Gala-Net Responds: Prices Coming Down, Point Is Moot

When Cryptic Studios announced that the upcoming expansion to Champions Online, Vibora Bay, would be a paid expansion, the reaction from the community was nothing short of explosive. Players saw an expansion adding in what should have been added in (a fill-in for the late game leveling gap), and overall were quite offended at having to pay for something they saw as vital to the game. Something worthy of note is that, even after Cryptic announced that the expansion would be free, the players were still angry about it, but now for other reasons.

The point with Cryptic is that the community felt that they were trying to get away with as much as they could, believing that the paid expansion announcement was a test to see if the community would buy into it. Thus, Cryptic had essentially sealed their fate from the first announcement. The same is going on with Allods Online and Gala-Net’s current predicament: The cash shop is ten times the price of the Russian version, and core game elements were removed or gutted in order to force people to fork out real money.

gPotato put out a release late last night in response to several criticisms of the game that surfaced over the past week. Among the two responses, the cash shop price:

“We are not sitting and waiting just to see how many dollars we’re going to make over the next four weeks.”

This raises several questions. If you weren’t looking to see how much money you could get, then why did Gala-net raise the prices ten times over the Russian version? Why was end-game raiding severely gimped in order to make perfume use mandatory? There are more questions to be asked, and even more to be answered.

What is done is done, at this point all Gala-Net can hope to do is move forward, make some adjustments before the game goes live, and hope all goes well. As I’ve pointed out before, and I still stand strong by this, the quality of Allods Online as a game allows it a rare benefit in that if this mistake is fixed quickly enough, the game can move ahead and leave this incident in the past. One aspect I have been paying heavy focus on is that the community wants this to work, and the thread that has been set up for feedback is already populated by great ideas, and progressive thoughts.

At this point, Allods Online isn’t nearly as close to a trainwreck as people may think, but closer to a failed sump pump. If Gala-Net can quickly get the motor started, and perhaps move the upholstery to the first floor, then the most damage you’ll see is a waterlogged carpet that needs to be replaced.

More on Allods Online as it appears.