Originally Posted by
edgecrusher
Every game has its problems at launch, it's just not that every game can fix them quickly or overcome them. Rift had its fair share of issues, but they were super quick to fix them. For those games that can't fix them as quickly as necessary, F2P becomes the "fallback" to help them bring in new players/revenue and improve upon the game.
Warhammer: Still hasn't fixed most of the underlying issues, and has suffered greatly because of it. I played at launch too and it was a mess, great ideas behind it but terrible implementation. An earlier F2P conversion would have likely helped the game considerably as it would have brought in new players and revenue to help them maintain an actual development team.
Vanguard: It's a bit unique in that it was basically launched in its pre-alpha phase, I played this at launch too (what a mess that was). It's still the most ambitious game released in the past 5 or so years, but because of the launch issues it stagnated. Even when they did address many of the problems in the post-launch patches (it was playable at least), there was no way they were going to pull back many people who left, or pull in new players. The only way for them to get new blood back in was a transition. It's very difficult to try to re-engage players who have let their subscription lapse for years, or to try and engage new players with an older subscription based game.
L2: Again, in order to make those sales, they had to re-engage the playerbase. Fixing the "problems" wouldn't matter if it was still a boxed copy with a subscription, because that's a high barrier of entry for people to test out the "fixed" version. As I said with Vanguard, the hardest part for a subscription based MMO, especially a much older one with a stigma attached to it, is re-engaging lapses players and more specifically trying to engage new players. Aion still has the "grinder" stigma attached to it despite the grind being mostly gone.
LOTRO/DDO: It wasn't engaging for enough people initially (though remember, the market was much different at the time), I agree. However they worked on the issues and by the F2P relaunch, apparently it was engaging enough to play again.
The idea that people will play a "bad" game that's not engaging simply because it's free just isn't accurate in the current market. It's one of the myths that still exists from years ago (along with myths like "Every F2P MMO is P2W"), but is no longer true. With the number of MMO's out there, both free and subscription based, there is no shortage of games to try out. If you're not engaged with one particular MMO, you're not going to end up playing it. I've uninstalled/stopped playing every MMO that I haven't found enjoyable, because there are plenty of other MMO's that I do enjoy. It's mostly the same for the majority of the MMO playerbase. They're not going to stick around with a mediocre game, and they definitely won't be spending much money on it.
I agree with you on Rift though, Trion jumped on the issues players had and dealt with them rather quickly. The biggest thing is that the game was all around pretty solid at launch to begin with, so there weren't any really big mechanical or design issues with the game, just a number of minor/medium sized ones that they fixed.
F2P offered the above games a second "lease on life" essentially. They wouldn't have gotten that chance if they had stayed with a subscription model (as they hadn't after working on addressing the issues and hadn't seen a big return of lapsed players).
I agree that Rift isn't in a position where it "needs" it by any stretch, the game is still quite healthy and Trion still do a great job of running it and delivering value for the subscription. I've never said otherwise and don't see this changing anytime soon.