what likely should of been there at launch anyhow, or at least a portion of it. Really, this is one of the biggest money grabber MMO companies Ive seen and for people who are picking up STO, you really need to be re-thinking that decision since that game has already started down the exact same path as this one.
Sadly this seems to be becoming a standard practice by gaming companies in all genres. More and more companies are releasing partially complete games then charging the playerbase to finish them. Its really a sad trend that seems to be becoming the norm.
#1 because Dark and Light was the worst MMO release/server/company/scam ever.
#2 Because CO charged me for a contentless shell of a game, then, after not allowing respecs putting them in a item mall for $12.50 (if memory serves) among other things, the game started running low on "content" (which = quests only, no alternative advancment) around level 13 and only got worse towards the 20-25 mark...then got unplayable at the 30+ mark. Dont charge me $50 bucks if I cant even hit max level without grinding PQ's.
#3 Nodiatis is actually a great game, with an interesting PK and player skill system....but the "time cards" and the"bonus packs" were not only overpriced, but ruined the game.....on top of TWO seperate $50.00 packs, you needed a $5 GTC to play the game for a certain amount of time (remember this is a basic 2d RPG with no animations for christs sake) SO on top of all that, to use purple items ("epic") you needed virtues.....all items had different virtue requirments, 18 diff virtues, $10.00 each! WTF?!
#4 Tabula Rasa because despite the fact the starter zone was kickass, and it had some interesting concepts and ideas...the second you got out of "T1" it became very apparent this game was not complete....so trudge on right? Well you soon realized there was virtually no content, at all......
The rabid Star Trek Online advocates would do well to be paying attention.
"Soloists and those who prefer small groups should never have to feel like they''re the ones getting the proverbial table scraps, as it were." - Scott Hartsman, Senior Producer, Everquest II "People love groups. Its a fallacy that people want to play solo all the time." - Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer, Rift
I'll come to cryptics defense on the instance to those that think they provided an "incomplete" game. I feel champions is a complete game... for a single player title. The content is just enough to get you to the end of a story... albeit the story that they tell you along the way isn't very engrossing, and I pass over a multitude of the quest lines simply because they have nothing important to tell me. The only quests that end up mattering are your nemesis quests as many of them are cutscenes.
If this game were to have released on console, as a single player game with online play... I think it would have gone over much better then a sub-par MMO with no lasting appeal. Since the balance of powers are all off, and the melee to ranged disparity is so great, these are things that can easily be passed over in a SP game, but in an MMO, it just doesn't cut it.
So they release an unfiinished game with content gaps and bugs. They then make a huge deal about fixing some bugs months later and announce a new zone that may address the content gaps that we have to pay for ! Is this April 1st already?
This. I truly believe many of the players complaining now, myself included, would be fine with a paid expansion AFTER they had fixed bugs and the thin content. To all the defenders of this BS move, I would say this is the main beef. MMOs are never finished but this game was released with far too little content to be called an MMO. It can not be said enough that the game was unfinished thus the huge uproar for charging for new content at this particular point in time. We feel like we are having to pay for content gaps and that is not cool no matter how you spin it.
At this point, I'm glad I cancelled my pre-order to STO. The lifetime sub was a huge enough mistake.
The rabid Star Trek Online advocates would do well to be paying attention.
Lulz... sounds like a fabled species like Sasquatch or the Yeti. STO advocates? Did YOU see any? hrhr XD
But seriously, I think that stinks. I mean, look how Turbine has launched massive content without any payment asked, except the really big expansions with level raise. Maybe if it's 5 dollars for something considerably big... but even then it stinks. I dunno who makes decisions over at Cryptic, but they surely must know it will aggravate many. Once you get a bad rep, you never get it away. See SOE. I wonder how they make such decisions... ok, I stopped wondering for real about any decision Cryptic makes by now, lol.
Most people won't buy it, many will quit CO over it or not subscribe after their 3 months and it will certainly make more enemies than friends. I mean, I am open to look at it before making a final say, but it sounds like a VERY bad idea right now.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I suspected things like this would happen while I was in CO's alpha and beta. The key take-away I had from that experience was that Cryptic's Devs simply weren't listening. Thus I wasn't too saddened to not be invited into STO's beta, despite the development team over there essentially saying, "We're nothing at all like Champions Online! Huh-uh, nosirree."
CO was about as broken and unfinished a game I've ever seen, and even pushing the release date back didn't help that. As I played throughout the beta, fewer and fewer people were logging in to play, right up until the open beta. I'm not surprised in the least to see the exact same kind of fading of the subscribing playerbase. If you can't keep people interested when it's free, how will you ever keep them engaged when they have to pony up the dough?
I suspected things like this would happen while I was in CO's alpha and beta. The key take-away I had from that experience was that Cryptic's Devs simply weren't listening. Thus I wasn't too saddened to not be invited into STO's beta, despite the development team over there essentially saying, "We're nothing at all like Champions Online! Huh-uh, nosirree." CO was about as broken and unfinished a game I've ever seen, and even pushing the release date back didn't help that. As I played throughout the beta, fewer and fewer people were logging in to play, right up until the open beta. I'm not surprised in the least to see the exact same kind of fading of the subscribing playerbase. If you can't keep people interested when it's free, how will you ever keep them engaged when they have to pony up the dough?
Thats not surprising. No matter if you hate or love CO or STO: both are VERY casual games and don't support a longer subscription. I had fun a few months in CO, and that was that, but I already see the end for me coming. I play STO now, but I am sure after, say, half a year at best, I have seen it all often enough. We all said it often enough: making TWO MMOs at the same time was way too much for any company.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I didnt trust Cryptic before this, and most certainly wont ever again. Theyre a company that release quick, rushed out games for full price and then bleed their customer base for every penny they can get. Time will tell whether STO turns out like Champions.
CO, in its current state, does not warrant a monthly subscription fee and now they want more money for an "expansion" which covers one zone and 4 levels for which there was little content to begin with?
Amazing... and it bothers me a great deal that this is the company that will also drive Star Trek Online (into the ground).
I find this move absolutely abhorrent. THEY KNOW the #1 complaint from their loyal subscribers is the lack of content yet they have the audacity to charge money for a measely fricking zone? Completely disgusting imo, I hope Cryptic get a swift lesson in why this was such a dick move
I don't think people mind paying for expansions when there is enough in the basic game to justify a subscription.....I mean keeping players occupied in a ongoing way is surely exactly what the subscription is all about....stuff in addition to that is fair target for charges imo.
The bizzarre fact here is that even Cryptics most ardent supporters would agree CO is overly lite on content for an ongoing sub...so it beggars belief that they would attempt this so early in its life.
However it may be a ploy to gauge reaction ready for something else (a f2p model with paid elements perhaps?)..... It seems a gameplan at Cryptic atm to announce/release something that is either obviously outrageous or inept and then claim 'we listened to the players' before doing something slighly less inept or outrageous.
Cryptic (or is this Atari?) does seem to be setting a number of precedents in the area of how to charge players for an mmo..... I hope their 'success' doesn't end up inspiring any others =/
Well, I was on the edge about keeping up my sub after a month, but this was the last straw.
CO has the makings of a good game, with some great ideas, and it's certainly worth the price and a month's sub, anyone will likely get their money's worth to that extent; but it's totally obvious that it was released unfinished. It's buggy, unpolished and thin on content (especially considering how inviting it is to altitis, which requires alternative levelling paths, which don't exist).
Fair enough, these things happen, and people of goodwill are usually happy to support the game till the content that was pulled before released is put back in, bugs are squashed, and the game is polished to where it should have been at launch.
But to propose a paid content update at this stage (by no stretch of the imagination can a lvl 37-40 new zone be called an "expansion" that might be worth paying for) is like kicking all those people of goodwill in the teeth.
An absolutely boneheaded, stupid, terrible, jaw-droppingly asinine move.
The rabid Star Trek Online advocates would do well to be paying attention.
It is ironic that they are defending Cryptic on this one, of all things.
Yep....both here and the official forums. I'm sure some of those folks have nonrefundable preorders and/or long term subs. For me, seeing how Cryptic treats its' existing customers was the last straw.
Clearly I'm not a fan of CO, but that aspect of my opinion aside... just thinking of the amount of content in the game, it occurs to me that games like Mass Effect 2 seem to actually have more content than CO, which kind of puts this into perspective. I actually got more playability from the single player campaign in the original Call of Duty than I ever did in Champions Online, which is something that should not be true in this or any universe.
When you consider the multiple choices one can make in RPGs like ME2, it makes the decision whether to buy Cryptic's MMOs less obvious, because in terms of sheer play time one might reasonably expect to get more bang for the buck from ME2 and its ilk. That, to me, is the greatest failing of Cryptic at this juncture. An MMO ought to be massive beyond belief in order to justify a monthly sub. After all, "massive" is in the name of the genre. Instead, games like CO seem to have substituted the word "minimum."
Comments
Wow really? I'll buy it just cause I do enjoy the game here and there, but it better be around the price of 9.99. Anymore and they are CRAZY!
Cryptic, i can see Uranus, and it's not pretty ...
(hehehe could not resist, sorry
long day at work)
They must have spent a long time on Uranus, as the Klingons are few to be seen.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
I like the general concept of the lifetime subscription. I mean look at something like LoTRO. If I had subscribed to that when the game started, and was still subscribed today, I would have saved myself a pretty penny. The thing that bothers me and throws up HUGE red flags is when a company only offers lifetime subscriptions for a limited time before the game is even in retail and stops offering it shortly after the game goes live...
-------------------------
"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places..." ~ H.P.Lovecraft, "From Beyond"
Member Since March 2004
All I know is with Cryptic adding a zone to there item mall that you must buy I don't want to hear one more complaint about DCUO being free to play XD. At least they won't have a monthly fee on top of the asinine item mall lol.
CO = A free to play gone rouge XD
It boggles the mind that players don't see that as a huge warning sign.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
You're willing to pay 10 bucks for something any other P2P MMO would do better AND for free? Why?
You're willing to pay 10 bucks for something any other P2P MMO would do better AND for free? Why?
Because any other P2P MMO is not Champions Online.
This company boggles my mind. CO is only losing people since launch so instead of trying to gain some back with new content they make people pay for what likely should of been there at launch anyhow, or at least a portion of it. Really, this is one of the biggest money grabber MMO companies Ive seen and for people who are picking up STO, you really need to be re-thinking that decision since that game has already started down the exact same path as this one.
Sadly this seems to be becoming a standard practice by gaming companies in all genres. More and more companies are releasing partially complete games then charging the playerbase to finish them. Its really a sad trend that seems to be becoming the norm.
No signature, I don't have a pen
Worst MMO "scams" released that I have played in order (and/or felt ripped off):
#1 Dark and Light
#2 Champions Online
#3 Nodiatis
#4 Tabula Rasa
#1 because Dark and Light was the worst MMO release/server/company/scam ever.
#2 Because CO charged me for a contentless shell of a game, then, after not allowing respecs putting them in a item mall for $12.50 (if memory serves) among other things, the game started running low on "content" (which = quests only, no alternative advancment) around level 13 and only got worse towards the 20-25 mark...then got unplayable at the 30+ mark. Dont charge me $50 bucks if I cant even hit max level without grinding PQ's.
#3 Nodiatis is actually a great game, with an interesting PK and player skill system....but the "time cards" and the"bonus packs" were not only overpriced, but ruined the game.....on top of TWO seperate $50.00 packs, you needed a $5 GTC to play the game for a certain amount of time (remember this is a basic 2d RPG with no animations for christs sake) SO on top of all that, to use purple items ("epic") you needed virtues.....all items had different virtue requirments, 18 diff virtues, $10.00 each! WTF?!
#4 Tabula Rasa because despite the fact the starter zone was kickass, and it had some interesting concepts and ideas...the second you got out of "T1" it became very apparent this game was not complete....so trudge on right? Well you soon realized there was virtually no content, at all......
I play all ghame
The rabid Star Trek Online advocates would do well to be paying attention.
"Soloists and those who prefer small groups should never have to feel like they''re the ones getting the proverbial table scraps, as it were." - Scott Hartsman, Senior Producer, Everquest II
"People love groups. Its a fallacy that people want to play solo all the time." - Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer, Rift
I'll come to cryptics defense on the instance to those that think they provided an "incomplete" game. I feel champions is a complete game... for a single player title. The content is just enough to get you to the end of a story... albeit the story that they tell you along the way isn't very engrossing, and I pass over a multitude of the quest lines simply because they have nothing important to tell me. The only quests that end up mattering are your nemesis quests as many of them are cutscenes.
If this game were to have released on console, as a single player game with online play... I think it would have gone over much better then a sub-par MMO with no lasting appeal. Since the balance of powers are all off, and the melee to ranged disparity is so great, these are things that can easily be passed over in a SP game, but in an MMO, it just doesn't cut it.
It is ironic that they are defending Cryptic on this one, of all things.
This. I truly believe many of the players complaining now, myself included, would be fine with a paid expansion AFTER they had fixed bugs and the thin content. To all the defenders of this BS move, I would say this is the main beef. MMOs are never finished but this game was released with far too little content to be called an MMO. It can not be said enough that the game was unfinished thus the huge uproar for charging for new content at this particular point in time. We feel like we are having to pay for content gaps and that is not cool no matter how you spin it.
At this point, I'm glad I cancelled my pre-order to STO. The lifetime sub was a huge enough mistake.
Lulz... sounds like a fabled species like Sasquatch or the Yeti. STO advocates? Did YOU see any? hrhr XD
But seriously, I think that stinks. I mean, look how Turbine has launched massive content without any payment asked, except the really big expansions with level raise. Maybe if it's 5 dollars for something considerably big... but even then it stinks. I dunno who makes decisions over at Cryptic, but they surely must know it will aggravate many. Once you get a bad rep, you never get it away. See SOE. I wonder how they make such decisions... ok, I stopped wondering for real about any decision Cryptic makes by now, lol.
Most people won't buy it, many will quit CO over it or not subscribe after their 3 months and it will certainly make more enemies than friends. I mean, I am open to look at it before making a final say, but it sounds like a VERY bad idea right now.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I suspected things like this would happen while I was in CO's alpha and beta. The key take-away I had from that experience was that Cryptic's Devs simply weren't listening. Thus I wasn't too saddened to not be invited into STO's beta, despite the development team over there essentially saying, "We're nothing at all like Champions Online! Huh-uh, nosirree."
CO was about as broken and unfinished a game I've ever seen, and even pushing the release date back didn't help that. As I played throughout the beta, fewer and fewer people were logging in to play, right up until the open beta. I'm not surprised in the least to see the exact same kind of fading of the subscribing playerbase. If you can't keep people interested when it's free, how will you ever keep them engaged when they have to pony up the dough?
Thats not surprising. No matter if you hate or love CO or STO: both are VERY casual games and don't support a longer subscription. I had fun a few months in CO, and that was that, but I already see the end for me coming. I play STO now, but I am sure after, say, half a year at best, I have seen it all often enough. We all said it often enough: making TWO MMOs at the same time was way too much for any company.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I didnt trust Cryptic before this, and most certainly wont ever again. Theyre a company that release quick, rushed out games for full price and then bleed their customer base for every penny they can get. Time will tell whether STO turns out like Champions.
CO, in its current state, does not warrant a monthly subscription fee and now they want more money for an "expansion" which covers one zone and 4 levels for which there was little content to begin with?
Amazing... and it bothers me a great deal that this is the company that will also drive Star Trek Online (into the ground).
My gaming blog
I find this move absolutely abhorrent. THEY KNOW the #1 complaint from their loyal subscribers is the lack of content yet they have the audacity to charge money for a measely fricking zone? Completely disgusting imo, I hope Cryptic get a swift lesson in why this was such a dick move
Currently Playing: The Game
I don't think people mind paying for expansions when there is enough in the basic game to justify a subscription.....I mean keeping players occupied in a ongoing way is surely exactly what the subscription is all about....stuff in addition to that is fair target for charges imo.
The bizzarre fact here is that even Cryptics most ardent supporters would agree CO is overly lite on content for an ongoing sub...so it beggars belief that they would attempt this so early in its life.
However it may be a ploy to gauge reaction ready for something else (a f2p model with paid elements perhaps?)..... It seems a gameplan at Cryptic atm to announce/release something that is either obviously outrageous or inept and then claim 'we listened to the players' before doing something slighly less inept or outrageous.
Cryptic (or is this Atari?) does seem to be setting a number of precedents in the area of how to charge players for an mmo..... I hope their 'success' doesn't end up inspiring any others =/
Well, I was on the edge about keeping up my sub after a month, but this was the last straw.
CO has the makings of a good game, with some great ideas, and it's certainly worth the price and a month's sub, anyone will likely get their money's worth to that extent; but it's totally obvious that it was released unfinished. It's buggy, unpolished and thin on content (especially considering how inviting it is to altitis, which requires alternative levelling paths, which don't exist).
Fair enough, these things happen, and people of goodwill are usually happy to support the game till the content that was pulled before released is put back in, bugs are squashed, and the game is polished to where it should have been at launch.
But to propose a paid content update at this stage (by no stretch of the imagination can a lvl 37-40 new zone be called an "expansion" that might be worth paying for) is like kicking all those people of goodwill in the teeth.
An absolutely boneheaded, stupid, terrible, jaw-droppingly asinine move.
It is ironic that they are defending Cryptic on this one, of all things.
Yep....both here and the official forums. I'm sure some of those folks have nonrefundable preorders and/or long term subs. For me, seeing how Cryptic treats its' existing customers was the last straw.
Clearly I'm not a fan of CO, but that aspect of my opinion aside... just thinking of the amount of content in the game, it occurs to me that games like Mass Effect 2 seem to actually have more content than CO, which kind of puts this into perspective. I actually got more playability from the single player campaign in the original Call of Duty than I ever did in Champions Online, which is something that should not be true in this or any universe.
When you consider the multiple choices one can make in RPGs like ME2, it makes the decision whether to buy Cryptic's MMOs less obvious, because in terms of sheer play time one might reasonably expect to get more bang for the buck from ME2 and its ilk. That, to me, is the greatest failing of Cryptic at this juncture. An MMO ought to be massive beyond belief in order to justify a monthly sub. After all, "massive" is in the name of the genre. Instead, games like CO seem to have substituted the word "minimum."