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Would you pay a sub for GW2
EvilGeek
Member UncommonPosts: 1,258
There's a poll over on gw2guru with the same title, the fanbase over there consists of a lot of GW fans, a large percentage seems to have bought GW simply because there is no sub fee and became fans through playing, to that end the results reflect that community. I'm just wondering if on a forum dedicated to the genre rather than the one game we would see a different result.
Before voting imagine that GW2 had always been developed as a subscription model, would it's list of features have you believe it is worth a monthly fee ? I also want you to take the item shop out of the equation, I want you to judge the game purely on its features.
For background on the game please look at:
Cali59's list of GW2 innovations, but please let's not get bogged down in semantics about the correct use of the word innovation 
Everything we know about GW2
Comments
It's kind of a loaded question really when you think about it.
Based on the features alone.. Yes, I would totally pay $15 a month for the game. The problem with that though is that ArenaNet have repeatedly said that they do not need a sub fee to run an MMO, even before really announcing GW2 in earnest. So if the game was anything other than B2P It would be a big issue.
If they had never said it was B2P and instead announced it as P2P I would have no issue with that but I prefer the B2P option nevertheless.
In other words, yes I would pay.. grudgingly.
If Guild Wars 2 turned out to meet the very realistic expectations that Arena Net has hyped me into, then I would certainly pay $15 a month. And if it does that and still doesn't require a fee, I'll just end up throwing money at them anyway, whbether it's the cash shop or just donations, because I'm super excited to play this.
Label me a fanboy!
Mesmer trailer was awesome.
That's why I ask people try and forget about the announced payment model and imagine it had always been developed as a sub based game, I know that also brings in mechanics that create time sinks to keep people subscribed that sub based games use. The question isn't about if they changed their mind
I would say yes at current sub prices, delivering what they are promising with no sub fee will make me want to support them via the shop too.
I'm always willing to pay a sub fee, as long as the game is worth it (in my eyes).
I've decided I'm never going to pay a subscription for a game again, so based on that I voted "no, but I have paid them in the past." That being said, one of the reasons I decided I'm never paying a sub again was because of GW2. So if it had always been designed to be P2P, would I still feel the same way? I like to think so anyway. For several reasons I won't derail the thread with, I just think that the P2P model is really bad for gamers.
B2P is definitely one of the reasons for me to get excited about GW2, kind of an "all this, and no sub?!" kind of thing. If it had a sub, I'd probably be interested, but might ultimately decide I didn't need to get sucked into another MMO.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
I think I'd have to try it first before saying I'd pay for it.
Right now all anyone can see are the videos pretty much of other people playing it.
"TO MICHAEL!"
Since this is all hypothetical, yeah, I would probably pay a $15/month sub for GW2, assuming it meets all of my expectations. Also, I'm no businessman, but I can't help but feel like Anet would net a lot more business (more subscribers) if the hypothetical sub price was somewhere between $5-$10. I'm glad there won't be a sub fee, but I'm almost sure that Anet could still do very well IF they decided to charge one.
yes, but shhhhh!!!! don't tell them....
If it's all it's being professed to be, then yes.
From the information I have now compared to the information I had for other games I was willing to sub to pre launch (Aion, AoC, etc) yes I would sub to GW2, and GW2 looks a lot more promising to me than those other two (Promising as in, more likely I'll enjoy it).
So yeah, I'd spend $15 to play GW2.
No problem here if GW2 was a P2P. I would gladly pay for it.
How many servers SWTOR will launch with on release?
ShredderSE - Umm how many do they need? Maybe 6.
US, EU, Asian, France, German and Russian.
Subs will be so low there is no need for more
Snoocky-How many servers?
The first 3 months a lot...after that 2 i guess, one for PVE and 1 for PVP...
Thorbrand - SWTOR doesn't have longevity at all. Might be one of the shortest lived MMOs.
yea
Guild Wars 2's 50 minutes game play video:
http://n4g.com/news/592585/guild-wars-2-50-minutes-of-pure-gameplay
Everything We Know about GW2:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/287180/page/1
Would if it was an option, but I like the B2P model, so I'll stick with that.
I self identify as a monkey.
Defenitely yes. However, I would probably rage a bit if Anet suddenly decided there to be one.
If they deliver I certainly would. And from what I've seen it might be the best MMO to date so I guess I will spend some money on their cash shop as a form of contribution to my fave game anyways (which i suppose GW2 will become).
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation
No, because they already said it will be B2P. According to Anet themselves they designed it with B2P in mind. A P2P GW2 could be a completely different game. Probably with more extra incentives to keep ppl subbed. The typical carrot on a stick grinds of P2P games come to mind.
So there was no option for me to chose from. I paid P2P fees before, but that has nothing to do with GW2.
no, I'd rather pay more initially then have to sub
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
I don't hate much, but I hate Apple© with a passion. If Steve Jobs was alive, I would punch him in the face.
I'd consider it after playing, but without having tried the game I can't say I'd even purchase it let alone subscribing. I personally like the idea of B2P better than subbing as I don't tend to be one of the people that has oodles of time to drain into an MMO and find that the P2P games I've played seem more beneficial for those that do have tons of free time.
No. Subscriptions are a tax for the foolish.
I'll adimt that the only time I've even considered it was due to WoW and their gods damn worgen. A werewolf nation? That's an idea I can get behined. Having to buy the game, two expansions, and having to pay $16 per month on top of that? That just turned me away from that idea anyway. And I know me, it'd take me four days tops before I got sick of WoW's grindy and static gameplay mechanics. Then I'd just stop bothering.
So I just didn't bother in the first place. Sure, I like the idea, but the idea of even something I really want isn't enough to sell it to me if there's a subscription involved. This is for a number of very important reasons which I've covered before and will cover again. These should generally be obvious, one would hope.
I'll do my best to explain my position, and I'll use Skyrim as a comparison point since it should still be fresh in the minds of most gamers, which will help me get my point across.
Subscriptions are a con.
Really, this shouldn't be that hard to figure out.
Consider that you can get a game these days for $40-50. That's a whole game with a hell of a lot of content. Just look at all the content in Skyrim. Skyrim easily has as much content as TOR does at the moment, but TOR makes its content look more with padding (I'll get back to this later). So let's do some math, here.
You pay $40-50 for the box and that gives you a month free. Then, within three months you've already paid another $45. In another three months, you've paid another $45. In a year, you've paid $205 (including the box price, generously assuming that the box price is $40). There's enough for four or five games there, but with every MMO out there, you'll exhaust most of the content in under a month, unless...
Subscription MMORPGs have to make the deal look good.
...you add lots of padding to the game.
Now, with most games, you have tiers. You do tier A before you move onto tier B. In the vast majority of games this is a smooth progression of A, to B, to C. In Skyrim you don't really notice your power levels increasing because it's happening whilst you're running content and doing things, and on a smooth power curve. The progression curve is pretty much smooth, it's like going along a straight road to a destination.
Now with an MMORPG that has a subscription, they need to spread out this progression in order to make the game look like it has more content. So you start off at A and the road to B is pretty smooth, then from B to C you start off okay, but then you notice you're climbing a hill. You're doing identikit quests with almost the same objectives, you're grinding the same mobs, and you spend forever in an area hoping that eventually they'll open up the gates to the next area for you. But you know that you have to be powerful enough for that. So you continue to seek out quests to make yourself more powerful, climbing uphill, so you cna reach that next flat part.
Now, the flat parts are the bits of fun content, like Skyrim. Those are the really clever, entertaining quests. But Skyrim is all of that, whereas an MMORPG has padding in between those bits. You feel like you're just grinding your way uphill so that you can get to the next fun bit of content. All the while you're telling yourself that this is all content, and that this content justifies the subscription fee. An MMORPG obviously has more content, but when 90% of that content is padding, then you can't really count most of that 90%.
Sadly, the majority do, and that 90% of just padded grinding is a selling point. People like to trick themselves into thinking that monotonous grind (which they could do just as easily in something like Minecraft) is making it worth their monthly fee.
Subscription MMORPGs are failures as games.
The reason why for this is covered above. It's just a big, grind-ridden mess.
It's all the padding to help convince people that the money they're paying is worth it. But when intelligent people look back at the time they've spent in an MMORPG, they wonder just how much of it was fun, and how much of it was soulless grind. Many of them will find that most of what they were doing wasn't very fun at all. It only falls under TOLERABLE because they had people there who were helping to make the work-like, grindy padding somewhat fun.
But you can say that about any job. Having fun people around makes a job TOLERABLE.
The intelligent person will then realise that this MMORPG is an ungame. It's not a game at all. A game is supposed to be FUN. But what they experienced wasn't FUN but TOLERABLE. The fun parts were few and far between, spread out between all the padding. Then they wonder why they're not just doing something that's actually fun, like playing Portal 2 co-op. So they go and do that instead and let their subscription drop. And this is why many people don't stick with an MMORPG for more than a month any more. Some of us are already so smart to this that we don't even bother in the first place.
A game should be fun. I'm not paying over $150 a year just to play something that feels like work, that's boring, and soul-devouringly dull and tedious most of the time. This is how most people feel, these days. They've wised up.
Games should be fun, if they're not fun then they fail at being a game. Subscription MMORPGs have never succeeded at being consistently fun in the way Skyrim does, for all the reasons mentioned above. We can therefore conclude that adding a subscription to a game ruins the game, because the developer has to try to make the subscrpition enticing over long periods, and the only ways to do that are the ones I've described. And the developers that do this are no better than Zynga.
Conclusion.
Subscriptions are pretty much a con, these days. They try to get us and our friends hooked on playing a relatively dull ungame via marketing and peer pressure. And it's gotten to the point where I really pity anyone who's conditioned themselves into believing that they're actually having fun playing a subscription-based game. No one is. And they all come to their senses eventually. A subscription-based game is about as fun and fulfilling as Farmville. And if you want to convince me that something like WoW and Farmville aren't exactly alike, you'd have to put forward some damned compelling evidence.
Therefore, I am not inclined to pay for a subscription for anything. I want to pay a box price, I want to be moderately entertained whilst having fun for a reasonable amount of time, and then I'll put the game down when I'm done with it, satisfied. I don't want to be in a position where I'm hanging onto a work-like game just because friends are there, and everyone has somehow brainwashed themselves into thinking that a work-like, grindy, padded game actually somehow is a valid substitute for fun.
I've seen people waste their lives on the likes of WoW. And I know that some of them look back on the amount of time they've spent in games like that and they could cry. I've been scarred by this as a room-mate fell in with WoW. I watched his life fall apart because generally we humans are weak-willed creatures.
People get stuck in a cycle of grind, and over the months, they somehow convince themselves it's fun.
It's not fun. Let's throw that illusion in the trash, where it belongs.
Fun games without subscriptions! That's what we should want!
Realistically, no, because I live in a poor country and I cannot afford it. If I could afford it, then yes, I would definitely pay for it.
I want to reborn as a Sylvari.
The big appeal of GW to me was that I can treat it as a normal game which I buy.
Would I pay a sub fee? Probably not.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
No, i wouldn't. Yet another fantasy MMO when there is already a sea of them and in need of some much needed alternate genres. For B2P i'll get it and likely play it every now and then but my interest wanes too quickly on fantasy MMO's these days that a sub wouldn't have been worth it, but that's just me.
No...I would not pay sub for any MMO anymore.
I am refusing to play SWTOR because of sub. Subs are thing of past , and should remain there.
Just read very good post by @Dream Chaser , above
Only game I would pay sub is PVP oriented sandbox like EVE, because any kind of F2P break balance in such games.
This (or any such game) are exception to the rule.
So.
GW2 sub ...
Very very grudgingly. And would leave very soon
It is too late in the development cycle for them to require a monthly fee. I personally would prefer it because it would mean some extra content for me and it might make the community a little better as it would weed out some of the younger kids. Plus it may minimize the cash shop.
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
A subscription would do none of those things.