Quoting: Guest

Quoting: DrMcCoyThis was the game that was heavily dependant on real money purchases, right? You need to plop down real actual money for a lot, for a house, and then regularily to keep that house, the items you put in, on and around your house, etc pp

No, the real money for plots/houses is entirely voluntarily, although the incentive was/is the tax free portion of it. Taxes are in game gold, although there is an option to pay probably through COTO's. People have property without spending any real money, indeed with row houses etc and player towns if you want a place someone is likely to have a spot for you whilst you save to get a lot deed and then a house.

Houses can be crafted in game too...

The vast majority of people with houses in game paid for them with real money. Deeds, required for placing a house, can not be purchased for in game gold unless another player decides to sell for gold. Houses can be crafted, but the skill needed for that crafting is quite high, houses on vendors are quite expensive and all of the crafted houses are less impressive versions of the ones for sale for real money.

There is/was a deed lottery, but ~90% of deeds were won by long term players with a pile of deeds already.

When I stopped playing, I had hundreds of hours logged since persistence and even if I liquidated everything I had collected since persistence, I'd only be able to scrape together around 40% of the selling price of the cheapest lot deed I had seen offered for sale for in game for in game currency.

If you don't mind the mobile game feeling of the developer pawing at you wallet the whole time you are playing, SOTA might be for you, otherwise give it a wide berth.

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Quoting: nateI still plan on buying this game, but I'm going to wait a year or so after release to do so to let them fix all the problems with it.

Given their userbase, a year is on the high side of how long many folks are estimating this game will last.

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Careful now, Portalarium's relationship with the truth entered the "It's Complicated" realm long ago. It's possible that Linux support was a promise made by someone no longer on the team which they take to mean it no longer applies to them. If you enjoy the game, more power to you, don't let me rain on your parade, if you haven't yet invested the 2-3 hundred the devs target for the "full experience" you might want to pass on this one.

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Quoting: ElectricPrismI'll be surprised if they don't raise 1 million, and I won't be shocked if they raise 2 million.

System Shock 2 remains in my top 5 games of all time, the story is amazing, even my Linux rig is named Citadel, I can't wait - but yeah no I'm not buying if it's not on Linux.

Which begs the question of why this is on Kickstarter. It isn't like Survival Horror is a dead genre or that the "??? Shock" brand has been in the dustbin for decades.

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Quoting: cprnSo... what gives?

Well... there are many problems,

1. Not all key retailers are equal, some are almost as shady as G2A. Some might not be able to specify exactly which keys are affected by the chargeback, but they are definitely taking that money back from the dev.

2. There is a delay between the fraudulent charge and the charge back. The charge back could come as much as 60 days after the original charge, which means you can't trust your revenue number for up to 2 months.

3. When you cancel the key, you are cancelling a game that someone actually paid for, you are going to piss them off, they may hate you forever as G2A is not exactly friendly with the refunds. Ubisoft might not give a shit, but if a smaller indie dev pisses off a few thousand gamers that could kill the company's reputation.

4. The big time thieves work with hundreds of accounts each with tens of thousands of transactions a year, a bit of negative feedback is barely going to register and just to be safe G2A will happily follow it with an official statement saying that the seller is totally all cool and it is such a shame that the buyer had a bad experience and if they had just subscribe to Shield then all would be well.

G2A know they are peddling stolen goods, they have access to the data, they know that their biggest sellers are moving a significant number of cancelled keys linked to stolen CCs, but they do nothing because they are making fat stacks of cash and live in a jurisdiction that doesn't particularly care about crimes against foreigners.

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Quoting: ANDREZAOHow can we be sure that G2a bulk purchase keys obtained by theft of credit cards?

It could be that people have legitimate access to large quantities of discount keys that they are able to sell for around half retail on launch day like: https://www.g2a.com/index.php/lego-star-wars-the-force-awakens-steam-cd-key-preorder-global.html?___store=canada [External Link]

But if they did, why would they sell them on one of the shadiest sites around? Given the volume of keys that G2A moves, were they all legit, hell even if half were legit, you could set up a simple store front with no gimmicks and sell everything, no subscriptions, no "buy a random key" nonsense, just turning around thousands of dollars of keys per day at no risk.

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Quoting: badberAand you know for a fact that people selling on G2A are either not from the countries where it's legal despite these terms or that the majority of keys have been obtained thousands at a time exactly how?

If you're cool helping turn a crank in a money laundering scheme, who am I to dissuade you? Just don't be surprised if you find your keys cancelled and your Steam account flagged some day.

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Quoting: badberWhat exactly are you basing that on?

I read, or at least glance through, the terms and conditions when I buy things. "Not for resale" clauses are the norm not the exception. Some countries will let a resale slide as consumer's rights, but buying thousands of copies, specifically for resale, wouldn't be protected under such provisions.

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Quoting: badberIf G2A will become more cooperative and allows the publishers/developers to check the keys and goes even further in the future, it'll be OK.

If they do that, they go out of business. The majority of keys for sale are from stolen credit cards and the majority of the remainder were originally sold with a "not for resale" clause in the purchasing agreement.

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Their basic business model is as follows:

1. User A steals a bunch of credit card numbers.
2. User A uses these credit cards to buy thousands of non-resalable Steam key from Steam key reseller B.
3. User A offers those keys for sale on G2A at a heavily discounted rate because their only cost so far has been the stolen credit cards.
4. User C buys the key from G2A, G2A takes a piece of the action and then turns over the (now laundered) money to User A.
5. User C activates the code on Steam.
6. Person D realizes that someone has made fraudulent charges on their credit card and has their credit card company issue a chargeback to Steam key reseller B.
7. Steam key reseller B debits the developer E's account for their share of the sale.
8. Developer E is now left in the awkward situation where thousands of people just got their game without the developer getting their share and if they cancel the codes they end of looking like a heel.
9. G2A laughs all the way to the bank.

The new model would change 8 so that the developers would become complicit with the theft.

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