I'll save people some time and say in advance that I'm probably beating a dead horse here. That out of the way I'm just going to go right ahead and say it. What in the **** has happened to this game? I remember the alpha coming out and having so many high hopes for the game. The graphics were great, the storyline was entertaining, and most importantly they took so many of the things that made other games of this genre tedious, annoying and P2W and did away with them. Yeah, there was stamina but you could still play quite a bit each day, yeah there was things to buy with shardium but they were minor/cosmetic. The game was fun, there were a ton of new players, chat was lively, we even got featured on the front page of kongregate. Since then it's been a never-ending death spiral.

The game is slowly having the fun sucked out of it. It's great up until you finish the current story, then it's literally nothing but grind. Grind HoT to get 5 sets of equipment for you and your companions, grind MP to get 5 sets of equipment to hold you over until then, grind brotherhood missions to get some tiny fraction of a bonus to your stats, then go grind missions to maybe get enough gold to enchant a piece of equipment up a few levels, oh and grind levels whacking objects to maybe get enough gems to decently gem equipment me, all so you can go grind out 20 arena battles so you can do it all over tomorrow.I realize this genre is based partly on grinding, that's fine, but it just isn't fun anymore.

Then there's guilds, which we may as well not even have. There's what, 2, maybe 3 active guilds on the server if you're lucky. The rest of us are lucky to have 2 or 3 active members. No worries, we'll pick up so more new players. Oh no, wait, we won't because the server split killed the population. Even when we're lucky enough to get a new player on the server they won't join our guild because there's no active members.

Why aren't their active members? Because apparently the devs are dead set on trying to do everything possible to ruin any chance of success the game had and milk as much money out of it as possible before the inevitable shut-down. It's like, almost every single day I log into the game and there's some new thing being sold for shardium. Would that be so bad in and of itself? No really. It's the massive increase in P2W elements that's destroying it. I'm sorry, the HoT glyphs amoung other things have completely passed the line of "Minor stat increases" to straight-up P2W territory. Oh, but no, it's okay, we get 1 whole glyph a month if we check in every day, yeah, that definitely evens things out. Why don't you just drop all the shardium items and make this game subscription based already. If you have any intention of trying to get anywhere on the leaderboards you're practically going to be paying one anyway.

I know some people are going to ask why I'm even still playing at this point. Because honestly I just can't bring myself to give up on a character I've probably put a few hundred hours towards at this point, as well as $100+ towards. Giving up feels like I've wasted all that time and money that I was so excited to put towards this game in the beginning. I'm getting there though, I'm slowly spending less and less time on this game and it sucks. We used to have such a fun active community around here. I used to hang out in the chat for hours talking to some of the new friends I made playing this game. Now, they're all gone.

Am I mad? Somewhat. Mostly, I'm just disappointed. I fought with people numerous times in alpha, and again when beta started that this wasn't going to turn into a P2W, cash-grab game. I argued numerous times that we need to trust the devs because of how good they did with BW2. I defended them time and time again in regards to how few updates we were getting. All that for what? The game is turning into a complete P2W cash-grab, exactly what it looked like it was trying so hard not to be in alpha. The dev team is practically non-existant. We went from having a team that kept us updated almost daily and put out numerous updates, to what's now a ghost town where we don't have the slightest clue of what's going on anymore, we've got content that's been promised for over 4 months now that appears to be no closer to release, we got a game that's practically dead because of how the devs are choosing to change and manage the game and we've even got the cash grabbing slowly leaking into the other games like BW2.

I don't really know what else to say. I wish I could understand what in the **** is going on at the CNE offices where these choices sound like a good idea and make sense. Do you guys just not care anymore? Is the company going under? Are you just being greedy? Seriously, what is going on these days. I just don't understand how a company whose games I've played daily for a few years now, spent I don't even know how much money on and defended so unquestionably is going downhill so badly. I think you guys owe us an answer for at least that.

Couldn't have said it better.

All good points, I like the idea of some sort of fundraising if the devs are in need of it.
But a quick point in defence of the paying features. They are not that bad, yes the packs are expensive for the in game bonuses you get. But the content in the packs is all stuff that you can find ingame. All paying does is speed up the endgame grind a bit. I have played many games where paying players have gear so far superior to non-paying that there is no way to compete with them. This game doesn't do that, you can compete without paying.

Very well answered David... If it was as bad as Tsu is suggesting, then I wouldn't be playing any more.

I do also like the comment about "if we wanted to play wartune, we'd play wartune"... It is sad to see the game getting very similar to wartune (not that I've played it, but Annie says it is getting more and more like wartune with each update).

As a competitive player, I've always said I'll quit the game when I feel I can no longer be competitive due to high-spending players... It seems like it's just a matter of time until that happens... but I'm not put off by the balance yet (I'm still here!).

I appreciate you taking the time out to answer david, and I'll try and take the time to clear up what I said before, since some parts of it were probably badly worded/unclear.

"As a development team we have always been very wary of anything that is pay to win, we value the player experience being fair for everyone. In the interest of fairness where ever possible we try to make purchased items save time, and reduce grinding, but always be within reach of someone who invests with time and dedication."

As a general idea, I think that's great and it's refreshing to see that point of view in a time where far too many developers are trying to pull a hit and run on their players.

"The game needs to support itself, we need to pay our developers, our artists, and our content creators, we also need to pay for servers and bandwidth. The game is free to play, but it has to offer something in game for players to purchase otherwise how can we afford to produce it?"

I also understand that. I work in IT and have also worked in game development before so I know how fast the cost for things like servers and devs can add up. In the past when I worked on games we afforded it by following the standard business model of P=R-E, meaning, if the game didn't make money, then neither did we. I'm not saying this was an ideal situation, far from it as it meant that all of us had to have at least a part time job elsewhere. I'm not saying that's what you guys should do, or that's something that is right for you guys, but just giving the example of what we did.

"We feel that offering items like the Hall of Trials Glyph is actually a very reasonable way to do this. I would argue strongly that it is not a pay to win feature. If you chose to buy one your next Hall of Trials run rewards twice as many tokens. This gets you ahead by one days worth of Hall of Trails tokens. A good value for the player who got the Glyph, and not out of reach for a player only investing their time in the game."

My issue isn't the player who buys 1 glyph every so often, it's the prospect of people buying several and getting several days ahead of people who buy none. HoT is basically the best equipment in the game, add onto that the bonuses from uses slotting rods on it and being able to lock and reroll stats on top of other paid bonuses like potions and clothing I can help but feel there's a potential for that gap to grow quite a bit, especially since may players may not be able to invest a lot of time into the game each day.

"I think if you can answer the question "Can a player reasonably get this item or the value it provides by investing their time?" with a yes then the item being sold isn't pay to win."

So far the only ways to get glyphs that I've seen is buy them or get 1 a month. 1 a month is practically negligible to a free player. For $5 I can get 2 days worth of tokens. I'd have to play just shy of 2 months to get that without spending money. Then there's slotting rod, I've still seen several people who haven't gotten a single 1 outside of paying since they were added, including myself. How is that something a free player can reasonably get?

"I know the Jungle update is a long time coming but we have been making steady progress on it. We have a lot of things to juggle so progress hasn't been what we would have hoped but a lot of hours are dedicated to it! Plus the features like Crafting, and Being able to upgrade your gears are important to getting the Jungle out so they are in part steps towards the Jungle! It's coming! I'm sorry its not here yet, but it is coming!"

The problem is this has become a boy who cried wolf situation. We keep getting told it's coming and things are leading up to it, but we've seen all of what? Like 2 screenshots of it? I'm not saying you guys are lying, but that it's hard to take any kind of stock in that.

So I have two questions for you:

1. What you feel is and isn't reasonable for us to sell in the game? if you limit the sales to cosmetic items, and cosmetic items don't make enough to support the game what would you do?

As much as no one wants to hear it, you then question the viability of keeping the game open. Does anyone want to see the game close? Fuck no. But the reality is that's what happens. You either find a way to support the game directly or you find a more indirect method of doing it, whether that means pulling money from another game, partnering up with someone, selling the game, doing a fundraiser, taking a loan, whatever.

2. When you reach the end of the campaign content what would you propose as an alternative to repeating content such as the HoT, Brotherhood Tasks, and Bounties?

My issue isn't so much the fact that content repeats so much as this game has become equipment upgrade simulator. There's no real point going after achievements since there's no benfit to them, and often times doing so will mean giving up the chance to grind out another equipment level's worth of resources. I want something more interactive to then then just spamming the 1 key on my keyboard and playing BW2.5 with all the breakable level objects. Give me an option to skip running though a level/mp instance and just straight to the reward. Like pay 20 stamina to do it normally, 25 to skip through. I'd gladly trade off doing 1 less quest a day to skip through the other 4 faster. Given me a way to upgrade my fishing rod so I can fish up my 20 stamina faster, I'd gladly through $5 towards a permenant upgraded fishing rod that got me 4 energy a minute.

Remerge the servers. The server split killed any chance of anyone being able to have a guild. It's also made it more difficult to find other players for mp. Scale back the amount of advertising at least until you manage to get the jungle shard released. Get back involved with the community. Ever since kittychix left it's been like a dev ghost town around here. No one has any idea what's going on around here any more and it just makes it look more and more like you're abandoning the game. No is going to spend money on a game they think is dying.

Put together some kind of beta-testing team. I know game balance isn't an easy thing, but there's just way too much content getting put out that just feels rushed and unbalanced. You have 2 servers. Merge the players into 1 server, get some other players together to do a private beta on the other. Find ways to put out smaller but more consistant content. Instead of trying to put out the whole jungle shard at once. Put up a mission or two each Friday or something. This game is dying because you're losing both the interest and trust of your players, you guys need to find ways to get those back and throwing more pay options at them isn't one of them.

My biggest concern to this Game imbalance is Simply the Reforging, It costs a Cash maller 1-2 $ to reforge their gear, to a cash maller this ammount is practically nothing, a mere 10th of an hour of work. However the problem i have is that a none cashmaller doing 20 PVP battles 5 MP and 6 Campaigns, can only get Maybe, 1-2 Reforges a day. were the cashmaller can reforge their gear an obserd ammount of times. You limit everything else, i say if your not going to stop them from cash malling reforges, AT THE VERY LEAST. make reforging cap at 5 times a day.

Lol, that's what I was just googling myself. :D

Well, for someone who has spent some money on the game and is a regular VIP, I can say that I rarely reforge my HoT gear. Always only after I had grinded enough HoT tokens to buy one item. And because I did all stamina missions and MP's every day, I had enough crystals to upgrade them to epic ones, so I can reroll my epic secondary stats. There were some people that I know of that used shardium to reroll their equipment, but I don't see how they are unbeatable in arena in any way.

I have spent a few shards here and there to buy an odd intel gem in the shop, just because my luck of having them drop has been disasterous, also the absence of the slotting rod (bugger just doesn't drop for me) "encouraged" me to buy the V-day's pack. I guess I don't mind spending on things that seem important to me because I love the game, love myself having a good time, and occasionally I even do love the devs. We give them hard time 24/7 but they are working hard to provide us with this game, new content and, in the end, if you feel like it's unfair that they ask for money (in exchange for some game stuff) because they have invested their time and talents in this game, well, maybe you're just being a douchebag yourself. We all need to pay bills, don't forget that.

I've quoted it many times before... but it seems appropriate to quote it again: (just copying from an old post)

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"I think that video games can cut through discrimination." "When you play a game, it doesn't matter what your gender is, it doesn't matter your sexual preference, your social class, your ethnicity - the only thing that matters when you play a game, is how good you are at the game - Nothing else”. ~Eric Jordan (CEO at CNE)

I agreed with everything he said there - Taken from his TEDx talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEjzSnSR2xY#t=492

Except... your 'social class' does matter in a MASSIVE way in a game built like this... In how much spare disposable income you have to spend on a ‘free-to-play’ game... But this 'pay-to-win' structure the game is being built around, is de-evolving all the good things games have grown into.