Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-30088034-20161213135458/@comment-25646419-20161214001808

"they are becoming WAY too focused on adding new avatars.. not actually fixing the game!"

Different staff members work on different things. Artists can push things out at a faster rate. Though updates on fixing the game are pretty slow. It feels like not too much was done this year and supposedly that's because the programmers were primarily focused on pushing Mobile out. (Mobile was a Kickstarter promise.) Something went wrong and they had to start from scratch.

I do prefer the older art style but the new style doesn't bug me.

Tormental and BMG have a history... Both of them have done their share of.... things.

I don't think the Merit Points are a bad idea at all, however BMG did wrong by not giving players a warning ahead of time. A lot of players felt frustrated that they were close to achieving an item and now cannot reach it unless they pay money. If those players had a warning, they may have played a few more games before the patch came out.

As for the financial thing:

"I realize from your guys perspective you are bummed about Merit Points. You use to be able to unlock everything in the game for free anytime you wanted to if you played enough and now you either have to purchase some Town Points or wait for the newer cosmetics to go onto free rotation. You can still unlock 75% of the shop for free, you can play the entire game for free and even the new skins will eventually be free as we rotate cosmetics, but hey we are trying to encourage people to support the game a little for the newest cosmetics so were scummy money grabbing assholes. I get it.

Having a two tiered currency allows us to have better control over the economy and be able to easily determine what items are free and what aren't free. We will be able to offer promotion sales for Town Points which we couldn't do before because having an 80% off sale on a promotion that can be bought with free currency wouldn't work. Were also going to be able to offer double Merit Point weekends and Town Point sales.

I'm sorry some of you are so mad because the system is different now but this is how FTP games work.... we have to make some money somewhere to keep things running. Despite what the internet haters out there think we aren't rolling in money and we have to constantly stress about new systems and ARPU to keep the game running and people employed." (Reference)

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"People see the big numbers and make assumptions. It's hard to talk them out of it. People don't realize that Kickstarter takes 10% and then another 60% goes to manufacturing and shipping. They think we just put this money into our pockets." (Reference)

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"Our Rackspace bill is over $10,000 a month. We also employ 5 programmers (including Blake and myself) a CM (Brandon) an artist and have a contract artist and contract sound engineer. Before people start raging at how we overpay... everyone at the company is underpaid by industry standards, we offer no benefits (health insurance, life insurance, dental) and no 401k benefits. I don't even know how we have such a loyal and devoted staff. We really got lucky and they are dedicated game developers.

Then keep in mind Steam and PayPal take a decent chunk of all purchases made.

Maybe if you take a second to step into our shoes you can see how much it hurts to have your community abuse you for trying to improve ARPU a little bit. We aren't like these AAA games that have ARPU perfected and make fuck tons of money." (Reference)

So basically this change doesn't affect the game itself at all. No one has an advantage over another player, and the devs make a few extra bucks from players who support the game and/or impulse buyers who feel like they need a new item the moment it comes out.