Multiple MMOs and multiple subscriptions?

[Maelle]

Well it looks to be quite the busy year for MMOs, lots of new stuff incoming, and several still going strong!

Anyway... I have been thinking really hard and still drawing a blank on deciding what I will do about the multiple MMOs I would really like to try/keep playing this year, and how that works out in relation to subscription fees. Now I realise playing several MMOs in a hardcore raiding big time investment sense wouldn't be possible (at least not for me - work n stuff), but the idea of playing a few MMOs a few hours a week on a casual basis, and picking out one for a time based "commitment" i.e raiding is appealing.

Basically I would be looking at about 4/5 monthly subs of roughly 12.99 euros which while isn't a fortune, it's not exactly pocket change either on my very average income! As it is I'll probably have to grudgingly pick out 2 or 3 max to play, and rotate them maybe... I'm not sure!

I play Rift alongside WoW currently. I raid in wow, but play Rift casually doing acheives and the big quest chains / events and starting master modes with my guild maybe a night a week - nothing at all serious. I sometimes only log in 2/3 times a week. I would like to play some SWOTOR for the questing and instances, but having to shell out a third monthly sub puts me off, as I would only be playing casually as and when.

For me the idea of playing GW2, if you like the sound of it, is a no-brainer in terms of ongoing financial commitment, as I understand it (if i am wrong correct me but please let's not turn it into a GW2 thread) there will be a cash shop for cosmetic things, and extra payments for more content later IF you want to buy it. Therefore, I will be trying it with little concern if I don't log in all the time to "get my moneys worth" as it were!

I was wondering if anyone else is having the same thoughts, and wishing and wondering if game developers may even realise that as more and more MMOs jostle for space and subs, that a monthly fee for people who just want to invest a smaller amount of time weekly could be putting people off playing.

I realise you can unsub and resub to MMOs and not lose your acc, but this is an all or nothing type arrangement, rather than something you can just pick up and play when you fancy it.

**Things I hope not to see derailing in the replys to this**

* Arguments over the relative MMOs, trying to share thoughts on subsciption models in a busy market - not on whether you think an MMO is good or not.
* Arguments about whether subbing to 5 MMOs can be considered "expensive" - thats pretty relative to your disposable income.

[Restos3]

I played WoW for a couple years and now I'm completely ditching the idea of subbing to any game.
F2P model is here to stay, and there is no way I'll pay to play a game while there are several other great games I can play without a damn sub.
I'm perfectly fine with B2P though.

[Deleted]

Just now i have a Rift and SW:TOR sub on the go. As you say its not really a matter of cost for the game its more a time allocation issue. What i generally do is buy almost every mmo that comes out. Give it its free month to see if it ticks all the boxes and keep going with it or not.

I would never have 4/5 subs on the go as i just would not have time to invest enough into them to achieve much.

[HeavensDemise]

I currently pay for WoW and Swtor and will probably pay for Tera once that comes out.

[Destian]

Burned out on WoW and SWTOR, loving the Tera beta so far.

While it IS sub-based, players can sell sub time to each other in game via use of an item called a "chronoscroll" which doubles as a means of combating RMT as it allows players to buy game time and sell it for in game currency while not being P2Win.

If you're a money-making wizard, you could hypothetically play the game for free.

[Nyanmaru]

How much play time do I get for my money? Buying a new single player game for 40$ that keeps me busy for 40h is 1$/h. Paying 15$ for a month of WoW keeps me busy for ~25h (LFR once a week for 2h, and daily 30m for fishing and stuff) which gets to 0.6$/h at worst... So even if I just resub to a MMO for a month just to play for 15h on a lazy weekend I still get the same $/h ratio I got from a full prized new game.

Though, why so many thoughts about stuff like if it's expensive or not?

Set yourself a limit how much money you want to spend on games per month. When this limit is reached, wait for the next month. I really don't care what I spend my "gaming money" on, if I am busy playing lots of 1 or 2 MMOs during that month and the money piles on to the next month I usually end up buying stupid appliances or consoles I rarely use. Just because I can. *looks at DS3, PS3, XBOX, Vita, iPad, Laptop and 8 different smartphones, a steering wheel and roughly 20 different keyboards and at least 10 mice*

As long as it's in the budget and keeps the hands busy while sitting at home it's all fair game.

[Restos3]

How much play time do I get for my money? Buying a new single player game for 40$ that keeps me busy for 40h is 1$/h. Paying 15$ for a month of WoW keeps me busy for ~25h (LFR once a week for 2h, and daily 30m for fishing and stuff) which gets to 0.6$/h at worst... So even if I just resub to a MMO for a month just to play for 15h on a lazy weekend I still get the same $/h ratio I got from a full prized new game.

Though, why so many thoughts about stuff like if it's expensive or not?

Set yourself a limit how much money you want to spend on games per month. When this limit is reached, wait for the next month. I really don't care what I spend my "gaming money" on, if I am busy playing lots of 1 or 2 MMOs during that month and the money piles on to the next month I usually end up buying stupid appliances or consoles I rarely use. Just because I can. *looks at DS3, PS3, XBOX, Vita, iPad, Laptop and 8 different smartphones, a steering wheel and roughly 20 different keyboards and at least 10 mice*

As long as it's in the budget and keeps the hands busy while sitting at home it's all fair game.

On p2p, you still need to pay for the game copy first, and then the sub. So you are missing that on your ecuation.

[Maelle]

How much play time do I get for my money? Buying a new single player game for 40$ that keeps me busy for 40h is 1$/h. Paying 15$ for a month of WoW keeps me busy for ~25h (LFR once a week for 2h, and daily 30m for fishing and stuff) which gets to 0.6$/h at worst... So even if I just resub to a MMO for a month just to play for 15h on a lazy weekend I still get the same $/h ratio I got from a full prized new game.

Though, why so many thoughts about stuff like if it's expensive or not?

Set yourself a limit how much money you want to spend on games per month. When this limit is reached, wait for the next month. I really don't care what I spend my "gaming money" on, if I am busy playing lots of 1 or 2 MMOs during that month and the money piles on to the next month I usually end up buying stupid appliances or consoles I rarely use. Just because I can. *looks at DS3, PS3, XBOX, Vita, iPad, Laptop and 8 different smartphones, a steering wheel and roughly 20 different keyboards and at least 10 mice*

As long as it's in the budget and keeps the hands busy while sitting at home it's all fair game.

I understand what you are saying... but it doesn't have a lot of bearing on what I was thinking about / trying to say

A TLDR version of my post would be: It's a shame that a sub model monthly puts of people like me that would run several simultaneous MMO accs, but not play them all a lot of time per month.

I can't compare my MMO habits to buying other games - because I don't play any other PC / console games other than MMOs - so to me MMO subs are not an offset of buying another game, they are simply an expense I wouldn't duplicate in a similar way.

[Deleted]

dont mind subs if im playing alot.. keeps me from spending more in steam / 3ds / console games.

[jakeic]

I played WoW for a couple years and now I'm completely ditching the idea of subbing to any game.
F2P model is here to stay, and there is no way I'll pay to play a game while there are several other great games I can play without a damn sub.
I'm perfectly fine with B2P though.

f2p is never free to play.

[Azuri]

I currently have a sub to Rift. I was subbed to SWTOR for a short time but it had nothing to do with the expense of 2 subs as my reasoning for dropping the one. If I feel two sub based games can keep me interested then I'll pay for two, not an issue for me. I don't think I would sub beyond 2 games at a time just due to time limitations. I do plan on playing D3 too but that's a dungeon crawler and I'll most likely purchase GW2 haven't decided on that yet I avoid the hype train as much as possible.

[Restos3]

f2p is never free to play.

I've been playing LoL for like 2 years now and I never spent a dollar. I guess that's free to play.

[Edge-]

f2p is never free to play.

Really? Take a look at Lineage 2 and soon Aion, I think Vindictus falls into that category as well. Paying doesn't give you access to any additional content or power, and the leveling process isn't prohibitively long. There are plenty of F2P games that are really free.

[Arachnan]

f2p is never free to play.

http://i.imgur.com/KXTMd.jpg *wink*

Really though, there -are- games that are free to play and can actually be played like so.
I've been playing League of Legends for a good year now and I haven't spend a single euro on RP.

[Deleted]

F2P Is almost never really free and worth the time...and I hate it when people bring in LoL. You are putting MMO's together with some strategy game, it doesn't work.

If you know of a well know f2p MMORPG that is still succesfull after a year, than we will talk...the only question is weither paying for items in GW2 will give you an advantage or not. I'm guessing it won't because if GW2 will have money sinks (as in real money) than I fear for the future of "free" games.

[Arachnan]

F2P Is almost never really free and worth the time...and I hate it when people bring in LoL. You are putting MMO's together with some strategy game, it doesn't work.

The post I quoted didn't specify, so he was talking about the F2P model in general which League of Legends is deffo part of.

[Edge-]

F2P Is almost never really free and worth the time...and I hate it when people bring in LoL. You are putting MMO's together with some strategy game, it doesn't work.

If you know of a well know f2p MMORPG that is still succesfull after a year, than we will talk...the only question is weither paying for items in GW2 will give you an advantage or not. I'm guessing it won't because if GW2 will have money sinks (as in real money) than I fear for the future of "free" games.

Are we talking about just NA/Europe or elsewhere? F2P is extremely popular in Asia and has tons of very successful games. Heck, Perfect World Entertainment and Nexon are both extremely successful and both run F2P games exclusively (PWE now has some freemium games since it purchased Cryptic).

And no, the devs have already stated they won't sell any items that give you an advantage over other players in GW2. They've stated it multiple times.

[jakeic]

F2P Is almost never really free and worth the time...and I hate it when people bring in LoL. You are putting MMO's together with some strategy game, it doesn't work.

If you know of a well know f2p MMORPG that is still succesfull after a year, than we will talk...the only question is weither paying for items in GW2 will give you an advantage or not. I'm guessing it won't because if GW2 will have money sinks (as in real money) than I fear for the future of "free" games.

lol is horrible anyway when it comes to time invested to game rewards as well. buying every champion with only ip is practically impossible, let alone having runes and rune pages for multiple champions. having recently returned to playing lol after a few month hiatus my perspective on riot's system has changed drastically. some games i can't play competitively simply because i lack the champions/runes to be effective (the game has changed rather dramatically in 6 months), games have become mostly a coin flip on whether someone on the other team chooses a character that is currently over powered or not.

but don't worry, after 3 weeks i've grinded out 4800 ip!

[Zoldor]

I've been playing LoL for like 2 years now and I never spent a dollar. I guess that's free to play.

You are one of the only people I know that can say that. I know a decent amount of LoL players who spend more than 15 dollars a week sometimes. My gf works for a game store that sells the cards and she has weekly regulars most of the time that buy stuff for LoL. Don't get me wrong its like magic you can buy a starter deck and play with it but most people don't.

OP: Wait on SWtOR it isn't totally polished just yet and can be off putting if you do anything outside of questing currently. It is a good game and I have high hopes that Bioware gives it a good layer of polish in the near future and it will be fairly competitive with the high end MMOs. If I were you I would keep up with Rift until you felt like it was at a wall then unsub. Also with the way WoW is going you could easily unsubb for a few months and miss nothing atm.

I agree though some of the monthly fee games need to be better if I have to pay for them endlessly. Still my gf, who basically had to quit MMOs because she has serious carpel tunnel and is refusing to get the surgery, plays tons of console and hand held games, she spends A LOT more a month than I do on games and sadly most of them aren't that long or have minimal replay value.

We just need our monthly games to be of high quality otherwise its a model that won't last forever, especially with devs turning out better and better free games. Still I'm not impressed with free games most of them remind me of shit I played on my 486 in the mid to late 90s. Glorified flash games mainly.

[Edge-]

I've played LoL off and on for over a year and have spent 5 dollars...to get the bunny Teemo skin. That's it. I don't own a lot of champs or runes because I don't have the time to play it a lot. My brother (before he got his account banned) played it a TON and had every champ and almost all the runes purchased without spending money on IP boosts or champs. If you want access to more champions you have to put in the time to earn it. If you want access to more runes, you have to put in the time to earn it. If you want to play competitively, you have to put in the time. I fail to see how that is unfair or "requires" you to spend money. Spending money just makes it more convenient.