A subscription model would work perfectly fine for this game. $10 per month, maybe an additional $5 per month for crystalline aura for people who want the additional features thereof. Remove all honing materials from the store, remove mari’s shop, keep cosmetics, mounts, pets, potions, plumes, name changes, instant completion tickets, preset extensions, storage extensions etc. and boom. All bots are gone, no more gold sellers, no more pay to win bullshit, no more drama. Obviously there would still be bots if AGS suddenly becomes an extremely lazy company and don’t ban bots before they make profit but we know they would implement systems to ban bots, right? Right? And obviously there would still be players that buy gold from other players but you can’t really do anything about that so I won’t get into it, it’s up to the publisher to catch and punish them.
Would you rather play the game in its current state or pay $10 or $15 monthly for a better experience? Most people already spend that amount, if not more. This is a common pitfall many publishers have fallen into in the past and many mmorpgs died because of this. They implement pay to win features and make money off of whales, but they lose a lot of players in the process. Apparently there’s nothing wrong because they keep printing money out of thin air. When whales are bored or have hit a wall, they implement more pay to win features to milk them once again and make them feel special but lose even more f2p/casual players. The cycle repeats and in the end, there’s no one left but whales and clueless casuals that won’t spend a penny anyway. I’ve been playing mmorpgs for almost 20 years and I’ve witnessed the exact same thing happen in three different mmorpgs in the last decade. I don’t want the same thing to happen to this one, it’s an awesome game.
Now, maybe it’s too late to change the game’s model but something has to be done. The game is bleeding right now. Yes, less than 5% people hit T3 so far but dedicated players in T1-T2 see what’s happening, they know what’s to come unless they live under a rock. The game has lost about 200k people in the last week alone. If you think those 200k is mainly comprised of banned bots, then please go to north vern or something, I guarantee you’ll see much more bots then you would have last week. I saw about 20 bots in like 5 minutes, in only one map, at only one spot, on only one channel. At this point I’m just assuming that they’re not banning these bots on purpose to inflate the numbers and make the game look better in charts, and only banning the buyers/gold storage accounts.
Why was Argos added before pvp vendor and ladder? Was it really more important? Why was Argos added before the other content between 1302-1370 that exists in other regions? This only makes me think that AGS wants to force people to spend money, because if we had the content that’s available on other regions, a lot of people would have made it to 1370 already. So they wouldn’t spend money to catch up with the brand new content. Guess what? It backfired. Is it unexpected? Absolutely not. They’ve been warned.
More importantly, maybe the most importantly, the game has proven itself in other regions. It has extremely high retention rate for an mmorpg and it keeps growing, which is also unusual for an mmorpg. Why would AGS decide to drastically alter an already successful game, when it’s known that p2w models are even less successful in the west? You think you’ll make it more successful with your dumb changes, AGS? Especially after the new world incident? Just give us the original game, stop trying to make changes that make no sense to anyone. If anything, the game should be LESS p2w than KR, as western players are more allergic to p2w bullshit than asian players.
/rant by a 1339 wardancer who hates alts