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F2P creating Free to Cheat players
LogicLester
Member UncommonPosts: 68
Gamers, and MMO players especially, have always had a good percentage of cheaters, exploiters, players who seek out bugs or even use hacks to gain advantage in the game. With developers always having to create new mechanics to stop them, or police the game. But it seems with the recent surge in F2P games that this is changing.
Now it would seem the cheaters are the majority, look in any forum or chat complaining about exploits and invariably the attitude isn't "damn those cheaters are ruining the game" it's "damn, I wish I could have cheated too!". In fact the developers of these F2P games seem to actually be embracing the cheaters, so long as it gets them more money. The most recent example being Neverwinter (again, and it should be noted that in that instance very few of the exploiters actually had any action taken against them beyond the rollback itself). And the developers do the absolute minimum to combat these cheaters now, because that costs development time/money. To the point now where they're congratulating them.
Now I really don't care about the impact of the exploit, in this case maybe it will hurt the game economy in the long run, and maybe it diminishes the "achievement" of having gotten that mount legitimately. But what it does show is how quickly the players rush to exploit any bug found in these games. And it's no longer just the few cheaters anymore, it's nearly every player. When someone says they didn't exploit it, even though being able to, they're met with incredulity, "why not??".
And I have to ask myself. Why not? The fact is these "free" to play games create a situation where it's players vs. developers. With the developers trying to spend as little as they possibly can creating the game while squeezing every penny out of the players for the entertainment their game provides. And the players trying to squeeze every bit of entertainment out of the game at the minimal cost to them. It's adversarial, and it's destroying any sense of acheivement left to gaming, in my opinion.
There's no joy to working hard and having fun with friends, or even strangers, to achieve some game goal anymore, it's just a race to see who can get to the goal fastest, whether by purchase or by cheat.
Comments
I have for some time now been an advocate for "cheat free" servers and "anything goes" servers. When one gets caught their char and stuff simply gets moved over to the anything goes server instead of a ban. It is a win win situation!
Bear in mind the great dev to cheat research that can go on in an anything goes environment.
My youtube MMO gaming channel
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Yes due to the fact that companies seem unwilling to actually enforce the ToS/Eula which I think should be a legal contract.. meaning if they don't enforce them aka perma ban people they should get sued... for breach of contract.
So after thinking on it years ago I came up with a similar idea but my name for those servers was not as nice as yours... I also think they should have their own server forums and not be able to access any other forums or get customer service of any kind. In other words no character/item restores.. absolutely nothing.
Planetside 2 was a prime example and might still be but I don't play it anymore. Smedley was running his mouth about how they would ban blah blah Yet most of the largest outfits on Mattherson (regardless of faction) were all blatantly exploiting and/or using 3rd party programs... hell some of their own vids clearly showed them exploiting bugs for personal gain and when I was a CS rep.. that was definitely a ban... of course back then we banned people.
The problem with F2P is no barrier to entry so it gets worse... oh well...
Your post has some valid points, however you didn't really show any real connection between cheating and f2p system.
I have played few games that are f2p, few with subscription and recently one with b2p system, and I have yet to see any relation between cheating and payment system. I saw cheaters everywere and in the same numbers, do you have any statistics to back it up, or is it just a claim made by you to give f2p system even more bad opinion on this forums than it already has?
No it's not.
If you have to spend 60 bucks to get a new account your less likely to do shit to get you banned. in WoW I have all the expansions. I would be pretty pissed if I lost that account. If for some reason I was banned in NeverWinter where I spent nothing I wouldn't care as much.
this exactly
and the reverse, as the OP pointed, is also true. there is certainly a direct association between revenue model and developer's effort and interest to police their game.
Because you can't ever do anything to get rid of cheaters/bots/exploiters in any free game.
On the off chance of ever getting an acct ban in a F2P game (because the devs don't care much or don't care enough to do anything about it) just recreate an acct or 10 and get right back to the a-hole behavior that was ban worthy in the first place.
At least with a P2P or B2P people have to purchase a new client, which slows some people down. But with an F2P game it is all cheating, all the time. And spamming and bots all the time.
And again, with some "F2P" games, there is every incentive TO cheat, because of how the payment model is set up: the more rewards or gold you acquire, the less actual money you have to pay for things in the cash shop (NW and PS2 are perfect examples of this and are overrun with cheaters).
There have been cheaters in every P2P game I have ever played, but compared to F2P games, they are practically non-existent.
(Edit: Plus in P2P games, the CS is a little better, so it is easier to report people and get something done about bannable behavior.)
There's nothing about a free-to-play model that encourages cheating. If you want to claim that, then it's equally valid to claim that a subscription model encourages obesity, alcoholism or snobbery. That's just silly.
Yes, you're emotionally invested in long-standing characters. If WoW goes completely F2P (as they appear to be doing), you will still feel unlikely to endanger the account with those characters on it. But that emotional tie isn't based on how you paid for the game, it's based on the time you've invested. F2P players who invest similar amounts of time into characters on other games might very well fell the same as you. Are their feelings for their characters any less valid than yours because of how the game company runs its business?
If cheating is rising, it is because players choose to do so and because companies cannot or will not police this behavior.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Explicitly proven incorrect.
In NWO, cheaters generated billions of refined AD, which in turn let them buy zen (Cryptic's virtual currency) which could then be used in the cash shop or sold to 3rd party sites. Several people posted about making several thousand RL dollars doing this. Why was it possible? Because Cryptic's F2P model made it viable and worthwhile to do.
Similar in PS2, but people there cheated their way to free equipment: kill more people, get more commendations, and then use them in the cash shop. Don't have to pay real money for them. This gave rise to many, many exploits and hacks, some of which were sold online. People would pay $5 for a hack and use it to get $200 worth of stuff from the cash shop. Had SOE not designed it that way, it would not happen thus. People didn't just cheat to wave the epeen or grief people: it saved them a whole ton of money.
And those are just 2 examples off the top of my head, there have been many more.
It's not the characters I'm attached to its the financial investment. If it went F2P all content free then I wouldn't care.
I only have to look at Rift to see where this fits now that it's F2P, the gold spam is endless, moderation of chat channels is non-existent and PvP has become a joke with the last one I have seen being someone blinking around the map at lightning speed.
It seems like a completely different company is running the game now.
You are over simplifying it. Just because two variables are independent doesn't mean there cannot be a correlation between the two. Once you determine if there is in fact a correlation then you need to determine a cause for the alleged increase in cheating. If a significant cause in the increase in players willing to cheat is due to a lower initial cost barrier to play then it is relevant to question F2P’s impact on cheating. However none of us have access to the actual data and numbers necessary to say definitively whether this is true or not so we can only speculate based off opinion and personal experience. But to dismiss the entire argument just because they are two independent variables is simply incorrect.
No, it's not silly.
Now I've been banned off of the forums in WoW, because I'm quite outspoken (still am, and no doubt be banned by one of those "official WoW fansites"). But ingame I play the game as is. That's because the game not only costs money, it costs time. It's an investment, so I don't just throw all that away. Besides, I like my toon. Now if Blizzard decides to ban my account for what I post, then I'm free to really post my feelings as there's nothing more to lose.
See?
When you don't have nothing to lose because you don't put money or time in something, you do as you please. It's all expendable. What is a ban if the content isn't worth a dime to pay? What would stop a player from cheating? A GM asking them to with a big smile?
Got to have some type of commitment or it's just helter skelter. Even if it's but a token. Because if a player feels he invested in a game, he would feel obliged to at least care.
I criticize Blizzard for their ways, but I don't wantonly do so without caring. Why go through all of this for no pay and facing fanboi junk? It's done so the game can improve, as I invested a mint. Don't want to play a second rate game. Have to push the devs to push the envelope.
.:| Kevyne@Shandris - Armory |:. - When WoW was #1 - .:| I AM A HOLY PALADIN - Guild Theme |:.
Even though this seems like a solid argument, playing different type of games I have never seen any relation like that. You have to take into account that kids cheat the most, and they couldn't care less about parents money in most cases.
You could also put it the other way around. A banned player means a risk of lost subscription money from that player.
Once again I don't know where this information come from. Hard to find relation. I could even go step further since you are just making assumptions, then so can I... I think that it is harder to get banned in p2p because of the "I pay, I demand" mentality and the fact that a banned player is a risk of lost money for a subscription based game as I said before.
In my opinion it is the other way around. Devs care at least the same or even more about cheaters in f2p game since the cash shop gets hit the most when players cheat. A subscription game being cheated results in possibly angry players and possibly lost subscriptions out of some frustration about broken market or unfair chances, while f2p game cheated directly hits cash shop, since it guarantees that a lot of people will no longer need it since they cheated their way to gold.
Two extreme cases are not really a proof of anything in such huge industry, can you provide more? Even though it does not neccessary prove your point. Also if devs don't do nothing to fight with cheaters might not always mean they don't care, there might be something you don't know about that prevents them from doing so, be it technical or financial issue, It all depends on game and that is why I don't see relation. Who would want their game to be cheated and loose money, no matter what payment system is used.
I goes against years of logic. Not just with MMO's but life in general. Free crap always gets treated worst. Have a neighborhood where a family is given a job and forced to pay rent vs. one where it's free and nobody has to work see which one looks better at the end of the year.
Over-simplification, maybe. But there's entirely too many assumptions that there is a direct correlation between F2P and cheating. There could be third or fourth or nth variables that together form some cause for the rise in cheating. There may even be several factors contributing to the observation. The hypothesis that F2P causes cheating cannot be proven to be definitive (nor can it be disproved) because we (the customers) are not privy to all the pertinent information -- CS staffing, employee satisfaction, corporate diligence, CS funding levels, etc. -- that may be acting behind the scene.
Many of the posters have made the assumption that F2P = cheating (it's even in the thread title). That's what triggered my reaction. Someone sees a forest fire and know that campers use fires to cook doesn't imply that campers are arsonists. Just because A = B and C = D doesn't mean that A = D. There's just not enough information to know.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
With all the things wrong and broken with the F2P model, I never thought about this angle as well. Your are correct in this. There is no barrier to entry, there is no fear of repercussion on any action, profanity, cheating, exploiting, anything goes in a F2P
Because every player is a potential revenue source they want to embrace. Meaning they are getting nothing from most of the players so doing anything to piss them off might interfere with the developers chance to get a couple of bucks from them.
In a P2P game players have an investment in the game that they dare not risk, its a type of self policing system.
I don't anyone here has proven anything about F2P & cheating except mouthing off their opinion or describe anecdotal examples which are not proved of anything general.
Thanks,
Mike
Working on Social Strategy MMORTS (now Launched!) http://www.worldalpha.com
Yeah ok F2P is easier to get accounts but it still does not mean that P2P does not have cheaters as well. Take DCUO before F2P that game was cheat city big time with the raids and in PVP. Also take Diablo 3 bots is a form of cheating and they overran the game in hours. Or heck even WoW has bots and has had them sense day one. So yes it goes both ways and I can list alot of games where cheats happen alot even console games that are online have cheaters in them. So yeah F2P gives them easier access but cheating happens in all games. Take CoD MW 2 and 3 both pc and console was loaded with aim programs as soon as they launched even the battlefield games have cheats and hacks. Heck I have not played a game to date you cant find cheats for.
You can even say that people posting online guides to things in games is a cheat as well cause it shows you how to do something you did not know how to complete before that could be considered a form of cheating. Also you can go on youtube and find cheats for mmo's really easy which I find funny cause I have had friends that use these all the time just so they can get things done easier and faster I have even used things in games to get things done faster because of time constraints. In fact almost everyone I know has used a cheat at sometime or another. In Diablo pk hunters used bobafett to hack the game to kill hackers I know because I was one and not once was I banned for it.
Many of you complain about some things that make no sense and yet this really is just wrong yes f2p makes getting into the game easy so does buying it heck so does paying $15 a month according to alot of people here so you can say all you want about F2P being bad but I know there not all bad in that way some are just plain bad.
Sherman's Gaming
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It's only common sense that a game without consquences is going to have more cheaters, gold sellers and the like. They're bad enough on P2P.