Eurogamer: $12,000 castles and $2100 deeds - inside Shroud of the Avatar's booming housing market

I'm very careful for what I believe here.

 

yes, the beer was the right move.. i hope i won't be sober on the cruise i go on with my 8 year old, either.

 

I would've opted for not taking the son on four hour flight.

 

Been in the position where I had to take my 2 year old on an 11 hour flight. Only way I could have won was if I bought eveyone a few beers. (Or a few shots for the little one)

That was a ruff flight.

 

I thought it was a relatively positive article, given that it was about money. The tone of it wasn't bad, just "Wow, look how much people like this game."

 

I never expected a mainstream game and i would never give a dime for a mainstream game.
Besides, it has been never advertised as mainstream game.
And yes, the game is exact what i expected and what i want.

 

Because... skeletons, kobolds, spiders, thieves, wolves... everything that is not protected by guards and walls, is razed down.

Must have other games in mind, where you start with say 20 slots but cannot upgrade without paying real money. Also, SotA allows to upgrade the bank with game currency. And there is not "character bank", "account bank" and "guild bank", each of one accepting a subset of all the items, and players have to buy them separately. Our bank is much more flexible.

I won every time I enjoy a game. Is that play for win?

The game, is a game for sure. But also a economic venture and we have to accept that money must flow.
The big issue with some games, IMHO, is the way they bind an force the player to expend more money. Monthly payments or very restrictive upgrades (some seems to have been designed by a mad accountant) are likely to be bad news for players. I don't see SotA working this way, they ask for an upfront inversion (pay2play model) and then it allow to enjoy the game forever.

 

Interesting.
I would like to see your proof for this statement.

 

Honestly: No.
Because so far nobody was able to proof to me that this game has a pay2win aspect. But the argument is used as a discussion overkill over and over again. And that's really annoying.

 

Ladies and gentlemen,

A premium membership subscription right before your very eyes.

I always thought that the buzzword "no subscription" that's floating around the industry is just a pile of manure. Recurring costs (like forever ongoing development, and live server/bandwidth costs) must meet with recurring income. There's not much going around that.

 

Hey Kat... those buzzwords can rapidly become mobile goalposts....just like....hmmm... Pe-alpha, Alpha.. Beta.... Launch.....

;p

 

To each his how but I will never understand why people spend so much money on virtual goods. What if the game is shut down?

 

They are gone.
But then again you spend money on beer or Disneyland or paytv or McDonald's and so on.
Can't see a real difference.

 

No problem, everyone can spend his money on what he wants. It's just not my cup of tea, especially with such prices.

 

With SotA if the game is shut down, the game should have offline play available yet.

 

Bashing out the team as being cash grab and such only deter people away from enjoying the actual game experience. Nobody has to buy anything with real cash as you don't need a house to complete the game.

I don't see any needs to flip the table and freaking out from this article. People can spend money however they like. You can burn several hundred dollars through booze and club hopping and that only last you for a few hours. You can spend money on collectible items, but there might also be the time where they could get stolen or damaged due to unexpected events. You can spend your life long savings on cars and one day the car engine might just die out beyond the repair.

As most of us are all grown up adults (per recent polls) who at this point should be capable making money and maintain fiduciary duty for themselves and their family members. The key here is to educate yourself before making any monetary decision. Don't just blindly throwing in the money and then later own being salty when the reality does not meet the expectation. At least for this game, people have options to cash out and sell their pledges, add-ons items to someone else who wants them. Also, at the end of the day, all these money go to developments and server maintenance.

$8-9 million USD from crowdfunding is nothing compare to what people spent $1 here and there on in-app purchase games like those in Facebook and mobile platforms (e.g., Candy Crush saga).

 

You can get at least 50 slots simply by paying in-game gold. 100 gold per 10 slots, if I remember correctly. It goes up a bit after that, but is still quite affordable even at 500 gold per 10 slots for the next few steps. (this of course depends on if Port decides to adjust the cost at FW due to observing the economy)


And for those concerned about the poor starving no-landers, I played R20-R22 without a landed pledge, mostly in Solania because of its bank being so close to crafting, but also in Ardoris. Two weeks before wipe I had saved up 200K to buy a town deed at the Owl's Head bank, then I basically stopped playing until wipe. The only real limitation was that I had to try keeping my banked stuff in one city or the other.


As for pay2win, the only thing I've seen that fits that term at all are the Prosperity tools, which help in "winning" the crafting economy by having both non-decay and a crafting bonus. Artisan tools also have the non-decay (but most people who get them can only choose one per pledge), and we have been told that it will be possible to craft tools with a higher crafting bonus, as well as crafting stations with a higher bonus than the Founder pledge reward crafting stations. Prosperity tools may not be the best in the game, but they are the best if you're the "smart lazy" type like me who doesn't want to have to keep messing with repairing/replacing things.

I've been in the position of being the three-year old (along with a two-year old) on a long flight. My dad was a dentist in the Army and got posted to SE Asia for a year when my brother and I were very little. After the tour was over, on the flight back to the States (via Anchorage), one of us threw up on my mom. I think it was my dad who then said "let's switch". An hour or three later, the other one threw up on my mom. This was loooong before people had internets, not that it would help with barfing babies. (It would probably be worse, because the barf would get all over the laptop/tablet!)

 

The more I think about it, it's rather a case of Pay 2 Be Lazy rather Pay 2 Win.. I mean whom are we beating exactly with prosperity tools?

 

Neverwinter (the MMO) went straight from Open Beta to Release without the flip of a switch. They didn't even do a character wipe.

 

Then they were live or in production as of Open Beta.