I just thought I'd share this bit of information (found on page 124 of the ever expanding EQ2 thread...), and its likely effect on the upcoming PS2.
Prosebien are going to be in control of the EQ2 cash shop and what goes in there (they have their own Alaplayer points), how they run their current Korean shooter MMO gives a worrying fortaste of PS2's european future.
Full article here
http://mmohuts.com/editorials/alapla...-arena-shooter
It is no secret that I hate the European MMO publisher Alaplaya. They buy up IP’s no one is interested in like DanceBattle: Audition, Fantasy Tennis 2, and the worthless pile of tripe known as Racing Star, then continually punishes the players of S4 League, the one game they have that people actually want to play. The player is presented with a very low quality version of an otherwise high quality shooter. Slow, late, and weak updates, inexplicable omissions of easily included content the Koreans have had for months, and “rebalanced” weapons that do not even need rebalancing are just a few examples of their past crimes. Most of this was tolerable, considering its just a F2P game, however since the new Patch 10 released a few weeks ago the game has gone completely out of control. All semblance of the balanced competitive game it once was, has been tossed aside for the sake of potentially increasing revenue.
For months now S4 League has offered slightly more powerful versions of weapons, and armor for players to rent for up to 30 days for real money, this is old news, and was perfectly fine. Though it did give a bit of an edge to those that purchased this gear, it did not give enough of an advantage that a player of higher skill without this gear could not have a chance against them.
This new patch changed this. In a poorly worked out line of logic, it must have been decided that not enough people were “renting” their pretend clothes. and weapons with real money, because they could just keep using permanent, slightly weaker, duller looking weapons, and armor that they bought with S4′s ingame currency PEN. To combat this, they first removed the option to buy permanent anything. All weapons and armor in EUS4 now can only exist in your inventory for a maximum of 30 days; this includes all PEN items. All preexisting perma-items stayed permanent, but now cost excessive amounts of PEN to keep repaired. This is very annoying but still tolerable, but they didn’t stop there, no. The players need more incentive to give us more money!
Alaplaya then drastically increased the armor bonus’s on P2P clothing and damage bonuses on P2P weapons. So drastically that when one purchases these items, they become god like. Able to instantly kill anyone not wearing the new P2P armor in a single hit, and the ability to take entire machine gun clips to the face, and survive, and ignore stuns completely. When I first started encountering these players I actually thought they were hacking. I have watched a single player in full pay gear totally destroy an entire team in Touchdown mode, completely by himself, and there is little an individual can do to stop them. |
Personally if they do go ahead and take full control of PS2 I'm just not able to see how I can buy into that game. If it were a 1 player game that I might play for a month or two its no big deal, I walk away.
But for a MMO where I might invest some serious time in I want to know the game is in safe hands, if the owners think pay to win is a fine concept then how long before if player numbers dip they decide to wring the cash out (get the players hooked and then reeeeel them in tactic).
Smedley has a lot to answer here, but from what I've heard they are still struggling to get over the region IP lock, the EQ2 player base at least have found 30 or so problems beyond that, all of them show stoppers.
2012-02-24, 04:12 PM
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