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demo
dargonight
Member Posts: 255
is there a demo for this game.
Comments
Nope, but if you can find it in a store it's only $30 with a free month. Worth giving it a shot. If you do try it, I suggest posting on the vault network boards on whatever server you choose, and ask for some help in-game. One thing I noticed about the community, however small it is, is that everyone is -very- friendly and helpful. I had people giving me stuff.. buffing me.. offering to PL me.
There was a demo a like two years ago, but nothing since then. The lack of a trial is a long standing failure by Turbine. I'm starting to wise up and seriously question their ability to produce and continue a decent game.
Well, to be fair, the cessation of free trials was due to player abuse. Players would create a dummy account, buy a house with it, add their other characters to the permission list, then continue to use those houses as storage bins after their free trial was discontinued. Others in small monarchies would create dozens and dozens of dummy free trial accounts and swear them into their monarchy just to qualify for a mansion.
While Turbine possibly could have taken some steps to prevent this, those steps would assuredly have taken a good deal of time due to the restrictive nature of the game's engine (they basically had to redesign the thing just to add new textures!); that time would have to come from somewhere, which would mean taking it away from development of the live game. They'd get criticized regardless of the direction they chose. As it turned out, they chose to develop the game rather than their playerbase.
I absolutely agree that a free trial would be fantastic if they could somehow figure out a way to prevent abuse without pulling resources away from development. As unlikely as that is, however, there's still the question of whether a free trial for a six-year-old game could draw enough new business to offset costs for redesigning the necessary game systems, bandwidth for trial client downloads, and database space for free trial users who opted not to subscribe. I'm no expert on costs and expenditures for an MMO, but I'm sure there are quite a few people in suits over at Turbine who are. Apparently they concluded it wasn't feasible.
Another thing to keep in mind is that free trials are something of a new addition to the MMO market. They certainly weren't around when Asheron's Call launched. 99% of home users were still on dial-up at the time, so downloading clients was out of the question. Now, free trials are considered in the design phase, which means the potential problems and solutions are analyzed before they occur. While the mindset of the industry has changed (including that of Turbine employees, who had already worked a trial client into AC2), the bones of Turbine's original engine for Asheron's Call 1 is still limited by the architecture of the 1990s.
Don't be so short sighted. The amount of players a demo would bring is well worth less content for a month or two if it really requires that much work to recode some game mechanics for trial accounts. Still a demo is kind of poinltess now. There should have been one years ago, especially around the time of the expansion when there was some minor press and advertising. Turbine is a poorly run business.
He already said that there -was- one years ago. People exploited it and used it to exploit game mechanics such as creating rank 10 chains to swear beneath people to get their allegiance to rank 10. They used it for housing storage, etc.
Even if they did this after the release of their recent expansion, it still would have required -way- too much coding change. They would have had to change literally the backbone of the game, because people were using the basic game mechanics such as allegiance rankings and housing to their advantage.
I'm well aware there was a demo. I played then. AC1 isn't that different of a game, almost every other game has been able to cope with it. Turbine is stupid, accept it. AC1 is going to be dead soon after DDO and LoTRO fail.