Commitment: B2P vs P2P

whilan

Not sure I understand a concept going on here, if someone who is under this thought process could explain this as I very much want to understand how a quote like this comes about.

In a GW2 thread asking what to do when they got to level 80 again this line was given as a plus reason why it's okay to leave the game and come back.

The owner of the below post is called Piechunks so hopefully he/she won't mind

That's the beauty of b2p titles. You pay once, you never pay again (except for expansions if you want) and you're never obligated to log in to make yourself feel like that 15 per month is worth it.

This is my line of thought: Unless it suddenly hits you that you don't care for the game so much that you have to leave now, then you can usually tell when you are losing interest in a game long before you tire of it. Couldn't you simply just stop the subscription and play out the rest of the time that is left? Most games the characters stay where they are (just like a buy to play game) until you decide to start back up. The line above and similar don't seem to suggest that the cost is too high, but that somehow it's a lot easier to come in and out of the game when you want to in B2P vs a P2P game.

So beyond feeling like if you stop half way through you lose part of the money there doesn't seem to be much difference between how a buy to play and a pay to play works, the only difference is you have to re-active (pay the fee again) to get back in. At most you would lose is 29 days if you didn't play and thats if you had a sudden change of heart right after the subscription tick

As for getting back in It doesn't seem that much of a barrier to make that much of a difference as post above seem to suggest. It takes me about 5 mins to get back into the game (provided I didn't forget/lose the password but B2P doesn't solve that issue at all) I want to play again enough to warrant logging back in.

It just seems very whimsical behavior to me. I'm all for drop in and drop out but 5 mins doesn't seem like that much of a barrier so i'm trying to figure out what the thought behind such quotes as the one above is. Is it the 5 mins, the cost?

Note: I used the above as an example but i see this getting used a lot and this was just the most recent example of it, I used GW2 as ti's B2P and this line gets used a lot in it's defense of why it's okay to stop playing for a while, so i'd prefer we didn't get caught up in GW2 it'self hence why it's not in their subforum.