The downside of F2P (lol at the web comic) - Page 3

Jimmuc · 2011-10-10, 01:38 AM

rather spend $30-50 on the game itself then $5-15 a month on a premium account that gives me something like +50% learning speed increase to skills while in-game and +25% increase while offline. like World of Tanks but not having to buy gold.

Zulthus · 2011-10-10, 02:01 AM

If you actually want to play the game, $15 a month is absolutely nothing. You can afford that from working at McDonald's. Provides more support for development, a more mature community (keeps the 8 year olds away), hopefully prevent a cash shop implementation (no matter how much they promise they won't sell power, we all know that it will eventually happen). Wouldn't disagree with a box price on top of it, either. It will help so much with hacking problems. The ol' argument "but we wutn getz 2many playerz" STFU. Even back in the day when sub fees were very new, it got 75k subs easy. Nowadays with the huge FPS crowd, I'd imagine seeing many more than 500k subs, EVEN WITH $15 a month. No one would mind paying if the gameplay is great. There's gonna be a hell of a lot of servers at release.

Xyntech · 2011-10-10, 02:38 AM

Originally Posted by Zulthus

If you actually want to play the game, $15 a month is absolutely nothing. You can afford that from working at McDonald's.

To someone who has only ever played non-P2P FPS games, it may seem like a pointless expenditure.

Originally Posted by Zulthus

Provides more support for development

True, but F2P has already proven to be a reliable business model.

Originally Posted by Zulthus

a more mature community (keeps the 8 year olds away)

This just isn't even remotely accurate. I know of several kids just in me and my friends families, some of whom are literally 8 or 9 years old, who play P2P MMOs.

Originally Posted by Zulthus

hopefully prevent a cash shop implementation (no matter how much they promise they won't sell power, we all know that it will eventually happen).

We all know they are already planning on "selling power" by your extremely broad definition. I also have every confidence that they will never sell power by my definition.

Originally Posted by Zulthus

Wouldn't disagree with a box price on top of it, either. It will help so much with hacking problems.

The transaction of money is the idea on how to reduce hacking problems. Having a subscription fee and a box price would be redundant there. A one time transaction is all you need to reduce this problem as much as it can be reduced in this way.

Originally Posted by Zulthus

The ol' argument "but we wutn getz 2many playerz" STFU. Even back in the day when sub fees were very new, it got 75k subs easy. Nowadays with the huge FPS crowd, I'd imagine seeing many more than 500k subs, EVEN WITH $15 a month. No one would mind paying if the gameplay is great. There's gonna be a hell of a lot of servers at release.

The game needs as many players as it can get and appealing to the FPS player market is the best way to do this. The only precedent we have for a P2P FPS game is the first Planetside, which started with semi-decent numbers and rapidly declined from there. I don't want a repeat of PS1's history.

In any case, the developers have said F2P is in. That isn't a gameplay decision subject to change, that is a business decision that we have no say in. It's not just for PS2, it's for SOE games in general. So really, there isn't much point in debating it.

If you don't like F2P and you want to play Planetside 2, it sounds like you are out of luck.

I for one welcome our new F2P overlords.

Captain B · 2011-10-10, 02:46 AM

I agree. One box = one account. If you want cool new stuff, pay more. If you want expansion content, pay more, or wait until it becomes available for all players 6-12 months later. F2P is great for people who just don't have the money (or desire) to pay almost $200 a year on a game, plus any other fees or purchases regarding the game (box, cash store, etc.), that is usually "beaten" in about 6 months of play and just repeated over and over again afterward.

The strength of F2P is more people playing (trial allows people to test the waters before purchasing outright). The weakness is too many accounts, which is immediately stamped out by purchasing accounts (box or account code D2D). It's one of those things that you can have your cake and eat it too. The only problem with F2P is the "Pay to Win" model, where you HAVE to buy the gear or just die incessantly, which actually works against the model's strengths since players aren't as stupid as devs often think and will realize the truth of it all in short order.

Any real gamer with a half a brain understands this. Zynga, anyone? Thought so.

Jimmuc · 2011-10-10, 03:06 AM

i agree with you Zulthus, i too would rather see an subscription but if their going to stay with F2P w/ cash shop its up to us to help them figure whats the best route to take. WoT is the only F2P that i like really and would like to see an premium account like theirs ($13-15 a month) instead of an cash shop and not having to buy/use gold/station cash or whatever. the F2P with premium account works the best imo (besides subscription) and no damn cash shop.

my idea is (open to any suggestions):
$50 for the box w/ game key and an extra $15 an month for premium with an option to buy 3/6/12 months worth of premium. having the premium account can give you what i said in my previous post and some other perks perhaps but nothing that makes you vastly superior to the non-premium players.

there are going to be people that only just spend $50 for the game, there are going to be people that buy the premium account for months/years at a time and then there are the people who will buy the premium off and on. like i said before i'd rather have an subscription but if they stick to the F2P, what i typed above is what i'd rather see if anything.

SKYeXile · 2011-10-10, 03:56 AM

Originally Posted by Zulthus

If you actually want to play the game, $15 a month is absolutely nothing. You can afford that from working at McDonald's. Provides more support for development, a more mature community (keeps the 8 year olds away), hopefully prevent a cash shop implementation (no matter how much they promise they won't sell power, we all know that it will eventually happen). Wouldn't disagree with a box price on top of it, either. It will help so much with hacking problems. The ol' argument "but we wutn getz 2many playerz" STFU. Even back in the day when sub fees were very new, it got 75k subs easy. Nowadays with the huge FPS crowd, I'd imagine seeing many more than 500k subs, EVEN WITH $15 a month. No one would mind paying if the gameplay is great. There's gonna be a hell of a lot of servers at release.

I agree $15.00 is nothing, but theres a whole lot of tight asses in the world, and guess what? alot of them play FPS's because they dont have to pay an ongoing sub. which is good, when the cash shop is opened I can CRUSH them with my wallet.

i said previously pay to play is the future, that was a lie, ITS THE NOW. why would you want to limit your income to your population x 15 per month? when you could have potentially unlimited income(que evil laugh) give people abit of a taste with some free stuff now and then, THEN MAKE THEM PAY! and of course have an incentive to sub, higher XP gains and XP while offline is a high candidate. being able to level over a certain level is another(they have done it before)

i agree having a purchase upfront would limit hackers, but also even if the game is clinetside having a proper tertiary hack detection program like warden is going to help things. but also banning the hackers...hackers were rarly seen back in 04, when banb was on the case, SOE does have the tools to detect them, but enforcing the banning policy is another thing...

I SandRock · 2011-10-10, 06:37 AM

My only major concern with the announcement of PS2 being F2P is that they won't charge for the original game. I have seen what happens to F2P FPS games that are free entirely...
They get overrun with hackers. (APB, CA, etc.)
You can never stop hackers entirely. But at least when you ban them and they have to buy the game again limits their ability to come back sufficiently.

PB etc. are useless crap when left to deal with h4xx0rs. I'm fine with no subs, just please, please, charge me for the original game :P

Bags · 2011-10-10, 10:08 AM

They haven't confirmed it will be F2P, just that it will have some F2P aspect.

Crator · 2011-10-10, 10:37 AM

Bags is correct. They haven't given us any details about the F2P models really. You guys are bringing up good concerns but please be aware that PS2 will have an anti-cheat program along with other measures to ensure cheat-hacking is taken care of.

From a business aspect, cash shops are most likely better for the business. And, the part I like, it allows people to try out the game before purchasing it. There wasn't this many complaints about the PS1 F2P reserves program other then the stupid cheat-hacks because of the lack of an ant-cheat and no in-game GMs.

Hamma · 2011-10-10, 11:45 AM

Originally Posted by SKYeXile

ThGlump · 2011-10-10, 12:07 PM

Originally Posted by SKYeXile

THEN MAKE THEM PAY!

And whats best at convincing players to pay? Sell better weapons. They already mentioned that there will be some weapons in cash shop only, with rare chance to drop. Im fine with sub, but i dont want to be charged $0.1 per spawn with some specific weapon.

Originally Posted by SKYeXile

but also banning the hackers

Banning has no effect if you can create new account in 5 min. Thats why it should have some sort of payment to start playing. (Or dedicated trial server, where you can try game before paying - then your characters are moved to regular servers - worked well in RIFT).

NapalmEnima · 2011-10-10, 12:50 PM

Originally Posted by ThGlump

Banning has no effect if you can create new account in 5 min. Thats why it should have some sort of payment to start playing.

To sign up for pay pal (iirc) I had to provide a cred card # that they then charged and immediately refunded then checked again for validity. Some cards let you generate 1-use credit card numbers. The charge-refund-recheck detects them.

So a simple known method for credit card checks and you've got a system that will let you ban CREDIT CARDS, which are much harder to come by.

Want to create four accounts with that card? Sure! But if little timmy hacks and gets busted, Dar's gonna be PISSED when his account gets ZAPPED too. And I'm okay with that.

Xyntech · 2011-10-10, 12:54 PM

Originally Posted by ThGlump

They already mentioned that there will be some weapons in cash shop only, with rare chance to drop.

Source? I don't remember hearing that one and I would have a problem with it if it were true.

I did hear that they would be selling weapons that you would otherwise have to work to unlock. That isn't at all the same as what you are saying.

ThGlump · 2011-10-10, 01:17 PM

http://www.planetside-universe.com/f...&postcount=153

There is nothing about availability through cert tree. Only shop/drop cycle.

Xyntech · 2011-10-10, 01:27 PM

Originally Posted by ThGlump

http://www.planetside-universe.com/f...&postcount=153

There is nothing about availability through cert tree. Only shop/drop cycle.

Thanks, I guess I had missed that one.

That still doesn't suggest exclusivity though. More of a situational availability. I'd need to hear more about the implementation. For example, what are these "drops?" From what I understood, we would unlock a weapon (through gameplay or the cash shop) and then always have access to it, or at least always have to option to equip it if our empire controls the right resources.

Sounds worrying, but very vague and half baked as well.

Hopefully the cash shop gets some play testing during beta. Maybe they could hand out the equivalent of $5 to each beta tester. At the very least, I hope we get some more definitive answers on exactly how they intend the cash shop to work before they actually lock it in.