And it was all going so well

Allods Online seems to have attracted a lot of attention all of a sudden.

Since going Open-Beta, what was expected of the game hasn't changed, but what the game expects of us seems to have changed quite a lot.

Some classes have been nerfed / tweaked, but that's only to be expected. And shouldn't really come as a suprise to anyone. Even if you did consider yourself a hard-core Closed-Beta player, there's no point QQ'ing about it if your favourite class suddenly isn't as over-powered as they were before. I'm sure the balancing will change again.

There are bigger problems though, which are either only just coming to light, or have always been there but there was a feeling they would be rectified soon. It turns out that's not really the case.

The Cash Shop:

The game is going to be funded by Micro-Transactions, the cash shop was inevitable, but it turns out there's nothing very 'Micro' about it.
I've no idea if it's available in the EU shard (server) yet, for the reasons explained later, but in the US it is. And there's a lot of very unhappy bunnies.
A 24 slot bag, currently costs about $20... Ouch.
They've apprently just added a zero to the end of all the original Russian prices. But at those sort of levels I don't think they're going to get many takers.

Server Issues:

I haven't been able to log on for the majority of the weekend. I get a nice little message telling me that I'm at position 1500 in the queue, before eventually timing-out.
Not good.
When I have been able to get online, the lag has been terrible but still playable. I can accept this sort of thing at the beggining of a games life. Everyone being in the same area, at the same time, is bound to have an impact. And it's only on the scale of a busy Dalaran.
They have promised to open more servers soon, but for an opening week. Not being able to log in is very frustrating, and is surely harming their business model.

Fear of Death:

One of the biggest causes of controversy in the game. And the potential straw-that-breaks-the-camels-back.
When you die in World of Warcraft, you either corpse-run, or get rezzed by a healer. Unless you choose to release, rather than run back to your body, the penalty is simply a repair-bill.
When you die in Allods, there's no repair bills, but you get a debuff known as 'Fear of Death'. This reduces your stats by 25%, and can stack up to 4 times, obviously adding up to a 100% debuff

Picture a raid-situation, you die on a boss, and even if you're rezzed by your team-mates, you're now 25% less effective than you were before dying, meaning your much more liekly to die again.
To get around this, you can give some in-game gold to an NPC, but as the price increases with each death, this would soon become very expensive.
Alternatively, you can use the Cash Shop, to purchase 'Perfume'. While under it's effect, you do not recieve the death penalty.

Now a few people have done the maths on this one, and with the current $US cost of that perfume. And the average number of wipes expected in a raid. The cost per player would be $50 to $75 per month, at end-game. Who the hell is going to pay that?

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the Fear of Death also applies if you are PvP killed... It put's things in a great deal of perspective.

Guild Management:

I've yet to be able to try this, since I haven't been able to log on. But apparently the guild interface is extremely basic, and buggy.
For a game that's going to rely quite heavily on it's social aspect, this is a pretty major flaw, that's goign to have to be resolved fairly soon.


It's a shame about all of the above. There's more faults, but these are some of the more important ones.
But I'm not going to give up on the game just yet. It's still fun to play, and the problems could potentially patched-out.
The general feeling seems to be swinging wildly between "This is a potentially great game" and "WTF!"

If things don't change fairly soon, it's going to end up being just another dissapointing MMO that no one plays.