I’ve paid for one thing in Allods: A vanity outfit. Otherwise, I’ve built my character from the ground-up completely free-to-play. No hand-outs were given to me. I worked my ass off for it, and a year in, I’m enjoying endgame to the fullest with my guild.

We’re running the endgame instance with success, progressing the way we should, PvPing and PvEing equally. Most of us don’t pay in, and we still win. We report bugs when we find them, and are very community-oriented, having held several events ourselves to benefit the community as a whole, including:

A Birthday Event thread on the forums; two of the five Astral Scholar team members (myself included) who go out of our way to help new players understand the game and find help from GMs when needed; a no-holds-barred ‘fair play’ policy, as well as an unwillingness to associate with exploiters; and a general-live-and let-live attitude towards inter-guild politics.

So needless to say, with the least amount of Cash Shop users, we still have plenty of success, in both gameplay and in community. It’s really not a P2W game, though it used to be at some point. But that was fixed due to community outcry, of which we were a part of.

I never put much stock in the maxim of, “if you don’t like it, leave”. The game has long since overcome its bad reputation spurned by the Gipat patch of last year, and endgame as well as mid-level and low-level zones are thriving to the point of bursting.

I may be an optimist, but don’t let that hurt my credibility on this matter. I’ve put the last year of my gaming into this game, and I’ve seen it grow quite a bit from what it was when I started. The game is rough around the edges, some bits of it are untested, and others are downright confusing and off-putting, but overall, you won’t regret putting some serious time into it. It is a team-based game, so guilding up is important if you want the best possible experience.

In summary: Some may call Allods a “WoW clone”. I’d call it a decent WoW alternative. It’s free, it showers new players with gifts, it has plenty of events each month in which you can win high-end cash shop prizes on FaceBook, and the GM team cares for its community in general. Out of every F2P I’ve seen, only one has really given more consideration to their community than this one: Team Fortress 2. But, that’s another story for another time!

Come give Allods Online a look, if nothing else. Get to level 10 with a character or two. If it’s not your thing, oh well. But if it is, you won’t regret trying it.

That said, it suffers from your basic flaws that kill most free-to-play, but pay-to-really-play model. You’ll only have fun for the first day or so before the lack of paying cash begins to ruin the fun. The game is also absolutely rotted with gold spammers.

I was getting private whispers from them literally every 30 seconds, non-stop for hours on end.

If you want a free to play game without pay players beating you down senseless this is not the game for you.