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Whats the point of playing a mmorpg with a marketplace?
dagon3
Member Posts: 117
Im not understanding why all these aaa games are going F2P with marketplaces ?
I dont know about all of you but i play mmorpg's for the challenge of leveling my character, and the challenge of doing dungeons, instances , and raids to find better gear for my toon.
Now heres my point why should or would i go into that dungeon to kill a boss for loot when i can buy better gear in a marketplace? doesnt that defeat the whole point?
Im just wondering after i buy all this gear on the marketplace what is left for me to do and why even do it?
The whole fun factor of trying to improve my character is gone .
Guess that just leaves me the option of showing off my gear to others and running around with nothing left to do because theres no point.
So give me your opinion if you can buy everything you need why even play? for what? gear?
Now i dont mind a free to play game that sells content , or appearance items or fluff for your house ect..
But selling items or anything that improves your toon IMO is taking the whole fun factor or challenge out of a game and leaves you standing there with your thumb up your ass saying hmm should i go with that pug , nah the drops are lame and i got bettter gear already .. Idont know i just dont get it , how you can have fun buying gear instead of working for it..
Anyway thats my opinion and im not burned out on the genre just hate the way there headed ..
Anyone agree or disagree with me , have at it !
Comments
It's called a cash shop.
Many players enjoy buying items and shopping. I dont' enjoy cash shop games. I think they break immersion by turning the game into a mall experience, which does not appeal to me.
BUT, what if you LOVE to go to the mall? You can have the same sort of experience without leaving your computer while playing your game, and certainly some people do love to shop.
Short answer is.....It's all about the money!!!!
It has been proven that currently the game companies will make more money by selling things in cash shops that by only subs. They are really obligated to make as much money as possible to give the investors the highest possible return. Therefore the "fault" actually lies with the current crop of gamers.
I do take issue with even the Fluff items. One of the main reasons I quit WOW. For instance there were several non-com pets that you had to try very hard to ever get. It was an accomplishment and meant something when you got one. Now it is crap as you can buy something better for a few $$.... Getting the Zul'Aman Bear mount was very difficult for a good team and meant alot. Now it is crap and you can buy something better for a few $$.... That game company is now out a few years of my subs but probably more people paid the few$$ for these things to make up for it. Nothing in that game even means anything anymore.
At some time (years) it will turn around. No doubt cash shop games will remain but finally games will be advertised as cash shop free.
I just feel this is going to be the downfall of mmo's because honestly there still not FREE 2 PLAY
And they probably end up costing more then a sub.
Im not talking about these foreign games im talking about everquest 2, lotro and the other ones made over here.
Like i said i dont mind paying for content or fluff and i dont even mind if people buy items(freedom of choice) But i wont be playing them games. i just dont see the point in playing a game when the point of the game is to lvl up and make a character better by PLAYING not buying ..
Its crazy , lets just hope RTS games and FPS games dont head that same direction, next thing you know you will have to pay cash for new untis or new weapons .
EDIT : Spelling its early here...
Lets take eq2 for instance im playing it right now, first they said no marketplace on live servers only on the exchange ones,now look its on all servers in all there games. Then they said no items in the marketplace will have stats on them , Now look mounts with stats on them . (With the sub still going to) LOL Last month they said eq2 will not be going F2P now look a month later F2P Beta..
This crap is getting out of hand .. Guess i might have to go back to the good ole diablo 2 days
Red alert, dawn of war , warcraft 3 ..
Im not going to compete with cash sorry ..
also you like to lie it seems...atleast to yourself. You dislike cash shops because you like the "better than you feeling" you get from doing "boss" encounters. It is not about your personal achievement you are worried about it is your achievement in the eyes of others you are worried about. It is like a guy driving by in a ferrari while you are in your chevy cobalt. You want to be in the ferrari that you got from a raid (etc.) that someone else could not do. If it was about your personal achievement then everytime you got something in the game that was even slightly better than what you had you would be satisfied with the achievement, but instead you are worried about the Jones.
Frankly you are the people that brought us Gearscore, armor requirements in other games, elitest jerks mostly, etc...that ruined MMO's to being with. "If you do not have *this or *that* you can not get in our group noob." Now that it is turned on you, you whine and cry about it. Take your ball and go home. While we are replacing one elitest jerk for another I just like fact that the tables got turned on you.
I aint worried about chit , and like i said i dont care what others do these posts are about whats the point of playing a game that the focus is on bettering your toon when you dont have to play the game to do it?
Awnser that ?
Are you playign the game because its fun or are you the type to go buy a bunch of chit on a marketplace so YOU can show of your goods? works both ways doesnt it ..
numnuts read the post next time i even said i dont have anythign against them i said WHATS THE POINT..
reply to the post and awnser the questions asked this isnt about me so quit flaming (im not gay)
Are you really that much of an idiot ?
go buy your gear because you dont have the time to play whatever game your in .
pull out your wallet give these companies your paycheck and then go raid loser .
you dont know me or how i play so STFU.
If your wife didnt give you any last night maybe thats your fault dont come over here and troll and flame because she asked you for money and you spent it all on your marketplace ok punk..
Go post in the ill be divorced soon section.. I heard your comments now move on ...
You see, I have cash because instead of playing all day, I work.
Now it's our time to have the upper hand, before I couldn't compete with time.
Get a life you freaking Gamer.....no no, you don't understand, I'm a Gamer, I have many lives!!
I work also man .
I play in the evening ..
What!!! ZA Bear > Celestial Pony.
While I'm not really into F2P games, I think you have to re-think why you are playing mmorpgs in the first place.
I dont know about all of you but i play mmorpg's for the challenge of leveling my character, and the challenge of doing dungeons, instances , and raids to find better gear for my toon.
Now heres my point why should or would i go into that dungeon to kill a boss for loot when i can buy better gear in a marketplace? doesnt that defeat the whole point?
There is much more in a mmorpg than killing Internet dragons to get fat epic loot. All the social or teamwork aspect matters to me. In some game you need a lot of coordination to achieve or complete the End Game. Heck, even in WoW, the guild with the first Lich King dead didn't have all their toons with 6k gearscore +30% stats bonus...
Whoa!
Horusra, you are seriously carrying around way too much baggage. That isn't healthy, man.
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Why play? Simple answer, play if you enjoy the game. Nobody has to buy anything from a cash shop, they are optional. Play, get a challenge, have fun with friends. Whats all the hubbub? I play DDO and it has a cash shop. The stuff I see in it is not better than what you acquire by playing. Its just 'good' stuff, not the best you can find from raids and hard dungeons. So play, enjoy, and live and let live.
I think there is a bit of "urban legend" when it comes to these cash shops.
I have no doubt that some games are set up so that players can buy quite a bit. But from what I've seen of the few non turbine cash shops, they really aren't "all that".
Usually they include vanity items and items that help players bypass the grindier aspects of the game. I've never seen a game that had top tier raid gear in the shop. Yet players do seem to talk about these cash shops as exactly that, a way to buy the best stuff in game.
As I've said, I'm sure there are games out there that are set up for complete purchase of all items, but for the most part it's usually xp pots, buff pots, added ports or things that help mitigate death penalty.
Not great but not the all encompassing "buying everything" that people usually conjure up.
In addition, players will say that it's impossible to play a game without purchasing items. Sometimes it seems that what this actually means is that it's impossible to play the game and be competitive but that it is indeed possible to still play. As long as one is patient with a longer grind or that they are not keeping up with the everyone else.
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I'm going to give you my opinion hoping your were serious about the topic. Why do people play on cash shop free to play games?. It depends mainly on the game. If you talk about eq2 extended,this particular free to play approach is horrible. They give you the game content for free and charge you for the stat gear you need ever amount of levels and they are giving advantage to people willing to spend money on it becouse of that. In the other hand is their money and eq2 is a pve based game, that means what others do doesnt really affect you, maybe just a little. In my opinion, people buying gear in the item shop will feel later that they wasted their money, they will realize how stupid it was buying with their money an easy way to nowhere becouse in mmorpgs, the travel is the objetive, what you were suposed to earn playing, but it's a matter of opinion.
But what if we talk about DDO and Lotro we talk about another kind of free to play, they give you most of the races and characters for free and then they charge you for game content. Once you reach level 20 you buy missions packs. They are giving you 3 options:
1- free to play if you dont mind the grind
And the best 2 of them:
2 - Pay sub and play the amount of tiem at month you feel your money is worth
3 - Buy the content and play at the speed you want. Once you unlock a mission packs is there for you forever, it is not lasting a predetermined amount of time related to your sub, it's tehre forever, you play today, the next weekend or the next year.
So depending on what you talk about it is just a way of being greedy witn your customer or a way of giving your customer the posibility of playing at the speed they want. Thats why DDO became succesfull and that why Lotro f2p is going to be a success too. It's free to play meaning "you are free to play when you feel like it"
In my opinion a marketplace based game can be an awesome idea or greedy bssines, depending on the approach it takes. There is no deed to talk bad about all the marketplace based games, but we should talk bad about the greedy and bad designed ones.
It is just these sad wretches that whine about cash shops because suddenly the playing field has changed and their uber raidiness is not the leetest in game. They talk about how it robs them of their personal achievement but they faile to even understand the phrase. PERSONAL achievement. It is possibly the stupiest argument. They hate the design because suddenly someone can buy and be as uber as them and this somehow robs them of personal achievement. Pure idoicy. What they are pissed about is the fact they are robbed of their one up on people. Instead of being better than 70% of the crowd they are not only better than say 30-50% depending I guess. These are the people that get their achievement in game from standing in cities showing off their epic gear and waiting for others to give them cool points. instead of just being happy about their achievement they are only happy when others drool over them.
That is the real reason people mostly raids hate cash shops. Because then time is not worth more than money. If anything they become even. Boo hoo you raided for 20 hours to get something and someone just bought it. Sucks to be you. I guess you will just have to go kill yourself now. It is a freaking game. If you only get joy by being better than others and not in what you achieve in the game why do you play a MMORPG...go play a FPS or something where you can be better than someone through skill and not the nice shinies you collect.
Horusa,
You seem full of hate.
You look at games like WoW, with it's gear score, and "leet" epicced raiders who raise the bar for entry so high that it's a real struggle for any newcomer to the game. The lack of friendliness and the snobbery. You assume that these are your opponents in this thread.
I'd say you're completely wrong, your opinion is dangerous, and it's actually, although you don't realise it, helping to create systems like the one you oppose.
I don't raid seriously nowadays (I've been on a total of two ICC 10 pugs that have actually managed to get past the first boss). That's because at the moment I don't really care for the current WoW raiding culture.
However, during TBC I was an officer in one raiding guild, and then healing lead in a second. I've known plenty of raiders, and the bunch I knew didn't really care about the gear. It was nice. They were proud of it. But they were proud of it because it represnted their own achievements. What they did. The bosses they downed. The point was the doing. You don't raid for gear. You raid to down bosses. The gear is just a means of progressing to the next set of bosses. Also, no one progressed far in the guild I was in unless they could work well with others. You spent a lot of time with these people - why would you invite them if they were arseholes?
You speak of raiders sitting around on uber mounts posing and showing off their uber gear. What sort of people do that? It's certainly not something any of the raiders I knew would do. It wouldn't even occur to them to do it. It seems to me that the people who pose and show off the gear are generally pretty insecure. They're the kids who got carried by epics, without really understanding the encounters, or how to play their characters. They pose with the gear, not to prove their superiority to others, but to justify their superiority to themselves.
And that's part of the problem I have with the current culture. The ease with which very good gear can be obtained has, to a large extent, decoupled personal player skill from gear levels. There are loads of people wandering around in really impressive gear, without having much of a clue. These are the people who stand around posing on mounts. And these are the people who ask for gear score, since they are looking for others like themselves.
You celebrate cash shops because you see them as an attack on elitist culture. It's not. It further breaks down the correlation between attributes such as skill, knowledge and the ability to work with others, and gear levels. If high end items become available for cash, then there will be more players wandering around with plenty of gear but without a clue how to play. These people will demand the same from others. They will demand ever higher gear scores, as more and more people compete in how much they can spend in the cash shop.
If ICC 25 heroic gear was available from the cash shop for hundreds of dollars, then plenty of PuGs would start demanding it as a minimum entry requirement. You don't have it? Then you obviously don't care enough about your character to spend money on it, and you don't deserve to raid. That is the future many people fear.
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1. You are not somehow better than another person, becuase you like to buy items in a game, and they do not.
2. You are not somehow better than another person, because you don't like to buy items in a game, and they do.
Please accept that people enjoy games in different ways.
It's OK to like buying items in a cash shop. You don't have to say everything that doesn't like this is somehow bad, or less of a wonderful person than you are, because you enjoy the freedom to shop when you want to or whatever.
It's OK to play a game with NO CASH shop, because that's what you enjoy. You don't have to tell people that like cash shops they are worthless people skipping the game.
People that like cash shops are not going to ever understand why some people don't like them. They will just constantly say, "Play my game with a cash shop, and don't buy the items!".
Which means, they get what they want, a cash shop.
And people that hate cash shops aren't going to ever understand why some people like to shop in a video game, even though it breaks immersion, and affects the game whether you purchase or not.
To answer your question, there is no point. If a game has a cash shop I am not interested. I don't play many MMOs these days. Maybe my time of playing MMOs is finished.
People like shopping, even if it is for virtual goods.
Hell if thats the case you can buy an account with a leveled toon that has the top gear. Then you wont have to play at all just hang out in the middle of town and let everyone see your uber greatness. Myself, I choose to play the game with the time I set aside to do so. Its not about having the upperhand its about playing the game. Ive said before, if you dont have time to play then perhaps mmo's are no longer an option for you. But its easier to piss an moan until a cash shop is introduced and the game play dumbed down so to appease you.
WOW isnt great because it has 12 million players. WOW has 12 million players because its great.
You are ignoring how cash shops are actually set up. For example, in DDO, you can buy adventure areas, not the loot dropped from the boss.
You don't understand because you have no clue about the nature of the cash shops.
Another example. LOTRO. You can buy quests. You can debate whether that is nickle & diming players. But certainly there is a point to the game ... you buy content to play. I don't see why a player shouldn't do that if the content is fun.
In a way I am against cash shops, mainly if items in the cashshop are items a only playing player can not aquire. But only can get thru a cashshop.
I don't mind a game with cash shop if playing players can aquire the same items that are sold in the cashshops by simply playing the game. I also do not mind if cash shop items are items for low lvl's.
What's the point of playing a MMORPG with a cash shop?, personaly would not know as it totally trows out the things I like about playing games, but overall there are thousands and thousands of reasons (exuses) people might use that use cash shops.
I do not feel that a P2P model + Cash Shop can co-exist in a healthy game. Eventually, the allure of easy $$$ from selling cheap content or difficult quest rewards, will impact and diminish the gameplay of those willing to pay a monthly fee.
The point?.....Making money.
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