The F2P joke

Talshere

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Jan 27, 2010
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So I'm very much into the F2P idea. I love the concept, it shuts down piracy completely and more often than not most people will by some things while other will buy most things.

But this bandwagon has got to stop.

I recently DLed Magic The Gathering - Tactics. Dubious from the outset since Wizards are about on par with Apple when it comes to scamming people for money, but I figured what could I lose since it was F2P right?

Within 30 seconds of logging in, I quit and un-installed. Virtual boosters, only 1 chapter available free. Points earned can only be spent on the AH, basically on stuff people have already bought.

Thats not free to play. Its not even buying power. To actually have any meaningful experience in the game you have to shell out and it starts making this obviously clear to you from the outset shoving stuff in your face in an attempt to make you buy things.

I dont mind you simply making you game a pay to play model, it still has its place in the market but I object to being lied to, at best this "game" could be described as a demo with DLC. Jesus Wizards, go find some dignity and respect. Its bad enough that you force us to re-buy our entire deck every 3 cycles now your lying to us and scamming us online to. Its just not on.

Dont call it F2P if its not. Charge a fee to play, release a reasonable amount of content with the game, not like MTG 2012 and dont start selling DLC in massive quantities, that take no effort to make in less than a week. Its a joke. Just release a demo and launch a normal game.
 

Alistair Crook

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Mar 16, 2011
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I call your (well-aimed and well deserved) rant and raise you team fortress. At least their problem is more tangible than the F2P features. Or so I am told. I personally quite like it as a whole, but meh.
 

Dansen

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Mar 24, 2010
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Alistair Crook said:
I call your (well-aimed and well deserved) rant and raise you team fortress. At least their problem is more tangible than the F2P features. Or so I am told. I personally quite like it as a whole, but meh.
What is the big deal with TF2? I've never had an issue with its model, I've gotten plenty of good weapons for free, and if I want one I haven't gotten I can just make it myself in crafting. I think the model Valve has created works great.

Also I agree with the OP, if you are going to sell specific parts of the game that are important for gameplay don't call it F2P.
 

Hero in a half shell

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Dec 30, 2009
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I see your Team Fortress and raise you Battlefield Play4free:

There are 4 roles available. You can only choose 2 and you have to pay for the others.
All clothing items can only be bought with real cash, and don't carry across to your other roles, so for a 4 man team you'll need to buy the same clothes... 4 times.
The free weapons totally suck (default sniper rifle takes 3 shots to kill, it's bolt action with about a 4 second reload per shot)
Money can be earned in game, but the only way to earn them is for coming high in the leaderboard at the end of a match, the maximum you can earn is 80 tokens per match.
These tokens can only be used on a select few things, but they are impossibly expensive. (the guns costs 45,000 tokens, that's a minimum of over 5000 matches needing to be played) A single training point costs 75,000, and the most overpowered weapons and abilities can only be purchased with real money.

Everything can be bought... everything. You can buy training points, experience, damage increase, armour, more ammo, greater explosives, better vehicle armour, etc. etc. etc.

Oh, and on the 21st December last year they screwed everyone over by taking away all the guns people had paid for (Battlefield promised they were forever) giving them nerfed replacements, and reducing everyones ammo and accuracy so you had to pay real money to buy upgrades to get the guns to a usable state. Broken abilities were added to the game, and stuff that was previously available for free was made pay to access only. Everything that had previously been balanced became unbalanced (rocket launchers and grenades are now magical AOE kill-cannons if you pay for it)

The game is completely broken. Pay to Win has never been a more appropriate label.
 

JackyG

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Jun 26, 2011
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People disguise pay to win as free to play. They give you a shell of a game and make you pay for enjoyment. I for one don't like thinking about my bank account while playing a game. I prefer the initial cost of entry and ownership.

gaming as a service... it just rubs me the wrong way.
 

Qitz

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Things like that aren't Free-To-Play, that's Pay-To-Win or Pay-Or-Be-Fucked. It's things like that that give actual good F2P games a bad rep.

Thankfully a lot of companies are that greedy, at least not the MMO's I've messed with.
 

him over there

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I remember in 6th grade when everyone in school played Maple Story it totally sat on the fence of this issue. On one hand you never bought power/levels/important parts of the game. You could of course buy switch server cards and triple exp cards and the like which are already sort of pushing it but the real ball buster is the cash shop. The items are all cosmetic and somewhat inexpensive but they're temporary, forving you to constantly pay to keep your things. Not really that unfair just sort of cheap.
 

TephlonPrice

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I take your TF2 & raise you Combat Arms, Warrock, & Operation 7. All of these games are F2P... in theory at least.

In Combat Arms, even though players who pay real money have their advantages, the regular in-game heaters can still bodybag an enemy team. And there's plenty of modes, maps, weapons, customization items, clans, custom gear & more. The thing here: paying to play DOES give advantages, but not enough that a guy with an AK-103 from a supply crate can't kill you over & over again.

With Warrock, you HAVE to pay if you want to access more than the basic maps, modes & the overpowered weapons on top of other special advantages. And this is with vehicle-based combat with aviation controls that don't work out well, classes that seem to be butt-fucked with some bad gear. There's a reason I installed it once, played it for a bit, and stopped.

Operation 7 is what happens when you take an excellent gun customization system & combine it with a somewhat slower-paced version of COD4's gameplay with a slight emphasis on realism. Every weapon, along with customization items for them & character gear can be purchased with in-game currency. IRL money can buy certain things, but it's not gonna be all that advantageous in the end.
 

Talshere

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him over there said:
I remember in 6th grade when everyone in school played Maple Story it totally sat on the fence of this issue. On one hand you never bought power/levels/important parts of the game. You could of course buy switch server cards and triple exp cards and the like which are already sort of pushing it but the real ball buster is the cash shop. The items are all cosmetic and somewhat inexpensive but they're temporary, forving you to constantly pay to keep your things. Not really that unfair just sort of cheap.
I think LOL nailed it with the F2P aspect. Considering that means there is an actual model to follow, its purely depressing how badly companies still do so badly!
 

Alistair Crook

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Mar 16, 2011
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Sorry. To clear up, I was aying that TF2 is a good one. I don't know for sure, because I had it before F2P, but I've heard few complaints from the actual f2pers.
 

BloatedGuppy

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Feb 3, 2010
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I never get tired of linking this particular cartoon, because it's always so relevant to this discussion.



"Free to Play" always, ALWAYS, means "Grease up your cornhole, here come the microtransactions". I find it hilarious that people continue to indulge in this fantasy that games going FTP have somehow failed to make the cut as subscription based titles. They're going "FTP" because there are buckets of money to be made.
 

Dandark

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Free to play is one of my favorite models when done right, I also spend a lot of money on it therefore the company makes a lot of money WHEN done right.

Sadly most companies cannot figure out how to do a Free to play model.
LoL has a great model. I get the game, play it, they release a new set of characters for free for one week. I try out a character in this example Shevana and think "Holy ****, this character is pretty damn cool and I am enjoying playing as her". Next week when she isn't free, a sale on shevana starts, she is half price. I think "Oh I want to take advantage of this and buy her, I'll buy 20$ worth of points since that gives me pretty good value."

I could of just saved up IP and gotten her for free, but I decided to invest money to increase my enjoyment of what I considered a free game. If you force people to spend money to buy the better weapons then it feels more like a demo than an actual free to play game.
 

Jdb

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If I game wants to be free-to-play, it needs to have access to every play style from the beginning and have almost nothing be a straight upgrade. Don't know about League of Legends, but Team Fortress 2 does this. Tribes Ascend does not. Tribes Ascend locks the following play styles: Stealth, sniper, deployables, and anti-vehicle. It would be like if Team Fortress 2 locked the spy, sniper, engineer, and the soldier or demoman. The inherent restrictions placed on starting players in Tribes Ascend combined with how long it takes to completely outfit and upgrade a character without VIP status or a booster makes it pay-to-win disguised as free-to-play.
 

wintercoat

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Good F2P model: Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online

Bad F2P model: Everquest 2, Age of Conan
 

Syntax Man

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The only F2P games I play are TF2 (got it before the F2P model started) and League of Legends, because they're the only games that aren't P2W.

In short, THIS [http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/microtransactions]
 

Maze1125

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City of Heroes is a great example of F2P.
You get everything the game had a its original subscriber only launch, and a whole lot more, without paying a penny. The worst you lose from not paying anything is the ability to use all the chat features, but that's only to stop spammers.

What you have to pay for are extra bonuses that don't matter a whole lot at all, and they were all added later on, so aren't necessary for the core game at all.