Game Director Letter - April 2013

[kalston]

Since servers are now in the US for good, how about adjusting the price of the subs for the Euros? Paying 15€ for a 100% US based game on which Americans spend $15 is not acceptable especially given the impact of latency on pvp. Didn't you adjust the price for Russians too when you merged them with other Euro servers?

[Misiuggah]

Funcom don't needs money because of TSW only... FC treads down the community since AoC was released. FC always had a good hand for making mistakes. FC always had a good hand to make false decisions. That´s all.

They also had a good hand for making brilliant yet flawed games

Somehow the best games always come with a side of crap. Black Isle, Troika, Obsidian...

[Kurt2013]

It would not cost much to adjust the item shop for more revenue or give good special offers each month.

[Invino]

Since servers are now in the US for good, how about adjusting the price of the subs for the Euros? Paying 15€ for a 100% US based game on which Americans spend $15 is not acceptable especially given the impact of latency on pvp. Didn't you adjust the price for Russians too when you merged them with other Euro servers?

This! Right now.In fact, we need a $5 discount for the extra lag.

So if I were to make a new account, I'd pick US now and pocket the difference. (I have a US account, which FC forced on me 1st time, so had to buy the game AGAIN)

[Wickeds]

Funcom said they have to move the servers to the US to get it easier with the merge but thats a lie. They only want to save money, not more. They don´t care about the people. It´s like in the past 5 years. Money is FC´s best friend but they often forget who will give them their money...

that was obvious to anyone with a thought process from the start. and you act like it's a surprise, no company cares about the people, it's always about money. and well, people asked for servers to be linked up a lot in the last 2 years so it's not like they're not doing what people asked for.

the ideal scenario would ofc be to have both linked, but be able to choose if you want to switch over for instances etc so, there might be a eu hosted mini queue and a us hosted queue, so if the one you usually play on is in dead time, you can go play on the other, and same with dungeons and even just instances in general. but that would have costed them a ton more money which they are supposed to be saving to keep from going under, so, in a way it is for the "people", dead game soon, or dead game later, any fan of the game would take the latter so.

[Kurt2013]

If it was about money, they must have had not the best of economic advisors. Though we will see about it in autumn.
Legally, they deliberately reduced the quality of their product. So in their own interest they should consider something like sub price reduction (not only because of that, but also because lower prices might make the decision to sub for a while or not easier for many f2p players now). They already said though, that they consider or plan changes to the f2p model (if those are good, still remains to be seen).

I am always surprised how people in economics present something as hard unavoidable fact or causal chain, while in reality it is just one choice of many.

[Wickeds]

If it was about money, they must have had not the best of economic advisors. Though we will see about it in autumn.

they should have sold it off to someone who has a clue and could resurrect it years ago. you guys rage on joel but really, he was dealt the worst hand possible after craig ran the game into the ground and almost killed it countless times (i'd say the closest the game came to death was december 2011, it's amazing people came back after that garbage) and is trying to pick up the pieces.

[Kurt2013]

Neither blaming or raging at him. He surely not responsible for certain decisions, the history of the company or the company structure and even if, he could have had bad advisors with the best intentions.

What puzzles me is just, why (assuming they need money) they are taking risky moves instead of at least doing some "sure" measures on the side? Also they are seemingly quite good at making it hard for people willing to spend money to actually do it

Take the online shop: Lots of suggestions online already...people even tell them what they would buy under which conditions.

[Karadok]

It would not cost much to adjust the item shop for more revenue or give good special offers each month.

I´m wondering about this too. The last shop update was the war mare, and this was months ago. Why not put some cool looking vanity armor into the shop every now and then ? In TSW they put new items into the shop weekly.

I see that the main revenue in TSW comes from the shop, so they have to work on it more than in AoC where the main revenue comes from subs, but there are also a lot of players in AoC who are willing to pay some extra bucks for some cool looking stuff.

They also should expand the stuff at the veteran merchants regularly so that the players with hundreds of vet tokens have something to spend on. This would give more value to the subs.

they should have sold it off to someone who has a clue and could resurrect it years ago. ...

Sometimes I thought the same, but then I told me "be careful what you wish for, it might become true". Imagine a company like €A would take over, they would make a mainstream cash cow of AoC, and I guess that´s something that nobody wants.