Steam

[Vectorus]

I am deeply grateful to Haxus for reaffirming his commitment to as persistent a universe as possible. It reflects well on the game that the stories and creations of its players are treated with consideration - something which cannot be said for very many MMOs with their freewheeling metagames and meaningless cycles of obsolescence. I believe that the advantages of a reset would have been very short term. In the long term, they will be outweighed by the feeling of repeat custom of players who feel respected and cared for by the game itself. I am glad to hear that important improvements are in the pipeline even without the prospect of a dramatic rupture. As a poster above wrote, our goal must ultimately be not to produce "churn", but a steady base of committed subscribers sufficient to at least cover server costs. The vision for Hazeron has always been a compelling background universe in which individual stories of emotional weight can occur. That is better achieved by moderate numbers of long-term empires than by large numbers of bubble-and-bursts. 

On that subject, I do not understand the prejudice against subscriptions. Is it really so hard to sell a subscription game? The only MMOs I have played which were truly worth it, Star Wars Galaxies principally, worked on that model, and even today a subscription game immediately suggests to me honourable business practices and stable management. Is that not the reaction most people have? The major free-to-play games that I've tried, such as SW:TOR and Star Trek Online, have played rather fast-and-loose with both my money and the quality of the game. I'm not saying it cannot be done well, but I have never seen it done well. A buy-to-play model, I would imagine, prevents those of us who really want to support the project from doing so in a continuing way without buying useless copies on a regular basis, and also places Haxus in the position of covering regular costs with an irregular and unpredictable income.