Zemi Interactive Inc., a developer and service provider of famous free to play MMO “4story” has announced that they will run a special Christmas iPod giveaway event from 1st Dec to 10th Jan 2010 from 41 days with an affiliated Webzine.
This special event welcomes all MMO lovers and iPods are rewarded for 5 winners. Individuals that wish to participate must post an article about 4Story fits at least one of the following categories given, 4Story game review, 4story game guide, 4story media promotion and 4story personal stories. And this could be a fabulous opportunity to show off your special strategies or knowledge about 4story to MMO players in the world. All the articles will be examined after the event and winners will be announced on 20th of Jan 2010.
You can check the official website of 4story here.
Would you like to read our review of 4story?
After more than a year of playing I can say that most of the bugs and problems in this game remain unfixed or have grown in dimension, mostly due to the fact that the support system is awful, to be euphemistic. People managing the support are inexperienced and tend to believe of themselves as rulers of the game, just because the user note states that they don’t need to provide you any explanation of whatever their decision. So, even explaining a bug can result in a ban or a perm ban from the game or the forum just because to admit it would imply that problems remain unsolved by them, if not ignored at all. The community is a real mass of bumpkins and rude people and I believe that this is not all of their fault. The quantity of problems and boredom inside the game is as huge that even the most polite person will begin to act in this way after a not so long period of time. The game is still affected by heavy lag and periodically hordes of cheaters invade it, mostly unsatisfied or wrongly sanctioned players that enjoy to one-shot others. In at least two cases hackers have caused rollback and crashes of the server, causing people to lost money or objects without the possibility to retrieve them. Only recently, items from the shop were made exchangeable, reducing the heavy gap between paying and not-paying players. However, just from the beginning the game was pretty unbalanced and most of the players choose to be archers or mages cause this classes are the easiest to use in combat. The combat system just sucks because it is completely based on stunning attacks and you can win combats without even getting a scratch from your opponents in a long series of fights, in particular if you are a mage or an archer. Quests are useless and after the first 30 levels you will stop to follow the story, or what they pretend to call so. Believe me, doing 30 levels in the game doesn’t take much time. In the game there aren’t instances for players of the same level, made exception of “documents” in which people of a certain range of level can fight, but the scenario is just one of the usual map re-proposed to the players. Too bad, most of the players tend to avoid this kind of fights because it is much more difficult to gain “honour points” with them and they prefer to stay inside those territory in which they can kill player much weaker or to use them to stun enemies of their level, achieving these points in an easier way. On top of the madness, people acting in this coward way climb the rank and they are praised every month with powerful and rare objects, increasing the tendency to distort the rules of the game. Moreover, inside low level documents newcomers are forced to fight against secondary pg’s of top players that use very high level equipment. This results in a very frustrating experience because, if you are an inexperienced player, you cannot even move a step without dying. The purpose of this all is to instil frustration inside new players forcing them to pump up their equipment with item from the shop. Too bad, most of the newbie’s tend to leave the game and, in fact, most of the people that you will meet inside it are always the same. Every day except Sunday, at a precise time, there is the conquest. Behind this quite fashionable word hides the most futile of all the action in this game. During this event, you will be asked to reach one of the proper territory and wait for the boss of the camp. Too bad that this boss is so weak that in the most lucky happening it will resist to the attacks for a second. In fact this boss is merely a normal png with the same quantity of health of a middle to top player (3000-6000 hp). So even a simple attack from a couple of top players can kill him once and for all. After his kill the territory is assigned to the guild of the pg who killed him but, being so weak and being so strong the players in his respect, this often causes harsh discussions between guilds, just because after more than a year nobody really understood how territories are assigned, thanks to the absconding support system. Let’s not consider the fact that this is the moment of the day during which the lag is manifest, implying that some player won’t be able to join the conquer. On Sunday, one of the four castle inside the game can be conquered by players, granting to conquerors the access to particular and not commonly available objects. This is really a great idea but once more, too bad, a questionable choice was made by the developers. Indeed, not every player can join the fight for the castle but only those enrolled with those guilds that conquered most of the territory in a region during the week. This literally caused an exodus from lesser guilds to the greater ones, destroying the community and causing an abandon en masse of players. Moreover, to commit a “crime” inside the game is so easy that honest people will see their behaviour heavily tested. To avoid a ban is sufficient to change the name of the pg that committed it or to trick people with a level1 pg that can be erased later. In this way the punishment will be forgotten forever. During my experience of more than a year I can say that tricksters are completely free to do whatever they please. Frequently, you will fall inside a bug making you die or forcing you to teleport home if you don’t have potions or skills to fly; some time happens that you cannot even use this method to free yourself so the teleport will be the only solution, if fully recharged. Complaining about this situation will make you do the unpleasant experience of meeting GM’s, a sort of gang of lazy individuals that are only able to publicly insult players and to ban those that are so ingenuous or pure-hearted to underline their questionable administration. Their policy is that, following the idea that most of the users are scum, they feel free to insult them, to ignore their requests and to sanction them without showing any proof, assuming that the truth just flows from their mouths. As a conclusion, I must say that for a “free” game it is not so bad but only if you want to play randomly and if you are a first-time player. If you came from a better MMORPG you won’t last for long inside here because frustration and irritation will erase your will to relax in your free time. Maybe, one day those problems will be fixed but, after a year, I believe that that day is far to come.