Hear me out, I love the concept of free to play games, in fact, one of the main reasons I ended up being able to spend so much time on this pixelated flash game was because I didn’t have to pay money to get my first few chars. But is this really the optimal way for the longevity of realm?
Realm is PLAGUED with bots, bots here, bots there, swatsikas in nexus, trackers, notifiers. This would all change if we simply added a 4.99 fee to making a new acc. No one in their right mind would drop 1k just to have a msg advertised.
Another game that’s has recently moved away from the f2p model is Town of Salem. Their issues with bots decreased dramatically as their developers were able to ban them without fear of them returning, as the content became locked under a paywall. You can check out their post here : http://www.blankmediagames.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=92848
One such argument against p2p is that it deters new users, but think about it. Loading into nexus for the first time and your are flooded with “COME PURCHASES DUPED ITEMS FROM REALMSTOCK, ONLY $12.99!!!” I don’t think many new players enjoy that experience, nor do higher tier players, they constantly have a tracker on them, entire discord’s have stopped runs for days on end because of mass crashing and trolling. We even had to add a teleportation delay to prevent people from notifying and sniping other people’s realm quests.
With the introduction of a p2p model, we can bump up the chars on a new account, vaults and allow new players to play more than 1 character at a time, I remember getting my 2nd char slot and being able to play multiple chars was a very exciting time.
My proposal :
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each new realm account costs (x) amount
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old players still retain their accounts
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accounts that haven’t been named are deleted
In conclusion, to provide a better experience for newcomers to realm, increase longevity for realm, and remove bots, realm should move away from a f2p model.
EDIT - when trying to post this on reddit, my post got removed, not sure why that would be but it seems I need to find other ways if I want to bring attention to this.