Planet Calypso player pays nearly $70,000 for virtual egg

Wow lots of comments do not think as this as a game but more of a casino. Yeah you can't do much if apart from explore or get sweat and sell it for small amounts of cash.

The whole game uses real money when you kill a mob it either does not drop any items or drops $1 to $1500 worth of items.

I have put the odd $10 in here and there and cashed out now and again. The comments about the guys paying silly amounts for stations well a while back someone bought a station for 100,000 ish and his comeback from owning that station was around the $1.2 million mark.

Yes you will find lots of people who will take big risks and invest in virtual items because that is what this game is all about. But it also suits for the casual gamer who wants to only throw in $10 to $20 a month.

Hell I know people who have invested more money in F2P games with cash shops for no return what so ever. At least in this game you can get a return for playing I guess that is why it is so popular.

You just have to remember the people paying silly amounts of money to play are more like investors than players.

Governments should step in to prevent these things....

sigh.

I played it for about 2 hours. Was bored, logged, deleted.

Virtual Pyramid Scheme.

As a PE player, I've grown used to all the snarky comments whenever a new news post about the game goes up. I've found that once people realize that this is NOT a f2p game, they have a bit more fun with it. It's designed to cost your $15/mo, just like any other p2p mmo, for the regular active user. And yes, it is just a glorified slot machine, but so are most other mmos. At least this one lets you cash out if you hit big. I'd take hunting deadly monsters or mining vast beautiful landscapes over pulling the level and hoping for lemons lemons lemons anyday.

I played this game for a while starting at the end of 2005. It was my first MMO. I started off grinding my skills up the melee path, ended up pretty powerful but was kind of small potatoes, but when they started selling Land Areas I invested heavily and bought three well located ones. I had a good friend in game and even though she was half a world away, we just clicked together and I had the best time together. She was into crafting really heavily and had lots of rare patterns and was making some good money off those and the auction house. We bought some high end armor and weapons and were involved in SOC activities and our SOC won LAs through the PVP events that we also collected a little money on.

I didn't like the nerfs that they started making, and they made and other changes that I didn't like. I loved Project Entropia, but when they changed to Entropia Universe it just started going down hill for me. I was at an inflection point, I was either going to heavily invest or leave, I made the decision to leave and sold out before they started selling limited items, etc. I walked away with over $35k usd profit. Small potatoes compared to many others that came later and invested heavily at more inflated prices though. It took months to get my money back but I did eventually get it back, that process wasn't the fastest at the time, I don't know what its like now. You can put Money in and have it that moment off your credit card, or wire transfer, but it takes a loooooong time to get your money wired back to your bank from the company. But, I can say that I, and many others got their money back.

I know many that lost a lot playing and would get discouraged and quit. But its like any casino, you go in and mine or craft or hunt mobs for the big jackpot you will most likely loose, your betting against the casino that has the advantage. They will pay out enough to keep you spending. They occasionally pay out big to noobs or old timers to keep the high numbers up on the scoreboard, but those are rare, and most players know they pay for it because they see their loots sucking for a long time before a big HOF. However, if you play against the players trading and such, and you can win playing the greater fool theory, at least it worked for me.

I log back in occasionally to say hi to friends on holidays and such, its free to chat ;) I havent' put any money in since I took it all out years ago but there are a lot of old timers still there who are still spending their $10 a month to try and hit the jackpot. There are many that pride themselves on having built it all up from sweating and have never deposited a dime, they are the real winners imo.

The game looks so much different now then when I started playing with the new engine. In some ways I look back with nostalgia at my old screen shots in how primitive it was then. But it was new, and exciting, and totally fun, and sucked me in and I played for hours and hours and hours and the money made it that much more fun and exciting and played at the highest levels of the game.

There was nothing like having the best armor and best weapons in the game ( at the time ) and going to my hanger and taking my ship up to the space station and tanking multiple alien mobs in Dome 4 with my gf and just watching the HOFS and Globals roll by the chat window. I could easily blow $100 a night in ammo, but I was making it off my LAs taxes and auctions so I didn't care, I was having fun. ahh good times. I haven't found anything else in the MMO space since then that gave me that thrill and challenge. I really miss those old days, I'm sorry they are gone.

I don't know enough about this game to call it a scam but if you spend some time reading the message boards there are certainly enough comments out there to warrant a red flag or two being raised.

The majority of posters seem to view the game as a grind.Some seem angry that they dropped real money into it only to fritter it away on weapons or tools that did nothing to get them anything of value.

But occasionally someone will post or you will see a story like this about how someone hit some sort of jackpot and is making decent scratch.

Does any of this sound familiar to any of you? Have any of you been involved in pyramid schemes or MLM campaigns? On the surface that is exactly what this sounds like. A majority of bitter people who feel like they were sold a bill of goods and a few people who view the game as a winner.

It sounds like Planet Ponzi to me but I'm going to try it out before reaching a verdict.