IGG's popular Tales of Pirates has gone through four major upgrades: the Spring Town, Union Guild War, Paradise Found, and Frozen Relics. Within a few days of the release of the latest update, the developers received some suggestions and critiques from the media and players. After carefully considering the feedback, the ToP Team decided to make some modifications to the current version of the game. Developer Zorro spilled the following details about the newest addition to Tales of Pirates.
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.
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.
It doesn't make them any better for sure! It just further shows how a good/fun game can be completely ruined by greed
It was a popular game back in the day among those who played free to play mmos on PC.
I believe the reason for talking about this game is to give an example of one of the worst offenders so we don't end up there again.
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.
Spent countless hours using that mentor system as well haha
The ToP2 version was actually the version private servers were already running on, so when it officially got released it left me and my friends confused. (If I recall it also added the Bleach knock off costumes?) I remember we spent so much time going for Rebirth to get the cool wings, but we ended up leaving the official servers before we reached that point.
The great thing about Private Servers was the fact that you could just get the leveled up gems in game for free, and all apparel costumes were free as well.
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..."
