Current State of the Beta! by MrVic & Breyd1971

Aristarkh, on 13 August 2010 - 03:20 AM, said: The ability to play a game together with your friends is such a basic and important feature that the idea of having to pay extra for it is absurd. What's next, a 1 gold charge per line of text in chat?
If a game is good and I have some extra cash to spend, I don't mind buying a little trinket like a premium tank or custom paint job. I've done it before in other games, and I've even donated to people who don't require any money at all for their games. If someone makes something that I enjoy, I feel that they should be rewarded. In case I didn't make it clear enough, I spend money on free games.
However, if you start doing unseemly things like removing fundamental features so that important parts of the game are unusable unless I pay, or making premium tanks more powerful than regular tanks so I have to buy them to stay competitive, or anything else that makes me feel pressured into buying something from you, then you won't get anything out of me. I simply don't reward pushy salespeople. Especially not ones who promised that the rewards of paying "will neither affect the gameplay nor give players decisive advantage in battles."
The ability to play a game with one's friends is as fundamental a requirement as the ability to have fun playing it. It needs to be something that even the newest of newbies can do. The only reason the lack of a "play with friends" option has been acceptable thus far is because we know the game is unfinished and we expect you to make everything work before release. It has nothing to do with what people can afford, or whether they have access to a credit card, or what their personal economic mentality is. This is about whether you respect your customers enough not to intentionally break your game just so you can charge them to fix it.
That said, if you really want to screw up random battles by letting people buy teamwork, at least give us a non-random battle mode we can play instead.