Free to download?

Rumblepit · 2011-12-23, 09:56 AM

i know there has been speculation, but im looking for confirmation .

this in my eyes will be the deciding factor of this games future.free to download will mean that this game may last 1 to 3 months before its taken offline.all it takes is 1 OPK,SVP,0 DELAY, and the game is over. it mite be cool the first time you see a hacker throw a frag and kill 1000 players at once, but after hrs,days weeks, months, it gets old fast. people who play ps1 already know what free to play can do to a game, and what effect a hacker can have in a game of this scale. this is why there is no free trial for ps1 right?

pay to download and free 2 play will still bring a few hackers but they cant just make another account 10 mins after being ban and go right back to hacking. they will have to buy the game again. so its 40 to 60$ every time you get caught hacking.i think this is the only way this type of game can use a f2p model.

CuddlyChud · 2011-12-23, 10:04 AM

I think the only people who can confirm the business model are the people at SOE, and they've stated that they're not ready to release those details.

However, I personally think it will be completely F2P, no box price. Personally, I don't see a problem with that. I haven't played that many F2P games, but in the ones I have I never noticed an inordinate amount of cheaters compared to a boxed game. I just think F2P has had some really outstanding cases (APB comes to mind) where hacking was rampant, giving it a bad name.

As far as the reserve system goes, I really don't think that was a good example of F2P games. A lot of older games like PS1 had hacking issues since anti-hack software wasn't very advanced at the time. The fact that Planetside was an FPS shoehorned into the original Everquest engine didn't help things.

I'm sure SOE wouldn't choose a business model they knew they wasn't sustainable. PS2 seems to be a big budget ticket for them, and they can't really afford yet another flop. F2P seems to be the trend that the market is moving towards, and as an economics major I implicitly trust the market

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Rumblepit · 2011-12-23, 10:12 AM

see this is the million dollar decision they have to make.

APB made the wrong choice, and made online gaming history game as the fastest flop. it was taken offline 90 days after release.

go with fast cash and hackers or have faith in your product sell it for money .

i have faith in this product!!! if i was working for soe on the ps2 project i would be FIRED the moment i heard the words "free to download".

Coreldan · 2011-12-23, 10:18 AM

It is not F2P if its not free to download. That is then a whole other business model.

APB originally did not go down cos of cheaters, they were bankrupt by the time the game was released. The problem was bad financial control than anything.

That said, if they've had any brains when making the engine, they make most of the stuff server side. That means that stuff like damage and radius (a grenade killing 1000 players as you mentioned) wouldnt be possible. That only leaves us with wallhacks and aimbots, while they are enough to kill a game, are still far less worse than those "ima kill the whole server" cheats.

PS1 is such an old game and was pretty much unique at it's time. The engine reflects that. Just about no modern online game will let the client do damage calculations and the likes, just cos it makes for really easy cheating. I doubt they would make that mistake of making the game client-side bases in 2011.

That said, I too would much prefer having some onetime fee on account creation. Even a small one to keep chronic cheaters at bay in the long run, but they say it's f2p, which rules out costs like that, as it IS NOT FREE TO PLAY IF IT COSTS TO PLAY.

LZachariah · 2011-12-23, 10:18 AM

I am almost 100% certain that there will be no box price (ie- it will be 100% F2P), because those of us who had pre-ordered copies at Gamestop were notified that "the game was canceled," which doesn't mean that the game has been dropped (Higby confirmed that they are definitely on-track to launch the game) but that Gamestop doesn't actually have anything "to sell." That means the game (which Gamestop previously thought cost $50 or whatever) actually costs nothing.

~Zachariah

Rumblepit · 2011-12-23, 10:41 AM

Originally Posted by Coreldan

APB originally did not go down cos of cheaters, they were bankrupt by the time the game was released. The problem was bad financial control than anything.

this is true, they were bankrupt, and they used a substandard hack prevention, then they couldnt afford to hire more people to deal with the hackers and bugs in game. then they flopped. and sold the game to the one and only GAMERSFIRST. these people are the slumlords of the gaming industry.and the only games they host are f2p. just throw some random numbers out there, id have to say there is a 65 to 35 % hacker to legit players ratio in all the games they host.

if it is free to download then most of you guys wont last long at all. i know i wont.
just for shets and giggles you should download and play some WARROCK, its fp2 and has pretty good hack prevention and second to none fps combat, combat in this game is just sick. and play for 1 hr and tell me how many hackers you saw. this will be the future of ps2 if they go down this road

xSlideShow · 2011-12-23, 12:35 PM

Download and play some League of Legends, or Global Agenda. F2P does not mean hackers. If you think about it, it is the absolute best thing to happen to Planetside. F2P means you can take breaks and your never going to quit because you have to pay for the game. It also means that your friends have no excuse to not try a game. It opens up the window for a lot of players.

Hackers have nothing to do with the business model.

Originally Posted by Rumblepit

if it is free to download then most of you guys wont last long at all. i know i wont.
just for shets and giggles you should download and play some WARROCK, its fp2 and has pretty good hack prevention and second to none fps combat, combat in this game is just sick. and play for 1 hr and tell me how many hackers you saw. this will be the future of ps2 if they go down this road

There will always be cheaters, even if you have to pay for the game. F2P is the future of gaming, embrace it, cause it's awesome. SOE should be able to handle hackers, if they cannot then it's not going to matter if they make us pay for the game or not. It will die because of hackers. It won't have anything to do with the business model.

Coreldan · 2011-12-23, 12:52 PM

Global Agenda is an interesting example. It is a game just like APB where aimbots and wallhacks could give you an edge. Why arn't they present? Is the anti-cheat so good (Doubt it, as cheats always bypass the current build of anticheat)? Is HI-rez handling the cheaters away so well? Is the game too crappy to be worth the time of cheat devs?

As for LoL, it's not quite a comparable game. Most modern games have aimbot and wallhack available and thats it, you can't do much more in modern games cos of server side verification. I havnt played LoL, but I know aimbot sure doesnt do anything for you there

Global Agenda was a good example, though.

Hardware bans could go a long way, even if those can be bypassed, it should be a whole lot of more trouble than just creating a new acc in 2 minutes.

That said, hackers do have something to do with business model, it's often the worst in F2P games, where nothing stops them from coming back 2 mins after they get banned.

VAC isn't any better as an anticheat, the thing just is that most VAC secured games have community-run servers, where the admins can enforce the rules. The problem in APB for example is that there aint enough staff to go around to ban the blatant cheaters at all times. Then again, those server running admins often kick innocent people too just cos they happen to kick ass.

Hamma · 2011-12-23, 01:06 PM

We already know that SOE (per Higby, Smed and T-Ray) are well aware of what Hackers can do to a game and are dedicated to stopping them. I talked to them personally about it at Fan Faire and I know it's very important to them. I'm sure that anti-hack is VERY high on the priority list for game development giving customer support the tools needed to combat hackers when they arise.

PlanetSide 1 has little to none of these tools and was easily hacked and compromised without much thought. It just was not as big of a deal back then.

If SOE is dedicated to stopping hackers and they put development time and their sizable customer service staff against it then we will be in good hands.

As for APB the nails were in the coffin before they even launched. The company was mismanaged and priorities on it were horrible.

Zulthus · 2011-12-23, 01:14 PM

Yeah, what Coreldan said. League of Legends truly has been a shitty example for some time now. Hacking would be such a waste of time on that game. You can't wallhack, aimbot, kill everyone instantly, or anything. Who would waste their time on that?

I honestly think PS2 should have a box price of at least $19.99. Anyone can pay for it, and hackers won't keep paying that much. Free download just leads to them coming back, coming back, and coming back for even more. And just because "everyone is doing it", why should PS2 follow the trend? If the game is good enough, people will pay money for it. It sounds like you all don't have very much faith in the game. Planetside 1 had a huge amount of subscribers for a few years, and they only left because of the lack of content updates (or a specific content update), not because it was a bad game. You guys call me a tight ass for not wanting to spend money.

Rumblepit · 2011-12-23, 01:34 PM

Originally Posted by xSlideShow

Download and play some League of Legends, or Global Agenda. F2P does not mean hackers. If you think about it, it is the absolute best thing to happen to Planetside. F2P means you can take breaks and your never going to quit because you have to pay for the game. It also means that your friends have no excuse to not try a game. It opens up the window for a lot of players.

Hackers have nothing to do with the business model.

There will always be cheaters, even if you have to pay for the game. F2P is the future of gaming, embrace it, cause it's awesome. SOE should be able to handle hackers, if they cannot then it's not going to matter if they make us pay for the game or not. It will die because of hackers. It won't have anything to do with the business model.

my name was rumblepit on global agenda, i played with vanquish for a long time. there were hackers in global agenda, but the game had such a low pop and such a tight community that they never became a problem.league of legends ,,, lol what kind of hacks could you use in that game anyway???????????

f2p is awesome and the future of gaming??????????

hers some info for your" f2p is awesome". swtor had 750,000 players in beta on stress test weekend. 1.5 million sub in the first 2 weeks of release. next month they should be close to 2 million, and it will continue to grow.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
this is what soe wants .... but they dont think they can pull it off so they are
going to play it safe with the f2p model.

they can have the best anti hack in the world. but will will stop the script kiddies from making new accounts.

MARK MY WORDS..... THIS WILL MAKE OR BREAK THIS GAME.

Coreldan · 2011-12-23, 01:37 PM

Star Wars and WoW are sort of hard to compare to Planetside. Both have extremely strong lores from way back before the games were even made. Unless you live in very poor conditions in a 3rd world country, you know what Star Wars is.

I don't know anyone IRL who knows what Planetside is.

It is not that simple, it is not about how good the game is either to get a good looking start.

As for f2p, I agree, it's a plague but sadly it is the way the industry is going to. However, I heard some source saying that now the industry is sorta starting to move away again from f2p model, cos people are starting to realize that to get the same content they get with a subscription/box cost game, they have to pay way more.

However, I don't think that breakpoint happens any time soon. SWTOR is likely to be just about the only succesful sub based new game. Retail box games will still manage, but that is widely dependant on the game. Games that are community-hosted servers or peer2peer tech can use boxed cost and be succesful. PS2 can't do that, cos running the servers costs and the staff to upkeep it all and manage the game is really expensive.

Before you take GW as an example, it as really low ongoing costs, cos most of the game is hosted p2p. PS2 can't do that, nor can it use community hosted servers. The game has to pay the bills and currently f2p pays it better for any MMO that isnt world known before its launch than a boxed cost + sub.

Rumblepit · 2011-12-23, 01:39 PM

Originally Posted by Zulthus

Yeah, what Coreldan said. League of Legends truly has been a shitty example for some time now. Hacking would be such a waste of time on that game. You can't wallhack, aimbot, kill everyone instantly, or anything. Who would waste their time on that?

I honestly think PS2 should have a box price of at least $19.99. Anyone can pay for it, and hackers won't keep paying that much. Free download just leads to them coming back, coming back, and coming back for even more. And just because "everyone is doing it", why should PS2 follow the trend? If the game is good enough, people will pay money for it. It sounds like you all don't have very much faith in the game. Planetside 1 had a huge amount of subscribers for a few years, and they only left because of the lack of content updates (or a specific content update), not because it was a bad game. You guys call me a tight ass for not wanting to spend money.

19.99$ digital download will stop most hackers from comin back.

Hobitt · 2011-12-23, 01:42 PM

Originally Posted by Rumblepit

19.99$ digital download will stop most hackers from comin back.

It wont some recent games showed that even in beta stage there were hacks later they tracked the site and prices for hacks are 30$ + and they didint care about vac bans on steam so if people want to cheat 20$ wont stop them

P.S im new here

Coreldan · 2011-12-23, 01:42 PM

It will also stop a crapton of players from ever trying the game.

A retail cost means the game is not f2p, so you can stop hoping, it won't happen at this point anymore.

20$ does stop long term chronic cheaters from coming back. They might try once or twice, but it will be VERY few who will be buying several 20usd copies per week