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TERA - Shaking the F2P stigma?
Pivotelite
Member UncommonPosts: 2,145
Everyone seems to be into sensationalism over here on MMORPG, so I decided to make a thread along those lines for my personal game of choice as well.
When you think of F2P games you also think of bots, gold spammers, awful support, hackers and restricted content right? I know I usually do.
Well, speaking from a North American TERA standpoint I have seen little to no bots, very comparable to WoW in that regard, I have yet to see a single gold spammer since TERA went F2P either, not even one.
Hackers... never witnessed anything of the sorts.
Restricted content? Nope, F2P has access to every single thing in the game, absolutely free.
Poor support? TERA still maintains a live chat and the devs comment on the forums 30-40 times per day.
Let's hope this is a sign that F2P games are actually starting to improve their qualities of service and break out of the stigmas associated with them.
Comments
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The crappy days of F2P are over thankfully.
People are no longer tolerating buy-to-win systems or games designed to prevent you from playing without spending - basically any F2P model that includes an intrusive heavy handed system is not flying with people anymore.
It's becoming an industry standard that people will stay longer and spend more if they don't feel imposed costs put on them.
Eastern Game companies seem to be taking a very posative stance on F2P. They are really pushing for F2P to be an experience that isn't 'cut off' by content restrictions making it easy to access through all the content without having to pay, often times at most relying on 'lock out' timers being their biggest restriction.
I honestly feel that if they do well, they can really help to drag onto western games which tend to milk players a lot more with 'gated' content. I'm personally not against it if its a freemium type model with extremely minimal cash shop supply, but with the F2P models like Aion or Tera around, they really promote a game experience that is surprisingly cheap. Cosmetics seem to be the bread and butter of their income and I really do like this concept.
Lets hope GW2 B2P method isn't looked on instead. Sure, its not completely bad but considering its basically doing what the Eastern games have set for a F2P model just with buying the box price, its not AS tasteful.