RF Online Episode 2 Update
Update time!
Right, so as most of you already know from the post made by our Director of Online Games a couple of weeks back, Codemasters Online Gaming and CCR have been working together on a plan for the North American / European version of RF Online and the subsequent distribution of Episode 2, for some time now.
We’ve noticed that a lot of players have been criticising the way in which Codemasters Online Gaming have handled the release of Episode 2, so I’d like to give you an update on our situation. We’ve always envisioned RF Online as a pay to play game, with free content updates and no paid for expansions. The free to play market is relatively new to us (and CCR) and players often confuse free to play with micro transaction as “whoever has the deepest pockets wins”, which obviously isn’t the case as the items for sale are generally consumables that only affect a player for a short period of time.
We’re also aware that Russia is live with Episode 2 Part 1 version 1.5 (or EP2 P1.1 from the Korean website). CCR offered this to us, but after looking through the changes made and playing that specific version on the Korean servers, we felt that there were too many drastic changes to the game’s core game mechanics for us to use it. Obviously we’ve been monitoring the update from when it went live in Russia, and as you can see from the following thread, the feedback isn’t positive.
http://community.codemasters.com/fo...ad.php?t=176098
The changes that CCR made have had a negative affect on the Russian player base – this isn’t what we want to do here. We had a West-specific version in dev for a long time, but it was never delivered in a release-ready format despite intensive effort at both CCR / Codemasters and was eventually abandoned by CCR this February. So, all the recent focus has been on moving to a common version that requires less time invested just to adjust it for the West.
So that’s where we are at; for the past few weeks we’ve been speaking to CCR about what content they will be able to provide and more importantly when that content will arrive. Initially CCR agreed to send us Episode 2 Part 1.4, which is what is live in Korea right now, but after researching into how the Korean players found this update (CCR ran a poll on there website that asked the player base):
Poll 1: Are you fine with the 0404 update as it is currently? (451 participated/ 620 gave personal opinions about this issue)
1. This update was intended to make players leave the game = 87.3%
2. This is a really good update = 12.1%
3. This is just fine = 0.44%
We kindly refused it and said that we needed a version that works  .
We want you to understand that our decisions on RFO *are* motivated by consideration for the players. We rejected the versions on offer because all the data we had said it wasn’t well regarded by players in other markets. This data was very conclusive, 80-90% of users being negative doesn’t shout “hey, release me” to us.
So as of today, we’ve had confirmation that CCR will be able to provide us with Episode 2 Part 1.5 (that’s the version that hasn’t yet gone live in Korea) – we will be the first territory to receive the update after Korea. This version of code is the most stable and it fixes all issues that previous versions of Episode 2 bring to the table. We’ll have translated versions of all the Episode 2 updates in the “Updates from Korea” section on the forums shortly.
Now I know you’re all going to be wondering when it is you guys will be able to jump into this new content. As I said earlier, CCR have not yet gone live with this version in Korea. They plan to go live later this month. After that time, they need to localise all of the different parts of Episode 2, test it and then send it over to us. We’re not totally happy with the proposed timescales and our production team are working hard to reduce them.
After receiving the content from CCR, Codemasters Online Gaming will test internally, ensuring all major issues are reported and fixed by CCR. I’m not going to give you guys a date, as we’ve done this before and it’s bitten us when we’ve had uncontrollable delays in the testing process. What I will say, is that Codemasters Online Gaming are extremely optimistic about RF Online and its future. We’ve been through some tough months, but the future is looking bright. Codemasters will support RF Online as long there are enough of you guys there to play it and with both the free to play model and Episode 2, we hope that will be for a long time to come. As a sign of our appreciation to those who have stuck with us, every active subscriber will receive a gift of in-game currency when we go free to play, proportional to the length of the subscription at the time. We’re still finalising item shop prices and hence the exact amount of this gift, but there will be news on that in coming weeks.
Thanks a lot – hang in there! |
