Goblin Squad Member
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Hi guys, still checking in again for my six month review of PFO.
[tldr: When my months of paid subscription run out, am I going to be able to play for free?]
I noticed some comments in the threads that imply that PFO will have a subscription model.
When I backed the Kickstarter for a hundo it was in large part becuase Ryan was evangelical that the old theme park model, including monthly subscriptions, were dinosaurs and the future of MMOs were free to play sandboxes with micro-transactions.
such as this long quote from Ryan....
"When we’re ready we’ll allow players to choose to either play via subscription or to play via microtransactions. This is the model that Turbine pioneered with Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online.
Unlike a lot of MMOs we’re not focusing our microtransaction system on “unlocking” core game elements. Rather, we’re going to focus it on our unusual skill-training system. Like EVE Online, characters will train skills in real time, regardless of whether the player is logged into the server or not. Training a skill is a pre-requisite to earn a character ability (in addition to other things like succeeding in certain in-game actions that we memorialize with a “merit badge” – a token of achievement).
A twist that we’re adding, taking more inspiration from EVE, is that you’ll be able to sell these skill-training time increments via the in-game market to other characters for Coin, the in-game currency. This mirrors EVE’s PLEX system and it is designed to do the same kind of thing; allow some players to “play for free” by earning their skill training time by purchasing it from other players who would rather buy and sell time than try to earn in-game Coin themselves. It cuts down on 3rd party “real money trading” and all the bad stuff that comes with RMT."
Anyway, does anyone know if this has changed? When my months of paid subscription run out, am I going to be able to play for free?
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Goblin Squad Member
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You are going to be able to play for free, yes.
What you will have to pay for, via micro transactions, is for training of your skills. You will be able to purchase Skill Training in small or large packages. Either way, as far as I know, there are no other restrictions while playing for free.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think this is the latest.
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.
Note that free-to-play isn't really expected at all until after the entire Early Enrollment ramp-up.
