Darkfall: Unholy Wars being the first sub-based MMO to use Steam’s new subscriber system has many benefits; market exposure, higher in-game population, easier to acquire the title, etc, but I think it’s pretty obvious that the biggest advantage is the introduction of Steamkiddie rage and tears. In some ways they are like the Massively trolls, but with a bit more focus on pricing rather than… whatever it is Massively trolls troll about.
By far my favorite new ‘person’ is Longknight, valiant defender of consumer spending who is on a personal crusade to lower costs for all! At close to 300 comments that thread is a long one, but man oh man is it quality reading. At least skim and read Longknight if nothing else. The rest of this post could comprise of nothing but quotes, but I’ll just go with this one:
yes but i need your help and everyone else if i was to set up a games review website (free of course as i dont want anyones money) and i had enough followers to turn around and boycott buying these kind of games they would have no choice but the bring their prices down thats fair to everyone but people are like sheep time to be a wolf
Rally the troops Longknight! It’s time to be a wolf, yo.
Longknight might be the dumbest of the bunch, but shockingly he is not alone, and others are also outraged that anyone would pay the absurd ransom of $40 AND THEN $15 A MONTH to play an MMO. Doesn’t Aventurine know all MMOs are F2P now?! The outrage!
F2P spending math-tax issue aside, not to mention $15 a month vs new game spending math, I’m reminded that UO came out in 1997, meaning there are gamers today who were not born when that standard was set. If your first (and perhaps only) experience with MMOs is Farmville and its ilk, paying up front for something and then being ‘forced’ to pay $15 a month might seem crazy. Especially for a game that doesn’t even look as good as Skyrim!
Luckily for Longknight and company, I’m sure DF:UW will go F2P soon, just like DF1 did. Hopefully those waiting for that to happen will hold their breath while they wait, that way we all win.
Hardcore Casual 
If DF:UW did go F2P, would you stop playing it?
Depends on how they did it exactly, but honestly, yea most likely.
It is almost as what goes around, comes around.
I remember a vocal contingent from the EQ days that were simply outraged that somebody would charge them for a game and then have the nerve to subsequently charge them to play the game. At least he isn’t complaining about it requiring an internet connection.
I suppose somebody has already chimed in with the classic, “If it keeps you from playing the game Longwolf, then the subscription is well worth it.”
I think that group of players either got used to the whole sub thing, or just got sick of complaining about it.
But Steam has always been the standalone single/multi player games or free to play MMO’s, and its customer base reflects that. Adding a subscription based MMO opens it up to players who may never have played a sub based MMO resulting in a return of the outraged complainer.
It is just the misspent rage that gets to me. If the pricing model is wrong, the game is going to have to change or fail in any case. If it isn’t, well, misspent rage.
I mean, this is a totally optional thing. It isn’t like, as an example, my local water district announcing that they need to jack up water prices by 40% and then telling the local paper and the public in general to basically screw off when asked for a justification. Working against that is rage well spent, since I gotta have water. I can’t even dig my own well, as the district claims all that water is theirs.
can we at least agree the lack of a trial option is retarded?
i’m not interested in buying an MMO and paying for a month only to find out i don’t like it. every MMO has had trial options for years!
Not really.
I’d rather they focus on paying customers and improving the game for that crowd then working on a trial and trying to balance it in a game like DF:UW (spam bots, harvesters, cheat testers).
Eventually, sure, but in the first few months I’d rather not have freeloaders taking up login and server space.
Every MMO? I don’t recall a free trial when I started Rift, WoW only added theirs a couple of years ago. I don’t think Champions, or STO had trials when they were released. That only happened when they went FTP.
Not a lot of single player games have demos anymore, either. You have to buy them to find out if you like them or not.
I remember a time where we’d consider an MMO to be failing if it would do a trial within the first 3-6 months as they were a way to bolster active players/accounts on the datasheets.
Of course this was before going F2P to keep up numbers became the fail du jour.
Maybe, but not at release. But my point stands, it took WoW years to do a trial.Rift went straight to FTP a year after release, as did Champs and STO (but that was a FTP era thing.)
I don’t remember a free trial in EQ, Asheron’s Call, Anarchy Online or UO. It was all buy the game, first 30 days ‘free.’ AO did go free for the basic game later, and that could be called a trial, but it was unlimited and technically could also be considered FTP since it encouraged a sub for the other areas (Shadowlands.)
I never encountered the MMO fail attitude if no free trial was given. I did however encounter that for SP games.
Wow certainly had a free trial late 2005. I remember playing it.
WoW had a really long open beta phase which was practically a free trial.
I hope Longknight does not find out I am paying for three accounts in EVE Online. He might champion my cause and stop me playing the game.
Hail to you champion!
Civ 3 or 4?
5>3>2>4
you’re on crack. 5>4>2>3 =P
Lol – I was trying to remember which game said “Hail to you champion” when you clicked on your warrior. I think it was Civ 4, could’ve been 3, I don’t think it was Age of Empires.
Regardless, I agree with Syncaine on the order.
Oh, Arise my Champion is (in my mind) from Prophecy of Pendor, the M&B:W mod. Every time you start a new game the sound clip plays, kinda surprise me every time.
Maybe if Darkfail 1: Fail harder would not have been such a failure if it had gone f2p. There hasn’t been that many MMOs that have been closed down faster than it did. Even a huge fail like WAR is still running.
If I were Adventurine I’d immediately get that shit on Steam sale for 5$. What Darkfall needs more than anything is new blood and a strong sub base. To that end, bringing the initial price point down as much as possible to get players to give the game another shot seems like a no brainer.
Being charitable, I’d say they are either incredibly strapped for cash and need it *now* or simply overlooked how important lowering the barrier to entry is to their long term success.
Or, more charitably, that they’re trying get new players at a trickle rather than a wave for game balance reason or so their servers don’t shit the bed.
On the other hand, the cynical side of me wonders if they’ve lost confidence in their product and it’s ability to hold subscribers outside the remaining Darkfall base and are simply trying to get as much cash as they can out of the curious as possible, who they don’t expect to stick around anyway.
The game doesn’t need more players right now. Starting areas are swamped.
That’s quite surprising as according to Xfire, it has 840 times less players than SW:Tor at the moment and we all know that based on Xfire stats, SW:Tor has been dead and buried for ages already. This naturally means that if Darkfall suddenly gained 840 times the number of players that it currently has, maybe we could start to call it dead and buried as well. (Before that – nonexistent, maybe?)
I guess “swamped” must mean something else than player count, then. My belief in Xfire stats as accurate measurement of practically anything remains unwavering.
Probably best not to bring up 2 servers or F2P right?
The definition of “dead and buried” somewhat depends on production and maintenance costs, doesn’t it? Plus, Xfire users can be a fickle bunch… all 17 of them :-).
Seriously though, I’d love a trial version of Darkfall, even if it were very limited. I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to pay (what used to be) standard box + sub fee, but being able to take a look around before spending the equivalent of multiple months of EVE would go a long way toward getting me to check out the game. Perhaps they’ll reconsider once the initial rush is over. I wouldn’t touch the game with a 10-foot pole if it were F2P, though. Sorry, Longknight.
Oh, so they don’t even want more people to play this game as then they’d have to open more servers. That explains it, Aventurine is hugely successful because they don’t even want more customers and SW:Tor is huge fail because they don’t have as much customers as WoW does. Even though they have 840 times more customers than Darkfail does.
Add ten servers with the same population that’s currently playing Darkfall. Then double each server’s population. Then triple the number of servers you now have. Then double the number of people playing on each server once again. And you’re still nowhere close to SW:Tor customer numbers. You know, the game that’s dead.
No wonder the Greek economy is in shambles, it seems everyone there forgot to take the Business Class 101. “The game doesn’t need more players right now” FFS.
Are you trying to convince me SW:TOR is doing well?
I went to two music festivals last year. One had 800 people in a beautiful and remote mountain location. The other had 50,000 people in an urban fairground. The first one was a rousing success, everyone had a great time and the event is happening again this year. The second one was a failure, because the organizers lost a ton of money on it and it’s not happening again, and people had some rough experiences there. Those are the factors one uses to evaluate success or failure: did attendees have a good time, did the event turn a profit? The attendance number does play into both of the above criteria, making it instrumentally valuable, but it’s not an intrinsic goal. By your standards, the best MMO out there is Solitaire. Despite being free and not an MMO, it has more players than any other game out there, which makes it the winner of your “best MMO out there” award. (SW:TOR is also free and not an MMO, after all)
Subscriber numbers and Xfire metrics are only useful Key Performance Indicators when they show that a new themepark declined after the marketing budget dried up.
Darkfall’s success will be judged on:
1) How long it has been online (Nearly 4 years, if we exclude the time that it was purposefully taken offline)
2) Number of guilds registered on the forums
3) Any anecdotal evidence available from current players
Anyone trying to play on a MacBook Pro?
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