However, it’s worth noting that improved relative subscriber retention and increased new users may still mean that overall subscriptions are dropping. Since the PC game’s May 2008 launch, subscriber figures fell far short of expectations, leading to the closure of 31 out of 42 servers.

I knew AoC had been slipping, but didn’t know that they closed 3/4 of their servers since I quit playing. Maybe Darkfall’s incremental approach isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Puzzle Pirates I also liked, and I’ve played it for a while – on the old subscription model (they didn’t use Doubloons when I joined). The big problem with it was that it didn’t offer any tutorial or guidelines in how to advance. I basically played the puzzles from the “Ahoy!” menu that you get when you begin, and there was no sign of how I would get a shop or ship or even why I would want to, so I continued to use it basically just as a puzzle game compilation.

I dont think that Free Realms would be this succesful if you had to interact with other players. After all, most people want MMOs to be like single player games. Aka, interact with others just because they want to, not because is neccesary for anything.

IMHO, that kills the entire idea of a MMO, but it sells. And all its about selling, amirite?

Mikey :
Much better than Wow. Wow has ruined the MMO market, bringing a new generation of ignorant gamers who don’t really understand how to work hard for anything. (Everquest taught us to be on our best game, death = lost xp = hours of wasted time, and levels equated to skill.) This dumbed-down arrival of the newbie MMOer has turned WoW into just another Diablo environment.
Free realms is doing significant damage to Wow, we actually interviewed a guy from Blizzard a few weeks ago and he stated they had been quite concerned about what this game would do to “their” market. Blizzard simply has nerfed too much and attracted too many l33td00dz to make it a fun environment anymore.
Good job Sony, glad to see a quality MMO coming out to finally level the playing field.

Ridiculous. WoW earned, and has sustained itself as the leader because it catered to what a majority of gamers wanted. Games have not surpassed WoW because they are not catering to what a majority of gamers want.

It’s nothing more, nor nothing less, than that.

For those who might not know, the blue oceans are exclusively for subscribers, but the green oceans have a “doubloon” system in which key goods require payment in both pieces-of-eight (which was the in-game currency) and doubloons (which you could buy for cash, or by exchanging pieces of eight at an auction house). Say, for example, that you wanted to buy a sloop, the smallest vessel in the game; prices when I played (Hunter Ocean) were 7,000-10,000 pieces of eight to purchase, and 20 doubloons for the “delivery”. But you can buy doubloons with pieces of eight, and it could go (at the time) from 700 to 1300 PoE per doubloon (I just logged in to check, and the exchange is now 2400 per doubloon). Likewise, if you want to be able to serve as officer on a crew, you need a badge, which has a doubloon price (from 8 to 20 for Captains), and so on. Basic goods are the only items exempted, but anything fancier than a striped shirt will carry a doubloon delivery price.

I could state for the record that my reason for not playing it anymore was the way they handled the foraging loophole. In a nutshell, before they closed the loophole, players could get wealthy by creating alts and using them to forage. The only requirements were that each alt had to own a labor badge (5 doubloons) and be logged in for 10 minutes at an undeveloped island. You could create up to 3 accounts (with 3 pirates each) per computer within a period of 3 months, so anyone starting out with enough wherewithal could theoretically get 9 pirates to forage. But inevitably you got cases of players using all the computers in their college dorm to create alts, and there was one player I remember who had upward of 100 (he didn’t even bother to find names for them anymore, he just numbered them), which made my 20 alts (at most; usually I bothered with only 12) look like a mom-and-pop operation by comparison. So it was inevitable that Three Rings would clamp down on that, even though it was a gray zone in terms of legality (it apparently was okay as long as you didn’t mess with the game files to create more alts than you could).

So they brought in a puzzle, a nice, slow one, that simply made it impossible to run three or four windows of the game at once and make your alts wait their 10 minutes before using them, because you would be so busy playing the puzzle with one character that if you did that with all your alts, you would waste your entire day doing it.

Three Rings’ idea was necessary, but imagine bringing that into the game years after some servers had launched. People who got rich with foraging would now be living with a cushion under them which new players couldn’t have. And it meant the old, rich, established alliances which had foraging empires would be able to remain on top despite losing this as a source of revenue, because nobody could catch up with them now (or not in the short term, at least). But wiping the servers would have been so unpopular that they had no choice but to get rid of the loophole and let the players live with the consequences.

The class question is interesting too, because I saw a great deal of that in Puzzle Pirates.

You would have the low-class pirates, newcomers with just the clothes they were created with, living in their free shack with cheap furniture that required no doubloons; at best, they might have the pirate badge, their first expense. Since skill also played a role in which class you would reach, most players with some skill at a puzzle and some dedication would rise above that.

Then you had the middle class, with decent low-level housing with ordinary furniture, and wearing some of the less expensive doubloon clothes. On top of that, they usually owned a sloop with an officer badge to sail it. As officers in charge of a ship, they were usually a waste of time to truly skilled players, but they still made some decent money that way. Most players seemed to stay at that stage.

Above that, you had the upper middle class, with a second-tier house and good furniture, fine yet practical clothing, and a few vessels to their name. Some would go for status items like pets and portraits, or would get into shopkeeping with varying degrees of success. In terms of skill, they would be semi-elite, excelling at perhaps one puzzle or two but without the connections to be invited to truly elite expeditions. This was the level I had reached when I quit, because I had pretty much hit the ceiling.

And finally you had the rich classes, dressed in gold and black (the two most expensive colours in the game), with extravagant housing and furniture, as well as extensive fleets (military and commercial). They would excel at many puzzles (sometimes all), had been playing for years, knew all the people worth knowing, were mainstays on elite pillages, and would dabble in politics. Because of their connections, they owned the largest shops in the game (for which you had to get a deed from an island governor). Everybody knew their names.

So yes, there was class warfare in Puzzle Pirates — plenty of it — but strangely enough it could bypass the doubloon purchasing process altogether. There was a definite tendency to denigrate those who bought their wealth with real money, as exemplified by the pejorative expression “CC (credit card) Captain”: http://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Credit_card_captain . In this case, it is a very interesting consideration. Gold buyers in subscription-based games are frowned upon because the practice is illegal and regarded as cheating, but that gold buying should be regarded in the same light in a game with a business model clearly designed this way is, to say the least, fascinating. Credit-card-bought wealth plus skill = good; credit-card-bought wealth minus skill = bad. There lies, in a nutshell, Puzzle Pirates’ elitism.

I’m not sure if other cash-shop games face a similar problem, except maybe among freeloading purists but certainly not among the bulk of players. And I’m not sure if Three Rings might have been negatively affected by this.

So the real class warfare in PP always had an element of skill involved; elite pillages, for instance, always gave more loot, the amount of which was linked to the skill displayed by the people taking part. It does seem to be one of PP’s distinctive features, and I’m not sure it is to be found in Freerealms.

I still have to try Freerealms, but when I realized that it had classes and such reserved for subscribers, I’m wondering how close it really is to Puzzle Pirates’ model as opposed to, say, Runescape’s (which did have exclusive skills and most of the map reserved for subscribers). Puzzle Pirates’ model, after all, hinges on offering non-subscribers everything in the game, at much higher prices, true, but if you have the money, you can buy it. Runescape and other games of a similar nature offer non-subscribers only the barest bones, which seems to be what Freerealms is really about.

As for Freerealms’ visual design, I finally remembered what it reminds me of: AdventureQuest with slightly less faux-anime, and with some WoW thrown in.

I still haven’t tried the game out myself, though. Just repeating what I’ve heard.

taodon :
Isn’t FreeRealms just Class Warfare Online?

A well-designed game will avoid this. The “have nots” as you wish to call them will have more time to spend in the game and gain in-game rewards, whereas the “haves” will have more money to spend on items. A smart game will make sure that the “have nots” don’t get too screwed, otherwise the social fabric of the game will be hurt.

Check out how Puzzle Pirates runs their dual currency system to see a way for people with lots of time and people with lots of money to actually work together. You don’t have to spend a dime in Puzzle Pirates on the green oceans if you don’t want, and you can still get anything people who pay for currency can get.