Ben from Netto's Game Room looks back on what he considers to be one of the worst cases of microtransactions from a 2007 game, where spending close to $40,000 is needed to even stand a chance.
MMOHut, "IGG has announced that after a successful test run, they will be migrating all Tales of Pirates characters and data to the new version of the game, Tales of Pirates 2. The “great migration” will take place in September, and will include equipment, friends lists, items, TOP points, Crystals, and Credits in addition to characters..."
MMOHut, "Tales of Pirates II has begun its migration project, in which players on Tales of Pirates will have their characters transferred to the new Tales of Pirates II..."
MMOHut, "Why is everything so terrible? It doesn’t matter where you go, these days. Pay-to-play, free-to-play… it’s all the same. Some of these games I play at release, and I ask myself, “Who spent time making this treadmill of suffering and thought it was FUN?” It’s like none of these MMO developers, whether it’s a big name, or a little indie operation..."
Yes, Microtransactions now are bad. Giving an example of one of the worst cases of a hardly known game in the past doesn’t make the situation now seem any better.
I remember playing this game back in the day. It was one of the first free to play mmos on the market. The gameplay, atmosphere, music and community were great.
I didn't pay much attention to the item mall and always ensured I participated in events that game mall points.
I remember when my younger brother and I would grind all weekend long starting from Friday night. He would start Friday night when 2x exp was turned on and go all the way into Saturday afternoon when I came home from class then I would take over until Sunday afternoon when 2 times exp ended. The game had a mentoring system that could be exploited by free to play players where we would create alt accounts with dummy characters and level them up to 40 then take all the rewards, delete and start over again. Eventually, we would earn enough currency to purchase gems and equipment from players who spent money on the game.
We were able to make it into the top guild on our server with a level 96 Crusader and the swords had plus 13 a d 14 gems. We shared the one character and took turns using it.
The game released a sequel called tales of pirates 2 and they raised the level cap of the game. At that point it would be extremely difficult to progress further and compete with the players who spend money on the game so we quit. The game was terrible with micro transactions and even made it so the Crusader was the strongest class to encourage players to use it. This because it had swords needed for applying gems.
I've never even heard of this game. The microtransactions sound ridiculous