PS2 officially going P2W?

I think PS2 is making enough money to sustain itself because there is barely content being released but just some balance patches and new weapons. I also think they want more money to fund their upcoming games. I agree with you there.

But I don't think this game is doing fine. I think it is on the backburner now for at least 6 months and they are trying to squeeze as much money out of it as fast they can before it's gone.

Look at the numbers:
http://borderlinetactical.net/rsnc/world-population/?world_id=0&zoom=4&totalpop=true
http://sirisian.com/planetside2/population.php?world=all&timezone=0

This game has less then 10.000 daily peak players.
For reference you can compare those numbers to:
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

Keep in mind this is a mmo which are supposed to have more people playing due to the cost of servers and what not.
A mmo having less then 200.000 subscribers (monthly paying customers) is consider to be doing poorly. I doubt PS2 has that many subscribers let alone people logging in including those who pay nothing.

People relax. If it would be something like mentioned. 10 nanites for 1 SC. 1 MBT for €4,50 gg
It's like the price of the chargers and implants, I don't think it will effect the game a lot. You will have 10 people on a server that are able to buy nanites in a number that they could play a MBT forever. Does that bother you that much?
When they start selling full cert lines etc for SC I will join the cry.

I don't believe this is going to get them all the monnies they want though. TV commercials and stuff like that would attract more new players, which will attract more players because more people. A lot of them will spend money on the game even if it is only a couple of bucks. That would make them a lot more than this change.

I would like to agree to the very first two posters in this thread:

Yes, it's going P2Win but we already have slippery "convenience" and boost items ingame that are not too different.

The ongoing monetization efforts ("every new mechanics must have something people can pay for!!11!!1!") are quite disturbing.

How to boil a frog? - heat the water slowly.

That's how F2P games do their monetization, yeah.

While I echo most people's sentiments here about this idea being too far into the P2W camp, there is something else SOE might consider for revenue.

Has anyone else held off buying station cash in hope of a sale? I have something like 550 left, not enough for most things, but I am reluctant to top it up in case the next holiday there is a SC sale. (Apologies if its already been announced no more SC sales as SOE policy.)

I built my PC because of accidentally finding a PS2 clip on YouTube and have only ever bought SC on sales (after buying Alpha Squad), but in 3 big bulk buys. I have spent over £100 in SC approximately. More than any other game, never mind a F2P game!

There is a company in my country called DFS who have figured it out! There is ALWAYS a sale on. They never stop shouting about it. I doubt anyone has ever bought something from them at "full price" but you still can't help but feel you've gotten a bargain. Perhaps if there was a Sale Roadmap added (not in game pop-ups) then we could look forward to dates to drop some smedbucks comfortably, knowing we weren't jumping the gun on a sale.

You could use national events/holidays as usual if you liked. I think it is no small coincidence that tomorrow is National: Get To Know Your Customer Day!

Actually, throwing a frog into boiling water will kill it almost instantly, but the metaphor is still fun to use.

They've said they won't do SC sales again, but you're right that their marketting in that direction is now pretty poor (or in somecases basically non-existant - look at the 4th of July "event").

Certainly Steam must get a LOT of its revenue from its sale items (it certainly gets a LOT from me - I've even bought games I already own if they were cheap enough - in one case a GOTY edition on Steam I already owned off-Steam that I had already had the vannilla version of on-Steam )....... everyone likes a bargin in the end!




I think they are after the "golden goose" in some sort of no work "pay...pay...pay" mechanic, but I don't think such a thing exists or even can exist (if you create one it simply kills the game/goose), rather you've got to work and be innovative for your $$$'s.

Again, in the short-term at least, making everything buyable with SC would likely raise sales of SC (if they need the cash).

F2P Do's for raising revenue:

1. Allow players to buy advanced positions for cash.

This doesn't change game play it just changes an individual players experience of game play. It doesn't help players dominate unless they have the skill to do it anyway and most of those players will be dominating very quickly anyway as they initially cert out their weapons. It does keep new players from being total rag dolls. Win-win.

2. Put good additional content out as DLC's for paying customers.

Whatever the content is if it makes the game better then it's worth paying for on a one time basis.

3. Make good optional equipment and cosmetics available for cash.

As long as the optional stuff does not change the power levels vs what you can grind for you're golden. Players who have cash to spend on luxuries do that and players who do not don't. Win-win.

F2P Don'ts for raising revenue:

1. Anything that changes the pace of the game such that paying players are given an advantage that can only be achieved by buying the item(s) in question.

This would include buying nanites which let you endlessly spawn vehicles and refresh consumables at a much faster rate than non-paying customers. If it is a minor increase in the rate that nanites refresh it is not significantly changing the pace of the game for people as they play. If it is an outright purchase then it will have a large effect on the pace of the game, both for the players and for their opponents, and it should not be allowed.

2. Anything that changes the physics of the game such that paying players are given an advantage that can only be achieved by buying the item(s) in question.

This would be super-powered weapons, vehicles, consumables, etc, that are only available to paying customers.

3. Anything that changes the access to the main game such that paying players are able to access the game at times that F2P players cannot.

This would be long queues for F2P players to login to a battlefield somewhere in the game. Having F2P players directed to a specific battlefield based on zone pop is acceptable but locking them out of the game entirely due to F2P status is not.

Just my 2 cents on the question at hand. If you're going to run an F2P game that relies on voluntary contributions to prosper then let people buy advanced positions in the game. Don't let them buy a play advantage that is unavailable to F2P players.

The develoeprs seem to have quieted down in the roadmap thread so there's no point in talking about it there. (Also, twelve pages of facts mixed with theory is hard to digest.)

I came up with an idea about how to get around what I perceived as a "pay to get around the system" aspect of purchasing nanites for their personal pool, though I am certain other people can do better. The short of it is debt.

A longer explanation is thus: purchased nanites count towards the player's personal nanite pool and toward's a player's debt, the former of which is using for resupplying and spawning and regenerates from the normal resource ticks, the latter of which is a persistent value that must be paid off by extracting resources from the most local base's nanite supply. Since the normal resources tick distributes resources from the base's supply anyway, there are two ways to proceed from here. The first is that the debt extra value is just that -- an extra value that must be paid off in addition to the player's personal resource pool being increased, e.g., the player gains 60 nanites and his debt is reduced by 60, with 120 resources having been extracted form the base. The second is that the debt must be paid off before the player begins gaining nanites again, e.g., the player's debt is reduced by 60, with 60 resources having been extracted from the base. The player can, of course, purchase more nanites for their personal pool, but that of course incurs more debt.

This follows the same theory that a classic Vehicle zerg will create a tremendous strain on the base's immediate power and resource supply by buying lots of stuff at once under the resource revamp mechanics. Purchased nanites, in the same way, strain the normal resource logistics within the game on a local base to base level but still leave the individual player(s) mostly free to reap the benefits of the purchased nanites. The ideal - a player with full resources does not burden a base's supply - and the normal - a player with "not full" resources exerts some burden on a base's supply - are both respected by this "less than ideal" debt mechanic.

Seriously though.
I played Forsaken World from Perfect World Entertainment
It was P2W.
Quite expensive too.
This game is far from P2W.
Far from it.

Arena style game.
I'm talking about MMO F2P games, which today includes about 98% of all MMO type games.

Just like with implants, I don't (yet?) know what the problem is.
Sure, if they make the resources refill slow as fk, yeah. I agree.
I feared bad things when they introduced implants accompanied by chargers. They could have made chargers extremely rare, and small capacity. As a result, only paying users could have used them to the fullest extent.
Instead, chargers get thrown after me like bullets, I'm swimming in them, and yet they increase their capacity, making all my ultra chargers...ultra chargers. Which I acquire easily without sc or certs.

Long story short, yes, they do have the option to mess the resource system up really bad to milk the players. But taking a look at their history, they made it more than fair when they introduced implants. You hardly have any advantage over non-paying players. Both can use them pretty much indefinitely plus even if you don't use one it hardly makes any remotely significant difference. People who compare this company and their product to blizzard's d3 seem to have forgotten that.
So yeah...voice your concern, make sure to let them know you don't want p2w. But there's no reason to put on your tinfoil hats.

Some people would have us believe that the majority of players are going to go buy resource refills the second they run out
and that simply isn't going to happen.

With my paid sub I will have more than enough to pull a vehicle /consumables when ever I need them and if I find myself short
somehow I will .... just wait. (BTW I always have SC in my account)

Alot of what I'm reading here is just free players unfortunately being reminded that there are benefits to having a paid sub or having access to SC.

This is my perspective too, and I see many others have posted similar sentiments.

PS2's gameplay has been screaming out for the Resource Revamp and all the improvements it brings - lowering vehicle / consumable spam, helping the outnumbered side in fights, discouraging zergs, creating new strategic depth and objectives etc.

To simultaneously tout the benefits of this system yet consider allowing players to completely avoid it by paying is utterly dismaying.

That would undermine the whole system and we'd have to start adding a bunch of qualifiers to those benefits. The Revamp will mean less mindless spam - unless you encounter paying players and then it's worse than it is now. Destroying enemy assets will feel more rewarding - unless the enemy just buys another one. Strategy will matter more - unless you pay and then it doesn't matter if you're cut off or if the enemy prevent resources from getting to your base.

This would be like redesigning the hex system to lattice and then asking whether players would be okay with paying to attack any base they like, regardless of circumstance.


I'm not really worried SOE will do it because of the sheer amount of negative feedback. I'm just staggered it was considered (or, at least, that it was taken seriously enough to be voiced to players).

-Players want less spam, and more tactical and strategic gameplay.
-Players want an endless amount of vehicles and consumables.

You're not going to reconcile these views.

The best thing you can do to generate income is make a quality gameplay experience. For that reason, you should be picking the former. If people are reluctant to pay adding more monetization methods that damage gameplay mechanics does nothing but put them off even more.


It's bad enough that we have resource boosts, which are the closest PS2 is to P2W. The only reason people haven't been complaining about those is because the placeholder resource system barely limited F2P players anyway. With the new, more restrictive system the power of boosts will be more noticeable. We haven't even seen the effects in-game yet and people are already asking whether this pushes boosts into unacceptable P2W levels.* Such comments are gradually cropping up more and more.

As others have said, at least that system is still vulnerable to the same tactical and strategic concerns. If you die one too many times in a short space of time you're still out of resources. And you may get double the resource rate but if that income is low or zero you still can't use much / anything.

Selling "power-ups" is one of the worst types of F2P. Selling tanks and aircraft at a faster rate is very unfortunate; it encroaches on P2W and if there were any good alternatives I'd love to see SOE withdraw from that front. Selling an infinite amount that bypasses in-game restrictions everyone else is subject to is clearly crossing a line.



*SOE, you spend all this time making sure a fully certed player gains very moderate benefits in most cases, 10% here and there, maybe 30% total on any particular item. Multiple people in this thread have mentioned that they actually praise you for being so conservative (both given the competition and the limited affect it has on determining the winner in a battle) and try to convince players that PS2 is not one of those P2W titles.

Yet, when it comes to vehicles - far, far more powerful force multipliers - it's not small increases, it's either 50% more access, or 100% more access. That's like comparing a gain of 20% more radius on a single grenade explosion to throwing 2 grenades instead of 1.

Personally, I wonder how much of a hit you'd actually take for lowering the resource benefits to more reasonable levels, say 15%-30% for membership (down from 25%-50%) and 25% for a boost. Would it even be an amount worth quibbling over? Could the loss be mitigated by players that welcome a concerted effort to keep PS2 away from P2W concerns?

And could it actually be more beneficial to the game in the long run, after the major content changes and word of mouth goes around about how much the experience of PS2 has changed / is finally living up to its potential, with mindful balance as a bonus? SOE stuck to their anti-P2W line and actually reduced the gap between free and paid players.

That's it exactly.

If they could provide new players with an upgrade in every slot, so the only thing they could buy were side grades, then that system would be excellent!

As you say, even without that it would be less worse than buying resources and the impact that would have on balance.

The unfortunate part of that is server transfer, name change etc. are all slow burners (which fits with a F2P game trying to last years). Since they don't generate much money, it would have made sense to put them in ASAP to make sure they were worth the time to add. Yes, it means putting off some other content, but it will never be a great time to do it - at least earlier on that stuff was in the Roadmap and people were saying they're good ideas. Now they'll just say it's late.

Now the best time to do it would be right before the PS4 release (or immediately afterwards but you never know what delays/problems might push other stuff back).

It's interesting that PS1 had the same issue.

Whenever the topic of making the PS2 subscription - now all access - "worth the cost" is raised, I've always wondered why the reflexive question is "What can we add to it?". The simple fact is it's difficult to think of ideas and many don't even like the resource gain. Instead of struggling to convince players the small benefits are worth a usual sub price, why not try a really cheap sub price?

Temporary 33%/40%/50% sale on PS2 subscription and see whether you make more or less money (don't forget, if you reach people that previously didn't think it was worthwhile they may also spend some SC with the 10% discount). Of course, that's more difficult now that it's all access. [And that's another thing, that change added zero value to players that don't play any other SOE games.]


P2P models can justify their charges because that's the only way to play the game. F2P focuses on small payments over time, added to that SOE's desire to avoid pay-to-win, or sectioning off content etc. means you inherently don't have much left over to offer for a monthly sub.

Instead of fighting that problem, make it your selling point! Under-cut your rivals and point out that you're deliberately keeping the gap between paid and free players small. And reduce that resource gain from 25%-50%, to 15%-30% while you're at it.

When the game is given away for free it's all about making players feel that they really should cough up and pay something because you're being so generous. However, if the prices look the same as P2P or B2P they start asking themselves why not save the money for those games which they otherwise wouldn't be able to play at all. As long as you undercut them and keep it low enough that people think "damn, that's a great deal" or, for SC items, so low they barely hesitate at all, people will gladly pay to keep the game alive. And then tell all their friends how cheap it is and how fair the gap between free and paid players is.

What's wrong with pay-to-play? Nobody seems to be willing to discuss the idea of a proven model that isn't so freaking complicated to sort out. With F2P, there are enough ways to draw the line that it takes a U.N. committee to sort them all out. Listening to the community just makes it worse. At some point, everything becomes noise level and above that is dead air. We don't know what we want until the devs put something in the game we don't like.

I had no problem paying $15/mo for PS1. I would have no problem paying $15/mo for PS2, as long as there was ZERO SC goodies. You either get the game or you don't. Devs get to focus on tuning the game, not trying to find the sweet spot in the revenue stream through trial and error. If I were Higby, I'd hit somebody. Jerking the dev track around in search of the market is like driving to Amazon to pick up your order. Make the game you know in your heart is great and find a market for it. Trying to adapt to the current hot market is like chasing smoke with a butterfly net. Games like PS2 don't make money by being hot. They make money by being different. You're not EA, get over it. You're not EA, thank the gods. Take your pick.

And for all of you online gaming business experts who are going to say subscription based gaming is a dead model, you need to talk to the 32,000 + pilots on Eve this weekend.

1 MBT = 540 nanites currently = 54SC = $0.54

My bad, added a 0 :$