RF Online on going free-to-play, localization differences
Warcry has posted a nice interview with Chris Dye and Kyle Rowley, Community Officer and Manager for RF Online, an MMO that sits in an interesting place-- it originally started out as a hardcore Korean MMO, and has now warped here in North America into a Westernized, free-to-play offshoot of the original. It's an interesting strategy, and only one that MMOs can pull off-- if your players don't like the game you release, just update it into a completely different one.
One very interesting change they made was to up loot drops-- apparently Western players felt they weren't getting rewarded the way they want to, so Codemasters (who publishes the game here) doubled the drop rates, not once but twice. On the other side of this, they've gone RMT to make the game free to play-- players can play real cash for ingame money used to buy ingame items. For some reason, that's flown in the Eastern MMO market, but not here so far-- it'll be interesting to see how RF Online players get into it (or don't).
Unfortunately, none of the interview actually focuses on whether RFO is any more fun to play. Then again, it is free now-- you could do worse than to go grab the download and check it out for yourself.
