Business model outdated

[aramsunat]

I corrected it for you


"No1. reason: I think most f2p/p2w/farm2p MMOs suck donkey balls. I think they are plain bad in comparison. "

Correction: "No1. reason: WE think most f2p/p2w/farm2p MMOs suck donkey balls. I think they are plain bad in comparison. "

I am fairly certain most people who still play AO didnt quit / came back for the sole reason that there is no better alternative.

More profitable = more likely to result in better maintenance, updates and so on.

Exactly. While many games receive a lot of updates and maintenance, they are calibrated to last 2-3 years tops before casual people move on to the new ones. There are rare examples of such mmos surviving for more years but I doubt it was planned. If there is a really good engaging game with great depth and enough trial options to bite the hook, people would pay even subscriptions.

The sad fact is that making a really high quality, deep and complex game is not in the interest of the purely money-motivated developers/studios because of two reasons:
- they discriminate dumb people, cutting off a significant portion of the population
- they are way too risky. Stock MMOs are cheaper to make and pay their cost back in a much shorter time frame = less risky.

[Gimpynoob]

What AO could have is a mixed system. Subscribers (aka "citizens") would be able to buy cash-shop items ingame from specialized shops with credits. Free players (aka "residents") would need to buy those items from the online store with RL money.

[Raelil]

I got 3 running active accs atm, and ive got no problem paying the sub cost. I like supporting FC, as i thoroughly enjoy AO.

It would cost me more to go out to a bar for a single evening than it would to pay those 3 once a month, and even less if i used the long term models.

My ONLY hurt with their system as it is at the moment, is the redicilous difference between EU customers and US, price wise.

[TheSneakyRussian]

"Free-To-Play" has shown time after time to only be for dead/dieing games, or low quality pieces of crap.

AO is still a good game, but they're NOT updating it leaving tons of old bugs that have been in place for YEARS.


$15/month is CHEAP compared to what they rip away and lock behind the cash-shop from you.


Free-To-Play is OBSOLETE the moment it came out. P2P is still the best, but they're intentionally ignoring AO to death.

[aramsunat]

AO IS getting constant updates. Many bugs are fixed and FC reasonably reacts to public opinion. Of course there are many things that even the majority of players might consider an annoyance, "bug", "unintended" etc. but FC does well to be careful about those. Sometimes players are prone with all their whining to ruin their own game. The devs shouldnt be spoon-feeding sugardaddies

I reckon there might be some old real bugs in the code, but it seems they werent considered to be game breaking and the effort to fix them is not worth it.

[Lordaegis]

I think FC is smart enough to make AO cheaper before they take it to steam

AO is one of most expensive games now and AO lost 2 servers which is very bad for any game

also AO is very hard for new players .. I think it's why FC don't make any advertisement for AO anymore