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I'm so confused...
MattMassacre
Member Posts: 182
Well, as the title says, I'm a bit confused. A bunch of people I've seen have said good things about the game, but then they talk about the cash shop RUINING it. I was thinking about trying the game, so can anyone please explain to me how the cash shop ruins it, and if the game will suck if i don't use it?
Comments
I'm playing it casually, and have level 7 on league, 8 on empire. So far I don't see any indication of cash shop issues. I could use a bigger bag (a cash shop item) but its not like the game is broken without it.
Only real issue that I've seen so far is the ignore system could be a bit easier to use. Its hard to filter out the gold spammers.
Ken
www.ActionMMORPG.com
One man, a small pile of money, and the screwball idea of a DIY Indie MMORPG? Yep, that's him. ~sigh~
Because you must use cash shop items to enjoy the game in the end.
Example, you get a ridiculous harsh death penalty when you die at level 40. 25% reduction to stats that can stack 4 times and last 1 hour each to vanish.
You can either get rid of it with a cash shop perfume item or spend massive amounts of gold.
When the game first started it was a 1200% increase in price for the perfumes in comparison to the Russian version.
A guildy did some math on it, it turned out to play hardcore, 40 hours a week, which some people do. The perfumes would cost you roughly something like 500 US dollars to never have to deal with the death penalty per month.
Casual players of only 20 hours a week would cost them 240 dollars. I know they have reduced the prices on these CS items, but they are still very high, and totally not worth paying the amount to play a "free" game.
500 dollars a month to enjoy a free game does not sound very free to me.
Next we had level 10 runes priced at something like 6000.00+ US Dollars. Seriously?
Anyway this games cash shop is ridiculous and without utilizing it, your time at end game would be dismal. Choice is yours.
I'd be surprised if I even got to endgame so this might not bother me... idk
Anyways... could anyone explain to me more about the game? I still don't know much about it.
The game itself, is very similar to world of warcraft. It resembles that game a lot in art direction, and is almost entirely quest driven. Grinding mobs net you almost no exp so you are constantly on the move with quest. Though I will say up to level 32 I was never without quest to do, they are plentiful.
The classes and how they are played are unique in some ways, like spell queuing.
I don't really know what all to tell you honestly. It is a decently made game, and would have probably been the best of the F2P games next to Guild Wars had the Cash Shop not utterly destroyed the game.
Ah it sounds pretty fun so far. Might as well try it. Just one more question: Where do you get the closed beta key?
That is uterly rediculious. I would love to see the math on that shit you're spouting. First off.. who in the hell plays 40 hours a week? If this is the case.. you have a problem and should seek counseling. Second, the purfumes are like 20 for 3 bucks. How often you dying? I play now about 10 hours a week including weekends, and its running me about 6 smackers a month.
You do not need one now, just go to the main site and sign up/register and DL the game.
Its either in a continuous open beta state now or in full release. My entire guild left it during open beta.
This is before the price changes.
Here enjoy!
Note on runes.
It's a hidden price sink. The original Russian version level 10 runes cost about $640. In order to get to a level 10 rune you need to combine like runes (the runes also have to be whatever god is randomly chosen for you from a quest around level 15, for instance Maylei's is Plams), use crystals, and a certain amount of gold dust. Gold dust is bought from vendors, but it gets very expensive at later levels. The current cash shop in Gpotato is X10 more expensive than the Russian version so you are looking at over $6400 per rune.
The crystals is the problem here. These can only be bought from vendors (you receive 100 crystals in a quest which allows you to do a single level 1 rune combine for a level 2 rune). To get to higher level runes you'll need expotentially more runes because you need a rune of the same level to combine with. The math for a level 10 rune comes to about $640. It's possible to get crystals through item shop chests that drop in game; however people who received these chests in beta report 50 or so per which isn't even enough for a level 1 rune combine. In reality you problem won't see more than 1000 crystals from chests if you were a hardcore player playing for a year.
So what do these runes do? 6 level 9 runes (Somewhere close to $5,000 US) gives you 45% more max HP and 15% more damage. That's a pretty powerful difference between someone without CS. I mentioned it somewhere before I believe, but it's like a runed out person can easily kill two without runes solo of equal gear.
Runes however are avoidable and most players who never bother to go past level 4 runes unless they enjoy completely wasting their money (I have no idea who would spend this amount of money on virtual items). It's not likely we'll encounter anyone who spent thousands of dollars on these. The even bigger problem is of course the perfumes which have been mentioned elsewhere on threads before we even got into the game.
You can enjoy the game up till about level 30. At that point you'll get a debuff mentioned here that simply lasts too long (it starts at level 15, but the penalty gets worse and worse with each level. The level 15 penalty fades in seconds). It's a -25% decrease to stats that's stackable. It can be removed with a gold cost by using Servant's of Light, so some people don't consider this a problem... However there is a big issue here that people aren't aware of.
At level 40 the penalty lasts for around 45 minutes. It costs only 3g 45s to remove, which isn't too bad. The problem is that Servants of Light are not everywhere and sometimes aren't even available in a zone. If you do a daily heroic instance and your group wipes you will not be able to do that instance again because you must leave the instance to go get the debuff removed. Sometimes the SoLs could be as far as 10 to 20 minutes away. Similar problems arise if you wipe in a raid and can't be ressurected you will pretty much be forced to leave the raid.
So even with that living without the perfume is managable, right? Well, the perfumes provide a HUGE (was it 50%) HP increase that is required for PvE tanking and puts you at a serious disadvantage if you don't have it for PvP. Yes, if you don't have perfumes on later bosses in places like the Allods and Heroic Dungeons will ONE SHOT well geared warriors and paladins.
In the Russian version you could manage playing the game on about $10-15 as a semi casual (20 hours a week). Even a hardcore player could probably get buy with some good money management and wise use of perfume. So what's the cost of the Gpotato version?:
Casual (10 hours a week): $54 a month
Semi-Casual (20 hours a week): $108 a month
Hardcore (40 hours a week): $216 a month
A single Allods raid ~5 hours: $7.25 PER RAID
All this will not effect you if you play on the low level; however like WoW the leveling curve is pretty quick and you can easily hit 40 through casual play. One of the main draws of the game (at least for me) was the end game Astral Ships and Allods. To be perfectly honest, I don't think the game differs much from WoW at the low levels. So if you were planning to just casually play at low level you may want to consider sticking with the game as you don't have to spend a single penny to enjoy the game.
There are a few other issues like the lack of bag space requiring you to spend $20 on only 6 extra slots (you'll have quests that give you items that take up 3 or 4 inventory spaces at a time, especially at later levels, and you'll have to only work on a few quests at a time and constantly run back and sell to manage the low bag space), buff pots on the item mall that unbalance the game, rubies from pages which are only available via lotto chests, and the possibility of future imbalances in place on the item mall, but none of these are a huge concern (IMO). The 2 major problems are listed above.
To those curious, each item on the Gpotato item mall has a 600%-2000% (yes, 20X) markup to the Russian version.
This is not a programming mistake. A programming mistake of this caliber would be addressed immediately and an emergency patch would be released. I have programming experience and I could pretty much tell you that this would be as simple as going into the source code and literally deleting a zero (if it was really the case an extra zero was add) on each line for each item's price. It would take a single programmer less than 10 minutes to fix. Obviously merging the source code, compiling a new build, and releasing it as a patch would take longer, but you'd at least get a community manager to address the issue and the fix would have already been implemented. This is simply Gpotato's greed. We'll be waiting a bit to see if they fix the issue, but if they do not address this then we should look into finding a new game.
I've played several F2P. Most of the cash shops are reasonable. There are often money sinks for players who want to rush to the end game or become as powerful as possible (especially popular are item lottos which exist in Allods in the form of chests), but most of the F2P you can get by and have a good time at any level with minimal or no cash shop usage, and the fact Gpotato released no cosmetic item sets which are a popular item in most F2P that HAVE ZERO EFFECT ON GAMEPLAY makes me think they have their heads up their asses in terms of what kind of player base plays Allods.
Ah it sounds pretty fun so far. Might as well try it. Just one more question: Where do you get the closed beta key?
going on their website would have tell you that you dont even need a key, unbeliavble you havent done that before this question.
anyways, its fun game but like said before if you cannot really go on without spending some real cash in this game thats how it ruins the game, the item shop im talking about. to me as long theres no weapons or armors on sale its fine.
the prices on the cash shop are outrageous havent played allods but have played rappelz and aika and can say that even if it doesnt require any purchases in the cash shop when you start you probably will by games end
also the fact that they can do this with allods leads me to believe they will try to get away with it on other games just because they can as i have stated in my blog ppl should ignore gpotato if enough players stop playing or more precisely stop paying then maybe they might get a hint
This is all fine and good, but this fellow is pulling theorectical numbers from thin air and making a lot of assumtions. The entire pricing structure that he list is based off of assumption. How would anyone know how many times a player will die? All in all, I have been playing the game as a causual player with a very low cost. The problem with this guy.. and anyone who plays a game 40 hours a week is that you are investing more time into the game then the average player. You are the extreme. You are not the norm. You are in fact.. very, very, VERY far from the norm. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but you will find that in playing a game for this amount of time per week, you will find issues with ANY game you play. Mostly becaused I don't even think that the dev's would have counted on people with this little of anything else to do.
I think if you do a poll here, you are going to be very surprised at what the "norm" is.
It has been done here already quite a few times, and usually the "norm" for a MMO player is anywhere between 25-40 hrs a week.
If you play anything under 20 you are super casual.
I myself have a family and a career and still play 35 hours a week over the course of 7 days. I play an average of 5 hours per night. Every night 7 days a week.
Go ahead and try it. Run yourself a poll and I will bet you the "norm" will surprise you.
That would be an interesting poll, especially if we could correlate that to age. My feeling would be:
- don;t play every day == casual, perhaps 10 hrs a week at most
- play some everyday, and more on weekends == dedicated, perhaps 20 hrs a week at most
- anything over 20 hours a week means you are hardcore
My guess is the younger you are, the more hours you play.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
That would be an interesting poll, especially if we could correlate that to age. My feeling would be:
- don;t play every day == casual, perhaps 10 hrs a week at most
- play some everyday, and more on weekends == dedicated, perhaps 20 hrs a week at most
- anything over 20 hours a week means you are hardcore
My guess is the younger you are, the more hours you play.
I used to play wow 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. College student 4tw. Its all about addiction. Its easy to slip into ridiculous cycles with these games. I now don't play anything, but still keep up on the "scene". My age has nothing to do with my play styles.
That would be an interesting poll, especially if we could correlate that to age. My feeling would be:
- don;t play every day == casual, perhaps 10 hrs a week at most
- play some everyday, and more on weekends == dedicated, perhaps 20 hrs a week at most
- anything over 20 hours a week means you are hardcore
My guess is the younger you are, the more hours you play.
I used to play wow 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. College student 4tw. Its all about addiction. Its easy to slip into ridiculous cycles with these games. I now don't play anything, but still keep up on the "scene". My age has nothing to do with my play styles.
though would make some sense being that kids have more time on their hands especially when summer hits
There is no need for a solution about the FoD issue, people will not buy the perfume in most cases that way, we will all be equally debuffed, Gpotato WILL have to lower their prices because this game's player community (us) ISN'T going to pay those rediculous prices (yes maybe one or two posh kids will, but hell what can you do...) I think Im not presumptuous if I say Im speaking for about 90% of the playerbase here, they WILL have to lower their prices if they plan on getting any profit of their product, if they don't they'll see people leaving in droves. As for me, right now Im having a blast I joined a very nice guild and basically having a LOT of fun, if in a few months I have to jump the ship cause it becomes deserted due to Gpotato f**cking about with the item mall, well it's their loss... Perhaps Cataclysm will be out by that time XD
666
I'm not near end game, but I have been playing it for a couple of weeks now. I have about 40 hrs into the game and so far I haven't had to spend a dime in the cash shop.
The game is free.
Just download and and try for yourself. I know I was surprised at who subtly complex the character evolution was and how varied game play is. I was surprised at how well the world looked and how well the game played. It even plays decently on my 5yr old el'cheapo dell with its onboard graphics card.
I can play the game at max settins in my 5yr old gaming rig too.
It's free...try it.
There is no doubt you will get at least a few hundred hours of fun before ( according to what I hear ) you will feel any need to spend money in their cash shop to continue to enjoy your experience.
What do you have to lose?
What i saw in the Allods game chat window was some players pleading with the other players not to use the cash shop until the prices were lowered. Some vocal folks thought the pricing way too high. I had already bought the larger bag and the larger safe deposit box and was delighted the team refunded my money for the already purchased items when the mark-down happened. From that chat window is the only thing I can tell you.
Chantilly
You don't need us to tell you what you can see for yourself for free. Just download the game and play, it downloads and works fine.
The only help you could possibly need is the advice to keep all stats marked as important about equal, do not "stack" anything.
All the confusion stems from the fact that Allods has unfinished cash shop model and developer and publishers are still experiementing with it and they totally fail at selling their experimental ideas to public, they are just trying the usuall F2P smokescreen cheating instead of explaining. A little more and they will end up selling crippled game to few dumb people left instead of what could be new fresh large and succesfull F2P, the Russian community went not just smaller but very noticeably dumber after last patches as the more considerate people left.