GW2: F2P doesn't cut it?

[Deleted]

There seem to be plenty of people playing when I login.
It may be subscription free but its not exactly free to play, you still have to buy the game.


A dungeon finder tool would be a nice addition.

[Zokten]

Then there is also the effect on the dev side, it seems to me GW2 is understaffed, I have never played a sub based MMO with so many fundamental bugs (things wrong with class skills / traits for instance) that have then taken so long too fix. (and still haven't fixed)

I feel they might be understaffed also, but I've experienced this same thing in WoW for years (still remember how many years it took them to fix charge/intercept bugs)

[Valeron]

F2P would be fine if it simply replaced the subscription model in an otherwise identical (value-wise) game. It's not like it's some kind of generous act of charity on the publisher's part, they're just changing from one payment model to another. They're still making money or they wouldn't do it. Hell, they're presumably making more money, why else would everyone be breaking into the world of microtransactions? It can be more convenient for the player, but rest assured that the publisher is not giving up their wealth in order to give gifts to their beloved customers. It just luckily happens that the model is better for both parties.

Or it should be, but it isn't if you skimp heavily on quality. GW2 is a game that suffers overwhelmingly from the taint of low quality. It's a discount product that, while possessing some good features and interesting innovations, is still of rock-bottom quality by high-profile MMORPG standards. If that's the tradeoff for being able to play "for free" then I'd rather pay that frankly insignificant monthly fee. It's not like GW2 is entirely free, anyway.

See, it's okay to make some sacrifices for the F2P model. Of course you can give up something, probably mostly in the form of the frequency of content patches. It is not a carte-blanche to design a terrible, flimsy, shallow discount product and blame all of its shortcomings on the economic model that they themselves chose. When a game's actual free-mode (the one where you refrain from participating in the microtransaction aspect and simply play without ever paying a dime) is so poor that it really tarnishes the whole experience, the F2P model has failed to serve any purpose beyond chasing away a large chunk of customers. People are often willing to pay extra to enhance a good game, but they're much less likely to pay in order to make a bad game tolerable.

If the new fact of life with the increasingly widespread F2P model is that games are shit until you buy a bunch of stuff, the whole thing can f*** right off. When it has become a goal for developers to design bad games in order to compel players to self-medicate with their wallets, the entire gaming industry has failed. The goal should always be to make the best game that the studio is capable of making, and if that doesn't seem worthwhile to them, they should go back to the model that worked quite well for a decade and a half.

I think ANet completely missed the point of the microtransaction model and failed catastrophically at implementing it into GW2. They made a mistake that was quite similar to the one Jay Wilson made with D3: design a game that is frustrating and unsatisfying with the expectation that this compels the player to pay for the privilege of fun, based mainly on their love for the previous game of the series. This was a miserable failure in D3, but Blizzard being Blizzard, they churned out a series of excellent patches over the course of six months and finally made the game decent. ANet do not have that kind of production power or development experience.

Instead of cutting corners, developers need to take a lesson from Riot: produce a game of top quality and the players will be happy to spend more money. If a completely new studio is able to massively succeed with a game of a (at the time) pretty niche genre, and a totally free game at that, it has to be possible for an established studio to continue an already succesful franchise in one of the core genres of the video game industry without making a product that resembles a foreign knock-off copy of a brand product. If League of Legends was able to become probably the most popular online game in history despite no guaranteed revenue, one should have been able to expect much more of GW2 with its hefty box price and pre-existing fanbase to guarantee a gigantic profit even if everybody bought it and immediately threw it in the trash. ANet skimped on quality and it didn't take long before the child shouted that the emperor is actually naked.

What a load of crap. Did you BS your way through college papers as well?

[Hockeyhacker]

So it seems to me that F2P doesn't really help it... I had so many active friends, they're not even coming back for 1 hour anymore... I guess it would be even worse if GW2 had subscription. What do you think?

This is based purely on my own observations, I'm not trying to push em down your throat.

Actually I think it would be the opposite of what you think would happen with a sub fee, the reason why games with sub fees get people playing so many hours a day/week/month is because people feel that they have to play x hours a month to be getting their "moneys worth". As it stands its a decently fun game that offers zero reason to have to play x hours a week. There is no "must grind this dungeon 10 times a day to keep my stats at top tier, and only have to do if I want a certain skin", and there is no "must play at least 30 hours a month even if I am not having as much fun as playing other games to justify my $15 a month"...

I don't feel the need to play Deus Ex x hours a week, that doesn't mean I didn't love the game in fact it was one of the games I have enjoyed the most in the past 5 years, but after beating it a few times in different ways I called it good until the DLC content, played through it and then called it good again. GW2 is the same thing for me, good game worth a few play throughs and then worth playing when new content gets added but not something I am going to play every week because I don't need to justify paying a sub fee.

Point is since it has no incentive to be treated like a traditional MMO many people treat it more like a single player game with occasional free DLC, where they play what they want and then call it good until they get more free content and play that for a bit and call it good till the next "free DLC". The combination between no tiered gear and no sub fee makes the constant population lower, adding a sub fee but still no tiered gear would hurt it more, but keeping no sub fee and adding some teiring system to reward people who play x hours a week in the hardest content would help its constant population but at the same time probably hurt its dip in and out of population.

With that said its designed in a way that may be fun a first or second time through but is designed in a way that doesn't support being a constant high population MMO either and instead will have its spuratic surges of population when something cool is going on instead.

Edit: And just to add on to that, its also currently tripple A single player game launch time as well so many people are playing those right now instead of GW2 because as I said no tiers and no sub= no reason to not take a break and play something else when something else sounds fun to play.

[Newbryn]

Since this is a speculation thread I'm just gonna put my 2 cents in, I feel Anet are actually profiting vastly from this model, the changes to the design philosophy can also be proof of this. My reason, the people who are welcoming the changes made to the game, as well as asking for it on the forums may very well be the people who are using the cash shop it would only make sense Arena net to listen to their paying customers after all.

[Hockeyhacker]

I feel like people keep using this stuff as an excuse for a sub-par game experience. I can't even possibly count the number of times I've heard. "....but it's free!" on this board used as a selling point or a counter to a criticism.

Look, you can take breaks from subscription based games, too. (Cancel button says hi) You can take a break from anything, really. And there's plenty of truly F2P games out there, as well. Having no sub fee is all well and good, but it's a separate factor from the game itself. Ideally your time would be more valuable than to squander it on a sub-par game just because it's "free". Now I'm not saying GW2 is a sub-par game here, I'm speaking in the general sense that being "free" shouldn't be enough by itself to keep you playing something.

Nice job taking something totally out of context, maybe try reading an entire post before getting upset about one small out of context part, had you actually read the post the point was its a decent one, two time through game (like most decent single player games) but lacks in having the feeling of needing to play x hours a week due to a COMBINATION of no tiering and no sub thus giving no feeling of needing to play continuously and thus many people treat it more like a single player game with free DLC then that of a traditional MMO... aka even the best single player games you have ever played you only play for x chunk of time to play through it once or a few times depending on how the game is made, but after that you shelf it sometimes for years or even decades before ever coming back to play it again.

Had you bothered even reading the entire sentence let alone entire post you would have seen

no tiers and no sub= no reason...

not just "no sub= ..."

[Stellan]

Since this is a speculation thread I'm just gonna put my 2 cents in, I feel Anet are actually profiting vastly from this model, the changes to the design philosophy can also be proof of this. My reason, the people who are welcoming the changes made to the game, as well as asking for it on the forums may very well be the people who are using the cash shop it would only make sense Arena net to listen to their paying customers after all.

Typically B2P games with cash shops rely on 'whales' to make profit. 'Whales" are the few players who spend a lot in the cash shops. The only way to enjoy a B2P or F2P game without paying as much as a monthly subscription (or more) is to stay away from the cash shops. Games like GW 2 and now SWTOR devote a lot of time to enticing you to their cash shops.

Personally, I much prefer a subscription based game like WOW. The subscription fee is small and predictable. I don't worry that any of my enjoyment of the game will be gated by the cash shop. The thing about WOW is the subscription fee is so small that it is just trivial and I know exactly how much it will be each month. I feel no compulsion to play the game constantly although I am a pretty dedicated player.

[Deleted]

F2P would be fine if it simply replaced the subscription model in an otherwise identical (value-wise) game. It's not like it's some kind of generous act of charity on the publisher's part, they're just changing from one payment model to another. They're still making money or they wouldn't do it. Hell, they're presumably making more money, why else would everyone be breaking into the world of microtransactions? It can be more convenient for the player, but rest assured that the publisher is not giving up their wealth in order to give gifts to their beloved customers. It just luckily happens that the model is better for both parties.

Or it should be, but it isn't if you skimp heavily on quality. GW2 is a game that suffers overwhelmingly from the taint of low quality. It's a discount product that, while possessing some good features and interesting innovations, is still of rock-bottom quality by high-profile MMORPG standards. If that's the tradeoff for being able to play "for free" then I'd rather pay that frankly insignificant monthly fee. It's not like GW2 is entirely free, anyway.

See, it's okay to make some sacrifices for the F2P model. Of course you can give up something, probably mostly in the form of the frequency of content patches. It is not a carte-blanche to design a terrible, flimsy, shallow discount product and blame all of its shortcomings on the economic model that they themselves chose. When a game's actual free-mode (the one where you refrain from participating in the microtransaction aspect and simply play without ever paying a dime) is so poor that it really tarnishes the whole experience, the F2P model has failed to serve any purpose beyond chasing away a large chunk of customers. People are often willing to pay extra to enhance a good game, but they're much less likely to pay in order to make a bad game tolerable.

If the new fact of life with the increasingly widespread F2P model is that games are shit until you buy a bunch of stuff, the whole thing can f*** right off. When it has become a goal for developers to design bad games in order to compel players to self-medicate with their wallets, the entire gaming industry has failed. The goal should always be to make the best game that the studio is capable of making, and if that doesn't seem worthwhile to them, they should go back to the model that worked quite well for a decade and a half.

I think ANet completely missed the point of the microtransaction model and failed catastrophically at implementing it into GW2. They made a mistake that was quite similar to the one Jay Wilson made with D3: design a game that is frustrating and unsatisfying with the expectation that this compels the player to pay for the privilege of fun, based mainly on their love for the previous game of the series. This was a miserable failure in D3, but Blizzard being Blizzard, they churned out a series of excellent patches over the course of six months and finally made the game decent. ANet do not have that kind of production power or development experience.

Instead of cutting corners, developers need to take a lesson from Riot: produce a game of top quality and the players will be happy to spend more money. If a completely new studio is able to massively succeed with a game of a (at the time) pretty niche genre, and a totally free game at that, it has to be possible for an established studio to continue an already succesful franchise in one of the core genres of the video game industry without making a product that resembles a foreign knock-off copy of a brand product. If League of Legends was able to become probably the most popular online game in history despite no guaranteed revenue, one should have been able to expect much more of GW2 with its hefty box price and pre-existing fanbase to guarantee a gigantic profit even if everybody bought it and immediately threw it in the trash. ANet skimped on quality and it didn't take long before the child shouted that the emperor is actually naked.

What a giant load of horseshit, lol

[Digglett]

Dude, 15$/month is not something that makes people not play an MMO. Unless you live in Somalia, 15$ is nothing. The fact that GW2 is f2p does nothing to bring in players if the game's quality doesn't meet current standards.

If GW2 had a sub, I'm fairly confident it would have had approximately the same amount of players.

Are you completely oblivious to the fact we're in an economic downfall? I'm not playing Tera specifically because it has a sub. If a game isn't worth $15 a month, I will not pay, simple as that.

I will use that $15 to buy me a hoagie instead, and then some chips, and a large soda, and I'd have $5 left for something else.

[Deleted]

Typically B2P games with cash shops rely on 'whales' to make profit. 'Whales" are the few players who spend a lot in the cash shops. The only way to enjoy a B2P or F2P game without paying as much as a monthly subscription (or more) is to stay away from the cash shops. Games like GW 2 and now SWTOR devote a lot of time to enticing you to their cash shops. I don't like to play an kind of F2P game that has a cash shop.

Personally, I much prefer a subscription based game like WOW. The subscription fee is small and predictable. I don't worry that any of my enjoyment of the game will be gated by the cash shop. The thing about WOW is the subscription fee is so small that it is just trivial and I know exactly how much it will be each month. I feel no compulsion to play the game constantly although I am a pretty dedicated player.

I agree with you that cash shops that you have to spend money in to be able to play the game stinks, but in GW2 you really don't have to so the fee is equally predictable there, in my case (and I assume most peoples) it is 0.

LOTRO is the perfect example of a pretty good game that is completely unplayable unless you spend money in the cash shop for questpacks or simply sub instead wich is the cheaper alternative in that case.

---------- Post added 2012-11-25 at 03:09 AM ----------

Are you completely oblivious to the fact we're in an economic downfall? I'm not playing Tera specifically because it has a sub. If a game isn't worth $15 a month, I will not pay, simple as that.

I will use that $15 to buy me a hoagie instead, and then some chips, and a large soda, and I'd have $5 left for something else.

it's also the thing of having multiple games with subs as many people play several games, it all adds up and quickly becomes noticable money spent with less time to make it worth it.

[Karizee]

So it seems to me that F2P doesn't really help it... I had so many active friends, they're not even coming back for 1 hour anymore... I guess it would be even worse if GW2 had subscription. What do you think?

This is based purely on my own observations, I'm not trying to push em down your throat.

My guild has 102 ppl on right now. That's 8pm Saturday night on a holiday weekend.

Judging from the volume of gem sales, the game is doing very well indeed

http://www.guildwarstrade.com/gems

[Lane]

Judging from the volume of gem sales, the game is doing very well indeed

http://www.guildwarstrade.com/gems

What do they mean by "Black Market"?

[sacrypheyes]

"Hey, unless you AFK-farm, making gold in this game is an absolutely boring process! Buy some gems!"

making gold as in how much? 1g? 10? 1k gold?
and even if you're stupid/wealthy enough to spend IRL money into gems and sell them for IG gold, what is it you're going to do with it? a legendary weapon which you could get anyway with more time and no gems selling?

well, not that i mind AFK-farmers and bots, i love reporting them as i expect them to have their acc banned sooner or later...

[Bugg]

SWTOR got killed by F2P.

One of the reasons I didn't ever like the ideas of F2P, I know many love to get things for free, but many things for free comes with restrictions. I loved the concept of Guild Wars 2 but it just didn't feel like me when I played the different classes.

I disagree with the first phase, and there are too many things to say WHY I think SWTOR was NOT killed by F2P (it died for me and many many others loooong before F2P arrived) and I will not go into details here.

Regarding the second phrase, I see no restrictions in GW2. Check the things you can buy with real money in GW2 vs the ones you can buy in SWTOR for example.

Anyway, good luck in finding a suitable game.

[Durzlla]

What do they mean by "Black Market"?

Black market = buying gold through a gold seller instead of through Anet.

[Lane]

Black market = buying gold through a gold seller instead of through Anet.

Ah, cause the way it's laid out made it look like you could buy 250+ gems on the black market, which I don't even know how you'd do without compromising your account.

[Yazeed]

well ,

i would say what make gw2 looks cool at begging is b2p but soon or later people will get boring

the thing is when the game hit the market and open servers u will see the servers are crowded ( many people online ) and it is normal !

what is happen later?

1- if the game is p2p then people would be more consider that factor part wich mean i will not pay for next month or the month after if this game did not take my attention while i test it ! that mean some people will quit after 1-2 or few month and that will lead to drop in population like what happen to some p2p games !
markting + hard work form company to push the game up with updates or new patch , new things , events and again markting !

2- if the game is f2p or b2p then it got more chance to keep up the population with some fators like media , markting and make it like the best game ever !

at the end u playing with out fee at the end of the month but your judgment will come later for sure even if its take much time !

just go read how people are happy for making gw2 b2p , or wait let me make it as a questions :

1- does f2p or b2p affecting to mmorpg games in business, qulity and popularity ?

the answer is yes !

2- does many people like to have f2p or b2p system in the games ?

the answer is yes !

3- does f2p or b2p make the game fine ?

the answer is , F2P OR B2P IS NOT EVERYTING !

some games are realy amazing even with f2p system but others are not

so, watch out what are u doing beacuse it is business at the end and we are the customers

[freeforumuser]

For a game with an F2P model it sure tries hard not to make money out of it.

1. No paid race / class / story changes
2. Dumb RNG chests instead of simply selling rares outright
3. Not selling extra town clothes when its already worn by NPCs
4. Those one-time use lvl 80 transmute stones? Let's discourage players from buying them by announcing Ascended gear that will replace their exotics except now only god knows when they will actually appear.

Instead we got a polarizing patch that pissed off much of the playerbase along with terrible PR, while not doing anything real to generate money from F2P. Well done!

[Deleted]

For a game with an F2P model it sure tries hard not to make money out of it.

1. No paid race / class / story changes
2. Dumb RNG chests instead of simply selling rares outright
3. Not selling extra town clothes when its already worn by NPCs
4. Those one-time use lvl 80 transmute stones? Let's discourage players from buying them by announcing Ascended gear that will replace their exotics except now only god knows when they will actually appear.

Instead we got a polarizing patch that pissed off much of the playerbase along with terrible PR, while not doing anything real to generate money from F2P. Well done!

It's not F2P it's B2P but I agree they could probably make more money than anything from more costume skins, I know I would buy them if there actually was any that I liked, to transmute I mean not the townclothes, townclothes is pretty uselsess in my opinion I would much rather that panel be turned into your costume panel to equip the look you want rather than to use transmute stones in the same way LOTRO and Rift has it, give us that and then they could sell additional ones for equipping multiple costume sets I would love that as I like to change outfit depending on zone.

edit: and hoods give us some nice looking hoods for christ sake, so many good and great detailed gear in this game and almost all headgear looks like shit kinda strange how that turned out.

[Trix]

They have a good F2P model. You're not restricted as far as I can remember.

It's just a boring game at max level.

Your friends don't play because they don't like the game, or are playing something better.