A FTP Cautionary Tale (LastChaos)

[SilentRose]

Greetings everyone, I have been a longtime lurker but after the events in another ftp mmo, I have felt the need to put out a post/warning for any potential players that come across the free to play game Last Chaos.

As a note - This game is classified heavilly as a pay to win as you can buy armor, leveling supplies and over 90% of the potions and items are only available in item mall as well as almost all the pets in the game are solely available in item mall and pets provide bonuses such as leveling your character or 300% damage boosts, damage increase/speed increases and fast mounts ect. You can also buy jumping potions on some of the versions which allow you to instant boost your character to level 90 or 120 with a full set of armor/weapon.


Around spring 2013, Game Sages(Player volunteers) were made aware that the game license would expire at end of 2013. They were not allowed to release said info or their accounts would be permanently banned and they would face penalties. Thus, this info was never released to the public.

At the beginning of August, a large scale dupe started on all three main servers, Katrissa, Vinicius and Nereus. This led to prices skyrocketing and the GM's did nothing much to ban the dupers as they were large cash spenders. This continued till the last week of august when they pushed through a incomplete patch to fix this issue after being warned by playtesters that it was completely broken.

In between this point, the Product manager for the game, stratos is fired/sacked and new product manager Adorkable is put in place. Less sales, people need to spend more to get what they used to.

The patch went live and the worst thing possible for any mmo player to imagine happened. Entire inventories randomly disapeared, storages disappeared, servers kept crashing and debuffs would be stuck to your toon, making you permanently stunned/slept. Tens of thousands of dollars worth of items disappeared in seconds and nothing was done about it for 2 weeks. Then they pushed forward another unfinished patch to fix these issues and the game broke 10 fold.

Mid september, they did a rollback of the game to before the patch was released. Then gave us two weeks till they pushed the same broken patch out. All throughout october people lost tens of thousands of dollars worth of items. They released a statement that they would fix the issue and told everyone to send rt with exactly what they lost. The item loss issue was mostly patched and RT system was flooded.

November - prices of items started skyrocketing in item mall.

Skip forward to around november 20th. The Game Masters and Product Manager for the game restore a couple peoples items to give an illusion of it being done.

November 29th to 31st. Black friday sales, players spend thousands of dollars in items.

December 1st. The forums are locked, players are given 24 hours notice that the games rights have been sold and that aeria is no longer responsible for the game. There will be no refunds, instead they will provide coupons (That you need to spend even more cash to even use), for those who want to stay and play other games. We are told the forums will be active for 3-6 months after merge and that the game will stay the same.


December 3rd/4th, Gamigo's new forums for the game are launched, launcher is updated and players are able to get into the game. We notice immediately that there is no real sales like at age and prices of items are around 3 to 10 times the amount we normally pay. Ie instead of spending 100$ to get from 163 to 165, its now around 2-3,000 dollars if your buying boosters, otherwise have fun getting 1% an hour.

December first few weeks, mass amount of rule breaking (There is no game enforcement) and cheaters run rampant.

December 16th, inventory patch, we are told and I quote "No other inventories will be negatively impacted." Which goes for inventory/warehouse as they were changing guild storage. After patch, many people including me lose hundreds if not thousands of dollars of items that disappear. Item stacking that went to 40k is now 999, have fun with that space change and now in order to have the space you used to, you need to buy keys which unlock bag space for 10$ a month if you want both unlocked and they expire every 30 days.

Skip forward to december 30th, Still no item restoration, cheaters running rampant, people in god mode are taking castle sieges, killing hundreds of players without being touched who are trying to defend their siege.

January 10th, Game masters are made from the old guard Game sages from Aeria games. Issues still are abound.

Skip forward to now, January 23rd. No attempts at item restoration have been made. People are still missing items from october/november and decembers patch. The servers are unstable, prices are insanely high and many key parts of the game have been changed, like afk pet lveling, allowed for 7 years at age, now banned at gamigo. Then we go to fact age made monsters and creatures on their version of lc need +28 weapons to down easy. Gamigo doesnt sell the + items so best players can really make is +15 weapons/gear which means they get oneshot/ or do 1 damage to mobs. Only the old weapons still in game that never got lost from game bugs are still able to do the job, so once those run out, don't expect to reach level cap.

Overall, players are out hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we have constantly been fed lies and deceit, false advertising ect. Despite me having a 185 level capped toon on Last Chaos, I would recommend people stay away from this title till it is fixed and people are compensated and prices are changed, with ingame systems also being repaired.

[Yunru]

1.st time i even hear of this game.
But year free to play games are full of that. (Wot is a good example of known ones)

[Kathandira]

I dig it. Pay to Win games suckering people out of their money is a great way to end the trend of Pay to Win games.

If you ask me, they all paid so the rest of the gaming community might win.

"Ie instead of spending 100$ to get from 163 to 165"

Is that accurate? People would pay $100 to move up two levels?!?

Also, Thank you for the post. It would be a real shame if more people fell into this trap.

[Vizardlorde]

Nexon Pulled something similar with DFO except it wasnt about dupes it was people getting hacked left and right after nexon's database was exposed then they kept on doing business like normal and when people started spending more money they shut down the game completely and only give a refund to people who spent money within something like 1 month.

[SilentRose]

I dig it. Pay to Win games suckering people out of their money is a great way to end the trend of Pay to Win games.

If you ask me, they all paid so the rest of the gaming community might win.

"Ie instead of spending 100$ to get from 163 to 165"

Is that accurate? People would pay $100 to move up two levels?!?

Also, Thank you for the post. It would be a real shame if more people fell into this trap.

Let me give you an example. For a few people to get +28 armor for their new 170+172+28 set/173+28 weapon, they would need to spend the following.

200-300 rop 1/2. roughly 50 cents per old price, now roughly 2-4$ per current. (Rops are Rune of protection, they prevent items from breaking on failing an upgrade)
200-300 runes, at 50-75 cents per old price, now roughly 2-4$ per current. (Upgrade materials, chance of failure rate is high).

Now with that, you MIGHT get your armor/weapon to +13.

Now you spend 10$ to get finest runes which can only be used once, to put plus of all items to 14. Now comes master stones.

Master stones are roughly 20-40$ per depending on sale. So lets say 30$. 30(price)x9(plus to 23)x7 (armor/weapon) to get your price of 1890$ usd.

Now ms past this point are usually 60-75$ usd, so lets say 65$, 65(price)x5(plus to 28)x7(armor/weapon) = 2275 usd.

Now that you plussed your gear, which has so far cost around 4500 to 5000$ usd. You need to gem it and enchant it!

AGR (Advanced Grade reforms), need a few dozen of these to boost your seals of your armor. They will put you roughly 500$ back on average if your lucky.

Then gems, level 1 gems drop ingame. Gems can go to level 15. It takes 3 gems to potentially make a gem 1 level higher. There is also a chance of gems breaking or falling back 2 levels. It takes roughly (This was math done on old forums), 500,000 gems to make a level 15 gem, while normally players can only get 10-15 gems an hour. So its impossible to make a lvl 15 gem without buying cash.

Gems can also break on putting into gear as well, chaos gems, which are rare type, are also needed and cost around 50-100$ usd to buy enough tokens to unlock a gem box with the chance it might be gem your looking for.

Overall, I know people who have spent around 30,000 usd to get a full set of lvl 7-10 gems. Getting lvl 15 gems is currently impossible unless your a millionaire.

So your looking at 30,000 to 40,000 usd to make a useful set of armor at a high level. I would rather not reveal how much I spent plussing my gear, its quite sad, really.


But to get to question of 100$ from 163 to 163. Well, mob kills give you .01% a kill if your lucky at that level, as well they hit for 1/4 of your health. So you buy health stealers to restore health, Mana stealers because some skills drain all your mana, critical strike potions, move speed potions, adrenaline, super haste to make you go faster, experience boosters and platinum blessed iris to boost your exp gain.

It takes on average 4-5k experience boosters a level from 163 to 170. The prices on gamigo list experience boosters 1700 cash or around 10-12$ for 100, so 400-450$ usd if you want one level without all other pots, currently its around 500-600usd per level.

Of course you don't need all this. You could grind without pots, this means maybe 1% an hour if your a good class. I play a weak class(healer), I could get 4-5 kills an hour with best gear, this means I get around .05% to .10% an hour. Do the math, I require pots or it would take me thousands of hours to gain one level. This is how they suckered people in.

[Edge-]

Shitty, old, MMO's from shitty, shady publishers have shitty, shady things happening in them? I'm shocked.

Low budget megapublishers like gPotato, Aeria, Perfect World, Gameforge and others are all shady as fuck. Do not trust them in the slightest.

This breed of MMO is still dying out, with low budget Korean import clones closing regularly every month, and that's a good thing because they're not indicative of the current market of modern F2P games, but are a relic of a time when it was acceptable for F2P games to be super low quality games and have terrible exploitative P2W cash shops.

[Vizardlorde]

Shitty, old, MMO's from shitty, shady publishers have shitty, shady things happening in them? I'm shocked.

Low budget megapublishers like gPotato, Aeria, Perfect World, Gameforge and others are all shady as fuck. Do not trust them in the slightest.

This breed of MMO is still dying out, with low budget Korean import clones closing regularly every month, and that's a good thing because they're not indicative of the current market of modern F2P games, but are a relic of a time when it was acceptable for F2P games to be super low quality games and have terrible exploitative P2W cash shops.

Maple story is still alive and kicking... (shoud be in the definition of Pay to Win)

[amishjello]

I remember playing that game. got to level 30 and quit, it took ages to level and it was grinding 24/7. I never understood why players were so drawn to these games? Thankfully there are F2P games out there now with much better gameplay/cash shops.

[Edge-]

Maple story is still alive and kicking... (shoud be in the definition of Pay to Win)

Indeed, and its overhead is essentially the bandwith and server costs. It doesn't get a ton of support, and what it does get is very cheap due to the extreme simplicity of the game.

The ones shutting down are generally more recent titles that don't have already established fanbases, so it will likely be some time before the older guard low budget shitty F2P import clones get closed down.

- - - Updated - - -

I never understood why players were so drawn to these games?

At the time, it was because they were free (at least for me). There really wasn't much choice for the F2P market, so people played what was available. I know I played at least a few dozen of the various first wave of import MMO's over the years when F2P MMO's were starting to become a thing. None of them were particularly good, but that's all there was at the time.

[Vespian]

And no one is about to point out that spending even close to 1000 dollar, let alone 10, 100,000 dollar, on a free to play game is beyond ridiculous? Don't get me wrong, It's pure fraud what they are pulling, but spending that much money on a game? WHAT??

[Hottage]

I read the title and thought it was about a hacker called LastChaos who was breaching poorly protected File Transfer Protocol servers.

I was disappointed.

[Jawless Jones]

i can't believe aeria still even exists

everytime i would see an advertisement for some shady "mmo" it would be published by those guys

[Evil Inside]

Ahh I played this game years ago. The thing that I loved was that mounts could do damage, when I got my dragon it was so awesome.

[Deleted]

People really shouldn't give cash in MMOs to games from developers who have nothing to lose if they rip them off For the amount of money you are talking about, people could have bought some quality games or played many high quality MMOs.

I played Last Chaos for about a year - quite a long time ago, perhaps 6 or 7 years ago now when there were far less choices for MMOs. The fact is, the amount of high quality MMOs out there now, I really don't understand why people are spending so much money on such poor, old, pay 2 win MMOs as this one.

That being said, it sucks that they ripped people off and can get away with treating their long-term customers badly. I wish that companies like this would get prosecuted for fraud, but unfortunately it's not even that uncommon that shady free to play mmos end this way.

[8bithamster]

5

Shitty, old, MMO's from shitty, shady publishers have shitty, shady things happening in them? I'm shocked.

Low budget megapublishers like gPotato, Aeria, Perfect World, Gameforge and others are all shady as fuck. Do not trust them in the slightest.

This breed of MMO is still dying out, with low budget Korean import clones closing regularly every month, and that's a good thing because they're not indicative of the current market of modern F2P games, but are a relic of a time when it was acceptable for F2P games to be super low quality games and have terrible exploitative P2W cash shops.

lawl.. bitching at aeria games. Let's ignore the fact that the community in Shaiya online is 100 times better than WoW..

I love Shaiya, love some Aeria games, they are pretty damn good for free to play titles (seeing as how I reached pretty decent end game gear in some of them without spending a dime).

And why did I start playing Shaiya? Something called a challenge. Ultimate Mode was a damn fun challenge.

[Raptor With a Saber]

Holy...fucking...shit, that is the most insane ripoff by any game company i've ever seen. That is even taking into account EA's Onlinepass BS.

[Matheren]

5

lawl.. bitching at aeria games. Let's ignore the fact that the community in Shaiya online is 100 times better than WoW..

We should ignore the fact since your subjective view of the community has absolutely nothing to do with the post you were replying to.

[JohnFitStuff]

dude , your post is so intense , i wonder , how much cash would cost leveling a character at level 185 ?

sorry for my english , i know the basic, xd