developer chat – Chasing Dings!

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.

Full dev chat transcript (the typed portion, anyway) after the break.

This is a transcript of the first half of the Acclaim Spellborn developer chat. The first half, as in, I typed until my fingers could type no more — and I was just halfway through. Even in the first half, though, many exciting topics come up.
In attendance were David Perry; Howard Marks, the CEO of Acclaim; Neal, the CTO of Acclaim, Aaron from marketing and communication; Historian, the Acclaim Community Manager; and El Drijver, the Spellborn lead designer, on the phone from the Netherlands.
Any transcription errors are mine and mine alone. If something seems wrong, it’s probably my fault, and I’m only typing this out for convenience; the original chat as an MP3 is hosted over at Historian’s site. In particular, I have no idea how to spell the player names, and I’m sure I confused David Perry and Historian more than once.
Topics include how Acclaim came to publish Spellborn, how Spellborn compares to other MMOs, the combat system, PvP, whether EU players and NA players can play on each other’s servers, and upcoming features such as the Arena, World PvP and the Marketplace.
All that and more (oh, my aching fingers!) — after the break.

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