Apologies or not, it seems unprofessional to let someone manage your community that personally attacked you and your products. I was already on the fence and there were a number of reasons besides this incident but here are a few:
- This was a fairly unique idea and concept for a game which was stolen from the creator of DayZ. This sort of thing happens all the time in the real world and more power to them if they can take the idea and make it better. It still doesn't sit well with my conscious. I have to think about how I would feel if I had came up with DayZ, only to have some rag-tag outfit swipe it out from underneath me and try to steal my thunder. Choosing a title like 'WarZ' to capitalize on the popularity of DayZ is also in poor taste.
- Copy and paste TOS from League of Legends, stolen Crysis features with little modification, heavily used War Inc. assets and barely modified game engine reeks of poor development and work ethic.
- Sergey was largely responsible for Big Rigs, one of the worst games ever made. This does not instill confidence.
- The game is still missing many announced features and several will not make into the final product by the time this leaves beta.
- Cash shop
- Selling the game as an Alpha. This is becoming a common practice with independent developers and I recall reading that DayZ will have a similar release and payment model. I still don't like it.
- Some of Sergey's comments have been very unprofessional and he often comes off as immature and conceited.
- There is still a large amount of hacking and cheating going on and most of the community is shoot first and ask questions later. There are little repercussions for killing others.
I played the game for about two days and lost most desire to continue playing. The game showed some promise in the little time I spent with it, but ultimately I'm only going to have time for one zombie survival game, and I have decided that game will be DayZ. Those are the developers that deserve my money.
I'm only going to touch on a few points that you made because some of them are your opinion and you are entitled to that. While I agree with you in the fact that the title is in poor taste, it did come from their game War Inc, so I don't have that much issue with it. Game development has been about taking unique ideas and expanding upon them for a long time. If War Z ends up being a better version of Day Z then I have no problem with it.
I see no problem with reusing assets from their past game. Any company making a game that can use old assets will. It cuts down on development time and if something works for your new game why wouldn't you use it again?
Sergey does come off as immature but I think that has a lot to do with the language barrier. Sometimes his statements just come off as someone who is struggling to find the right words. I had no idea he had anything to do with Big Rigs. I'm not going to let that stop me from enjoying this game though.
The cash shop isn't really all that useful. It doesn't offer any real advantages and you can earn the currency through in game actions. Plus they just reset everyone's GC that bought a package that gave you bonus GC. They also added extra on top of it as a thank you.
The Alpha thing I'm pretty sure comes from developers seeing the success of Minecraft and how that worked out. You can purchase it now and play through the Alpha and Beta instead of waiting for the full release or you can wait for the final product. No one really took issue with the way Minecraft did it so I don't see why someone else doing it should be a problem.
There isn't a large amount of hacking anymore. I've played for around 60 hours now and I've only ran into one hacker which happened to be early on. Once word got out that there was hacking (just like in Day Z mind you) people automatically assume that they've been killed by one if they don't see the guy who kills them. They are releasing the game on steam soon and giving steam keys to anyone who has already purchased the game. With steam comes the extra security measures.
The community for this game at the official forums is shit though. I realize that most official forums are horrible but the ones for this game seem especially bad. People seem way more entitled and impatient with it. It's an alpha/beta build right now and most people expect a flawless full release. The main problem is that when the developers say that they are hoping to release a feature within a certain time frame and it doesn't happen people go apeshit. That is the exact reason why other developers don't promise features by a certain date.
Day z has a better community right now because it isn't as easy to get into. I have a feeling that once they have the standalone release that the community will slowly turn to shit as well. At first this game had a lot more friendly players who worked together. Now they are few and far between.
I played Day z almost up to the point that this released. I wanted to see if this would be any better and so far it is. They both have their pros and cons but right now I'm sticking with this. If the standalone for Day Z happens to be better than War Z then I will switch back.