Sword of the New World: Another K2 Network Fallout?

Sword of the New World: Grandado Espada is a massive multi-player on line (MMO) game originally created by IMC Games. K2 Network received rights to publish the game in the US and launched it on July 10th of 2007. Before the official launch, during June 27th 2007 and July 9th 2007 Sword of the New World was under open beta phase. During open beta K2 worked with developers of IMC Games the the players to make appropriate fixes in glitches, text, bugs, and other content to make a better gaming experience before the launch. As it happens during this open beta phase everything seemed to be just fine, there wasn't much wrong with the game except the occasional small glitch or bug that was easily fixed in a minor patch update. Sword of the New World was looking pretty good come the official launch date... Or was it?

The Official Launch and it's Problems

When July 10th came around staff members of K2 Network announced the official launch of the game. With the launch came the paid to play advertisement, a promotional CD which players could purchase, and an exclusive gift to all beta testers giving them a month free if they signed up for one month of subscription to the game.

Information on the launch can be seen here - http://forum.swordofthenewworld.com/index.php?showtopic=5130&hl=Official+Launch

The monthly fee to play the game was around $8.95 USD, the promotional CD was about $19.99. Because the game was so successful during the beta phase that almost all of the beta testers signed up for the monthly subscription, and or bought the promotional CD. Even people who haven't played during the beta phase signed up, so things were looking pretty nicely for K2 and it's staff. The only problem is that once the official launch was out, everything just seemed to crumble.

The first thing that players noticed was an unbelievably ridiculous amount of dialog errors found within various NPC's. The entire game was translated to meet the language preference of English speaking players, and even to this day a lot of the supported dialog hasn't yet been fixed.

There also came a ton of glitches and bugs that were highly noticeable. One was if a player selected a certain costume when creating a character, the character would not show up in the quarters mode making it impossible to select or delete it. Another glitch came with some of the normal and raid bosses throughout the game, especially when quests involved you to kill certain bosses for drops. A lot of these bosses never dropped anything, which frustrated people greatly as they spent hours searching and killing these said bosses. Another one was the infamous HP glitch, in which if you are attacked you don't lose HP, but suddenly die not noticing it. This became extremely annoying as the healers in your team will not heal those character and it makes it hard not knowing whether or not your guy is getting hit or not.

The biggest problem that faced the official launch was with X-Trap. X-Trap is an anti hacking/anti botting system that is implemented in the game and almost all other games published by K2. The purpose of X-Trap was to make the game hacker and botter free, but the only thing it really did was keep good playing people out the game. X-Trap caused a ton of errors that kept players from actually being able to play the game. If a player wanted to fix this they would have to venture through the forums hoping that someone posted a fix, usually a download to an updated X-Trap folder or a work around. A lot of fixes were posted by other players, but never once by K2 themselves.

K2 finally stepped in and set up a ticket submission solely for X-Trap errors, and it seemed that finally K2 was going to step in and help. The thing was that the only thing K2 wanted to do was log the errors, and no one actually got any help from them. When you submitted a ticket about anything relating to X-Trap it was closed in a few short hours.

You can view more about the X-Trap problem here - http://forum.swordofthenewworld.com/index.php?showtopic=5551&hl=X-Trap

It also doesn't seem that X-Trap ever really did it's job as the game became flooded with botters. Because the game supported AFK (away from keyboard) leveling, players didn't actually have to be at their computer to level, which meant that a lot of places were full of people leveling, making the game extremely lagging and almost impossible to play on low performance computers. And because AFK leveling was okay by K2, it also opened it's door to botters who found work-arounds to bypass X-Trap. To this day the game is still infested with nothing but AFKers and botters.

Read more here - http://forum.swordofthenewworld.com/index.php?showtopic=14491

Sword of the New World goes Free to Play!

It would seem that K2 already has it's share of problems but it doesn't end there. On August 21st 2007, a little over a month after the official launch of the game K2 announced that Sword of the New World was going Free to play. So what about the people who paid subscription to the game already, maybe paid for a couple months in advanced? What was K2's compensation for this? Giving players who paid for monthly subscription 1,000 gold (cash shop/item mall currency) for every month they previously paid for before the free to play announcement. Sound's fair huh? I don't think so. A lot of the players became upset as this seemed exactly like a bait and switch scam. The announcement for the free to play switch over came suddenly and there was no previous warning or announcement advertising it. It was almost like a big slap in the face for the people on Sword of the New World. A lot of the players didn't want the compensation of gold, they wanted their money refunded, but K2 refused to do such a thing. Because K2 refused to refund the money people used to pay for the game, a lot of players turned to the Better Business Bureau. The BBB stepped in, and anyone who filed a complaint about the incident quickly got their money back.

More about the free to play launch - http://forum.swordofthenewworld.com/index.php?showtopic=9298&hl=Beta
K2's Company Report from the BBB - http://www.labbb.org/BBBWeb/Forms/Business/CompanyReportPage_Expository.aspx?CompanyID=100018034
Notice the nice B rating, and the 400+ complaints.

The month that players paid for was dubbed the "Paid Beta", which it really was. During that time there was a ton of glitches and bugs and other problems with the game, but you still had to pay for it. So it seems like people were basically PAYING to help K2 fix their game, and once things got better they finally went free to play.

Overview

So it seems that Sword of the New World has pretty much gone down the drain since it's beta. There are still countless problems with the game, and probably more or so to come. It would seem that maybe the problems only exist in the game itself, but a lot of the other games published by K2 have had their share of problems as well. Can I really be one to judge them and the entire on line gaming industry? Certainly not, but I have played a good share of on line games and I know from experience that problems like these should never have come up and if so should of been dealt with long ago. There really isn't much of an excuse K2 can offer that can validate some of the problems that have occurred.

Summary

Basically Sword of the New World gets a nice 3 out of 5 stars for me. The over all design and look of the game is nice, but the service sucks. I wouldn't really recommend this game to anyone, even if it's free to play. I know there are some good free to play games out there but this one surely isn't. If you do plan on playing this game, I'd take precaution. If something happens and you want it fixed don't expect K2 to rush in and assist you. The forums and the players will pretty much be the only help you'll get in this game.