Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg
Oh joy. In-game advertising. I have certainly looked forward to that all my life!  |
It's not unheard of. Anarchy Online (when playing as a "froobie" (free-account player)) displays ads all over the place when you're in a city, sometimes to the point of bogging your system to a crawl. (Heheh...somehow, I'd managed to disable said ads in my free-account client, but lost that when I had to reinstall) Of course, the free accounts were supposed to be gone by January 2008 (a bad idea, if you ask me, since a lot of free-account players later update to subscriptions, since the free accounts can't get to all the quests, and the ones they can get to can't always be solved by free-account holders). One word of caution: The client is HUGE. Nearly two gig for the full client, which also works(ed?) for the free accounts.
Being a social player of such games, I do best when I'm working alongside someone I know, or at least have learned can be trusted in-game not to injure party members in a fight. When my friend died IRL in November 2006, I eventually quit playing Anarchy Online, because it was no longer as much fun for me. Paying in excess of $130 a year for a game just doesn't cut it for me, and most MMO games nowadays are $15 a month or higher. There are some holdouts (look on
www.gpotato.com for several, but look out if you're using Vista and they haven't patched the anti-hacker protection. It does bad things to Vista's licensing infos. Another holdout is The Realm (
www.realmserver.com) which has changed hands about three times; last I checked, it's still $54 a year. The disadvantage is that the game (unless they've significantly upgraded the in-game engine) still uses
King's Quest-style graphics. (and yes, despite Ultima Online's claim, The Realm is the oldest and longest-running of the MMOs. I still remember when UO went into beta; I'd been playing "The Realm" for nearly a year by then.)