Romdeau wrote:Alteil's staff (Japanese and US) should really take note of how well this truly free to play game is doing. You can literally unlock all the playable content in the game if you are willing to put in enough time to play. This is a high quality, evolving game that is constantly updated with changes to the balance. New content and events are happening all the time.
I understand that it's a bit harder to directly translate their model of success to Alteil, but in theory it should work something like this: new events happening regularly (think once a week), changes to cards being made at least every month (in response to player feedback and internal testing), and allowing players to unlock most of the content for free if they are willing to put in a reasonable amount of time to play every day.
It may be very late into Alteil's life to make such a drastic change, but better late than never. The game's popularity would drastically increase.
I quit alteil after the last errata completely. Been playing League of Legends instead. I didn't play dota, rather I made fun of my roomate for playing it, but LoL has been way more fun than alteil ever was (I got like 200 matches on alteil which take anywhere from 15-30min from over a year, whereas I have about 150 matches on LoL which take 30-70min over a 1month period). LoL's transaction model is much better than alteil's ever will be (which is moot since Alteil is making money according to Logress and to sumarize what he said 'we'd be crazy to change how we do things since we're doing something right'), and they're attentive to user feedback and fairly open to discuss specifics (and make the changes!). Pretty much every week there are balance updates, bug fixes, improvements, and heroes rotate weekly now too. I actually ended up liking the game so much, I bought the collector's pack off ebay for 15 dollars, which gave me 20 champions and 10 dollars in "riot points" aka gran. What people have said about not being able to unlock the full game until lvl 30 is a bit misleading, since you're generally matched with players of similar level. You don't need to have every champion unlocked to enjoy the game (most people decide to master 1 or 2 champs first to begin with anyways and champs are rotated weekly), and masteries and runes do matter, but not in a terribly significant way (it's a team game after all). Either way, for 15 dollars I unlocked half the champs and got credited 10 dollars in cash points, whereas in Alteil I think I probably threw down about 100 dollars over 16 months or so and wasn't able to actually complete any real playsets of anything above 2*'s.
The real kicker is the only items that require cash purchase and actually cost anything are skins. Personally I find it to be a waste of money, but apparently it's not to many other people who enjoy those kinds of aesthetics and it seems to generate enough profit. I've seen it in other games too like Pangya! and many other mmo's where aesthetic items were cash only, though sometimes they did add stats. Obviously this would never work for alteil because our avatars are so pathetic looking (it's like I'm back in 1991), although seasonal cards are a better analog to aesthetic items in other mmos than our avatars. The skins in LoL game don't add anything to the gameplay, though runes do, however runes are in game money only, so cash can't buy you an advantage. Also, ranking matches are limited to lvl 20-30 only, where the top tier runes become available, so lower level players can enjoy normal unranked matches.
Alteil is of course more accessible of course, pc-anywhere wise, but just a thought in comparing how these two games are managed. Especially when looking at how much has been changed, balanced, and added since even the last post in this thread was made. (like several new champs, an upcoming new champ, and of course, significant balance changes and client/server improvements)
Of course I'm not saying to pick one or the other, me quitting Alteil had nothing to do with me picking up LoL and vice versa, I'd play both if Alteil could get things right. You even earn XP/IP (IP is the in game currency) from practice matches, whether they be vs humans or bots with only a 10% penalty, although you are limited to 4-6 practice games that earn you xp/ip, after that the penalty becomes 100% and you earn nothing. I think a similar system was suggested for Alteil, but cries of 'abuse' were probably shouted, but if alteil had 2-3 games where you could play in training or vs the bots where you could earn reduced xp/fm, I'm sure almost nobody would complain as this would help lower level players reach their level up goals much easier. With bot lvls that only go up to 35? I think, level 100 players would obviously benefit much less from grinding bots than newbies would, which is how it should be.
Peace out, ign Multiplatinum
Sometimes, it's like this.
