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Marketing Idea
loudermp
Member Posts: 20
Let me start by stating FFXIV is graphically the most beautiful game to date and I have not played it since the beta, but I think the game needs to change its marketing skim to buy the game and play for free, I favor this marketing which is used for Guild Wars 2 which I currently play, another game to adopt this is The Secret World which I am tempted to try now, I understand FFXIV is at least graphically better looking than these two games that is why I could see it charging more for the game, in a world dominated by free to play games I think this would be a winner marketing wise and they could still make money from a in game and online shops not to mention charging for expansions.
It must be true, I read it on the internet!
PDL
Comments
I dont agree at all, i prefer by far i sub fee. The reason is simple, better customers services, the sub fee prevent the gold seller to screw witht he economics, at least with SE, Final fantasy XI as proven this.
In GW2 customers services suck and the game is plagued with bots and they dont do nothing about it and this. Final fantasy is a pure sub game without cashshop so this is the best option for me.
If someone cant spend 15$ a month for a mmorpg, they can stick witht the F2P or B2P games, that ok but for me 15$ for a game withtout cashshop its perfect.
Now if FFXIV can be a game who will can keep me playing for month i give them my 15$ a month without a blink and i will even give more if it where needed. Time will tell.
I did battle with ignorance today, and ignorance won.
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
I have to say their subscription model (or lack of one) is not the foremost thing in my mind. I was SO very excited about FFXIV when it was announced and then I was so VERY disappointed when I played. I couldn't BELIEVE how bad it was. I have my fingers crossed that when it is released it will be something that the right kind of people want to play.
If the game turns out to be something people want to play THEN we can start arguing over sub vs. B2P.
Oh please, please, let this be successful relaunch. C'mon SE!
Currently Playing: FFXIV:ARR
Looking Forward to: Wildstar
No, it means each and every post above my initial post I can pick apart and show obvious flaws with their reasoning including examples. Judging a payment model entirely because you had a good or bad experience with it previously is foolish.
I did battle with ignorance today, and ignorance won.
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
Wrong informations and flaws in our rersoning? Care to explain what are the wrongs info we give? Obviously you cant cause there is no info in ours post but simply opinions.
Now you say flaws in ours reasoning. Again care to explain it? Do you even have an opinion about F2P and sub games?
Judging a payment model because a good or bad experience is foolish, you say? At least we can have ours own opinions unlike you who just tell us who are foolish but without any reason to back it up....
For example, the number of bots in GW2 was dramatically reduced post-launch, according to both official info and player-made reports. I used to see them all the time, but I haven't seen a single one for months. There are some gold sellers left, but saying the game is "plagued" with bots is an obvious exaggeration and claiming ANet is not doing anything about them is wrong.
I agree some games are better off with a sub, but IMO a sub-based game should have the following:
1) Excellent customer service
2) No or tiny cash shop (like Rift's)
3) Plenty of free updates
Right now, GW2 has actually had more updates than most sub-based games, so B2P looks very tempting. Of course, Square is updating this game for free and I can respect that, but they still need to make the update great and offer solid service afterwards. Just selling a game and asking 15$ a month for almost nothing won't cut it anymore.
But there are "facts" presented, just none of them with any actual number backing them. Op states rather clearly that ARR is the best looking game ever, and that even though this fact means we should probably pay more the environment is dominated by f2p, so it should do that to compete. That is all numbers wise false. In terms of pure number of pixels/effects Aoc clocks in higher than ARR, not to mention Tsw. Also, in the west, while there may be more f2p/b2p titles, Blizzard is still destroying them profit wise, even combined. Now if you want to count the east, you actually run into quite the pickle since traditional payment models do not work there for a number of reasons.
Then you get to Kingkaio, who attempts to state that payment model effects longevity, which you can look to Ao as a solid guideline in the west that f2p does not mean early closure, and even all the way back to "illegal" effectively state run servers for UO in the east that are still oporational to this day that its entirely false.
Then we get to your hilarious post. You certainly have a ton of reasons why that dreaded b2p/f2p model is so terrible. the fact is, poor cs is often the case of poor cs, not an actual money issue. Cs is rarely done in house, and between training times and churn rate (cs is one of the worse jobs in any industry) you often get poorly experienced reps, and they rarely actually care becuase they do not make enough to really put up overly much with your crap. Now I would hazard a guess that you are actually going from the money aspect, as in f2p models do not bring in enough money to actually hire enough reps etc that would generally speaking be false. Actual revenue per user is generally higher than that of a sub game, though not always. Next up you try to assert that subs keep the goldfarmers away, which is hillariously inaccurate. You can still find them in WoW, Eve, Rift, Gw2 etc. The more popular the game, the harder they will work to circumvent things. There for a long time the FBI actually even had stolen wow accounts marked as worth more money than stolen credit cards on the black market. Sub price does not matter to those people.
The Epic1oots has the audacity to say all f2p games suck, when I highly doubt he has tried all of them, or even close to half of them to be able to even get close to that blanket of a statement. Then goes on to applaud using a sub model as a great way to KEEP PLAYERS FROM PLAYING YOUR GAME. Which from both a design and business perspective is simply stupid. A designer designs things so it will be played, and enjoyed. Even making a niche game, you still want everyone within that niche to enjoy your game, and hopefully some from outside it to dive in also.
Hence my statement. I am truly glad that the players have no actual say in this. Not that just slapping on a cash shop and saying come on in would be anywhere near successful anyway. You still need to design around that fact. You have to make sure drop rates are where you need them to be (LOL Gw2!) and the shop actually has things in it that people want (LOL Tsw) and you need to make sure that players do not feel forced to buy store products to effectively branch out and compete (LOL Ps2).
I did battle with ignorance today, and ignorance won.
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
F2P options normally cost you more in the long run to be competitive or to play with better equipment to play end game content. GW2 system is an entirely different system to the f2p model and relies soley on grind and gem shop/gold or should I say money/gem - gold exchange And how many players spent over $50 on chests during the halloween event and never got any halloween related items? a lot. Arenanet uses the player phsycology of I want it now by using a very unforgiving RNG to make lots of money.
Subscription for me is better, and my experience with SE is that they produce some good quality content updates, It also puts everyone on a fair level playing field with game experience. SE are good with the GM's and will always appear in pretty good time if they are called upon. You try and call a GM in most other f2p games, it can take days for anyone to respond to a reported issue.
There is a bad stigma attached to cash shops and they can produce discrimination amongst players in some games. Lets face it, the price of the subscription cost no more than a happy meal every month, great bang for your buck imo.
The real test for Gw2 is going to come with the q2 financials. The store has to be insanely popular to even cover basic upkeep. A single programer costs upwards of $10k per month, and last I heard they employ roughly 40. I mean I would not be surprised if it was just enough "new content" canned pre release and the like just to drive holiday sales.
I did battle with ignorance today, and ignorance won.
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
Yes, I'm interested to see what happens next. You have to keep in mind that people are still buying GW2. It never left Amazon's Best Selling PC Games list, for example. I think it's always been in top 10 up there. ANet is also hiring, so they seem pretty confident.
GW2 is the flagship B2P title, so at least we'll see lots of interesting forum conversations if it suddenly fails and ANet has to lay half of its staff off. On the other hand, if it does succeed it may actually change something, since it's higher-profile than GW1 was and a real MMO.
There are multiple reasons why XIV ARR will never go F2P.
1. A large junk of players will not be buying the game. It is a free update to previous owners of the game, so sale rev will primarly be coming from the new PS3 players and PC players who want to give it another go.
2. Their P2P has worked for FFxi for almost 11 years now i dont see why they would change it up no.
3. If XIV gets as popular as XI did then we will be seeing many updates and expansions. And if they did f2p like TSW then you would be paying each month for updates and square doesnt want that.
4. Constant DLC packs make a player fill obligated where if you pay 15 buck it just fills like your continueing your service each month and they keep giving you product in return.
To be the best, you must help each other become the best.
FFXI Character: Satimasu
FFXI Server: Valefor
FFXIV Character: Tamorae Fonteil
I'd have to say what SE has already done to basically remake FFXIV almost entirely over the past 2 years is more than enough to warrant the "worth our while" quote! And many of the changes are due to listening to the community through official polls and our requests on their forums.
The future of XIV is to become only better with Yoshida-san at the helm...
Absolutely.
To be the best, you must help each other become the best.
FFXI Character: Satimasu
FFXI Server: Valefor
FFXIV Character: Tamorae Fonteil
Yeah, I would definitely say every post that preceeded Jimdandy26's contained nothing more than gross hyperbole that failed to acknowledge any of the pros or cons of any of the payment models they praised or criticized.
83 bullet points for improvements that was fedback from testers, Yoshi is taking players seriously and respects their views.
I hope this game never becomes free to play. There are still many games that have a subscription to play the games and an expensive item shop. A game that is free to play like secret world has big problems. If you ever want to see the problems look at the forums. Just by looking at several posts I found the game worse than FFXIV 1.0. I understand now why they went B2P. The samething happened with many other games.
Now lets take a look at a game that has been running for some time. WOW is free to play up to level 20, afterwards you still have to pay. Why is that, because it is a good game and is always making money. How about FFXI, well they still have not gone free to play. This is another good game and not to mentiuon the free games are overun with bots, scammers, hackers, very rude people, and many other things. This model of free to play shows me that the gaming community wants more money for a game that is less than the pay to play games.
Games like Runes of magic, very good game and free to play. You will always find gold sellers, bots and many other problems. The game also has many bugs and they refuse to fix the bugs. To play in any of the real game content, you have to pay an absurd amount of money or spend a lot of time farming. Some of the players even spent over $1,000 from what they said to get to end game in less than a year. This game has always been free to play and if done right you can play for free forever(Just be prepared to spend half of your life getting there, lol).
Lets look at a game that went to free to play with a subscription model. Lord of the Rings is a very good polished game. To get anywhere in the game, you will have to spend money. A lot of guilds will not let a free to play person in because they are severally limited. When i first looked at this cash shop, I found that you could get almost everything except usable gear and items dropped in the game. The game is great, but either you slowly spend money to get what you need or you are stuck. Many of the games that went this route have went this way to limit the people so much it is not really a good experience.
Some of them have limited chat features and access to only certain classes. So in all honesty, they are not free to play. I would prefer a game like runes of magic as it is completely free content wise, you just need the gear to do it. If they make the free to play out of final fantasy, i will still pay my monthly dues as the free to play will be a cut down version of the game. If this game went free to play, it would look like this:
Players have limited chat Option: Can only say, tell, party, and guild chat. (Shout would be out)
Can only create one charater per account (This is really all you need)
Can only be certain classes (3 classes at most)
Charater has only one bag slot (so much for farming)
Charater can hold a max of 100k gold (not enough to do much with as the game gets older)
Limited to 1 raid per day (you really did not want to do more than that to get an item, lol)
Unable to make a guild (Who wants to be leader of a guild anyways, Linkshell in this game)
Limited to level 20 (You will not be able to experience any of the real content)
These are just some of the things that these companies do to get you hooked to the game and convert you to pay to play. I want the full experience, not some knocked down version of the game. That is not fun to me and I would feel it is more of a watse of time. Not to mention sooner or later you will convert over to pay to play if you like it that much.
You are so wrong I don't even know where to begin.
Better customer service? We're talking about SE. Did you play their first MMO? Not very many people have nice things to say about SE customer support.
And just what in the hell are you talking about RMT not being able to interfere with the economy in a P2P game like FFXI? Have you set foot in Dreamland Dynamis in the last three years? It's a bunch of invisible BSTs with Dipper Yuly. It a gigantic swarm of RMT Ladybugs. No? How about FC leech parties run by RMT that charge 500k/5 hours? SE actively battles RMT, but there's still a metric shitton of RMT in FFXI, which is several orders of magnitude less than there used to be when the game was more popular.
Ever hear of claimbots when everybody camped ground kings and drops weren't rare/ex? How about the fishing bots that basically forced SE to re-design fishing? How about the multi-tool Mr. Argus? How about Spellcasting .xml's? FFXI is botted and hacked all to hell and has been for a long time.
I don't mind if FFXIV is F2P or P2P. I'll play either way, but you, good sir, have no clue what the hell you're talking about.
This is nonsence . SE already said the game will be Sub based. If you goto ALL the info page i made Yoshi states the reasons why. He said the reason why is because FFXIV was going to have a Sub base anyway before it failed. It went almost 2 full years free to play wile they were fixing it. Then charged a fee for it. SE gave the players who stayed with it Legacy status . Witch is a discount on the month fee + credits in the new game. Yoshi has said because a Sub based game offers more for the play and company. SE is beholden to no outside or 3rd party investors , So there is no rush to make money to pay the investors . With a Sub fee SE can take the money and invest it back in the game witch means we will get more better updates , more content , more Expanision packs , in less time. When XI came out 10 years ago it has had now 5 or 6 Major Exp packs , and new content added every 2 or 3 months from Seasonal events , to Lore events . 15$ USD breaks down to .50cents a day or &3.50 a week . If you have a job and work say part time 24 hours a week and make $6.00 per hour in one week you have made $144 . Subtract tax your looking at about $118 ~ $124 depending on where you live. Subtract $3.50 a week for the game your at $114.50 ~$120.5 pay a week. Or more over per month you make $472 ~$496 and a month fee of $15 makes it $457 ~ $481 . Now i am sure most i would guess 98% of us make more then 6$ an hour and work more then 24 hours a week . If you dont have a job....Thats your own fault dont bring the rest of us down because you cant afford to play the game. And if your a child then thats your parents call. NO ONE is entitled to play FFXIV:ARR .
From my Post
#12 VG24/7 interview with Yoshi - P http://www.vg247.com/2012/11/19/final-fantasy-xiv-a-realm-reborn-squares-second-chance/ *MARRIAGE , WHY THE GAME IS P2P*
Read it.
Now for a great Marketing idea . SE needs to attack the commerical TV waves hard , Mix in the End of a Realm video that made us all shead a tear , and the New Realm with awesome combat and a sence of community to win over the masses. Having the PS3 version launch at the sametime Will help a lot on that front
http://absoluteretribution.enjin.com/ Guild Website and Recruitment link
Lol i remember when XI was filled with bots. and RMTs it was fun getting a whole LS to try to out claim a RMT for Leaping boots , Or the Yag in Castle Oz. Punisher i think it was. ( thats going way back) i remember when they added the gobs to the fishing spots , then added "you caught a monster" . RMTs will be in every game there is no way around that. Until people stop buying Gil and earning it . How someone can justify shelling out 100's of $s for fake money is beyond me.
http://absoluteretribution.enjin.com/ Guild Website and Recruitment link
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR