F2P and augs

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Scroterly, Mar 7, 2021.

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  1. Benito EQ player since 2001.


    I can't believe we're even here. Though, these threads are written by new and returning players.

    They are trying to solve the problem (i.e. lack of tutorial or guidance, difficulty leveling) the wrong way.
  2. Cuuthbert Augur

    Lot of different angles being taken here. That being said my belief is this. F2P accounts from the DB side is to attract new players. From the Player stand point... it is a way to store crap and try to find a way to get free entertainment off the backs that pay subs/use buy Krona and keep the lights on.
    Benito likes this.
  3. Gherig Addicted since Aug 1st, 1998

    I dragged 54 people around for more then 2 years to complete the BIC aug killing dozens of raid target mobs 100% knowing that regardless of my subscription level I would never in a million years expect that aug to be relevant or desirable a decade later. As a matter of fact, that aug being desirable as long as it was, was a bad design flaw, just like Berserkers wearing 5 year old gloves because of the effect, was a bad design.

    There are a lot of augs that are really good for Free to Play players. There are also so many options for extremely good gear that are player made and almost equal to prestige raid and mission gear. Conflagrant Armor is extremely generous of Daybreak to give away for free to players who chose to not pay a sub, and its usable at lvl 106. No other game out there does that without making you buy a loot box or a sub.

    Are you going to be killing endgame content in Free to play gear ... no ... and you should never be able too. If you could then the company has failed at its job. Free 2 Play should always be behind the curve in Gear and Power. It should never be on par with paid subs.
    CatsPaws and Benito like this.
  4. MyShadower All-natural Intelligence


    This is my take away from this thread. F2P just needs commercials (not pop ups!) sprinkled throughout your game play.

    Kill a named and you have to watch a 60 second spot on the gear they drop that you could use if only you were a member. Forage for 5 minutes and you have to watch a 30 second spot on something you cannot make with your most recent find.

    Bombard them with imagery of heroes doing things they cannot without membership. Nobody will be talking about this augment issue anymore.
    Benito likes this.
  5. Gherig Addicted since Aug 1st, 1998

    There is no problem to solve though. You get limited at best access for free. The solution is to pay to increase that access level. There is no problem.
    Benito likes this.
  6. Niskin Clockwork Arguer


    I'm not lookin for them to drop anything. I think they can keep it going without ads or loot boxes. I simply believe that when the F2P rage hit, people scrambled to include that in their model, and that the implementation might not have been perfect. Even if it was, it may not be still today.

    Literally everything I've said so far has been "tweak F2P to improve revenue." Can you modify F2P to get more people to sub, without gimping F2P completely? If yes, then great. Can you modify F2P to sell more expansions? If yes, then great. Sell more stuff in the Marketplace? If yes, then great.

    This isn't a mobile game, and they already have a marketplace, I'm not saying they need to add new revenue streams, just optimize the ones they have. IMO the current F2P, while generous by the standards of other games, is still mostly useless somewhere past level 50. Not everyone will box, I certainly won't box more than two accounts, I don't like doing it, but it's necessary for some things. Because of this, I will never play without subbing. That's fine with me, but I already love the game and don't have an issue with having to sub to play the way I want.

    F2P should be the gateway to the secondary market. Don't want to sub? That's fine, get addicted anyway and buy some cosmetic stuff. That's the modern revenue model. But as some have pointed out, the current F2P implementation doesn't truly facilitate that. It may actually block it completely. Alternately if a F2P player ends up subbing to try out a TLP that's another big win because that will likely be a multi-month sub rather than one month for AA auto-grants or whatever.

    Change doesn't have to be conformity, it just has to be different. I'm curious to see if they could find a balance that enhances revenue from all streams.
  7. Benito EQ player since 2001.

    How long have you been playing since you came back? Are you playing in ToV or CoV?

    Some people want to engineer society to live in a utopian commune or collective. It usually doesn't work out for everyone else.
  8. Gherig Addicted since Aug 1st, 1998

    Here is another good example.

    • This is the Blizzard lvl 1-20 F2P model as an example. When you test drive a car, you can drive it around a few blocks for a few miles, then you need to get out of the car and decide ... do you want to buy it or go someplace else and buy a different car.
    • Now the Everquest Test Drive. You get a car, the dealer generously allows you to drive that car for 4 years and see how you like it, never asking you to pay for wear on the car or its added miles. You finally reach a certain mileage [lets call those Levels and AA's in EQ] and now Daybreak says "Hey bud, you have had that car for 4 years and 80,000 miles, do you want to buy it or not". Not only do you refuse to buy the car, you demand they give you new tires, upgrade the interior and drivetrain and allow you to drive it another 80,000 for free. When Daybreak says no we can't do that, you run to Yelp and down vote the Car Dealer [Daybreak] and call them greedy.
    Benito likes this.
  9. KrakenReality Augur

    Not even close.
  10. Gherig Addicted since Aug 1st, 1998

    More like spot on, nailed on the head.
    Benito likes this.
  11. Benito EQ player since 2001.

    Love this.

    Daybreak can also make a F2P server with full membership benefits but half of your gaming session is watching Allstate and Progressive ads. You also have to wear a "Fly Emirates" flag in your off-hand slot.
  12. Niskin Clockwork Arguer

    About a month, I don't own ToV or CoV. I bought EoK on both of my accounts during EoK, and RoS on my main, not sure if I bought it for the alt. Other than logging into my live characters to get the AA auto-grant, my time since coming back has been spent entirely on Agnarr.

    My opinion of the uselessness of F2P is based on previous attempts to use Heroic boosted toons to do anything at all. Somewhere past level 50, A5 mercs get stupid and useless, and that's more important to me than most arguments about gear. If I can't take a tank with an A5 healer merc to relevant content and survive then I'm not going to play F2P. Same with an A5 tank merc and some healer class.


    I saw a couple versions of whatever you were trying to say here. We were having a nice conversation, but you had to ruin it. Suggesting that DPG optimize their income streams is not suggesting communism or free rides or giving away the store. Too many people are hung up on what other people are getting for free, when they had to pay a different price for it. This is not about that, if you look at it that way we all lose.

    F2P probably isn't going away. Expansions are going to keep coming. The level cap will keep going up. Increasing portions of the game may no longer be relevant to the people who pay for the latest content or full access to their character's capabilities and equipment. If DPG can find some way to utilize the combination of old content and F2P accounts to improve their monetization, why would that bother you?
  13. KrakenReality Augur

    I'd review the AA unlocker amount and mercenary access. Augs seem like a prestige feature, but that would be worth creating prestige and free categories. Maybe, some weak craftable augs in the future for the tradeskill folks?
    Gherig likes this.
  14. Benito EQ player since 2001.

    Give me your thoughts in a year or when you are near current content. Respectfully, most players are happy to provide advice and feedback regarding your experience so far.

    We can agree to disagree before this exchange gets out of hand.
  15. Gherig Addicted since Aug 1st, 1998

    Now this is the first thing the Pro F2P player has posted in this thread that makes sense. The Daybreak DBC store is too expensive and things like AA unlocks are horribly priced. If you really want to improve the F2P experience, I would expend 100% of your energy working to get Daybreak to change this end of the F2P model and not about some augs you don't have access too.
  16. Joules_Bianchi A certain gnome

    No, not even close.

    All these parables miss the mark.

    Also the OP.

    F2P augs:

    1) Should not, if a player has rightfully earned them, render player gear and the augs themselves useless as it's a barrier to leveling up, pointlessly. Prestige is a bad mechanic as all it DOES is punish a player for lapsing. Playing in the later expansions and being able to raid and a level cap below current max is more than enough of a reward, much less proper AA autogrants, which, last I knew, were a catch up mechanic to help new and returning players to CATCH UP AND BUY NEW EXPANSIONS, which by them usually are subs via card or Krono.

    2) If leveling up is so easy as you keep saying, WTF does anyone care if a level 70 can use a Deep Sky aug they earned, paid for, that it must, in 2021, still me marked prestige. This isn't necessary, it's just coercive and stealth shading someone for not having the ability to pay this week, but maybe next month, after being a loyal (has 5700+ Loyalty) and 15 years PAID time on an account.

    Like why do you care SO much, unless you have a stake in keeping players down, or some belief that a frustrated returning player logs in, sees the utter nightmare that is all their characters in unusable gear and all their real estate in the bank. It frankly takes LESS time to start a new account than to deal with all that noise.

    20 years of developers adding catch up mechanics just so players will be able to muddle through 20 years of content, but these stupid barriers MUST persist. Tatsujiro The Serene Level 70 augs are NO threat to anyone's purse. Being so passive aggressive toward a returning player though, does.

    Even if we could log them in and spend the loyalty I earned to pay for bags of plat for distillers and spend 2-4 hours per character sorting out augs and getting 13 years of placeables out of bags and resetting guild halls that some squatter wants a quarter million PP to get off the guild plot , the rest of our accounts WOULD be subbed.

    Use all the rhetorical devices and shell game arguments you like, but it's just sensible to stop hindering returning players from gaining current meta and <wanting> to sub, you know, for content over extremely behind the curve augs.
  17. CazRa New Member

    Saying "not even close" is good and all but better is to explain how it is not close.
  18. KrakenReality Augur


    It really doesn't work. You have to view EQ as an entertainment venue (club, bar, Top-Golf, etc), where the goal is getting big crowds and to upsell premium features or memberships. Live does a decent job at getting people to convert to premium membership, journeyman mercs and autogranted AA are very enticing.

    Personally, I think the FTP journey just comes up too short to really maximize the conversion rate, but that goes partially in hand with the design of catch-up content.
    Niskin likes this.
  19. Joules_Bianchi A certain gnome

    Oh and if you want to "optimize revenue streams" maybe just add ALL the LoN drops to marketplace full time and lose real estate upleep and see how much stuff you sell to people who actually LIKE the real estate content?

    but, yeah, free to play players disallowed from using level 70 augs, that's a ticket to millions, sure.
  20. Joules_Bianchi A certain gnome

    Oh, and for the record, before we went to TLP servers to play a while, we had 10 all access accounts, but as we were checking out old expansion raid content on TLPs, live server stuff bounced on 4 of the accounts due to lifeus interruptus.

    A year later and we still haven't sorted out 3 servers full of 13 characters per slot worth of Lore flagged crates of eviction.

    If it weren't for THAT those accounts would be back up and subbed.

    Trust me, it's NOT old augs.
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