While i generally only play B2P or F2P games i actually really like WS payment model. Its really not gonna be hard to afford it if your f2p normally or a sub player it caters to both. You buy the game pay for a month or so for sub fee after that you will prob be max level and you can earn a good amount of gold an just buy your sub fee basicly with ingame gold an never have to worry about it. I think its a good system. If the game was just pure p2p i would not even consider playing it, but having the credd model makes it worthwhile. F2P and P2P are good models an they are both constantly evolving. The credd system is def a good one.
Originally posted by Precusor Love the sound of CREDD.. its like making those f2p players slave away for the P2P players.
Winner, winner. What we got for him Johnny?
I just hope we don't have to group with F2Pers unless it's instance/dungeon farming.
One thing I like about CREDD is that the company itself will be measuring and monitoring ratios and rates. So it'll hopefully never be "free CREDD" or anywhere close.
Originally posted by Precusor Love the sound of CREDD.. its like making those f2p players slave away for the P2P players.
I like the way your mind works
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
Free to play is a company hoping that a few paying players will spend enough to pay for all the rest. A few companies do this well but most fall into the trap of unbalancing the game in various ways in order to entice payers to spend enough to make it all work. This is where pay to win comes from, companies that lack self-discipline in their monetization scheme.
Normal pay to play simply means everyone has to pay their own way. But everyone is forced to pay without an alternative way of earning their time.
P2P with Credd or Plex or something similar still means everyone has to earn their play time but it allows for flexibility in who pays for that game time. Yes, you can play free but every month you need to dedicate some of your play time to earning the play time someone else was willing to buy.
And no, this is not cheating for the paying player either. Making money in game is usually a function of spending time farming it. Is it fair that some kid can spend 12-16 hours a day playing the game and I can only spend 3 or 4? If this is a competition to see who can accumulate more virtual stuff then why should some people be allowed to play more than others? why not limit everyone to 2 hours a day? Because it is not a competition in that way.
If my son wants to play a game with a sub and I offer to pay it for him if he mows the lawn every other weekend is there anything wrong with that? But why would I do that? because I can make enough to pay his sub and give him some extra in about 15 minutes at work. It would take him a couple of hours to do the same. I get a nice looking lawn, he gets to play the game, He spends time (which he has a lot of) doing something for me and I give him some money (which I can make faster than him.) for that time.
Now how is this different if it is not my kid and not my lawn but rather some random kid anywhere in the world spending a few hours farming gold for me. I pay his sub though Credd and he farms up some gold for me so I don't have to waste a night or two or five of my limited playtime doing the farming myself.
All Credd or Plex is is a fungible unit of exchange that allows us to trade time for money and money for time.
And everyone earns their game time, one way or the other.
I will readily admit that F2P has a place, but that we haven't understood that place fully yet, both as community and especially as developers. There are some good examples out there on how to do F2P proper, but there are imho way more examples where a game begins to feel kind of scummy and just out to entertain you enough so you buy that overpowered shiny from the cash shop.
That said, why do so many subscription games fail? Simple. They do not offer a long-term gaming investment while asking for a long-term money investment.
Let's face it. Modern day themepark MMOs have one, and only one road. You do a braindead-easy leveling quest from 1 to 50, then do your daily quests for a week and do those 5 or so heroic dungeons until you are raid ready. And once you hit that point, you never have to do anything in the open world ever again as you begin raiding. You then raid, until a new raid tier comes out, or until a new expansion sweeps your gear to the side and pretty much reboots the item game. Ad nauseum.
Some games offer even less, and if you aren't a raider, well, you usually have little to nothing to do or to challenge you. Content generally always follows the rule of solo < 5 man < 10/25 man in both difficulty and rewards, and in some games, you don't even have a raid until whenever the first tiny content update comes out.
FF14 is a good example of this. Once you hit cap, you grind the same 1-2 instances about 40 times, then throw yourself at binding coil if you hate yourself. Other than that, there is nothing to do at the end. And the end game is lately where you spend most of your time after all, where you will want to be playing unless you are into alts. If the world is static, compact, and really just serving as a backdrop to kill 10 rats in front of, then alts or alt jobs aren't appealing in the slightest. And FF14 sadly is such a world. It is gorgeous and beautifully rendered. But it is a fully static world, filled with retards too lazy to do their own work, and quickly devolves into public event zerging if you can be bothered to level an alt.
So essentially, games ask for money every month, but once you are through the leveling content, you actually have LESS to do than while you are leveling, in many cases. The harder content you unlock, the more you outgrow other content. Or did any of you raid guys go back and do some more dailies after having earned your purples? Unlikely I would say at least.
Here is where I have faith in wildstar. Not only are they already offering a good amount of things during leveling and more that hasn't been announced, they pretty much made a statement that they want the elder game to be the time where you have the most things to do, not the least. And for that, they are iirc spending roughly 50% of their development assets on elder game alone and are planning on a monthly content schedule.
I mean lets look at i like this. Most games offer dungeons, quests, shitty crafting. At endgame you craft your one raid purple for yourself and then never craft again unless youre an alchemist or enchanter. Then you daily grind, dungeon grind, then raid.
Meanwhile, we know for a fact that wildstar has the following:
- path content that is specific to your desired playstyle and adds another progression path
- separate progression paths for raiders, pvpers and solo/small groupers at endgame, so people who dont like raids have things they can do, enjoy, get challenged by, and get rewarded for appropriately
- adventures, which are not talked about much yet, but ocnsidered to be longer, 10-man instances that will be very creative and more mechanics focused over pure combat. someone likened it to stuff like the chess game in karazhan.
- shiphand missions, 1-5 player missions that take place on various spaceships and which will have different outcomes every time and random elements
- expeditions, dungeons you can find inworld as housing plot items. smaller, temporary stuff for i believe 1-3 players
- a crafting system that was announced to be set up so that not everyone is a master crafter, but where good crafters will be sought after assets who provide services to the adventurers, while adventureres provide materials to them. A system of "everyone contributes and helps others" rather than "everyone is a master and never needs to help others - unless youre an alchemist, then you make fricken BANK at endgame".
- warplots, 40v40 fortress pvp where you build your own fortress. and if your guild has good raiders, capture a fricken raidboss and sick em on the enemy team.
- 20 and 40 man raids which are hard, and designed for people who actually want good and hard raids, rather than to appeal to the large mass of players so they can LFR and "see the content" and feel badass
- the ability for your character to continue developing past level cap, by means of earning elder game xp, growing stronger not only by means of gear
- a housing system that you will get access to early on and that you can furnish with trophies of your achievements, stuff that boosts your rested exp gain (or elder game xp gain as you hit cap), and where you can collect fun and badass decorations and housing plugs like expeditions or dungeon/raid portals and such
This sounds like advertisement, but this stuff is known about and pretty much confirmed to be in. And seeing how a lot of other elder game stuff is still under wraps, you can probably imagine that yes, once you hit cap, you will have a lot of things to pick from.
Personally, my favorite is the triple gearing paths, some people might bitch about raid gear not being the default strongest any more, but honestly, it solves so many issues with current themepark endgame design and is a good idea. Raiders will still have their tasty gear carrot, but it will be good /for raiding/, not ultimate godlike gear for everything else.
So that all said, I think Wildstar is doing the right thing, and will be a game that can support a subscription model by means of actually having things to do at all times.
1. F2P isn't free. Most of the "leechers" people like to talk about, people who never pay anything, I doubt stay very long. If you are actually committed to playing a F2P game you will likely end up paying more in a few months than most P2P players will in a year of play. Either that or roughly equal. Most people who aren't paying anything don't stay for long.
Think about it, do you think companies make their games F2P to be generous? No, they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't think it was more profitable.
2. $15/mo subs DOES NOT mean that the game will not have a cash shop. There are many games with "hybrid" models which basically just means that $15/mo still isn't going to get you everything in the game.
3. $15/mo is only really worth it if you play constantly to get your money's worth. It isn't really leeching to play a F2P game when you only play 5 hours a week, then occasionally buy something from the cash shop. But it's really a rip-off to be paying $15 to play 45 hours a month when someone pays the same price to play 90+ hours a month. Do you see why many people don't think it's worth it? It makes you feel pressured to play even if you don't want to in order to get more value for what you paid. I've never liked that aspect of subscriptions.
Played: DAoC, AC2, WoW, CoH, GW, GW2, WAR, AoC, Champions Online, Rift, Dragon Nest, Vindictus, Warframe, Neverwinter, Dungeon Fighter Online
Comments
Paying for themepark ?!
LOL
Winner, winner. What we got for him Johnny?
I just hope we don't have to group with F2Pers unless it's instance/dungeon farming.
One thing I like about CREDD is that the company itself will be measuring and monitoring ratios and rates. So it'll hopefully never be "free CREDD" or anywhere close.
*whip lash*
Discuss. Reason. Society.
Become a Dragon. Take your world back.
I like the way your mind works
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
Free to play is a company hoping that a few paying players will spend enough to pay for all the rest. A few companies do this well but most fall into the trap of unbalancing the game in various ways in order to entice payers to spend enough to make it all work. This is where pay to win comes from, companies that lack self-discipline in their monetization scheme.
Normal pay to play simply means everyone has to pay their own way. But everyone is forced to pay without an alternative way of earning their time.
P2P with Credd or Plex or something similar still means everyone has to earn their play time but it allows for flexibility in who pays for that game time. Yes, you can play free but every month you need to dedicate some of your play time to earning the play time someone else was willing to buy.
And no, this is not cheating for the paying player either. Making money in game is usually a function of spending time farming it. Is it fair that some kid can spend 12-16 hours a day playing the game and I can only spend 3 or 4? If this is a competition to see who can accumulate more virtual stuff then why should some people be allowed to play more than others? why not limit everyone to 2 hours a day? Because it is not a competition in that way.
If my son wants to play a game with a sub and I offer to pay it for him if he mows the lawn every other weekend is there anything wrong with that? But why would I do that? because I can make enough to pay his sub and give him some extra in about 15 minutes at work. It would take him a couple of hours to do the same. I get a nice looking lawn, he gets to play the game, He spends time (which he has a lot of) doing something for me and I give him some money (which I can make faster than him.) for that time.
Now how is this different if it is not my kid and not my lawn but rather some random kid anywhere in the world spending a few hours farming gold for me. I pay his sub though Credd and he farms up some gold for me so I don't have to waste a night or two or five of my limited playtime doing the farming myself.
All Credd or Plex is is a fungible unit of exchange that allows us to trade time for money and money for time.
And everyone earns their game time, one way or the other.
All die, so die well.
I will readily admit that F2P has a place, but that we haven't understood that place fully yet, both as community and especially as developers. There are some good examples out there on how to do F2P proper, but there are imho way more examples where a game begins to feel kind of scummy and just out to entertain you enough so you buy that overpowered shiny from the cash shop.
That said, why do so many subscription games fail? Simple. They do not offer a long-term gaming investment while asking for a long-term money investment.
Let's face it. Modern day themepark MMOs have one, and only one road. You do a braindead-easy leveling quest from 1 to 50, then do your daily quests for a week and do those 5 or so heroic dungeons until you are raid ready. And once you hit that point, you never have to do anything in the open world ever again as you begin raiding. You then raid, until a new raid tier comes out, or until a new expansion sweeps your gear to the side and pretty much reboots the item game. Ad nauseum.
Some games offer even less, and if you aren't a raider, well, you usually have little to nothing to do or to challenge you. Content generally always follows the rule of solo < 5 man < 10/25 man in both difficulty and rewards, and in some games, you don't even have a raid until whenever the first tiny content update comes out.
FF14 is a good example of this. Once you hit cap, you grind the same 1-2 instances about 40 times, then throw yourself at binding coil if you hate yourself. Other than that, there is nothing to do at the end. And the end game is lately where you spend most of your time after all, where you will want to be playing unless you are into alts. If the world is static, compact, and really just serving as a backdrop to kill 10 rats in front of, then alts or alt jobs aren't appealing in the slightest. And FF14 sadly is such a world. It is gorgeous and beautifully rendered. But it is a fully static world, filled with retards too lazy to do their own work, and quickly devolves into public event zerging if you can be bothered to level an alt.
So essentially, games ask for money every month, but once you are through the leveling content, you actually have LESS to do than while you are leveling, in many cases. The harder content you unlock, the more you outgrow other content. Or did any of you raid guys go back and do some more dailies after having earned your purples? Unlikely I would say at least.
Here is where I have faith in wildstar. Not only are they already offering a good amount of things during leveling and more that hasn't been announced, they pretty much made a statement that they want the elder game to be the time where you have the most things to do, not the least. And for that, they are iirc spending roughly 50% of their development assets on elder game alone and are planning on a monthly content schedule.
I mean lets look at i like this. Most games offer dungeons, quests, shitty crafting. At endgame you craft your one raid purple for yourself and then never craft again unless youre an alchemist or enchanter. Then you daily grind, dungeon grind, then raid.
Meanwhile, we know for a fact that wildstar has the following:
- path content that is specific to your desired playstyle and adds another progression path
- separate progression paths for raiders, pvpers and solo/small groupers at endgame, so people who dont like raids have things they can do, enjoy, get challenged by, and get rewarded for appropriately
- adventures, which are not talked about much yet, but ocnsidered to be longer, 10-man instances that will be very creative and more mechanics focused over pure combat. someone likened it to stuff like the chess game in karazhan.
- shiphand missions, 1-5 player missions that take place on various spaceships and which will have different outcomes every time and random elements
- expeditions, dungeons you can find inworld as housing plot items. smaller, temporary stuff for i believe 1-3 players
- a crafting system that was announced to be set up so that not everyone is a master crafter, but where good crafters will be sought after assets who provide services to the adventurers, while adventureres provide materials to them. A system of "everyone contributes and helps others" rather than "everyone is a master and never needs to help others - unless youre an alchemist, then you make fricken BANK at endgame".
- warplots, 40v40 fortress pvp where you build your own fortress. and if your guild has good raiders, capture a fricken raidboss and sick em on the enemy team.
- 20 and 40 man raids which are hard, and designed for people who actually want good and hard raids, rather than to appeal to the large mass of players so they can LFR and "see the content" and feel badass
- the ability for your character to continue developing past level cap, by means of earning elder game xp, growing stronger not only by means of gear
- a housing system that you will get access to early on and that you can furnish with trophies of your achievements, stuff that boosts your rested exp gain (or elder game xp gain as you hit cap), and where you can collect fun and badass decorations and housing plugs like expeditions or dungeon/raid portals and such
This sounds like advertisement, but this stuff is known about and pretty much confirmed to be in. And seeing how a lot of other elder game stuff is still under wraps, you can probably imagine that yes, once you hit cap, you will have a lot of things to pick from.
Personally, my favorite is the triple gearing paths, some people might bitch about raid gear not being the default strongest any more, but honestly, it solves so many issues with current themepark endgame design and is a good idea. Raiders will still have their tasty gear carrot, but it will be good /for raiding/, not ultimate godlike gear for everything else.
So that all said, I think Wildstar is doing the right thing, and will be a game that can support a subscription model by means of actually having things to do at all times.
1. F2P isn't free. Most of the "leechers" people like to talk about, people who never pay anything, I doubt stay very long. If you are actually committed to playing a F2P game you will likely end up paying more in a few months than most P2P players will in a year of play. Either that or roughly equal. Most people who aren't paying anything don't stay for long.
Think about it, do you think companies make their games F2P to be generous? No, they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't think it was more profitable.
2. $15/mo subs DOES NOT mean that the game will not have a cash shop. There are many games with "hybrid" models which basically just means that $15/mo still isn't going to get you everything in the game.
3. $15/mo is only really worth it if you play constantly to get your money's worth. It isn't really leeching to play a F2P game when you only play 5 hours a week, then occasionally buy something from the cash shop. But it's really a rip-off to be paying $15 to play 45 hours a month when someone pays the same price to play 90+ hours a month. Do you see why many people don't think it's worth it? It makes you feel pressured to play even if you don't want to in order to get more value for what you paid. I've never liked that aspect of subscriptions.
Played: DAoC, AC2, WoW, CoH, GW, GW2, WAR, AoC, Champions Online, Rift, Dragon Nest, Vindictus, Warframe, Neverwinter, Dungeon Fighter Online
Currently Playing: Dungeon Fighter Online Global
Waiting for: None
or when they offer a trial