Well, it turns out that writing a blog is harder than it looks, with the drive to keep it interesting its very easy to say nothing at all and stay safe, of course maybe I shouldn’t worry too much since nobody much knows about us yet :)
So, Bill Roper and the team that left Blizzard to form Flagship Studios are putting the on the final touches to Hellgate:London, their first release since going their own way. I must admit I think that World of Warcraft would have a more universal appeal to ‘causals’ (by which I mean people with limited time to raid at peak times) if Bill was still onboard, simply because he has so much experience at pavlovian experiments.
The point of all this is that I misread the recent announcement about their pricing structure over at Hellgate guru (handy link) and I thought that they were using a MMO monthly subscription structure. Instead it seems they are wisely offering their version of Battle.net for free but charging $9.95 a month for ‘elite status’, with a range of what looks to me like pretty unappealing features.
The part that caught my eye was ‘24/7 phone- and internet-support’ which will probably only cover technical support, but could become very interesting if subscribers demand it matches the same level of customer support as the MMOs charging a similar monthly fee. One of the biggest problems with Diablo 2 was duping, map hackers and so on, and you always got the impression that nothing was going to get fixed in a hurry since, hey its free, you get what you pay for!
I think that even if Flagship try to distance themselves from in-game MMO support standards of today like policing behaviour and naming, people paying 10 bucks a month (which is a very hefty chunk over a year) are going to demand action when the inevitable exploits are discovered. And those without the elite status? Don’t worry, you can still player-kill the pampered souls above you, in fact I think that may be a great idea for a Clan! :)
