Every time I go to write a blog post for today, the only thing on my mind is how silly Allods (and the majority of the F2P market) really is. People FEARING upcoming patches? People calculating how much they will need to spend to just get by? People hoping the cash shop is not abused by others and balance is somewhat maintained? Really, THAT’S how you want to play your MMO? Living in fear of tomorrow? So so backwards.
And in case you need more convincing that Allods might not use lube when bending you over, here is a copy/paste from someone over at Keen and Greav’s (I’d link but Keen gets all upset with me trying to steal his audience…) with a bit more Allods experience. Thanks Alex VAO.
Hi everybody!
I am one of russian beta-testers of AO. So please forgive my bad English, I had no pactice in it for about 10 years.
I surfed the WWW and ran into this blog. Looks like no one here have REAL knowledge about things happening in russian AO.
And those things are really awful.
You know that Perfume price lowered from 5 roubles to 2 in patch 1.0.07.07. But it’s just a visible part of an iceberg.
With this cheaping, Mail.ru (real owner of the game, Astrum Nival was bought by them in December 2009) did something to increase it’s expenditure havily.
Patronage has now points. 30 points for one unit of Perfume. 1 point = 1 minute. You can not just activate it by perfume, you can now stack it over up to level number times: some people told they’ve seen one 40-level warrior under 40 “smokes”. Demigod. Unkillable. There is a full raid (24 players) needed to kill him without any garantee. Just one more donate-born disbalance.
Patronage gives you extra char points (about 60 on level 40). Those are given to you when you activate the patronage with a Perfume and you can add it to any characteristic you wish. Points are taken off when a patronage ends.
Also they added a new skills given to player according to the patronage level.
1st level gives the skill which fully regenerates your health and mana/stamina for 10 seconds in rest or full mana for 20 seconds in battle. It consumes 1 patronage point! Yeah, minus 1 minute of patronage for one skill use.
2nd level gives instant regen of mana/energy and consumes 10 patronage points.
3rd level gives instant health regen – 10 patronage points.
4th level (a mistery… there’s rumors that there is an Astral island called Argus where you can start the quest chain for getting this 4th level. There’s legends about players who saw that island) – gives skill that instantly removes any Control effect from you. Also 10 points. Psionics are now just a meat for 4-patr person.Just calculate. No more 30 minutes for Perfume bit. Cast, cast, cast – and it is gone.
When we looked at patch-note 07.7 we asked ourselves – why do we need a 1st-level patronage skill? We all have skills to regen mana. That’s simple – after this patch all the mana users HAVE NO mana-regen skills! If you cast spells – you have to “smoke”. Only psionics still have their “battle trance”, but the cool-down time of this trance is now 3.5 minutes. And the Empathic Gift (we call it “pouring”) is decreased in 7-10 times. Psionic can’t now pour all the party with full mana each cast, then sit in battle trance, and pour again, as it was before. Pour-pour-pour-trance-pour-pour-pour and finish. No mana for healers, tanks die, casters die.
We, mana users, are FORCED to “smoke” because we cannot play without mana-regen.After the patch that brought a FoD (on russian “strakh smerti”, we abbreviate it to SS – quite a simbol, eh?) the gamers community initiated a petition to eliminate this debuff. That petition had a result – after 07.7 the length of SS became 1h46m on level 40. 2 times increase.
Nearly 80% of “old guardians” – fans of Allods series since ‘98 – have already left the game. After patch 07.7 gamers initiated a 7-days boycott of the game. It did not help.
Astral that amased you so much is dead now. No one sails there because there is no reason to sail. Astral monsters are divided on 2 classes: one is so weak that it is just a source of astral emanations, and the others is so strong that you have no chance to kill them, and in fact there is no hope to flee if it saw your ship.
Monsters on astral islands became too strong. A full-violet crew (that obtained their armor in “days before SS”) wipes out on most “thrash” mobs, not even a bosses.Official forum of the game now is like a forum of KGB of soviet times. Those who complain are banned. Those who say anything bad about Astrum Nival or Mail.ru – are banned. Those who tell something “in allods this works bad because …, and in works good because …” – are banned. You can be banned even if you say a word “WoW” or “Aion” – I’m not joking, things happened!
The number of players online is decreased since December for about 4-5 times. My guild has about 70 40-level players, and 50 of them whom I did not see for about a month. Nearly half of those who are still in the game really do not play – they just sit in chat with friends, do daily quests for gold (in a hope of “better times”). “Full-violets” and “semi-violets” walks into heroic adventures out of habit (“green-blue’s” have no chances in these “heroics”, monsters are too strong for them). It’s real pain in my heart: the game based on my favorite game universe, a potential masterpiece of game industry, is dying. As it happens with any game having misfortune to fall into the dirty hands of Mail.ru.
Becoming a raid boss, now only $2000 in the Allods cash shop, buy today! Now who’s excited about that upcoming patch, eh eh?
Hardcore Casual 
I would love to become a raid boss… but not for money. :)
By the way, I’m really tempted to subscribe to darkfall now (and thus, give you a cut since I signed up using your referral link heehee.) because of your writings and my experience during my trial. I just wish I could experience it outside of newbie protection right now, as I still have five hours of newbie protection left.
You can turn off the newbie protection, just wander outside of the designated area and after 2 minutes its gone.
You mean, out of my racial area? I’ll give that a try. :)
Anyway, got 6 more hours, supposedly, till my trial expires. I think I’ll have an otherwise positive write-up when I’m done. :)
Yea just wander one zone over and you should be good. You will get a message that you are leaving the protected area.
“Official forum of the game now is like a forum of KGB of soviet times.”
Priceless.
In soviet Russia, MMO plays you!
This may all be true, or it may not. Who knows. I have seen and read quite a few positive posts about Allods from Russian players, so it could go either way and this guy could be totally wrong or blowing things out of proportion.
But to be fair, this is the exact type of post you would go ballistic about if it was about Darkfall. A single, bad impression of a game from an anonymous source. Even though I personally love Darkfall, I know I could find a post by a “former player” that would make Darkfall seem just as bad if not worse, not from a monetary perspective but from gameplay.
Either way, I will wait to see what happens in Allods. I am enjoying leveling there if nothing else.
Regarding DarkFall: Only if what Alex wrote is indeed false. If it’s true though, I would have no issue with someone writing something negative about DarkFall (I linked a few initial impressions that were a bit negative and acknowledged that while I may be able to look past some issues (UI), I can understand how others can not).
The difference is that AV is motivated to keep the game fun, while Allods is motivated to herd you into the CS. I’m excited about the next DF expansion. Allods players are in fear of an upcoming patch (or hoping that the changes are just a bad rumor, which is even more sad).
I can not possibly fathom what is drawing serious gamers to Allods. Maybe a gamer that barely plays more than 5 hours a week would come out ahead financially by using this system instead of the traditional subscription model, but for anyone else they are seriously going to get bent over a barrel. Its not like this is a niche title that offers something no one else does. It is just the latest imported version of a wow clone.
People fear patches all the time. Nerfs come to mind. Just about every patch I see come across from “insert game title here,” I see a post from one blogger stating that they are afraid of what that change will mean for their character, and then another blogger who complains that they’ll /ragequit if X change occurs, and another blogger that says they’ll have to spend all week farming Y so that when the change hits they’ll be prepared. That’s the way of the world when it comes to MMOs. Sure, there are some patches that people are excited about, but there will always be people that are freaked about what the next patch can bring.
And I have to agree with Brannagar, it seems silly to use a random blog comment from someone as the basis of an argument for or against something. Yes, comments can be ammusing at times, but definitive statements of fact they are not.
The thing that boggled my mind is that many F2P supporters like Keen know it’s exploitive and are fine with it as long as the price is reasonable.
I wrote somewhere that I think it’s fundamentally a trust issue. Some players are just willing to trust the dev to not be exploitive and price things in a reasonable and fair way.
Keen and others reacted so badly last week because that trust was violated.
I just don’t have that trust. I think it’s human nature to try to get as much as you possibly can without tipping over the boat.
As Tobold mentioned on his blog, the current price reduction was likely the intended price all along.
DDOs real success, in my mind, was gaining that kind of trust from players by listening to them. They cultivated that trust and adjusted prices/items accordingly.
Yes, because of course the ranting of 1 guy on a forum MUST be true :p If you’re that hard up for topics, I’m sure you can find lots of info on how WoW is in it’s death throes on their forums . . .
Just be sure to come back after the patch and let me know how wrong that guy was.
Is this like Stockholm Syndrome? I honestly can’t understand people defending Allods at this point. They are S C R E W I N G you in the rear and being bold faced about it. But whatever, I guess some folks like taking it up the a$$.
I really think it comes down people being wiling to relax the sphincter muscles if the person tells them what they are about to do before raping them? Personally no amount of sweet talking is going to make me pay out these kind of dollars, but then again this is not my kind of game in the least.
Having played WOW for several years paying more than I care to remember on subs, transfers, name changes and expansion packs … I must say I for one am enjoying Allods Online. It has better character skins for a start. And some of the UI functionality, such as looting and interacting with NPCs without having to use the mouse is great :D
But I must admit that I’d prefer to know exactly how much cash I was expected to eventually have to fork out if I wanted to raid regularly.
Grats on the third rate reporting btw! Gives you so much cred posting what-he-said about what-he-said…
I played wow for 2 years, then when tbc came i stopped :P they just fkd everything up with the store etc, had great potencial but blizzard decided to milk it. Anyway, as it seems you dont know what if the character skins in wow bother you, you can go to curse gaming and replace your wow skins? example, if youre horde orc shaman, and when you turn into a bear you dont like it, or you dont like ur wolf mount, you just mod the skinds and you’re an alliance elf riding a sabertooth(thats how you look, youre still horde orc ofc). Or you can make urself look like a tauren rogue even if ur an undead priest, you know what i mean, its customizable.And looting and interacting with npcs can be bound to a key on ur keyboard, but you also have mods for that. Like, autolooting etc…