Just finished listening in on the Spellborn dev chat/’webinar’. Lots of interesting discussion, some of which is after the break.
While the devs were talking, I was programming. I went through everything on the Acclaim website, trying to figure out what combination of memberships, terms of subscription, and quantities of coin bought would combine to form the cheapest monthly cost?
They will be, at some point, adding a set price of $15/month (for now, possibly rising to $18/month when they end the introductory price), but I thought we could get it cheaper.
I’ve plugged all the numbers into the equations, exhaustively tried all the combinations, and the cheapest (in the long run) way to get coins is to buy a Silver membership for $10. This gives you a 30% discount on Coins purchases for a month, but you only need it for one purchase. Buy 10050 coins for $70 (with the 30% discount). This nets you 11555 coins with the bonus coins, or 13060 coins with double bonus coins when they run that promotion.
A 180 day premium Spellborn subscription costs 7800 coins (for now). That will cost you $13.33/month if you play for that term and then never play again. You’ll have enough coins left over for two more months (at 1500 coins/month). So 180 days plus two times 30 day premium subscriptions — eight months total — comes to $10/month on the nose. If you bought your coin during a Double Bonus Coin weekend, you can squeeze an extra month out for $8.89/month — and that’s not bad.
Or, you could just pay the $15/month when they offer that option.
The Webinar software let us see El (Spellborn Lead Designer) Drijver’s computer, and he casually dragged several sets of new armor onto it for us. I was pretty darn quick on the Print Screen button, and got pictures of them all to share. All of them are, I believe, High House specific armors. The black set is for House Shroud, and I don’t know about the silver and the red sets. Click on the pictures for a slightly larger look.
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Full dev chat transcript (the typed portion, anyway) after the break.
Audience Question:
Q: When will open beta activation be up again?
A: We are working on opening it back up within the hour
Audience Question:
Q: What will the monthly price be for those that decides to do premium?
A: $15 per month
Audience Question:
Q: Is there going to be a standard, fixed price monthly subscription model available at some point?
A: There is a fixed monthly price which is available now at http://spellborn.acclaim.com/keypurchase.html
Audience Question:
Q: Hello Historian! With the release of the open beta we have become privy to the payment methods allowed to us. Primarily of course that being Acclaim coins. My question is will we have other ways of paying for our subscriptions? Many people are used to,with a p2p game, placing a card on file to have a seemless hassle free subscription.
A: You will have other ways. We are working toward "Set it and Forget it" options. One option will be where you can enter a Credit Card and it will bill you monthly.
Q: What are the PvP rules? Repercussions for killing a non hostile person?
Audience Question:
Q: subscribtion based?
A: In all regions, Spellborn is a "Freemium" game, with a Free to Play zone and
a required premium subscription service in order to access the full game
past the Free to Play zone. The premium subscriptions are now available for
the game
Audience Question:
Q: Will there be time cards for TCoS?
A: We already have time cards. These are the Acclaim Coins cards you can purchase at Target, Best Buy and Rite Aid in the US and many more cards around the world. With those cards you can subscribe for one month. Do you want an option for less time ?
Audience Question:
Q: Will countries from the regions of frogster be able to play on acclaim servers and vice versa? Or do we need to download the separated client?
A: You can play on either server but theres different clients so you will need to download both
Audience Question:
Q: When will you be ending the introductory price of 1500 coins/month to 1800 coins/month?
A: This is has not been decided yet
Audience Question:
Q: is the open beta Activation closed ?
A: We reached the cap do to the early rush this morning but it will be open again soon.
Audience Question:
Q: Is the open beta going to be staged and released in short bursts or is there just a delay in the open beta registration at this time? It says Activation for today is closed, please check back tomorrow. Thanks! at this time
A: In order to ensure server stability our CTO has a daily limit but the limits will be raised daily, check back often to ensure activation
Howard Marks (to All – Entire Audience): please raise your hand if you would like to speak
Audience Question:
Q: When will the game be open to play for all?
A: Once our CTO confirms the servers and response rate is 100% ready.
Audience Question:
Q: Just to make sure, there will not be a wipe after Open Beta?
A: We have no plans for a wipe.
Audience Question:
Q: It has been mentioned that some Lore will be released through pvp events. Now that we have a PVE server in open beta. Will these pvp events still be availble on the PVE server also?
A: There is PvP even on the PvE servers. The difference is in PvP there are more areas where you can do it.
Audience Question:
Q: Is the downloader of the Open-beta client a torrent or an HTTP download?
A: Our downloaders are Peer-to-Peer, we actually hev 2 different downloaders, should one not work for you. http://spellborn.acclaim.com/downloads.html
Audience Question:
Q: What are the expected numbers of players starting at the release of Acclaim territory and how many servers will acclaim set up?
A: We currently have two servers; one PvP and one PvE. We do have plans for a server physically located, if we see the need.
Q: …. sounds like te WoW Gorabaldi Arena
Audience Question:
Q: Can you give me access to the Open Beta because I am here? I really want to play, have been waiting for more than a year for this!
A: I wish we could! We want everyone playing, but we also want to ease in to it. Overloading the server isn’t fun for anyone.
Audience Question:
Q: How are patches distributed currently? Will there be manual patch downloads as well as ‘live’ downloads on log in?
A: Currently they are handled by the client, where it will download and update itself. However, if there is a lot of call for a manual patch we will consider making one.
Howard Marks (to All – Entire Audience): raise your hand it you would like to ask questions
Hmm, well, thanks for doing the math, but laying out $80 is a bit beyond my budget.
I hope they come out with the flat rate sub soon. I’m happy to pay $15 for a month. Maybe even $18 for a month, given that I didn’t have to purchase a client. But as it stands, I have to pay $20 for a month (and have some coins left over, which is fine if I sub for a 2nd month, but if not they’re just extra bits in my account).
That red armor is definantly the Shroud House set with the colors red and black….Excitement!!!
Q: Hello Historian! With the release of the open beta we have become privy to the payment methods allowed to us. Primarily of course that being Acclaim coins. My question is will we have other ways of paying for our subscriptions? Many people are used to,with a p2p game, placing a card on file to have a seemless hassle free subscription.
A: You will have other ways. We are working toward “Set it and Forget it” options. One option will be where you can enter a Credit Card and it will bill you monthly.
Muhahah this one is mine!!!!! Muhehehehe!
I think a lot of people are waiting for that.
I just did the plan I figured out above. $80 for 8 months.
I’m kind of excited about this game. I registered last week for the closed beta and I got really happy that they started the open beta today. I downloaded it but I can’t play. It looks like GameGuard is not compatible with Windows 7 and I can’t get the game started because of that. What a bummer… I hope they release a fix for that soon.
I’m gonna ask you a dumb question that’s probably answered elsewhere. Does your Spellborn launcher create a security alert about an out of date certificate or is that just me?
It does indeed. All the way through closed beta and now into open.
Thanks a bunch!
Does the game have microtransactions too, or is it simply being run as a “free to try, subscribe to continue” game in the US?
The latter; the game has no RMT stuff, aside from the subscription.
Tipa – Wonderful write-ups. I don’t think I have the time for another full time MMO and have some reservations about Acclaim in general. What is your opinion on the casualness of Spellborn? I see people posting about wandering around trying to figure quests out. How does the ability to solo effectively stack up against games like WOW & W101? Is it a game where you can bump around casually and still get things done?
WoW and W101 are far more solo friendly games, but I soloed, except for one group, in the EU Spellborn until level 13 without any trouble. Well, except for the Vaults, but I went in there a little early just because I wanted to see what it looked like.
The designers say you can solo to max level, but some things may be difficult.