My Name's Jack Emmert, And I'm With The Subscription Is Too Damn High Party

Hmm. They aren’t using the ‘store points each month for being subscribed’ model that LotRO did. The thing that has going for it, IMHO, is that it leaves people with an excuse not to cancel when they know they won’t be playing for a few months. Say, because of Lego Universe or Cataclysm or suddenly needing to grind out a bunch of stuff in Guild Wars.

Of course, I’m biased. I have a lifetime subscription to both LotRO and CO, so I kind of enjoy the ‘free points every month forever*’ way of doing things.

* Forever isn’t always a long time. I also had a lifetime subscription to Hellgate: London…

Well they’d dipped every possible other way – subs, lifetime subs, entry to STO beta if you lifetime sub tie-in, box price, cash shop. Would be a shame not to monetise the player base even harder.

No suprise that cryptic is more scummy than turbine with microtransactions. They aren’t even bothering to reconcile previously paid accounts. Got some old toons? Sorry, they’re locked out until you nerf them, and then you can pay $15 to make them not nerfed again!

If any of you remember Pirates of the Burning Sea, they’re going ftp on the 22nd. At least they’re allowing people to trade their rmt currency for in-game currency. Like Eve, people with more money than time can buy doubloons from people with more time than money, eventually allowing poopsockers to have a character that’s almost as equal to a subscription character without having to spend a dime.

PURCHASE LIFE TIME SUBSCRITIONS FOR THE PRICE OF A YEAR OR SO. OH A YEAR HAS PASSED? TIME FOR FREE TO PLAY… IT’S WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT WINK WINK!

I have less trouble with them having a F2P model than the fact that, if you are a subscriber that wanted/had to cancel their subscription and yet wanted to play again (like, say, me) … they would not be able to use their characters without likely gimping them.

Hey, guys? Making my awesome max level character suddenly suck is not going to make me want to give you money again.

Actually I always felt that they should have switched to classes. The current situation pretty much has the choice of cherry-picking the best abilities or not. By making archetypes they might be forced to balance powersets better and avoid the uber builds that have made the game trivial.

While there are issues in PvP and on higher difficulties, the game itself is very easy to level in, so this affects things a lot less than you think. Classes may actually be good in that weaker characters might boost partying, and make much less soloing Elite things and World Bosses.

I’m usually hard on F2P but this is a lot better than EQ for one. You get 5 out of 6 zones, unimpeded levelling to cap, can fully chat and join groups after your first 20 hours, and can use the auction house and costume services.

Although I am not very up to date according Champions Online or the company, I am still not surprised about such news at all.

We will see a lot of those in the very next years. And there will be a lot of companies who do it totally wrong, like recently “Team Fortress” with the “headshot-protection”-hats. Please correct me if I am wrong.

There is a very good reason to do Free-to-play with Item Sales instead of subscription: more money, or more precisely, a higher lifetimevalue, meaning not only more profit, but better games (for a sacrifice of fairness) with more players (by more advertisement).

There are also very good reasons not to do Free-to-play with Item Sales:
- being already successful with subscription
- being confident to succeed with subscription
- not having prepared or planned anything for Free-to-play with Item Sales

I hope although I read different, BioWare clearly goes for subscription with their Star Wars MMO. They would be doomed if they wouldn’t.

Yes, players go mad about it. But why doesn’t management care? Because the revenue by it and it’s active player numbers already are that small, that they tell themselves: screw our current players, it doesn’t work anyway. Screw the revenue and game we have for the chance to have the chance to make big business.

We will see how it turns out. There is currently no clue that they did a bad service, isn’t there? Well, despite the fact how they treat their current customers. Free-to-play customers care less about this, since they choose to pay or pay not after they experience the game and service.

They could pay me 20 bucks a month to play CO and to be honest I would have to turn them down.

I positively abhor the game. Played the heck out of it but each balance pass they made herded the remaining players into fewer options and not more and took the major thing the IP had going for it, diversity in abilities, and drove it into FOTM face-rollville.

–m.

“Actually I always felt that they should have switched to classes. The current situation pretty much has the choice of cherry-picking the best abilities or not. By making archetypes they might be forced to balance powersets better and avoid the uber builds that have made the game trivial.”

Except that it won’t because there will still be uber builds making content tricial. 4 Guys having trouble with some group content? No problem, just invite me and watch me solo it. Getting your but handed to you in Arenas against other players? No problem as a handful of custom builds by subscription players will be able to solo 4 archetypes.

They have previously said they planned on fleshing out the powersets (now we know why), but they would have to completely redo them to prevent cherry picking powers creating over the top characters. Any time you can pick a dps ability from a dps archetype, a healing ability from a healing archetype, a defense from a tanking archetype, and a crowd control ability from a CC archetype… you pretty much make Archetype limited builds the “have nots” of a game.

I do drool, however, at the thought of being able to pick any 10 abilities from classes in WoW and seeing what that would allow me to do in THAT game. Would be a heck of a hunter between his Fear, Plate Armor, 4 pets, and stealth.

Whatever you fancy if you can pick whatever skills you want while most of the player base is stuck to specific classes

I, for one, welcome my somewhat-mediocre but free-to-play heroics-to-be.

My prediction is that Champions Online will benefit from the transition probably as well as Dungeons and Dragons Online did and for a very similar reason: both games make heavy utilization of instancing.

There’s something very psychological there, but basically any game that makes heavy use of instancing is not worthy of a monthly subscription. It’s the difference between paying rent on your key to a virtual world and paying rent on a typical multiplayer game that hid its lobbies. The difference registers on a subconscious level even for the most ignorant player.

I am a bit worried about how mediocre the overall gameplay sophistication is, however. During development, they tried to make it console friendly and to have one point pool pay for everything. They aborted both of these at the last minute (well, the last 3 months or so of development) and the power systems and central gameplay mechanics have been a rather loosely-balanced wreck every since.

Having put some 1700 hours into City of Heroes, I imagine Champions Online will enjoy a permanent spot on my hard drive after the game goes F2P, but I half-wish they’d invoke potential NGE-style wrath by massively revamping their entire power system.

No no, I have too! I mean, you can play Champions Online *as an action game* if you configure it properly, like it was any other action/platformer or even FPS out there (not even worrying about target selection or anything!). Taking Acrobatics as a travel power and a full set of pistol powers was *fun*. And Dual Blades… I’m just saying, if you haven’t tried it, you *need* to.

It’s much farther along than any other MMO in terms of this design aspect. It’s the one reason I still have it installed, even if I’m not subscribed.

> And there will be a lot of companies who do it totally wrong, like recently “Team Fortress” with the “headshot-protection”-hats. Please correct me if I am wrong.

You’re wrong. Mostly.

http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Item_sets#The_Sniper

The hat you’re referring to is the “Ol’ Snaggletooth”, which is a crocodile hat for the Sniper class to wear. It’s part of an “item set” called the “Croc-O-Style Kit”, which consists of four items, all obtainable through gameplay (though with varying difficulty). Wearing all four of the items in the Croc-O-Style Kit set makes your Sniper character unable to be killed by headshots. The major downside to this is that one of the Kit’s components is a sniper rifle called the “Sydney Sleeper” which cannot itself perform headshots (and is thus kinda weak).

In a nutshell, Valve released a bunch of new items that gave players a slew of new options for how they structure their character, and then let people skip some or all of the time investment required to earn those options by paying them and the community members who created the items. They aren’t selling “headshot-protection”-hats, or win buttons, or anything like that. Indeed, pretty much all of the stuff available in the store is unlockable through a combination of gameplay and trade with other community members.

As an aside, are we OK with calling Team Fortress 2 an MMO at this point? Is the MMO label even a useful distinction anymore?

Gx1080:

Raise your hands if you are actually surprised with this move.
…..Anybody?

The move was anticipated, but less in a way that suggests I knew it would happen, and more in a way that I really thought it was really something they aught to do.

I enjoy the microtransaction model in D&D online. Maybe because i never felt that they were trying to cheat me. Its a complete game, even without paying for anything.

Now, Cryptic I dunno. CO felt like it was designed to trick me. Box + subscriptionfee + microtransactions for everything. Bugged, contentstarved and underpolished. It left a bad taste and i regret buying it.

I suppose its more about the feeling than anything else. Cryptic keeps trying to trick me into buying stuff and turbine offers me a decent deal. /Shrug

Kinda surprising that a company that has been so quick to add microtransactions on top of their P2P model is so ignorant about how microtransaction balance works: you’ve gotta let the F2P folk operate comfortably enough to be fished into shelling out more for the game.

1/4 inventory bags isn’t going to cut it. 3/4 is about right. 2/4 would be pushing things but operable.

Power tinting shouldn’t be “unavailable” to F2P, it should be an unlockable cosmetic purchase.

The base archetypes restriction may actually have an unintended benefit: frankly, the open-ended power system Champions Online has now has always been rather boring in that it lacks sufficient structure to be interesting. They might have been able to get away with a completely open-ended system based off of a single point pool where some powers cost more than others, and City of Heroes has demonstrated that a completely restricted selection of powers works too, but this in-between solution they currently have satisfies no one.

The F2P element is in beta currently. Players are pushing for various changes to the F2P matrix.

It’s a tough line to walk – give too much away and players won’t pay a dime, give too little and players won’t hang around. ChampO does have inventory issues anyway, even if you have access to 4 (5?) bags.

Getting every single player to pay in F2P usually isn’t the point of the systems. Rather, the idea is rather is to set up a bandwagon affect that fishes in severalfold more players than you’d normally have. Once you’ve got that going on, even if the majority doesn’t pay a dime, the minority are paying more than enough to make up for it.

For example, lets say we’ve got about 50,000 players under a P2P model. We throw the switch and the game becomes F2P. Suddenly, we’ve got 1,000,000 players. Maybe 10% of those players pay as much as players were paying under a P2P, however, that’s still twice the profit you were getting before.