It all depends on what you're trying to do in the game. One could take a character from several factions through from tutorial to endgame in a month or two, easy, all without paying anything. You could play every mission in the game, and your progression through the levels wouldn't be significantly slower than if you paid for ships and xp bonuses and whatnot.
So obviously you're referring to kitting your ship out with top-tier gear, which takes longer and often costs dilithium. Yeah, that will take less time if you pay lots of money, but getting all the good stuff is always going to take either time or money, whatever game you play.
The game itself is remarkably easy to progress through without paying anything. Free-to-play will never mean free-to-'get everything you want right now without paying'. But given that most everything can be accomplished in the game without mk xii purple gear, it's not a big deal that it takes a while to get that stuff.
Take a look at my Foundry missions! Conjoined, Re-emergence, and . . .
I have been scratching my head in puzzlement,as to how a player can progress in this game,without him or her pumping in real money.
Completely free means to me,very slow progress and a total disadvantage to those that put real cash into this game. surely to get anywhere,it would take months and years to do so.Better ships and equipment and so on.
I dont really get what you find so puzzling. The game needs money to survive. some of the players have to pay for the game to even continue.
a player can get *everything* in the game for free if they work hard and long enough and even then its only the extras like ships and equipment that just makes life easier when playing. the mission content itself is free.
it could takes them years but that is their choice to avoid spending cash. if another player wants to get stuff quickly then they pay and the more they pay the faster they get stuff. its a trade off; time vs cash. some people have plenty of time, some have plenty of cash.
Another good thing is, that you can buy pretty much everything through ingame currency (EC) and have someone else spend RL $$$.
The only endgame ships (meaning 10-console ones) I can think of that are 100% bound to the c-store and to Zen are those from the 3-packs. (Vesta, Andorian Escort and the 10-console Flagships (Ody, Bortas and Scimitar). All the other 10-console variants can be bought from the exchange or via fleets.
Even without spending any RL-money, you can level up and gear up a character in the same time as a paying player would. Paying players don't level any faster and paying players are timegated through queue cooldowns and the rep system in the same way a "real" F2P one is.
"Participation in PVP-related activities is so low on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis that we could in fact just completely take it out of STO and it would not impact the overall number of people [who] log in to the game and play in any significant way." -Gozer, Cryptic PvP Dev
The F2P model is one of STO's strong points. It has one of the best F2P models towards players that are currently availible in any MMO.
You can literally obtain anything in this game, excluding few non-gamebreaking things the veterans get, via grind and time investment. This is the last game that forces you to spend real money on items or unlocks.
Ofcoruse it's a slower progerssion OP, the subscribers and lifers invest money because the don't have/want to invest time, F2P players invest time/effort because they don't have/want to invest money. Nothing strange here.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a person who plays STO under the blanket of the F2P freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said "thank you", and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a subscription, and buy some ZEN. Either way, I don't care what you think you are entitled to!
I have been scratching my head in puzzlement,as to how a player can progress in this game,without him or her pumping in real money.
Completely free means to me,very slow progress and a total disadvantage to those that put real cash into this game. surely to get anywhere,it would take months and years to do so.Better ships and equipment and so on.
Yep, ton of time to get anywhere but it is free. Real cash provides a shortcut. So yes, still free to play,
Other f2p models don't even give you access to cash bought items, stop model is revolutionary
The free-to-play setup in this game could be a LOT worse. I've seen a similar setup with LOTRO (except LOTRO's points aren't player-provided, and more of the 'essential content' has to be unlocked) and it seems to work well as long as you're willing to put in the needed time. I myself have obtained two Fleet ships recently from spending some EC to buy Fleet Modules and getting a few modules via the dil > zen conversion. It took a while, but I got it done. I have my sights on another Fleet ship down the road. All of the Fleet gear (some of the best stuff in the game) can be obtained absolutely free via grinding fleet credits and dilithium. To me, the fleet credits are the harder part. . .I can gather dilithium rather easily. Just running 8 eSTFs a day will net you the dilithium you need for the day. . .that's maybe 2 hours of play a day, if you're playing with competent players. You have to be willing to put the time in to grind in order for the f2p system to work.
The only problem I have with the game setup is the end-game. Specifically, the underdeveloped PvP and the feeling that there isn't enough end-game repeatable content. It's getting better on the latter half, at least, as the Seasons go by.
Casual players are screwed unless they use $$$, but dedicated ones can get most of the stuff in this game without paying a cent. The exception are lock box items that require luck or a lot of EC.
I dunno. I'm pretty damned casual - maybe an hour or so of play per day, and even that not every day - and I haven't felt "screwed" at all. None of my toons have had an issue with EC after reaching about lvl 10, because so many things will bring several thousand EC at a time on the Exchange. And as for the so-called "slow leveling" - I don't grind at all, I don't have time for that. All I play is the story missions. And I created a KDF toon for the giveaways a little while back, an Orion male named Malthit, and hit Major General after a little over a week, while also sparing the time to work on a Romulan, Ael t'Pirinath (who made full Commander a couple of days ago).
And I haven't spent a penny on this game. For those last two toons, I haven't even spent any Dilithium - I keep hoping to get enough to swap it for enough Zen to get the Romulan Survivor DOff pack (but the price on Zen has been pretty high on the D-Exchange lately...). I haven't noticed any lack at all. Maybe it's because I don't do the PvP stuff, and Malthit's Qin-class raptor is more than adequate to take on PvE challenges, even given that he's been equipped exclusively with items picked up during missions. (If you're frustrated with your leveling speed, take the Nimbus III mission chain as soon as it's offered - I actually got my Fed, a Ferengi named Grunt, from Rear Admiral Lower Half almost all the way to Vice Admiral there.)
The title is "Cryptic, Please consider making this game more fun and affordable."
The game is completely 100% FREE. You don't have to buy it, you can get currency in-game to exchange for zen to buy anything from the store, how much more affordable can you make it without them paying you to play it? It is 100% Free and doesn't cost you a cent of real world money if you don't want it to...
Having said that the 8k dili TRIBBLE is ridiculous and the Auto Refine on login for Gold members is busted again so back to 8k a day plus the 2 day "daily" extra 2k assignment at the academy...
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] ***Disenchanted***
Real Join Date: Monday, 17 May 2010
Maybe I'm showing my age here... but when did it turn that everyone needed every item in a game, any game, -Right now-. Or even soon for that matter. The greatest game I ever played that was PC and non MMO admittedly, was Bard's Tale 3. 8 huge dimensions, and absolutely no shortcuts while character building.
The second an MMO or any game wants to go this direction, of truly making a game great instead of just good, there is a backlash. Is this because of some kind of generational thing? I'm not that old was born in 77'. Still, every time someone makes a game easier just for the sake of being easier to me it lessens the experience. Also it's important that I'm not talking about functional difficulty, like making all the Borg impossible to kill, because that does break a game. I think I'm speaking more of an RP difficulty, in which some challenges make the player -feel- like they are playing thier character inside the MMO because of the length of time they have played that character.
Well I should say, easier as opposed to time consuming. The best games, just in my humble opinion, consume the most playing time. This is why if something even says how many levels or how much playing time out of the box I'll never buy it. And why some of the best games have infinite playing times or very close to it, like Fallout 1 or 2 (Not so much 3). In this regard I actually like STO a lot because it feels like it takes a -very- long time after level 50 to become a force in the universe. After all Picard or Kirk wasn't made overnight.
Yeah I wasn't comparing it to any MMO like that, just meant since this is a game and that's a trend of gaming in general. If the other reference was too much sorry about that, but in terms of STO I do feel that there is enough value so far in terms of what I was talking about, the amount of time it takes to complete, and hope it's even longer in the future. Seems to be going that way with the next FE happening after a rep system finish.
This game is about as affordable as it gets. As for fun, that's in the eye of the beholder. I think most things in this game are plenty enjoyable,... if you don't, then you may want to look to your expectations, not the games mechanics.
And yes, many people don't like games that make them think for more than 5 minutes. I like games to be challenging, but not so much so that I have to use a calculator and slide rule to figure it out.
"Go play with your DPS in the corner, I don't care how big it is." ~ Me "There... are... four... lights!" ~Jean Luc Picard
Apparently Cryptic's metrics don't agree, and only they have the information needed to judge if things are worth lowering in price or not.
Your best bet is to wait for when Cryptic to have a discount sale.
But Cryptic hasnt really tried any other method except for keys and PWE always uses high prices rather than volume sales.
It is true that lower prices makes more money because of the volume of sales. if they split the costume pack into individual parts and sold them for 100 zen they would make far more money than they do from complete sets. Lower prices also entice more people to bring out the credit card because the customer see's that item for $1 and thats not much, compound that $1 over thousands of customers a day and it outpaces high priced items.
This is exactly why keys are priced at 125 zen. But then what about all the other items? a couple hundred outfit parts, tribbles, doff packs, boff's, weapons... If those were reduced in price as well as reduce ship prices they would see an increase in revenue.
As for the original post i don't completely agree and most of it would kill the revenue. Some things can use a reduction in costs, keys are fine, the lockbox system is fine as is.
Join Date: Nobody cares.
"I'm drunk, whats your excuse for being an idiot?" - Unknown drunk man. :eek:
Comments
So obviously you're referring to kitting your ship out with top-tier gear, which takes longer and often costs dilithium. Yeah, that will take less time if you pay lots of money, but getting all the good stuff is always going to take either time or money, whatever game you play.
The game itself is remarkably easy to progress through without paying anything. Free-to-play will never mean free-to-'get everything you want right now without paying'. But given that most everything can be accomplished in the game without mk xii purple gear, it's not a big deal that it takes a while to get that stuff.
Conjoined, Re-emergence, and . . .
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
could be a catchy F2P jingle...: "spend the time or spend a dime"
---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----
I dont really get what you find so puzzling. The game needs money to survive. some of the players have to pay for the game to even continue.
a player can get *everything* in the game for free if they work hard and long enough and even then its only the extras like ships and equipment that just makes life easier when playing. the mission content itself is free.
it could takes them years but that is their choice to avoid spending cash. if another player wants to get stuff quickly then they pay and the more they pay the faster they get stuff. its a trade off; time vs cash. some people have plenty of time, some have plenty of cash.
The only endgame ships (meaning 10-console ones) I can think of that are 100% bound to the c-store and to Zen are those from the 3-packs. (Vesta, Andorian Escort and the 10-console Flagships (Ody, Bortas and Scimitar). All the other 10-console variants can be bought from the exchange or via fleets.
Even without spending any RL-money, you can level up and gear up a character in the same time as a paying player would. Paying players don't level any faster and paying players are timegated through queue cooldowns and the rep system in the same way a "real" F2P one is.
You can literally obtain anything in this game, excluding few non-gamebreaking things the veterans get, via grind and time investment. This is the last game that forces you to spend real money on items or unlocks.
Ofcoruse it's a slower progerssion OP, the subscribers and lifers invest money because the don't have/want to invest time, F2P players invest time/effort because they don't have/want to invest money. Nothing strange here.
--Col Jesup
Indeed. Were I a Mod, I would probably lock this second thread as "spam."
Yep, ton of time to get anywhere but it is free. Real cash provides a shortcut. So yes, still free to play,
Other f2p models don't even give you access to cash bought items, stop model is revolutionary
My PvE/PvP hybrid skill tree
---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----
The only problem I have with the game setup is the end-game. Specifically, the underdeveloped PvP and the feeling that there isn't enough end-game repeatable content. It's getting better on the latter half, at least, as the Seasons go by.
And I haven't spent a penny on this game. For those last two toons, I haven't even spent any Dilithium - I keep hoping to get enough to swap it for enough Zen to get the Romulan Survivor DOff pack (but the price on Zen has been pretty high on the D-Exchange lately...). I haven't noticed any lack at all. Maybe it's because I don't do the PvP stuff, and Malthit's Qin-class raptor is more than adequate to take on PvE challenges, even given that he's been equipped exclusively with items picked up during missions. (If you're frustrated with your leveling speed, take the Nimbus III mission chain as soon as it's offered - I actually got my Fed, a Ferengi named Grunt, from Rear Admiral Lower Half almost all the way to Vice Admiral there.)
I would prefer go back to the old system and use Roxey but edcs and rare borg XXXX tradable.not bound
USS WARRIOR NCC 1720 Commanding Officer
Star Trek Gamers
The game is completely 100% FREE. You don't have to buy it, you can get currency in-game to exchange for zen to buy anything from the store, how much more affordable can you make it without them paying you to play it? It is 100% Free and doesn't cost you a cent of real world money if you don't want it to...
Having said that the 8k dili TRIBBLE is ridiculous and the Auto Refine on login for Gold members is busted again so back to 8k a day plus the 2 day "daily" extra 2k assignment at the academy...
***Disenchanted***
Real Join Date: Monday, 17 May 2010
The second an MMO or any game wants to go this direction, of truly making a game great instead of just good, there is a backlash. Is this because of some kind of generational thing? I'm not that old was born in 77'. Still, every time someone makes a game easier just for the sake of being easier to me it lessens the experience. Also it's important that I'm not talking about functional difficulty, like making all the Borg impossible to kill, because that does break a game. I think I'm speaking more of an RP difficulty, in which some challenges make the player -feel- like they are playing thier character inside the MMO because of the length of time they have played that character.
Well I should say, easier as opposed to time consuming. The best games, just in my humble opinion, consume the most playing time. This is why if something even says how many levels or how much playing time out of the box I'll never buy it. And why some of the best games have infinite playing times or very close to it, like Fallout 1 or 2 (Not so much 3). In this regard I actually like STO a lot because it feels like it takes a -very- long time after level 50 to become a force in the universe. After all Picard or Kirk wasn't made overnight.
USS WARRIOR NCC 1720 Commanding Officer
Star Trek Gamers
My character Tsin'xing
And yes, many people don't like games that make them think for more than 5 minutes. I like games to be challenging, but not so much so that I have to use a calculator and slide rule to figure it out.
"There... are... four... lights!" ~Jean Luc Picard
But Cryptic hasnt really tried any other method except for keys and PWE always uses high prices rather than volume sales.
It is true that lower prices makes more money because of the volume of sales. if they split the costume pack into individual parts and sold them for 100 zen they would make far more money than they do from complete sets. Lower prices also entice more people to bring out the credit card because the customer see's that item for $1 and thats not much, compound that $1 over thousands of customers a day and it outpaces high priced items.
This is exactly why keys are priced at 125 zen. But then what about all the other items? a couple hundred outfit parts, tribbles, doff packs, boff's, weapons... If those were reduced in price as well as reduce ship prices they would see an increase in revenue.
As for the original post i don't completely agree and most of it would kill the revenue. Some things can use a reduction in costs, keys are fine, the lockbox system is fine as is.
"I'm drunk, whats your excuse for being an idiot?" - Unknown drunk man. :eek: