Free-to-play is the WORST thing to happen to video gaming.

[Gray-Philosophy]

When done right, I think F2P model can be alright.

In Planetside2, while I do agree there is a lot of farming involved if you really want to save up, pretty much everything you actually need to be competitively viable is unlockable without having to pay for it, safe for a couple exclusive weapons. In fact, you can even stick with the starting weapons throughout and still be able to keep up with other players, if you adapt. It's a huge game, that you can play for absolutely free. Why would they not allow players to pay for convenience and cosmetics?
It's certainly not perfect, but I really don't think it's that bad.

Then there's a game like Neverwinter. They have a F2P model I find to be absolutely despicable. To get a mount that is faster than the beginner mount, you either need to farm literal millions of in-game currency called astral diamonds (which are limited to some 21k per day), or pay for it. Mounts, bagspace, character slots, companions, new playable race (despite promises of never having to pay for these) and even respecs are all paid for. Along with many other things with significant impact on gameplay and compatibility. Not to mention the overabundance of lockboxes that drop from monsters everywhere but requires paid keys to open with a %chance of getting something awesome.
To me, this is a F2P model done horribly wrong. However, stubborn as I am I have played this game for quite some time without spending a dime, and have actually enjoyed it so far.

Regarding Leage of Legends, I'm not sure how it used to be previously, but to my knowledge you can no longer purchase champions with money, only through points earned in-game. The only things you buy now are skins, boosters, rune pages and such. Nothing you can't live without.

Another game I think has done F2P well enough so far is Warframe. Everything you need can be unlocked through gameplay, cosmetics and convenience (not having to farm and wait for stuff) can be purchased with an in-game currency called Platinum, which is bought with money. However, you can trade this platinum between players, so if you're lucky you can find some good stuff and sell it to other players willing to spend some platinum on your find.

In a F2P model you should want to pay for things, not have to.

 

[Techno Squidgy]

Yeah, I'm on the NA server. Lots of arty hating twerps there. The abuse was actually bad enough that it combined with my (then) shitty computer to make me quit for a few months. I'm thinking about getting back into it. Not sure if it's worth it though. Been shoved out of bushes a few times, once by a heavy while in a glass cannon TD. He was pissy because I was not "pushing " with him. Sorry if my toaster is too thin armoured to fight the front lines with you there bub but piss off is basically what I said to him.

The window licking from other players in that game is truly astonishing. Sorry to hear about the nationalist abuse though. From Russian players I expect? I guess I should have known there was still some bad shit going there.

I've never understood the arty hate. A good arty player can make all the difference to a bad engagement, and one that's good at counter-battery fire is invaluable to a team. Sure, it's frustrating being nailed by an opponent you can't see, but watching that shot from the heavens (and hearing it scream through the air if you have gnomefather's mod) cripple the heavy tank that's been giving you trouble is worth the occasional frustration.

Not so much Russian players, there aren't too many of them on the EU servers, it seems to come from across the board, somehow this stereotype has developed that Polish players are worse than everyone else. I can't help but wonder if the increasing amount of hostility between players of different nationalities is somehow related to the rise of far right parties across Europe. We Brits don't get too much abuse though. I guess people like Jingles and Quickybaby help give us a good name.

Playing in a platoon is far more rewarding than playing solo. Having one or two people you know you can depend on is a great thing, and a bit of friendly banter helps you keep from getting too frustrated.

 

[Netrigan]

That said, both are from Valve so take that for what it's worth. The problem is most free to plays use a broken system to cater to 'whales'(players that will pour a lot of money into the game). At one of the conventions last year I think, there were a number of panels about how to cater to 'whales'(I hate this term).

Gambling term and pretty accurate. A whale was the big-pocketed sucker who you wined and dined so he'd drop millions at the tables. The movie Casino had a bit about a whale who had won big, so the private jet that was supposed to fly him back to Japan got "mechanical troubles" and they comped him another day in their best suite. He ended up losing all his winnings and then some.

 

[Sanderpower]

Riot is now a LOT better at balancing their champions now. The don't do drastic nerfs or buffs like they used too. League of Legends has one of the best free-to-play models I've seen. You can't buy power. When you enter a game you're on a completely equal footing as everybody else. I've been playing the game for about two and a half years now and I've only used my money to buy the cosmetic skins (They only make your champions look cooler for those who don't play League). I'm a Platinum player too. I seriously think you should come back to playing the game. Even the community is starting to become better now that Riot is starting to seriously crack down on trolls and toxic players.

The rune system is buying power

"But wait!" you say, "runes cannot be bought with RP"

No they cannot, but champions can be. The person who spends RP on champions has more IP to spend on runes.
I played over 5000 games since 2009 before I quit, and I still didn't have all the runes or champions I wanted.

Their f2p model really is quite greedy, and it has only gotten worse since Tencent took over.

You would have a point, if it wasn't for the fact that 80% of the runes are nearly worthless. Only a few select runes are useful and even fewer have niche uses. The other rune pages are mostly wasted or inefficient stat usage. If you look at people's rune pages they all use similar runes because of the fact that only certain rune types are efficient.

Having a shit ton of runes doesn't give you power, because most of those runes you have are useless. The ones that aren't useless everybody already has.

Now for the champions argument. You don't NEED to buy every single champion. You need to learn what every champion does, but you don't need to play them. You only need a decent set of champions that you have mastered. Most people with full champion pages only want it because their completionists, they aren't planning on actually using every single one in games. Now if you really want to try out a champion, there is a fresh rotation of temporarily free champions every week. You can try out a champion that looks interesting to you, and if you like it, you can just buy him using IP.

There's also the fact that if League of Legends changed it's monetization, they could be making nearly double the amount of money. They don't do that because they actually give a damn about the longevity and integrity of the game. Something most "greedy" companies care very little about.

Here's a source for you:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-08-11-if-they-let-me-change-league-of-legends-i-could-double-its-revenue

 

[Sanderpower]

Your example about League of Legends is a classic Hanlon's Razor "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

This, this, this. We can end this fucking idiotic thread now.

In this context, a Razor is used to eliminate unlikely explanations for a phenomenon. You are both wrong as there IS a likely explanation. Anything of interest happen to Riot in 2011? Anything big at all, such as Chinese company Tencent BUYING a majority stake in Riot Games for $400 million dollars in Spring 2011? Gosh, that was right before Yorick was launched too! What a coincidence!

When a company buys your company for $400,000,000 they expect a return on their investment. Its that simple. "Well Brim, they wouldn't just buff a champion so people would buy him!" Yeah, and gas station don't collude on price either. The price just seems to magically go up $.30 on Fridays or $.50/gallon right before a holiday weekend! What a PHENOMENON!

Just because a company expects a return on their investment doesn't mean they immediately turn into horribly greedy. A company can pay back their investors and at the same time keep their integrity. If League of Legends really wanted to milk their game dry, they could have. Hell a businessman from Ubisoft said he could of doubled their profits if League changed it's monetisation policy.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-08-11-if-they-let-me-change-league-of-legends-i-could-double-its-revenue

One example would be that Riot could of made it so that for the first few weeks new champions could only be bought with RP. That would of greatly increased their revenue.

Another example is that they could of made runes purchase with RP and rune pages ONLY purchasable with RP (instead of being able to bought with both RP and IP).

Lets face it, Riot could me milking League a lot more, but they don't because they aren't some greedy ass company that only cares about profits. They care about the worth of their video game, not just in money, but also about it's integrity as a competitive game.

 

[Sanderpower]

F2P isn't inherently good or bad. In in the OP's rant, he conveniently skips over good examples of Free to Play games like Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2. And for your example regarding Yorick, I'd go with this explanation:

Your example about League of Legends is a classic Hanlon's Razor "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Yorick is a poorly designed champion, he's remained a problem even until today and he's the only champion that will never be on the free week rotation until he is fully reworked. If Riot just made the new and expensive champions OP then Nidalee and Kassadin (two old, cheap champs) wouldn't have spent a year+ being dominant.

Riot was bad with balancing in general. They would have champions that needed a few changes and they would overbuff and overnerf them and they wouldn't know how to fix them without pissing off the community. An example of how bad they were at balancing champions was that they left Evelynn a trash tier champion for a long time (nearly a year I believe). They did it because they literally had no idea how to make her viable without making her frustrating to play against. So they just nerfed her to the ground until she was a literally considered a champion you would pick if you wanted to lose on purpose to troll your teammates.

They messed up new champions and old champions. They messed them up a LOT. Hanlon's Razor still applies.

 

[SSJBlastoise]

I've never understood the arty hate. A good arty player can make all the difference to a bad engagement, and one that's good at counter-battery fire is invaluable to a team. Sure, it's frustrating being nailed by an opponent you can't see, but watching that shot from the heavens (and hearing it scream through the air if you have gnomefather's mod) cripple the heavy tank that's been giving you trouble is worth the occasional frustration.

Not so much Russian players, there aren't too many of them on the EU servers, it seems to come from across the board, somehow this stereotype has developed that Polish players are worse than everyone else. I can't help but wonder if the increasing amount of hostility between players of different nationalities is somehow related to the rise of far right parties across Europe. We Brits don't get too much abuse though. I guess people like Jingles and Quickybaby help give us a good name.

Playing in a platoon is far more rewarding than playing solo. Having one or two people you know you can depend on is a great thing, and a bit of friendly banter helps you keep from getting too frustrated.

Would it be possible that the Polish players are more likely to have PL in their screen name or basically announce they are Polish that people target them?

I'm on the SEA server and usually players with any identification of nationality (the two biggest populations that do this are Aussies and Vietnamese) tend to range in skill from average to down right awful. Mind you there isn't much animosity towards the Vietnamese because VPA are one of the strongest clans in SEA so any time someone says Vietnamese players suck it's pretty easy to show them how they are wrong. I'm not sure how it is in Europe but that's what I see could be the issue, they make it known they are Polish so it becomes an easy target.

I also have a theory regarding in game names; if you have a name like Rommel or any other famous war figure you are usually a tomato. I know it's most likely confirmation bias but I don't think I've seen a good player with a name like that yet.

 

[Steve Waltz]

Free-to-play is the WORST thing to happen to video gaming.

?Really? Did it cause the crash of the entire western games industry? No? Well, then E.T. for the Atari 2600 remains the worst thing to happen to video gaming.?

Outside of that poorly placed Zero Punctuation joke, F2P is like DLCs. A good idea that has been twisted into something bad by greedy companies.

Seriously, Valve did F2P right when they made TF2 a F2P game. The only things people will buy are hats and scarfs and other stupid stuff for their characters. Users want to look cool in-game, and Valve wants their money. Seems like a win-win considering the game is free. Of course, I was one of those suckers that bought the game?

Well, minus that robot-killing coop mode they added, which I have yet to play because they want me to buy a ticket or something stupid. It looks like Sven Coop, without the user content, and fun.

 

[someonehairy-ish]

Eh, everyone and their dog has already said go play DOTA2

...

But it bears repeating; go play DOTA2.

 

[sturryz]

Just because valve is doing it right doesn't make it okay for everyone else to do it wrong.

it does you no favors to pretend otherwise, so stop it.

 

[War_Dyn27]

Free-to-play is the WORST thing to happen to video gaming.

?Really? Did it cause the crash of the entire western games industry? No? Well, then E.T. for the Atari 2600 remains the worst thing to happen to video gaming.?

Outside of that poorly placed Zero Punctuation joke, F2P is like DLCs. A good idea that has been twisted into something bad by greedy companies.

Seriously, Valve did F2P right when they made TF2 a F2P game. The only things people will buy are hats and scarfs and other stupid stuff for their characters. Users want to look cool in-game, and Valve wants their money. Seems like a win-win considering the game is free. Of course, I was one of those suckers that bought the game?

Well, minus that robot-killing coop mode they added, which I have yet to play because they want me to buy a ticket or something stupid. It looks like Sven Coop, without the user content, and fun.

You can play MvM with out the ticket, all it does is gives you extra fancy hats if you do well or something like that.

Eh, everyone and their dog has already said go play DOTA2

...

But it bears repeating; go play DOTA2.

I agree with this notion, Dota 2 is basically the the only F2P game I've stuck with, and the only one (outside of 2 tf2 chests) that I have spent any substantial money on.

why?

because I respect it as a great game and it respects me as a player, it doesn't gate important content off and let the F2P model corrupt its design like so many.

for reference, other than Dota 2, I have played Hearthstone, Warframe, HoTS, LoL, Hawken, TF2, MechWarrior Online and Planetsiders 2 and all, aside froM TF2 got boring fast, so I just stopped playing.

 

[Roysten]

Free to play should be a great thing, in practice it really isn't.

It does something to the companies that run the games, it breeds a contempt for their customers that is palpable.

If you want a current example check out Archeage a very recent MMO run by Trion. I am in the middle of trying to bail out of the horror show going on over there.

The tragedy of course is that fundamentally it is a superb game, and yet in practice it is getting closer and closer to a mobile app like Dungeon Keeper on a daily basis.

Some of the things happening actually defy belief, and it has most definitely become much much more entertaining to watch from the outside than play.

The Trion I remembered had a pretty good rep. after Rift a few years ago, but I missed the part with new management and hedge-fund investors coming in for the brave new FTP world.

The closest comparison I can make is with the film "The Producers".
Over in world of Archeage "Springtime for Hitler" has started playing and you can barely hear the tune for the noise.
It is just weird seeing any business trying so hard to get rid of customers who "invested", and replace them with marks who will gamble box.

Last night it actually became hilarious when an anon. forum post appeared where a concerned customer tried desperately to contact Trion because they had accidentally found an expliot that would crash the servers. Watching a thread roll on a forum and see a poster actually crash a server on demand to prove they were not a troll in real time is surreal.
As far as I can tell Trion had exactly one person (no exageration 2 servers dropped unnoticed for 7 hours on 4thNov)on duty, the thread remained open for hours.

http://forums.archeagegame.com/showthread.php?114483-I-caused-the-Kyrios-Naima-crash-sorry-please-read-Trion

Oh and its still there, its just wonderful. My favourite part is that this really looks genuine and not some extortion racket.
I was humming "Springtime for Hitler" as the thread evolved.

There is a lot of other really shadey stuff going on as well from Trion that needs picking up on, but in the end its worth just watching the show.

 

[GrimThunder]

It's funny when I hear people complaining about being slowed down, or limited, in a "free-to-play" game, and then go on to say that the game isn't "free-to-play" because of micro-transactions, or subscriptions. You are playing the game... for free. It's free-to-play. It didn't cost you a dime to play it. Don't like micro-transactions? Don't buy anything. Don't want to be slowed down in comparison to people who actually payed? Uninstall. It's not hard to avoid these kinds of games. It really isn't.

Also, about the League of Legends "Runes are power" thing. If you buy runes pre-level 20(30 is max) you're a dunce. The runes are worthless until you get the tier-3 runes at 20. By then, if you haven't found a few champs that you like, you're doing something wrong. Heck, many of the cheaper champs are excellent choices. Need a solid mid? Annie. Want to play top? Garen's an amazing tank, and Ryze is a monster. Bot lane? Soraka is THE healer and Ashe is a decent ADC. More into the jungle? Master Yi is probably one of the easier champs to snowball with. All of these guys? 450 IP. The most expensive champs being 6300, and they can easily be shut-down by most of these 450s.

As mentioned in a previous comment as well, League of Legends gives you 10 free champions a week to use. You don't even need to spend IP on champions if you don't want to.

 

[Pikey Mikey]

Agreed, Free-to-Play and Always-Online can both go die and feed themselves to pigs (a lá Brick Top)

 

[War_Dyn27]

It's funny when I hear people complaining about being slowed down, or limited, in a "free-to-play" game, and then go on to say that the game isn't "free-to-play" because of micro-transactions, or subscriptions. You are playing the game... for free. It's free-to-play. It didn't cost you a dime to play it. Don't like micro-transactions? Don't buy anything. Don't want to be slowed down in comparison to people who actually payed? Uninstall. It's not hard to avoid these kinds of games. It really isn't.

Also, about the League of Legends "Runes are power" thing. If you buy runes pre-level 20(30 is max) you're a dunce. The runes are worthless until you get the tier-3 runes at 20. By then, if you haven't found a few champs that you like, you're doing something wrong. Heck, many of the cheaper champs are excellent choices. Need a solid mid? Annie. Want to play top? Garen's an amazing tank, and Ryze is a monster. Bot lane? Soraka is THE healer and Ashe is a decent ADC. More into the jungle? Master Yi is probably one of the easier champs to snowball with. All of these guys? 450 IP. The most expensive champs being 6300, and they can easily be shut-down by most of these 450s.

As mentioned in a previous comment as well, League of Legends gives you 10 free champions a week to use. You don't even need to spend IP on champions if you don't want to.

And how are new players supposed to know which characters are better to buy. especicially since, at least when I tried the game, there was no 'try before you buy' out side of the rotation system.

Also, how are they supposed to know pre tier-3 runes are useless, and in that case what the hell is the point in selling these things if they are useless. I know you can't buy runes with real money, but the system seems designed to screw uninformed players out of their grind points so that they won't have any to buy characters and thus be more likely to buy them with real money. For all Riot's talk of 'removing unnecessary complexity,' the don't seem to mind it when it makes them money.

the game isn't free because most of the important content is locked behind either a paywall or a waitgate, and as they say time is money.

 

[Greg White]

There are some F2P games I like.

Star Trek Online: Originally got it back when it was subscription-based(so I've got the 'you've been playing this way too long' titles) and the thing is that they haven't really changed things that much gameplay wise between the F2P and regular. The vast majority of premium stuff is mostly cosmetic(uniforms, bridges, and crew) with a few ships scattered around. The game itself can be played quite easily without ever buying anything from the Cryptic Store, though those damn lockbox drops do get annoying after a while.

World of Tanks: You can get almost any tank in the game without ever paying. The premium tanks are a bit of a mixed bag, but almost all of them are pretty middling vehicles for their tier(see the Panther/M10 and M4A3E8 Fury, which are inferior to the regular models, or the TOG II which is a horrible, if amusing tank) and only used because they make more credits and can train other tank's crews. Premium consumables(to include "gold" ammo) can all be purchased with the in game currency and while they can help, they aren't going to make a bad player any better. You can pay for premium time, but your only advantage with that is that you can advance through the tiers faster, which may or may not be a good thing...unless you're stuck in the M3 Lee, in which case you'll want to get through that as fast as possible.

Path of Exile: Diablo II clone. Pretty decent game overall and the microtransactions are almost all cosmetic, be they skins or spell effects.

Warframe: Everything that isn't cosmetic(and even some of what is) is available to all players, baring 2 weapons and the Excalibur Prime which were founder's-only. They do offer to let you buy most everything minus the Prime weapons and frames, but all can be gotten without paying, plus if you go hunting for some of the more annoying stuff other players will pay platinum(the premium currency) for it. Mostly you'll be spending it on equipment slots, but you have enough at the beginning to last a little while.

War Thunder: Similar to World of Tanks in model. You can pay to grind less, but it's not really going to give you much of an advantage. You're still going to have to learn to play to do anything and, much like WoT, the premium vehicles aren't all that great...though I do like my Soviet-marked Catalina.

Firefall: Mech suits with jump jets and plasma gatling guns. The microtransactions mostly revolve around cosmetic stuff, though deployable vehicles are in there too, as is being able to access the advanced classes before level 30.