Here's a suggestion to make paying for the Basic Edition more attractive: give paid users the ability to "skip" the queue or at least be prioritized higher in terms of server traffic than the Free users. This way, if you want the best connection to the game, you are incentivized to pay for your account. Additionally, this will make those of us who are already paid users and long-time players happier to play the game and invest even more of our money into it!
While the chance to cut through the queue is tempting, I feel that this choice would just end up creating a very bad image for Card Hunter/Blue Manchu. It paints a very dark pay to play picture of them. This game in my opinion is meant to be a fun, lighthearted game that absorbs too much (in a good way) of my time.
This (hopefully) is only a temporary problem, they'll sort out the server and many of the new players will stop playing after a while anyway. It's probably better in fact, in terms of numbers, if the new players get to play, as older players will probably stick around anyway.
On the flip side, this is how the majority of multiple-subscription type pay-to-play games, and free-to-play/premium games behave. In fact, in the case of Dungeons & Dragons Online, the queue order is as follows: VIP (skip the queue) Premium (next up!) F2P (sucks to be you if the server you want to join is high-population) Though, in fairness, DDO hasn't really had to worry about server load problems for a few years now, I think >.> And I think they actually dropped the preference-sorting when they dropped Gamespy, so that may be outdated. But anyway! Point being, it's not a 'dark picture' it's a 'very normal picture'. All that said, I do agree that it doesn't really fit the open-welcoming-arms no-heavy-thoughts-about-buying-in approach CH presents. Besides, people need to learn patience anyway- and it's never too early for them to start. Though if I end up going on a garden-gnome-kicking rampage due to lack of CH-fix, that's totally on me not being able to log in, I'm just saying :X
I would just give people who need to reconnect to matches the advantage: In this order: Official tournament marked games(can only be marked by devs) League games Ranked games Casual and Campaign
Judging by the raging internet, it's CRUEL AND GREEDY to sell special pre-order editions or to allow modders to charge money for their work. The image of a policy may be more important than the actual effect, especially for a small game like this that relies on word of mouth.
Wasn't arguing that, but you're comparing different topics. Queue-sorting has long been one of the non-pay-to-win approaches to making it beneficial to provide payment for a game. Some of the earliest F2P games used that approach- in a sort of 'You paid for use to allow better service, you get access to that better service' concept. I don't see anything wrong with it as a concept, but adding it in after-the-fact to a game as welcoming and open as CH is a bad idea. That, and you can really only afford to throttle logins when your server can minimize delays for everyone [if someone gets put on queue for more'n a few seconds, they tend to get irked], which doesn't really help the overall lag situation we're currently sorting through. So not really a fix relevant to the issues at hand. Also, you should stop listening to the internet, it's a dark and terrible place :X
