Naaaw, the Orc is sad at the state of affairs at gPotato.
It’s only been a week since gPotato answered the storm that the players of Allods Online stirred up on the official forums and blogs across the Internet. Darren Allarde, associate producer for the game at gPotato, even went on Massively Speaking to talk about the controversy. Somehow, it feels like ages ago.
And for the players of Allods, it was an eternity ago. Even though nothing was really said about what was going to be done to the cash shop prices, it seemed like the community gained a bit of trust in the developers again. At the same time, we did expect more to be said. Since there was really no more info than “we’re looking at it and discussing our options”, and nothing changing in the cash shop since last week, gPotato would do well to keep talking – no matter how impressive their communication last week was, especially for a F2P game.
Over the course of the last week, new problems have been brought up by the community. Reports of speed hacking have started to circulate (which is always tricky in a PvP-game, you have to sift through the real reports and the typical “you ganked me, so you must have used a hack-crap), gold spammers have set up shop in the Zone channels (making it even more useless than it was before). There seem to be no active GMs to battle the ongoing problems either. The silence on the forums is deafening.
Is this Aion at launch? No, it's Allods in beta. And the spam kept flowing...
I’m losing hope in Allods and gPotato. I count the hours before the first reports of bots start to appear, how the gold spammers spread out by using the mail system, how speed hacks become more and more common. And despite the game only having two servers, which should be easy to police more or less around the clock, I doubt that gPotato have what it takes to turn this game into what it could truly be.
gPotato, you impressed us all last week. But it’s not enough. Faith in the way you are handling Allods is eroding fast. You need to keep talking, you need to tell us what is happening to the game. You need to communicate more with the Russian devs, give us more information about what is going to happen in the next patch or the patch after that. Where do you want the game to be when you “launch”? You opened your mouth, your current silence seems more like you’re only waiting it out, hoping that the problems will all go away.
I am finishing up my feature about Allods tomorrow, hopefully it will be published in both Swedish and English tomorrow or later this week. It feels odd, but it will end on a rather sad note. My faith that Allods will actually live up to its potential is gone, unless gPotato suddenly turns around and start talking to us again. I will leave my mage in Yasker’s Tower, waiting to see what happens from this point on. I do hope to return soon.
Time passes quickly in the MMO-sphere and trust is such a fickle thing.
Edit: A few minutes after I posted this, gPotato posted on their Allods Twitter about a new announcement. True enough, they have now posted on the official website that they are “making revisions to a majority of the Allods Online item shop” and that these changes will go live sometime during this week. They thank everyone for the feedback and that they’ve “revised pricing so that more people can participate in this feature of the game”. No actual news on what kinds of revisions they are doing, but I guess we will see later this week. Have they learned their lesson?
I knew I should have waited posting this entry until Monday was offically over…
