Welcome to a brand new show here at MMOBomb!...
Free to Play Cast: Game Updates and Pauses, Atlas Reactor F2P...AGAIN Ep 207
On this week's show we jump into Atlas Reactor becoming free-to-play...AGAIN, talk about updates coming to a few games we never really talk about including HeroWarz going on "Pause," and finish up with Nexon America shake ups. All that and more on this week's Free to Play Cast!
Discussion Timestamps:
02:00 Atlas Reactor and Trion Worlds
13:40 Random Game Updates and HeroWarz
24:03 Nexon America Changes
27:59 Weekly Bombs (DA-Bomb / A-Bomb)
38:11 Questions and Answers of the Week
If you have submissions for the show's Weekly Bombs, have questions for the panel (nothing is off limits!), or just ideas for what you want covered you can now send them to magicman@mmobomb.com. You can also be a guest in the show, just send us why you want to host, and what topic or game you would like to cover.
Free-To-Play Cast is the official podcast (and videocast) of MMOBomb.com about free to play multiplayer online games. Free-To-Play Cast takes on the week's biggest news with plenty of opinion, weekly bombs, community feedback, guests, laughs thrown in for good measure and much more. Have fun and expect a new episode next week!
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I didn't really care for any of Trion's other titles, they got my attention with Atlas Reactor, even-though I bought a Founders Pack and enjoy the game I considered abandoning the game, not because of the changes, but because the changes seemed dishonest/poorly thought of, and figured all the uncertainty would eventually end up killing the game, I actually didn't think the game would make it to 2017.
What i would like to see from them is honesty and more thoughtfulness, it's hard to defend a game, even a good game, when the developers themselves doesn't seem to care about their reputation. I would hate to see Atlas Reactor go away because of greed or incompetence, hopefully they'll think before making any more stupid decisions that might end up completely pushing people away.
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That, of course, is RIFT. You all know I haven't agreed with, or understood, all of their decisions. But I have played -many- MMOs since my fledgling days on Everquest, and that coupled with my many years of customer service experience, I think, gives me a certain perspective.
Why do I continue to support RIFT both by playing it and monetarily? Well, have you ever watched a livestream or announcement with a Ben Stein-esque host? I have. It's terrible. You wonder why they even bothered to film the thing. They're clearly not excited so why should you be? This isn't the case with RIFT's team. You can always tell that they're truly excited about what they're bringing you and that more than that, they believe in it. Secondly, through forums and other venues, they have far more communication with their community than a majority of the games I've played. They also have transparency about their updates and changes. They nearly always have patch notes accompanying any update (no ninja patching), which go into detail and have included admitting fixes for some hilariously embarrassing bugs (not being able to heal the other faction for example). Again this is not the case for several of the games I've played. And finally, customer service. Now, given my profession, this is the biggest one for me. They do take longer to answer a ticket than most games I've played... but that's the key. The ticket gets answered, and resolved. They have never failed to do so. They have never told me they simply cannot help. I have never received a dismissive automated response, or a response that clearly shows they never fully read my ticket in the first place. So for all these reasons, and simply having a quality game, I continue to support RIFT. In fact, I can only name one other team that I have had the same respect for. Unfortunately, that game no longer exsists.
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What I would have them improve? Motivation to do dungeons at lower levels. They removed the random loot bag, and since Instant Adventures are a more efficient (and vastly more boring) way to level, the que times are huge for almost any role. It's the way I prefer to level, and I feel that all options to level should be equally viable.
Atlas Reactor went free to play because of this: http://steamcharts.com/app/402570#6m
It's clearly a dying game, just like Devilian (which is in an even worse state). They milked it with founder packs as they always do, milked what they could with buy to play, and threw in free to play as a last resort to squeeze out whatever's left in it.
I won't touch any game from them as they will lie to and screw over customers at every opportunity if it means a tiny profit, and they have pounced on to just about every one of the most exploitative aspects of the free to play market. On top of that, they're completely incompetent as a publisher as the completely avoidable disasters we hear about every week demonstrate.
QotW for you guys. If you had to pick a combat system from you favorite single player game and incorporate it in a mmo you play, what would it be? For me I would love to have Mass Effect's combat in SWTOR.
No bombs this week for me and instead a bored Meh Bomb to free gaming in general, I'm playing Witcher 3 again this is how uneventful this week has been for me!