The "free to play" and "freemium" models exist because of the market they are trying to market, and the product they are trying to sell. In all cases, nothing is free, and you get what you pay for.
There are many players who prefer to simply pay a flat monthly fee to paly the game and get access to everything.
Then there are other players who like to be able to pick and choose what content to pay for, they're the "freemium" and "F2P" payers.
Lastly there are those that don't mind being the bottom rung so long as it's cheap or free.
All in all, the subscription model of a game can have a significant impact on how the actual game is designed. "F2P" MMOs with item malls are designed to be painful if you don't purchase from the item mall. "Freemium" games are designed to churn out "expansions" to get you to keep paying for more and more chunks of content. Subscription MMOs are designed to keep players playing and therefore paying their subscription, as long as possible.
Gw2's "freemium" model will be anythign but free. They will chunk content out into paid mini-expansions to force players to keep opening their wallet. The only difference between that and a subscription game is that you can "choose" if/when you want to pay to unlock the next content, but the bottom line is that if you want access to the entire game you still have to keep consistently paying each time something new comes out.
1) Greater Interactivity. The things the players do should have meaningfull and lasting effects on the game system and the story arcs running in the game.
2) Dynamic Content and live events. The game world should be constantly evolving any changing. This should also include live events and story arcs run by GM's in addition to proceduraly generated stuff. Every day you login, the game world should be different then when you logged off.
3) Greater varietry in offerings. Publishers especialy the big ones need to be less afraid to branch out and offer different sorts of games. There is nothing wrong with fantasy themed, casual, solo-freindly, theme-park, quest based, class based, holy trinity, tab targeting with hotbar special abilitiy games. There is nothing wrong with peanut-butter and jelly sandwich's either...they are a tastey treat....but I don't want to eat one at EVERY SINGLE MEAL. Give me pizza once in awhile or a burger..or god-forbid lobster.
4) Remember that the bartles test DOES indicate that there is more then one type of gamer. Hey, nothing wrong with putting in shinies to satisfy the achievers....but try to remember that there ARE socializers/role-players, explorers/puzzle solvers, etc out there too.
5) Physics. Technology has come a LONG way since the 80's. There is no reason you have to rely on the same cheats games did back then. Ditch aggro....there is no reason you can't use actual blocking and collision detection at least against AI. There is no reason you can't utilize actual LOS & Cover....recoil, projectile drop, wind and weather effects, destructible terrain, actual spotting & hiding..... the technologies to model all this stuff is out there now....start using them.
I just wanna see more faster updates. Most MMOs, (even the giant World of Warcraft) is the slooooooowest when it comes to updates. I don't understand how a billion dollar company from this MMO can't provide us with a new dungeon each month. That alone may make me curious and hold on to a sub. The way to play WoW is to buy into it at patch, play 3 months then quit cause you seen it all. After 3 months if you don't have at least 2 characters max level and geared and seen everything, then you definitely an MMO noob. But hopefully, you start to understand that it's a lot of illusion of new material when it's nothing but rehashed instances. I think it's crazy this company charges for expansions too. Money hungry much?
I don't mind $15.00 a month if I get my $15.00 worth of new stuff. Why do I have to pay that much money each month to do the same exact crap? Hence, why I never play games like WoW longer than 2-3 months after an expansion. It's just stupid. After all they are the kinds of rehashing old instances and such, so the work is already done for the most part, just rehash a different one each month if they trying to cut corners.
So far, all MMOs I've played were extremely slow at putting out content. And I know it can be done. I never played EQ sadly but I heard they were pumping out so many updates it was hard to see all the content. Am I strange to say I would love this? I'd rather be in a virtual world where I can't see it all before the next update than in 1 month after and update I'm already bored. Specially if paying a monthly fee.
Now I understand there is some issues with bringing out content too fast. New comers won't be able to catch up. It splits up many people playing due to time restraints from RL that can't play the game 24/7. Etc. I think it still can be done without compromising that. I think the whole leveling should be greatly reduced. Why do games go to 50? 70 or 80 levels. I don't understand why you can't make a game that does all that with 10 levels or even 5. Least this would fix a lot of mechanics with PvP I think lol. I don't see why there has to be "this zone" level 1-10, etc. I think should just make one huge world like stated above and mix things up. Learn what you can and cannot face. Run into a group of mobs that whip your ass, hey, you gotta find some gear or friends to face them and learn about them. Not it just be a 'known' thing by level above mobs head.
Anyway, I'm off subject. but maybe this goes along with his first one of it being more real.
My list to make MMOs better:
Less Leveling Curves
SWG like crafting (<< I know some people that will play an MMO just for a crafting system like SWG)
Armor that is beneficial but doesn't exponentially make a difference. - I liked how Aion's armor at level 55 was good armor but you could still beat someone wearing that gear even wearing level 45 gear. Gear improved the character but it didn't make so big a difference that you had 0 chance against them. That game had other major issues but that one was small cool thing they did.
I understand player/guild houses is a huge database but apparently it's not that difficult of a feat since many games do it even free-to-play games. I think Vanguard was great game where the company dropped the ball, not the game itself.
Immersive, vast worlds. New MMOs seem to be extremely small these days and keep getting released with smaller and smaller zones. I don't think it would be hard for a team to expand it a little bit and create content for it that' isn't grindy. I don't mind grind too much, after all, I expect some grind in an MMO.
Lose the RNG! This is a time sink factor for games. I think games should just be more difficult. Simple. Not grindy in a sense that I have to do a boss 50 times and still not have my full set of gear. I'm a big believer, if I kill it. reward me, show me something harder. I'd rather have a difficult challenge than a grindy one. Aion also failed at that. Running that stupid DP instance 100 times or more and never seeing a piece of gear was very annoying while someone else luckily gets it on their first run. I'd rather have seen it just the other way around. DP actually been hard and progressive bosses that drop items that reward the players all for their accomplishments. And with my point about gear above, this would be easy to pull off since gear is slightly an upgrade than a massive one like in WoW.
I'm not picking on Aion alone about that RNG crap. Try loading up WoW and getting you a Zin Rokh sword off Archaeology. Good Luck!
You said some good things here. But I absolutely disagree with you on Subscriptions. Now sure some should be charging lower monthly fees then they do but still.. I think the fees are good none the less.
Even beyond the dreaded pay to win I don't want to have to end up buy every quest, area, shiny they add just so I don't get left out by my friends in the game. I would much rather pay my dues and have access to it all.
No idea why the guy above me WANTS to pay subscriptions. Back when I used to think that my reasoning was something along the lines of "Oh, if they make this game F2P then it'll end up flooded with immature idiots", but then I realized it's pretty much impossible to avoid those people in any MMO so subscription fee's won't spare you from their wrath. On a side note, one of those games that came to mind that definitely doesn't feel worth the subscription fee right now would be Warhammer Online. Don't get me wrong, I love that game and recognize it's problems and feel they just don't add up to $15 a month.
You said some good things here. But I absolutely disagree with you on Subscriptions. Now sure some should be charging lower monthly fees then they do but still.. I think the fees are good none the less.
Even beyond the dreaded pay to win I don't want to have to end up buy every quest, area, shiny they add just so I don't get left out by my friends in the game. I would much rather pay my dues and have access to it all.
I prefer B2P myself. It works fine for all other genres including console games that hosts their own servers for online gaming, and Guildwars never sold anything that helps you in PvP or PvE.
I don't really mind paying 15 bucks a month but Guildwars is still the best value I ever got from my money.
Freemium games always feels like a scam to me, they are just a little too happy to try to sell all kind of junk to me. I can of course understand why they have to but it kinda feels like one of those guys who try to sell stuff on the street and are pushy...
I of course like most people would prefer to get great games for free. I am actually surprised that there aren't any MMOs that are living on showing adds instead of having fees.
dude... mabinogi has all that and more! but the graphics do suck!
Hahaha, well said, I personally enjoyed that game, though it has a pretty bad dev. company, if you can overlook that (and the graphics, I guess) it is actually a great game, and the system they use should be used more often.
Less subscriptions? Trust me F2P's are way more expensive... (Or better known as P2W "pay to win") at least in subscription game's you get access to all the content and that's it, in f2p games you have to pay from 15-30 bucks to get extra stuff... and there always releasing new stuff so your always getting outdated.
I would gladly pay $50 a month to play what I consider the perfect game, it still isnt out yet. The only reason any of you want a GW type of system is cause you are cheap or poor. From a business standpoint it is absolutely stupid to have a b2p 1 time fee. GW2 I expect to be a great game, and if it was subscription it would far surpass their net profit from just a 1x buy to play.
Lets say GW2 sells 5 million copies at $50 a box in 6 yrs (as long as GW1 has been out) with an expansion every 2 yrs (as GW1) at $50 a pop.
Orig sales $250 mil
expansion sales $750 mil
Total Gross 1 bill over 6 yrs.
How many subscribers would it take to generate $1 bil over 6 yrs (with 3 expansions, cause face it every company can still charge for expansions)
Even if they Gave away the Game, and Every expansion for free, They would only need 925,925 subscirbers to reach 1 bil in 6 yrs at $15 a month. Now if they charge the standard $50 a box for orig + 3 expansion, they are sitting at 2 Billion
So once again from a business standpoint, B2P is a very dumb business model. In order to reach the revenue of a monthly sub, they will need 10 box sales for every 1 subscription player. Guild Wars 2 would easily top 1 mil subs, will it sell 10 million boxes and 10 mil of each expansion?
1. Good interface; mean world - MMOs make the mistake of being too nice all around. Interfaces need to be natural and good, but the landscape itself should be unrelenting and meaningful. The concept of leveling flow is nice, but not at the cost of a map that naturally transitions from one area to the next without the necessary variety that makes fantasy novels reasonably exciting. While yes, there should be flow, that flow should be discovered by players so it fosters an environment where people can actually be legitimate help to one another, as opposed to the equivalent of a talking bot that steals your mobs.
2. More persistence - It stands to reason that MMOs should be shapable by their playerbase. At the moment, the average MMO does not allow for much world-shaping. It doesn't necessarily have to be buildings, but monster migration patterns or something to ensure that landscapes change with regularity due to player influence.
3. Be less like a MOBA - I like MOBAs, but MMOs make godawful MOBAs. The pretense that a MMO can create a fair, balanced environment is ultimately contradictory to the notion that players are rewarded for persistence directly by the game. If you want to play a MOBA, I would highly recommend playing one, but the expectation that all MMOs need on-demand, anonymous match-making PvP needs to take a backseat to something that MMOs can do that MOBAs can't. It sorta' nods back to number 2.
4. Adventuring needs to come back - Right now, you run to most content. You're not climbing, scaling, planning or doing anything that a fantasy novel trope suggests as a necessary monsterless challenge. I get that it's implied in instances, but it's unused design space.
5. Less combat; more living - The biggest problem with MMOs is that they're all about combat for the most part. In the abstract, this combat focus has reduced the playerbase to hating itself because the people who are good at combat generally do not sparkle with charisma. If developers analyzed what makes the world tick, they would discover that passive individuals are equally capable of garnering respect.
Comments
The "free to play" and "freemium" models exist because of the market they are trying to market, and the product they are trying to sell. In all cases, nothing is free, and you get what you pay for.
There are many players who prefer to simply pay a flat monthly fee to paly the game and get access to everything.
Then there are other players who like to be able to pick and choose what content to pay for, they're the "freemium" and "F2P" payers.
Lastly there are those that don't mind being the bottom rung so long as it's cheap or free.
All in all, the subscription model of a game can have a significant impact on how the actual game is designed. "F2P" MMOs with item malls are designed to be painful if you don't purchase from the item mall. "Freemium" games are designed to churn out "expansions" to get you to keep paying for more and more chunks of content. Subscription MMOs are designed to keep players playing and therefore paying their subscription, as long as possible.
Gw2's "freemium" model will be anythign but free. They will chunk content out into paid mini-expansions to force players to keep opening their wallet. The only difference between that and a subscription game is that you can "choose" if/when you want to pay to unlock the next content, but the bottom line is that if you want access to the entire game you still have to keep consistently paying each time something new comes out.
My list...
1) Greater Interactivity. The things the players do should have meaningfull and lasting effects on the game system and the story arcs running in the game.
2) Dynamic Content and live events. The game world should be constantly evolving any changing. This should also include live events and story arcs run by GM's in addition to proceduraly generated stuff. Every day you login, the game world should be different then when you logged off.
3) Greater varietry in offerings. Publishers especialy the big ones need to be less afraid to branch out and offer different sorts of games. There is nothing wrong with fantasy themed, casual, solo-freindly, theme-park, quest based, class based, holy trinity, tab targeting with hotbar special abilitiy games. There is nothing wrong with peanut-butter and jelly sandwich's either...they are a tastey treat....but I don't want to eat one at EVERY SINGLE MEAL. Give me pizza once in awhile or a burger..or god-forbid lobster.
4) Remember that the bartles test DOES indicate that there is more then one type of gamer. Hey, nothing wrong with putting in shinies to satisfy the achievers....but try to remember that there ARE socializers/role-players, explorers/puzzle solvers, etc out there too.
5) Physics. Technology has come a LONG way since the 80's. There is no reason you have to rely on the same cheats games did back then. Ditch aggro....there is no reason you can't use actual blocking and collision detection at least against AI. There is no reason you can't utilize actual LOS & Cover....recoil, projectile drop, wind and weather effects, destructible terrain, actual spotting & hiding..... the technologies to model all this stuff is out there now....start using them.
I just wanna see more faster updates. Most MMOs, (even the giant World of Warcraft) is the slooooooowest when it comes to updates. I don't understand how a billion dollar company from this MMO can't provide us with a new dungeon each month. That alone may make me curious and hold on to a sub. The way to play WoW is to buy into it at patch, play 3 months then quit cause you seen it all. After 3 months if you don't have at least 2 characters max level and geared and seen everything, then you definitely an MMO noob. But hopefully, you start to understand that it's a lot of illusion of new material when it's nothing but rehashed instances. I think it's crazy this company charges for expansions too. Money hungry much?
I don't mind $15.00 a month if I get my $15.00 worth of new stuff. Why do I have to pay that much money each month to do the same exact crap? Hence, why I never play games like WoW longer than 2-3 months after an expansion. It's just stupid. After all they are the kinds of rehashing old instances and such, so the work is already done for the most part, just rehash a different one each month if they trying to cut corners.
So far, all MMOs I've played were extremely slow at putting out content. And I know it can be done. I never played EQ sadly but I heard they were pumping out so many updates it was hard to see all the content. Am I strange to say I would love this? I'd rather be in a virtual world where I can't see it all before the next update than in 1 month after and update I'm already bored. Specially if paying a monthly fee.
Now I understand there is some issues with bringing out content too fast. New comers won't be able to catch up. It splits up many people playing due to time restraints from RL that can't play the game 24/7. Etc. I think it still can be done without compromising that. I think the whole leveling should be greatly reduced. Why do games go to 50? 70 or 80 levels. I don't understand why you can't make a game that does all that with 10 levels or even 5. Least this would fix a lot of mechanics with PvP I think lol. I don't see why there has to be "this zone" level 1-10, etc. I think should just make one huge world like stated above and mix things up. Learn what you can and cannot face. Run into a group of mobs that whip your ass, hey, you gotta find some gear or friends to face them and learn about them. Not it just be a 'known' thing by level above mobs head.
Anyway, I'm off subject. but maybe this goes along with his first one of it being more real.
My list to make MMOs better:
Less Leveling Curves
SWG like crafting (<< I know some people that will play an MMO just for a crafting system like SWG)
Armor that is beneficial but doesn't exponentially make a difference. - I liked how Aion's armor at level 55 was good armor but you could still beat someone wearing that gear even wearing level 45 gear. Gear improved the character but it didn't make so big a difference that you had 0 chance against them. That game had other major issues but that one was small cool thing they did.
I understand player/guild houses is a huge database but apparently it's not that difficult of a feat since many games do it even free-to-play games. I think Vanguard was great game where the company dropped the ball, not the game itself.
Immersive, vast worlds. New MMOs seem to be extremely small these days and keep getting released with smaller and smaller zones. I don't think it would be hard for a team to expand it a little bit and create content for it that' isn't grindy. I don't mind grind too much, after all, I expect some grind in an MMO.
Lose the RNG! This is a time sink factor for games. I think games should just be more difficult. Simple. Not grindy in a sense that I have to do a boss 50 times and still not have my full set of gear. I'm a big believer, if I kill it. reward me, show me something harder. I'd rather have a difficult challenge than a grindy one. Aion also failed at that. Running that stupid DP instance 100 times or more and never seeing a piece of gear was very annoying while someone else luckily gets it on their first run. I'd rather have seen it just the other way around. DP actually been hard and progressive bosses that drop items that reward the players all for their accomplishments. And with my point about gear above, this would be easy to pull off since gear is slightly an upgrade than a massive one like in WoW.
I'm not picking on Aion alone about that RNG crap. Try loading up WoW and getting you a Zin Rokh sword off Archaeology. Good Luck!
Anyway,..
1 swg-like crafting
2 eve-like economy
3 darkfall-like pvp
4 swg-like housing
5 more polished than the recent sandbox releases
1 way to make these articles better.
The pictures should have something to do with the content and not just random pictures you put up for the "lulz".
You said some good things here. But I absolutely disagree with you on Subscriptions. Now sure some should be charging lower monthly fees then they do but still.. I think the fees are good none the less.
Even beyond the dreaded pay to win I don't want to have to end up buy every quest, area, shiny they add just so I don't get left out by my friends in the game. I would much rather pay my dues and have access to it all.
No idea why the guy above me WANTS to pay subscriptions. Back when I used to think that my reasoning was something along the lines of "Oh, if they make this game F2P then it'll end up flooded with immature idiots", but then I realized it's pretty much impossible to avoid those people in any MMO so subscription fee's won't spare you from their wrath. On a side note, one of those games that came to mind that definitely doesn't feel worth the subscription fee right now would be Warhammer Online. Don't get me wrong, I love that game and recognize it's problems and feel they just don't add up to $15 a month.
I prefer B2P myself. It works fine for all other genres including console games that hosts their own servers for online gaming, and Guildwars never sold anything that helps you in PvP or PvE.
I don't really mind paying 15 bucks a month but Guildwars is still the best value I ever got from my money.
Freemium games always feels like a scam to me, they are just a little too happy to try to sell all kind of junk to me. I can of course understand why they have to but it kinda feels like one of those guys who try to sell stuff on the street and are pushy...
I of course like most people would prefer to get great games for free. I am actually surprised that there aren't any MMOs that are living on showing adds instead of having fees.
Hahaha, well said, I personally enjoyed that game, though it has a pretty bad dev. company, if you can overlook that (and the graphics, I guess) it is actually a great game, and the system they use should be used more often.
Less subscriptions? Trust me F2P's are way more expensive... (Or better known as P2W "pay to win") at least in subscription game's you get access to all the content and that's it, in f2p games you have to pay from 15-30 bucks to get extra stuff... and there always releasing new stuff so your always getting outdated.
When i was young we went to arcades and put money in the machines to play. (often pound coins)
Wow charges 29 pence a day to play.
I dont know why people moan about that.
I would gladly pay $50 a month to play what I consider the perfect game, it still isnt out yet. The only reason any of you want a GW type of system is cause you are cheap or poor. From a business standpoint it is absolutely stupid to have a b2p 1 time fee. GW2 I expect to be a great game, and if it was subscription it would far surpass their net profit from just a 1x buy to play.
Lets say GW2 sells 5 million copies at $50 a box in 6 yrs (as long as GW1 has been out) with an expansion every 2 yrs (as GW1) at $50 a pop.
Orig sales $250 mil
expansion sales $750 mil
Total Gross 1 bill over 6 yrs.
How many subscribers would it take to generate $1 bil over 6 yrs (with 3 expansions, cause face it every company can still charge for expansions)
Even if they Gave away the Game, and Every expansion for free, They would only need 925,925 subscirbers to reach 1 bil in 6 yrs at $15 a month. Now if they charge the standard $50 a box for orig + 3 expansion, they are sitting at 2 Billion
So once again from a business standpoint, B2P is a very dumb business model. In order to reach the revenue of a monthly sub, they will need 10 box sales for every 1 subscription player. Guild Wars 2 would easily top 1 mil subs, will it sell 10 million boxes and 10 mil of each expansion?
1. Good interface; mean world - MMOs make the mistake of being too nice all around. Interfaces need to be natural and good, but the landscape itself should be unrelenting and meaningful. The concept of leveling flow is nice, but not at the cost of a map that naturally transitions from one area to the next without the necessary variety that makes fantasy novels reasonably exciting. While yes, there should be flow, that flow should be discovered by players so it fosters an environment where people can actually be legitimate help to one another, as opposed to the equivalent of a talking bot that steals your mobs.
2. More persistence - It stands to reason that MMOs should be shapable by their playerbase. At the moment, the average MMO does not allow for much world-shaping. It doesn't necessarily have to be buildings, but monster migration patterns or something to ensure that landscapes change with regularity due to player influence.
3. Be less like a MOBA - I like MOBAs, but MMOs make godawful MOBAs. The pretense that a MMO can create a fair, balanced environment is ultimately contradictory to the notion that players are rewarded for persistence directly by the game. If you want to play a MOBA, I would highly recommend playing one, but the expectation that all MMOs need on-demand, anonymous match-making PvP needs to take a backseat to something that MMOs can do that MOBAs can't. It sorta' nods back to number 2.
4. Adventuring needs to come back - Right now, you run to most content. You're not climbing, scaling, planning or doing anything that a fantasy novel trope suggests as a necessary monsterless challenge. I get that it's implied in instances, but it's unused design space.
5. Less combat; more living - The biggest problem with MMOs is that they're all about combat for the most part. In the abstract, this combat focus has reduced the playerbase to hating itself because the people who are good at combat generally do not sparkle with charisma. If developers analyzed what makes the world tick, they would discover that passive individuals are equally capable of garnering respect.