Fizzgig
Young
- Joined
- Mar 4, 2010
- Posts
- 13
Welcome, have a seat while I tell you of my magical month long journey through Planet Calypso!
It all started when I read a Yahoo! article about Neverdie and his interstellar night club, and how he made a million dollars off of it. That sounded pretty cool. So I looked the game up and gave it a download.
At that point in time I thought the game was pretty new, maybe 1-2 years old (which might explain why I had never heard of it). But no, I found out later that it was over 5 years old which was pretty shocking. But anyway back to the download. I had figured that a lot of new players were downloading the game because there was a notice on the website that they were having issues with users downloading patches. Okay no problem, new game, new press, lots of new users (so I thought) and so I waited, starting up the launcher a few times a day to see if it worked, never did. A week passed before I decided to look into this further. I manually downloaded the patches and applied them in order to finally get the game to work. Then I remember a few days after that a new patch came up and the loader wouldn't automatically load it, AND trying to go to the website to download it wouldn't work either until I did some tricky stuff to get it to work. As a computer science major I know my way around a pc but I strongly feel that less knowledgeable users would have quit when the loader did not work.
So MindArk, making it as difficult as possible to simply log into the game as a new player is probably not the best business model... but I digress.
Hooray! A week has passed and I am now in the game! Hmm interesting, everyone is white, oh well I'm not bothered, I don't care about graphics much at all when it comes to games, I want content. A week later I find out that it is because my graphics are on safe mode, which was kinda funny. The Entropia world really is beautiful when the settings are up.
A few times I have traveled the world and I'm really amazed with it's beauty and scope, MindArk has done a great job with it I think. Well, that is until I read a post about a landowner who invested heavily in flat land which was sent in upheaval after the v10 update.
For the last month I have been sweating, exploring (a bit), and absorbing as much information about this game as I can. After a month my account is worth about 220 PED (approx. 45k sweat gathered).
So here's what I'm trying to get at: If I deposit it will be for an amount necessary to buy something I deem is a worthy investment, which I would estimate to be $15,000-30,000. However, a number of things concern me which is why I most likely will never invest in this game, some of those include:
1. MindArk placing graphics above game play in the following areas:
a. Changing landscape which affected the value of investors negatively.
b. Disabling the use of Hangars (I don't care what kind of compensation program is going to happen, that is just unprofessional).
c. Disabling taming and mindforce.
2. Instantiating "banks" which are little more than pawnshops.
3. Never following through with the stock market. Which leads to (4).
4. Keeping the scope of the game very narrow. For this game to truly be a virtual universe Calypso needs more than hunting, mining, and a few professions. I'm sure you guys at MindArk have some great ideas but invest in some talent and pump out some updates which fix some very basic issues fast.
5. Put a cap on deposit and withdraw fees. I can understand squeezing the nickles and dimes out of regular depositors, but I'm not going to deposit 20k in a game with the above mentioned issues only to get 19k back on the initial investment when I cash out.
Maybe you want to cater to the more casual player who deposits $20-100 on ammo and blows it all hoping for an uber hof, which is fine, I can certainly understand that. However, if you want large investors (which I'm sure you do), you guys really gotta get your stuff together!
I'll be casually sweating until I feel like this is game is a reasonable place to put some cash.
Peace, John Marshall Raleigh.
It all started when I read a Yahoo! article about Neverdie and his interstellar night club, and how he made a million dollars off of it. That sounded pretty cool. So I looked the game up and gave it a download.
At that point in time I thought the game was pretty new, maybe 1-2 years old (which might explain why I had never heard of it). But no, I found out later that it was over 5 years old which was pretty shocking. But anyway back to the download. I had figured that a lot of new players were downloading the game because there was a notice on the website that they were having issues with users downloading patches. Okay no problem, new game, new press, lots of new users (so I thought) and so I waited, starting up the launcher a few times a day to see if it worked, never did. A week passed before I decided to look into this further. I manually downloaded the patches and applied them in order to finally get the game to work. Then I remember a few days after that a new patch came up and the loader wouldn't automatically load it, AND trying to go to the website to download it wouldn't work either until I did some tricky stuff to get it to work. As a computer science major I know my way around a pc but I strongly feel that less knowledgeable users would have quit when the loader did not work.
So MindArk, making it as difficult as possible to simply log into the game as a new player is probably not the best business model... but I digress.
Hooray! A week has passed and I am now in the game! Hmm interesting, everyone is white, oh well I'm not bothered, I don't care about graphics much at all when it comes to games, I want content. A week later I find out that it is because my graphics are on safe mode, which was kinda funny. The Entropia world really is beautiful when the settings are up.
A few times I have traveled the world and I'm really amazed with it's beauty and scope, MindArk has done a great job with it I think. Well, that is until I read a post about a landowner who invested heavily in flat land which was sent in upheaval after the v10 update.
For the last month I have been sweating, exploring (a bit), and absorbing as much information about this game as I can. After a month my account is worth about 220 PED (approx. 45k sweat gathered).
So here's what I'm trying to get at: If I deposit it will be for an amount necessary to buy something I deem is a worthy investment, which I would estimate to be $15,000-30,000. However, a number of things concern me which is why I most likely will never invest in this game, some of those include:
1. MindArk placing graphics above game play in the following areas:
a. Changing landscape which affected the value of investors negatively.
b. Disabling the use of Hangars (I don't care what kind of compensation program is going to happen, that is just unprofessional).
c. Disabling taming and mindforce.
2. Instantiating "banks" which are little more than pawnshops.
3. Never following through with the stock market. Which leads to (4).
4. Keeping the scope of the game very narrow. For this game to truly be a virtual universe Calypso needs more than hunting, mining, and a few professions. I'm sure you guys at MindArk have some great ideas but invest in some talent and pump out some updates which fix some very basic issues fast.
5. Put a cap on deposit and withdraw fees. I can understand squeezing the nickles and dimes out of regular depositors, but I'm not going to deposit 20k in a game with the above mentioned issues only to get 19k back on the initial investment when I cash out.
Maybe you want to cater to the more casual player who deposits $20-100 on ammo and blows it all hoping for an uber hof, which is fine, I can certainly understand that. However, if you want large investors (which I'm sure you do), you guys really gotta get your stuff together!
I'll be casually sweating until I feel like this is game is a reasonable place to put some cash.
Peace, John Marshall Raleigh.