Free 2 Play is a horrible concept...

Why?

Let me quote another player:

Doesn't this sound like Eric is talking about his day job? And it doesn't really sound as if he's having a good time either.

I think most of us can agree that we have spend hours at times doing things we don't really enjoy for XP and certs. In extreme situations players will even teamkill to get the XP for a SCU triggering. There is a bloodbath every time a shielded spawnroom falls. Players are so desperate for those 2 or 3 kills that they will happily mow down 5 of their teammates to get an assist. There is more honor between thieves than between XP-starved Zerglings.

And on double XP weekends? You might think it would be more relaxed when you get more XP anyway, right? Nope, quite the opposite. There is limited time, the clock is ticking, you need to farm those certs even harder during double XP!!!


Here we are, sitting at our high end PCs, destroying and repairing virtual consoles for XP that we will use to unlock virtual upgrades for our virtual weapons. Some spend hours ghostcapping entire continents during the early morning hours for a hand full of certs. Does anybody enjoy ghostcapping? I read the forum or watch Youtube while I wait for a point to turn.

Should I need to find some other medium to enjoy my free time while I'm playing a game?

Is this not a parody on gaming if a player is forced to find something else to do because the game he is playing is so boring?


I'm not blaming SOE or the developers. The developers didn't have much of a choice anyway and SOE porbably thought that F2P was the best way to get enough players for that Massive Multiplayer Online experience they wanted. And it works - mostly. There are probably a couple of hundred players staring at an empty door next to a cap point right now!

No, I blame us as human beings. We get joy from achieving irrelevant and stupid things sometimes or at least we think we do. Game designers call it a carrot. Carrots are something that keeps you coming back for more. Even if you are not having fun. Even if you would rather do something else. Most games have carrots. Most successful modern online games have them. They are called achievements, medals, rank, K/D (this is a BIG ONE!) or ingame credits.

This is where the Free 2 Play concept fails us as gamers. We waste our (sometimes considerable amounts) of free time with boring grind. You have to have grind in a F2P game! Why would players spend money on a game otherwise? You need to keep them playing as long as possible. Only if the players spend a lot of time in the game will they start thinking about spending money voluntarily. And the higher the development costs for a game are, the higher is the need to earn money and bore the players with grind!

This is why I think F2P is a bad concept for games. Unless:

(TL;DR):
Stop playing for certs! Play for fun! Become aware of when you are doing something you do not enjoy. Then change it! You can have fun in a F2P game. You just have to ask yourself from time to time: Do I enjoy what I'm doing right now? No? Fix it! It's up to us players!


Don't be that guy who kills 5 teammates with a grenade to kill one enemy. Get an ESF and fly loopings or race through the canyons near the warpgate. (Currently mostly viable for VS ) There is enough fun to be had in PS2, you just need to find it for yourself. Godspeed!

Unlock progression doesn't mean free to play, hundreds of paid games have it, and the people who decide to make the game into a job, instead of playing the game and having fun and earning those same points at the same time anyway are morons and should not be protected from themselves. Let them waste the time, who cares?

Free to Play is the only way to be successful on the market now.
Deal with it.

i like what you had to say, but im not sure that im making the correlation between F2P and the farming mentality. ALL games with unlocks (which is all games these days) will encourage players to farm XP however they can. its not the F2P model that does that.

Good read, and the TLDR section sums it up very nice.

Grinding is not a F2P thing, its an MMO thing. Maybe this game is a little more RPGish then most people realize, in the grind the **** out of your char sense rpgs often have. I remember standing in one spot in oblivion casting the same spell over and over just top lvl a skill. And that game had a command prompt and I could have cheated easily.

F2P in an MMO is nice imo, I don't need to commit to the game and if I like it, I can support it. Also the game has never felt like a grind to me, after a while I have a **** ton of certs saved up and can buy pretty much whatever I want when I want. Just play the game and you will get a lot of certs. Have fun, if you arent having fun getting a bunch of certs wont change that.

Absolutely not true! The business model depends entirely on the kind of game you want to make. F2P is a way to support a game for a very long time without resorting to monthly payments or a steady stream of expansions. The latest thing is crowd funding btw. Have the fans pay for your game before development even starts. Now this is an even hotter topic for another thread (on another forum)...

Yup, agree 100%. You could even say unlocks are THE core concept of RPGs. Imagine a game like Skyrim without level progression. The difference however is that the financial success of Skyrim does not depend on farming. Once you have payed for the game the dev team has done their job. Then the only question becomes how they can sell you DLC.

F2P games are actually designed to put their claws into you. And they need to add a good amount of boring grind because that is what sells boosters and goodies in the shop! Imagine for a moment you would get 5 times as much XP in PS2. Most players would never spend a single dollar. But the sometimes painfully slow cert gain makes sure players buy boosters and weapons.

True, MMOs are forced to 'bind' their players as well to keep them subscribed. Making players grind is not a new concept, it's only that in most F2P games it is the most important way to finance your game. In MMOs you get the grind because player progress needs to be slowed down for the developers to finish new content. (It hardly matters though since your weapons are pretty much useless once the next expansion pack is released... )


Anyway, I made this thread to remind everybody that you are here to have fun, not to farm certs. I think a lot of us - and that includes myself - tend to forget this at times. Go, live a little! Forget about the certs and do some silly stuff. I think I'll crash Galaxies into stuff this afternoon. Or try to knife MAX suits.

Finding funds to create a game and monetizing your game on market are two separate things, don't confuse them together. Options for the first are Publishers, Investors and Crowdfunding. Options for the second are Pay to play, Subscription and Free to play. Among them Free to play is the only profitable for MMO (exept for WoW and EVE), no matter how it was funded.

Oh you couldn't be any more wrong.

The only good (ie: worth your time) FTP games I can count on my fingers. Everything else in the market is either subscription based or one-time payment only. One-time payment has been the most successful business practice to this point and still makes up the VAST majority of games for all platforms.

Free2play won't be as popular with customers until free2play devs stop screwing over customers with exploitative business practices. "Pay2Win" and overpriced goods are so common in free2play games that they have become basic assumptions the moment "Free To Play" is even mentioned.

If you don't want to spend a lot of money or any money on this game, I would highly recommend choosing VS or TR. Their faction starter weapons are great. The NC's default weapons pave a path to tears, as you will get ROFLSTOMPED in close quarters with them and to capture points...well...you have to engage close quarters.

I remeber playing WoW pvp battlegrounds while watching TV series / movies from other screen. No less grind realy. And sure isent free to play ither.

Thanks for the warning, RobotNinja. The starter weapons don't really concern me though as I just bought the best weapons for my NC character. Combined with cosmetics I spend like 15000sc on my NC toon. My VS and TR accounts are pretty much just free. I want to see how this game develops from here on before I spend any more money.

Well said. Who here would disagree that the careful rebalancing of the Annihilator in the last patch is not a direct result of PS2 being free to play? If this was a subscription based model the Annihilator would have gotten the full force of the nerf bat and then some. Same with rocket pods and the Zepher. (Had to mention them otherwise people would think I am a biased flyboy! [I am, don't be fooled!!! ])

And if PS2 would have been a regular 'pay up front' title SOE could just double our XP gain permanently if they wanted to. Doing this in a F2P game means losing money. Developers like to keep the numbers a secret but from what I have heard only 5% of the players spend real money. I think those numbers are from LoL. Don't quote me on that though. Raising the XP gain would cut into those paying 5%, probably a lot!

Not to mention the problems with cheaters in F2P games. Sure, you get cheaters in every online game but in F2P they can run rampant despite the best efforts of the developers. Until a developer decides to involve reliable members of their community to help with cheaters... Oh well.

AC
Crysis
COD
WoW
TES
TESO(?)
Minecraft
BF
FC
GW2
etc etc. Don't really care wether you ment only RPGs and so forth. These represent alot of different genres. None of them being F2P. All of them very succesfull.

There's a single F2P game I can recall being successive... LoL

Free to play is by no means a horrible concept.

The thing you complained about are the general flaws of PS2...not the flaws of the F2P concept.


PS2 has the grind element implemented to make up for the fact of lacking content. THIS is the problem here.... F2P is actually a great thing if implemented correctly (Don't sell power, only sell convenience and vanity)

First off, many of those games have a very traditional Multiplayer aspect to the game, as in a (compared to planetside 2)very low player cap and "instanced" matches. You know, the standard we are all used to. Obviously games you pay up front for but don't have a subscription will still easily be successful, but for many of those games you don't have to rely on hundred(if not thousands) of players to be on your server to get the most out of the game. And this is why MMO's are generally trying to go free to play, because it is the most encouraging way to get people to play, or at least try, your game.

Now as to MMO's in particular, I like how you bring up WoW, which at this point is the EXCEPTION when it comes to subscriptions, off the top off my head I can already think of Star Wars the Old Republic, The Secret World, and Terra Online that all went free to play, and I know for a fact that the first two went that road after their subscription based pricing for the games did not go well(can't remember if terra had a subscription, I didn't keep up with it when it launched).

And lastly, about F2P in general, I find it odd you only bring up LoL as being the only "successful" F2P game, this just isn't true. Team Fortress 2 is ridiculously popular and they even released the money they've made from their F2P model, Blacklight Retribution is definitely doing well to what I've seen and I'm sure when Dota 2 finally gets out of "beta(It sure doesn't feel like a beta product)" it has a good chance to put LoL in it's place. There's also the fact that World of Tanks, another F2P, as I saw recently, has even more reported players than LoL now.
You have all that and the tons of F2P games in the works like Hawken, World of Warplanes, Path of Exile, even Command and Conquer Generals 2, etc.

So yeah, you are foolish if you think F2P is something that isn't successful and/or is the way the game industry is seriously going.

You simply don't know the F2P market then.

Not to mention most of the games you mentioned there are a one time purchase and then F2P. Your examples are horrible and you should feel horrible.

While I disagree with that guy saying F2P is the only way...a good implemented F2P is now easier to be successful with than a good P2P.


Because if you look at the SUBSCIBTION GAMES (the real P2P) within the last 3 years over 80% (not a made up number) of the big! P2P launches either went free or went down.


Just to give you a few examples of games that had to go free (big ones too) to avoid having to shut down their game...and I will only list the newest ones here.

Tera
Rift
SWTOR
Ragnarok Online (used to be the game with the most players ever)
D&DO
Lord of the Rings
Archlord
Sword of the New World
Rising Force
Everquest 2
Hellgate London -> Relaunch as F2P known under the name Hellgate : Global
Mortal Online

Games up on the list for the soon future:
Age of Conan
Warhammer Online

Those are only the big known ones.... many other games simply had to shut down because they weren't as big to begin with or simply never had the funds

Unfortunately, even if we customers changed our attitude there's no way out for developers. Imagine this was subscription-only product and it launched when it did in state it was. How many renewals do you think would happen on Dec, 20th? For that model to have any chance of success game needed at least three more months; with SOE's track record probably more like six. So either six more months of paying developers and all other people game the size of this one needs or hiring better people. Both means a lot more investment money. Could it still be jackpot for SOE? Yeah, I think it could. Doubt anyone there was willing to risk it though.

One thing is our and maybe even some devs' desire for what a game should be, something completely different is putting your job on the line to see it through. I don't think PS2 is beyond point-of-no-return but I do think gaming industry is. Trend could have probably been stopped five years ago if our reply to "hey, it's free, stop nagging us about quality" was "fine, f* you" but now?

Anyway, nice read, thanks.

It's not the F2P nature of the game that hurts.


PS2 isn't just confident enough to ONLY sell cosmetics.
DotA2, which is the only REAL f2p, as in you unlock 100% of the (gameplay) content from the start, is backed up by a long time loyal playerbase. It just cannot fail.

Instead we get the grindy, silly Certification system which makes absolutely no sense gameplay-wise, but to create artificial progression.

None of them are as big as the ones I said.

Generally MMOs go F2P whenever the playerbase dips so low they'll make more money from some random kids buying stuff in the shop than the subscription fee.

Almost all of the games you said that I know off have been huge failures. And the fact that I don't know about the others is equally bad

You do realize that planetside 2's main feature is huge fights right?

You do also realize that those huge fights derive from population of players right?

You do also realize that the population tripples when you dont have the pay anything right?

Want to know how subbed planetside turns out? go look at the later years of PS1