The maintenance patch on Friday applied a patch that added items from the cash shop into the Honor Shop where purchases are made with points that were awarded from arena PvP.
Wins award 10 points while losses and ties give 2 points. There are currently four different type of arenas: 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4. Wintrading tends to be a common problem when there are desirable rewards in the shop. With 1v1, the potential for abuse is high for obvious reasons.
On a side note, I’m having to really think outside the norm with this game. For one, I didn’t realize just how small the population was for this game when Webzen published it as ELOA. It seems there were no more than a few hundred players (not even 500 from what I heard). To put this into perspective, Devilian (Trion Worlds) had 5 figures per region near the beginning but quickly settled into a 4-digit range for 2016. And even in the 2nd half of that year, players were already complaining about the game “being dead”. It wasn’t until the latter half of 2017 that the population (NA first) dipped below 1000 players.
The open beta (soft launch) of MU Legend plus the Windows 10 build 1709 issue pretty much dropped the population (extrapolated using the total rankings based on gear score) below the 750 player marker in each region when the game population really began to quickly empty out (AFKers gradually shrank in Asperon). Over the past few days, the early access average for Warlords Awakening has settled to around the 330 range with a peak of 469 (as of this entry).
From my perspective, this is absolutely near death levels and unsustainable because the numbers don’t lie when factoring in the cost of operations (server/bandwidth provisioning, support and operations personnel, etc). However, from the perspective of an ELOA (Webzen and GamenGame) player, this is like a decent sized increase. And that just threw me for a loop because the population of this will need to draw in at least several thousand in order to survive for at least an year.
PLAYWITH has been eating potential revenue in terms of close to 1500 keys given away so far (though I believe a decent amount ended up in the hands of resellers or gold selling operations where they first need to generate enough to actually put their selling bots into action) as well as sponsoring some World of Warcraft streamers (2 hour streams) each day since Friday. I know cosmetics and pets will soon enter into the equation in the cash shop but those need to be priced right. They’ve already mentioned they intend to do the “limited sales” thing (sold for a limited time before it is removed and replaced with something else).
A lot will depend on how many whales exist in the game (since they are usually the driving force of purchasing those for their characters as well as listing them on the trade broker to sell for gold). I personally never engage in that aspect myself. During TERA’s 6th anniversary, I did spend $500 to get a bunch of the Attack on Titan cosmetics (since they aren’t going to be available ever again due to the licensing agreement with Kodansha). But I have no intention of selling the spare boxes since I’m saving them for other characters in the future.
Basically, the economy in Warlords Awakening is still rather pristine. But that will change once the first cosmetics and pets hit the cash shop and it remains to be seen how well that will play out in this game given (from my perspective) the really small population that currently exists.
