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That’s fair. Outriders was ultimately a good game that delivered on its promises, however misunderstood they may have been, but I’d agree that publishers don’t consider good sell-through to be enough return anymore. On the subject of New World, I believed the game was good enough on its own to have a potential turn around with enough time and good decisions. At this point based solely on the communication from the dev team and the obvious fuckups from both the design and implementation perspective, I’m afraid the whole thing is circling the drain.
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Jul 20, 2023 20:01
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Here's something I just noticed today. Take a look at the game's versioning scheme for the past several major updates: The game shipped as version 1.0 in 2021, and every major release since then has iterated the number after the decimal, '1.1', '1.2', etc., like a normal versioning system. Minor updates would result in Versions '1.X.1', hotfixes might result in Versions '1.X.Y.1', etc., like you'd expect. However, with the most recent major update, they changed the version number from 1.9 to 2.0, rather than the expected iteration to 1.10. It's like the person left on the team responsible for release control was told "add .1 to the version for every major release", and they took the instruction literally. It's actually the kind of error you would expect from a poorly written script rather than a person, so maybe it's a reflection of there no longer being a human-in-the-loop for that part of their development process anymore.
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Jul 20, 2023 22:44
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aw frig aw dang it posted:It's a dead game and the people left working on it are just running out the clock. Dream job right there.
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Jul 21, 2023 06:30
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for some people 1.10 and 1.1 are the same number.
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Jul 21, 2023 16:40
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Third World Reagan posted:for some people 1.10 and 1.1 are the same number. When I was trying to look up an old thread with examples about the game's Trading Post sort functionality, I discovered that AGS finally officially removed all trace of their old official forums. While they had officially closed them at the start of May, they had at least archived the forums to allow read-only access to the years'-worth of old threads/posts. I guess some time in the past several weeks they nuked the database, and tthat evidence that the game existed is lost to the sands of time. Of course, the game's website still has a dropdown menu that suggests a Forums for the game exists:  In a way, that provides a better example of my original point than the Trading Post sorting irregularities. Edit: Using Google's cache let me get this screenshot of the sort issue I was talking about : 
Discospawn fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Jul 21, 2023 |
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Jul 21, 2023 18:04
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To be fair they could just be updating the first numeral with each season like actually-successful MMOs do with expansions and it just happened that coincidentally the 10th update was season 2. So if season 3 rolls around (lol the game is going to stop receiving updates before that happens) during, say, 2.3, then the next patch would be 3.0 None of that changes the extremely dire and hilarious straits the game is in, of course.
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Jul 22, 2023 17:45
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FrostyPox posted:To be fair they could just be updating the first numeral with each season like actually-successful MMOs do with expansions and it just happened that coincidentally the 10th update was season 2. So if season 3 rolls around (lol the game is going to stop receiving updates before that happens) during, say, 2.3, then the next patch would be 3.0 I will point out that their first planned patch for this release cycle was labeled 2.0.1, which suggests that they consider "2.0" as the Major release, when you would expect it to have been labeled "2.1" if they were just switching to sync up the major release and Season #. I know it's all trivial in the grand scheme of things, and not anywhere close to among the game's biggest issues that are leading to its seemingly inevitable failure. It's just something that sticks out to me because I've worked in software development at different parts of the development cycle, and I know how frustrating it is to encounter problems related to the wrong build being delivered, or the build not compiling in the first place, because of poor version control and configuration management. If their external release practices are flawed 2 years after product launch, I can only imagine how often their entire team ends up wasting time and thrashing because their internal processes are even sloppier.
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Jul 22, 2023 20:46
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1 of the game's remaining Twitch streamers decided that now was a good time to get a New World tattoo: https://twitter.com/YaBoiWiilly/status/1683518503691722759 In official New World news, the devs released their monthly Q&A vlog, and it managed to provide virtually 0 new information to the community. It's only 11 minutes long, and it might be worth watching by anybody who played the game for any significant amount of time before quitting. So many of the questions revolve around basic changes/features/improvements that players have asked for since release, and the devs are still unwilling to commit to any specific plan to give players what they want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ7tFrO18Yw It's a good video to watch if you want to feel more confident in your decision to stop playing because you felt the pace of updates was too slow, or that the game wasn't on track to ever meet its potential. It's the kind of video you would expect for the 1st update of an indie-developed Early Access title, not a AAA game that's 2 years old and on the verge of releasing its first expansion.
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Jul 24, 2023 20:43
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Hahahaha
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Jul 24, 2023 20:50
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I feel embarrassment on that guys behalf.
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Jul 24, 2023 21:20
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Looking into it briefly, it looks like he started his Twitch channel in March 2022, and almost immediately, within 2 weeks, started to average around 200 viewers per stream, and never really grow from there. Since most Twitch streamers are streaming to literally 0 people, this still puts him into the "Top 0.07% of Twitch", though I'm unsure if 200 viewers is enough to make streaming a bad game your primary method of income. Unfortunately, to do this he has had to stream over 2000 hours of New World in the last 16 months, which is not the life most people choose to live, so likely the game has had at least that very large impact on his life. Not sure I'd commemorate it by semi-permanently etching the logo of said bad game on my leg.
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Jul 24, 2023 22:03
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GaylordButts posted:Looking into it briefly, it looks like he started his Twitch channel in March 2022, and almost immediately, within 2 weeks, started to average around 200 viewers per stream, and never really grow from there. Since most Twitch streamers are streaming to literally 0 people, this still puts him into the "Top 0.07% of Twitch", though I'm unsure if 200 viewers is enough to make streaming a bad game your primary method of income. I'm genuinely concerned for the guy, because he regularly hosts 24+ hour streams where he has rewards where he demeans himself based on meeting subscription/donation goals, and he also drunkstreams a lot, to the point that I suspect he either already has a problem with alcohol, or will develop one. I know this isn't too far outside the norm for Twitch streamers, but that doesn't mean it's healthy. It's the kind of streamer personality most corporations would avoid making ties with, because there's very little free publicity, but there's a significant chance that the streamer's madness takes a turn and they become hostile to the game or some specific group of people in a way that no business wants to be associated with.
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Jul 24, 2023 22:33
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Discospawn posted:Yeah, despite his passion for the game, he's never broken into the top (or even medium) tier of New World streamers, probably because he typically focuses on commentating/shoutcasting Wars rather than playing the game. This is 100 levels of depressing. I noticed he went out of his way to make sure the word "Aeternum" was on the tattoo, which is particularly unfortunate - in the real world nobody knows what New World is so that tat might have passed off as some decent esoteric artwork. But with the word on there, it just takes a quick Google search for a casual observer to wish they hadn't.
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Jul 25, 2023 00:26
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Scruffpuff posted:This is 100 levels of depressing. I noticed he went out of his way to make sure the word "Aeternum" was on the tattoo, which is particularly unfortunate - in the real world nobody knows what New World is so that tat might have passed off as some decent esoteric artwork. But with the word on there, it just takes a quick Google search for a casual observer to wish they hadn't.
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Jul 25, 2023 01:34
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he's the coolest guy in Indiana now, a small price to pay
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Jul 25, 2023 14:21
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You know it's not terrible to get a video game tattoo, even of a niche and dying game. However it is terrible when the disconnected from the game first impression of the tattoo is you like evil conquistadors.
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Jul 26, 2023 06:14
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I'll be honest if I didn't know anything about new world and i saw that tattoo when out and about my first reaction would be "woah that's sick"
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Jul 26, 2023 17:29
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With the full context, it doesn't seem like a good idea to get a tattoo of a failing MMORPG.
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Jul 26, 2023 17:50
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I said come in! posted:With the full context, it doesn't seem like a good idea to get a tattoo of a failing MMORPG. It’s not like you’d ever have reason to regret it
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Jul 26, 2023 18:40
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30.5 Days posted:I'll be honest if I didn't know anything about new world and i saw that tattoo when out and about my first reaction would be "woah that's sick" 
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Jul 26, 2023 20:39
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They tried to release an update yesterday that touted changes that would improve game client performance and fix a rare issue causing server crashes. Let's take a look at the official Discord server, which is the community hub for the game after shuttering their official forums, and see how that went: It did not go well. They announced the patch on Tuesday, then had to delay the update 1 hour before it was scheduled to start on Wednesday. They then said it would be released this morning, and when they went forward with it, it took much longer than expected and when it was 'finished' and they brought the game back online, most of the game's servers started continuously crashing until they performed another round of resets. However, even once the servers became stable, a significant number of players have found themselves unable to start the game, login, stay connected for more than a few minutes at a time, or any other number of serious problems that represent a serious degradation in "performance". Now, it seems like they've started taking the servers down region by region to apply more hotfixes or roll back the changes, but there hasn't been any official announcement about a plan going forward. To top it all off, for the players who were able to log in and play after the update, there was an exploit quickly found that allowed players to earn 5 Season Pass ranks by crafting 1 of their daily gypsum items (essentially allowing for near instant completion of the 100 ranks of the Season Pass). As a reminder, the Season Pass system they added to New World allows players to purchase Season Pass ranks with real money, at a rate of $1 per level, so this theoretically was a bug that directly impacted Amazon Games' bottom-line; of course, they 'fixed' this exploit before they started taking steps to improve server stability or player issues. So yeah, it's not going well. It really gives the feeling of a ship that's taking on water, and the crew aren't able to bail out water fast enough, but in all the commotion and panic they also managed to set the sails on fire. It's a scary thought, because as we all know, you still can't swim in New World. Discospawn fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Aug 4, 2023 |
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Aug 4, 2023 02:35
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Discospawn posted:So yeah, it's not going well. It really gives the feeling of a ship that's taking on water, and the crew aren't able to bail out water fast enough, but in all the commotion and panic they also managed to set the sails on fire. It's a scary thought, because as we all know, you still can't swim in New World. I don't know if this will fit in the title as-is, but we should patch the forum so it does.
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Aug 4, 2023 09:30
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Discord is such a terrible format for technical support. You have to fight to get people to read FAQs and pins.Third World Reagan posted:for some people 1.10 and 1.1 are the same number. I'm some people. In most other industries these are the same number. From 1.9 you can go to 1.9.1 or 2.0 and it's literally a higher number. 1.10 < 1.9. edit: ok even I can't get it right first go Heran Bago fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Aug 4, 2023 |
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Aug 4, 2023 12:11
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the proper way is to go from 1.001 to 1.002
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Aug 4, 2023 14:30
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I think New World will eventually be one of those case studies in game development courses about how to take a great idea and run it into the ground. New World was a really cool looking game with some cool ideas and they just didn't execute. Makes me wonder what could have been if they had stuck to the original pvp/survival model.
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Aug 4, 2023 14:39
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ShowTime posted:I think New World will eventually be one of those case studies in game development courses about how to take a great idea and run it into the ground. New World was a really cool looking game with some cool ideas and they just didn't execute. Makes me wonder what could have been if they had stuck to the original pvp/survival model. The problem is that there wasn't a "great idea", there was several "great ideas". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVJ_k75f_GQ Also, the case study has already been done. RagnarokZ fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Aug 5, 2023 |
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Aug 4, 2023 20:29
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That video is good, and to go back further in time, there's also this terrific article from January of 2021 that describes a studio floundering to accomplish anything of merit due to poor Leadership and badly misspent resources. My favorite quote is about Amazon Game Studio's head executive, Mike Frazzini:quote:Frazzini’s lack of experience in video games showed during project review sessions, a standard industry ritual when the boss plays early prototypes and offers feedback. His comments were of the focus-group variety, recalls a former Amazon developer: “Why is it this color?” and “Seems fun. When will it be ready?” On a different occasion, says another developer, the team cringed as Frazzini struggled to differentiate between hyper-polished conceptual footage and live gameplay, a sign he didn’t understand the technology. That article was released 8 months before New World launched, and Frazzini resigned in March of 2022. It has always felt like New World was an unfinished game when it was first released, but then the developers didn't seem to be trying to complete it, but rather stuck to some plan/schedule they had come up with before launch. This could be a reflection of the studio's lack of Leadership for an extended period of time, when employees were just following their last official taskings before a management reshuffle started that didn't resolve for a year or longer. I'm still hoping that some day we get more details about the studio, like its operating budget, including how many tens of millions of dollars they paid to license CryEngine and re-brand it as their proprietary (and now defunct) Lumberyard engine. They hired some big name veterans from the games industry, and have multiple studios set up in various countries, and yet New World remains their only released AAA game, with nothing else from their studio even announced as being worked on, other than a LotR MMO that they obtained the rights for but have not yet started development on. Discospawn fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Aug 4, 2023 |
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Aug 4, 2023 20:55
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Discospawn posted:They hired some big name veterans from the games industry, and have multiple studios set up in various countries, and yet New World remains their only released AAA game, with nothing else from their studio even announced as being worked on, other than a LotR MMO that they obtained the rights for but have not yet started development on. Didn't they lose the rights to LotR? Edit: never mind, I missed the latest on this high-quality studio's expert approach to IP acquisition and game development. Guess we'll see some new and exciting ways they can fail.
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Aug 4, 2023 21:59
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It’s pretty sad because there is a lot to like about this game if they could just get the other half right and actually execute anything without breaking other stuff. The combat and world are cool and feel unique to the genre. Responsive, decently engaging action combat is lacking. Gw2 is barely action combat and eso’s combat is its main criticism. BDO does it excellently but is almost too “actiony” sometimes if you want to just chill and slow down a bit.
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Aug 6, 2023 14:52
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The game's technical problems continue to mount after the 'Performance Update' from 2 weeks ago. Yesterday, on the busiest day of the week, all US-West servers broke and stopped creating OPR matches for players. This morning AGS confirmed the problem and said they're looking into it: https://twitter.com/NWGameStatus/status/1691126847059419136 I guess the positive spin on the issue would be that not many players were affected, since yesterday the US-West region peaked at ~1,600 concurrent players, spread across 2 different servers. Edit: Meanwhile, they just released a short video about the still-delayed Transmog feature they're working on, but the 4 minute long video doesn't announce a planned release date or pricing structure for how the system will work. Discospawn fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 18:22
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https://massivelyop.com/2023/08/15/diablo-iv-temporarily-disables-player-trading-after-gamers-discover-an-item-and-gold-duping-exploit/ Guess we know where some of the New World devs ended up going to 
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Aug 15, 2023 19:15
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They had to update their splash screen art because after 2 years somebody noticed that their gibberish pseudo-language contained the word FAG:
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Aug 16, 2023 01:53
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Why did they make the image look like they scribbled over the F with a sharpie?
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Aug 16, 2023 17:29
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Please don't post AGS trade secrets
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Aug 16, 2023 20:06
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I think that may just be someone dirty rear end monitor. the main logo looks like used it as a coffee coaster too
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Aug 16, 2023 21:31
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Cutedge posted:Why did they make the image look like they scribbled over the F with a sharpie? It's clone tool'ed out. Badly. If someone actually knew how to PrintScreen to get a decent look at it we could judge their choice on where to clone from. It definitely wasn't an artist's work.
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Aug 16, 2023 21:34
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Ranzear posted:It's clone tool'ed out. Badly. If someone actually knew how to PrintScreen to get a decent look at it we could judge their choice on where to clone from. It definitely wasn't an artist's work. It definitely looks like an edit that somebody did in MS Paint or similar built-in app, rather than a professional image editor. Anybody with Photoshop would know to at least blur the edges of the edit so that it doesn't just look like a larger, dark-grey 'F' with a line through. Or it could be somebody who used Photoshop despite not knowing how to use it, when they could have done a better job using MS Paint and manually using the eye dropper and changing pixels to look more natural. In other news, they started a new 2-week event in the game today called Luck of the Bones. As a primer, last year, they introduced a new enemy called "Rafflebones" to the game, who acted as a sort of loot goblin who would occasionally spawn in the world and players could kill him for a drop from the largest loot pool of named items in the game (including named items that were in the game files since launch but had never been added to any loot pools, likely by mistake). However, players quickly discovered that Rafflebones didn't really spawn 'randomly', but had a preset spawn location in every territory, and could be slowly but reliably farmed by players who knew these locations. AGS didn't like this, so after a couple months they changed his spawn rate in a way where he essentially ceased to exist in the game. Anyways, the new event has a 'boss' version of this enemy spawn out of predefined portals every 5 minutes, and players can kill him for a drop of 4 random items from the huge loot pool. The event limits players to getting these rewards from killing him 3 times a day. So to recap: it's a re-used mob, who drops re-used loot, who provides 15 minutes of re-used 'content' a day, who only exists for the next 2 weeks. It's only been a day, but so far the event has not done anything to improve the game's population numbers. Meanwhile, the performance issues that were introduced 2 weeks ago (which seem to be primarily impacting PvP activities) are still unsolved after last night's update. I suspect AGS is behind schedule to such a degree that they're no longer trying to maintain the game, with the idea being that they can focus all of their resources on completing the content for Transmog, Season 3, and the Fall Expansion and just have 1 big, perfect, game-saving update in October. From a Systems Engineering perspective, this is usually a really bad idea, because it's basically just giving up on establishing the processes and framework needed for a stable, successful product. Instead, management just hopes that a miracle happens, and the next time they release a product with so many random variables unaccounted for, everything magically aligns and none of the previous problems repeat themselves and they also manage to stumble into success despite not having any sort of feedback loop built-in to their processes anymore.
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Aug 17, 2023 09:28
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They finally released details about the Transmog system they're introducing, and they published the article on a Friday with a set release date of this coming Monday, which is the kind of timing that organizations use when they're trying to bury bad news. Converting an item to being unlocked as a transmog option requires 1 Transmog Token. It would take 5 Transmog Tokens to create an entire armor set for all 6 armor pieces, and another 2 Transmog Tokens for a character's equipped weapon skins. These tokens will cost $2.50 each, and players can earn 1 token per week for free by farming Elite Chests, where the tokens will have a 1% drop rate. Players can also obtain 8 tokens every 3 months via the Season Pass system, 3 from the Free version of the pass and 5 from the $20 Premium version. Players have not been happy with this announcement. It's hard to believe this system will do anything to help player numbers, and it continues the trend of AGS adding microtransactions that feel like an attempt to "cash out" of the game by exploiting the remaining player base rather than a meaningful attempt to make the game financially sustainable. Edit: Well, I said that player sentiment was negative about the announcement, but due to the game's low player count the top posts of the game's subreddit now looks like this:  I guess if people were willing to stick with the game this long, they feel obligated to support anything that AGS does. Discospawn fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Aug 19, 2023 |
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Aug 19, 2023 00:18
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Yea thats a pretty lovely system. Purchasing the tokens means it would cost $20 for a single set of transmog. Farming them would be, what, nearly 2 months of grinding. Again, for a single set. I'm sure this doesn't need to even be mentioned here, because we are all used to MMOs, but you never have just 1 skin set. You often have dozens. So 1 set of transmog is basically worthless. This is definitely just the last attempts of a company to eek out every last cent it can from a game before shutting it down.
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Aug 19, 2023 00:25
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1Rc0h_F3rg Mounts New Weapon Gear Overhaul +5 Levels Mutations condensed from 10 levels to 3 New rarity tier for items $30, October 2023
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Aug 30, 2023 16:18
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