AfterWorld Survival Forum

I believe using the good old Wikipedia definition of RCE (Real Cash Economy, a concept for video games, when both depositing & withdrawal of funds are made available) might help avoid confusion.

Afterworld (Alpha, Survival, Rebirth) has never been RCE.
Implementation of the RCE aspect is currently not included in any official plans or roadmaps.

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Short version. Forget it.

Yes, that's the truth about the state of this "RCE game" so far.

It is also worth mentioning that whether the dev team want it or not, they have 7 year long legacy of players "donating" dozens of thousand dollars to have them built a RCE game, and not just any game they fancy, mind you. The RCE aspect of it was the prime reason people had been giving away their money.

During all these years the developers used this money to help them build something nobody asked them to build, not a single element of RCE ever thought through put on the road map or implemented and they still continue to go that way speeding up in the wrong direction, re-designing and re-balancing the game without any concern about RCE.

That is to say it politely, quite disappointing.

This is my understanding of how you make an RCE game: above all, you implement RCE (deposits + withdrawal) right from the start, see how it goes and then adjust the game economy on the fly.

Before you start you have to have a clear idea how RCE will work to keep your business floating and allow the player base to have their income. And not just in general terms but with the precise numbers put on paper.

You have to have a business plan where all the economy elements like mobs, pnotes, skills, loot etc. wired into a financial plan that should generate certain profit and that you will have to adjust a thousand times as you go till it works because you cannot predict how people will like (hopefully) to spend their real money in your game. Plus hundreds of small things like how farming-proof your mechanics are and how you protect your economy from damage when real money is involved.

You also have to have a clear understanding of how your accounting will work because you will have to handle a lot of international transactions in and out and keep your fees low.


Where is all that?

All I see here is people trying to make your average donation/subscription MORPG that works on completely different principles and the more they work in that direction, the farther it is from RCE.

What's the point in severely re-balancing and re-designing the existing game economy without RCE in place?

All you are doing now will be forfeited when you introduce RCE, that is if you are actually planning to introduce it.

The value of loot, how strong / aggressive the mobs are, how "funny" / "annoying" some activities are etc. - all of this will be seen in at a completely different angle when the real $$ is involved.

You either build one game or another, you can't go in two different directions at the same time.

To me it is pretty clear that so far the developers are building a small MORPG and trying hard to make it work and make sense as an MORPG.

When they succeed they will have exactly that, a MORPG; it won't be possible just to slap RCE up on it or just to add some RCE elements to the game, they will have to start a new game from scratch, re-design / re-balance it again, remove elements that do not work with real cash, implement new etc.

Maybe the devs will do that in a very distant future but it's gonna be "another game", the game they are building now has no RCE future.

I don't think I got any official replies to my question I posted earlier, so I'd like to ask again here hoping to get one.

Do you have any official plans / strategy regarding RCE?

Is this game going to be a RCE one or not?

I'm not going to "speak for 99% of EU players here" or whatever but I personally have been watching the progress of this game for about 5 years now and the only reason for that was the small note on the front page of your web site saying it's "a real cash economy game".

Many people I know donated thousands of dollars not just to get another MORPG but a RCE game where they could start getting their investments back at some point.

After seven years all I know is that your team decided they don't want this game to be "an EU clone" and they want it to be "something different". Honestly, seven years is a lot of "thinking time", is that all you got so far?

I understand that now you are busy implementing some important programming solutions that any modern game is normally based on just to catch up with reality in technical term and that's great. Kickstart and PR is also great, still exactly what kind of game are you going to advertise?

How is the game economy going to work?

Is it going to be a "donation" base game as it is now?

Are you going just to wait how things will work themselves out in the process and then maybe implement RCE at some uncertain point in the future?

This game is not an RCE one at the moment and you can't advertise it as such.

The promise of RCE was the strongest pivotal point of this game, it's uniqueness, are you just going to compete with hundreds of other not-RCE MORPGs on the market?

I think now it's the proper time to at least make a definite statement about this, the statement that would go a little farther than "we're thinking about it" or "we're aware of it" or "we're too busy to think what kind of game we're actually trying to build".

Thank you!