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Why free 2 play is Very Bad
hyefather
Member Posts: 1,286 Arc User
Free 2 play is bad simple because it is Completly Developer Driven for Profit and a Subscription based game is Completely Player and Content driven. So in other words instead of us getting New story missions and Fleet ships we get a Lock box and Lobi store items. How in the Hell did this ever take the place of subscription based MMO's. Are there really that many ppl out there that support such a self destructive idea such as this. Please constructive critisism only.
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FTP is the only viable model in this economy unless your game is extremely niche; like how eve caters to a specific player base.
Yes mostly because they seriously think it's cheaper ... as long as it says "Free" you could sell Manure for 10 bucks
Defending The Galaxy By Breaking One Starfleet Regulation After The Next.
It is cheaper as long as you do things the hard way and don't purchase virtual items. At least Cryptic has a method for players to get C-Store items for free through hard work.
Yeah that might apply somehow to the current Cryptic Model (even before F2P)... but in the regular Sub-Based MMO's back in the day everything was / would've been free including C-Store Ships etc ...
Sure sure you only NEED one Ship, and so on ... but it's still content you'll have to pay even if you don't "Need" it ... some people like to collect Ships, i.E. ...
You're dreaming of an era that is now gone; like the dodo and the stagecoach.
Not dreaming, just answering to the OP ...
Not sure if Eve Online has any microtransactions. I know you can sell subscriptions on their version of the exchange to get their version of Energy Credits, but most of their items are player driven. Wildstar is supposed to use the same type of subscription system as Eve and I haven't heard anything about it having microtransactions either. MMOs with just Subscriptions are endangered, but they are not extinct.
Developer Driven for Profit and a Subscription
You answered you own question...micro transactions lead to a much larger bottom line.
At least with sto, there are many ways to get everything without spending a dime sans the red matter capacitor and it's ilk
My PvE/PvP hybrid skill tree
I think a lot of games will still try the sub model. I just think they'll end up going ftp like all the others that have tried in the last few years.
Frankly I have seen more done to this game since F2P than before, probably than all of before combined.
Not everything you see on the internet is true - Abraham Lincoln
Occidere populo et effercio confractus
Words of True Wisdom!
I thought WoW's forums had angry elitist snobs, but I never could have imagined the level STO forums has.
@DevolvedOne
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXA559KNopI
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I was referring to trading plex for isk which is their version of energy credits.
Not sure how you came up with that unless DOA seems something other than Dead On Arrival. It seems to have a pretty loyal following and the game is still in Beta so it is too early to say how long it will last. It is not another lousy fantasy MMO so players will try it out just for that.
TL;DR; F2P is good in my opinion.
I actually like Delta Rising.
I'm just going to leave this here without context. It's funnier that way.
Then you're only remembering Season 4, and completely dismissing Season 3,2 etc ... we got 3 FE Series within 6 months during that time, not mentioning new Klingon Missions etc etc ... please explain to me how Season 2 & 3 are smaller than 8 & 9 ...
Sure F2P might have been necessary for the game to survive, but the First Year of STO was pretty good ...
Wow, that's some Grade-A ignorance-fueled hatred right there, I can't wait to skewer and roast your logic and consume it in a glorious feast.
ಠ_ಠ
Um, if they make a game that no one finds fun to play in some respect, it's hard for them to generate RMT sales as if no one wants to play, no one will spend a dime. So, sorry, but your premise is full of holes in that regard.
As for 'no story missions' - considering they probably just added probably the best story based FE to date with Season 10, along with revamping 3 of the older Borg story missions; and with LoR added a completely new storyline for the new Romulan Republic faction; added a story tutorial for the KDF faction; and redid the starting Fed tutorial to make it more story driven; and also added two story driven FE's over the course of Season 8; I have to wonder if you've really played STO, or paid attention to what's been developed and added to it since it went F2P.
Does it have it's problems? Yep. But overall since it went F2P; I's say there was a hell of a lot more story added by PWE then they ever did in the Subscription days under French-based Atari.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
In a traditional, P2P MMO, you want new players.. You want them far more than any old player, for one simple reason. You want to sell copies of the game. The money is not in the monthly subsciptions, but it's in the $50 a pop plus $20+ an expansion the new players will spend to get into the game in the first place and then once they have spent that much, they usually feel commited to stick it out for at least a few months as subscribers to make it worth their intiitial investment in time.
This model is completely bass akwards in F2P and is something Cryptic does not seem to get. There is NO money in new players to a F2P MMO.. Few are going to come in and drop $50 on day 1 to get all the goodies they want. They will come in and they will play for free for a while and then they might decide to drop money, but it will seldom be soon.
What's more, not everyone will drop cash, so the very idea that they will sucker everyone into dropping tons of money because it claims to be free is just bunk. You don't need to spend money. You can grind for the stuff at a rate of around 75 cents per character per day if you are trading your dilithium for Zen. It's what I've done for most of my play time, but that does not mean such players are not contributing because that Zen has to come from somewhere and it does. It comes from the wealthy players that can afford to throw $100s a month at their hobbies to get all the best gear and not have to grind for their dilithium but to just have the best they can get anytime they get on to play. All the zen on the exchange comes from somewhere, and it's the veteran players that have been around a long time making most of the actual Zen Store purchases because they have mastered the grind for the exchange methods of play and generate the demand for the big investor types to sell to.
If you treat it like a normal business model it will never get the best possible business it can, and this season is going to hurt them far more than help because of how many of us veteran players they TRIBBLE off, because new players won't drop big investments, old players grind for dilithium and without them the big investors have no one to sell their Zen to and the whole market they have created starts grinding down, and the price of Zen on the exchange drops to far less than the 100 to 150 dilithium a pop that Cryptic seem to want to keep it at because there is a lot of Zen in supply and little demand, be realise... EVERY zen in the exchange was probably put there by a paying customer and every zen that gets bought should be bought by a grinding player, but I really would NOT put it past Crypic to really game and manipulate the system and just buy up Zen themselves when no one else will buy it because either way, they get to pocket the currency... Infact if you go pure income based logical reasoning, they'd actually be making out like bandits if they were catering to only a few thousand rich investors and just letting them trade Zen for Dilithium under the guise that it's other players buying it than they would catering to 100's of thousands in a legit market, because it's much more income per player and less work to maintain the servers for the smaller player base, but the fact is that when the player base finally figures out a rigged system like this is going on, I can almost garrauntee you the MMO goes bankrupt almost immediately because then, most players feel cheated and almost no one plays anymore.
Well hard to be constructive when you are looking for black and white. Which is not the way the world works.
Subs don't work period. There is NO sub game in existence that you can point to and say look there a sub game that works long term. There just isn't.
Wow... as someone else pointed out 50% less subs today then a few years ago. Most companies wouldn't look at a loss of 50% of its revenue as viable. Honestly expect wow to be f2p with in the next year or so... or for Blizzard to try and wow there wow customers on something new.
Eve... Sub sure sure... and a few years ago they added a way to earn subs in game. Hardly a sub game any longer. It is also extremely niche.
Its almost impossible to grow Sub only games... frankly if you have yet to play Wow after all these years... why would you start paying for a sub now. Sure a small handful of new gamers show up every year... that isn't a viable growth model though. Relying on that would be like car companies only planning to grow there sales by marketing to 16 year olds.
The main issue with your assertion about F2P is this. You are saying you don't like cash shops, a lottery, and lack of new content. Well that isn't a F2P issue that is 100% a Cryptic issue. There are other games like say Lotro that continue to pump out tons of NEW story content every year. The fact that Cryptics idea of content has become one mission per lockbox to give us a semi logical reason to be playing the lotto for items from that one missions villain race. Has zero to do with F2P... and 100% to do with a failure on Cryptics part. They sold us an expansion not to long ago that did in fact have new content. (granted it was aimed at a new pay for race... they would have done that the same way even if the game wasn't f2p though, they would have (and did) charge there subs for the expansion as well).
What you really want to do instead of rail against f2p... which is a GOOD thing for this game... and to be honest Cryptics F2P model is one of the best in the industry. Is ask for better contetn. This is one of the few f2p games that can really honestly be played 100% free... including all the goodies like lockboxes... if you are willing to put in the grind time in STO you can have it all with zero down. IMO that makes it a market leader in the area and as I see it the best F2P game out there... not because the devs are the best mind you they just have the best F2P / Economy setup around.
Sorry back to the point the thing to do instead of QQ about F2P is DEMAND better content.... what I suggest start a thread asking what ever happened to the idea of serial episodes (missions).
Remember we got breen episodes. (that felt like a 5 episode Television run).... then we got a Devidian 5 parter. A 6 part romulan and then the most recent 5 part Dominion stories.
Cryptic at one point early on promised those every few months ... to make it feel like you where living a Star Trek Television show. The fact that they can't be bothered to produce 4-5 missions every 2-3 months is SAD... but it isn't a F2P issue its 100% a fail developer issue. we should be raiding H about there fail there... not about one of the few redeming qualities of STO. That being the fact that EVERYTHING in STO (including lockboxes) is 100% free to play... you pay to get perks with subs or you pay for Zen to speed grind times, that's it... nothing exists behind a pay wall.
Not going to work because you can't monetize Mission Content in F2P games the same way as in Sub-games .... well you could but Cryptic decided against putting Missions in the C-Store ... it's no mystic coincidence "Serial Episodes" went over board just after F2P ...
The only reason they're able to do LOR was because, we got lots of new Stuff in the C-Store, Romulan stuff ... if they made just 25 new FED Mission i.E. => no reason to buy new shinies from the Store => (no Subs) => no profit ...
If it's 100% Dev-Failure, why could they do it before F2P ?
Yes because they charge you extra for it ... aka "How F2P works" :P