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Make ESO B2P and get rid of Levels == Win
MMOExposed
Member RarePosts: 7,400
Get rid of the levels, to make the game seem like it has more freedom.
Use the current ingame skill advancement system as a replacement for the main form of progression. More skills, and more skill branches. All discovered in the world, or bought from NPC faction trainers.
As for the payment model.
make the game B2P. Gain massive amount of money off the Box sells. People are much more forgiving of flaws in game design when they dont have to pay a punishing sub fee to play something they already bought. So this would be a good push for both the population in the game, as well as more sells.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Comments
Remove levels? Ok plan
Remove subscriptions? Big nope.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
what I mean by that, is being forced to pay a sub fee for a product which doesnt have a quality that deserving of that fee. So its punishing.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
No one is forcing you to play this game. So it is not punishing, unless you are a masochist.
didnt say force to play the game. I said forced to pay a sub fee that doesnt fit the quality of the game, in order to play the game.
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Philosophy of MMO Game Design
No to many free loaders today, I have no issue paying for a sub, don't play many MMO's, no idea what to tell you but paying 30 bucks a month is not a big deal.. If its is maybe play one?? There are plenty of that free to play trash, to many people whine about prices, when they have no idea the cost or hard work to make these games.
When MMO's die off you will wonder why, I know why, to many free loaders today!!
[mod edit]
Outside of that, after playing ESO I don't think it's a subscription valued game. It plays and patches like a B2P with purchasable DLC. Meanwhile the most fun and immersion I'm having is in a F2P game that wouldn't be wrong if it was P2P. Irony.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Aloha Mr Hand !
Keep Subscription; played enough F2P games to know that I like sub better. $15 a month sucks sometimes but the games fall apart with F2P, the only F2P game I like is Rift, but really it was better as a subscription game. The additional content was better, patching more frequent, level playing field. Sure you can say F2P isn't ncessarily P2W but it is Pay to level and acquire currency faster than free players...so you still end up paying for the game to stay on a level playing field but the quality is worse then when it was P2P.
GW2 I guess B2P worked for. IMO that game was boring as hell, but to each there own. I really only liked the graphics of that game, everything else just felt like a button mash grindfest.
Back to ESO, Vet levels need to be removed, or at least from the standard map. I wouldn't be opposed to Craglorn being V1-5. but I know that isn't going to happen. Keep 1-50 that experience is fine, awesome even. Then allow the whole map to be open for V1s. It can be increased difficulty but not as much as VR5-10...it can even be all the factions together because at this point there is no Immersion in the story anyway.
Add Arena.
And there you go! my winning method.
Looking forward to: Crowfall / Lost Ark / Black Desert Mobile
Ideal would be:
no classes (except the way they were in other TES games)
no character levels (instead skill system similar to the one in DF / EvE)
character development through using skills (eventually trainers for gold - like in old TES games) - quests only for fun and as equal to other activities
veteran content sure, why not. Designed to be fully as AFTERMATH not as what happened in the meantime...
Actually the last one can be still possible - after defeating Molag Bal player may have a choice between current vet content and what happened next but that would mean Craglorn being available since rank 1... I guess we all know it's not going to happen.
B2P would unfortunately solve no problem - I buy the game so I already paid for it, play 2 - 3 weeks and get annoyed by how things are handled, then I leave. My cost is still the same regardless business model (unless we consider free 2 play with item shop or some freemium).
It is going to go F2P and that is all there is to it. I doubt that will even save the game at this point.
If they fixed all their issues quickly, B2P would not be so bad if the price was cheap enough and it provided some extra things from the cash shop.
While it's possible that TESO might adopt a non-sub payment model, it's by no means certain. It all depends on how many subs they are holding. While my best guess is that they might have sold as many as a million, or perhaps as few as 700K, the key would be their trendline on subs. If we assume that TESO had approximately the same production cost as SWTOR, then perhaps we can use BW's statement of long ago that 500K subs for SWTOR would be profitable.
Since Zenimax is not a publicly traded company, they neither need to report their financials, nor do they have stockholders to keep appeased. Thus, they have more leeway to do what they want to do, rather than being pushed by their stock price. I have no real clue as to who owns and controls the company and its pursestrings.
At this point, there is no way that the game would ever get rid of levels. The amount of redesign that would take would seem staggering to me. You can't, I think, just retrofit that in. The game needs to be designed around it.
However, I am beginning to feel that MMOs should consider flattening or eliminating the progression curve. For one, it doesn't seem to make sense to spend so much money on producing the "progression content" that many players just consider to be "in the way" on their way to "endgame". And even for players who enjoy this kind of content (like I do), they see it only once per character. That just seems to me to be completely opposite what an MMO should be designed for. The long-term play needs to have variety, but what most end up with is only "short-term variety" and like many MMOs, SWTOR and TESO included, what you get after you hit max level is very little content (at launch, at least).
Plus, one thing that I think hurts the socialization of MMOs is to stratify your playerbase by design, where new and old players/characters cannot really play (in PvE) or compete (in PvP) very easily. Plus, unless you put in mechanics to dynamically tune the content's difficulty with character level, you are always under the gun for having content that is under/overleveled for an individual, which leads to complaints about the game being too tough or too easy.
No one forces you to play a game. Or is someone from Zenimax sitting behind your chair with a gun at your head forcing you to get a subscription? If you fear being punished, simply do not play the game.
It is good that TESO has got a subscription fee. It ensures a high level of service, quality of updates and future content updates that will be completely free.
I like both B2P (at least if it has the support of GW2) and P2P systems but you are right about the patient of the ppl for a game when it comes to B2P. Imo a subscription fee is ok to exist in a game when 1) you have an excellent customer service 2) when there is high quality and fast paced content additions and 3) there is fast fixing of bugs and other ingame issues.
Many aspects in a game like graphics, gameplay, combat, pvp/pve oriented, char progression etc may be up to every ones tastes, but i think the 3 above are something that all players want to their game, especially when it comes to a sub game.
All Time Favorites: EQ1, WoW, EvE, GW1
Playing Now: WoW, ESO, GW2
Whatever they do it won't be for at least 1-2 years, mmo titles don't change payment systems before that.
ESO has a whole other slew of releases on consoles to come yet still too.
Stating how you want the game to be (no levels etc) is silly, that is simply your own personal preference and has no validity to what anyone else wants. If you were some kind of mmo visionary and knew how to fix everything you would be working for the games industry.
It's a moot point. People do think it's a quality product worth a subscription. IMHO if ESO isn't worth a subscription no game is.
Also, in regard to no levels. I know Skyrim had levels but the monsters leveled as you did so you could have that non-linear, go anywhere game play style.
However the combat increasingly became easier, not harder as you progressed. It's why I rarely leveled a character beyond 30 as the combat was becoming easier and unengaging. It was basically becoming not fun to play. Combat suffered immensely IMO.
So how would combat work in a game with no levels?
exactly what I was thinking...
people don't get it.. subscription doesn't guarantee that the game will provide quality level and not having a sub also doesn't mean the quality will decrease.
"Happiness is not a destination. It is a method of life."
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I don't understand this logic.
ESO /w 15$ a month = Shit game.
ESO /w F2P = Awesome game.
Price tag doesn't improve a game because what is most valuable is the players/gamers time.
Simply put:
PRICE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE GAME'S QUALITY UNLESS IT OUTWRIGHT BREAKS THE GAME
(I.E FREE-TO-PLAY-PAY-TO-WINS)