A Player's Critique

Ah the sad tale of Acclaim and the pursuit of easy money , the never ending story of good products gone to waste due to poor management and bad decisions.

I began that end of things playing the first closed beta for 9 Dragons with the European host Persistant Worlds , way back when the game first hit the Western market. PW went out of business and Acclaim continued to host the game in the USA under the guise of what they said would be a game more geared toward western players with less grind and more content , which it is not to this day. I soon joined the Acclaim open beta and went on to become one of the original members of Divine Spears ,which at the time was the top Brotherood of Thieves Clan which later dissolved with the forced move to Asura server for pvp , another Acclaim mistake.

I had played Hero also from the first week of its open beta , that was one wild community back then with Kagesama and his Zhuang guild Juppongatanna squad tryingto kill anyone who went to Mudo island or forcing them to pay gold to level there in peace , I was a Shao myself and we had some interesting conflicts with the Zhuang back then, but eventually everyone moved on to less grindy games, the grind in both games is quite comparable but 9D was still a much better game. After reaching close to level 80 I moved on to 2 Moons which is better than both but again , I don`t have the greater part of my life to devote to leveling so I had to stop due to the grind also.

Acclaim has a pattern of obtaining pre exsisting titles to host in the west with lots of promises of less grind and additional content but they never seem to break away from the exp item dependent cash shop models and once they have any kind of population , the management seems to vanish.

People in 9 Dragons and 2 moons are still waiting for the rest of the games to be added but Acclaim doesent seem to have very good relations with the Korean developers and can never get much from them in the way of expansions. The asian versions of both games are complete with much more content than what Acclaim is hosting , they are very nice games but Acclaim`s versions are nothing more than grindfests with little content. In fact many people love Dekeron , the Korean game which 2 moons is based on , and also the Viet and Korean versions of 9 Dragons , both of which are very popular in asian countries .

Many people saw the potential of these 2 games and hung on to hopes that they would evolve , however this is not the case and so they are much less desirable . I still have the desire to play them but I just cant face the idea of having to kill 6 million mobs in order to gain a small amount of exp. it`s a shame that these 2 beauties have gone to waste , they are both unique and interesting games  that have become stagnant .