AzrealMaximillion said:
Hopefully the Elder Scrolls Online looks at this and The Old Republic's way of pricing and realizes that the pay to play subscription style is on its way out in a big way.
Not really. The subscription based model is far, far, better overall, the problem has been companies recurringly making the same mistakes.
For a subscription based game to survive and thrive what it needs is an incredibly strong endgame experience, one that is fun, but also takes a lot of time and dedication. After all at the end of the day you need to keep people busy so they keep re-upping their subscriptions and working on their characters.
The problem that hit both "ToR" and "TSW" is that they launched without much endgame content. Both were based entirely around a fun journey through the content and enviroments, complete with voicework for quests, and interesting enviroments. However once you saw everything there wasn't much else there to do. In both cases you wound up with a small selection of pretty approachable instances that you could grind again and again for gear, without a whole lot of planning or effort (the exception to this being TSW's nighmare level, but more on that later).
Those developing subscription based games tend to look at the model of WoW and what it launched with, which was very little in the way of endgame. Not bothering to consider that it had little competition for that at the time and also rushed out it's "Molten Core" and "Blackwing Lair" raids pretty quickly, as well as other 20 and 40 man raids. This is what cemented WoW's success and kept a huge core of players renewing their subscriptions every month.
Developers need to understand that casuals by their nature have little in the way of loyalty, they keep chasing the next big thing, especially when they can clearly say they are "done" with the content in a game. Pretty much every MMO out there has made a big deal out of how to max out your character, get the best gear, and see all the content you won't have to invest hundreds or thousands of hours, or coordinate with tons of people to figure out obtuse boss fight gimmicks. While this makes the casuals happy, there is rarely any consideration for what it means when people get all of the best gear and see everything in a couple of months because it was made easy to do. Once that happens people leave. The hardcore have little to occupy their attention and work towards, and as the casuals get it they move on to the next game. Sure, people oftentimes will return IF more content is added to the game, but once it's done they leave again, meaning there isn't anything keeping them playing during the middle months to finance that new content.
As much as people might have complained they DID do those 40 man raids in WoW, and for a long time. The headache in getting 40 people together and fairly coordinated was part of the point, since it took time, and with the way loot drops worked it meant people would keep coming back to gear their characters. It ensured that there were still people running MC and BWL when the expansions came out, as people got into the huge-scale raiding and re-upped their subscriptions every month. By the time Blizzard made raids and such more approachable they had enough endgame content that they could keep people occupied from expansion to expansion. It's only been fairly recent that their numbers have been dying down.
As someone who was in Beta for TSW I can tell you that their failure has been due to not knowing what the heck they were trying to develop. I get the impression that the devs and the guys running the financial end of things (EA apparently) weren't talking to each other very much. TSW is one of my favorite MMOs ever, and I forecast it as being a big success... based on the claims that Funcom was basically developing an intentionally niche MMO for mature, dedicated, players. NOT that they were expecting large scale, fairly mainstream success. As a game it succeeded based on it's initial projections and did attract a dedicated, niche, audience, but obviously that wasn't what the business side of things expected.
TSW's endgame was (and still is) kind of pathetic. It's basically a handfull of farily short 5 man dungeons that can be adjusted between 3 levels of difficulty... normal, elite, and nightmare, which influance the rewards you get for victory. The jump in difficulty between Elite and Nightmare being pretty substantial as well. It was a giant mess, but as a niche game based on it's uniqueness I figured this was one time it wouldn't matter because they weren't planning on holding hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers to begin with, and there were plans for frequent, monthly, content updates. Not aiming for mainstream success and a huge player base increasing their options and viability.
Their very endgame design is kind of a problem where the community itself created a kind of barrier to the real endgame content where nobody even wants to talk to you nowadays unless you've already mastered it and can meet stats that are impossible to reach coming up from the "elite" level. This because advancement at the end is largely dictated by farming vast numbers of black bullion (tokens) to obtain and upgrade your gear to the top levels, and being short dungeons full of content people have run hundreds of times, people want to get it done quick as a sort of chore.
One advantage to a large scale endgame is simply that when your filling things like 40 man raids your more likely to find spots because of the time and organization involved. This helped ensure WoW's endgame, at least to begin with, never became all that elitist. The criticisms being more along the lines that you had to have "no life" due to the dedication it took to commit to showing up 2-3 times a week in some cases to finish a raid, spending 6-8 hours at a time, making it easily the equivilent to a part time job.... but it immersed people, and kept them coming back.
Basically the thing is that the subscription model takes more effort, setting up an endgame is the hardest part of MMO design, and as a result the most overlooked, while also being the most critical.
Free To Play games do tend to be a bit more approachable, but also tend to be more expensive than subscription based games since they rapidly turn into an exercise of throwing down barriers in front of you, and making you pay to get the most out of them. People tend to rapidly forget that for every person who plays entirely to free, their enjoyment is dependant on others who invest money in the game to keep it profitable. It's a very precarious situation. Not to mention that most FTP games release very little in the way of serious content updates, especially signifigant ones, what content they produce is typically designed for sale.
I also tend to think that the subscription model has been having trouble because of WoW still, even with WoW now finally losing players, the bottom line is that it's the best endgame enviroment out there. If you want to keep having something to chase, WoW is your game. People leave WoW for a while to try the latest "WoW-killer" like ToR, advance through the content, oftentimes praising it, and then wind up at endgame, their gear maxxed out, and nothing to do but troll on space stations while perhaps occasionally running the same, tired, gauntlets again and again. Obviously people aren't going to pay a sub to do that.
