I just can’t ignore this topic. As most of you already know, part of Allods Online fans are very… VERY unhappy since the new patch was installed on game servers. NA and EU Official forum communities are boiling. In fact,the patch is not that bad: many bugfixes, several nice interface and gameplay changes etc. There are really three changes that turned so many players from euphoria to despair:
Patch 1.00.05 least liked features
1) Fear of Death effect. It lowers your stats for some time after resurrection. The higher your level the longer the time when you feel yourself not like a great hero but more like a small chicken. At highest level this time is about 40-50 minutes. Stat reduction of 25% make char nearly worthless. Debuff stacks and can be removed by perfume (Cash Shop item) or by paying large sum of game currency to NPC near resurrection point.
2) New items in Cash Shop. New potions that increase stats appeared in Allods CS. Many players think that their buffs are too great . E.g. in 1v1 PvP character with this buff will surely kill character without buff no matter what classes they are and what PvP skills the players have.
3) New PvP flag system. Players can now switch PvP flag off and other players are unable to attack them untill the flag is on again.
So what?
Why those three changes caused many angry posts from beta-testers? For two reasons in fact:
I) Using perfume and potions (which means – paying real world cash) is now nearly mandatory at higher levels.
Pro: “Oops, we killed Big Fearsome Deadly Boss but our mage died in the process. Everybody, AFK 40 min before we try next Biggest Fearsome Deadly Boss or shall we just change the mage? Maybe the new one will have nice CS potions?”, “I nearly killed this mob but sneaky 40lvl stalker one-shooted me. Now have to gather herbs for half an hour – quest mobs are too tough for me”, “Oh, shit! I bought those damn perfumes but my stupid friends with whom I wanted to quest or to try instance didn’t. So I have to wait for them or go somewhere with total strangers”
Contra: “The higher death penalties are the more realistic the game is. If char dies often he has to progress slower than the one who dies not-so-often”, “Perfumes and potions allow to progress faster – that is what CS for”, “Allods have no Exp charge for dying, no item repair costs, so FoD is OK: pay gold, pay cash or pay nothing but wait”
II) PvP will be dead.
Pro: “Show me the idiot who will turn PvP flag on unless forced to if death mean pay or go AFK?”
Contra: “Yeah! I don’t have to kill these annoying League (Empire) players every five minutes. Once in an hour will be enough”
Many people who like Allods fear that those changes will ruin the game. They say that RU version was ruined by it and NA and EU version will share this fate. Well, we don’t have any reliable statistics about RU version player base changes after implementing this patch. It’s true that some people left it. And it’s true that some are still enjoying it. Producers say that they localize the game, not blindly copying it and it’s still CBT. E.g. they didn’t make zone chat CS megaphones which exist in RU version and.
IMHO
I think that the real question is not “Is FoD good or bad?” but rather “Where lies the balance between players’ and publisher’s interests in NA and EU Allods Online?”. Hope we all agree that there must be some cash flowing from gamers to game owners. Those guys are entertaining us, after all. Why not pay them for good work? And I also hope we all agree that you should be able to have fun in FtP game even without spending real world money. In other words: “play for free = fun, spend some cash = even more fun”. Not “spend some cash = fun, spend no cash = no fun”.
And this is the point where opinions start to differ. One group of players think that FoD kills the fun for “free gamers”, the other think it’s OK to play without paying cash even with FoD. Who is right? I dunno… But I’d like to find it out. When OBT starts (it’ll be soon) I’ll make a character and set a goal for him to reach maximum level without paying single cent. No other my ‘rich’ chars will be helping him – the experiment must be pure. If it’ll be possible to have fun playing him I’ll say that Allods Online succeeded as real FtP game.
And what about balancing publisher’s and gamers’ interests in Allods Online? I believe that we shall try to find a solution through the dialog. The main question now is: what items must be in the Cash Shop? Something that a lot of player will eagerly buy but at the same time it must not spoil the game for those who do not buy it. I have several ideas, but first I have to hear your opinions. So please vote in our new poll (’more than one answer possible’ option is on) and leave comments with your ideas. There is a chance it’ll help to make the game better for all and everyone.
Related posts:
- Nival promised Fear of Death removal?
- Trying to Stay Positive or Is There Life After Patch 1.1
- New Cash Shop system on Russian servers
- Waiting for the Patch to Come
- New Patch on RU Servers
Tags: Allods Online, MMO, MMORPG, online games, Poll
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I don’t see what the problem is. Look at DDO: Eberron: it’s nice and free until you’ve been through 2/3 of the game and suddenly you have to pay them so that they let you inside instances and zones.
High level players are expected to cough up money in any “freemium” game like Allods or DDO. This is why FoD lasts longer for high level chars.
MMORPGS thrive on the endgame content, this is where all the fun is at. Do you really expect them to treat you as a level 1 character when you’re actually maximum level?
Allods looks like it’s free, but it’s not. It’s more or less an unlimited trial that does not force you to give out credit card details in order to keep playing. But if you’re serious, then show Nival the money.
FoD is not weird, it’s just business. What’s really weird is paying $20 for a motherfucking bag, and this is what you should be complaining about. Loudly. With that king of money you play a month of WoW and get all the bags you want.
As far as I understand, the dead got a price tag in Allods, thats fine, and as far as i know, it costs 5 Gold, I mean 5 gold, isnt hard to get. As long as you play solo, you ignore the debuff and do other stuff ( crafting, rep quests whatever ) When you are on an ini, you pay the 5 Gold, Thats imho ok. And you usaly do it one or two times on an ini…
Hi, I’ll think about it. The main problem is that we don’t have any reliable quest database yet. But I’ll try to give general idea of what quests are required for it. Thanks for the idea!
Hello,
Please post guides for the world mystery quests. Almost all players are stuck in some of them, no clue what to do, where to go, and so on. Quests themselves don’t have many clues on how could be solved. So if someone is making them, please post a tutorial on how you did it. League and Empire side. Thank you.
FAILLLLLLLLLLLLLL.
PVP game + flag system = fail
Hard mob and pvp in leveling maps + Fear of death = Fail
God nerd cash shop = FAIL
I am willing to spend $!% a month to play a game. But not more than that. So I guess I won’t be playing this game after all. This is the first FtP game I ever even considered playing, for the reason that it would cost more than $15 a month in the end to play one. Good luck with it anyway.
I believe Fear of Death is a mistake, not as a mechanic, but as marketing, and since it created such an uproar it will surely drive some people away, however I do believe that the same people would be playing the game anyways if flagging or fear of death had been in it since the first CBT since they would have just gotten used to it. Also FoD and Flagging come hand in hand.
I think there are 2 reasons for FoD. One is a game reason – death was incredibly cheap on this game AND the game needed money sinks. Most of the usual money sinks were not in game: Fast travel charges, Durability Loss, Currency based respecs, Housing rental costs, etc… Sometimes I wonder if they added a fee to use the teleporter service if the uproar wouldn’t be as great! Secondly the death penalty was praticaly non existant in this game, which promotes a First Person Shooter mentality that is hardly constructive to a RPG. You need to risk. The fact that death was so insignificant can be checked on the healer/summoner boards – go there and check the builds, you will see that several don’t even take ressurection skills AND ones that do might get criticized for taking them!
On the other hand, I firmly believe that they needed to make money. Russia was hit by the financial crisis much harder than NA or EU. Their GNP contracted 7.9% on 2009, inflation was 9.1% per year for 2009, and the ruble lost 35% of its buying power against the NA dollar. This is the economic context in which this game was released, as you can see, a free to play game with only convenience or vanity items would probably not be making a lot of money in this context, as I can’t see the average joe buying virtual convenience or vanity in this situation. Therefore they needed an item that is a guaranteed seller – almost “necessary” for playing – and that item is perfume.
Also, I checked today, it is absolutely possible to play FREE and get perfume. It will require grinding, but say you have a main character that enjoys about 2 hours a day of intense pvp-ing. You can level 3 other characters to level 15, and do the daily perfume quests for all characters. It is time consuming, yes, but they give you an in-game method to get the necessary item, just as they do for a bigger bag and extra bank space or increased levels of patronage. And while time consuming, it is still nowhere near comparable grinds in other F2P games.
a FtP that does Death Penalty is Guild Wars.
Although it’s mainly a PVE game with the ability to do PVP
As you kill things your DP (negative % to everything) goes away to 0 but on the other hand to can get a Morale boost (plus % to everything also that helps you do more damage
Will you get the fear of death effect if you bribe the goblin?
Man i don’t like this patch.
There are a million other ways of making people WANT to pay Gpotato, but instead they force them to pay if they want to have a fun time playing the game.
I mean, how fun is it to use the cash shop when you dont get to buy what you really want? When you have to spend money on shit that they make you buy to be able to even play the game.
For instance, WoW has a fee to play the game, but when you play the game EVERYONE plays on equal terms.
If Gpotato thinks it’ll be more fun for players to be ganked and then have to wait half an hour then they are dead wrong.
If this FoD is fully removed or taken down from 40 minutes to 5 minutes, i’d play the game and use the Cash shop.
Else make it P2P, competing with wow and other mmorpgs will be easier then, instead of having a stupid cash system.
Kane, that’s strange cause I’ve seen many posts both on NA and EU forums which were very angry about FoD system and the authors were not banned. Wish you luck in solving this misunderstanding between you and forum administration.
Wolfiebr, thanks for critizising Pro arguments. I see that Contra arguments in the post seem more valid to you. As for me I really don’t care who is right or who is wrong in this discussion I’ve seen on forums. But I care about Allods Online future success and I fear that some people may leave the game just because they hate FoD. So I hope there is solution that will make happy both publishers and players, maybe it will be not-so-harsh FoD or cheaper parfumes or some other CS changes.
Btw, in EVE PvPers like to say “Never fly a ship you can’t afford to lose”. So I don’t think EVE is good example: if you are killed you just activate your clone and take new ship from hangar. There is death debuff which can be removed by spending gold in PvP-centric Warhammer Online but it’s very cheap indeed. Pity those two great games are PtP, I wonder if there is FtP game with something like FoD so we can compare?
couldnt agree more with this post
Number I scenario you point is not really correspondent to the truth since Fear of Death does not strike if your are rezzed, therefore if the mage dies in an instance he can be rezzed and you progress normally through. In fact, given the daily limitations on heroic instances you cannot “release” and run back in, so you cannot really wipe, giving the summoner archetype a superiority with their wipe protection skill. Also on many games raids would be suspended on wiping/rezzing costs and the durability levels of gear, and in fact since Allods does not have durability loss I honestly believe it in fact needs some more money sinks to maintain economic balance in the game and prevent the inflation that would surely come.
If level 40 stalker one-shot you, you can always pay in-game currency to jump right back into the fray. OR you can gather herbs for 40 minutes. The same goes for people who are questing/instancing with you. If they dont buy perfume then they must be ready to spend their in-game currency. Free to play games trade services for GRINDS and this is one.
I do believe that FoD in its current implementation is much too harsh, but I don’t believe they will remove its system (specially since it is a core part of the game engine right now and all balancing of new game content will take it into account, this game is developed by Astrum Nival after all so Gala.net does not have that much say in the area), however they could find a more suitable and acceptable balance with a death penalty that is harsh enough to make death meaningfull either by lowering the percent value of the debuff or (more probably) by lowering its duration.
Your number II point is also incredibly short-sighted. There are MANY pvp-centric games with much harsher death penalties. MUCH harsher. You can lose all your stuff. You can even have to restart your entire progression all over again (EVE). And these games have healthy PvP-centric communities. It is the “meaningless arena FPS PvP sytle” crowd of warhammer widows that complain about that. Also the business of keeping your flag down is quite not as simple as that, since this is a game based on quest-leveling, and a great amount of quests have as objective PvP-enabled NPCs. I am not sure you can progress in levels without major grinding without upping your flag. What this does control a bit is WHEN you will PvP, but you will have to have your flag up some time if you want efficient leveling.
I wish you luck on your endeavour of capping a character without paying. I believe it will be entirely possible, though it will be harder and not as fun as paying. At least it won’t involve extreme grinding like in DDO for instance (which can hardly be called a failure in F2P games.)
There should be a mark like 15-20 deaths a day..after passing that mark the effect(fear of death) is activated.And i think the shop should have stylish items and potions that increase the exp/fatigue gain amm food that restores more hp/mana
I got banned for posting the same concerns on my blog and on MMORPG.com.
I guess they do listen and know if they don’t control free speech they will lose more players lol
http://kanehart.com/2010/01/31.....-of-death/
That was the info on my ban so far.