It's a forecast.

P2P strategy:

Make a very compelling game with a huge budget catering to many players and do everything you can to retain your players. Slow down the gameplay pace, introduce roadblocks and limit the amount of content players can access, make them work to progress and trickle the content in. Enslave them to your game.

Issues:

Realisation of part of the player base that this concept of compulsive leveling is being rehashed and reused. Players realising that they're grinding in the game instead of fully experiencing the content. Former players who have grown up and demand a more casual and fulfilling experience than being kept on a monthly leash.

Result:

F2P will gain more and more ground until P2P loses it's power over MMO.

O_o F2P games tend to focus more on compulsive leveling than P2P from what I've seen.

...and if F2P is going to sure is taking long enough for it to happen.  Supposedly Runes of Magic was going to obliterate WoW and take over the mmorpg world as we know it changing peolpe's opinions on P2P vs F2P according to some when I was playing that game in beta.  Great game for a "free one" but if RoM can't get the ball rolling I don't see anything-anytime soon doing that.

 A less polished game, takes longer to level up, can pump them out at the rate of 3 a year, and can make a ton off the cashshop per game, and can run all the games simoltaniously, yep sounds about right, when you can make money with less effort, why do the one with less money and more effort?

Your crystal ball is more like a microscope with a cracked lens and no focus adjustment.

F2P Stratergy- Offer people limited content for free, and reserve the best parts of the game for "premium" subscriptions. Offer the best items and rewards for a cash shop fee, and make it impossible for the player to be competitve without forking out tons of cash.

Result- the player ends up paying MORE per month than a P2P game. Brilliant revenue plan, screw the player.

The ONLY decent F2P MMOs out there are FreeRealms (supper kiddy) and Runes of Magic (quite literally Vanilla WoW's scruffy twin). The rest are garbage and they reflect poorly on the players that choose to play them.

P2P is fine. It's the irrational forum whining model that's flawed.

Edit: To the poster above me, more and more F2Ps are choosing to ignore that model and instead are making cash items more or less cosmetic or consumable in nature, especially the western F2Ps. For example in Runes of Magic you can't buy with real world cash the uber sword of mom-slaying.

Your "forecast" is based on a weak opinion, not on any facts.

Nothing wrong with P2P subscription model MMOGs.

Easy to budget for 'cos you always know what you're spending, very cheap when you consider the value/hour ratio and the quality always seems to be much higher than F2P alternatives.

Originally posted by Senadina

Result- the player ends up paying MORE per month than a P2P game. Brilliant revenue plan, screw the player.

The stunning part is the need for some of them to share or brag to others the amounts they are willing to spend. Quite a while back there was a goof bragging about spending over 3k in one year in 2 Moons.

I'm not sure I would even let anyone know I actually play that game for a year let alone willing say I spent thousands of dollars on it.

As far as I can see, the main objectors to P2P are kids who have to ask parents to pay for it. Any adult can afford $15 a month for entertainment. That's 50 cents a day. If you can't afford that you shouldn't be playing games anyway, you should be trying to make money.

F2P is a marketting tool designed to exploit customers.

P2P is a service agreement with both parties best interest in mind.

Perhaps all the best PvP games will be F2P, since fast action and class balance are more imporant (to me). In this case, you would need a good variety of Peer to Peer servers such as FPS (Quake, CS, TF2) to be successful and players are not going to pay for that in my opinion. I could see a hybrid MMO like WoW doing well with a battle.net (Diablo) interface for PvP and still being P2P, but it would have to have very good PvE content as well. The best PvE MMOs will likely remain P2P since they require more of a grind to get levels, loot, etc. That's just a guess, of course.

Epic quote of the day. I'll be quoting you every time F2P kiddies start QQing and d00msaying about P2P.

Senadina said:
"F2P Stratergy- Offer people limited content for free, and reserve the best

parts of the game for "premium" subscriptions. Offer the best items and

rewards for a cash shop fee, and make it impossible for the player to be

competitve without forking out tons of cash.

Result- the player ends up paying MORE per month than a P2P game. Brilliant

revenue plan, screw the player.
As far as I can see, the main objectors to P2P are kids who have to ask

parents to pay for it. Any adult can afford $15 a month for entertainment.

That's 50 cents a day. If you can't afford that you shouldn't be playing

games anyway, you should be trying to make money."

I've played/tryed countless P2P games, and almost the same amount of F2P games. What i've found is that F2P games generally have sub-par gameplay, a LOT more lag, and caters to people who like to grind fest. What Senadina said was correct, inferior quality & you end up paying a LOT more $$ to compete than a normal P2P user.

FACT: F2P caters to cheapskate kids who can't afford lunch money every day.
 

Originally posted by Waterlily

It's a forecast.

 

P2P strategy:

Make a very compelling game with a huge budget catering to many players and do everything you can to retain your players. Slow down the gameplay pace, introduce roadblocks and limit the amount of content players can access, make them work to progress and trickle the content in. Enslave them to your game.

 

Issues:

Realisation of part of the player base that this concept of compulsive leveling is being rehashed and reused. Players realising that they're grinding in the game instead of fully experiencing the content. Former players who have grown up and demand a more casual and fulfilling experience than being kept on a monthly leash.

 

Result:

F2P will gain more and more ground until P2P loses it's power over MMO.

 

 

 

Wait... is that P2P strategy... or F2P strategy?

In P2P games they need to keep you entertained otherwise you will not keep your sub, they need to pump content for you and you need to have fun playing it. You don't like it, you move on. You like it, you will spend $15 a month and not what-you-can-afford to boost your capabilities in that game, that what-you-can-afford is really an endless sink. When I like a game, I don't want to feel it is eating my budget, in F2P games you do not have that kind of control when you're addicted to it.

In F2P games... well... you have all the mentioned grind plus the option of paying to be OP. It's true, F2P have a lot more potential because of the ignorance of the masses that believe paying $15 for a whole month to a MMO is something against divine rules of free fun, and these are the ones that feed the fun of those that spend hundreds a month. You will take 10x longer to do something on that game "for free" than someone that spends on their abusive microtransaction system, paying for virtual goods, what the heck, I want to pay for content to entertain myself, not to grow an e-peen or skip hundreds of hours of grinding.

F2P games exploit your addiction, first they start with cosmetic items, and then when they have a potential addicted player base they start their updates with 50% of it focused on their item mall or content that can only be done with money.

 In my opinion, P2P games that are constantly evolving are the best out there. F2P games are nice, but premium items malls suck, and they put non-premium item buying people at a disadvantage. Also, bots tend to swarm these games like flies (though I'm starting to see a few P2P games out there with bots slowly creeping in as well).

A F2P game that has an item mall, but doesn't offer premium items, and instead offers fun items like avatar suits and the like only (so there's no advanced defense items, strongest weapons, etc) are better in my opinion. They are the F2P games I would play.

A constantly evolving P2P game I would love to play sometime is EVE online. Like I said earlier, it constantly evolves the gameplay to offer fresh new ideas and concepts (or reuse awesome ideas). Unfortunately, having been too addicted to Silkroad Online, I still seek F2P games with similar concepts to the game I loved playing but had to leave because of terrible treatment by its company (Joymax) and the fact that bots overran the game. Hopefully, the item mall on Mir2 isn't premium item based, because that game does look good...

Cool story bro

Originally posted by Waterlily

It's a forecast.

 

P2P strategy:

Make a very compelling game with a huge budget catering to many players and do everything you can to retain your players. Slow down the gameplay pace, introduce roadblocks and limit the amount of content players can access, make them work to progress and trickle the content in. Enslave them to your game.

 

Issues:

Realisation of part of the player base that this concept of compulsive leveling is being rehashed and reused. Players realising that they're grinding in the game instead of fully experiencing the content. Former players who have grown up and demand a more casual and fulfilling experience than being kept on a monthly leash.

 

Result:

F2P will gain more and more ground until P2P loses it's power over MMO.

 

 

 

Uhh you're insane, right? You must honestly have zero idea of what you're talking about. The mainstream of MMO's are not anywhere even close to what you describe. Leveling in any mmo these days will take a casual (1-4 hours per day) player about a month to reach max level. Many f2p games take way longer unless you shell out a fair amount of cash.

In P2P games for your initial box price and monthly fee you (usually) have access to all of the items and content in the game. Usually you have to buy expansions, but there are also quite a few out there in which you don't.

In most F2P games usually the only way to get access to the best gear and items is to spend a lot of money.

In P2P games everybody is on an equal playing field as far as how fast you can level goes (class abilities aside). In other words killing mob x will give everybody the same amount of exp.

In F2P games those who have cash to shell out on boost scrolls/potions level signifcantly faster than those who don't. Often doing this for an entire month's worth of time ends up costing you more than $12-$14.

In P2P games, gear aside, everyone is usually on the same playing field as far as PvP goes. Some classes might be better than others, but you can't give the company more money to become uber.

In F2P games those who spend 100+ dollars often end up completely destroying anyone who hasn't.

 PS: There are some P2P games that have ridiculous models behind them. Any game by SOE now has just utterly insane item shops AND monthly fee's and in the case of SWG ANOTHER item mall of sorts.

SOE, as a company, can burn in hell for all I care. I won't ever touch another SOE title and I'll bad mouth them as much as I can in the hopes in loses them business. Why you ask? Because they're the perfect example of the kind of business that doesn't belong making MMO's. My advice is to NEVER buy an SOE product, ever. Screw the devs that work for them.

CCP is an amazing company, Blizzard is an amazing company and Bioware is an amazing company (we'll see how they handle TOR). Whether you like or dislike EVE/WoW you have to admit the companies behind them have good heads at the helm. The games aren't anything alike except for that one fact; the companies behind them are very smart and work hard to please their customers.

I agree with the OP on everything else but the result.

P2P system indeed gives the devs a motive to make the game slower and abundant with huge amount of content of questionable quality. Still I think P2P games aren't going anywhere.

Item mall games are just as bad. Your experience isn't as good as it can be if you do not pay for something. It might be even more expensive than a P2P game.

This is partly why I root for ArenaNet and their business model with GW and GW2. There's every reason to make a thoroughly good game with better than average content or else they will sell no sequels.

Originally posted by Waterlily

It's a forecast.

 

P2P strategy:

Make a very compelling game with a huge budget catering to many players and do everything you can to retain your players. Slow down the gameplay pace, introduce roadblocks and limit the amount of content players can access, make them work to progress and trickle the content in. Enslave them to your game.

 

Issues:

Realisation of part of the player base that this concept of compulsive leveling is being rehashed and reused. Players realising that they're grinding in the game instead of fully experiencing the content. Former players who have grown up and demand a more casual and fulfilling experience than being kept on a monthly leash.

 

Result:

F2P will gain more and more ground until P2P loses it's power over MMO.

 

 

 

I don't think you address this issue.

There are two types of gamers taht play these games. Those that want progress to be measured by doing content, and those that don't mind if progress is measured by paying cash.

I can't see gamers that feel progress should be measured by doing content turning into gamers that measure progress by paying cash.

Or rather, gamers that dont' care about the progression of a character, but care about the items they can purchase in the cash shop.

When I"m playing an MMORPG, I'm progressing my character by doing content. By grinding mobs, or doing quests. I don't care about the gear I'm getting. The sword I have means nothing. It's just a tool I need to continue to do the content.

The F2P gamers wants the sword, just to have it, not to continue doing the content, because obviously they are paying to skip the content.

I just don't see either type of player going away, and as long as there are players that prefer to progress their character by doing content, instead of paying to skip the content, developers will cater to them and take their monthly sub fees.

I also agree with some posters that most of the F2P advocates are kids that can't pay a monthly fee, and the ones that are paying in the cash shops are like i said, gamers that care about owning the virtual junk, not really doing the content.

Originally posted by Waterlily

It's a forecast.

 

P2P strategy:

Make a very compelling game with a huge budget catering to many players and do everything you can to retain your players. Slow down the gameplay pace, introduce roadblocks and limit the amount of content players can access, make them work to progress and trickle the content in. Enslave them to your game.

 

Issues:

Realisation of part of the player base that this concept of compulsive leveling is being rehashed and reused. Players realising that they're grinding in the game instead of fully experiencing the content. Former players who have grown up and demand a more casual and fulfilling experience than being kept on a monthly leash.

 

Result:

F2P will gain more and more ground until P2P loses it's power over MMO.

 

 

 

There is allot of talk of F2P Taking over but i have yet to see a game use the F2P method affectivley (and the game being good)