Spiraling Past 1,000,000
July 10th, 2011 by CrusaderSega and Three Rings Design‘s free-to-play MMO Spiral Knights, as noted at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, now has over a million players, prompting Sega to release new content:
Now available to all Spiral Knights players, is the Ironclaw Munitions Factory, a new dungeon located “deep within the Clockworks”. There are a whole load of cryptic clues as to what you should expect from this new dungeon strewn all over the game’s twitter page, here.
July 19th, 2011 at 6:05 pm
After playing for a few hours, I have learned that this game is basically a scam. Its not a free to play any more then downloading a demo of say crysis and calling crysis a free 2 play. There is a system where in order to actually play the game (ie going to a dungen to fight), you have to pay energy points. You can only carry 100 energy points (that are free) and these points take 22 hours to regenerate. This equates to about 1 hour of gameplay per day.
If you want to play more, then you need to purchase energy points with USD or buy energy points from other players with their in game currency. Energy points can only be purchased with real currency so the game is heavily tied to real currency.
This type of payment system reminds me of the old arcade games like ninja turtles or the simpsons arcade. You get periodic points in the game where you just have to feed it coins in order to continue. What this means to me is that the overall game experience just isn’t fun. There are many different Free 2 Play MMO’s out there that are more fun and even some work on GNU/Linux.
Its a shame because the gameplay is fun and the game is java. Their money making scheme kills it for me and so I won’t be playing any longer. Back to Regnum Online (a good free 2 play MMO that has the payment scheme working and the GNU/Linux client works great)!