Goblin Squad Member
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And Team Fortress 2 is a fantastic and content-filled F2P game as well (which has always been subscriptionless, but originally you had to buy the game itself. Now there's absolutely no purchases). :)
Not an MMO, but when I think of successful F2P I always think to TF2. It's been around for 7 years now and there're still many people who play it, plus it's legitimately fun.
Fair enough, I should have specified MMO XD
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Goblin Squad Member
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Isn't the core gameplay too similar in a lot of those mmorpgs?
Starbound just past 1m sales from a recent report and it came out on 4th Dec. It's an explore/build/share type of 2d space terraria. Seems different gameplay will warrant a sub; such as building stuff not just mmo-combat that is similar in a lot of mmorpgs?
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Goblin Squad Member
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You've stumbled upon one of the issues PFO will have to face.
It is still a fantasy based MMO with similarities with many of the existing MMO's out there.
If they go too far away from the combat & mechanics of other games it could be a turnoff due to the unfamiliarity and "quirkiness" of the system and not worth the subscription to people.
If they stay to close it could be an even bigger turnoff, why pay for something when you can get the same gameplay for free elsewhere?
The experience system they are using is a gamble as outside of Eve Online, which they are basing there model on this will be unfamiliar terrain for many players. Will people accept paying a subscription and play a game where you don't level by participating, but based on how long you've been subscribed for and you can never catch up to someone who started 6 months before you even if you play 10 times as much.
Please keep in mind that "Well it works for Eve, it'll work for PFO" is an invalid argument. Eve has no competition and has never had any competition. If you want to do spaceship combat in an MMO you do eve.
Pfo does have competition and it will need to steal players from other games, many of which are free, and convince them that PFO offers something worth a monthly subscription.
They need to do this while releasing a MINIMUM viable product...
How is GW going to convince enough people to pay a monthly fee to play a MINIMUM product in an already saturated market that will be only more saturated when the game finally releases?
In order to succeed they will need players who are willing to pay to play an incomplete "minimum" game compared to the game we all have pictured in our minds, the expectations we all have, the "perfect dream vision" we all carry, the game PFO might live to one day become in many years time.
I don't care how much prep they do to prepare people, how much down talking they do EVERY SINGLE PLAYER that logs in is going to be "I thought... I wanted... Where is..." when they first log in.
Those players are going to have to suffer through bugs, nurfs, balancing, griefing (yes there will be a lot of this until GW gets there systems fine tuned) lag, crashes, and all the other assorted goodies players should expect during what will essentially be an elongated beta period as new systems and features are implemented and added.
And they will need to pay to do it in a game market that's will be saturated with free to pay as well as subscription based games to do it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Those of us that contributed to the Kickstarter(s) were told that EE will basically be an unfinished product until OE comes about. There will be probably a lot of people in EE that will complain about the stuff you have listed. But they knew this stuff would be there before they committed to the Kickstarter. I won't have any sympathy for them.
If they really don't like it. They don't have to activate their account for EE and wait for OE to start and then buy Training Time in the Shop instead of doing Subscription.
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Goblin Squad Member
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How is GW going to convince enough people to pay a monthly fee to play a MINIMUM product in an already saturated market that will be only more saturated when the game finally releases?
They already did. It's called Early Enrollment and it's going to have plenty of Kickstarter backers playing.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think a large portion of this forum would be happy to bash each other with stickmen using sticks and a single attack / sit there and roleplay with /emotes as long as we were doing it in something called Pathfinder Online. Especially if we knew we were building skills that would remain on our characters permanently.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I don't really think it's a matter of payment models.
I think the secret is that the MMO market really isn't as big as WoW might lead you to believe. Never has been. If you can retain a few hundred thousand players, you have a large and healthy game.
Unless, of course, you build your entire business model on the assumption that you can retain several million recurrent players. Which, surprise surprise, you can't.
One of the things PFO is doing right, is not to expect a multi-million playerbase.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think that there are aspects of PFO that makes it differ from other similar titles. The fact that players can, will and want to build buildings on predetermined spots and choose what buildings they want to build and the fact that someone can come and kick that building down or even a whole settlement that players have built is kind of exciting. And if all these things can be done in fairly multigraded multifaceted ways, then it'll definitely set PFO a part from other titles.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Andius and Aeioun hit the nail on the head for me. Both those apply to me.
And Ryan's right: At a small enough size, there IS enough people that really dig a particular game above anything else (same with Trials of Ascension folks except they need to get over the 1st hurdle; some of whom have followed that game since early 2000's!).
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Goblin Squad Member
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Logging into a single player game that is unfinnished isn't going to have much appeal. The difference with a multi-player game like this is the community. Being part of that community from the outset and helping to build it and shape it and participate in it from the outset and while it's still small has a special appeal which is entirely divorced from game mechanics or graphics or any of the technical stuff of the game. It's that human factor of exploring and sharing the growth of the game together that is going to have a draw all it's own.
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Goblin Squad Member
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My experience has been different. I went back to LOTRO when it became Free-to-Play, and I can't think of anything that was missing from before. I've played Vanguard (a lot) both before and after it went Free-to-Play, and again I don't see anything missing. Sure, both games have features that aren't fully available to free players, but that's to be expected. In general, I think Free-to-Play mostly just brings in a lot of players who wouldn't otherwise be there.I hope FTP never becomes a reality, it destroys the community.I do not know about the community, but I find that it often reduces the quality of the game itself. Whether it is causation or coincidence I do not know, but FTP games always seem... lacking.
This is mostly because LOTRO is for the most part a solo game. If there was more community interaction I guarantee you would see a difference. Thankfully PFO won't be a solo "MMO by name only" like LOTRO is. I think it should stay away from FTP.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I played LOTRO both before and after it went F2P. Since I had lifetime membership not much changed in what was available to me. But there are two big things I noted.
1. The rate at which new non-MTX content became available seemed to decrease. To me at least.
2. The quality if the community seemed to decrease. When people aren't willing to pay 15$ a month to join your community they just don't care about it as much.
Personally I think the starter towns and surrounding areas should be the only places you can go as a F2P character. Everyone else should pay 5$ a month for full access and much slower skill training, + whatever else they want or the full cost of a month of skill training + whatever else they want.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Personally I think the starter towns and surrounding areas should be the only places you can go as a F2P character. Everyone else should pay 5$ a month for full access and much slower skill training, + whatever else they want or the full cost of a month of skill training + whatever else they want.
That sounds reasonable to me.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Please keep in mind that "Well it works for Eve, it'll work for PFO" is an invalid argument. Eve has no competition and has never had any competition. If you want to do spaceship combat in an MMO you do eve... or Star Trek Online to name at least one alternative, that's actually doing quite well as a FTP game.
I think Star Trek Online is not a competitor to EvE Online in the same way Counter Strike is not a competitor to Battlefield 3+.
They are similar on the surface but the reasons to play those games are very different. Flying spaceships in EvE is very different to flying spaceships in Star Trek Online.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I played LOTRO both before and after it went F2P. Since I had lifetime membership not much changed in what was available to me. But there are two big things I noted.
1. The rate at which new non-MTX content became available seemed to decrease. To me at least.
Turbine has been fairly busy with Helm's Deep. This may be a more salient consideration than the change in business model.
2. The quality if the community seemed to decrease. When people aren't willing to pay 15$ a month to join your community they just don't care about it as much.
I'd just say the community has decreased and leave it there. There were always bad eggs, there were just many more good eggs. Now there are simply few eggs.
Personally I think the starter towns and surrounding areas should be the only places you can go as a F2P character. Everyone else should pay 5$ a month for full access and much slower skill training, + whatever else they want or the full cost of a month of skill training + whatever else they want.
I'd rather have more company to fellow with, out in the hinterlands.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'd be willing to pay a subscription for all game content at 15 - 20 per month, which would include a small stipend of MTX cash (for the extra $5.00). I'd like to see different monthly packages, which are basically standard w/ a few additional long term options.
1 month
3 month
6 month
12 month
16 month
24 month
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Goblin Squad Member
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In DUST 514 training speed boosts come as items purchased with Aurum (The MTX cash). As you purchase larger Aurum packages you get more and more value per dollar. If I remember right the larger packages both gave more AUR per dollar and threw in some exclusive items.
Not a bad way to run it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Here's my thoughts about free to play in Pathfinder Online.
In a perfect world we would have a free to play tier in our pricing system that was truly free to play - you wouldn't have to pay us anything to play the game at least at some minimal level of character ability. Its the ideal way to get a lot of people into an MMO, and once ours has matured to the point where it is robust in many dimensions of development we'd like to have as many people play it as possible as each additional player creates more content for everyone else already in the game.
The downside is that unlike the traditional theme park MMOs which use shards, and which have hard caps on how many people can log in at any one time (a hard cap only works when you have shards because you can just add more shards as the demand exceeds the caps) we will have one server, with no cap (hopefully). So we are bound by server limitations and could easily find ourselves in a situation where we can't keep up with server demand if we had a huge population of free players. In order to keep the environment optimal for our paying players we could find ourselves in a position where we just can't offer a free to play option.
We will probably experiment with a lot of options in the 2017+ timeframe, by which time we should have a pretty good handle on server loads and strategies to keep characters from "over populating" a given area.
I am thinking if you do have an active player cap on the server (and you'd have to have some sort of cap, realistically, to prevent a total crash or freeze), dibs go to the most profitable and regular income producers, Tier 1 if you refer to avari3's set up. you want those that pay and play to have access and the taste testers would have to queue up.
I read the Forbes article first (stumbled across it at work since Forbes is not a game website) and read the MMORPG after. Paul Tassi (Forbes) wrote as though he only read the cliff notes version of your original article. Granted, he couldn't reprint the entire thing, but he was pretty selective in his excerpts and overall poo-pooed sub fees while backtracking on his original claim in the first story that "he might be wrong", which I found a strange paradox. Will sub fees work or not? I think so, but there are going to be many innovative models in the future.
Just played the ESO beta and had fun. If you get an invite, try it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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ehhh my experience in the eso beta was the exact opposite. As an mmo it doesnt do anything different than the other theme park mmos out there and they gave up much of what made the elder scroll games enjoyable to play.
There really wasnt anything to hold my attention. I think the game is going to end up similar to SWTOR.
Its going to survive, but its not going to hold nearly the player base they are looking for and it wont be nearly as interesting as it could have been.
Honestly i think thats why Sony scrapped what they had for EQ next and basically are redoing it. They were doing the same thing as SWTOR and ESO and thought to themselves.......wow this is the same as everyone else, lets attempt to do something different. now how well will they be able to do that? no idea, heck i dont even know if what they have right now is any good, but they decided that what they had, wasnt.
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Goblin Squad Member
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To be honest about it, a completely "free to play option", one where you could train a toon to a certain level of skill and then stop paying but continue playing it would result in retaining a few extra actual PLAYERS and generate an incredible number of LG settlement trading and crafting and hauling ALTS. It probably would be very popular with people whose main toon was a bandit/pirate/naer-do-well type to give them easy access to settlement markets :D
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Goblin Squad Member
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ESO is a joke, and will fail. They keep inviting me to their stupid beta, it's like they're begging me to come in.
The problem, however, isn't that they made it a sub game, it was a sub game from day one when Matt Firor kept saying it would be "Premium". People kept saying "well, we don't know for sure it will be sub-game", and I was like *rolls eyes*. And... sure enough.
The PROBLEM, was them making it a sub game from the start, and then bending to a whole bunch of self-entitled whiners on their forums who played the Single-Player ES games, and wanted a completely different game than they were offering.
So, they CHANGED the game to suit their needs, and made it more like their regular single-player TES games, and then once that happened, people were expecting that it wouldn't be a sub game, just like the other single-player TES games they've played. Originally, it was never like those games, it was more akin to DAoC.
Then they destroyed it. I just hope it causes Zenimax to go bankrupt, and no mroe single player TES games are made. That way I can look at all the Single-Player TES fans who worked to destroy the game with a big smile on my face, and say, "Mission Accomplished". :)
Wow, that's petty.
I've played in the beta twice now, and its pretty decent. Everyone there seems to enjoy it. If you can get past the ridiculous premise of the story (which totally violates lore, btw) you can enjoy it. The solo-able aspects in the early game should be seen as a "work-out" for your character. A build-up to the PvP centric territory control of the late-game.
ESO is like a hybrid of PFO and WoW. Its that place in the middle between theme-park and a sandbox with theme-park distractions.
As for MTX and in-game shops, I feel that Star Trek Online has done a good job with that. Although the interface is all kinds of bad otherwise, they did well in making the in-game shop completely unobtrusive to the experience.
Unlike in LotRO where it is shoe-horned into multiple interfaces. (I felt like I was hit in the face with an in-game cash shop official brick when i opened the crafting menu for the first time).
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CEO, Goblinworks
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@theStormWeaver - I think it's very hard to say it's in the middle between Pathfinder Online and WoW. There is no persistent territorial control. They're just WoW-style battlefields with sieges. There's nothing persistent in the game except stuff you craft and your character. The factions are determined by developer fiat and don't respond to any player input. The focus of the game is clearly and squarely on it's PvE content.
It's another themepark WoW clone.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@theStormWeaver - I think it's very hard to say it's in the middle between Pathfinder Online and WoW. There is no persistent territorial control. They're just WoW-style battlefields with sieges. There's nothing persistent in the game except stuff you craft and your character. The factions are determined by developer fiat and don't respond to any player input. The focus of the game is clearly and squarely on it's PvE content.
It's another themepark WoW clone.
Can I take that to mean that Factions in PFO will not be the same way?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I've been MMO clean for almost a year now, since I stopped playing SWtOR (and my brief dabbling in MMOs). So I'm no longer playing $100+ a year to subscribe to games with friends.
As a result I'm spending more.
Rather than $10-15 a month I'm spending $30-60 every two or three months for a new game to multiplayer with a friend. We'll buy a new game, play for a period, burn out or beat it, and get a new game (or some DLC). And I'm buying more single player games.
I'll be very happy to only be paying monthly fees for a single dedicated game again.
I'm not a fan of MTX, but I accept them. I prefer when they're bonus content like extra races, some cosmetic clothes, vanity pets, or reskins of existing combat pets. Stuff where you can play the game forever and never really notice, but doesn't change the game balance.
I've dumped some money for vanity mounts or pets in WoW, but it always felt optional, like a nice perk.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Can I take that to mean that Factions in PFO will not be the same way?@theStormWeaver - I think it's very hard to say it's in the middle between Pathfinder Online and WoW. There is no persistent territorial control. They're just WoW-style battlefields with sieges. There's nothing persistent in the game except stuff you craft and your character. The factions are determined by developer fiat and don't respond to any player input. The focus of the game is clearly and squarely on it's PvE content.
It's another themepark WoW clone.
PFO has at least 3 levels of "faction", your settlement/CC, alliances and alignment. None of them are set permanently at character creation.
In Age of Conan your guild could actually "hold" a keep. The keep had siege windows and gave bonuses. It was a theme park with a single sand box element but that didn't make it sand box in any way, shape or form. AoC is theme park.
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Goblin Squad Member
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That would be an innovative mechanic to add to a persistent MMO.My question was referring to NPC Factions, I should have made that clear.
Will the NPC Factions that we van join be mailable by player interactions over a prolonged period of time?
I understand it's like the Fallen earth system, so yes.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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Players won't have a persistent in-game effect on NPC factions. But unlike in a theme park game, the NPC factions will be the least important part of the territorial and political landscape of the world. They're just hooks to hang some storytelling on. Once you establish a place for yourself in a player Settlement the NPC factions will fade into the distant background of the world.
