Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

Does Allod's onlines latest advertising campaign remind you of anything? To be fair to Allods, they are using their own artwork in the ads, the image is taken from one of the game's splash screens I believe. Allods is even a pretty decent game despite their ham-fisted attempts at commercialising it. This campaign does smack of desperation though, doesn't it?

XAES is a level 10 instance for Empire players of Allods online. It contains the final quest in a chain of 5 "pilgrimages" that all new players get. The pic shows my summoner Arzuthr standing at the entrance to the main building (after we had cleared the place out). The summoner is quite a complex character to play. At level 10 I have a powerful pet who can tank and does a fair amount of DPS.  I am also a healer who I can heal myself and others. On top of that I have spells that do direct damage and damage over time. That sounds like an overpowered combination but it is balanced by the fact that my spell casting is very slow - it takes several agonising seconds to cast anything. The net result is that my personal dps is very low (less than the pets) and my healing capability is similarly constrained. A second restraint on healing is that you need to store up "drops of blood" in order to cast heal and the only way I can generate drops of blood is using a slow cas...

It looks like my confident prediction of a grovelling apology and price reduction from Gpotato were somewhat wide of the mark. Here is their first official response to Cash-shop-rip-offgate . Grovelling  apology it is not. Oh  they do apologise for not telling people that the item shop was going live. I haven't read a single complaint from anybody who was upset because "No one told me the cash shop was opening". All of the complaints were about the cash shop pricing and Gpotato's statement most pointedly does not apologise for that. They do acknowledge the concern and promise somewhat vaguely to "begin to evaluate the details of our item shop". That is not an apologyu or re-traction. If anything that is a confirmation of intent. The apoplexy of the community begins to make more sense to me now. They must have seen this coming even if I didn't. Even the normally impeccably spoken Saylah of Mystic Worlds has taken to using anatomical references . Temper...