Quote:
Originally Posted by Ardenya
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Exactly, thats my point. Personally, I detest micropayments, Station/Cryptic Store and the likes. I have played many games over the years but not once did I buy anything for a game with real money besides the montly access fee. Especially the combination of a subscription and a store like SOE does it smells very fishy to me. As soon as something store-bought would affect my gameplay in a way that it felt needed (the only way to respec, xp potions to speed up a boring and long grind to a bearable level) I would probably stop playing altogether.
Still, as seen with DDO, for a dying game switching from a sub to F2P with a cash store might be a great way to introduce new players to a game by taking away the entry barrier of a sub. Although I fully agree with you stormlord, F2P and item stores leave a bad taste, just as SOE's latest invention: EQ2 Extended. Every sensible customer will realize that hes better off just paying the monthly sub. Yet, its an interesting concept to introduce a more flexible way of paying for what you want in a product.
Lets face it, there are many people like me who would love to play VG and pay for it but simply wont put money into a dead product. I realize that content and dev support comes with subs and increased revenue rates but this train is long gone. I have payed and played it for over 1.5 years and seen APW (VG's raiding dungeon which was very fun actually) take a what, a year to be released, the promised follow-up raid zone Nexus and all other additional content which is not daily quests to grind to be postponed until further notice. It was about then when I canceled my sub. Now if the game itself was F2P I would at least play it which by itself is an improvement.
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Point taken, but please understand that if DDO hadn't been free-to-play I probably would not have tried it. But the fact that I tried it does not mean micro-transactions are a success and that free-to-play will always work. I would rather like to see capped micro-transactions, especially if you can buy things that directly impact gameplay, or something else altogether different like ad revenue or payed-for customer service. I don't think that free-to-play is the only answer, and I think it's trendy to bring it up because micro-transactions are becoming increasingly popular. I think companies are starting to find out they can make MORE money with them than without them precisely because there's no cap. A middelman is needed to stop this mess.
And most other free games that i've seen that, to be honest, are not on the same level of games that I've payed for. There's this whole argument that no-strings-attached free games can be just as good as p2p games, but I've never seen an example that satisfied me. But i've never cared that free games don't have the same quality because I usually overlook that in favor of just playing the game; project1999 is a good example. And it seems like micro-transactions are the new ploy to get people to pay money to play. Games like DDO are NOT free, and people creating an account because they think it's are being misled.
Besides, I got tired of DDOs gameplay style as well. Yes, it's true that micro-transactions make the whole thing feel sour, but I also hated being rushed by groups when doing quests. I had the most fun in DDO when I was alone by myself and doing things solo, but then I would always get a desire to join a group. The problem in DDO is that in a group everyone is rushed to keep up and to complete the tasks. It's hard to enjoy the story and immersion when you can't go at your own pace. That really ruined it for me, in addition to the bad feeling micro-transactions give me. Before DDO I was playing Entropia Universe. In that game micro-transactions are even worse and totally spoil it. So to be fair, I went into DDO with a very bad taste in my mouth already.