I would pay 50 USD / month for a top quality game and I believe i am not alone.
Problem of recent P2P games is not the business model, but the fact that they lack quality to be profitable using it.
I disagree that it is an outdated model.
Because you believe because you are paying 50 dollars a month that you are going to get a higher quality experience, it's just not true you are just failing into the scam. it's your money though so i don't really care what you do with it. i know i won't be supporting sub based mmo's ever again.
No, I would be paying the money because I choose to. It's supply and demand. If they offer sufficient quality for which there would be demand at higher price, they would offer it at that price because it would result in higher profits which is the purpose of doing business.
You are not forced to pay that sub, you just have information that there is supply of such product at certain price and you decide whether you want to represent demand for that supply or not.
"Failing into the scam" is like saying you would pay the price because you are stupid...
The problem is they ARE NOT offering suffienct quality to justify the subscription money.
I would pay 50 USD / month for a top quality game and I believe i am not alone.
Problem of recent P2P games is not the business model, but the fact that they lack quality to be profitable using it.
I disagree that it is an outdated model.
Because you believe because you are paying 50 dollars a month that you are going to get a higher quality experience, it's just not true you are just failing into the scam. it's your money though so i don't really care what you do with it. i know i won't be supporting sub based mmo's ever again.
No, I would be paying the money because I choose to. It's supply and demand. If they offer sufficient quality for which there would be demand at higher price, they would offer it at that price because it would result in higher profits which is the purpose of doing business.
You are not forced to pay that sub, you just have information that there is supply of such product at certain price and you decide whether you want to represent demand for that supply or not.
"Failing into the scam" is like saying you would pay the price because you are stupid...
can i really have a logically conversation with a person that is following an mmo that doesn't even exist(titan)..that proves my point.
I would pay 50 USD / month for a top quality game and I believe i am not alone.
Problem of recent P2P games is not the business model, but the fact that they lack quality to be profitable using it.
I disagree that it is an outdated model.
Because you believe because you are paying 50 dollars a month that you are going to get a higher quality experience, it's just not true you are just failing into the scam. it's your money though so i don't really care what you do with it. i know i won't be supporting sub based mmo's ever again.
No, I would be paying the money because I choose to. It's supply and demand. If they offer sufficient quality for which there would be demand at higher price, they would offer it at that price because it would result in higher profits which is the purpose of doing business.
You are not forced to pay that sub, you just have information that there is supply of such product at certain price and you decide whether you want to represent demand for that supply or not.
"Failing into the scam" is like saying you would pay the price because you are stupid...
At least I'm honest about it. When I go back to WOW--and at some point I will--I will pay the sub because I have to not because I think I'm getting more there than in GW2. Why go back? My 2 level 85 characters... just habit. Or nostalgia...or addiction... I'm sure its one of those.
But trust me, I will think long and hard before I ever again buy into any new MMO with a compulsory sub.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
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“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
Originally posted by Istavaan people are just conditioned to think mmo's should have a subscription fee, if you asked someone who hasn't played an mmo what they think about paying 15 dollars a month for a game they already paid 60 dollars for, they'd simple say "are you high"..it's a scam and always has been.
Exactly. We bought into the scam when the infrastructure and bandwith cost a lot of money...but in 2012? Please...
The cost of making, fixing bugs/balancing/etc., and updating these are huge.
So many people here seem to think developers should work for free or someone else should pay for it.
Please......
Stop begging or stop playing.
I don't need to beg i can get an mmo now that has the same quality as an mmo that has a sub, it would be stupid of me to pay for something that i can get for free.
That only being the case because the so called "quality" F2P MMOs were P2P to begin with. Had they been envisioned as F2P from the go, they'd have never been made. And had they been successful, they'd have never been converted to F2P. F2P conversion is a measure of last resort, because all the other alternatives are worse.
Converted games are largely like buying something at the Goodwill store, yes, you can get it for almost nothing, but only because someone else paid for it already and got rid of it.
So techincally, you can sort of have AAA quality in a F2P game, but only after the game tanks.
Expecting AAA games to be "free" out of the gate or think they should be all be free outright is just silly.
GW2 is of the same quality as any sub based mmo so how can you justify a sub when arenanet can give you it for free, yes you may not like gw2 and thats fine, im sure you don't like every sub based mmo either..but they are all the bloody same, same concept just arranged differently.
Well, because GW2 has a full box price, that covers most of the development costs.
Typical F2P games have no box price. Even the so called "good ones" that used to be P2P.
Plus GW2 has a non cosmetic only cash shop, which is another big turn off for some.
I would rather pay a sub fee and have access to everything, than not pay a sub fee and get nickled and dimed to death.
But all that is beside the point, there are damn few games around worth my TIME to play. If a game is worth my time, I don't mind paying a sub for it, if it isn't, having no sub fee won't make me want to play it more.
MMO's are going to have to go to a FTP / BTP model otherwise they won't survive.
In 2001 I started playing MMO's and I happily paid a sub due to the lack of MMO's out there. Not to mention virtually no competition from console or PC. (Wii, smartphones, hand held devices didn't even exist!)
In today's market there are:
- consoles
- PC single player games like Skyrim
- Hand held devices
- dozens of MMO's
- Wii
- Flash games on Face book
- Smart phones / iPad
There are multiple ways for a gamer to get a fix. In the past 3 years I have seen a trend of MMO's being packed for 3 months at launch then dying a quick death. Players won't commit to an MMO long term if there is a sub. There is always a new MMO on the horizon or a new console or game being released.
An MMO needs a lot of population or by its very nature it dies badly. FTP / BTP is the only model that will work going forward and if companies insist on sticking with a sub model, then they have literally set themselves up to fail.
My thread isn't a support thread for FTP / BTP btw. Its about the changing gaming market and how subs are not justifiable anymore.
The reason so many MMO's have not been all that successful is simple. They were mediocre games at best. They had little sustainable gaming elements. They were all pretty much themepark throwaway games and the only way some could stay in business was to go to the F2P model. I do not see EVE going F2P any time soon, or WoW for that matter. I honestly think gamers would pay $20 US sub a month if the game was worth it. Right now there are none that would constitute paying a sub over the standard $14.95 a month. Games whose only hook are raids and PvP BG's that come onto the market post WoW will never be any near as successful as WoW. Thus the reason we see so many that either fold up or go F2P. People get tired of the same-old same-old. Give them something good with sustainable game play elements and they'll be more than happy to pay a monthly fee. Hell, they'd be throwing money at a company saying "Here, take my money!"
How long do most F2P last, usually a couple of months and they're dead. I would rather pay a monthly sub than having an MMO that is just there to cash in and start over with a new MMO every other month. Because that's how Asian MMO play now, you play them a couple of months and the servers shut down.
Originally posted by Istavaan The subscription model is dead, some people don't like change but any new mmo that releases with a subscription is just asking for failure. if you were business savy at all you could see this changing climate.
if your going f2p b2p whats the point in going mmo then? be easier+safer just to make a "single player" game and charge for dlc's.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Players won't commit to an MMO long term if there is a sub. There is always a new MMO on the horizon or a new console or game being released.
Your thread makes no sense you know that, players are far more committed to P2P games than to F2P.
What F2P does is allow you to jump from game to game without making any investment and the inclusion of a cash shop means that people bail F2P rather fast because the higher-end stuff tends to be completely cash shop based.
Someone linked a video of F2P in China, where there are no P2P, they last a couple of months and they get shut down.
The problem is they ARE NOT offering suffienct quality to justify the subscription money.
Some yes, the old one mostly. The new one then yeah i agree with you they do not offer the gameplay (not just the quality). Now if you dont like a game, that doesnt mean it doesnt offer the quality who justify the sub, it just mean this game is not for you.
MMO's are going to have to go to a FTP / BTP model otherwise they won't survive.
In 2001 I started playing MMO's and I happily paid a sub due to the lack of MMO's out there. Not to mention virtually no competition from console or PC. (Wii, smartphones, hand held devices didn't even exist!)
In today's market there are:
- consoles
- PC single player games like Skyrim
- Hand held devices
- dozens of MMO's
- Wii
- Flash games on Face book
- Smart phones / iPad
There are multiple ways for a gamer to get a fix. In the past 3 years I have seen a trend of MMO's being packed for 3 months at launch then dying a quick death. Players won't commit to an MMO long term if there is a sub. There is always a new MMO on the horizon or a new console or game being released.
An MMO needs a lot of population or by its very nature it dies badly. FTP / BTP is the only model that will work going forward and if companies insist on sticking with a sub model, then they have literally set themselves up to fail.
My thread isn't a support thread for FTP / BTP btw. Its about the changing gaming market and how subs are not justifiable anymore.
In old days you had playstation 2 instead of 3, PC single games like Morrowind instead of skyrim, MMO's like UO, EQ and AC that took time, instead of the quick levelling up to cap that we have now. What we didn't have were colleagues that had zero interest of gaming but play wii, facebook games and stuff on smart phones.
Its not about payment methods because eve online and wow still have a very healthy population, and rift will release their expansion shortly. Swtor and GW2 sold 2+ million copies so its not like people avoided swtor just because it was P2P.
The real problem is that levelling is very quick, and the themepark endgame isn't enough to keep people commited, and it simply doesn't matter what payment method you have if there is no new content to play.
Originally posted by DSWBeef I disagree totally. The reason soo many sub games fail is not due to the model but how they are made. SWTOR, Wow clone, RIFT wow clone at lunch, WAR buggy mess, VG buggy mess, AION grind, TSW no end game. The list goes on and on. Sub will work if the game is unique and not broken.
this +100
Without a sub fee, the companies that make the games must find a way to make that money up...or make the game in much less time. That equates to a loss in quality of game or a Cash Shop that offers game-breaking items.
Box sales of MMOs in particular, typically barely cover the initial development and deployment costs. That's half the reason they HAVE a box sale price instead of just being digital download - some attempt needs to be made to recoup the initial dev costs or you're in the red for literally the first several years of your game's lifespan. The only way around this is using someone else's engine, with relatively generic art assets and very little custom programming. Which is how you get the horde of terrible, terrible F2P games out there.
Ongoing maintenance costs money.
Ongoing development costs money.
Subscriptions provide the ability to forecast your revenue. That means you can accurately plan development time.
F2P systems provide no ability to forecast revenue - additionally, they are a revenue stream that will inherently decrease over time, independent of player retention, unless you either make your game require constant expenditure in the cash shop (angers players and they leave) or constantly flood new items onto the market (only extends the timeframe for revenue stream degradation, as most players will not continue to buy the new items as they appear).
Basically, if you implement a non-cash shop required F2P game that you intend to continue to develop substantially, you are crippling your game's lifespan. This has been proven in the industry over and over.
So, is the subscription model dead? No. Not at all. It very much has its place - if you're planning on creating an MMO where the game is receiving steady new development and content, as a financial model it's the only one that you can rely on. The move away from subscription-based models for games with ongoing development is one of the most detrimental things we've seen in regards to the quality of upcoming titles, frankly, only beaten out only by the tendency more and more development houses have shown towards removing the carrots or making them ridiculously easy to get.
That being said, F2P systems have their place too - but they typically only work successfully long-term in relatively shallow games. World of Tanks and League of Legends are two of the poster children for this.
Attempting to apply a single financial model to an incredibly broad spread of development models is foolishness at best.
MMO's are going to have to go to a FTP / BTP model otherwise they won't survive.
In 2001 I started playing MMO's and I happily paid a sub due to the lack of MMO's out there. Not to mention virtually no competition from console or PC. (Wii, smartphones, hand held devices didn't even exist!)
In today's market there are:
- consoles
- PC single player games like Skyrim
- Hand held devices
- dozens of MMO's
- Wii
- Flash games on Face book
- Smart phones / iPad
There are multiple ways for a gamer to get a fix. In the past 3 years I have seen a trend of MMO's being packed for 3 months at launch then dying a quick death. Players won't commit to an MMO long term if there is a sub. There is always a new MMO on the horizon or a new console or game being released.
An MMO needs a lot of population or by its very nature it dies badly. FTP / BTP is the only model that will
going forward and if companies insist on sticking with a sub model, then they have literally set themselves up to fail.
My thread isn't a support thread for FTP / BTP btw. Its about the changing gaming market and how subs are not justifiable anymore.
It's strange how we have all these so called "free to play" MMO's out here now but I still play a subscription based game. I like the BTP system much better than the F2P or Cash shop options. But to me all F2P tells me is that the game has faliled and they are looking for a way to hold their heads above water.
I think the real reason there a lack of desire for P2P MMORPG's is because new "MMORPG's" are not MMORPG's....they are dumbed down versions with a much faster, more linear and easier progression. Until they make more complex games that dont play like console games (that dont have a sub), even if a sub is charged, not many will pay it. But that doesnt mean gamers wouldnt pay a sub...it just means that standards for subbed games is not up to par currently.
I dont think it is outdated so much as, its not doing what it should be doing for the vast majority of the market. There are only a few games around anymore that actually provde anything that can really be justified with a subscription such as bug fixes, adding content, providing proper customer support, etc.. Too many of them just remain stagnant for too long with major bugs going unfixed, promised features not being implemented, and no new content being added.
WAR is such a perfect example of that. The game was great in some ways, and I enjoyed the PvP immensely. But they ran the game so terribly. Not only was the performance / optimization of the game extremely bad, it also had a ton of major bugs, some of which still to this day have not been fixed. They also had severe balance issues, which again they still have not managed to resolve. On top of that it launched without 2 of the classes which were supposed to be in (even though they were nothing more than mirrors of already existing classes on opposite factions, nothing new that required extensive work), those came a couple months after. It also launched with only 2 of 6 promised racial capital cities. They spent the next like 2 years continuing to promise they were getting added, then finally admitted theyre never going to add them. Also forts, which were supposed to be a big deal, were so severely broken (sometimes causing entire servers to come crashing down) that rather than fixing them they simply removed them from the game for nearly 2 years as well.
On top of its major problems, they also only ever made 1 major content addition, the Land of the Dead, which IIRC came out somewhere between 6 months to a year after launch. No real content has been aded besides that. In fact theyve actually made the majority of the content obsolete through changes to rewards and driving the game into a Renown Rank grind forcing players to avoid any XP gain whenever possible. As it is now, they may as well simply remove nearly all of the PvE content and just have the game be RvR lakes connected together.
All this time, they still continue charging $15 a month as well as charging IIRC $20 for the RvR pack which is required to get to RR 100. Without the RvR pack and the RR 90-100 gear, youre severely gimped in endgame PvP.
WAR is just 1 example of this type of crap, but many similar types of things have been happening in other games as well. Yet all of them still continue charging full sub prices for providing broken games lacking content they were supposed to have.
If game companies werent pulling so much of this crap, many of us would have much less of a problem with the sub model. But its become the norm for the indursty to provide inferior games and still charge full price.
I disagree. There method that seems best, at least outside straight P2P is actually Freemium which offers a sub option with all the trimmings. Right now that has shown to be one of the best models. Going straight F2P means if you really want to play the game, your going to be paying a lot more for the same experience then a monthly subscription, and B2P often times will do the very same, likely more considering the model often involves actively buying expansions, with the core game itself less likely to ever drop in price to attract new players all to much.
The sub model disapearing would mean anyone really into an MMo would end up paying more for a game to have even a chance of staying in the loop. As nice as it would be to have F2P offering only cosmetics as their only source of income, they would quickly drain their bank accounts trying to support an MMO like that. Freemium at least give an option for people who like the game to pay for it without needing to shell out rediculous amounts of cash for the same experience.
You know what I have noticed in games that make the switch to F2P? I have noticed that most of the time, perhaps not always but most of the time they simply stop giving you those little freebie things during holiday events. Lineage 2 used to do this all the time, give you all sorts of odds and ends during events but when they went f2p the events became, "buy a "box 'o crap" for 50% off. Basically you can get your holiday goodies or at least most of them by buying them. Weeeee.
Sorry I would still rather pay a simple $10 a month, (multi month subber) and simply get some extras at holiday times rather than getting nickled and dimed. Sure, the stuff is usually junk and i don't need it either way but the fact is you are going to pay in some manner or another if you play online games. I prefer to pay a predictable amount each month.
sub models will never disappear. Why? because some of us simply prefer them and someone will always be willing to provide the service that will fill that market need.
There are multiple ways for a gamer to get a fix. In the past 3 years I have seen a trend of MMO's being packed for 3 months at launch then dying a quick death. Players won't commit to an MMO long term if there is a sub. There is always a new MMO on the horizon or a new console or game being released.
That doesn't make sense.
If all mmo's had subs then hopping to a new game that also has a sub wouldn't change anything.
Besides, the reason these games are only holding their audience for a few months is that they only have a few months of content and then players have to wait for the next influx. This is a problem that is indicative of theme park mmo's.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
Cash Shops at their core undermine the very nature of what an MMORPG is. I am firmly of the belief that you start with nothing and if it's something you want, you go out and get it. If you can't go out and get it, you find other people who will go out and get it and you can buy it with gold you earned in the game. If you can't find someone who can/will sell what you want, you find other people who also want what you want and you all go out together and get it. Cash Shops destroy this concept. Even if there is something in the shop that you can get, in game through game play but someone else doesn't have to get it now because it's in the shop, well guess what? Now there are that many less players who will work with you to get what you want. I absolutely despise Cash Shops, I quit my favorite game of all time (Anarchy Online) because of it. A game that could have been revived is now a dead shell of it's former self. Not to mention they want a sub along with the shop. Nope Never doing that one again.
It's a non-issue to me; I pay 160 USD once every 2 years for my game of choice, and I am totally satisfied with it. As I only have to think about payment once every couple of years the game basically feels like it's free, and I don't have to put up with any of that cash shop or free area nonsense. One world, one 'verse, one love. I'll keep playing as long as the ship keeps sailing.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Authored 139 missions in VendettaOnline and 6 tracks in Distance
Really? They need to go B2P or F2P? It has nothing to do with the fact that all the new games are just the same ones over and over? And the fact that they now make whats called "end game" which equals repeating the same damn raid/dungeons over and over until they are easy to repeat with all the gear you unlocked while completing them.... no it couldn't be that... people hate playing new games!!! BRING ON MORE OF THE SAME AND BLAME THE PAYMENT MODEL!!!!
Comments
The problem is they ARE NOT offering suffienct quality to justify the subscription money.
can i really have a logically conversation with a person that is following an mmo that doesn't even exist(titan)..that proves my point.
At least I'm honest about it. When I go back to WOW--and at some point I will--I will pay the sub because I have to not because I think I'm getting more there than in GW2. Why go back? My 2 level 85 characters... just habit. Or nostalgia...or addiction... I'm sure its one of those.
But trust me, I will think long and hard before I ever again buy into any new MMO with a compulsory sub.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Well, because GW2 has a full box price, that covers most of the development costs.
Typical F2P games have no box price. Even the so called "good ones" that used to be P2P.
Plus GW2 has a non cosmetic only cash shop, which is another big turn off for some.
I would rather pay a sub fee and have access to everything, than not pay a sub fee and get nickled and dimed to death.
But all that is beside the point, there are damn few games around worth my TIME to play. If a game is worth my time, I don't mind paying a sub for it, if it isn't, having no sub fee won't make me want to play it more.
The reason so many MMO's have not been all that successful is simple. They were mediocre games at best. They had little sustainable gaming elements. They were all pretty much themepark throwaway games and the only way some could stay in business was to go to the F2P model. I do not see EVE going F2P any time soon, or WoW for that matter. I honestly think gamers would pay $20 US sub a month if the game was worth it. Right now there are none that would constitute paying a sub over the standard $14.95 a month. Games whose only hook are raids and PvP BG's that come onto the market post WoW will never be any near as successful as WoW. Thus the reason we see so many that either fold up or go F2P. People get tired of the same-old same-old. Give them something good with sustainable game play elements and they'll be more than happy to pay a monthly fee. Hell, they'd be throwing money at a company saying "Here, take my money!"
You stay sassy!
F2P already die.
How long do most F2P last, usually a couple of months and they're dead. I would rather pay a monthly sub than having an MMO that is just there to cash in and start over with a new MMO every other month. Because that's how Asian MMO play now, you play them a couple of months and the servers shut down.
if your going f2p b2p whats the point in going mmo then? be easier+safer just to make a "single player" game and charge for dlc's.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Your thread makes no sense you know that, players are far more committed to P2P games than to F2P.
What F2P does is allow you to jump from game to game without making any investment and the inclusion of a cash shop means that people bail F2P rather fast because the higher-end stuff tends to be completely cash shop based.
Someone linked a video of F2P in China, where there are no P2P, they last a couple of months and they get shut down.
Some yes, the old one mostly. The new one then yeah i agree with you they do not offer the gameplay (not just the quality). Now if you dont like a game, that doesnt mean it doesnt offer the quality who justify the sub, it just mean this game is not for you.
In old days you had playstation 2 instead of 3, PC single games like Morrowind instead of skyrim, MMO's like UO, EQ and AC that took time, instead of the quick levelling up to cap that we have now. What we didn't have were colleagues that had zero interest of gaming but play wii, facebook games and stuff on smart phones.
Its not about payment methods because eve online and wow still have a very healthy population, and rift will release their expansion shortly. Swtor and GW2 sold 2+ million copies so its not like people avoided swtor just because it was P2P.
The real problem is that levelling is very quick, and the themepark endgame isn't enough to keep people commited, and it simply doesn't matter what payment method you have if there is no new content to play.
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this +100
Without a sub fee, the companies that make the games must find a way to make that money up...or make the game in much less time. That equates to a loss in quality of game or a Cash Shop that offers game-breaking items.
Box sales of MMOs in particular, typically barely cover the initial development and deployment costs. That's half the reason they HAVE a box sale price instead of just being digital download - some attempt needs to be made to recoup the initial dev costs or you're in the red for literally the first several years of your game's lifespan. The only way around this is using someone else's engine, with relatively generic art assets and very little custom programming. Which is how you get the horde of terrible, terrible F2P games out there.
Ongoing maintenance costs money.
Ongoing development costs money.
Subscriptions provide the ability to forecast your revenue. That means you can accurately plan development time.
F2P systems provide no ability to forecast revenue - additionally, they are a revenue stream that will inherently decrease over time, independent of player retention, unless you either make your game require constant expenditure in the cash shop (angers players and they leave) or constantly flood new items onto the market (only extends the timeframe for revenue stream degradation, as most players will not continue to buy the new items as they appear).
Basically, if you implement a non-cash shop required F2P game that you intend to continue to develop substantially, you are crippling your game's lifespan. This has been proven in the industry over and over.
So, is the subscription model dead? No. Not at all. It very much has its place - if you're planning on creating an MMO where the game is receiving steady new development and content, as a financial model it's the only one that you can rely on. The move away from subscription-based models for games with ongoing development is one of the most detrimental things we've seen in regards to the quality of upcoming titles, frankly, only beaten out only by the tendency more and more development houses have shown towards removing the carrots or making them ridiculously easy to get.
That being said, F2P systems have their place too - but they typically only work successfully long-term in relatively shallow games. World of Tanks and League of Legends are two of the poster children for this.
Attempting to apply a single financial model to an incredibly broad spread of development models is foolishness at best.
It's strange how we have all these so called "free to play" MMO's out here now but I still play a subscription based game. I like the BTP system much better than the F2P or Cash shop options. But to me all F2P tells me is that the game has faliled and they are looking for a way to hold their heads above water.
I dont think it is outdated so much as, its not doing what it should be doing for the vast majority of the market. There are only a few games around anymore that actually provde anything that can really be justified with a subscription such as bug fixes, adding content, providing proper customer support, etc.. Too many of them just remain stagnant for too long with major bugs going unfixed, promised features not being implemented, and no new content being added.
WAR is such a perfect example of that. The game was great in some ways, and I enjoyed the PvP immensely. But they ran the game so terribly. Not only was the performance / optimization of the game extremely bad, it also had a ton of major bugs, some of which still to this day have not been fixed. They also had severe balance issues, which again they still have not managed to resolve. On top of that it launched without 2 of the classes which were supposed to be in (even though they were nothing more than mirrors of already existing classes on opposite factions, nothing new that required extensive work), those came a couple months after. It also launched with only 2 of 6 promised racial capital cities. They spent the next like 2 years continuing to promise they were getting added, then finally admitted theyre never going to add them. Also forts, which were supposed to be a big deal, were so severely broken (sometimes causing entire servers to come crashing down) that rather than fixing them they simply removed them from the game for nearly 2 years as well.
On top of its major problems, they also only ever made 1 major content addition, the Land of the Dead, which IIRC came out somewhere between 6 months to a year after launch. No real content has been aded besides that. In fact theyve actually made the majority of the content obsolete through changes to rewards and driving the game into a Renown Rank grind forcing players to avoid any XP gain whenever possible. As it is now, they may as well simply remove nearly all of the PvE content and just have the game be RvR lakes connected together.
All this time, they still continue charging $15 a month as well as charging IIRC $20 for the RvR pack which is required to get to RR 100. Without the RvR pack and the RR 90-100 gear, youre severely gimped in endgame PvP.
WAR is just 1 example of this type of crap, but many similar types of things have been happening in other games as well. Yet all of them still continue charging full sub prices for providing broken games lacking content they were supposed to have.
If game companies werent pulling so much of this crap, many of us would have much less of a problem with the sub model. But its become the norm for the indursty to provide inferior games and still charge full price.
I disagree. There method that seems best, at least outside straight P2P is actually Freemium which offers a sub option with all the trimmings. Right now that has shown to be one of the best models. Going straight F2P means if you really want to play the game, your going to be paying a lot more for the same experience then a monthly subscription, and B2P often times will do the very same, likely more considering the model often involves actively buying expansions, with the core game itself less likely to ever drop in price to attract new players all to much.
The sub model disapearing would mean anyone really into an MMo would end up paying more for a game to have even a chance of staying in the loop. As nice as it would be to have F2P offering only cosmetics as their only source of income, they would quickly drain their bank accounts trying to support an MMO like that. Freemium at least give an option for people who like the game to pay for it without needing to shell out rediculous amounts of cash for the same experience.
You know what I have noticed in games that make the switch to F2P? I have noticed that most of the time, perhaps not always but most of the time they simply stop giving you those little freebie things during holiday events. Lineage 2 used to do this all the time, give you all sorts of odds and ends during events but when they went f2p the events became, "buy a "box 'o crap" for 50% off. Basically you can get your holiday goodies or at least most of them by buying them. Weeeee.
Sorry I would still rather pay a simple $10 a month, (multi month subber) and simply get some extras at holiday times rather than getting nickled and dimed. Sure, the stuff is usually junk and i don't need it either way but the fact is you are going to pay in some manner or another if you play online games. I prefer to pay a predictable amount each month.
sub models will never disappear. Why? because some of us simply prefer them and someone will always be willing to provide the service that will fill that market need.
All die, so die well.
I disagree, I would still prefer a sub for a game, however I would like a trial period before having to commit to anything.
Also, if a game has a sub there should not be a cash shop.
Originally posted by Arskaaa
"when players learned tacticks in dungeon/raids, its bread".
That doesn't make sense.
If all mmo's had subs then hopping to a new game that also has a sub wouldn't change anything.
Besides, the reason these games are only holding their audience for a few months is that they only have a few months of content and then players have to wait for the next influx. This is a problem that is indicative of theme park mmo's.
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Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
OP: I'm sorry but back in the real world, you are 100% wrong.
WoW has 10 million subs and is still the most successful mmo ever made.
It has lost more subs then most mmo's ever dream of having (even f2p ones) and still has 10 million to spare 8 yrs later.
When I wake up, the real nightmare begins
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
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