Trying to force my life into a game schedule is the prime reason I've quit many games
Spacetime,
I'm writing to express my deep frustration and decreasing desire to
bother trying to play your games. PL and SL had both previously
become completely uninteresting to me and I was quitting, transferring
guild leadership to my wife and deleting the games. Then I
heard about DL and how it would be a new take on STS games so I waited
with some excitement to see the new mechanics. On release I liked the
combat system and the passive (you called them cutscenes I believe)
missions. I hated the server lag and "refusal to feed on enemies when
ready" and "refusal to consume blood packs" that caused the majority
of the few deaths my characters had. Overall I was satisfied,
expecting the lag issues would improve as you refined the code and
that did seem to be the case with occasional setbacks after major
releases.
Then you changed the passive missions to allies and added expirations.
(In all of the following I'm referring to 24 hour activities
including allies and nightlies/dailies) I had been enjoying the
ability to save up passives for days at a time to strategically level
when I wanted so I could keep playing or to not collect them until I'd
leveled so the drops would be higher level and the passives/cutscenes
would push me closer to the next level. I saw some value in being
able to play active (you call them 3D) missions at will without limit
though that's really not my thing - not a farmer as a rule.
But the expirations are nothing like what I'd expected. I'd estimated
something from 1-1.5x the duration of the mission at least. It turns
out to be less than half of the duration of the mission - 8 hours or
less for allies, something well less than that for DL nightlies. For
PL dailies I found recently they apparently expire in under 5 hours!
As I mentioned in the subject of this mail, being forced to schedule
my life around an arbitary, inflexible and narrow game schedule is the
prime reason I've quit many games I enjoyed and put a lot of time and
money into. It doesn't take a lot of effort on your part (and no
revenue impact) to fix this - just adjust the expirations of 24 hour
missions to something reasonable and tell us what the expiration
lengths are. I want at least 24 hours to collect but if you at least
allow 12 hours - half the time it takes to mature - then at least I
won't hate it so much and might decide to stay around (though it
wouldn't be as much motivation to spend money in the future.) I would
appreciate having expiration timers just like the ally maturity timers
and a "when it expired timestamp" in the messages for expired missions
but if you could just give a long enough expiration so that as the
maturity times slip around the clock, as they inevitably do, I can
make a healthy choice and go to bed and get them in the morning.
Another concern - giving exclusive items to the "I live in the game
and do nothing else" fanatics, who already have all the best in-game
drops and in some cases all the best plat drops as well, is my other
greatest concern in DL currently. This helps those who need the least
help and is a finger to the rest of us. There are other ways to suck
gold out - sell plat (at a very high price) for gold, have risks that
increase the more gold you have (could be risks to your gold, risks to
you in game, etc.), that wouldn't just be further elevating those
players. (And yes, even selling for 5-9.99 million is giving for
these players. They'll have that many times over before I get it once
- plus they'd get exclusive items to help them get wealthy even faster
if you keep doing that.)
I hope you will listen to my concerns and take action. I believe I'm
in the majority and there is a very limited run possible in the "suck
you in, make you sick, you quit" cycle - eventually you have nothing
but a small core of fanatics paying relatively little money and
millions of people who'd never play any game from you again - and tell
everyone in their gaming community exactly that.
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