Devs continue to shoot for early April official release date, keep initial purchase price to "prevent Alganon from being saturated by gamers who have no investment in the game they are playing."

After only a few months of availability to consumers, the developers at Alganon have opted to drop the subscription fee to their game. Although they're not moving to a straight free-to-play model, they've decided to go the route that we've seen with Guild Wars in the past and allow gamers to play their game for free once they've made their initial purchase.

For the entire story, you can either continue reading or head on over to the Alganon official site to check out their post and discussion.

From the official site:

Participating in the online gaming industry is more challenging now than it has ever been and the Free to Play market has changed the game. Partially for the good. Partially for the bad. It has resulted in more choices for gamers, but lessened the quality of so many released products and Micro transactions are now becoming the norm.  To evolve with the ever changing market, Alganon has moved to a Subscription Free model.

There is a difference between Free to Play (F2P) and Subscription Free (SF). F2P gives the client away so there is zero barrier of entry. This creates a game world where anyone can just come in and do their thing. The drawback is the lack of controlling troublemakers and defining the general social maturity of a game.

We decided to keep the purchase price to prevent Alganon from being saturated by gamers who have no investment in the game they are playing. Even though we are subscription free most gamers prefer to play with others who are committed to the game to some degree.

Regarding the much-anticipated March 1st hype, we know that you are looking forward to new features and the Dawning world bosses in the patch that many people assumed to be today.  This was our initial plan and what we were shooting for.  However, we looked in the oven, and it's not quite finished baking.  So there will be a slight delay until everything is complete.  The week of March 11th we'll be releasing a patch that will include The Dawning world bosses (as well as the usual patch fixes/etc).  In the meantime the developers are diligently working to complete several new and redesigned features, most noticeably the collection of Dungeon Instances, a fully redesigned Starter experience (including completely unique starter areas - we're excited about this!), and the Tribute Market System.  They are all on track to be part of our Official Launch release on week of April 8th.

Right now we know you are thinking: "What about those of us who pre-paid?  If there isn't a subscription what did I pre-pay for?"

Well we've worked out a special for you.  All Subscribers are being converted into Citizens and because we want to thank you for your show of support for Alganon, we have worked out a deal where what was paid will be converted to Alganon Tribute, a new in game currency system.  Pre-Paid quarterly players will get 839 Tribute, semi-annual will get 1,559 Tribute and annual will get 2,878 Tribute deposited into their accounts after the April launch.  We realize these numbers mean little without something to reference them against, so we will release more information on Tribute numbers as it gets closer to the Official Launch.

The Tribute Market System (TMS) will serve as the foundation of Alganons new real-dollar transactional framework. This market will support three categories of purchases: Items, Boons, and Services.

• Items include Pets, Mounts, Equipment, Access Keys, Potions, Boxed Collections, Tokens and specialty items that will be available through the Market.
• Boons are specific to studies and allow the purchase of study-time. This provides the player with options since the study system directly relates to access of advanced game content and systems. A player could purchase a year of studies right away or use the studies system in real-time; boons simply let the player accelerate that time.
• Initial Services offered will be character transfers.

One thing that makes the Tribute Market System unique is Item Maintenance. This way players will never lose certain items they purchase from the market (ones that are not a consumable or have a finite number of charges). This allows players to buy that special mount and use their Tribute to pay Maintenance on the mount to keep it active. If it goes inactive, they can easily reactivate with Tribute instead of having to re-purchase the mount.

You will also get Tribute simply by playing the game.  The more days you log in, the more Tribute you'll have added to your game account. Tribute is account-wide, so the points can be used by any character. In addition, players can purchase Items via a web-browser on MyAlganon or through the game.  Any character tied to their account can then claim the items.

This is going to be a big month for us here at QOL as we wrap up the core elements of the game and get ready for the Official Release in April. We couldn't have done (nor continue to do) this without your faith and support in what we are doing, and we hope for even bigger things to come both with and because of that support.

As always, we want you to thank you for continuing help to spread the word of Alganon.

Sincerely,

The Alganon Team