Does a major part of the player base of F2P/B2P only care about the end game?

Jamar870

That's my question. Comes from my experience with Tera in it's current form.

laxie

I think the endgame focus is an effect of game design, not necessarily the monetisation model.


The difference with F2P is no barrier to entry. This means people are more likely to leave. The design therefore needs to do two things:

1. Make sure people stick with the game long enough. 
2. Try and get people to make any purchase as soon as possible.

These games need to perfectly nail the new player experience. The first few minutes matter a lot. This is less true for B2P/Subscription games, where you are financially invested to begin with. The majority of the F2P development resources therefore go to two groups of people. Those who are spending money (think regular new cosmetic items) and those who just started (e.g. improving starting zones). I believe F2P games have more consistent progression.

Subscription games will get away with a slightly lackluster new player experience. In turn, they focus on the majority of players equally - they thrive off a working community as a whole. It just so happens that the vertical progression in WoW clumps players together at the endgame. This means focusing on the majority leads to focusing on endgame. If you had a subscription sandbox exploration game, focusing on the majority would mean focusing on adding new explorable zones.

I'd imagine Tera would be simiar to WoW. There is a strong vertical progression, meaning long term players are clumped together at cap. If Tera has some sort of a subscription (does it?) it would make sense to keep making endgame content, getting money from those long term players. If you have a F2P game with no subscription, it is more important to focus on cash shop items.

Leiloni

Jamar870 said:

That's my question. Comes from my experience with Tera in it's current form.

Well TERA is a 5 year old game so most of the playerbase is at max already and either is only leveling alts so they want to do it quickly, or new players need to be ushered to max quickly in order to have people to play with due to lower leveling populations. Most traditional themeparks suffer this same thing. I can tell you when TERA first released leveling was much slower, harder, and things like dungeons and group quests were very much a thing.

But this is not a F2P/B2P game thing, but more a fault of the design of traditional themeparks. After a few years developers are stuck with populations that are mostly max level, so new players don't have anyone to play with while leveling, so they rush them through it. Games like ESO and GW2 have tried to make the leveling experience last longer so even when players are "higher level" they can still do the lower level content and be challenged and rewarded properly. That's turned out much better.

Hopefully more games try to do similar things like this, that spread out the "endgame" content across the entire game. It should be obvious to developers when all your content is shoved at max level, that a game will be very top heavy after a while. The other problem this creates, aside from the leveling being rushed, is that older content becomes outdated with new gear sets or level increases. 

Octagon7711

SWG had all kinds of time syncs. It got crazy sometimes the things they would do to slow people down so I think it's a tradition that started a long time ago.  

I never really cared much for end game. Only liked max level because it usually meant your character had access to all it's skills.

MaxBacon

Endgame is fundamental if you play one MMO; after all they do are long-term games, and is that end-game that you'll end up playing for a long time if you do indeed keep playing. So I think it's pretty important to be okay with the endgame of a MMO before even start playing it.

I think not doing so is one of the biggest reasons for #ragequits.