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My 2 cents on game expansion packs
Aguy
Member Posts: 561
Expansion packs are, in my opinion, not a good thing.
First off, they can cost around 40 bucks. That's quite a lot, considering it's for a game you already have. The fact of the matter is, there are many players out there who are not willing to dish out this kind of money, and if in the future they have reached the end with their game, that's a lot of money down the drain.
IMO, games should never have more then 1 expansion pack. 2 would REALLY be pushing it, any more is absolutely out of the question. Just make patches and updates, what players pay for in their monthly fee. They don't want to blow all that money for an addon to their game, they want stuff they pay $15 for!
I don't like making extremely long posts, I keep it simple and to the point, so that's all I got.
Comments
Well certain games do it as free content updates such as Turbine MMOs, Lineage 2, and even EQ2 has started to do some small free content updates. There are others I'm certain, but I if you think about it the price isn't that bad for the hours spent playing. For example there was an e3 interview about EQ2: Rise of Kunark, and I believe they said there will be at least 20 hours of gameplay in the level 1-20 zone. That right there makes up for the 40dollar price tag. Hell I've bought games that cost 50 dollars and I beat in 5 hours.
Regarding the monthly fees we pay to play. Those are justified too because we pay for the 24/7 servers running, support staff, live development team, and many other services as well. Also think of how many hours a person plays on average within in a month. Just like my expansion arguement it becomes worth it IMO if the person plays at least 20-40hours in that month. Which many play way beyond that even.
Expansion packs = milking the consumer to the maximum.
You think that Blizzard doesn't pull enough of a profit so they have to charge for Burning Crusade? Yeh I guess that WoW doesn't pull in enough cash to to pay for the staff working on BC and allow for it to be free! It isn't about profits it's about milking the playerbase, trying to squeeze out maximum profit for minnimum input. And yes I understand that that's business and Blizzard is in business, it doesn't mean I have to like it when a company stoops to the lowest common denominator does it?
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis
I think the only way blizzard would do major free content updates is if they were really hurting for new subscribers or returning ones. No point in them giving any freebies if they don't have to.
If they released an expansion pack that has equal content as what you have now not as many will buy it, yes I'm quite sure a very large portion will buy it just to go to the new areas. But when they raise level caps, make areas that you MUST go to in order to be on par with everyone else (or to even attempt to be on par) then every player must buy it. If you don't buy it you will be left out and no one will want you (seriously).
If they wanted to they could release 4 expansions a year that adds 1-2 new instances and raises the cap by say 5 levels a pack and charge $20 for each of them. Hmm better instances which means better gear, oh 5 more levels too I have to get it now or else I will be useless and will get owned if I'm not level 8505. If they did this I'm sure a fair number of people would quit due to all the money they MUST pump into the game.
If the expansion adds a lot content and more to due, but they're vary far from each other (every 3-4 years) then it's fine. Not every year.
I don't mind expansion packs so much, I don't even mind paying for like, one a year. I kinda liked the way mythic did it. They did two major expansions a year. One would be free, the other a box you paid for.
It wasn't so bad, and would bring back a lot of people who had gotten bored.
My only beef with xpacs are the ones that change the mechanics of the game, or that force you grind stuff out to compete(TOA cough, cough)
The other thing with mythic at least, with the paid expansions they would update the graphics engine also. For people who's computers couldn't run the updated graphics, they could still run the older client. They would miss out on the new content, but they could still play.
D.
That's sort of what EQ2 did at first and it wasn't very successful. They were creating the expansions but alongside them came the adventure packs which added small amount of content for smaller fee, but hardly anyone uses those areas.
Translated: I want it for free.
I agree that it's all about squeezing as much profits from the player base as possible. Lineage 2 is perfectly functional game that, despite not having a player base that rivals WoW or EQ2 (in the US region at least), does not charge for expansions and yet still produces content as good and worth as many hours spent as those you would pay for in EQ2.
The subscription fee that we pay is more than sufficient for the server's upkeep, a small support staff (let's not pretend that support in EQ2 isn't automated most of the time), and a team of developers to keep working on the game. The cost involved in creating expansions isn't very huge since the fundementals of the game, such as the engine, is already in place.
Although I dislike paying for expansions, there's nothing that I can do about it. It's in the corporate interest to maximize profits, and they'll do whatever they can. At least charging for expansions makes more sense that paying $50 for a character transfer which simply involves moving a few entries around in a database. The marvels of modern capitalism at work!
I'm playing WoW again and doing raiding again once I loot whore kara (no joke.... I can get all my items I need for 25 mans just handed to me, no DKP or anything). I heard of the leaked / rumors (I wont lie, I really think the "rumors" are real) of the next expansion. If they do raise the cap ONCE AGAIN and make all my loot that my GM went through to make and time we all did for this loot now just to say "Oh ya, anything less then T5 is useless sorry!" I'm done. I will destroy all of his gear and wipe him off the face of that server. Forcing players to pay more and more just to do the same crap pisses me off.
This is just me, some might feel the same but I have no doubt Blizzard will hold their numbers.
Hey hey don't knock capitalism nothing wrong with wanting to make money, and a lot of it.
That's how expansions have always worked though in every game, free or not, it's a circle of nerfing and un-nerfing. But adding new items in a game while making the old ones useless is a natural process. Otherwise, what would you work towards? If you always had the top gear in the game, it would get boring fast, wouldn't it?
Nah, the way EQ2 did it was stupid. They made content that should have either been saved for a full xpac, or included free with a regular patch and charged people for it.
Of course people aren't going to use those small areas much or pay for them. That was the most dumb money hungry thing I had seen an MMO do for a long time.
With daoc, the free expansion was like...a complete revamp of the pvp frontier, not one stupid dungeon or small area.
The paid xpac is usually for pve content.
D.
I know, but it takes a lot of blood a sweat (not literally but you know) to get to where you are, and a major portion of the population can't or is not at the "very end." I could understand if about half the "raiding" population is very close to the very end and release more, but once the pack is release you have 0 reason to progress in the instances you were in. All you do is level and try again at the new stuff in hopes of hitting the end before the next expansion.
It doesn't matter, if a company releases a major pack that changes a lot you have to buy it or don't play. I'm going with option two (that's just me).
Oh heh my reply you quoted was actually meant for jimmylegs. Wasn't comparing it to DAoC's style of expansions.
Yeah. Actually, even though it's minor, you'd still have to get it because you're inadvertently going join a group that wants to hunt in one of the new areas, and it sucks if you can't go. I usually buy it because I'm already heavily addicted to the game at this point.
One of my friends was a hard core WoW player. He told me about the xpac when it was coming out..I told him he'd quit within a month...and he did.
Adding levels or making gear obsolete is pretty dumb, especially with as hard a grind as wow is at the high end.
I don't think a game should ever raise its level cap..expand laterally instead.
Well..I guess with a pure pve game I guess raising the level cap doesn't matter...there's nothing to do BUT level in a pve game, and wow is a straight pve game..I don't care what anyone says, or how much they flame..wow pvp is about the most pointless thing I've ever seen, it was actually better before they put the stupid battle ground things in.
I think after someone like blizzard raises the level cap..people start to see how pointless the game is and /cry IRL for all the time they wasted on it.
Then again..I suppose its the same for any game out there.
D.
I just thought of an interesting way a game can handle expansion packs. Have the game built to have a really high amount of levels for the maximum. So at launch the game will have a max level of 200 but the monsters will only cap out at 60 initially. The later expansions will then add new content in increments of ten levels every half a year. Lastly it would still be possible to level beyond the max level of the current content, but it would pretty much be an horrible grind with very little reward till the expansion with the appropriate level content comes out.
I've seen games do a soft level cap like that. It works well for pve games, but I dunno about pvp games.
You're still adding levels that way, just calling it something different, but its still the same thing.
Could be a cool idea though.
D.
It depends on the content of the expansions. I'm not going to pay another $49,99 in addition to the monthly fee for 3 new skills and 1 new dungeon, but I might pay $30 for new player classes, new areas, new gear, new core mechanics, and so on.
Overall I feel that if there is a monthly fee, they should keep pushing out updates regularely. I prefer how Lineage 2 and Eve does it, how the expansions (or "major updates") are free and frequent. You could probably play one of the former games for about a year and get all the expansions for free for the price that you pay for all 3 Guild Wars packages at a regular price. But hey, at least GW is "free", right?
yeah it is still adding levels, but the emphasis is not on getting to end game, because the true end game won't come for years. The point of the system would be to enjoy the journey, and to let you have something to always look forward to. Once the game hits that maximum level that would be the true end game with a grand finale.
Any pay2play game should not be charging for expansions. Any p2p game that is popular enough to have expansions should not be looking to the customer TWICE for an addition to the game that is supposed to be provided from the monthly fees. People are basically getting double charged and loving it :P Lineage 2 is a great example of how things should work.
I don't like expansion packs, but for some developers it's a way to go if their additional content is too large to distribute through bit torrent or other file sharing systems. None the less, it should be noted that eventually the idea of expansion packs will become fairly obsolete in the face of more broadband options which offer better throughput for less. So, MMOs will evolve to accept this fact, either sharply or subtly (I pick subtly since investors hate giving up old models they assume will be around past their life times.) with each new MMO or updates to existing MMOs.
-- Brede
Oops, carry on then, lol.
D.