I've said my part about this game already, And I don't intend to repeat that but...
A free weekend. Seriously. A Free 2-day period. :/
Even more commercial MMOs give a longer period to get hooked. Either Sir Eskil has a lot of confidence, or the game doesn't have much to do.
Or he's trying to appeal to the people who have shitloads of weekend time to spare. Either way I don't think he thought this thing through. :V
It's important to remember that is not an MMO, even though some people like to call it that. While the game does have a bit of a learning curve, most of what you can do in the game can be done right from the start. With the exception of some of the systems that AVAIL introduced there isn't much preventing a new player from doing the same things as a long time player so 2 days is enough to at least get a taste of what you can do in the game provided you don't get hopelessly lost and confused (which does happen and we'll try to prevent that as much as we can). The lasting appeal of the game depends on more spontaneous things, and less on things that the game intentionally holds back from you.
For people who want to try it out for even longer, the game already has a "trial" of sorts in the form of friend accounts. Anyone who already pays for the game can bring in one other person for free as long as they're online and there is no time limit to this.
On the other hand, I guess if you wanted to take a more cynical view of things, the thing with a free weekend is that it's "safe" and you don't lose much if stuff goes wrong.
People would get pissed off if they expected a longer trial period that would have to be ended for whatever reason, and while hopefully that won't happen the possibility is there.
The current maximum capacity of the game counting all servers is about 1000 players. That's less than a single WoW server a decent day, and it doesn't help that Love's servers are actually more expensive to run due to the game being very demanding on the server side of things. That's only the hard limit, in practice the number of players that can be playing at once without adversely affecting gameplay is much lower than that.
We think the game is fairly niche and doesn't have enough "mainstream" appeal in the first place to get that many over the course of a couple days and on such short notice. However, there is always the remote possibility that we could be wrong and see this offset by the appeal of "free game".
Technical issues aside, this is a game that has had problems with large influxes of players before. While launch day went fairly well overall, there was some serious balance issues that occured. For much of the first half of launch day the game was unable to compensate for the number of players coming in and nearly all AI settlements were rapidly being destroyed much faster than the game could propagate them through the world, and so there were long periods of pretty much nothing going on. Later that day a few adjustments were made to the AI, but this turned out to be severe overkill it resulted in all player settlements being destroyed within minutes.
That being said, the game is probably much better set up now to handle this sort of thing than it was back then, but because the number of regular players has been fairly consistent since then it hasn't exactly been tested.
If it turns out that having all these new people around really messes up the game then it would be bad to be stuck with them for very long, especially if it cripples the game to the point where it can't make a good impression and defeats the point of having the game free for that time in the first place.
As you've pointed out before there is also always the possibility of massive griefing, though surprisingly there has been very little to no significant griefing in Love so far. Of course, the game has never been free before.
While this is to bring in new players, it is also bit of an experimental shot in the dark and nobody is quite sure what's going to happen.
If it does happen to go really well then it would be much easier to extend or repeat it than to shorten it. There's no skeptical company bureaucracy to convince here, Eskil can make it however long he wants. If it turns out that 2 days isn't long enough then it can easily be turned into a week.
Anyway I managed got a more definite time for this. It should start 6pm GMT on Friday and continue until noon on Monday.
