Free to Play Cast: Atlas Reactor Review, Guild Wars 2 Updates, and More Bless Online Ep 177

Why go with Aeria Games? 2 possible reasons may be they have a proven track record for making money and they may offer a standard contract rather than months of haggling. Aeria Games is terrible about promoting its games after launch. Aura Kingdom has had 23 content patches but you never hear about it. They are doing a better job of comunicating with the player base, just about all there games have a monthly producers letter. And there merger of the US, German, and Italian servers for Grand Fantasia has been a success, while the game is not crowded it is not the ghost town it was before.

QotW:
There's only one publisher I'll avoid no matter what: Trion. I decided to avoid them completely after getting burned and shat on, and since then if anything they've got even worse. I wouldn't want to support any company that consistently treats customers as cash machines, even if they came up with a good game with a good monetisation model (though obviously that isn't going to happen).

A bomb to myself for always writing damn Blog posts, I should start a blog, would be more like a "how many can I offend in a Single Post" blog.

Da Bomb to the Chinese Company Tenzen for letting western Players play their Games in all its glory and even actively support and tell those players to enjoy their games, Tenzen on top offers help with translations, would be nice to see that from Japan and Korea in near future. I am currently playing quite a few Korean games like Closers, soulworker, Figure Heads yet I wish I could play PSO2 but I can't get past the Captcha, damn you captcha !

Question of the Week
Yes i do stay away from Games Published by certain Companys, Companys like EA, Activision, Ubisoft which create the glorious Tripple A games are yet to Deliver games that are worthy of having the Tripple A tag, mostly you get unfinished games that either are full of Bugs and Problems or don't run at all. In terms of MMO Publisher I usually do not stay away from them if the game is the one I would like to play, however, if the game is clearly Pay 2 Win and pretty much tells you to buy things around every corner then I will drop it or stay away. And then trion and Daybreak appeared, and everything changed, i only stay away from those two.

First time watcher and quite enjoyed this program! Well done the three of you. :-)

Q of the week:

To answer the question simply. No, the publisher would not deter me from playing a specific game I was interested. If you search around long enough on the endless internetz for all of the different publishers you will find a group of individuals who are screaming negativity from the mountain tops. Game’s should be judged on their play-ability and content rather than the name on the game box. Publishers and Developers are two vastly different influence on the game’s quality. In Bless and Aeria Games’ specific case I believe the group mentality is declaring the ship in sinking prematurely. I’m not going to assume when you recorded this episode, but I wanted to bring a reddit post to your attention. On the MMORPG reddit a recent (past) employee of Aeria Games provided some insight into how Aeria Games is trying to shift their focus away from the P2W monetization plans and strengthening their servers which would be needed for a larger title such as Bless. Also, what I believe a large percentage of the nay sayers are forgetting that we do not know the details of the contract between Aeria Games and Neowiz. Aeria may not have 100% free reign on setting the Cash Shop prices like people are assuming.

Now that the AMA is over, I highly suggest you take another look to see how it was beneficial for the Aeria Games’ team working on Bless and how many other questions/topics were answered/discussed (not just deferred questions about the cash shop as your video somewhat suggests). As a community member who was a little nervous about the initial announcement of Aeria as the publisher, I found this AMA to be very helpful and reassuring. Even if not much information is available it is a positive sign that the dialogue between the Publisher and Player Base was opened this early. It’s something that does not happen often with larger title releases and certainly not something Aeria is known for. So, wouldn’t this be sign #1 that their focus is shifting?

Here's a question you have the BEST MMO to release you want it to go F2P, what company would you choose to publish it in the west? (Your thought is "I want to make it right!")

My answer would be "someone small but somewhat recognizable" so I could get some "pull" on the store and monetization!

Da Bomb to the MMOBOMB crew, you guys keep up the good work. I look forward to the cast every week.

Q of the week
absolutely id stay away from a game because of the publisher. some companies I just cant give my money to. if EA published the greatest game ever id have to miss out on it, id rather burn my cash than give it to them. Other companies just operate so poorly that you know how it will turn out. p2w, bad customer service etc., so why even bother with a game when you know that ultimately you will be disappointed with the experience.

Da bomb for my poor pc, whose age has never become more apparent then when I got into Paragon, for being to run the damn game at all. Don't worry my sweet prince, I forsee a well deserved upgrade in your future