Would you see free to play as a failure?Follow

Failure? Not necessarily.

My kind of game, though? No.

Do I think it will ever happen? No. If SE cared that much about F2P cash grabs, then FFXI would have gone F2P years ago. Like Yoshi-P has said, what separates SE/Blizzard from the rest is a lack of investors to need to pay off. This game will make enough of a profit to be successful for SE, and, like XI, will probably be a nice little cash cow for years to come.


In related news, I didn't realize that ESO is going to have a subscription, too.

The biggest impact that I've seen with F2P is the difficulty with teaming with certain players. Sometimes they didn't purchase a particular dungeon or quest chain so it's tough get a team organized. Also IMHO some F2P games seem a little too pay to win or they sell you some potions which power level you quickly.

I don't believe I would continue playing a MMORPG that only offered F2P.

If warhammer "the game every forgot about" ca still survive with a fluctuation if 50k to 100k subscribers you better believe this game will.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, the day SE stops charging us to play is the day I stop playing.

This game already went Free To Play in its very beginning of the 1.0. We all saw the results? Game wiped harder than the stock markets during the Great Depression (For you US Citizens out there.). A Free To Play engine ruins all games. I personally hate them and I won't lie that my post right now has a boat load of bias. So I'm just going to cover the Free To Play aspect of this conversation and stay on topic.

Free To Play (Pay to Win) - The engine is garbage, utter garbage. This is where most MMO's fail. Because they have to set in restrictions against the players themselves on getting good things. The drop rates usually plummet, which sends the market skyrocketing into the millions. Way out of the reach of your average joe player. This also factors in the one thing that any company wants. Money. Free To Play models are notorious for placing Vanity Items (The "I want that.") in CS (Cash Shops) for those of you who don't know. These are what put players in that restricting bind of either doing one of the following.

A. Come out of their pocket with real money to buy in-game currency sponsered by the company via Cash Cards.
B. Save up enough money in-game to buy a code for choice A due to not having proper income in real life.
C. Cheat/Hack the game using bots/code generators.

Also even if you DO get your item it comes with another restriction. For instance we'll use Maplestory. Buying outfit. Let's use a more settled example here.

Say you pick choice A. from the list there and you want an outfit. The outfit cost I dunno, let's say 2,200 NX. You get the money, about to get the outfit and then you read...(Using an example here.) Holiday X-mas Outfit, 2,700 (7 Days). You kidding me? You have to RENT and outfit just to look cool? Oh but if you want the Permanant one it will cost you maybe almost 10k-12k NX. Which is almost about 20 to 40 dollars in real life.

This is why Free To Play (Pay to Win) Models never work, they drive the players to spend money on items they will never really look forward to using. Unlike in a Pay To Play situation you get your items and they're useful to you.

If XIV goes Free To Play I'm going right back to XI and I will never touch XIV again.

Edited, Sep 17th 2013 6:40pm by ImmolatedHope

Interestingly, Diablo III is ending its in game cash auction house.

Not quite the same as F2P but whatever reason they had to include it originally apparently is no longer panning out.

People were just cutting out the middle-man(Blizzard) and it wasn't worth it to them anymore. I didn't get too deep into D3, but Blizzard basically had you set up an account with them. If you sold goods for real money, that money would go into your account and Blizz kept a portion of the money as an auction house tax.

People said ***** that' and just started selling through other avenues.

Content that is designed to promote players to create long-term goals can be completely independent of the payment model.

I just find it odd that people will pay the premium when it's tacked on to a collector's edition or a subscription plan, but paying for it on their own terms is unacceptable. I've tried to make sense of that, but I can't.

Sorry to quote you, but I feel its important for others to understand the mythology of the so-called "free to play" MMOs out there. No one, for "free", is hosting servers, paying a development staff, support, etc for "free." (No such thing as a free lunch right?)
While F2P MMOs may have some RMT, the point to F2P games is so the vendor can get the revenue that RMTs would... Many F2P game bank on putting RMT out of business and offer RMT (if you will) from the vendor. Sure you could spend, idk 12 game hours getting that magic sword in a F2P MMO, or pay the vendor $12 to get it on the spot.

Last I checked, F2P MMOs are pulling more money than P2P, but SE, or Japan I general, will not accept this. Just look at their iphone games; $20 for a iOS game, really? That foreign to many of us on the west, but I personally agree with them (and I'm the minority there =)

I hope they stay p2p, but show me a successful p2p MMO w/o a healthy RMT community(and we know SEs stance on this)... Sad but true folks...

Edited, Sep 17th 2013 9:04pm by thatguy9927

1) The horse was beaten to death before he could find its free lunch.
2) In Soviet Russia, horses play free games. Sorry guys, but Comrade Stalin is dead.
3) In Capitalist America, horses will be beaten or starved to death if it considers the idea of free stuff.

(I am not sure I am making sense - may be I am reading too much absurdist humour)

+1

P.S. The dead horse can't speak, but if he could, i'd imagine him saying something like... "ENOUGH ALREADY!!"

I see nothing wrong with the File Transfer Protocals either. I mean, you need them for SSH with linux and other nifty web server stuff.

:p

Edited, Sep 18th 2013 8:08am by TwilightSkye