What V:SoH needs

Derrico

 Make it free to play! 

 

I played on the FFA server for 6+ months before leaving and never looking back and still think of it as such an amazing time, however I refuse to come back because of the population, despite how great I hear it actually is now.

 

By making V:SoH free to play you will gain SO many members, look at games like silk road etc...GARBAGE games yet loads of people...then after 6 months announce your going to charge, many will leave and many will stay

 

either way alotta people join.

ethion

Originally posted by Derrico


 Make it free to play! 
 
I played on the FFA server for 6+ months before leaving and never looking back and still think of it as such an amazing time, however I refuse to come back because of the population, despite how great I hear it actually is now.
 
By making V:SoH free to play you will gain SO many members, look at games like silk road etc...GARBAGE games yet loads of people...then after 6 months announce your going to charge, many will leave and many will stay
 
either way alotta people join.

 

I guess it is still an investment that soe doesn't seem willing to make.  I mean if you make the game free for 6 months that is a lot of revenue that is being lost, and increase in costs for CS staff, network, servers, etc and when it is over with what will be the retention % and how many months will it take to pay back the investment?  How speculative is it and do they have the necessary amount of money to invest?

Frankly for that amount of money I would think they would be better off investing it in a real expansion and relaunching the game in a major way.  I think that VG is really a top tier game that can be compared favorably against any game on the market.  It just has no marketing, no shelf space, no expansion, a bad launch, and a perception that it is a dead/dying game.

Relaunch it with an expansion, add a new class or two, new content, add in the alchemy/cooking crafting class and maybe sear fairing raid encounters or something unique with sea monsters.  Maybe a city in the sky on clouds, or some other feature that is uniquely vanguard and beyond the likes of any other game and I think you would be far more effective then trying to go free then change and start charging.  Frankly I think doing something like that would be a huge disaster and just create a lot more negative press around soe and vanguard.

 

Quizzical

So the plan is to lose money on every player, but make it up in volume?

If they announce that it's free to play for six months and then they'll charge again, the people you get that way that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise are the ones who will never pay.  That just increases your costs for six months, and doesn't provide any extra revenue later.

If they announce that it's free to play without saying that it's going to go pay to play again, and then surprise people by making it pay to play again later, that gets SOE a lot of bad publicity, and may well drive away players who would otherwise have been inclined to pay.  SOE doesn't need more bad publicity, nor do they need to chase away more paying players.

Making the game free to play for a while means that you lose the revenue during that time interval from people who would have otherwise paid.  It may well also mean a worse gaming experience for those players.  Free to play games tend to have substantially worse communities than pay to play games, as most of the people who are regarded as "bad" are the ones who can't or won't pay.  Making a game pay to play filters them out.

They'd also have to open a bunch of extra servers to accommodate the extra playerbase who would join due to it being free and then leave when it goes back to paid.   They'd then have to do server mergers to close those extra servers when the players leave.  Splitting and then merging servers unnecessarily can make quite a mess of a game's community.

boojiboy

The money making model for Vanguard is through subscriptions while the game itself is very inexpensive.  They can't make it free to play.

Conversely, the money making model for LotRo and other similar MMOs is to sell boxes for the initial game and every 6 months to 12 months for 'paid' expansions.  LotRo could be free to play and still generate a lot of income by players paying for all the content updates.

Carl132p

Originally posted by boojiboy


The money making model for Vanguard is through subscriptions while the game itself is very inexpensive.  They can't make it free to play.
Conversely, the money making model for LotRo and other similar MMOs is to sell boxes for the initial game and every 6 months to 12 months for 'paid' expansions.  LotRo could be free to play and still generate a lot of income by players paying for all the content updates.

 

i don't know where you get that the models are different. If vg had a player base there would be expansions you can be sure of it. Lotro is also making more money to the point where you could just say all of its money from subscriptions than it is from its 2 boxes that it has released. Anyway A re release of VG is probably the only way to ramp up the player base at this point. Making it free wouldn't really grab anyone because F2P people are either unwilling to pay monthly  or children with no credit cards (not an insult to either group).

ArcheusCross

What this game needs? Well what is SoE good at? Broad sweeping changes! WOOO!!!

No but seriously.... a little old brad mcquid vision would be nice. It seems as if its quite far away from the original promised features.

rturja

The thing VG seriously needs is a devteam that has focus instead bunch of people dabbling here and there, adding new broken things on top of other broken things. They should do a complete feature freeze fix underlying problems and then focus on the raids, pvp etc.

The problem in their dev process seems to be top heavy thinking, and keeping existing players ingame - from whom a significant portion could continue without all the added 'endgame' content. Instead they should fix quests and all the activities newbies can take part in order to raise retention factor of the game.

csthao

Originally posted by rturja


The thing VG seriously needs is a devteam that has focus instead bunch of people dabbling here and there, adding new broken things on top of other broken things. They should do a complete feature freeze fix underlying problems and then focus on the raids, pvp etc.
The problem in their dev process seems to be top heavy thinking, and keeping existing players ingame - from whom a significant portion could continue without all the added 'endgame' content. Instead they should fix quests and all the activities newbies can take part in order to raise retention factor of the game.

 

Yes, I cant recall having any fun at all during my level 45-50 days...But during the time I was below those levels, it was a blast! So much funner during your newbie to mid level range...Theres a lot of stuff you can do it was endless...

Ekibiogami

What the game needs? Lots of things. But F2P ISENT one of them. It would go from great comunity to crap over night.

But a free server with ad's everywhere and before the game launches with Item mall could help people see that the P2Play servers are good to :P

astrob0y

Creating a f2p server with a cash shop is a great idea that SOE should use. Its a win-win situation for them.

And they should also fix the shutters the game has. Its not fun to have a high end compture that runs all games on max and then have to see some horrible fps numbers in major citys like NT. I for one tried really hard to stand the dips but couldnt ignore them after some months in the game. Its a shame becuse Vanguard is one of my top mmo experince And that mostly becuse of the free world, the beautiful graphics and my wonderfull guild.

kage-no-shi

i dont think they should make it totally f2p but they could lower the  price to $10, at that price i would definately consider going back and staying for a long while, even a drop to $12 would be great especially in this economy