RisenKill
What other developers have to do with this is that most people will not support financially, month to month, for non-porn indies. Even as awesome as Rimworld, Tynan didn't expect to succeed at a month to month patreon, hence why he went the Kickstarter route. Its only Porn indies that can expect to be paid month to month, to develop a game over 6+ years to final build state. Sometimes even longer, like Wild Life.
Its often a hard sale to get someone to spend $40 once, on an Indie, and feel like they got their money's worth. For a fully released and feature complete game. Like how many people quibble over Everspace 2's price, but will shell out month to month to support a porn developer. I'm not saying that porn devs don't deserve every penny, but many gamers can be quite petty with forking over money for a one-time fee structure for feature complete games.
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Well, 1.5 years is accurate. Because before the crack came out, the free version was for Release 8, with the latest at Release 13. With a free release every 3 months, it would take waiting 1.5 years to see Release 13. But by then, any bugs in Release 13 would be fixed, so any feedback would be totally irrelevant, unless you were paying to get access to latest stable releases.
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There are often ways to prevent trolls and spam bots, that don't require paywalls. Examples I've seen are:
1. Have to wait 24 hours to post.
2. A bot messages you when you join, and have to do a quick captcha.
3. Have to post 10 messages, in general chat, before can post elsewhere.
4. Have to agree to submitting your IP address, so that if you spam stuff, they can easily report you.
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One mechanic from souls games that people like/hate. Hrmm... those potentially are:
-> Notes (often useless ones)
-> Previous death marks (clicking on it, to get killed by the thing they got killed by)
-> Invasions (hate me those darn invasions, especially as they prevent entering the boss arena and invaders often use glitches and exploits to be uber powerful)
-> Losing your currency and having to retrieve it, to get killed and lose that stuff permanently.
-> Having butt ugly female characters.
-> Install kill fall damage from a short height.
-> Getting backstabbed from a rubber banding when you roll and get backstabbed anyway.
-> Invisible floors in the crystal cavern.
-> Petrification clouds.
-> Ghosts that go through walls and floors and hit hard.
The list goes on...