I think people just don’t want to give up hope, as though there’s some way the game can survive. Personally, I think that the entire “Community Edition” idea involves a LOT of wishful thinking. Once people encounter the severe limitations involved, I expect most remaining players to quickly abandon the game for good. (Unreasonable server costs might kill it even sooner, of course. I’m still wondering what those will involve, considering that a dedicated server will certainly be required. I’d guess $50/month, which is probably a lot more than people are expecting.)
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Its already playable. To get back our accounts will take atleast a month to wait. We already have all skins unlocked as well.
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I wanna play in my acc. I feels weird to rank without my acc and without friends
You do know that friends and the list is going away right…
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Not to mention that rank is meaningless now …
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I…
Sigh…
30 chars is not enough to write down my dissapointment
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I don’t believe that they would waste effort on working on the game in any capacity, much less modifying functionality so that people could still play event game modes and make parties, if people weren’t still playing. It would have been of little value for them to not let the game get shut down unless there was enough people still playing to make it a worthwhile investment.
Practically speaking, lets be real; it is highly unlikely that SEMC saved this game solely out of love for the game. There might be other factors like player interest in the assets which could lead to retention in spellfire, and company good will, but ultimately it stands to reason that enough people are still either playing or trying to play this game for it to have been worth it for semc to save it, regardless of profitability. With that said, I don’t see their decision making process as motivated to just be done with it: they’re actively engaging with the community, they’re providing regular and informative updates, they’re just… doing a lot of stuff they really don’t have to do, and it makes me believe that ridding themselves of this game in a tight package is not their primary motivation.
As for legal issues, that’s a whole other ball game, and obligatory IANAL, however regarding the main thing; the value of your money, it stands to reason that making the primary reasons for your purchase of their currency free to all, along with re-adding a ranking system and some kind of party play functionality, acknowledges the main reasons why people might have a valid legal gripe. Also this is why I don’t quite follow the ‘removing everything’ line of thought, as they’re just removing their role in providing features, not eliminating the capability of those features to serve their function.
Now that’s not to say that I don’t think it’s a stretch that this game will be able to survive, but I don’t think it’s outlandish to assume right now that it’s less a question of if it will survive, but how.
and lol @hazeleyes I can’t speak for anyone else, but for myself, I am not basing my assumptions off of hope. I just look at the critical failure point for this game as a bit further off, and am making an analysis based on inferences for now. For example I’m more worried for the point where they move off semc servers. Right now it seems like a good enough amount of people who have game knowledge are still playing the game, even with the limitations now, even if they aren’t spending money. I don’t think much is going to change initially, especially if they re-add most functionality back. People love this game, and this game has been ‘dying off’ for years. I don’t doubt that people who still want to play are going to play. What I fear is the effect of server fragmentation, so I’m more concerned with how semc implements its server plan than anything: is it going to just be one selected company hosting the game with everyone still relegated to an initial vanilla server? (preferred for continuity), are people going to have to pay to play now, or are things going to be based on donations to who manages the server? (realistically, a small group of supportive donors taking the hit is more efficient for keeping the game alive than forcing everybody to pay). Those are the questions I ask myself when I question whether this game is truly dead. I think it might die in that process, but is it DOA with this new community edition? I think it really depends on how SEMC manages to keep the community playing together.
What are you basing this statement on? I’m genuinely curious, because literally every piece of actual evidence I’ve seen shows the exact opposite.
That, at least, is quite true.
What we’ve learned from the Rogue debacle is that the game has been losing money (and large amounts of it) for quite some time. Rogue tried but was unable to make the game self-sustaining. (And recall that I’ve been told that SEMC had been looking for a buyer for the game for quite a while but got no offers.) That leads to the fairly obvious conclusion that the game in its existing form was doomed no matter who was running it.
That said, I think there would be a chance for VG to live on and perhaps even attract new players if SEMC were to allow mods and user-created content. It would be a bit of a Wild West at first, but as better designed mods and well maintained servers grew in popularity, you’d essentially have a renaissance of a game which was new but which had the VG we all love at its core.
Unfortunately, that’s not what SEMC have done. Instead, they’re attempting to maintain control over the game while making the community pay the infrastructure costs. That’s not likely to work out well, imo, especially with the game in its current, very broken state.
And let’s not forget the sleeping giant that is Riot. Once they enter the mobile space, there won’t be much oxygen left for VGCE.
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Honestly I’m mainly basing things off of SEMC’s reaction to things. I just don’t see them making this type of effort with this much gusto if a playerbase wasn’t there even if they weren’t spending money. Yes profitability is a necessity, but this largely looks like a move to retain as much loyalty and players as possible until spellfire, which I don’t think they’d do if there wasn’t something there and they didn’t have evidence that people still cared about vainglory assets.
I think that vainglory is doomed where substantial profit is concerned atm, but I don’t think it’s doomed in general. I mean think about it, if semc server costs are so high, chances are there are a good amount of people still playing. If self sustainability is an issue, it leads me to think that these players are just not spending money. As for the mods/user content, I haven’t seen the community clamoring for mods the same way other game communities have, and this leads me to believe that mods are not as important to players as a functional core game without the bs. I just don’t see modifying the game as being the breaking point for invested players.
All that said, LoL:WR is a whole other beast. I’m not calculating that into things because the sticking point of vg largely seems to be its impressionability, which makes WR’S effect on the vg playerbase much more of a wildcard, as player nostalgia and loyalty to vg’s concept may sway retention much more than in other games.
Will read the rest a little bit later as I have work now, but I base my opinion on real numbers. You see, samsung. track players like steam on every galaxy phone out there from years. It’s easy and simple to see that info if you have one and everyone is tracked even if he never agreed to. So I knew the exact number of players on all the galaxy devices as old as galaxy s6 and older… but all the lines are included like galaxy A, galaxy J and so on. Basically every samsung device out there. I can easily double the number to include all the iphones and other brands android devices and voala - I know pretty much what’s the player base or sort of.
Saying all that, to know where the game is going I don’t need accurate number, just the direction it’s going. It was kinda stable till 2.9 HP changes where it started to decline faster and after the 5vs5 release where it started to lose players super fast. From there is a bumpy downwards trend only and a pretty fast one.
So basic your opinion on feels or assumptions is not good enough for me when I base mine on real numbers that are accurate. I even compared back in the days how VG stands next to ML and AOV, it was really bad and that was shortly after 5vs5 release. Truth is, ML makes even AOV looks like a joke in player base and was the only mobile MOBA last time I checked (pre summer 2019 iirc) that actually grows and with a good rate. AOV is also dying, but still had literally 30-40 times VG player base.
I can’t be sure and totally don’t want to put time to check, but I suspect that legally they can get into trouble if you spend 1k euro (my case, sadly. I am sure there are people that spend even more btw) on the game and they stop it for you while continue to support it in another region. The solely fact they addressed specifically that topic in one of the QAs and the guys sounded kinda… dunno what word to use for, but maybe uncomfortable. Maybe there is something into it. After all we are not talking about total game death, don’t forget that. It will still continue to exist in it’s full form in China.
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Its okay. Me two. I think Im at the accepting level of the stages of grief.
From my understanding (and I have not researched this in a while), no games as a service title is going to set up their TOS so that they can’t shut down the game. There is always some stipulation that they reserve the right to do basically whatever they want with the product, as evident by the fact that Rogue planned to shut it down without even turning off IAP first.
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I definitely agree with your sentiment in a lot of ways. I also believe something happened around the hp changes, and around the time they first introduced talents, things were already ominous to me: it seemed like there was a change in core philosophy about the game somewhere. I think they decided that a more casual experience to stimulate growth through accessibility was the move to make. At the same time, they made a push to appeal to competitive players for things like worlds and what not. Those are two competing ideologies often; it’s hard to make a game function as easy to play, hard to master, in a competitive situation, as eventually the skill ceiling has gotta be high enough for players to feel like their actions are controlling the results, and yet at the same time it has to be so low that new players don’t have to try as hard to get results. It’s a highly opposing dynamic.
The one thing we might have to agree to disagree on is how we factor in things that are harder to quantify. The ‘feel’ of a situation is not arbitrary to me. It is usually based on things we just struggle to put into numbers, and so while it might not be ‘number data’ that I use to come to conclusions, I am using ‘information’ of a different sort.
Take for example @coltonJW 's statement about how Rogue likely wouldn’t have attempted to shut down the servers like they did if they were reasonably concerned about legal ramifications for doing so. That is something that I would use to infer that chances are SEMC also has enough confidence in their lack of liability that that wasn’t a motivator for saving the game by itself. That’s not number data, but that is a type of information that can give you an idea about how to correctly perceive the situation. Anyway that whole debate has and continues to be had.
I also think you make an interesting point about AOV dying even though exponentially bigger than VG. Things like that make me question if players just don’t like certain things in mobas even on an (ugh, hate the term) subconscious level, you know? After all, the most successful moba is still highly technical. Again more reaching and inferences though!
We can’t make conclusions based on that as in the end VG is SEMC’s game, so we can’t be sure how the contract was made and it’s totally possible that rogue are ok legally wise and all things would go towards SEMC if they shutdown the game.
As for AOV, I played it a decent amount too and it’s too close to ML while offering less. It’s simple as that. At first it was smoother/prettier, but ML saw a lot of updates + new client from scratch on another engine that is fast, smooth, pretty. ML is just a better game, simple + 1000+ times the player base in EU helps vs AOV. 
Both are different type of MOBA compared to VG/LOL WR tho. Really targeting playing on the go instead of home. So while MOBA genre is not as popular, the reason AOV is dying in Europe/rest of the world besides China is that players just play ML for the better overall game/experience. In China AOV do just fine.
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No friends list - how will we then initiate party invites? What the heck is this? @hazeleyes, I haven’t logged in in over a month at least. Not planning to now, unfortunately. I would for a VGF server, but how can I invite folks like @HipsterSkaarf and yourself along with many others to a party for some fun?
Parties are disabled or at least I wasn’t able to even start one (even if it was just me in it). In theory they will come back in the future.
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Hola, mi amigo! 
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Hello!
Good to see you!
My brother an I have been trying to queue at the same time to get into a match together. Didn’t work 
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There is supposed to be some sort of invite code system as an interim solution until eventually some kind of friends list gets re-implemented.
They don’t seem to grasp that the more barriers they raise to making it easy for people to play, the fewer people will bother.
Y’all are playing without getting your acc back?