[rdanner3]

Originally Posted by Miros1

Especially when honest customers have to download a crack to play the game they legally bought!

Command and Conquer: Red Alert (without the no-CD crack) used the CD-ROM drive so hard that I broke two playing it.

Originally Posted by rdanner3

Paying in excess of $130 a year for a game just doesn't cut it for me, and most MMO games nowadays are $15 a month or higher.

That's just it, Greg: They have been going up because the gaming companies think that people enjoy getting soaked. If magazine subscriptions were that high (and getting higher) the companies would be out of business quite fast.

Yes, paying $15 a month might make sense if the game client was a free download or came with offsetting credit to the game, but that never happens. I've seen (I think it was WoW) one client that cost $55, but only gave one free month of play. (A whopping $20 "value") That's not entirely fair to the customer, especially with the issues that copy-protection too often cause legal customers.

I have beta- (and alpha-)tested games before. First game I ever did that with was The Realm; I played version 1.13, and played continuously until (I think) v3.07. (and in case you were wondering, there was a v1.117, so it isn't a "normal" progression in all cases) The Alpha was Underlight, and, in fact, I was supposed to be a Pre-Pre-Alpha tester, but my computer at the time didn't have the oomph to run the game, and I handed off my tester key to a friend who did. (that test group was 1500 folks)

Underlight bit the big one not because of the gameplay (which was, and I quote one of the original dev-team) "written by RPGers FOR RPGers", but because the player client refused to run unless it was running in exclusive mode, was ultra-sensitive to drive fragmentation, and the GM client didn't have either restriction. The GMs, when confronted by utterly ticked-off players' rightful complaints about their abuses, claimed "RHIP" (Rank Hath Its Privileges) and blew off the complaints, while also throwing anybody out of the GM ranks who actually paid attention to what the GMs were supposed to do. Got to where the players universally distrusted (at the least) GMs in that game. When I left, the game engine was struggling hard to keep up under the load of House (UL's version of Guilds or Clans) wars that it was never designed to cope with on an ongoing basis. As I said on that forum just before I left for the final time, "I did not get into UL to participate in JADE. Goodbye and good luck." (JADE: Just Another Deathmatch Experience" (ok, ok, the original acronym has "DooM(ed)" instead of Deathmatch, but it's clearer with "Deathmatch" in there). There were people on the GM team running hacked GM clients, too, and they got away with it in spades. If a player tried to go in with a hacked client (and the thing was ridiculously easy to hack, as I discovered for myself) their account was terminated in a matter of hours, usually (but see a bit later). Even though the game was $10 a month, it wasn't worth it, since, unless you sucked up to the GMs in a very obvious way both in and out of game, you never got anywhere. If you were a close personal IRL or IC friend of one of the GMs, you could (and often did) get away with serious infractions, some of which were also illegal in the real world! Got out of UL after I came close to having a serious nervous breakdown. I had gotten so enraged by what was going on that I was not a pleasant person to be around. (Heck, couldn't stand to be around myself, for that matter.) One hacker who did get prosecuted later got hired by the FBI for his hacking skills. (Man, that just proves crime DOES pay, at least for some.)