Originally posted by nerovipus32 why would i pay for something every month when i can get the same thing for a one time payment. The biggest scam in mmo's is not the cash shops as you are not forced to buy anything in them, the biggest scam is how so many people have been conditioned into paying a monthly fee for rubbish, static and uninspiring games.
You don't get the same thing.
How am I "conditioned into" paying a monthly fee? I spend my money as I please, and entertainment to me is worth more than $15 a month.
I'm glad to see there are more and more people getting sick of the p2p is the only way games can ever be good BS.
Every payment model has examples of both good and bad. That isn't why games suck. It's the people making them and who they answer to that make or break games. That's what needs to change.
At least in sub based games I can enjoy the game without constantly having the feeling of the game trying to take me for every cent I have.
What you want more bag space... 6 bucks!
What you want more space for your guild bank......6 bucks!
What! you want to respec because the description alone isn't enough to let you know it you like that skill or not.......6 BUCKS!
Oh and we only sell currency we use to buy stuff in game by amounts of 5 so you have to spend 10 bucks to get anything that cost 6...........see what we did there!
The company that Neverwinter bills are being pay by is the worst company I have come across ever since MMOs have been out. The F2P business model they have picked would work but their stance on their bad programming costing players IRL money is pretty much go f off and thanks for the money. I wont go into detail but I lost around $70.00 because of a bug that I found out after the fact, they have refused to comment or accommodate those affect by this bug. Any time you have real money involved and dont give the product that was paid for you are treading in murky waters. I will NEVER EVER buy another product maybe by PW, they trump EA by miles when it comes to worst company ever.
I've started to think that FTP will be the end of us old time mmo gamers. Look at the crap that has been released in the last year or so. The bugs..the hacking..the complete collapse of markets. If we want mmo's that are worth playing...we are gonna have to want it to be a sub based game simple as that.
People think that game developers want to work for peanuts ??? The best games are sub. It's sad that most gamers today want it to be ftp. All I can say is Thx for....nothing. ....and get a job.
F2P is a symptom, not a cause.
The cause is that a whole generation doesn't think it needs to pay for entertainment.
This has consequences for music and computer games.
Talking MMOs, people want VERY good stuff, expencive as f**k, and massive updates every week. They want a huge active CS. They want developers to spend time communicating with the players.
They don't want to pay $. They may be persuaded to buy the actual game, but then they expect to play it for free for as long as they want to. Cash shop is shunned, it's called P2W rather than P2D (pay to develop). Sub is all out. Forget about it.
political parrot mimics his party while leaving his brain idle.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire: Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
I've started to think that FTP will be the end of us old time mmo gamers. Look at the crap that has been released in the last year or so. The bugs..the hacking..the complete collapse of markets. If we want mmo's that are worth playing...we are gonna have to want it to be a sub based game simple as that.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire: Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
One of the animators that I know used to roll his eyes when newly-fresh-out-of-college workers would say, "will work for food".
I don't know, but something about this post made me think of that...
It's interesting to notice that the games that are, or went, f2p are still able to perform maintenance on a monthly, if not weekly, basis; only earning money from cashshops. Especially considering as most games aren't P2W.
So how do the companies get compensation for doing their work?
I don't have anything against F2P, per se, but I believe one of the biggest flaws is the ease in which people can just create throwaway accounts. That makes griefing, exploiting, gold selling, and every other action people don't want associated with the main account that much easier; a B2P/P2P game doesn't prevent that, but it does hedge out cheapskates who don't want to shell out $60 for a box or $15/mo for each dummy account (and get a new credit card for each account).
That being said, I don't think F2P will be the end of it. It's generally not the payment model (be it subscription of cash shop) that retains players, it's the quality of the game and customer service that determines that. The only thing F2P does is encourage people to give the game a try, but a B2P or P2P game wouldn't necessarily need that if's heavily anticipated. Publishers and developers know this as well.
That's also why some of the poorer quality F2P games have massively overpriced cash shops: they want to get as much out of players before they quit the game out of disgust/boredom.
I've started to think that FTP will be the end of us old time mmo gamers. Look at the crap that has been released in the last year or so. The bugs..the hacking..the complete collapse of markets. If we want mmo's that are worth playing...we are gonna have to want it to be a sub based game simple as that.
People think that game developers want to work for peanuts ??? The best games are sub. It's sad that most gamers today want it to be ftp. All I can say is Thx for....nothing. ....and get a job.
Are you sure that best games are for subs? like it or not but decision to stay P2P doesn't depend upon the companies but consumers.
When people don't want to pay monthly sub anymore and support the game then companies have to either go F2P or B2P. The only other option is to make a very small budget indie MMO and try to stay content with 50K player base on P2P model but we know even then people complain because small budget indie titles are not good enough and lack quality.
People want AAA quality MMOS too and don't want to pay monthly sub either..sorry but you can not have it both ways.
I have to disagree with you, the decision of a a game going P2P does not depend on the consumer at all. When a company are losing customer, they have to go F2P, they have blame the consumer? This is pretty ridiculous if you think about it. The company first have to think of why they are running out of customer. The reason is pretty obvious when F2P game have much higher quality game then Sub-based game. Which cause gamer to move to F2P community. If a company's game is is good enough people will happily pay for it every month, but when F2P game is doing better than you with out any fee at all. Of course people will go to F2P game. It's not the gamer that cause this kind of situation to happen, it is the company that are slacking off and refuse to do better. If a company want the people's money, they have to work for it, show the people that they care.
Majority of games that went F2P were once P2P so that puts a big hole in your theory. The current trend is that people just don't want to pay 15 bucks a month to get access to the game no matter how good the game is.
AA which gets all people raving and how they would spend 50 bucks a month for it also just went F2P in Asia and it is not even released in west yet.
File Transfer Protocol doesn't threaten much of anybody (except net admins fighting for security, I guess).
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Majority of games that went F2P were once P2P so that puts a big hole in your theory. The current trend is that people just don't want to pay 15 bucks a month to get access to the game no matter how good the game is.
AA which gets all people raving and how they would spend 50 bucks a month for it also just went F2P in Asia and it is not even released in west yet.
There's a vast difference between a game that was originally designed, developed, launched and run (for a year or more) as P2P and a game that was designed and developed as F2P.
That P2P game would have recovered a huge amount of cash in its first year via pre-orders, box sales and monthly subs. When it finally goes F2P, it's because that is seen as an additional way of extending the game's earning potential.
The game that launches as F2P has to make all that money via it's Cash Shop by selling "optional" items to players.
If you don't believe that F2P games "have to earn all that money in their first year", then you either accept that F2P games are cheaper to make (for some weird reason) or that F2P developers are happy to earn less money than their P2P counterparts.
None of the P2P games that went F2P did so overnight. They all required at least 6 to 8 months of development work to change the game so that it "worked" as F2P. Things need to be taken out of the game so that they can be sold in the Cash Shop. Gameplay needs to be changed so that the "convenience items" in the Cash Shop can be made attractively convenient.
Somebody earlier in this thread alleged that there's no difference in design and quality between P2P and F2P games, because "the payment model is only decided in the last few months before launch". That's nonsense. The decision that is made in those last few months is how much to charge and how to charge it, not whether it will be F2P.
I've started to think that FTP will be the end of us old time mmo gamers. Look at the crap that has been released in the last year or so. The bugs..the hacking..the complete collapse of markets. If we want mmo's that are worth playing...we are gonna have to want it to be a sub based game simple as that.
People think that game developers want to work for peanuts ??? The best games are sub. It's sad that most gamers today want it to be ftp. All I can say is Thx for....nothing. ....and get a job.
When I said something similar, I always got 2 responses:
1) Suck my d...
2) F*** your p2p games...
And, yes it's end. We got crap, cause people wanted crap. If I was dev/publishers, I also wouldn't miss a chance to release crap (less resources, less investement, cheap staff) with so many sheeps aboard. Sheep doesn't know anything better but grass, lemme add some cool effects... Oh, shiny grass! Enjoy your new F2P mmo!
The only other option is to make a very small budget indie MMO and try to stay content with 50K player base on P2P model but we know even then people complain because small budget indie titles are not good enough and lack quality.
Most AAA games don't even have 50k, you can forget an indie having that. TERA has maybe 25k tops.
F2P makes more than P2P because people are stupid and complacent (look how many white knight these fail companies!), and there isn't a casino law against these scammers. Corporations don't give a flying shit about you, they do what's: a. cheapest b. brings the most money c. anything not explicitly illegal
The solution is legislation regarding what is and isn't okay. There should be refunds on epic fails like Neverwinter, and scam boxes that PWE are so well known for should become a long forgotten thing of the past. This nonsense of PWE making games where all (or 95%) of gold is cash shop sourced as in Forsaken World should also be illegal. I've never seen a game with a worse economy and than that pos FW where paying to compete is mandatory.
I don't think the payment method is the problem. It's the content in the games.
There just isn't enough. Take a look at Neverwinters foundry for example.
It's a great idea, but the content in it is severly lacking compared to the old NWN toolset. (Just 1 example).
If content is the problem how do you explain games like Arch Age going F2P?
The content is then obviously not entertaining enough to attract new people and keep players playing.
You have a different explanation or can rebuke mine?
So what is it..lacking as in less content or less interesting? or both? if AA's content is not interesting then i have no hope for future MMOS.
one good example of non interesting content is AA is a new mmo and still have the same old character progression from WoW (the ! questing). Why didnt they scratch that and made a dynamic progression to fit with the AAA status of a brand new game? if i have to subscribe to AA to level up my character the same way i did in wow, ill stick to wow that at least has a better story to keep me engaged. Making sandboxy environments and crafting doesnt make AA anymore fun if your character is still going to progress through the same old boring ! questing process. That only turn off a lot of people. Let alone any other decisions they might have done wrong.
EDIT: lack of content is bad, but quantity not always mean quality either.
I've started to think that FTP will be the end of us old time mmo gamers. Look at the crap that has been released in the last year or so. The bugs..the hacking..the complete collapse of markets. If we want mmo's that are worth playing...we are gonna have to want it to be a sub based game simple as that.
People think that game developers want to work for peanuts ??? The best games are sub. It's sad that most gamers today want it to be ftp. All I can say is Thx for....nothing. ....and get a job.
Its not necessarily F2p but just by playing neverwinter i realized what is going on... its a damn casino experience. From the sounds to the visuals to the area designs with little regard for anything more than a few months of activity and a desire to bleed people of dollars as fast as possible.
When looking back at great successes of the past or games that built businesses, we have not had one close to that in a LONG LONG time... and with recent failures likely longer what with the public company control over development dollars.
The f2p piece is interesting to look at because when you think about the "possibilities" of good game designs coming from games driven by microtransactions... i fear its already over.
I have not played an MMO with any vigor other than Vanguard / DDO over the past years. I try them all and they all suck for one reason or another.
Comments
You don't get the same thing.
How am I "conditioned into" paying a monthly fee? I spend my money as I please, and entertainment to me is worth more than $15 a month.
I'm glad to see there are more and more people getting sick of the p2p is the only way games can ever be good BS.
Every payment model has examples of both good and bad. That isn't why games suck. It's the people making them and who they answer to that make or break games. That's what needs to change.
Exactly.
political parrot mimics his party while leaving his brain idle.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
YES
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
One of the animators that I know used to roll his eyes when newly-fresh-out-of-college workers would say, "will work for food".
I don't know, but something about this post made me think of that...
It's interesting to notice that the games that are, or went, f2p are still able to perform maintenance on a monthly, if not weekly, basis; only earning money from cashshops. Especially considering as most games aren't P2W.
So how do the companies get compensation for doing their work?
I don't have anything against F2P, per se, but I believe one of the biggest flaws is the ease in which people can just create throwaway accounts. That makes griefing, exploiting, gold selling, and every other action people don't want associated with the main account that much easier; a B2P/P2P game doesn't prevent that, but it does hedge out cheapskates who don't want to shell out $60 for a box or $15/mo for each dummy account (and get a new credit card for each account).
That being said, I don't think F2P will be the end of it. It's generally not the payment model (be it subscription of cash shop) that retains players, it's the quality of the game and customer service that determines that. The only thing F2P does is encourage people to give the game a try, but a B2P or P2P game wouldn't necessarily need that if's heavily anticipated. Publishers and developers know this as well.
That's also why some of the poorer quality F2P games have massively overpriced cash shops: they want to get as much out of players before they quit the game out of disgust/boredom.
Majority of games that went F2P were once P2P so that puts a big hole in your theory. The current trend is that people just don't want to pay 15 bucks a month to get access to the game no matter how good the game is.
AA which gets all people raving and how they would spend 50 bucks a month for it also just went F2P in Asia and it is not even released in west yet.
I don't think the payment method is the problem. It's the content in the games.
There just isn't enough. Take a look at Neverwinters foundry for example.
It's a great idea, but the content in it is severly lacking compared to the old NWN toolset. (Just 1 example).
If content is the problem how do you explain games like Arch Age going F2P?
The content is then obviously not entertaining enough to attract new people and keep players playing.
You have a different explanation or can rebuke mine?
There's a reason we use F2P rather than FTP.
File Transfer Protocol doesn't threaten much of anybody (except net admins fighting for security, I guess).
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
There's a vast difference between a game that was originally designed, developed, launched and run (for a year or more) as P2P and a game that was designed and developed as F2P.
That P2P game would have recovered a huge amount of cash in its first year via pre-orders, box sales and monthly subs. When it finally goes F2P, it's because that is seen as an additional way of extending the game's earning potential.
The game that launches as F2P has to make all that money via it's Cash Shop by selling "optional" items to players.
If you don't believe that F2P games "have to earn all that money in their first year", then you either accept that F2P games are cheaper to make (for some weird reason) or that F2P developers are happy to earn less money than their P2P counterparts.
None of the P2P games that went F2P did so overnight. They all required at least 6 to 8 months of development work to change the game so that it "worked" as F2P. Things need to be taken out of the game so that they can be sold in the Cash Shop. Gameplay needs to be changed so that the "convenience items" in the Cash Shop can be made attractively convenient.
Somebody earlier in this thread alleged that there's no difference in design and quality between P2P and F2P games, because "the payment model is only decided in the last few months before launch". That's nonsense. The decision that is made in those last few months is how much to charge and how to charge it, not whether it will be F2P.
When I said something similar, I always got 2 responses:
1) Suck my d...
2) F*** your p2p games...
And, yes it's end. We got crap, cause people wanted crap. If I was dev/publishers, I also wouldn't miss a chance to release crap (less resources, less investement, cheap staff) with so many sheeps aboard. Sheep doesn't know anything better but grass, lemme add some cool effects... Oh, shiny grass! Enjoy your new F2P mmo!
Most AAA games don't even have 50k, you can forget an indie having that. TERA has maybe 25k tops.
F2P makes more than P2P because people are stupid and complacent (look how many white knight these fail companies!), and there isn't a casino law against these scammers. Corporations don't give a flying shit about you, they do what's: a. cheapest b. brings the most money c. anything not explicitly illegal
The solution is legislation regarding what is and isn't okay. There should be refunds on epic fails like Neverwinter, and scam boxes that PWE are so well known for should become a long forgotten thing of the past. This nonsense of PWE making games where all (or 95%) of gold is cash shop sourced as in Forsaken World should also be illegal. I've never seen a game with a worse economy and than that pos FW where paying to compete is mandatory.
So what is it..lacking as in less content or less interesting? or both? if AA's content is not interesting then i have no hope for future MMOS.
one good example of non interesting content is AA is a new mmo and still have the same old character progression from WoW (the ! questing). Why didnt they scratch that and made a dynamic progression to fit with the AAA status of a brand new game? if i have to subscribe to AA to level up my character the same way i did in wow, ill stick to wow that at least has a better story to keep me engaged. Making sandboxy environments and crafting doesnt make AA anymore fun if your character is still going to progress through the same old boring ! questing process. That only turn off a lot of people. Let alone any other decisions they might have done wrong.
EDIT: lack of content is bad, but quantity not always mean quality either.
Its not necessarily F2p but just by playing neverwinter i realized what is going on... its a damn casino experience. From the sounds to the visuals to the area designs with little regard for anything more than a few months of activity and a desire to bleed people of dollars as fast as possible.
When looking back at great successes of the past or games that built businesses, we have not had one close to that in a LONG LONG time... and with recent failures likely longer what with the public company control over development dollars.
The f2p piece is interesting to look at because when you think about the "possibilities" of good game designs coming from games driven by microtransactions... i fear its already over.
I have not played an MMO with any vigor other than Vanguard / DDO over the past years. I try them all and they all suck for one reason or another.