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[COH ON]Company of Heroes - Wherein We Grudgingly Accept A Balanced(ish) Game
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MWO: Adamski
Also, how does a beta fail? Normally a game at least gets released and then fails, but to shut it down when it was in beta seems odd.
I KISS YOU!
Let me do a bit of digging to see if I can puzzle out why they closed it...
First, they said that account progress would not be wiped. The items and heroes that you bought would not go away, they said. Many players, including me, put money into the game with the expectation that the game would continue for the foreseeable future, as we were told.
Second, generally with software betas, there's no cost associated with testing the software. You might be able to get into the beta via pre-ordering a complete product, but the beta itself doesn't cost anything. AFAIK, this is standard practice for software development. Betas are incomplete and exist for testing and marketing purposes. The fact that the beta software is free and for testing purposes only reduces the responsibility on the developer's part from putting out a complete, fully-functional product. In other words, players can't complain about an unfinished beta.
However, in this case, they opened up microtransactions for the game. This is sort of a grey area. They didn't require you pay for the software, however they did allow you to pay for special content within the beta. Now, with the beta coming to a close, that strikes me as dubious. It feels like they used the excuse of the beta to extract some cash from the game, and then close the service.
Finally, the status of Company of Heroes Online as a beta was actually surprising to me. I didn't realize that it was still in beta until I heard this announcement. Indeed, the website says that Company of Heroes Online was released in Fall 2010. From the download site to the loading browser to the game itself, it is almost always referred to without the "beta" tag at the end.
Those three issues -- opening up transactions within the beta, promising that those transactions would not be erased, and not informing the user that they were actually participating in a beta test of unfinished software -- leaves me disappointed.
Yes, much against our better judgement as always. Dare I say it's reasonably balanced at this point? At least I can build a Hotchkiss now and not feel like I've completely lost my mind.
And go through the utter INSANITY of the patching process?
"Just"?
Well it's moot for me anyway, I'm on the disc based version.
I guess I should be glad that DoW2 doesn't really suffer from that problem. I guess the fact that this is likely to be the last ever patch for CoH probably helps it as well.