So I watched a video the other day where your boy Asmongold the OC wow content creator was reacting to someone reacting to something that had occurred with the recent wow expansion and it kind of just made me sad.
Games launch in different ways, for instance we plan on first launching @holozing in private alpha only and inviting a few people we know have experience not only with such games but also to test them and help balance them out. Other games may have these "early access" events as well, players can help do the same there, decide on what's working and what isn't and what they'd like changed and then check what the wisdom of the crowd thinks about it.
After that you may do something like a "public" alpha where you open the doors to a lot more people, this is kind of both like a stresstest on your servers but with more eyes and attempts you also start finding the rarer bugs that may not occur with only a few people trying the game out.
While we hope that with @holozing we still have interested people in attempting to help out with the private and public alpha when the time comes, we won't be doing things as were mentioned in the video.
Primarily, we won't sell different tiers of starter vials or healers based on if you pay more you get some additional items. While this version is fine and kind of a default in the space it usually involves some additional collector items. I think the latter is okay for those who really want to pay more for their favorite game and franchise to get some extra things. While we're not really there yet as this is our first launch of a new game so it wouldn't make sense to sell different tiers of it to people, it's not something we may shy away from in the future.
Okay so the other thing on top of the different tiers they offered people and kind of is the real package deal here most were looking for, is earlier access to the new content of the game if you paid for the higher tier. Players got to enter the new zones and level up 4 days earlier than the others I believe.
In some cases even that might be okay, but it doesn't work with all genres and games, especially not MMORPG's in my opinion and it definitely isn't something that's going to work for @holozing.
As it turns out, players who bought the expensive tier (up to $90), leveled quick and easy from lvl 70 to 80. It's no surprise that some people spend a lot of time on games like WoW so I reckon that some of them farmed and explored everything in those 4 days. Now what they decided to do next is not in Blizzard's hands, I can't blame them fully for this but at the same time if I remember correctly it's an opt-in thing where if you have "war-mode" option selected you are opting in for open-world PvP, meaning players of a different faction can battle and defeat you while you are busy exploring the new zones. So, naturally, these people who were now at max level with potentially much better gear formed groups to start killing all these newcomers who only paid the default amount for the new content.
Now you may be conflicted or wondering if it really is that bad, but we haven't gotten to the worst part yet.
All that aside, a day or two into the new expansion, the team behind the game decided suddenly that the content was too easy. I heard someone had leveled from 70 to 80 in only an hour for instance but generally it didn't take too many hours even if you didn't attempt a world record. According to the video it had gotten so bad that players couldn't even tag mobs because they'd get 1-shotted, i.e. someone would basically just look at a monster and it'd instantly die, not giving the option for others to be included in that kill for their quest. This lead to them deciding, a day or two after the game had launched for the higher paying players, to balance the game out to make it harder.
Now again, Blizzard probably only has the best intentions in mind but holy shit how this comes off to the players. Not only are they now getting farmed by max level players that were able to play the game with a 4 day jumpstart, basically ruining their experience (if they have war-mode on and/or are playing on PvP enabled servers), but it's now going to take them way longer to level up to catch up to them.
As Asmon said, this sets a precedent that if you don't pay more you're generally going to have a bad time because that's literally what is happening here. They took some good ideas from other games and the name "early access" and made it a living hell for the rest of the community as long as they get more money out of it. He also mentions that power corrupts, if players can do this, of course they're going to - when it comes to killing lower level players that don't have a chance.
Anyway, just a good example of shareholder greed taking it out on players yet again as we see often in the web2 and web3 space.
It's unbelievable to me that no one noticed or bothered bringing up the issue that monsters are dying too quick before the actual game launched. Especially considering how many testers games like these have, they're literally the leading franchises in the world in this genre and no one thought about the issue that tagging mobs in time won't be possible and that potentially fast spawns won't be enough for everyone if some are going around 1shot tagging everything to take quest objectives from lowlvl players while at the same time getting killed by others? Geez.
Some things deserve their time and proper testing, and I don't know, people actually thinking a bit forward and speaking up about it.
Lastly, I want to make it clear that people playing on the private and public alpha version of @holozing won't get any advantage towards everyone else in beta. All progression will be cleared and restarted, everything will be running on a beta site with test assets only. The max testers and players in alpha can expect to get out of it is a soulbound NFT for having been part of it and active, that may get them some zing as collection rewards but nothing else. Others not playing will be able to learn and watch gameplay videos I'm sure alpha testers will share so they won't get the advantage to "know more about the game" than those who don't get access to the alpha, even though we'll attempt to give testing access to everyone interested eventually.