Bigpoint's DarkOrbit turns five this month

EVE has probably more registered player then that. so ya doubt it, registrted players and actual playing player is nothing. If you count that Wow has 500 million registred players (probably lo if you count all the banned chinese farmers.l)

Oh yeah...

I heard of this, the same as I heard of Kim Kardishan and IPad five years ago.

What are we talking about again?

Bic Pens? Love them. Those cheap, inexpensive ballpoint pens are the cheap standard of the world. And I believe they've poked more than one person's eye out in some instances!

;P

we're talking about the game where people spent thousands of dollars to buy an especially rare drone, and is one of the worst cash shop offenders out there. I know Massively is all about the puff pieces, but we should be appalled that a game that charges what it does still exists, not congratulating it.

We can laugh all we want but seriously these guys are selling "micro" transactions for $1000 and people are buying it and they are staying profitable.

Sometimes I wish I thought of such a scheme to make money.

I would sell these expensive items in the game and make them very powerful, more powerful than everything else in the game. But I would also make them a limited thing, so lets say only 20 of said items would be available for purchase. Just to make it super exclusive.

I would use money from that game to make and support a game that fits my design principles and is not about squeezing every last penny from the players. Hell I would lower the sub cost if possible. But it would be a sub title for sure.

The 5 yr anniversary I thought would not come. I play this game Dark Orbit and I like it. I don't have the 'drone' yet as it would of course be ridiculous to pay outright for it. I'll go ahead and work for it on the game.

The evil in this game is the method they use to 'sell' the drone. They have it for a one time purchase price of (ok now there's two drones.. guess the first one was pretty lucrative so..) 100, or 150 dollars. Where the 'thousands' come in is the other ways people get the drones. In the game we have little piles of pixels known as booty boxes(kindof corny but it works for BP). In these boxes there are among many other things(ammo, cloaks, boosters..ect) there are Blueprints used to construct the drone piece by piece. If you get 45 blueprints then your drone is made. The instant purchase price goes down as you collect blueprints. A lot of people were hornswaggled into thinking they might get their drone cheaper if they purchased booty keys in order to pick up the booty boxes and spent 'thousands' on those keys. With the keys costing maybe .50cents a piece people thought why not get em... but they got hundreds.. and that didn't make the drone.. then they got hundreds more and they were mad because that didn't make the drone.. so they purchased whatever they had left of the drone.

These booty keys are used to procure booty boxes with lasers as well. The chance of getting any of these items in the booty boxes isn't known, but it varies visibly from time to time... probably with the need for profit???

The skinner box(sounds crude huh.. but google it..its real) psychological model is what they're using to sell just about everything new in this game. Wouldn't you know it, that's the same model that casinos use to get people to pull the arm on the slot machines!!!

As I said before I play this game. I do not pay to play.. I free to play (ok after I figured out what was going on and wasted hundreds of bucks.. I'm free to play:)

Boots