I think the biggest problem is going to be the 100% PvP focus. I could be wrong, but I will be shocked if an all PvP subscription game will really draw enough fans to support it self. We will see how the Kickstarter goes though.
It amuses me when people start talking about advantages and disadvantages of P2P vs F2P. Advent of F2P is simply the result of game companies trying to undercut each other while they attempt to sell you their version of World of Warcraft. The MMO market is oversaturated with clones that target the same audience, and F2P/B2P are a business necessity that helps some of these half-baked ventures stay afloat. For a game that is not competing with WoW and is creating its own market, there is no practical reason to go F2P. The new market/audience in question are the hardcore RVR fans, and as long as Camelot Unchained is the only game in that niche they can freely charge a premium for their product.
For the record to those that apparently didn't read the very first sentence and just hit the reply button, I said no cash shops and no digital cash. Fyi that makes it impossible to be a pay to win game.
Again for those saying $15, that is exactly the subscriber model I was refering to. You pay $15 a month, and you are a member. You get member benefits.
You let others play for free but they don't get member benefits and can be used to fix population problems. Because they don't pay you can tell them where to play.
And a sponsor/voucher system to ensure they aren't being cheating or gold farming dickwads.
I can't cliffnotes it anymore than that. At this point if you say pay to win again you're just being a troll.
Answer this fair question: Why the posturing about being a whale in the original post?
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
Im all for free to play as it does draw in the numbers, cant say im a fan of most F2P games with the tackiness of cash shops, but what would the benefit be to subscribing then?
Originally posted by Benezetta Free to play = Free to harass other players and just generally act like a turdbutt. No thanks.
That is my new favorite word for my 18 year old son. I totally agree though, subs will weed out the riffraff who think there sole mission in life is to troll a game they have no interest in and abuse other players.
B2P could be a reasonable option for CU. I'm just hoping they'll make a lifetime sub such an attractive tier option for the kickstarter that large numbers of future players will contribute that amount. Then for those players it would be in effect B2P even if CSE chooses to require a monthly sub for players who didn't contribute that amount to kickstarter. I agree that player retention will be vitally important for such a niche game. A lower than standard monthly sub like Mark has hinted at should help, but I'm not sure it will be enough. You don't want to wait until servers start to be ghost towns and need to be merged to go to a different payment model.
This game needs a stable community. Free To Play games could never provide that. They didn't in the past and they won't in the future since many F2P games are "just passing by".
One more problem with Free To Play in Camelot Unchained would be "realmpride" since you could create infinite accounts and play different realms on the same server which would be one more step towards unstable community.
Pay To Play is the way for a good and stable community. Even if its small.
I don't understand so many people on these forums, free to play is pay to win! And we all know that that's not true, if we look at for example: League of Legends, that's a free to play game with a cash shop, and that is definitely not pay to win.
And about the "free to play are just games that passes by and doesn't have a good community" Then Bitch Please! league of Legends is free to play and have you seen it's community? fanart? and do you know how long league of legends has been around? (And that is just an example, look at gw2 with the b2p model and so on)
Some developers have proven that they can remain profitable by releasing a B2P or F2P game, while only offering cosmetics and the like in their cash shop. However, the problem they haven't solved is the revolving door being free creates of the games population. People are just cycling in and out of the game, leaving the dedicated players with no idea who they can rely and depend on in game. MMORPG's need committed members in order to thrive. They need members that are dedicated to the game and its community. Having a subscription as a barrier to entry not only funds future development, but forces the player to commit to playing that game for x amount of time.
Personally, I'd like to see them charge between $5-$10 dollars a month to support their team and pay for their expenses, and just charge us for content patches. Yet I have no idea what would constitue content in a game where there's no PvE at all.
People revolve in and out because games aren't very good. Make a great, fun game and people will keep playing it whether it requires a monthly fee or is free.
Im all for free to play as it does draw in the numbers, cant say im a fan of most F2P games with the tackiness of cash shops, but what would the benefit be to subscribing then?
This would be the tricky part they would need to figure out. To keep the subscription based feel, free players would need to be inconvenienced in ways that would not hinder their interaction and cooperation with subscribers. A subscriber shouldn't even notice that the person they're working with is a free player.
One way might be, like I mentioned earlier, you can't create a new character on an overpopulated realm, that helps toward server/realm pop issues.
Can't use broadband chat channels like region, yell.
Get limited to how much they can play every week. Remember that most f2p players that are there to try it out and become power users, they end up spending a lot of money. In a subscription based f2p the idea is to lure them into becoming subscribers. If they want to spend lots of time in the game, they need to subscribe.
I guess the idea would be to treat them like a friend of the family. The subscribers are our family, the free players are our friends. We like you, but you're not family. Gotta find the inconveniences that you would impose on friends of the family while retaining them as friends, but luring them to marry one of your daughters.
For me the problem with F2P is not how it starts out but how it ends up - or simply the fact that it can be changed any time. I know with a sub that I am getting the entire game for a fee.
Once individual thing are monetized the goal is always going to be to increase that income. . as it should be. This leads to design decisions being made based on monetization rather than game play. What starts out as cosmetics and "convenience items" turns into cosmetics and "anti-grind" items.
Want to increase money coming in to LOTRO. . make the quests require more travel. I like F2P as a casual player because it still ends up cheaper for me but if I was playing all the time I would be dead set against it.
I would almost rather they launch as a sub and go F2P later. . at least then the entire game is not based around it.
Oh and finally I just want to point out that bandwidth doesn't cost the amount of money that subscription based services will lead you to believe, this is the foundation for why free to play works in MMOs in the first places.
Since the client for a game like daoc is free and you pay for the privilege to log in and play and can play as much or as little as you would like, the value you are consuming is intangible, as intangible as in-game gold.
The only tangible cost you're consuming is the actual bandwith you're consuming, and obviously that isn't much or f2p just wouldn't work.
Another industry that does free to play but doesn't admit it, are high cost applications like windows OS, Maya, 3d studio max, where the value of their product is intangible, they price them at hundreds ore thousands of dollars fully aware that most people will torrent them, but that businesses will purchase liscenses. (and even businesses lie about how many copies they're using)
But back on topic, the bandwidth that casual f2p gamers consume is negligible. Pandara eats much more bandwidth per user than an MMO does and they're paying customers only fork up $3.99.
Just keep that in mind when thinking out loud about free users putting an MMO out of business. They aren't.
Need to think of them as people that wouldn't be playing the game if it were not free, so not losing money. And if adding a lot of free players to the pool of players enriches the experience of subscribers, well then you're not losing you're gaining.
That was the intent of this suggestion. As a subscriber I would like more people to participate in RvR even if they weren't paying, because it improves my playing experience.
For me the problem with F2P is not how it starts out but how it ends up - or simply the fact that it can be changed any time. I know with a sub that I am getting the entire game for a fee.
Once individual thing are monetized the goal is always going to be to increase that income. . as it should be. This leads to design decisions being made based on monetization rather than game play. What starts out as cosmetics and "convenience items" turns into cosmetics and "anti-grind" items.
Want to increase money coming in to LOTRO. . make the quests require more travel. I like F2P as a casual player because it still ends up cheaper for me but if I was playing all the time I would be dead set against it.
I would almost rather they launch as a sub and go F2P later. . at least then the entire game is not based around it.
Well its easy to avoid those things and identify when they're incoming.
If the only way possible for you to pay the developer is through subscription fee, there can be no cash shop or diamonds/station cash.
I think the biggest problem when people hear free to play they immediately associate cash shops and digital currency. Those are the only examples we have, so naturally people will assume.
Eve online is free to play. I bet a lot of people didn't even know that. They now have a cash shop but they were free to play long before they had a cash shop.
So how does a subscription based game like eve online achieve free to play without digital currency nor a cash shop? Well they did it, it worked really well, and nobody had a problem with it. In fact if you were to ask eve players if eve is free to play they would swear that it isn't, but it is.
It's a good idea because it would give us more action. I'd rather have a sub fee only though as it filters hackers and trolls a bit better than a f2p or even a b2p model. That said I think when the game population starts to become a bit small, allowing f2p account would be a nice way to give the game a more time to thrive.
Do you guys even realize how F2P actually make money? What whale actually means.. it is not a guy who spends a $100 a month.. it is an addict who blows through 5-6k+ a month. I used to share an office with one of the companies that run few of these facebook f2p scams, it is puke inducing to just hear how decisions are made in terms of gameplay and getting people addicted
This game needs a stable community. Free To Play games could never provide that. They didn't in the past and they won't in the future since many F2P games are "just passing by".
One more problem with Free To Play in Camelot Unchained would be "realmpride" since you could create infinite accounts and play different realms on the same server which would be one more step towards unstable community.
Pay To Play is the way for a good and stable community. Even if its small.
The evidence actually speaks to the opposite of that.
If pay to play (subs) offered a good stable community then many newer mmorpgs wouldn't be switching. SW:TOr, Tera, TSW, Age of Conan, Everquest (the newest everquest is also going to be free to play), planetside, Aion, Neverwinter, Guild Wars 2 etc..
All of these games are either switching from your traditional mmo style or developed to be f2p or in GW2's case, buy once and play for free.
Originally posted by nate1980
Some developers have proven that they can remain profitable by releasing a B2P or F2P game, while only offering cosmetics and the like in their cash shop. However, the problem they haven't solved is the revolving door being free creates of the games population. People are just cycling in and out of the game, leaving the dedicated players with no idea who they can rely and depend on in game. MMORPG's need committed members in order to thrive. They need members that are dedicated to the game and its community. Having a subscription as a barrier to entry not only funds future development, but forces the player to commit to playing that game for x amount of time.
Personally, I'd like to see them charge between $5-$10 dollars a month to support their team and pay for their expenses, and just charge us for content patches. Yet I have no idea what would constitue content in a game where there's no PvE at all.
And pay to play sub games don't do this? Many people will buy an mmo that uses a subscription, play for the first month or two, then quit.
F2p brings in more players then sub-based games, people that are simply curious and not sure if they'd plop down the box pric e+ sub price, and some of them stay, and purchase in game cash shop items.
However I am not sure this topic is even revelant, as Mark has stated CU is going toward a sub model (IIRC, in the recent podcast).
Originally posted by meddyck People revolve in and out because games aren't very good. Make a great, fun game and people will keep playing it whether it requires a monthly fee or is free.
That's not entirely true. People revolve in and out even in fun games, because they get bored or are bored with the genre and don't know what they want in addition to some being bad games.
A 14 day free trial the way DAoC does it would fix this problem I think.
In games where the entertainment is provided by other players, and if there isn't entertainment then people quit the game, then its worth allowing people to play the game for free, if for no other reason than to provide entertainment to your paying subscribers.
So in other words, you want cannon fodders for you to farm.
Okay, lol.
PS: even if free, I don';t think fodders likes to be fodders for very long if they keep on getting killed/beaten on by the same people. All the game will get in the end is a bad reputation.
Originally posted by meddyck People revolve in and out because games aren't very good. Make a great, fun game and people will keep playing it whether it requires a monthly fee or is free.
That's not entirely true. People revolve in and out even in fun games, because they get bored or are bored with the genre and don't know what they want in addition to some being bad games.
A 14 day free trial the way DAoC does it would fix this problem I think.
Yeah that was kind of what I was thinking. Lets say I want to get my friends to play CU with me. I tell them about it, and send them a free trial.
Hell maybe thats the solution.. subscribers acrue trial hours that we can give to people. They can't be horded and used for free subscriptions, but enable us to sponsor our friends that we're trying to get hooked.
I used to play daoc with a guy named Joeey ingame and he was a fantastic healer. We play all kinds of games and sometimes we just don't feel like playing daoc, or feel that paying an extra $15 to play for a couple hours at most every month just isn't worth it. Well we wanted him to log on and play with us so badly a few times that we literally just reactivated his account and payed it for him so that when we wanted him to play with us every once in a while, he could.
Now most people wouldn't do this... but he was a REALLY good healer. xD
Originally posted by meddyck People revolve in and out because games aren't very good. Make a great, fun game and people will keep playing it whether it requires a monthly fee or is free.
That's not entirely true. People revolve in and out even in fun games, because they get bored or are bored with the genre and don't know what they want in addition to some being bad games.
A 14 day free trial the way DAoC does it would fix this problem I think.
Yeah that was kind of what I was thinking. Lets say I want to get my friends to play CU with me. I tell them about it, and send them a free trial.
Hell maybe thats the solution.. subscribers acrue trial hours that we can give to people. They can't be horded and used for free subscriptions, but enable us to sponsor our friends that we're trying to get hooked.
I used to play daoc with a guy named Joeey ingame and he was a fantastic healer. We play all kinds of games and sometimes we just don't feel like playing daoc, or feel that paying an extra $15 to play for a couple hours at most every month just isn't worth it. Well we wanted him to log on and play with us so badly a few times that we literally just reactivated his account and payed it for him so that when we wanted him to play with us every once in a while, he could.
Now most people wouldn't do this... but he was a REALLY good healer. xD
Yeah, I personally think free trail periods are the best way to go. You could have a standard 14 day trial, which is long enough to get a person hooked and ready to pay a subscription if they ever intended to in the first place, then you could also have free trial weeks or months once a year to try to get more players hooked or veteran players that quit back into the game after a meaningful patch.
Comments
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
It amuses me when people start talking about advantages and disadvantages of P2P vs F2P. Advent of F2P is simply the result of game companies trying to undercut each other while they attempt to sell you their version of World of Warcraft. The MMO market is oversaturated with clones that target the same audience, and F2P/B2P are a business necessity that helps some of these half-baked ventures stay afloat. For a game that is not competing with WoW and is creating its own market, there is no practical reason to go F2P. The new market/audience in question are the hardcore RVR fans, and as long as Camelot Unchained is the only game in that niche they can freely charge a premium for their product.
Answer this fair question: Why the posturing about being a whale in the original post?
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Im all for free to play as it does draw in the numbers, cant say im a fan of most F2P games with the tackiness of cash shops, but what would the benefit be to subscribing then?
SKYeXile
TRF - GM - GW2, PS2, WAR, AION, Rift, WoW, WOT....etc...
Future Crew - High Council. Planetside 1 & 2.
That is my new favorite word for my 18 year old son. I totally agree though, subs will weed out the riffraff who think there sole mission in life is to troll a game they have no interest in and abuse other players.
Lolipops !
you win most ridiculous post of the day, here have a cookie
Secrets of Dragon?s Spine Trailer.. !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwT9cFVQCMw
Best MMOs ever played: Ultima, EvE, SW Galaxies, Age of Conan, The Secret World
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2X_SbZCHpc&t=21s
.
.
The Return of ELITE !
I would be less likely to play if it goes F2P.
Just sayin
DAOC Live (inactive): R11 Cleric R11 Druid R11 Minstrel R9 Eldritch R6 Sorc R6 Scout R6 Healer
This game needs a stable community. Free To Play games could never provide that. They didn't in the past and they won't in the future since many F2P games are "just passing by".
One more problem with Free To Play in Camelot Unchained would be "realmpride" since you could create infinite accounts and play different realms on the same server which would be one more step towards unstable community.
Pay To Play is the way for a good and stable community. Even if its small.
I don't understand so many people on these forums, free to play is pay to win! And we all know that that's not true, if we look at for example: League of Legends, that's a free to play game with a cash shop, and that is definitely not pay to win.
And about the "free to play are just games that passes by and doesn't have a good community" Then Bitch Please! league of Legends is free to play and have you seen it's community? fanart? and do you know how long league of legends has been around? (And that is just an example, look at gw2 with the b2p model and so on)
Some developers have proven that they can remain profitable by releasing a B2P or F2P game, while only offering cosmetics and the like in their cash shop. However, the problem they haven't solved is the revolving door being free creates of the games population. People are just cycling in and out of the game, leaving the dedicated players with no idea who they can rely and depend on in game. MMORPG's need committed members in order to thrive. They need members that are dedicated to the game and its community. Having a subscription as a barrier to entry not only funds future development, but forces the player to commit to playing that game for x amount of time.
Personally, I'd like to see them charge between $5-$10 dollars a month to support their team and pay for their expenses, and just charge us for content patches. Yet I have no idea what would constitue content in a game where there's no PvE at all.
DAOC Live (inactive): R11 Cleric R11 Druid R11 Minstrel R9 Eldritch R6 Sorc R6 Scout R6 Healer
This would be the tricky part they would need to figure out. To keep the subscription based feel, free players would need to be inconvenienced in ways that would not hinder their interaction and cooperation with subscribers. A subscriber shouldn't even notice that the person they're working with is a free player.
One way might be, like I mentioned earlier, you can't create a new character on an overpopulated realm, that helps toward server/realm pop issues.
Can't use broadband chat channels like region, yell.
Get limited to how much they can play every week. Remember that most f2p players that are there to try it out and become power users, they end up spending a lot of money. In a subscription based f2p the idea is to lure them into becoming subscribers. If they want to spend lots of time in the game, they need to subscribe.
I guess the idea would be to treat them like a friend of the family. The subscribers are our family, the free players are our friends. We like you, but you're not family. Gotta find the inconveniences that you would impose on friends of the family while retaining them as friends, but luring them to marry one of your daughters.
Mark Jacobs:
Subscribers:
Free players:
For me the problem with F2P is not how it starts out but how it ends up - or simply the fact that it can be changed any time. I know with a sub that I am getting the entire game for a fee.
Once individual thing are monetized the goal is always going to be to increase that income. . as it should be. This leads to design decisions being made based on monetization rather than game play. What starts out as cosmetics and "convenience items" turns into cosmetics and "anti-grind" items.
Want to increase money coming in to LOTRO. . make the quests require more travel. I like F2P as a casual player because it still ends up cheaper for me but if I was playing all the time I would be dead set against it.
I would almost rather they launch as a sub and go F2P later. . at least then the entire game is not based around it.
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
Oh and finally I just want to point out that bandwidth doesn't cost the amount of money that subscription based services will lead you to believe, this is the foundation for why free to play works in MMOs in the first places.
Since the client for a game like daoc is free and you pay for the privilege to log in and play and can play as much or as little as you would like, the value you are consuming is intangible, as intangible as in-game gold.
The only tangible cost you're consuming is the actual bandwith you're consuming, and obviously that isn't much or f2p just wouldn't work.
Another industry that does free to play but doesn't admit it, are high cost applications like windows OS, Maya, 3d studio max, where the value of their product is intangible, they price them at hundreds ore thousands of dollars fully aware that most people will torrent them, but that businesses will purchase liscenses. (and even businesses lie about how many copies they're using)
But back on topic, the bandwidth that casual f2p gamers consume is negligible. Pandara eats much more bandwidth per user than an MMO does and they're paying customers only fork up $3.99.
Just keep that in mind when thinking out loud about free users putting an MMO out of business. They aren't.
Need to think of them as people that wouldn't be playing the game if it were not free, so not losing money. And if adding a lot of free players to the pool of players enriches the experience of subscribers, well then you're not losing you're gaining.
That was the intent of this suggestion. As a subscriber I would like more people to participate in RvR even if they weren't paying, because it improves my playing experience.
Well its easy to avoid those things and identify when they're incoming.
If the only way possible for you to pay the developer is through subscription fee, there can be no cash shop or diamonds/station cash.
I think the biggest problem when people hear free to play they immediately associate cash shops and digital currency. Those are the only examples we have, so naturally people will assume.
Eve online is free to play. I bet a lot of people didn't even know that. They now have a cash shop but they were free to play long before they had a cash shop.
So how does a subscription based game like eve online achieve free to play without digital currency nor a cash shop? Well they did it, it worked really well, and nobody had a problem with it. In fact if you were to ask eve players if eve is free to play they would swear that it isn't, but it is.
Do you guys even realize how F2P actually make money? What whale actually means.. it is not a guy who spends a $100 a month.. it is an addict who blows through 5-6k+ a month. I used to share an office with one of the companies that run few of these facebook f2p scams, it is puke inducing to just hear how decisions are made in terms of gameplay and getting people addicted
in conclusion NO as in F!@# NO!
The evidence actually speaks to the opposite of that.
If pay to play (subs) offered a good stable community then many newer mmorpgs wouldn't be switching. SW:TOr, Tera, TSW, Age of Conan, Everquest (the newest everquest is also going to be free to play), planetside, Aion, Neverwinter, Guild Wars 2 etc..
All of these games are either switching from your traditional mmo style or developed to be f2p or in GW2's case, buy once and play for free.
And pay to play sub games don't do this? Many people will buy an mmo that uses a subscription, play for the first month or two, then quit.
F2p brings in more players then sub-based games, people that are simply curious and not sure if they'd plop down the box pric e+ sub price, and some of them stay, and purchase in game cash shop items.
However I am not sure this topic is even revelant, as Mark has stated CU is going toward a sub model (IIRC, in the recent podcast).
That's not entirely true. People revolve in and out even in fun games, because they get bored or are bored with the genre and don't know what they want in addition to some being bad games.
A 14 day free trial the way DAoC does it would fix this problem I think.
So in other words, you want cannon fodders for you to farm.
Okay, lol.
PS: even if free, I don';t think fodders likes to be fodders for very long if they keep on getting killed/beaten on by the same people. All the game will get in the end is a bad reputation.
Yeah that was kind of what I was thinking. Lets say I want to get my friends to play CU with me. I tell them about it, and send them a free trial.
Hell maybe thats the solution.. subscribers acrue trial hours that we can give to people. They can't be horded and used for free subscriptions, but enable us to sponsor our friends that we're trying to get hooked.
I used to play daoc with a guy named Joeey ingame and he was a fantastic healer. We play all kinds of games and sometimes we just don't feel like playing daoc, or feel that paying an extra $15 to play for a couple hours at most every month just isn't worth it. Well we wanted him to log on and play with us so badly a few times that we literally just reactivated his account and payed it for him so that when we wanted him to play with us every once in a while, he could.
Now most people wouldn't do this... but he was a REALLY good healer. xD
Yeah, I personally think free trail periods are the best way to go. You could have a standard 14 day trial, which is long enough to get a person hooked and ready to pay a subscription if they ever intended to in the first place, then you could also have free trial weeks or months once a year to try to get more players hooked or veteran players that quit back into the game after a meaningful patch.