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Subscribe to play is as bad as pay to win
nerovergil
Member UncommonPosts: 680
Best option is buy to play with 30 days free trial. with cosmetics shop
Not everyone is rich like american. Especially south east asia players.
Not everyone is rich like american. Especially south east asia players.
Comments
The ability to afford a subscription has nothing to do with whether it is P2W or not, without going into a theoretical rabbit hole that never ends. I would suggest changing the title.
Seriously, when all players gets a level field it is very different from people paying loads of cash for in game buffs and gear.
The only thing that would make P2P without cashshop as bad as pay2win is if you have several different fees you could buy, some more expensive then others.
We could however discuss why the monthly fees are not more often based on an average workers salary or the big mac index, charging too much in poorer countries is generally stupid since you get very few subs and loads of players paying $5 in a poor country is generally better then a few paying fifteen. That has nothing to do with pay2win, it has to do with the price you can take to get maximum income in each country, rise or lower the price too much and you loose tons of cash.
I would suggest putting countries in 3 different zones based on how much the average people earn, $5 for poor countries, $10 for so-so and $15 for richer countries like NA and EU (or at least most of EU, Greece could do for $10).
we want all players in the world to play the game. we mmo players are precious. some people doesnt even liked game. they too busy with real life
If it is b2p then you can bet your ass it will release unfinished,the dev will save parts of the game to sell you in a very early expansion.
You can also bet no developer is going to make items for a cash shop that nobody will buy,they will make it so it is p2w.Further more,i want a developer spending all of it's time,my money on building the game and resources,not spending it to make cash shop items.I want bugs fixed,support/gm staff,i don't want all the team working on PR and cash shops.
Bottom line is they are getting their money out of you one way or another,if you are too blind to see the gimmicks and deceiving ways,then your the lesser for it.
There is no problem with a subscription model,since it creates an across the board FAIR system and with no cash shop,there is no tendency to lean the team in that direction or make changes to suit the CS.Where it becomes a problem is if they are over charging and using that money to fund the next expansion and then try and sell us that expansion with the money we already gave them.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Of course, pay2win games with optional sub is even worse.
However in general games like World OF Warcraft are worth the subscription you get pretty much everything the game has to offer that is if you like the game, Plus expansions and its reasonable, what is unreasonable is games like BDO, Arche Age, Final Fantasy XIV, Many F2P Games, and SWTOR's Cartel Market its all awful...
MMO's need to be better again but developers lack the skills, and decisions to make such happen, or maybe its just really bad management.
Fun Fact: American made MMOs mostly target playerbase in NA/EU, sometimes global too, but rarely. Since most spenders come from NA or EU, they won't give a damn for SEA players like you and me.
Happy now?
When you don't want the truth, you will make up your own truth.
There are a few P2P MMO around, Wow and Lineage are the largest. Guess which 2 MMOs that have the highest income of all MMOs no matter what model they use? Wow and Lineage. FF XIV is doing about the same as ESO, GW2 and TOR even if it is still P2P.
Unless you mess things up and go totally pay2win it seems to me that most MMOs actually earns money based on how fun players think they are, not on how people pay for playing. Sure, a bad model can turn off many players but that usually just happens in extreme cases (Allods lost a lot of people early due to insane prices for example).
A great MMO will always earn money, and now when the novelty of the F2P market is gone I am not convinced at all that F2P actually is the best way to earn money, it is if you only want to keep those players a month (that or B2P) but long term the evidence is at best circumstantial.
Look on Wildstar, the publicity of it changing model did temporary bring up the income but rather soon it dipped down below earlier income.
It is certainly possible that it might work for specific games or specific markets but as general it is still Lineage and Wow that earns the most money right now, and not only that, if you look on the entire lifespan of a MMO no F2P game will ever be close to those giants.
F2P just means you will get more people trying the game at launch, or some extra publicity when you change model but it seems harder to get the players staying long term in F2P and long term P2P earns more cash unless you compare a bad P2P game with a good F2P one.
But yes, most devs focus the game mainly on people from the country they come from, no matter if they are US, Germans, Russians, Japanese , south Koreans or Chinese (or whatever). It is just logical, we do know our own playerbase best after all. If people from other regions like it then great but if not then there are companies from those regions making games as well.
And don't complain, almost all AAA MMOs nowadays comes from the east.
Tencent is probably the biggest video game company in the world right now, and it's Asian. It either owns or has distribution rights to many very popular titles, many of the worlds most popular online games, and even owns a very large stake in Blizzard. So you could even say WoW is definitely pivoting away from strictly US/EU culture (and if you don't believe that, Mists of Pandaria says Hello).
Perfect World is another Asian company that has a lot of MMOs. It owns Cryptic Studios, which you could say those MMOs were developed in US/EU markets, but PWI has published many, many more MMOs than just what Cryptic has to offer.
FFXIV is definitely not Western - coming largely from Japanese culture. I realize Japanese culture isn't the same as SEA, but you also can't really lump it in there with US/EU either.
NCSoft, Webzen, and Nexon are all huge MMO publishers, all based out of Korea (again, not the same as SEA, but definitely not US/EU). I'd accept that Guildwars and Wildstar are Western-developed though, because ArenaNet and Carbine are US subsidiaries, but they are still published by NCSoft, so there's still some non-US influence in there. The Lineage line is sitll one of the most popular MMOs in the world.
I would even go so far as to argue that My.com, which is largely Russian, doesn't exactly cater to what the typical "Western" game would contain.
As far as Western MMOs go - Trion is still kicking around, Daybreak is back in US ownership (although it still developed largely for a western audience even when owned by Sony, and who knows how much longer it will be around anyway). Bioware remains pretty strongly Western. Zenimax is largely Western influenced. Cryptic remains more or less Western oriented in content, but has definitely adopted an Asian-style billing model. Blizzard has really started to go more international, but we don't see it as prevelent because they highly regionalize their products. Carbine Studios was pretty heavily western influenced, even though it was published by NCSoft (and in their hubris to copy what they thought made "Vanilla" WoW so popular, cratered and probably won't live through that disaster). ArenaNet I'd say still is largely Western.
Past that list, I'm struggling to come up with names of titles that have had a lot of success. There are a lot of startups/indie titles that are pretty heavily Western - but I'm sure there are just as many Asian-influenced titles out there, and they just aren't getting press on this site because this site is largely a Western audience.
The last 10 or so years would argue with everything you've stated. Most MMOs released over the last decade have been released with plenty of unfinished systems. You could even argue that in some games those systems were then released with an expansion.
Pretty much all games have cash shops, including P2P games, but not all cash shops are P2W.
The money you give the game is going to be used for whatever is going to net them the most cash back. Bug fixes and support/gm staff are typically only reduced if the game isn't doing well, regardless of payment model.
I personally can't think of a P2P game that doesn't have a cash shop, aside from games that were released over a decade ago. Additionally, aside from very few P2P games, most of the more recent P2P games either went B2P or took up some type of a Freemium model.
Subscriptions are falling by the wayside. There is far too much competition out there to justify "renting" access to a game you also had to purchase. Subs worked well when pretty much only mmorpgs had the broadest amount of persistent online play. However, tons of games have mmo systems in place, and all come with the price of the box.
It will be interesting to see if subs will wind up running into a cycle. All it would really take is for the next giant mmo to come out and be sub based to get everyone on board again.
The model was a golden cow for developers and it worked until the market was flooded with games.
Whether a game is finished depends on initial funding, how good the team are, whether they think they can recoup their costs etc.
Sub, cash shop or b2p games can all be "unfinished" or "finished". There have been examples of each finished and unfinished.
buy to play with cosmetic shop still can generate moneys
player who often subs can buy cosmetic every month
No, Devs should not make new PC games that run on anything less than this standard.
This would leave console quality games on $300 to $400 hardware for those with less means.
"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
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"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
Premise 1: I wanna play AAA MMO (<<not a mandatory needs).
Premise 2: I can't afford paying subs (<<his condition).
Conclusion: Don't make sub-based AAA MMO (<<complained as an non-mandatory factor doesn't suits his condition ).
Edit for clearance.
When you don't want the truth, you will make up your own truth.
I want to earn the right to look awesome in the game, not through a 0 effort store.
It's one of my biggest gripes with path of exile.
I'll always prefer B2P without a cash shop ( which isn't a viable MMO model ) or Subscription based, i could accept a cosmetic shop if all cosmetics where also able to be gotten in the game itself though.
This is the reason why I can't support such a game, and have to say D3 does a better job.
Cosmetic shops can be OK but very few games keep them as just cosmetic, over time they start to add crap the pushes the P2W boundaries which ruins games.
The best MMOs were pay to play.. So yeah, keep your horse at $10 or your new haircut at $5.. And let me play my pay to play games.