In this time, people need things to play indoors. That’s why Vendetta Online has decided to go free-to-play until June. No, not “free-to-play with a cash shop.” Not “potentially free with subscriptions.” The game is just giving everyone access to the highest tier of subscription for free for two months. Period, end of discussion. The newsletter announcing it is quite open about the fact that it’s at once a promotional strategy and a chance for players former, new, and veteran to all get in and enjoy the game together.
The developers also have longer-term plans for the game, but consider the next couple months to have a greater need for smaller projects that can roll out now rather than larger ones that won’t be available for quite some time. Players can thus benefit now from improved NPC behavior, better toxicity reporting, and better sector load times. If you like the general atmosphere conveyed in the game’s latest newsletter, well… you can jump on in if you’d like, because the game is free for the moment.
Been playing the game for about a decade and a half, the game is a twitch combat oriented game but the vast majority of players are mobile, which is incapable of doing any real combat when compared to PC players. Administration has a severe problem of being disconnected from their community, and the business model lends itself to Guild Software not curtailing their product to the subscribers and players and more to corporate/media entities such as Google, Samsung, Verizon, and so forth. At best, the game is a graphical chat interface and space station docking/trading simulator with a UI straight out of the late 90’s with authoritarian style moderation. There’s recently been a purge of the actual veteran players who do the actual community building/guiding now that administration is trapped in their houses with nothing better to do, the few who still could stomach logging in. You will end up paying 1-10$ a month to become a live bug-tester for code that is sold to above corporate entities, and promised feature sets/content will take a years/decade past ETA’s to be put into the game, while the core gameplay of space combat takes a backseat or are removed entirely.
There’s a lot better stuff to be doing these next couple of months than wasting it playing Vendetta Online.
Being on the receiving end of moderation never feels good, but… it’s fairly egalitarian and distributed? I mean, it’s right in the newsletter (linked in the article above), starting with the header “Reducing Bad Chat Behavior, Toxicity”:
So.. the community more or less self-moderates. It’s only on rare occasions an actual moderator will need to step in. It doesn’t look like they are “disconnected” from their player base; I mean, they are providing and improving moderation tools that are accessed by actual players.
Did you mean “surge”? Activity has been way up.
You can play for free, forever, on Android or iOS. If you don’t have a phone with these platforms or prefer playing on PC, use an emulator. Some people like to support the devs because they believe in the game.
What is your source on this?
Well, that’s your take. I mean, you’ve played for 15 years so there must be something about it you like?
I find the best parts of the game are in player duels, which are highly sensitive to player skill. It’s also fun to trade between players and factions including manufacturable cap ship parts or rare Hive drops or ore. There is much more to it than could ever be covered here.
Furballs are also great:
…and, I mean, it’s a VRMMO, so there is that.
how this was payed :o
its normally a subscription game past the time-limited free trial.
Freemium. There is a free-to-play tier, as well as $1 per month ‘Lite subs’, and $10 per month ‘Full subs’, with discounts for purchasing bulk time (generally, I pay around $6 per month for a full sub with a little savvy toward discounts and promos). “Crystal” is the freemium currency, which can be earned via gameplay, and goes away on a full sub.
None of that really applies until June, though, for now. There is a very solid game here, aside from whatever payment scheme exists. I mean, it’s really the gameplay first; pay model is strikes me as more of an afterthought. As such, I highly recommend checking it out.
It’s actually fairly annoying to me how often the pay model comes up with respect to this game as the very first talking point, because it’s about the least interesting thing regarding this project, to me.