Elsewhere in deal-altering news, Alganon Online has just announced that they will be going with a subscription free model where you buy the game, but going forward there’s no fee. There will be an shop selling things for real world money in a similar way to Allods and its F2P friends.
But wait. They’ve been selling subscriptions. Presumably those are going to be refunded?
No. From the Alganon site news:
Right now we know you are thinking: “What about those of us who pre-paid? If there isn’t a subscription what did I pre-pay for?”
Well we’ve worked out a special for you. All Subscribers are being converted into Citizens and because we want to thank you for your show of support for Alganon, we have worked out a deal where what was paid will be converted to Alganon Tribute, a new in game currency system. Pre-Paid quarterly players will get 839 Tribute, semi-annual will get 1,559 Tribute and annual will get 2,878 Tribute deposited into their accounts after the April launch. We realize these numbers mean little without something to reference them against, so we will release more information on Tribute numbers as it gets closer to the Official Launch.
The Tribute Market System (TMS) will serve as the foundation of Alganons new real-dollar transactional framework. This market will support three categories of purchases: Items, Boons, and Services.
* Items include Pets, Mounts, Equipment, Access Keys, Potions, Boxed Collections, Tokens and specialty items that will be available through the Market.
* Boons are specific to studies and allow the purchase of study-time. This provides the player with options since the study system directly relates to access of advanced game content and systems. A player could purchase a year of studies right away or use the studies system in real-time; boons simply let the player accelerate that time.
* Initial Services offered will be character transfers.
So the money you paid to subscribe is getting turned into Alganon Tribute. Without asking. That is indeed “Special”!
But what if you don’t want to buy anything from the shop? Maybe you’d like to be the one who decides when it is that you buy Alganon Tribute, instead of having, in the case of an pre-paid annual subscription, a considerable amount of money converted into Tribute without you having any say on it. Once again, an MMO company is simply altering the deal.
This is not something that should be encouraged. I’m no lawyer, but it does sound like it might brush up against some sort of law or other. It certainly does not make me feel particularly good about trusting them with my credit card details.