djmoody said:
Yes the game has no balance.
I have been through this with another game - "War of Legends" published by Jagex. They got more and more greedy and eventually the game shut down with very few actives left in it.
You have to remember the content in this game is minimal. It wouldn't take long to code this game. Stormfall is therefore throw away to them. The real cost of the game is the advertising to draw in members and the ongoing support costs. They can open another version of the game e.g. Nords, Vikings etc easily and simply switch the support headcount and the advertising to it.
So the shame of it is that the customers whose hobbies these games are have a massive personal investment and love for them but the people that run them are at best ambivalent to them. It is a business and nothing more. This mismatch causes a lot of unhappiness.
If you want to play a game where the developers appear to love for the game as much as the players then try Eve (although even that isn't perfect as the developers continually siphon funds from Eve into other projects none of which has come off yet)
I found C&C Tiberium Alliances to be more responsible. They actually limit your daily spending amount - and that game is ultimately run by EA who you wouldn't expect to be altruistic. The game has significant elements of skill (you actually run the battles yourself) which also allows good players to close the gap on big spending ones.
The sad thing is that most developers, especially in the RTS arena, are running exactly the same micro transactions, small player base, pay to win business model. As gamers there are thousands of games but virtually no choice. It's certinaly not just Plarium.
Not quite true, Dust 154 and EVE Valkyrie, both set in the EVE universe. Although Dust 154 was shut down, they working on a new project in the same gate using the unreal engine for PC afaik. Maybe they show more info at next fan fest. as for their venture into World of Darkness, it didn't come through, but that applies for a lot of games out there. Yeah CCP spend income on other projects not just keep EVE alive, but as a business they need to right? EVE get content patches and expansions a few times a year still.
For the money Plarium want us to invest into their games, we get very little in return back though.
