there no such thin as free to play any way you paying for market items market place to get stuff most of the free to play games have stuff you need from market? so no such thin as free any ways it will take you money one way or other
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OzzallosRunes of Magic CorrespondentMemberUncommonPosts: 35
Alright, pissing into the wind here, but seriously...
"Free to Play" is your web based email account. You maintain full usage of it while the providers make use of other revenue streams. Your email isn't delivered slower just because you didn't pay for the cash shop item to speed it up. Your ability to add attatchments doesn't vanish because your week rental expired... Your email is, by and large, fully functional whether you ever pay into the system or not.
What the current crop of trialware devlopers are insisting is free to play- including and especially LotR Online -simply isn't. It's free to log in. It's free to grind a few monsters. But serious advancement and competition? That's where your freedom stops. One look at LotR comparison chart confirms this all day long, and if you doubt that, look at DDO as an example of a ready made blueprint. Back in the day, this was called Shareware: You use a crippled version of a piece of software and pay to unlock it's full abilities.
Sound familiar?
Believe it or not, I don't have a problem with this, but dammit, call it for what it is. Whatever f2P was supposed to be, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a panzi scheme to lure gamers into a title under the false pretense that they wouldn't pay- or even be expected to pay -anything into a cash shop of any kind to normalize their advancement to compete with paying customers.
And even if you were one of the ones that survived the cashless grind to the top, the game still wasn't built with you in mind. It was built in the expectation that somebody else would pay in, and the leveling curve, mobs, etc, are designed with that in mind. That alone is a shady business practice.
True free to play doesn't build a game around paying customers. It doesn't expect its gamers to pay into a cash shop. It doesn't try to lure them in with a promise of non-monetary gameplay while the host website pushes the top-up button on every page.
It's possible to make real, free to play gaming... Your email proves that. Just the suckering of people thinking they're going to get a free MMO experience while subtly weening them onto the teet of the cash shop is easier and much more profitable.
In fact, it's a safe bet that if you just took all the different bonus points they're going to give out between now and when this change goes live you would be able to drop to Premium and buy most of the limitation removals. In other words, you could very possibly cancel your subscription after the change is made and continue to play completely free. At least, until the next major content release.
So how exactly are premium members going to remove the chat, mail and auction limitations... according to the chart, they can't.
I didn't say all limitations. I only said most of the limitation removals.
And again, I come back to the question: What happens today if you cancel your subscription? How much chat can you do once your paid time has run out? How much mail can you send? How many auctions can you post? Under the new system you will still have some access to all those features and as DDO shows, "some" is still a fair bit..
Okay, I wasn't going to say anything, since a lot of people seemed to enjoy this piece and I may be in the minority, but I've read a couple responses praising this article for how "logical" it was - which is not at all the case.
This article is riddled with informal logical fallacies, including strawman arguements and ad populum. Infact, the whole article is pretty much a big ad populum: the author acts as though she speaks for the supposed majority of the mmo community, but cannot. She also rallies everyone against some faceless menace and constructs "their side" of the argument out of nearly nothing.
This is not a good example of a logical work. Let's treat it like what it is: an opinion piece.
Dude, this isn't a college thesis, or a scientific paper, or a great philosophical debate.
Okay, I wasn't going to say anything, since a lot of people seemed to enjoy this piece and I may be in the minority, but I've read a couple responses praising this article for how "logical" it was - which is not at all the case.
This article is riddled with informal logical fallacies, including strawman arguements and ad populum. Infact, the whole article is pretty much a big ad populum: the author acts as though she speaks for the supposed majority of the mmo community, but cannot. She also rallies everyone against some faceless menace and constructs "their side" of the argument out of nearly nothing.
This is not a good example of a logical work. Let's treat it like what it is: an opinion piece.
Dude, this isn't a college thesis, or a scientific paper, or a great philosophical debate.
It's a ARTICLE based on OPINION on a GAMING SITE.
FFS lighten up.
Well its to bad that most of the opions now day want to force any kind of f2p model down our throat and expect us to like it. It is a shame really, and I can see where headed for an mmo failure across the board at this rate, due to a lot of players just throwing up there hands and walking away.
Is it coincedence that all the columnist here like the F2P model?
Or is there some kind of secret marketing agenda going on in the background here at MMORPG?
I dont think there any coincednece. Tthere seams to be a lot of folks jumping on the lets defend turbine for going f2p. There seams to be a real push here and there to go that route.
I just wonder why.
In the absense of any real facts, the lowest common demoninator in intelligence will always gravitate toward the most sinister explanation.
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. -Winston Churchill
I recognize that as more and more mainstream F2P +cash shop games are released, the currently existing MMO community will shrivel and be replaced by those who do not object to this billing system.
I think game designers will therefore take a greater interest in the wishes of their customers when designing products and features, as they will only receive remuneration if those features are entirely desired by a clear margin of consumers.
i feel the endless torrent of crap games we see polluting the market is a product of the current mainstream billing system, being monthly fee billing, as developers are able to largely ignore the fluid and active desires of their player base by relying on the bottom line of inflow, mainly stemming from loyalty, laziness, and complacency on the part of the consumer base.
I do not see F2P + cash shop as "robbery" or "extortion" as many seem to think it is. As a consumer, i (and optimally) all consumers, will seek only to put their money into products that saticfy a certain standard of quality. I believe that new industry standards will be isolated and promoted by cash shops, as the system developes.
currently, we are only able to see a small selection of features available in item malls, including advanced character options, higher grade items, unlockable content like instances or realms etc. i think as time passes, and purchasing patterns emerge, new inovations will be favored by the consumer, and the rate of new and quality content will become much more competitive than monthly fee systems would allow.
when a monthly fee game gets a bad wrap for some foible (like a bad launch, or a series of unwanted patches) there is not much they can do. i believe the rate of attrition in cash shop games would demand a much faster and substantion reaction rate.
Okay, I wasn't going to say anything, since a lot of people seemed to enjoy this piece and I may be in the minority, but I've read a couple responses praising this article for how "logical" it was - which is not at all the case.
This article is riddled with informal logical fallacies, including strawman arguements and ad populum. Infact, the whole article is pretty much a big ad populum: the author acts as though she speaks for the supposed majority of the mmo community, but cannot. She also rallies everyone against some faceless menace and constructs "their side" of the argument out of nearly nothing.
This is not a good example of a logical work. Let's treat it like what it is: an opinion piece.
Dude, this isn't a college thesis, or a scientific paper, or a great philosophical debate.
It's a ARTICLE based on OPINION on a GAMING SITE.
FFS lighten up.
Well its to bad that most of the opions now day want to force any kind of f2p model down our throat and expect us to like it. It is a shame really, and I can see where headed for an mmo failure across the board at this rate, due to a lot of players just throwing up there hands and walking away.
Oh, I agree with ya. The whole F2P trend makes me want to vomit.
But I'm startng to look at it this way: Not every company is going to take their game down the F2P road....and the ones that do aren't the ones I would want to do business with anyway.
On a similar note, the kind of people who flock to F2P games are generally not the kind of people that I enjoy gaming with.
This may be a good way of culling the MMO herd, so to speak. The refuse of the MMORPG player population can go play their F2P games, and will be out of our hair for once.
Okay, I wasn't going to say anything, since a lot of people seemed to enjoy this piece and I may be in the minority, but I've read a couple responses praising this article for how "logical" it was - which is not at all the case.
This article is riddled with informal logical fallacies, including strawman arguements and ad populum. Infact, the whole article is pretty much a big ad populum: the author acts as though she speaks for the supposed majority of the mmo community, but cannot. She also rallies everyone against some faceless menace and constructs "their side" of the argument out of nearly nothing.
This is not a good example of a logical work. Let's treat it like what it is: an opinion piece.
Dude, this isn't a college thesis, or a scientific paper, or a great philosophical debate.
It's a ARTICLE based on OPINION on a GAMING SITE.
FFS lighten up.
Well its to bad that most of the opions now day want to force any kind of f2p model down our throat and expect us to like it. It is a shame really, and I can see where headed for an mmo failure across the board at this rate, due to a lot of players just throwing up there hands and walking away.
Oh, I agree with ya. The whole F2P trend makes me want to vomit.
But I'm startng to look at it this way: Not every company is going to take their game down the F2P road....and the ones that do aren't the ones I would want to do business with anyway.
On a similar note, the kind of people who flock to F2P games are generally not the kind of people that I enjoy gaming with.
This may be a good way of culling the MMO herd, so to speak. The refuse of the MMORPG player population can go play their F2P games, and will be out of our hair for once.
why do you care so much if games you dont play have cash shops? you guys are all seething with hatred for people you never have to interact with, and you treat their existance as some kind of threat to your whole world.
there's a new kid on the block, and he's playing a game you dont like or understand. deal. it wont be the last time you get discluded from an activity you werent that interested in anyway....
Okay, I wasn't going to say anything, since a lot of people seemed to enjoy this piece and I may be in the minority, but I've read a couple responses praising this article for how "logical" it was - which is not at all the case.
This article is riddled with informal logical fallacies, including strawman arguements and ad populum. Infact, the whole article is pretty much a big ad populum: the author acts as though she speaks for the supposed majority of the mmo community, but cannot. She also rallies everyone against some faceless menace and constructs "their side" of the argument out of nearly nothing.
This is not a good example of a logical work. Let's treat it like what it is: an opinion piece.
Dude, this isn't a college thesis, or a scientific paper, or a great philosophical debate.
It's a ARTICLE based on OPINION on a GAMING SITE.
FFS lighten up.
Well its to bad that most of the opions now day want to force any kind of f2p model down our throat and expect us to like it. It is a shame really, and I can see where headed for an mmo failure across the board at this rate, due to a lot of players just throwing up there hands and walking away.
Oh, I agree with ya. The whole F2P trend makes me want to vomit.
But I'm startng to look at it this way: Not every company is going to take their game down the F2P road....and the ones that do aren't the ones I would want to do business with anyway.
On a similar note, the kind of people who flock to F2P games are generally not the kind of people that I enjoy gaming with.
This may be a good way of culling the MMO herd, so to speak. The refuse of the MMORPG player population can go play their F2P games, and will be out of our hair for once.
why do you care so much if games you dont play have cash shops? you guys are all seething with hatred for people you never have to interact with, and you treat their existance as some kind of threat to your whole world.
there's a new kid on the block, and he's playing a game you dont like or understand. deal. it wont be the last time you get discluded from an activity you werent that interested in anyway....
Ah, I used to play LOTRO, actually. I've played it on and off since release. Of course, I'll never play it again now.
The whole F2P could potentially become a plauge on the MMORPG industry. Many people look to WoW as the beginning of low-quality cash-grab poorly made MORPGs being churned out by the dozens by greedy companies trying to get a piece of the 12million sub pie. Given the damage that this has caused to MMORPG gaming as a whole....many of us are naturally wary of the potential carnage that could be unleased by P2P over the next few years.
I mean, if you think 1000 wow clones is bad, how about 1000 F2P, cash-shop wow-clones??
Those of us who prefer quality games will be buried under a ton of corporate vomit. And there's always the chance that the companies who make the games WE play might jump on the F2P bandwagon, leaving us one less game to choose from.
Problem is, many people are too short sighted to see the damage this could cause. They see that they might get something "free", and are all for it. They don't care if what they are getting is in reality just a shit sandwich painted rainbow colors....as long as they think that they are getting something free.
But like I said in my earlier post....this could go either way. It could be a useful tool for seperating the quality from the trash just as easily as it could be the MMORPG apocolypse.
i guess i just dont see the damage you are talking about.
monthly fees built a power base of leet players who run around pretending that maxing a toon in a video game is some great achievment. this faux classism has driven away many more millions of potential MMOers, and i find its mostly them who are complaining now.
F2P + cash shops are the end of their grip.
i dont see capitalism as some monstrous threat that steals freedom. i see it as something that represents and reflects peoples wishes.
Ftp with shops, will be like any other business: if it offers crappy overpriced products, it will fail. if it doesent care that it will fail, it will fail sooner. it wont just be some infinite downward suck. it will just propel competion, and generate more funds to make them.
i guess i just dont see the damage you are talking about.
monthly fees built a power base of leet players who run around pretending that maxing a toon in a video game is some great achievment. this faux classism has driven away many more millions of potential MMOers, and i find its mostly them who are complaining now.
F2P + cash shops are the end of their grip.
i dont see capitalism as some monstrous threat that steals freedom. i see it as something that represents and reflects peoples wishes.
Ftp with shops, will be like any other business: if it offers crappy overpriced products, it will fail. if it doesent care that it will fail, it will fail sooner. it wont just be some infinite downward suck. it will just propel competion, and generate more funds to make them.
Just take a look at the banking industry if you want a prime example of corporate nickle-and-diming strategy, and greed.
Monthly fees are not responsible for the poor state of the MMORPG industry...it's years of WoW clones funded by corporations looking to cash in on the industry. This is just the next step in their money grubbing efforts.
There's a line between capitalism, and flat-out prostitution and exploitation. F2P games, especially those with cash shops, cross that line, just as predatory lending and transaction fees do.
i guess i just dont see the damage you are talking about.
monthly fees built a power base of leet players who run around pretending that maxing a toon in a video game is some great achievment. this faux classism has driven away many more millions of potential MMOers, and i find its mostly them who are complaining now.
F2P + cash shops are the end of their grip.
i dont see capitalism as some monstrous threat that steals freedom. i see it as something that represents and reflects peoples wishes.
Ftp with shops, will be like any other business: if it offers crappy overpriced products, it will fail. if it doesent care that it will fail, it will fail sooner. it wont just be some infinite downward suck. it will just propel competion, and generate more funds to make them.
Just take a look at the banking industry if you want a prime example of corporate nickle-and-diming strategy, and greed.
Monthly fees are not responsible for the poor state of the MMORPG industry...it's years of WoW clones funded by corporations looking to cash in on the industry. This is just the next step in their money grubbing efforts.
There's a line between capitalism, and flat-out prostitution and exploitation. F2P games, especially those with cash shops, cross that line, just as predatory lending and transaction fees do.
youre making an astonishingly huge leap here, comparing the control that financial institutions were designed to have over domestic economy regulation, to charging $10 for a ridable unicorn in a video game.
its not the same thing, BUT, tho "banks" and other large corporation have ruined thier own reps by succumbing to greed and corruption, their net influence on the many western countries was to dramatically improve the standard of living of the bulk of the citizenry. yes, corruption is always possible for those with money, but with sound regulation (in this case, people either CHOOSING to pay on a case by case basis, or NOT CHOOSING, the results will be pretty immediate.
MMO's will never have the potential for corruption that a bank has. all i can do is potentially offer lame products that no one wants, and therefore, no one will buy.....a transaction is by definition consentual....i cant really make this any clearer.
i guess i just dont see the damage you are talking about.
monthly fees built a power base of leet players who run around pretending that maxing a toon in a video game is some great achievment. this faux classism has driven away many more millions of potential MMOers, and i find its mostly them who are complaining now.
F2P + cash shops are the end of their grip.
i dont see capitalism as some monstrous threat that steals freedom. i see it as something that represents and reflects peoples wishes.
Ftp with shops, will be like any other business: if it offers crappy overpriced products, it will fail. if it doesent care that it will fail, it will fail sooner. it wont just be some infinite downward suck. it will just propel competion, and generate more funds to make them.
Just take a look at the banking industry if you want a prime example of corporate nickle-and-diming strategy, and greed.
Monthly fees are not responsible for the poor state of the MMORPG industry...it's years of WoW clones funded by corporations looking to cash in on the industry. This is just the next step in their money grubbing efforts.
There's a line between capitalism, and flat-out prostitution and exploitation. F2P games, especially those with cash shops, cross that line, just as predatory lending and transaction fees do.
youre making an astonishingly huge leap here, comparing the control that financial institutions were designed to have over domestic economy regulation, to charging $10 for a ridable unicorn in a video game.
its not the same thing, BUT, tho "banks" and other large corporation have ruined thier own reps by succumbing to greed and corruption, their net influence on the many western countries was to dramatically improve the standard of living of the bulk of the citizenry. yes, corruption is always possible for those with money, but with sound regulation (in this case, people either CHOOSING to pay on a case by case basis, or NOT CHOOSING, the results will be pretty immediate.
MMO's will never have the potential for corruption that a bank has. all i can do is potentially offer lame products that no one wants, and therefore, no one will buy.....a transaction is by definition consentual....i cant really make this any clearer.
I can't help thinking that you sound rather naive here, man. I guess you just havn't experienced as many "NON-consentual transactions" as I have
a non consentual transaction would be unethical, and anyone who didnt break all ties with that business, after clearing being stolen from, would be a moron.
ive seen alot more monthly fee games wreak bloody havoc with credit card info than i have from F2P cash shop companies.
not much to be revealed from comparison on this front, any company who commits fraud or billing incompetence loses consumer confidence and fails. this is not yay or nay for F2P.
if i buy a +1 sword that is listed as $5, and i end up getting charged $25, im raising holy hell. and if im not saticfied by the outcome, ill never do business with the company again. not a hard concept, and really not evidence against F2P companies, unless they dont care in the slightest whether they fail or not.
a non consentual transaction would be unethical, and anyone who didnt break all ties with that business, after clearing being stolen from, would be a moron.
ive seen alot more monthly fee games wreak bloody havoc with credit card info than i have from F2P cash shop companies.
not much to be revealed from comparison on this front, any company who commits fraud or billing incompetence loses consumer confidence and fails. this is not yay or nay for F2P.
if i buy a +1 sword that is listed as $5, and i end up getting charged $25, im raising holy hell. and if im not saticfied by the outcome, ill never do business with the company again. not a hard concept, and really not evidence against F2P companies, unless they dont care in the slightest whether they fail or not.
try again.
What you may be missing, is that many people do not like F2P w/cash because it is not so much F2P as P2W in many cases, or at best, pay to not suck.
Also, when a game bases itself on cash shop revenue, they are really basing it on REPEAT cash shop revenue. So maybe they crank up the decay on that +1 sword you bought o you have to buy a new one each week. Or, they put in a +2 sword 2 weeks later for $8. And the companies do this, because that is how they built their revenue model. And they do.
You say P2P caters to so called "elitists", I say it is the other way around with F2P +cash. He/she who spends the most $$, wins. Or can get a big, game changing advantage, at the minimum. Asian grinders are terrible for this.
This is the flip side of a P2P, where, to a certain extent, it is true that people that play more tend to have a better advantage, because of more IG money, gear and experience, but, at least the playing field is mostly level to begin with. In F2P, you can always buy an advantage.
there is nothing wrong with other players having an advantage. perhaps, if the game was centered around meaningful PvP, would have to have an Item Shop more focusing on dungeons and activities, or perhaps exclusive yet balance classe/races, but i see nothing inherently wrong with that either.
you are all attaching your worst fears to this billing system, while complete idealizing monthly fee games. a game that relies on case by case transactions is alot more sensitive to the wishes of the playerbase than you realize. these games have to be, or their only source of money dries up instantly. the same is not so for monthly fee games, who are able to ignore and string along the bulk of their play base out of loyalty and previous investment...this a weakness that has broken the spirit of much the MMO community. being tethered to crappy games because quitting would mean admitting the waste of so much time and money. this is not so for F2P+shops. you dont like where things are going, youre outta there, and your money goes with you. this means the devs will be trying damn hard to keep you.
there is nothing wrong with other players having an advantage. perhaps, if the game was centered around meaningful PvP, would have to have an Item Shop more focusing on dungeons and activities, or perhaps exclusive yet balance classe/races, but i see nothing inherently wrong with that either.
you are all attaching your worst fears to this billing system, while complete idealizing monthly fee games. a game that relies on case by case transactions is alot more sensitive to the wishes of the playerbase than you realize. these games have to be, or their only source of money dries up instantly. the same is not so for monthly fee games, who are able to ignore and string along the bulk of their play base out of loyalty and previous investment...this a weakness that has broken the spirit of much the MMO community. being tethered to crappy games because quitting would mean admitting the waste of so much time and money. this is not so for F2P+shops. you dont like where things are going, youre outta there, and your money goes with you. this means the devs will be trying damn hard to keep you.
I never said there was anything wrong with one player having an advantage, what I (and many other critics of so called F2P games) object to is BUYING that advantage. Play for a while farming X to get Y, at least you put in the time to "earn" the reward, instead of breaking out the CC and getting the special IG offer for $19.95.
And I would say, spending a ton of cash in a crappy cash shop is just as much if not more of a tether on staying in a crappy game than a sub fee. Every time you look at that +1 sword, you see the $5 you spent on it.
I have never had a problem "untethering" myself from a crappy sub game, and by the sharp declines in other sub-par monthly sub titles, plenty of other people have no problem quitting.
"F2P" comes down to companies designing a game to squeeze more money out of the customer, It gives the company every incentive to make cash shop items better than IG drops, and to keep a constant flow of them into the game. being nickeled and dimed, sucks.
If a company can not put out a game good enough to justify me to paying a sub fee, it is probably not good enough for me to play at all (and DDO and now LOTRO do not count, those would never have been made had they been intended for F2P +cash).
If you like F2p or shelling out more to a company that a "standard" sub fee to play or like P2W, fine, more power to you. But plenty of MMO fans like me, hate P2W with a passion and have not played a F2P +cash worth the time. If that happens (and I am not holding my breath), I'll be happy to be wrong.
that's the beauty part, the rise of the F2p + shop i going to bring weekend warriors who can obstensibly "rent" the game for a few days, play at max level with top gear, and then never play again, if they dont want to. this will completely change every aspect of MMO's as we know it. some people will truly love some games and make them their home, but a much much larger audience will now be granted instant access to all levels of the game.
what this means, is that it simply doesent matter what the currenty relatively puny MMO community thinks. if they all quit en masse, they would be a tiny blip on the radar, with so many less dedicated players willing play more often, in higher ammounts, for less service.
i know not many will agree with me, but its a gold mine just being recognized by the major companies. why should they have to cater to throngs of whiny geeks like us, who can never be saticfied with anything they do, when they can hold a poll for what weapon people want next week, delivery for $5 a pop, and have a new poll up before the charges even show up on peoples parents credit cards.
As someone else already mentioned in this thread, not only would I NOT want to play such a game, I would not want to play any game with anyone who liked that playstyle.
I do not deny there is a useful purpose for such a game: it would keep all the people that like that sort of gaming experience in other games and away from me.
If you like that, fine. Insta max level / capped gear for $10/day is the ultimate example of why P2W sucks.
The journey is just as important as the destination, or should be in any game that is not a POS. To say "You need to be a maxed level with top gear in order to "enjoy" this game" is to me saying this whole game is crap until the endgame. Why should I have to play a game for months and months (of suckage) and only then be able to enjoy it or, because the journey to the endgame sucks so badly, that it is desirable to pay $10/day to skip all that? In both cases, this is a failure of game design.
As someone else already mentioned in this thread, not only would I NOT want to play such a game, I would not want to play any game with anyone who liked that playstyle.
I do not deny there is a useful purpose for such a game: it would keep all the people that like that sort of gaming experience in other games and away from me.
If you like that, fine. Insta max level / capped gear for $10/day is the ultimate example of why P2W sucks.
The journey is just as important as the destination, or should be in any game that is not a POS. To say "You need to be a maxed level with top gear in order to "enjoy" this game" is to me saying this whole game is crap until the endgame. Why should I have to play a game for months and months (of suckage) and only then be able to enjoy it or, because the journey to the endgame sucks so badly, that it is desirable to pay $10/day to skip all that? In both cases, this is a failure of game design.
i think ultamately, F2P +shops will produce games that have done away with leveling and similar advancement. the purchasable content will prolly head more towards appearance, full class/race selection, and activity roster collection (as in buying access to dungeons/quests)
its just your stereotype that anyone who wants to use an Item shop would only ever do so to "win". perhaps that what you would do, but not everyone feels the same.
As someone else already mentioned in this thread, not only would I NOT want to play such a game, I would not want to play any game with anyone who liked that playstyle.
I do not deny there is a useful purpose for such a game: it would keep all the people that like that sort of gaming experience in other games and away from me.
If you like that, fine. Insta max level / capped gear for $10/day is the ultimate example of why P2W sucks.
The journey is just as important as the destination, or should be in any game that is not a POS. To say "You need to be a maxed level with top gear in order to "enjoy" this game" is to me saying this whole game is crap until the endgame. Why should I have to play a game for months and months (of suckage) and only then be able to enjoy it or, because the journey to the endgame sucks so badly, that it is desirable to pay $10/day to skip all that? In both cases, this is a failure of game design.
TLDR version: all of your assumptions about "pay 2 win" are wrong and outdated, there is still a lot involved in "winning" besides spending $. It may have just required some $ to be the best in past games, but that is no longer the norm for newer F2Ps. Stop spreading ignorant and outdated BS.
You, just like the majority of anti-F2P people on here, are still continuing to live in the past and spreading outdated and incorrect stereotypes. It's obvious you've never played an F2P or at least not one thats released in the past 2 years or so. Ive played dozens of F2P games in that time, and NONE of them are Pay 2 Win the way you try to describe them as far as doing shit like buying max level, or buying the best gear. No recent Cash Shops offer stuff like that, what they offer instead is the chance to do things like lessen the grind (though you still DO have to grind, you are not simply buying levels with cash, youve still got to play the game, you just level slightly faster), or enhancers/upgraders for equipment that have a betetr chance of succeeding, or do things like prevent your gear from breaking upon failure. Most of the time the items in the cash shops are simply slightly better versions of what is found in game, nothing even remotely close to buying level cap and max gear.
Ill use one of my usual references:
RF Online:
-Leveling: Takes an average player playing a few hours a day (not hardcore/obsessively) usually about 2-3 months to reach level 50 (without being power leveled). You can buy XP boosters which decrease the grind required, bringing it down to somewhere around 1-1 1/2 months, but youre still earning those levels. Level cap in the game is 65, an dnobody on the current official servers has even reached level cap yet, even with spending money in the cash shop fro XP boosts.
-Getting Equipment: There is no equipment whatsoever that can be purchased through the cash shop. All equipment is either bought from NPCs ingame with ingame gold, gained through completing quest chains, or gained as loot drops from mobs. The best versions of equipment are called Intense (insert name), and at higher levels, the only way of gaining Intense gear is through loot drops which are so rare that about half the people who have reached 50+ do not own any intense gear at all, and much fewer actually have full sets of Intense gear. Cash shop items can give you a slight boost to loot drops, but so little that nobody i know even really bothers buying them.
-Equipment upgrades: are done through the use of items called talics and jewels, jewels increase the chance of the upgrade succeeding, and the higher upgrades become hard and harder to do. You can find 4 tiers of jewels ingame that increase your chances by 4 different amounts, and you can also buy a set of jewels which we call Tier 5 which are slightly bette rthan Tier 4 found ingame, but still very very far from guaranteed success. Max upgrade is +7, and nobody on the current servers has +7 equipment currently, +6 is the highest yet because going even from +4 to +5 with full T4 jewels youve got something like a 20-30% chance of success. Using T5 from cash shop slightly increases it to somewhere around 30-40%. Going from +5 to +6 is about a 10% chance with T4, and about a 15% chance using T5. So yeah youve got a slightly better chance of it working, but nowhere close to simply "buying" best gear.
This is very similar to the way the majority of cash shops work now. They give you slight boosts, and better chances at succesful upgrades for equipment, but its a far cry from buying your level or buying your gear, there is still much grinding, farming for loot, and luck required to achieve anything worthwhile in the game. So FFS get off the "buying insta level/max gear" bullshit, because its simply not true. It may have been that way in the past, and few games still use that method, but it is no longer the norm.
As someone else already mentioned in this thread, not only would I NOT want to play such a game, I would not want to play any game with anyone who liked that playstyle.
I do not deny there is a useful purpose for such a game: it would keep all the people that like that sort of gaming experience in other games and away from me.
If you like that, fine. Insta max level / capped gear for $10/day is the ultimate example of why P2W sucks.
The journey is just as important as the destination, or should be in any game that is not a POS. To say "You need to be a maxed level with top gear in order to "enjoy" this game" is to me saying this whole game is crap until the endgame. Why should I have to play a game for months and months (of suckage) and only then be able to enjoy it or, because the journey to the endgame sucks so badly, that it is desirable to pay $10/day to skip all that? In both cases, this is a failure of game design.
TLDR version: all of your assumptions about "pay 2 win" are wrong and outdated, there is still a lot involved in "winning" besides spending $. It may have just required some $ to be the best in past games, but that is no longer the norm for newer F2Ps. Stop spreading ignorant and outdated BS.
You, just like the majority of anti-F2P people on here, are still continuing to live in the past and spreading outdated and incorrect stereotypes. It's obvious you've never played an F2P or at least not one thats released in the past 2 years or so. Ive played dozens of F2P games in that time, and NONE of them are Pay 2 Win the way you try to describe them as far as doing shit like buying max level, or buying the best gear. No recent Cash Shops offer stuff like that, what they offer instead is the chance to do things like lessen the grind (though you still DO have to grind, you are not simply buying levels with cash, youve still got to play the game, you just level slightly faster), or enhancers/upgraders for equipment that have a betetr chance of succeeding, or do things like prevent your gear from breaking upon failure. Most of the time the items in the cash shops are simply slightly better versions of what is found in game, nothing even remotely close to buying level cap and max gear.
Ill use one of my usual references:
RF Online:
-Leveling: Takes an average player playing a few hours a day (not hardcore/obsessively) usually about 2-3 months to reach level 50 (without being power leveled). You can buy XP boosters which decrease the grind required, bringing it down to somewhere around 1-1 1/2 months, but youre still earning those levels. Level cap in the game is 65, an dnobody on the current official servers has even reached level cap yet, even with spending money in the cash shop fro XP boosts.
-Getting Equipment: There is no equipment whatsoever that can be purchased through the cash shop. All equipment is either bought from NPCs ingame with ingame gold, gained through completing quest chains, or gained as loot drops from mobs. The best versions of equipment are called Intense (insert name), and at higher levels, the only way of gaining Intense gear is through loot drops which are so rare that about half the people who have reached 50+ do not own any intense gear at all, and much fewer actually have full sets of Intense gear. Cash shop items can give you a slight boost to loot drops, but so little that nobody i know even really bothers buying them.
-Equipment upgrades: are done through the use of items called talics and jewels, jewels increase the chance of the upgrade succeeding, and the higher upgrades become hard and harder to do. You can find 4 tiers of jewels ingame that increase your chances by 4 different amounts, and you can also buy a set of jewels which we call Tier 5 which are slightly bette rthan Tier 4 found ingame, but still very very far from guaranteed success. Max upgrade is +7, and nobody on the current servers has +7 equipment currently, +6 is the highest yet because going even from +4 to +5 with full T4 jewels youve got something like a 20-30% chance of success. Using T5 from cash shop slightly increases it to somewhere around 30-40%. Going from +5 to +6 is about a 10% chance with T4, and about a 15% chance using T5. So yeah youve got a slightly better chance of it working, but nowhere close to simply "buying" best gear.
This is very similar to the way the majority of cash shops work now. They give you slight boosts, and better chances at succesful upgrades for equipment, but its a far cry from buying your level or buying your gear, there is still much grinding, farming for loot, and luck required to achieve anything worthwhile in the game. So FFS get off the "buying insta level/max gear" bullshit, because its simply not true. It may have been that way in the past, and few games still use that method, but it is no longer the norm.
Perhaps, you might have taken the time to read for 30 seconds before responding.
I was reponding to and quoting the previous poster about "buying" max level and gear, renting for a weekend to play the endgame, was his idea. Galactically stupid IMO, and about the worst F2P idea I have heard in some time, among many bad F2P ideas. Buying one's way to directly to cap is equally bad. Take the time to read before spewing the hate, eh?
As to playing of not playing a F2P in last couple years, I haven't, because I have given up on them. A couple of games that were released as P2P, were of such subpar quality, and would likely have had better success.
F2P is dead to me. The games I played before that were not worth the time. The companies were a bunch of greedy bastards and specifically built in game mechanics to "make" players use the cash shops or suffer a significant penalty by not. If it is not quite like that now, which I don't believe, it doesn't matter to me... I won't be playing a F2P anyway.
At best, Cash shops in F2Ps are "pay to not suck" or go blind doing a grind 3X as long. At worst, they are or have been pay to win or pay to not die. And that is how the game companies want it.
In any case, I'll skip the whole debate and stick with P2Ps, and right now I am not even doing that. Based on my past experiences, I am not missing much.
TLDR version: all of your assumptions about "pay 2 win" are wrong and outdated, there is still a lot involved in "winning" besides spending $. It may have just required some $ to be the best in past games, but that is no longer the norm for newer F2Ps. Stop spreading ignorant and outdated BS.
You, just like the majority of anti-F2P people on here, are still continuing to live in the past and spreading outdated and incorrect stereotypes. It's obvious you've never played an F2P or at least not one thats released in the past 2 years or so. Ive played dozens of F2P games in that time, and NONE of them are Pay 2 Win the way you try to describe them as far as doing shit like buying max level, or buying the best gear. No recent Cash Shops offer stuff like that, what they offer instead is the chance to do things like lessen the grind (though you still DO have to grind, you are not simply buying levels with cash, youve still got to play the game, you just level slightly faster), or enhancers/upgraders for equipment that have a betetr chance of succeeding, or do things like prevent your gear from breaking upon failure. Most of the time the items in the cash shops are simply slightly better versions of what is found in game, nothing even remotely close to buying level cap and max gear.
Never tried Perfect World have you? Try it out some time it is the purest definition of PAY 2 WIN. When the game was released it took approx. 8 months til the first level 100 character. Now a new player can start and reach 100 in a little over a week if they use the cash shop. Gear used to take time and effort for people to farm the best gear in game. Now all the best gear can be purchased in the cash shop by buying $1 gambling packs with a 98% chance of crap and 2% chance of getting one of 20-30 random profitable items. They released an expansion last year adding in new end game equipment where you would have to farm a new instance to upgrade the existing end game gear to the new high end equipment. A month later they released the items needed to reforge equipment into end game gear into these cash shop gambling packs.
I could go on and on and give examples of many other so called F2P games which use a pure Pay 2 Win model. I have tried out close to 100 different F2P games over the years and have found very few which didnt use the Pay 2 Win model. The ones that kept the overpowering items out of their cash shops always ended up being low budget games with few players and even less customer support.
I have personally never found a true F2P game released in the last few years. They are all P2W.
On a side note...
I will never play a hybrid model ever. If I am playing a subscription game I do not want any RMT involved in it. Whats the point of paying a monthly subscription if people can still buy their way to power though RMT.
I havent found a single P2P that can keep my attention for long because they are all too easy. Spend a few weeks to reach max level Then you spend a few months tops to gear out. After that what is there to do? None of them give an incentive to put anymore effort into the game.
F2P I hate because of the P2W style they all seem to follow. They usually start off the first 6 months keeping overpowering items out of their cash shop. Then they all slowly start adding in items which you will need to compete because they can not be obtained any other way than cash shop or not without spending some overly insane amount of time.
I know there are very few people at least in the western "I want everything now and dont want to work for it" market that will disagree with me on this but this is the kind of game that I would like to see...
I would like a P2P with no game influencing items at all. (server transfers/basic fashion and other fluff are ok) I would like the game play to be a hybrid of the typical P2P and F2P styles. I want the content and updates of a P2P with the larger leveling curve of a F2P. I want in game effort to mean something instead of 100 hours to max level. (I'm talking where it would take a hardcore player a year to reach max) There will be no buying your way to catch up. Skill and effort will be the determining factors for who will be the top players. Effort will mean something because max level will take an extended period of time to reach.
I personally hate "grinding" but at the same time I would rather have to put in effort and have that effort mean something. If I have more time to put in than someone else I deserve to be higher level and have better equips. If I have less time than others I will just have to be much more skilled than them to make up for their level and gear advantage they might have.
OK wall of text over. Waiting for the rage of the new style gamer. "give me now give me now"
I agree w/ article...F2P is encroaching everywhere and becoming 'the' model of the future and is still a single idea...and the developers at these companies should be giving us more options not just either p2p or f2p...there's a good plus for both depending on who you are...me i prefer the p2p and and i dont play ANY f2p games at all...but thats just me...i get a new game...buy the box...i put 3 months minimum in it to see whether i like it or not and then it either gets the boot as being a paid beta game like many before it or it gets a few more months of subs to see how it turns out...how thing evolve in the game world...and most of all if its fun.....
iff it sin't fun, ur likely not even going to get that full 3 months...but the hem in the public into just f2p or p2p models isn't good...i think players should have more choice....
Comments
there no such thin as free to play any way you paying for market items market place to get stuff most of the free to play games have stuff you need from market? so no such thin as free any ways it will take you money one way or other
.....
Alright, pissing into the wind here, but seriously...
"Free to Play" is your web based email account. You maintain full usage of it while the providers make use of other revenue streams. Your email isn't delivered slower just because you didn't pay for the cash shop item to speed it up. Your ability to add attatchments doesn't vanish because your week rental expired... Your email is, by and large, fully functional whether you ever pay into the system or not.
What the current crop of trialware devlopers are insisting is free to play- including and especially LotR Online -simply isn't. It's free to log in. It's free to grind a few monsters. But serious advancement and competition? That's where your freedom stops. One look at LotR comparison chart confirms this all day long, and if you doubt that, look at DDO as an example of a ready made blueprint. Back in the day, this was called Shareware: You use a crippled version of a piece of software and pay to unlock it's full abilities.
Sound familiar?
Believe it or not, I don't have a problem with this, but dammit, call it for what it is. Whatever f2P was supposed to be, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a panzi scheme to lure gamers into a title under the false pretense that they wouldn't pay- or even be expected to pay -anything into a cash shop of any kind to normalize their advancement to compete with paying customers.
And even if you were one of the ones that survived the cashless grind to the top, the game still wasn't built with you in mind. It was built in the expectation that somebody else would pay in, and the leveling curve, mobs, etc, are designed with that in mind. That alone is a shady business practice.
True free to play doesn't build a game around paying customers. It doesn't expect its gamers to pay into a cash shop. It doesn't try to lure them in with a promise of non-monetary gameplay while the host website pushes the top-up button on every page.
It's possible to make real, free to play gaming... Your email proves that. Just the suckering of people thinking they're going to get a free MMO experience while subtly weening them onto the teet of the cash shop is easier and much more profitable.
I didn't say all limitations. I only said most of the limitation removals.
And again, I come back to the question: What happens today if you cancel your subscription? How much chat can you do once your paid time has run out? How much mail can you send? How many auctions can you post? Under the new system you will still have some access to all those features and as DDO shows, "some" is still a fair bit..
Dude, this isn't a college thesis, or a scientific paper, or a great philosophical debate.
It's a ARTICLE based on OPINION on a GAMING SITE.
FFS lighten up.
Well its to bad that most of the opions now day want to force any kind of f2p model down our throat and expect us to like it. It is a shame really, and I can see where headed for an mmo failure across the board at this rate, due to a lot of players just throwing up there hands and walking away.
In the absense of any real facts, the lowest common demoninator in intelligence will always gravitate toward the most sinister explanation.
I am pro F2P +cash shop.
I recognize that as more and more mainstream F2P +cash shop games are released, the currently existing MMO community will shrivel and be replaced by those who do not object to this billing system.
I think game designers will therefore take a greater interest in the wishes of their customers when designing products and features, as they will only receive remuneration if those features are entirely desired by a clear margin of consumers.
i feel the endless torrent of crap games we see polluting the market is a product of the current mainstream billing system, being monthly fee billing, as developers are able to largely ignore the fluid and active desires of their player base by relying on the bottom line of inflow, mainly stemming from loyalty, laziness, and complacency on the part of the consumer base.
I do not see F2P + cash shop as "robbery" or "extortion" as many seem to think it is. As a consumer, i (and optimally) all consumers, will seek only to put their money into products that saticfy a certain standard of quality. I believe that new industry standards will be isolated and promoted by cash shops, as the system developes.
currently, we are only able to see a small selection of features available in item malls, including advanced character options, higher grade items, unlockable content like instances or realms etc. i think as time passes, and purchasing patterns emerge, new inovations will be favored by the consumer, and the rate of new and quality content will become much more competitive than monthly fee systems would allow.
when a monthly fee game gets a bad wrap for some foible (like a bad launch, or a series of unwanted patches) there is not much they can do. i believe the rate of attrition in cash shop games would demand a much faster and substantion reaction rate.
Oh, I agree with ya. The whole F2P trend makes me want to vomit.
But I'm startng to look at it this way: Not every company is going to take their game down the F2P road....and the ones that do aren't the ones I would want to do business with anyway.
On a similar note, the kind of people who flock to F2P games are generally not the kind of people that I enjoy gaming with.
This may be a good way of culling the MMO herd, so to speak. The refuse of the MMORPG player population can go play their F2P games, and will be out of our hair for once.
why do you care so much if games you dont play have cash shops? you guys are all seething with hatred for people you never have to interact with, and you treat their existance as some kind of threat to your whole world.
there's a new kid on the block, and he's playing a game you dont like or understand. deal. it wont be the last time you get discluded from an activity you werent that interested in anyway....
Ah, I used to play LOTRO, actually. I've played it on and off since release. Of course, I'll never play it again now.
The whole F2P could potentially become a plauge on the MMORPG industry. Many people look to WoW as the beginning of low-quality cash-grab poorly made MORPGs being churned out by the dozens by greedy companies trying to get a piece of the 12million sub pie. Given the damage that this has caused to MMORPG gaming as a whole....many of us are naturally wary of the potential carnage that could be unleased by P2P over the next few years.
I mean, if you think 1000 wow clones is bad, how about 1000 F2P, cash-shop wow-clones??
Those of us who prefer quality games will be buried under a ton of corporate vomit. And there's always the chance that the companies who make the games WE play might jump on the F2P bandwagon, leaving us one less game to choose from.
Problem is, many people are too short sighted to see the damage this could cause. They see that they might get something "free", and are all for it. They don't care if what they are getting is in reality just a shit sandwich painted rainbow colors....as long as they think that they are getting something free.
But like I said in my earlier post....this could go either way. It could be a useful tool for seperating the quality from the trash just as easily as it could be the MMORPG apocolypse.
Will just have to see where this goes.
i guess i just dont see the damage you are talking about.
monthly fees built a power base of leet players who run around pretending that maxing a toon in a video game is some great achievment. this faux classism has driven away many more millions of potential MMOers, and i find its mostly them who are complaining now.
F2P + cash shops are the end of their grip.
i dont see capitalism as some monstrous threat that steals freedom. i see it as something that represents and reflects peoples wishes.
Ftp with shops, will be like any other business: if it offers crappy overpriced products, it will fail. if it doesent care that it will fail, it will fail sooner. it wont just be some infinite downward suck. it will just propel competion, and generate more funds to make them.
Just take a look at the banking industry if you want a prime example of corporate nickle-and-diming strategy, and greed.
Monthly fees are not responsible for the poor state of the MMORPG industry...it's years of WoW clones funded by corporations looking to cash in on the industry. This is just the next step in their money grubbing efforts.
There's a line between capitalism, and flat-out prostitution and exploitation. F2P games, especially those with cash shops, cross that line, just as predatory lending and transaction fees do.
youre making an astonishingly huge leap here, comparing the control that financial institutions were designed to have over domestic economy regulation, to charging $10 for a ridable unicorn in a video game.
its not the same thing, BUT, tho "banks" and other large corporation have ruined thier own reps by succumbing to greed and corruption, their net influence on the many western countries was to dramatically improve the standard of living of the bulk of the citizenry. yes, corruption is always possible for those with money, but with sound regulation (in this case, people either CHOOSING to pay on a case by case basis, or NOT CHOOSING, the results will be pretty immediate.
MMO's will never have the potential for corruption that a bank has. all i can do is potentially offer lame products that no one wants, and therefore, no one will buy.....a transaction is by definition consentual....i cant really make this any clearer.
I can't help thinking that you sound rather naive here, man. I guess you just havn't experienced as many "NON-consentual transactions" as I have
a non consentual transaction would be unethical, and anyone who didnt break all ties with that business, after clearing being stolen from, would be a moron.
ive seen alot more monthly fee games wreak bloody havoc with credit card info than i have from F2P cash shop companies.
not much to be revealed from comparison on this front, any company who commits fraud or billing incompetence loses consumer confidence and fails. this is not yay or nay for F2P.
if i buy a +1 sword that is listed as $5, and i end up getting charged $25, im raising holy hell. and if im not saticfied by the outcome, ill never do business with the company again. not a hard concept, and really not evidence against F2P companies, unless they dont care in the slightest whether they fail or not.
try again.
What you may be missing, is that many people do not like F2P w/cash because it is not so much F2P as P2W in many cases, or at best, pay to not suck.
Also, when a game bases itself on cash shop revenue, they are really basing it on REPEAT cash shop revenue. So maybe they crank up the decay on that +1 sword you bought o you have to buy a new one each week. Or, they put in a +2 sword 2 weeks later for $8. And the companies do this, because that is how they built their revenue model. And they do.
You say P2P caters to so called "elitists", I say it is the other way around with F2P +cash. He/she who spends the most $$, wins. Or can get a big, game changing advantage, at the minimum. Asian grinders are terrible for this.
This is the flip side of a P2P, where, to a certain extent, it is true that people that play more tend to have a better advantage, because of more IG money, gear and experience, but, at least the playing field is mostly level to begin with. In F2P, you can always buy an advantage.
No thanks.
I refuse to play a cash shop game.
there is nothing wrong with other players having an advantage. perhaps, if the game was centered around meaningful PvP, would have to have an Item Shop more focusing on dungeons and activities, or perhaps exclusive yet balance classe/races, but i see nothing inherently wrong with that either.
you are all attaching your worst fears to this billing system, while complete idealizing monthly fee games. a game that relies on case by case transactions is alot more sensitive to the wishes of the playerbase than you realize. these games have to be, or their only source of money dries up instantly. the same is not so for monthly fee games, who are able to ignore and string along the bulk of their play base out of loyalty and previous investment...this a weakness that has broken the spirit of much the MMO community. being tethered to crappy games because quitting would mean admitting the waste of so much time and money. this is not so for F2P+shops. you dont like where things are going, youre outta there, and your money goes with you. this means the devs will be trying damn hard to keep you.
I never said there was anything wrong with one player having an advantage, what I (and many other critics of so called F2P games) object to is BUYING that advantage. Play for a while farming X to get Y, at least you put in the time to "earn" the reward, instead of breaking out the CC and getting the special IG offer for $19.95.
And I would say, spending a ton of cash in a crappy cash shop is just as much if not more of a tether on staying in a crappy game than a sub fee. Every time you look at that +1 sword, you see the $5 you spent on it.
I have never had a problem "untethering" myself from a crappy sub game, and by the sharp declines in other sub-par monthly sub titles, plenty of other people have no problem quitting.
"F2P" comes down to companies designing a game to squeeze more money out of the customer, It gives the company every incentive to make cash shop items better than IG drops, and to keep a constant flow of them into the game. being nickeled and dimed, sucks.
If a company can not put out a game good enough to justify me to paying a sub fee, it is probably not good enough for me to play at all (and DDO and now LOTRO do not count, those would never have been made had they been intended for F2P +cash).
If you like F2p or shelling out more to a company that a "standard" sub fee to play or like P2W, fine, more power to you. But plenty of MMO fans like me, hate P2W with a passion and have not played a F2P +cash worth the time. If that happens (and I am not holding my breath), I'll be happy to be wrong.
Until then, I'll play a sub game, or nothing.
that's the beauty part, the rise of the F2p + shop i going to bring weekend warriors who can obstensibly "rent" the game for a few days, play at max level with top gear, and then never play again, if they dont want to. this will completely change every aspect of MMO's as we know it. some people will truly love some games and make them their home, but a much much larger audience will now be granted instant access to all levels of the game.
what this means, is that it simply doesent matter what the currenty relatively puny MMO community thinks. if they all quit en masse, they would be a tiny blip on the radar, with so many less dedicated players willing play more often, in higher ammounts, for less service.
i know not many will agree with me, but its a gold mine just being recognized by the major companies. why should they have to cater to throngs of whiny geeks like us, who can never be saticfied with anything they do, when they can hold a poll for what weapon people want next week, delivery for $5 a pop, and have a new poll up before the charges even show up on peoples parents credit cards.
the future isnt now, but it is next week...
As someone else already mentioned in this thread, not only would I NOT want to play such a game, I would not want to play any game with anyone who liked that playstyle.
I do not deny there is a useful purpose for such a game: it would keep all the people that like that sort of gaming experience in other games and away from me.
If you like that, fine. Insta max level / capped gear for $10/day is the ultimate example of why P2W sucks.
The journey is just as important as the destination, or should be in any game that is not a POS. To say "You need to be a maxed level with top gear in order to "enjoy" this game" is to me saying this whole game is crap until the endgame. Why should I have to play a game for months and months (of suckage) and only then be able to enjoy it or, because the journey to the endgame sucks so badly, that it is desirable to pay $10/day to skip all that? In both cases, this is a failure of game design.
i think ultamately, F2P +shops will produce games that have done away with leveling and similar advancement. the purchasable content will prolly head more towards appearance, full class/race selection, and activity roster collection (as in buying access to dungeons/quests)
its just your stereotype that anyone who wants to use an Item shop would only ever do so to "win". perhaps that what you would do, but not everyone feels the same.
TLDR version: all of your assumptions about "pay 2 win" are wrong and outdated, there is still a lot involved in "winning" besides spending $. It may have just required some $ to be the best in past games, but that is no longer the norm for newer F2Ps. Stop spreading ignorant and outdated BS.
You, just like the majority of anti-F2P people on here, are still continuing to live in the past and spreading outdated and incorrect stereotypes. It's obvious you've never played an F2P or at least not one thats released in the past 2 years or so. Ive played dozens of F2P games in that time, and NONE of them are Pay 2 Win the way you try to describe them as far as doing shit like buying max level, or buying the best gear. No recent Cash Shops offer stuff like that, what they offer instead is the chance to do things like lessen the grind (though you still DO have to grind, you are not simply buying levels with cash, youve still got to play the game, you just level slightly faster), or enhancers/upgraders for equipment that have a betetr chance of succeeding, or do things like prevent your gear from breaking upon failure. Most of the time the items in the cash shops are simply slightly better versions of what is found in game, nothing even remotely close to buying level cap and max gear.
Ill use one of my usual references:
RF Online:
-Leveling: Takes an average player playing a few hours a day (not hardcore/obsessively) usually about 2-3 months to reach level 50 (without being power leveled). You can buy XP boosters which decrease the grind required, bringing it down to somewhere around 1-1 1/2 months, but youre still earning those levels. Level cap in the game is 65, an dnobody on the current official servers has even reached level cap yet, even with spending money in the cash shop fro XP boosts.
-Getting Equipment: There is no equipment whatsoever that can be purchased through the cash shop. All equipment is either bought from NPCs ingame with ingame gold, gained through completing quest chains, or gained as loot drops from mobs. The best versions of equipment are called Intense (insert name), and at higher levels, the only way of gaining Intense gear is through loot drops which are so rare that about half the people who have reached 50+ do not own any intense gear at all, and much fewer actually have full sets of Intense gear. Cash shop items can give you a slight boost to loot drops, but so little that nobody i know even really bothers buying them.
-Equipment upgrades: are done through the use of items called talics and jewels, jewels increase the chance of the upgrade succeeding, and the higher upgrades become hard and harder to do. You can find 4 tiers of jewels ingame that increase your chances by 4 different amounts, and you can also buy a set of jewels which we call Tier 5 which are slightly bette rthan Tier 4 found ingame, but still very very far from guaranteed success. Max upgrade is +7, and nobody on the current servers has +7 equipment currently, +6 is the highest yet because going even from +4 to +5 with full T4 jewels youve got something like a 20-30% chance of success. Using T5 from cash shop slightly increases it to somewhere around 30-40%. Going from +5 to +6 is about a 10% chance with T4, and about a 15% chance using T5. So yeah youve got a slightly better chance of it working, but nowhere close to simply "buying" best gear.
This is very similar to the way the majority of cash shops work now. They give you slight boosts, and better chances at succesful upgrades for equipment, but its a far cry from buying your level or buying your gear, there is still much grinding, farming for loot, and luck required to achieve anything worthwhile in the game. So FFS get off the "buying insta level/max gear" bullshit, because its simply not true. It may have been that way in the past, and few games still use that method, but it is no longer the norm.
Perhaps, you might have taken the time to read for 30 seconds before responding.
I was reponding to and quoting the previous poster about "buying" max level and gear, renting for a weekend to play the endgame, was his idea. Galactically stupid IMO, and about the worst F2P idea I have heard in some time, among many bad F2P ideas. Buying one's way to directly to cap is equally bad. Take the time to read before spewing the hate, eh?
As to playing of not playing a F2P in last couple years, I haven't, because I have given up on them. A couple of games that were released as P2P, were of such subpar quality, and would likely have had better success.
F2P is dead to me. The games I played before that were not worth the time. The companies were a bunch of greedy bastards and specifically built in game mechanics to "make" players use the cash shops or suffer a significant penalty by not. If it is not quite like that now, which I don't believe, it doesn't matter to me... I won't be playing a F2P anyway.
At best, Cash shops in F2Ps are "pay to not suck" or go blind doing a grind 3X as long. At worst, they are or have been pay to win or pay to not die. And that is how the game companies want it.
In any case, I'll skip the whole debate and stick with P2Ps, and right now I am not even doing that. Based on my past experiences, I am not missing much.
Never tried Perfect World have you? Try it out some time it is the purest definition of PAY 2 WIN. When the game was released it took approx. 8 months til the first level 100 character. Now a new player can start and reach 100 in a little over a week if they use the cash shop. Gear used to take time and effort for people to farm the best gear in game. Now all the best gear can be purchased in the cash shop by buying $1 gambling packs with a 98% chance of crap and 2% chance of getting one of 20-30 random profitable items. They released an expansion last year adding in new end game equipment where you would have to farm a new instance to upgrade the existing end game gear to the new high end equipment. A month later they released the items needed to reforge equipment into end game gear into these cash shop gambling packs.
I could go on and on and give examples of many other so called F2P games which use a pure Pay 2 Win model. I have tried out close to 100 different F2P games over the years and have found very few which didnt use the Pay 2 Win model. The ones that kept the overpowering items out of their cash shops always ended up being low budget games with few players and even less customer support.
I have personally never found a true F2P game released in the last few years. They are all P2W.
On a side note...
I will never play a hybrid model ever. If I am playing a subscription game I do not want any RMT involved in it. Whats the point of paying a monthly subscription if people can still buy their way to power though RMT.
I havent found a single P2P that can keep my attention for long because they are all too easy. Spend a few weeks to reach max level Then you spend a few months tops to gear out. After that what is there to do? None of them give an incentive to put anymore effort into the game.
F2P I hate because of the P2W style they all seem to follow. They usually start off the first 6 months keeping overpowering items out of their cash shop. Then they all slowly start adding in items which you will need to compete because they can not be obtained any other way than cash shop or not without spending some overly insane amount of time.
I know there are very few people at least in the western "I want everything now and dont want to work for it" market that will disagree with me on this but this is the kind of game that I would like to see...
I would like a P2P with no game influencing items at all. (server transfers/basic fashion and other fluff are ok) I would like the game play to be a hybrid of the typical P2P and F2P styles. I want the content and updates of a P2P with the larger leveling curve of a F2P. I want in game effort to mean something instead of 100 hours to max level. (I'm talking where it would take a hardcore player a year to reach max) There will be no buying your way to catch up. Skill and effort will be the determining factors for who will be the top players. Effort will mean something because max level will take an extended period of time to reach.
I personally hate "grinding" but at the same time I would rather have to put in effort and have that effort mean something. If I have more time to put in than someone else I deserve to be higher level and have better equips. If I have less time than others I will just have to be much more skilled than them to make up for their level and gear advantage they might have.
OK wall of text over. Waiting for the rage of the new style gamer. "give me now give me now"
I agree w/ article...F2P is encroaching everywhere and becoming 'the' model of the future and is still a single idea...and the developers at these companies should be giving us more options not just either p2p or f2p...there's a good plus for both depending on who you are...me i prefer the p2p and and i dont play ANY f2p games at all...but thats just me...i get a new game...buy the box...i put 3 months minimum in it to see whether i like it or not and then it either gets the boot as being a paid beta game like many before it or it gets a few more months of subs to see how it turns out...how thing evolve in the game world...and most of all if its fun.....
iff it sin't fun, ur likely not even going to get that full 3 months...but the hem in the public into just f2p or p2p models isn't good...i think players should have more choice....
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