Allods has blown it. Its dead before it even got out of open beta. At this point, no matter how much Allods gets its game together and fixes all the problems which are turning off players by the masses, there has still been a huge amount of PR damage. Its a pretty incredible case of how many things can be done so wrong in such a short time. People will look back at Allods as that one game who destroyed its potential by its monumental failure at implementing the cash shop.
I'm not jumping on the bandwagon of hate towards this game, just as I didn't jump on the bandwagon of love towards Allods before OB. I made this video a few days after I got into CB1, a fair bit before the blogging community went insane over the game. What can I say about the turn of events? I guess I can only say why I myself left.
I haven't played Allods in over a week. I stopped when I hit level 25, stuck right bang in the middle of the Holy Lands, the infamous PvP spamfest. If I continued to play I would have at least 3 more levels before getting out of the zone. Fairly obviously the problem I had with the zone was indeed the PvP itself. I got into the game early and spent a fair amount of time playing it, but I was far from keeping up with the more dedicated players. As a result at level 25 I was constantly a lower level then the people I met in world PvP.
It got to the point that Holy Lands became a hunting ground for bored 40s. One repeatable rep quest required each side to go right up to the opposing side's PvP base and kill their guards. This obviously was designed to instigate big old PvP battles between the two sides. When I this whole area was a battleground for 40s to run around and faceroll lower levels. No fun at all. What made this so utterly worse was the fact that after getting pwned by the bored powerlevelers you received the gift of FoD.
I'll never understand why the developers thought FoD was a good idea, after they initially claimed that unpaying players would be able to enjoy the game just as much as paying players. That statement is a complete joke now. Allods is not free-to-play it is pay-to-play.
Its the worse thing to have your players being deterred from leveling because they know its only going to get worse at the higher levels. (Fear of Death, which reduces your offensive stats by 25% lasts for 1 hour at 40) Compounding this fear is the fact that 40s are spending all their time participating in PvP where it is much less likely that they will be killed. Instead of being involved in intense end-game PvP everyone is getting put off by FoD.
In summary the cash shop system in Allods Online in my experience is the greatest failure in free-to-play MMO history. Its frustrating because the game had a lot of potential, but even if these problems were cleaned up the playerbase would very likely have diminished enormously, with a vaste number of potential paying players put off forever.
Only thing left is now that I have stopped playing Allods, and given up in dispair and mild disgust of WoW, I don't really have any MMO to play. Any suggestions?
I'm not jumping on the bandwagon of hate towards this game, just as I didn't jump on the bandwagon of love towards Allods before OB. I made this video a few days after I got into CB1, a fair bit before the blogging community went insane over the game. What can I say about the turn of events? I guess I can only say why I myself left.
I haven't played Allods in over a week. I stopped when I hit level 25, stuck right bang in the middle of the Holy Lands, the infamous PvP spamfest. If I continued to play I would have at least 3 more levels before getting out of the zone. Fairly obviously the problem I had with the zone was indeed the PvP itself. I got into the game early and spent a fair amount of time playing it, but I was far from keeping up with the more dedicated players. As a result at level 25 I was constantly a lower level then the people I met in world PvP.
It got to the point that Holy Lands became a hunting ground for bored 40s. One repeatable rep quest required each side to go right up to the opposing side's PvP base and kill their guards. This obviously was designed to instigate big old PvP battles between the two sides. When I this whole area was a battleground for 40s to run around and faceroll lower levels. No fun at all. What made this so utterly worse was the fact that after getting pwned by the bored powerlevelers you received the gift of FoD.
I'll never understand why the developers thought FoD was a good idea, after they initially claimed that unpaying players would be able to enjoy the game just as much as paying players. That statement is a complete joke now. Allods is not free-to-play it is pay-to-play.
Its the worse thing to have your players being deterred from leveling because they know its only going to get worse at the higher levels. (Fear of Death, which reduces your offensive stats by 25% lasts for 1 hour at 40) Compounding this fear is the fact that 40s are spending all their time participating in PvP where it is much less likely that they will be killed. Instead of being involved in intense end-game PvP everyone is getting put off by FoD.
In summary the cash shop system in Allods Online in my experience is the greatest failure in free-to-play MMO history. Its frustrating because the game had a lot of potential, but even if these problems were cleaned up the playerbase would very likely have diminished enormously, with a vaste number of potential paying players put off forever.
Only thing left is now that I have stopped playing Allods, and given up in dispair and mild disgust of WoW, I don't really have any MMO to play. Any suggestions?
