What do you think about F2P model?

[gezegond]

http://www.gamesradar.com/how-f2p-ga...it-your-brain/
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/Ramin...ion_Tricks.php

What do you guys think about the F2P model? It seems everyone and their brothers are doing F2P now. What are your favorite F2P games and what do you like about them? Do you think F2P is the future or just a trend that will be forgotten soon?

Personally, I liked F2P when it was new. I liked the fact that I could spend exactly as much as I wanted on a game (nothing). The games I played were Quake Live and Battlefield Play4Free. I liked both of them a lot.

However now that everyone is doing it, and considering the articles above, I really hope it doesn't stay long. It has basically morphed into a method to trick players into paying more and more. Sure it's profitable, the only other business model I've seen that resembles this is fraud.

My other gripe with them is that you can never experience the game in its entirety. There are always new things coming awaiting purchase. They also die when the servers go offline. Many might not care, but I sorta prefer to just install a game and be sure that I can play it forever in its entirety.

[Cookie Monster]

I can't say I've played many F2P games, but I smiled when I saw one of the ones I've played, Candy Crush Saga, mentioned. It's pure evil

I don't really have any problem with them, as long as you have clear that you shouldn't spend a single dime on them, you'll be fine As you said, they aren't meant to last forever, thus not worth my money.
And if a game is conceived to not be enjoyed without paying for stuff, then it's not worth my time either.

Traditional gaming FTW.

[Warrior]

What Cookie said

I have played a few F2P games before and they were pretty obnoxious with the gotta pay real cash for the better stuff.

[gezegond]

What I think is acceptable, is a game that charges for real work.

For instance, a racing game in which you can unlock cars by paying. Cars in a racing game take time and effort to develop, so it seems reasonable for me to charge for them. On the other hand, if you make the player lose on purpose and then tell him he has to pay in order to not lose everything he has is completely unacceptable. Not only are they lying to and deceiving the player, they're also charging for nothing. They're basically charging for something they haven't spend a single dime or a single second developing.

Free Money! Economic Bubble detected.

tl;dr:
Pay for content: Good
Pay to win: Bad
==============================

Most of you find money games in poor form, but that is what is getting funded.
For many of you, that means a choice between doing them or going without work.
It is a tragic situation caused by misinformed investors and management.
Only education or tragedy will change the situation, and education is cheaper.

As someone who hopes to be developing games one day, I seriously hope it won't come to that for me.

Traditional gaming FTW indeed.

[Mr. Nemo]

Ehhhh. The free to play model certainly has allowed more A/AA titles to come out and while that is potentially good, the level 7 psychology lessons being used to manipulate the players completely removes any justification for making that decision (well, not everything since money is kind of a big deal). PC gaming in general has taught me there are thousands of games legitimately for free and the ones that do cost money are usually $10 or less because of bundles and just plain old competition. I'd rather pay a few bucks and have a satisfactory feeling playing a game then have an online game be a monkey on my back.

[treos]

considering most games i play are browser based (flash and text based mmo's), i don't usually have much problem with them unless its one of those crappy pay-to-win setups where most payout in the game (currency/resource/exp/etc.) is really low vs when you pay irl $ for boosts. sadly, i've seen numerous game from korean based evs come out like that where all the exp or gold payout from fighting monsters is super low (next to nothing) and all your lvling is just handouts via quests. tbh i find that type of setup rather insulting in a number of ways.

all thats aside however, i've also seen a lot of games that are relatively well balanced and the only "premium" stuff is in the mall/item shop or whatever they choose to call it so thats not too bad.

bear in mind, i was referring to flash/text based games mostly. i'd try bigger games more often but with this laptop, i sometimes have to watch the system requirements and download sizes of bigger mmo's

[gamerdude21]

Free to play almost always = pay to win. There are a few exceptions. There is a cool Diablo clone out in open beta ATM. Its called Path of Exile. http://www.pathofexile.com/

Its probably the best FTP game that I've played. Instead of selling players items they can use to win in the game, they're selling cosmetic effects, and extra storage space in the stash. They already give you 4 tabs of shared storage for free, which is more space than Diablo 3 gives you.

If you thought Diablo 3 sucked, and are looking for a solid ARPG, I'd recommend this.

One pointer I'll give people is you shouldn't gamble the more expensive currency. The currency is orbs you can use to reroll certain things on items. Some other jackass will burn them up, but there is literally no logical reason to be burning up expensive items that most likely you could trade for something that has a 99.9999% chance of being better than anything you can roll by burning the item up.

[Gare]

I've played a couple. F2P sounds good on paper and draws people in but it can turn Pay2Win real fast. However, I don't play MMOs for long enough to warrant cash shop purchases, so I'm fine with getting a quick taste via the free model.

I played Tera semi-recently, although I wasn't a full free user - I bought a boxed copy of the game which gave me certain privileges. But even then their model (back in February/March, at least) was pretty okay, and the cash shop mostly had cosmetic shit. However, Tera EU is kind of a mess compared to the USA version, and I've seen people rage about the EU cash shop prices on the forums, so yeah. If your MMO is being managed by a greedy scumfuck company, you're kinda screwed. I've yet to see a F2P game that wan't surrounded by cash shop drama, so take that for what you will.

Also my brother played that online Tribes game (Ascend?) last year and he thought their F2P model was a fucking mess and outright unfair to free users, so he quit fairly early on. It was basically a "pay for everything or grind for eternity" model based on what he told me.

On a similar note, I would be interested in how PSO2 is handled right now. Anyone tried it recently? I played it last summer and considered going back to it, unless their F2P sucks too. It was a fun game, though a bit on the grindy side.

With that said, F2P is probably the future, as it tends to make more money than the subscription-based model... or so I heard.

[soysauce2rice]

I've played a couple. F2P sounds good on paper and draws people in but it can turn Pay2Win real fast. However, I don't play MMOs for long enough to warrant cash shop purchases, so I'm fine with getting a quick taste via the free model.

Yep same here, I've been rolling around with a couple f2p mmos. Kinda hard for me to pick one and just try it out but I get there, usually stopping mid level (mostly due to I suck at banking money). On a side note, after Jul. 1's patch the Tera bams (below 40 or 50) are now soloable they're too easy :/ I've lost a bit of interest in Tera now.

Sometimes I look at a game's cash shop and it's just expensive as hell for whatever reason. Sometimes items can be considerably expensive but it's a "pay to win" item. I've heard of some games ran by "evil" companies from friends and their experiences sounded traumatizing. My friend played some game called Iris Online that used to be hosted by Gpotato. She said something like they advertise/promoted sales on the "last" month and whatnot to spend irl cash on the game, then closed the game down with barely a forewarning. I'd have to ask for the details. Lately I've been looking at the games Aeriagames have been hosting and a ton of them seem to close down within the first few months. For example, Ijji Gunz was added to Aeria's list of games. A game that had been running for I think 5 years shows up in Aeria's hands and didn't even make it past 1 year.

In terms of the model though I do like F2P but sometimes it feels like a pain when it's pay to win depending on the economy. My favorite mmo that closed called Domo felt easy for me when I could farm mob drops at a very high rate and cash shop items weren't overpriced in terms of in-game gold. In terms of numbers, an average player Level 30-50 can farm 50-70k an hour. A stronger Level 70 player (cap) can farm 150k an hour at a higher level area. I was banking 250k an hour. Reskills were 50k each. We went to see the Chinese server (the original) since our's closed and reskills there cost 1 mil; basically meant don't screw up your skills or you're done. I'm sort of ok with having "pay to win" items, but it sucks when the price in game looks incredibly high. Aesthetics are nice but I hate it when it's in the millions in some game, especially since most games make them untradable on equip.

When it comes to F2P a game usually has a large player base on the first few months, and I try it out mostly for a social aspect. Even now though I'm kinda getting tired of mmorpgs, usually due to the community. There's a lot of douchebag players that can be pretty aggravating.

So far my favorite F2P is Tera. It's combat system is great but it needs a few tweaks. The craft system looked pretty rough and a lot of people disagree on the mass amount of quests Tera gives you. That's a different discussion though.
If Borderlands 1 and 2 is an F2P then I like those 2. Borderlands 1 is great but there's barely anyone playing it now, at least low levels anyway. BL2 is fun at times but it feels like Gearbox is trying to make it like an mmorpg. There's a 24 hour raid boss lock-out timer after killing the boss for whatever reason. Voracidious raid boss is a piece of crap that looks poorly designed imo.

[Gare]

Yep same here, I've been rolling around with a couple f2p mmos. Kinda hard for me to pick one and just try it out but I get there, usually stopping mid level (mostly due to I suck at banking money). On a side note, after Jul. 1's patch the Tera bams (below 40 or 50) are now soloable they're too easy :/ I've lost a bit of interest in Tera now.

Well that sucks. The primary fun factor of Tera (for me, at least) was taking down bams in groups. Oh well. I've seen many enjoy the solo aspect, but I never fully understood that. I don't see the point of playing an MMO as a single player experience, kinda defeats the purpose of the game. Although, to each their own.

I agree that the combat is fun, although it depends on what class you pick. My main was a Lancer which is tons of fun to play, but I also had a Sorcerer which was just dreadfully boring. Oh and yeah the game does give you way too many quests, I had to skip a bunch because I was overleveled by the time I got to them. The pacing of going from one area to another is done extremely poorly.

[soysauce2rice]

Well that sucks. The primary fun factor of Tera (for me, at least) was taking down bams in groups. Oh well. I've seen many enjoy the solo aspect, but I never fully understood that. I don't see the point of playing an MMO as a single player experience, kinda defeats the purpose of the game. Although, to each their own.

I agree that the combat is fun, although it depends on what class you pick. My main was a Lancer which is tons of fun to play, but I also had a Sorcerer which was just dreadfully boring. Oh and yeah the game does give you way too many quests, I had to skip a bunch because I was overleveled by the time I got to them. The pacing of going from one area to another is done extremely poorly.

Not to derail too much from the topic but yeah the open world bams are what defined the game for me. I'd get so ecstatic when I can solo kill a bam, and I don't really care if I can't repeat it over and over, it just feels so satisfying to do it. I also enjoy group bam hunting as a dps as it lets me beat the crap out of it without worrying too much of aggro. Now you can probably literally faceroll a bam below 30s. I did it on Mystic vs a Fimbrilisk and it didn't enrage at all. I hope it doesn't leave a bad impression on newcomers as one can get to Level 19 and nothing exciting happens until 20.
Been loving Warrior (sucks until 28) knowing I can tank too, given I have experience in the area first. Slayer is probably second. I haven't had too much free time, but 2 friends and I are starting from Lv 1 again, cept I'm a Lancer so guess I'll see how fun it is. I only tanked in 1 mmo and it was easy, you just stand there using 1 skill.

[Gare]

Not to derail too much from the topic but yeah the open world bams are what defined the game for me. I'd get so ecstatic when I can solo kill a bam, and I don't really care if I can't repeat it over and over, it just feels so satisfying to do it. I also enjoy group bam hunting as a dps as it lets me beat the crap out of it without worrying too much of aggro. Now you can probably literally faceroll a bam below 30s. I did it on Mystic vs a Fimbrilisk and it didn't enrage at all. I hope it doesn't leave a bad impression on newcomers as one can get to Level 19 and nothing exciting happens until 20.
Been loving Warrior (sucks until 28) knowing I can tank too, given I have experience in the area first. Slayer is probably second. I haven't had too much free time, but 2 friends and I are starting from Lv 1 again, cept I'm a Lancer so guess I'll see how fun it is. I only tanked in 1 mmo and it was easy, you just stand there using 1 skill.

Eh, it's still sort of on-topic. The thread is about F2P and we're talking about a F2P game.

Tanking as a Lancer isn't too hard (I was 40 when I quit), you just need to learn the bam's attack patterns, block with good timing, and do some minor damage/aggro maintenance with Shield Counter between the boss' attacks (you'll need a proper Glyph setup for this). It's easier than it sounds. The first dungeon that required *some* tanking skill was Cultists' Refuge (around lv38), when you had to keep the boss from spawning minions with a well-timed Leash. Of course, a mindless dps or an incompetent healer can ruin anyone's day, but that just comes with the territory. It's still far less stressful than playing a Priest, in which case you have to pretty much babysit bad players and still get blamed for a wipe. Trust me, I've been there.

But overall it's not a big deal if you're a competent player. Even when I myself wasn't satisfied with my tanking, I was still getting praised by teammates. I guess since 90% of Lancers I've met were garbage, the few ones that aren't horrible are labeled as having mad skillz.

[soysauce2rice]

Tanking as a Lancer isn't too hard (I was 40 when I quit), you just need to learn the bam's attack patterns, block with good timing, and do some minor damage/aggro maintenance with Shield Counter between the boss' attacks (you'll need a proper Glyph setup for this). It's easier than it sounds. The first dungeon that required *some* tanking skill was Cultists' Refuge (around lv38), when you had to keep the boss from spawning minions with a well-timed Leash. Of course, a mindless dps or an incompetent healer can ruin anyone's day, but that just comes with the territory. It's still far less stressful than playing a Priest, in which case you have to pretty much babysit bad players and still get blamed for a wipe. Trust me, I've been there.

But overall it's not a big deal if you're a competent player. Even when I myself wasn't satisfied with my tanking, I was still getting praised by teammates. I guess since 90% of Lancers I've met were garbage, the few ones that aren't horrible are labeled as having mad skillz.

Well tbh I only got Lancer to 20 so I haven't looked at their skills much. I only remember they get an hp and resolve heal skill, and a leash that stuns. I'm not too worried about the Bams though. I'm only worried about mobbing enemies like, I guess more than 5 at a time. I've had some cases where some lancers I grouped with would 1) mitigate a lot of damage from the mob, 2) hold block all day, 3) try to faceroll the mob usually having half hp or less by the time the mob dies. This is probably the reason why I haven't tanked yet as Warrior in a dungeon as their shout is a 30 sec cd, 24 with a 4pt glyph. I'm not really confident but I guess I'd have to try it for once to actually get a feel for it.

I could not play priest for some reason though haha. I played Mystic so... I guess if anyone blamed me for dying I'd just say they should've grabbed the eff ton of hp skittles I drop as I try to keep up at least 3 assuming we're in a circle or a cone formation. Haven't played Mystic in a while as I hate healing since there can be obliviously bad players.

[williamjones]

Theyre ripoffs in disguise too much of the time. And a ton of parents are losing money due to their kids paying actual money for stuff in these games. In the UK I think people trying to pass laws restricting things. Apple have also started to reimburse people.

[angelboy77777]

I play Facebook games... they are F2P. They fun