The reason why all F2P games are bad for the player is simple: their model revolves around making your game experience painful. While a P2P game’s income is fixed, a F2P game tries to con as much money from you as fast as possible.
In standard MMORPGs, the standard kill-loot-sell mechanism is well ingrained and enjoyable. However, F2Pers can create an artificial scarcity by making the starting inventory so small that it forces you to buy additional slots to complete your character. These are usually increasingly expensive.
Games that do this ordinarily do not have droppable bags in the game. If they do, it takes ridiculous hours of play to get them until it isn’t worth it. This is so they can lie and say that “everything that is in the cash shop is available in game”.
Just create equipment that is better than anything you can find in the game. This one works especially well because equipment goes out of date, so they can charge you again and again and again. If you don’t pay for the special equipment (and it usually looks cool as they make the standard equipment purposely ugly), the “elites” that do will shun you.
Additionally, they simply make the standard game balanced for the cash shop equipment. If you don’t buy it, you’re in a hurt locker as you will be constantly underpowered.
In essence, you have to pay to “uncripple” your character.
They attempt to sell you decorative stuff, be it clothes, sparklies for your weapons, junk for your house, emotes, or non-combat pets. Sometimes the cost on these items can be substantial.
Generally, companies that try this method realize that very few people buy vanity items. People do buy them, but in very small quantities. This leads them to the other methods of “revenue enhancement” and to the dark side. All, and I repeat, all F2P companies are going to or have done this. It is inevitable.
It is my opinion that some companies actively lie about only using Method 3 until the player base becomes established only to flip-flop and immediately begin ripping off the player base as soon as possible.
Along with providing some decorative benefit, some companies provide additional benefits. In some cases they increase storage or provide extra experience for logging out in the home. Some pets provide run speed or other buffs as well.
For instance: Runes of Magic provides furniture that allows additional storage of items in virtual housing. This is particularly desirable because of outrageous policies outlined in Method 1. You can only constantly pay for extra bag space and bank space. If you don’t pay, you lose access to those items. What a rip-off!
These are an easy rip-off as well. Everyone wants to level up faster, so experience modifiers are an easy sell. The way companies rip you off on these are plenty:
They adjust the experience point curve so normal levelling is so painful that you either get bored and quit (which they want you to do if you aren’t buying anything) or you buy their potions.
In addition, if you do buy the potions, they can always slowly turn down the experience point benefit to get you to buy more and more potions. You won’t notice a 0.3% or 0.5% decrease in experience gain with each potion you buy; you’ll just think that the levels require more experience. And you’ll buy more potions.
Also, they can lower the duration. You won’t, again, notice them removing a few seconds here and there.
In addition, they can use the tricks P2P games use for extending content: They can give incentives to make you run back and forth to the merchant, as most F2P games cripple your inventory. If you are running, you aren’t gaining experience and that potion isn’t doing you any good. You can choose to avoid loot, but that digs you into another hole.
Most F2P games cripple mob experience to make you use only Quest experience. These are the worst games to by time-limited items such as buffs as they have the lowest-per-hour experience gain available and require the most travel while being able to create artificial bottlenecks by not spawning enough quest mobs.
So, Experience items, unless they’re permanent, are always rip-offs and should be avoided. Most games, as I have mentioned previously, are out to make your life miserable.
Healing potions, like Experience potions are always a rip-off and should be avoided.
However, as with experience potions, companies have many ways to make your life miserable: They can simply balance the mobs to assume you are using healing potions. If you don’t, you get killed a lot and suffer whatever death penalty they have in place. Additionally, you probably can’t complete some quests without help while health potion users kill the mob and go on.
Either way, you’re going to be crippled unless you shell out more money.
A particularly evil F2P company, whose name I won’t mention out of courtesy, peeks in your inventory to see if you have bought healing potions. If you do, the mob critical hits against you with slightly greater frequency and slows down damage when you’re at 10% health. Most players pop a healing potion around then, so they can leech more money from your pocket. They get you coming and going. A player has no way to avoid these scams or even see them.
Buying gold is a rip-off from hell.
This one is probably the easiest scam available to F2P companies. Any time you see game currency for sale in the item shop you know the game is a rip-off.
For starters, they make gold overly scarce in the game and charge an exorbitant rate for merchant items. This will force the players into un-fun grinds or shelling out money to perform standard game functions (such as travel).
Secondly, they can simply look to see if you’ve bought gold and make the mobs drop slightly less. If you’re willing to buy it once, you’re probably sucker enough to buy again.
And finally, they can create ways to remove money from you both ways: they damage your equipment. If you don’t repair it, it either breaks or becomes useless. The price for doing this removes gold from the game. It can be, but probably isn’t, adjusted like the gold drop rate. Creating pain for people that don’t buy gold encourages them to leave. Additionally, repairing equipment creates an artificial time-sink that eats up buff or healing potion time.
These are great for beating money out of you because there can be multiple buffs you wish to have. These are usually cheaper than healing potions & experience potions.
However, the same rip-offs that work with healing potions and experience potions work here. They balance the game to assume you are running a certain set of buff potions.
Generally, these effects are removed when you die. Way to “revenue enhance”? Just make sure the mobs critically hit in strings to kill you once in a while if you’re wearing the buff or buffs. You won’t notice, but you will use another potion.
If you don’t use the potions, then the same scrape-effect applies as it does in Method 5: You will likely leave you free-loading scum!
Mounts are easy as most players really want them. Faster movement equals faster levelling and greater access to scarce resources or mobs.
Most games provide either no mount or a crippled mount outside the cash shop. The way to rip players off with the cash shop is to provide a sliding cost-reward scale.
For instance: I have 3 mounts: £5 for a 5% movement increase, £10 for a 10% movement increase, and £25 for a 25% movement increase. Which mount do you think most players will buy? The £25 one of course. Now, bear in mind the different mounts are no additional cost to the F2P company, they can just con more money from you.
Also, they can make certain that the distances between the mobs and towns (where you pick up quests, repair, and so on) are so long compared to run speed, that you will either cripple your levelling, go mad watching your character run and run and run, or you will buy a mount. They win, you lose.
As Method 8 above, most of the same applies here, except most insta-travel items are single use. They usually sell these in multiples to hide how expensive they really are on a per-use basis.
How do they rip you off with these? They simply code the quests to require travel back and forth through the insta-travel areas. You want to run for several minutes each way and fight trash mobs or would you like to insert a coin?
“Your pain or our gain!” says the F2P company.
A short-circuit item is something that removes or lessens the amount of pointless clicking or dragging in some game mechanic.
For instance: If mining returned a single item for each node, a “super shiny pickaxe” might return 1-4. Or it might improve skill with each click instead of every 5 clicks.
Really, the potential for causing the players pain is unlimited. Require feeding their mount or get a feed bag item and forget about it. Find a static fire to cook on or use our handy portable stove. Click 6000 times (actual figure) to learn identification of items or buy our nifty £20 identifying glass. (This is a real item and cost.)
The only thing required is a wicked imagination and the willingness to rip you off. Any game mechanic can be abused in this manner with a little thought. You can either pay or not do that thing.
Remember, they have everything to gain and nothing to lose by making your experience as painful as possible. You will either pay them or go away. Either way they win!
This one is also an easy mechanic to rip players off with.
They simply code a desirable quest, item, or collection to require a rare drop. Then they make sure the mob or item to get that drop is contested and/or requires hours of grinding to get. Then they offer the item in the cash shop for “a modest fee”. Cha-ching! They win and they win.
Method 11 is especially prominent with heavy-crafting games.
The F2P ghouls implement a bought-only or so-rare-as-to-be-not-available blueprint that makes an item better than any other dropped item for the tier.
This is subject to the same abuse as Method 2, but generally doesn’t excite the masses as much. I guess the disconnect is too far for most people to understand they’re being ripped off.
Sometimes this blueprint is one-use-only and usually requires rare components which subjects the crafter to Method 11 for “additional revenue”. Usually they do not list the ingredients list when you’re buying the blueprint, so you have no way to know you will be paying extra unless you look it up on another game site.
This Method is pretty much the same as Method 7, but in reverse. When a character dies, sometimes he is assigned a death penalty. Some game companies make this death penalty effectively remove the usefulness of the character or assign xp penalties which cost time.
To remove this, naturally, the kindly F2P ghouls provide a widget or potion that removes or guards against this penalty. It only lasts for 1 death.
Obviously, the method described in Method 7 could easily be exploited here. After they set the sucker-flag on your account, they can pretty much bet you’ll be a sucker again.
Due to the insult-to-injury that death penalties cause, this is a good money maker and one that causes severe irritation with the player base if it can’t be found or gotten during play.
Naturally, a game company will make sure that these items are scarce to entice the players to pay up.
These come in various forms but in general they are something that you buy that when activated returns an item or items. Some of the items returned can be very rare or valuable.
Obviously this is always a rip-off. The game company is in complete control of the odds and can modify them at a whim (such as lowering the chances with every ticket you buy or hold in your inventory). The player has no way to know what odds an item or items have for dropping and thus, outside of expensive charting, are not going to know the “value” of the item.
For instance: If a Super-sword +90 is £100 and a Magic Ticket is £1 but might drop a rare Super-sword +90, which one is the better deal? Without knowing, you might as well shell out for the Super-sword +90. If the F2P company is cheating, they can simply make sure the overall payout on Super-sword +90’s from tickets are ~1% minus the value of any other ticket-getting items that is. That is if they’re fair.
Lottery Tickets are always considered a rip-off.
This is the nuclear option of rip-offs. EECs are items that have a CHANCE when applied to an item to increase it to some point. It will usually destroy the item on a good roll.
They can generally be applied multiple times. This is to apply people’s greed vs. their own pocket book. Guess who wins 100% of the time? (Hint: It ain’t the player.)
Runes of Magic has refined this rip-off to a fine art. I have a hard time understanding how someone would be so stupid as to be ripped off by these.
Method 15 also lends itself well to PVP games. Any advantage at or near the top tier becomes overwhelming in morale or fact. All PVPers strive to have the absolute best gear.
A magic window is a marketing technique that plays off of standard psychology; people react when there is a perceived closing window of opportunity.
The scam works like this: On Friday morning they put out a “Sale on Healing Potions!” and they get a spike of sales on them.
However, they turn up whatever mechanism requiring you to use those items and use them up faster. If you don’t buy them, you suffer the standard psychological pain. If you do, you lose anyway. So they win and win.
A magic carrot is another marketing technique whereby an older uber-item is placed on sale just before they release a newer, more expensive item that is obviously better. This way, they can snake some additional money out of an old item they’re going to retire.
As an additional gambit, they can announce retirement of the item with no replacement and create a run on the item beforehand. Then, a week later, they can announce the new happy item.
More money for them, less for you. They win and win!
Packages of unlock able content for a price.
These are easy to exploit. First, you create some simple content with your development toolkit and existing artwork. Maybe you pay the artist to throw in a couple of new models.
Then you add a single benefit that is better than anything else at the content’s tier and a handful of useless items at the end of some annoying quests.
If the players don’t buy the upgrade, they short themselves the valuable content and cripple their characters in some way. The “elites” all go there to play immediately and exploit the new gear to race ahead. Either you pay or you’re in pain.
Additionally, they always turn up loot and experience rewards in the first couple of weeks to entice players to shell out while the iron’s hot. Naturally, competition for rewards usually brings rewards over time below what they would normally be!
As soon as the number of people buying the expansion drops to a dribble, fire up the content tools and spin out another droplet of content.
This time, as you know, this content has to be slightly better than the previous content to entice people to shell out. You use one of the handful of useless items in the previous module(s) and create an EVEN BETTER item by combining those (or requiring the first expansion’s item to start the quest in the second expansion). That way, you can ensure that people have to buy both expansions to have the good gear.
If you go ape with this, you can likely stuff off 6 or so on the populace per year. By the second year, buying your way to end game could cost over £400 or more. And, sadly, some idiots will pay it.
Really, all that is required is starting a quest in expansion 1 and leading it through 2 to 12. This requires you to have every expansion in the chain and at the end you get the best items in the game. Of course, the company has shook a huge amount of change out of your pockets in the process. Far more than a subscription would’ve cost.
As you can see, playing a F2P game is like playing a dice game where you send me money, I roll some dice on my end and tell you if you won. If you win, I’ll send you back double your money. Sound like a great idea?
In finishing, F2P games are always more expensive than the comparable P2P games, MMORPGs are very cheap when a P2P game is played.
Almost everyone will spend more per month on a F2P game than a comparable P2P game or they won’t have as much fun. The F2P model requires they make your experience painful.
P2P games with item shops are so far of a rip-off, you should show up and burn down the building. You obviously shouldn’t play them. I can’t express how bad a deal those are.
F2P games are also usually filled with miscreant morons, griefers, scammers, and children. Since the game is free, you get the lowest common denominator in players. Far, far worse than WoW.
If your counter argument is: “I don’t have £10 per month to spend on a game!” My reasonable retort is: “If you can’t spare £10 PER MONTH, then you don’t need to be playing video games. You need to be working on your cash flow”
F2P games aren’t ever more entertaining than P2P games because the company has a vested interest in making you fork over money constantly in order to play. They, in fact, hate you as the player.
You are, in fact, rewarding them for kicking you in the groin. Why?
F2P games have radically lower production values. Most of these games are built on the cheap with packaged graphics packages and/or physics engines. Some of them are turn-key systems with graphics pasted in.
F2P producers are only interested in making the cheapest game possible as this is just a front for scraping money from your pockets. Longevity in playing doesn’t mean much to them. Either you fork over the money to up your investment and thus keep playing no matter what or you quit. Either way they win.
So there is absolutely no reason to play a F2P game. They are a cheaply built, non-fun, sleazy, pile of rubbish. They are always more costly, less enjoyable, less balanced, and less polished than a comparable P2P server. The player base is always the lowest possible scum and orders of magnitude more contemptible than a comparable P2P server. They have an active incentive and the means to rip you off and you won’t know it. F2P gaming companies are generally disreputable to boot. You notice they never offer refunds no matter what. Ever wonder why?
If all P2P games go the way of the Dodo or put in item malls, I will just go do something else with my time. It is what I’m doing now anyway.
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/Cor4x/022010/5782_F2P-Games-Are-Bad-or-How-to-Pay-Someone-to-Kick-You
Ok after that rant I'm going to walk my dog, discuss. PS please try to remain civil.
Method 1: Shrink your inventory & bank slots.
In standard MMORPGs, the standard kill-loot-sell mechanism is well ingrained and enjoyable. However, F2Pers can create an artificial scarcity by making the starting inventory so small that it forces you to buy additional slots to complete your character. These are usually increasingly expensive.
Games that do this ordinarily do not have droppable bags in the game. If they do, it takes ridiculous hours of play to get them until it isn’t worth it. This is so they can lie and say that “everything that is in the cash shop is available in game”.
Method 2: Super-Double-Sword + 2!
Just create equipment that is better than anything you can find in the game. This one works especially well because equipment goes out of date, so they can charge you again and again and again. If you don’t pay for the special equipment (and it usually looks cool as they make the standard equipment purposely ugly), the “elites” that do will shun you.
Additionally, they simply make the standard game balanced for the cash shop equipment. If you don’t buy it, you’re in a hurt locker as you will be constantly underpowered.
In essence, you have to pay to “uncripple” your character.
Method 3: Bric-A-Brac.
They attempt to sell you decorative stuff, be it clothes, sparklies for your weapons, junk for your house, emotes, or non-combat pets. Sometimes the cost on these items can be substantial.
Generally, companies that try this method realize that very few people buy vanity items. People do buy them, but in very small quantities. This leads them to the other methods of “revenue enhancement” and to the dark side. All, and I repeat, all F2P companies are going to or have done this. It is inevitable.
It is my opinion that some companies actively lie about only using Method 3 until the player base becomes established only to flip-flop and immediately begin ripping off the player base as soon as possible.
Along with providing some decorative benefit, some companies provide additional benefits. In some cases they increase storage or provide extra experience for logging out in the home. Some pets provide run speed or other buffs as well.
For instance: Runes of Magic provides furniture that allows additional storage of items in virtual housing. This is particularly desirable because of outrageous policies outlined in Method 1. You can only constantly pay for extra bag space and bank space. If you don’t pay, you lose access to those items. What a rip-off!
Method 4: Experience Potions/Scrolls/Orbs.
These are an easy rip-off as well. Everyone wants to level up faster, so experience modifiers are an easy sell. The way companies rip you off on these are plenty:
They adjust the experience point curve so normal levelling is so painful that you either get bored and quit (which they want you to do if you aren’t buying anything) or you buy their potions.
In addition, if you do buy the potions, they can always slowly turn down the experience point benefit to get you to buy more and more potions. You won’t notice a 0.3% or 0.5% decrease in experience gain with each potion you buy; you’ll just think that the levels require more experience. And you’ll buy more potions.
Also, they can lower the duration. You won’t, again, notice them removing a few seconds here and there.
In addition, they can use the tricks P2P games use for extending content: They can give incentives to make you run back and forth to the merchant, as most F2P games cripple your inventory. If you are running, you aren’t gaining experience and that potion isn’t doing you any good. You can choose to avoid loot, but that digs you into another hole.
Most F2P games cripple mob experience to make you use only Quest experience. These are the worst games to by time-limited items such as buffs as they have the lowest-per-hour experience gain available and require the most travel while being able to create artificial bottlenecks by not spawning enough quest mobs.
So, Experience items, unless they’re permanent, are always rip-offs and should be avoided. Most games, as I have mentioned previously, are out to make your life miserable.
Method 5: Healing potions.
Healing potions, like Experience potions are always a rip-off and should be avoided.
However, as with experience potions, companies have many ways to make your life miserable: They can simply balance the mobs to assume you are using healing potions. If you don’t, you get killed a lot and suffer whatever death penalty they have in place. Additionally, you probably can’t complete some quests without help while health potion users kill the mob and go on.
Either way, you’re going to be crippled unless you shell out more money.
A particularly evil F2P company, whose name I won’t mention out of courtesy, peeks in your inventory to see if you have bought healing potions. If you do, the mob critical hits against you with slightly greater frequency and slows down damage when you’re at 10% health. Most players pop a healing potion around then, so they can leech more money from your pocket. They get you coming and going. A player has no way to avoid these scams or even see them.
Method 6: Buying Gold. Oh man.
Buying gold is a rip-off from hell.
This one is probably the easiest scam available to F2P companies. Any time you see game currency for sale in the item shop you know the game is a rip-off.
For starters, they make gold overly scarce in the game and charge an exorbitant rate for merchant items. This will force the players into un-fun grinds or shelling out money to perform standard game functions (such as travel).
Secondly, they can simply look to see if you’ve bought gold and make the mobs drop slightly less. If you’re willing to buy it once, you’re probably sucker enough to buy again.
And finally, they can create ways to remove money from you both ways: they damage your equipment. If you don’t repair it, it either breaks or becomes useless. The price for doing this removes gold from the game. It can be, but probably isn’t, adjusted like the gold drop rate. Creating pain for people that don’t buy gold encourages them to leave. Additionally, repairing equipment creates an artificial time-sink that eats up buff or healing potion time.
Method 7: Buff Potions/Scrolls/Orbs.
These are great for beating money out of you because there can be multiple buffs you wish to have. These are usually cheaper than healing potions & experience potions.
However, the same rip-offs that work with healing potions and experience potions work here. They balance the game to assume you are running a certain set of buff potions.
Generally, these effects are removed when you die. Way to “revenue enhance”? Just make sure the mobs critically hit in strings to kill you once in a while if you’re wearing the buff or buffs. You won’t notice, but you will use another potion.
If you don’t use the potions, then the same scrape-effect applies as it does in Method 5: You will likely leave you free-loading scum!
Method 8: Mounts.
Mounts are easy as most players really want them. Faster movement equals faster levelling and greater access to scarce resources or mobs.
Most games provide either no mount or a crippled mount outside the cash shop. The way to rip players off with the cash shop is to provide a sliding cost-reward scale.
For instance: I have 3 mounts: £5 for a 5% movement increase, £10 for a 10% movement increase, and £25 for a 25% movement increase. Which mount do you think most players will buy? The £25 one of course. Now, bear in mind the different mounts are no additional cost to the F2P company, they can just con more money from you.
Also, they can make certain that the distances between the mobs and towns (where you pick up quests, repair, and so on) are so long compared to run speed, that you will either cripple your levelling, go mad watching your character run and run and run, or you will buy a mount. They win, you lose.
Method 9: Insta-travel items.
As Method 8 above, most of the same applies here, except most insta-travel items are single use. They usually sell these in multiples to hide how expensive they really are on a per-use basis.
How do they rip you off with these? They simply code the quests to require travel back and forth through the insta-travel areas. You want to run for several minutes each way and fight trash mobs or would you like to insert a coin?
“Your pain or our gain!” says the F2P company.
Method 10: Short-circuit items.
A short-circuit item is something that removes or lessens the amount of pointless clicking or dragging in some game mechanic.
For instance: If mining returned a single item for each node, a “super shiny pickaxe” might return 1-4. Or it might improve skill with each click instead of every 5 clicks.
Really, the potential for causing the players pain is unlimited. Require feeding their mount or get a feed bag item and forget about it. Find a static fire to cook on or use our handy portable stove. Click 6000 times (actual figure) to learn identification of items or buy our nifty £20 identifying glass. (This is a real item and cost.)
The only thing required is a wicked imagination and the willingness to rip you off. Any game mechanic can be abused in this manner with a little thought. You can either pay or not do that thing.
Remember, they have everything to gain and nothing to lose by making your experience as painful as possible. You will either pay them or go away. Either way they win!
Method 11: The rare item rip-off.
This one is also an easy mechanic to rip players off with.
They simply code a desirable quest, item, or collection to require a rare drop. Then they make sure the mob or item to get that drop is contested and/or requires hours of grinding to get. Then they offer the item in the cash shop for “a modest fee”. Cha-ching! They win and they win.
Method 11 is especially prominent with heavy-crafting games.
Method 12: Bought blueprints.
The F2P ghouls implement a bought-only or so-rare-as-to-be-not-available blueprint that makes an item better than any other dropped item for the tier.
This is subject to the same abuse as Method 2, but generally doesn’t excite the masses as much. I guess the disconnect is too far for most people to understand they’re being ripped off.
Sometimes this blueprint is one-use-only and usually requires rare components which subjects the crafter to Method 11 for “additional revenue”. Usually they do not list the ingredients list when you’re buying the blueprint, so you have no way to know you will be paying extra unless you look it up on another game site.
Method 13: Death penalties and insurance.
This Method is pretty much the same as Method 7, but in reverse. When a character dies, sometimes he is assigned a death penalty. Some game companies make this death penalty effectively remove the usefulness of the character or assign xp penalties which cost time.
To remove this, naturally, the kindly F2P ghouls provide a widget or potion that removes or guards against this penalty. It only lasts for 1 death.
Obviously, the method described in Method 7 could easily be exploited here. After they set the sucker-flag on your account, they can pretty much bet you’ll be a sucker again.
Due to the insult-to-injury that death penalties cause, this is a good money maker and one that causes severe irritation with the player base if it can’t be found or gotten during play.
Naturally, a game company will make sure that these items are scarce to entice the players to pay up.
Method 14: Lottery Tickets.
These come in various forms but in general they are something that you buy that when activated returns an item or items. Some of the items returned can be very rare or valuable.
Obviously this is always a rip-off. The game company is in complete control of the odds and can modify them at a whim (such as lowering the chances with every ticket you buy or hold in your inventory). The player has no way to know what odds an item or items have for dropping and thus, outside of expensive charting, are not going to know the “value” of the item.
For instance: If a Super-sword +90 is £100 and a Magic Ticket is £1 but might drop a rare Super-sword +90, which one is the better deal? Without knowing, you might as well shell out for the Super-sword +90. If the F2P company is cheating, they can simply make sure the overall payout on Super-sword +90’s from tickets are ~1% minus the value of any other ticket-getting items that is. That is if they’re fair.
Lottery Tickets are always considered a rip-off.
Method 15: Equipment Enhancement Chance.
This is the nuclear option of rip-offs. EECs are items that have a CHANCE when applied to an item to increase it to some point. It will usually destroy the item on a good roll.
They can generally be applied multiple times. This is to apply people’s greed vs. their own pocket book. Guess who wins 100% of the time? (Hint: It ain’t the player.)
Runes of Magic has refined this rip-off to a fine art. I have a hard time understanding how someone would be so stupid as to be ripped off by these.
Method 15 also lends itself well to PVP games. Any advantage at or near the top tier becomes overwhelming in morale or fact. All PVPers strive to have the absolute best gear.
Method 16: The Magic Window.
A magic window is a marketing technique that plays off of standard psychology; people react when there is a perceived closing window of opportunity.
The scam works like this: On Friday morning they put out a “Sale on Healing Potions!” and they get a spike of sales on them.
However, they turn up whatever mechanism requiring you to use those items and use them up faster. If you don’t buy them, you suffer the standard psychological pain. If you do, you lose anyway. So they win and win.
Method 17: The Magic Carrot.
A magic carrot is another marketing technique whereby an older uber-item is placed on sale just before they release a newer, more expensive item that is obviously better. This way, they can snake some additional money out of an old item they’re going to retire.
As an additional gambit, they can announce retirement of the item with no replacement and create a run on the item beforehand. Then, a week later, they can announce the new happy item.
More money for them, less for you. They win and win!
Finally, Method 18: The Games Workshop Staircase:
Packages of unlock able content for a price.
These are easy to exploit. First, you create some simple content with your development toolkit and existing artwork. Maybe you pay the artist to throw in a couple of new models.
Then you add a single benefit that is better than anything else at the content’s tier and a handful of useless items at the end of some annoying quests.
If the players don’t buy the upgrade, they short themselves the valuable content and cripple their characters in some way. The “elites” all go there to play immediately and exploit the new gear to race ahead. Either you pay or you’re in pain.
Additionally, they always turn up loot and experience rewards in the first couple of weeks to entice players to shell out while the iron’s hot. Naturally, competition for rewards usually brings rewards over time below what they would normally be!
As soon as the number of people buying the expansion drops to a dribble, fire up the content tools and spin out another droplet of content.
This time, as you know, this content has to be slightly better than the previous content to entice people to shell out. You use one of the handful of useless items in the previous module(s) and create an EVEN BETTER item by combining those (or requiring the first expansion’s item to start the quest in the second expansion). That way, you can ensure that people have to buy both expansions to have the good gear.
If you go ape with this, you can likely stuff off 6 or so on the populace per year. By the second year, buying your way to end game could cost over £400 or more. And, sadly, some idiots will pay it.
Really, all that is required is starting a quest in expansion 1 and leading it through 2 to 12. This requires you to have every expansion in the chain and at the end you get the best items in the game. Of course, the company has shook a huge amount of change out of your pockets in the process. Far more than a subscription would’ve cost.
As you can see, playing a F2P game is like playing a dice game where you send me money, I roll some dice on my end and tell you if you won. If you win, I’ll send you back double your money. Sound like a great idea?
In finishing, F2P games are always more expensive than the comparable P2P games, MMORPGs are very cheap when a P2P game is played.
Almost everyone will spend more per month on a F2P game than a comparable P2P game or they won’t have as much fun. The F2P model requires they make your experience painful.
P2P games with item shops are so far of a rip-off, you should show up and burn down the building. You obviously shouldn’t play them. I can’t express how bad a deal those are.
F2P games are also usually filled with miscreant morons, griefers, scammers, and children. Since the game is free, you get the lowest common denominator in players. Far, far worse than WoW.
If your counter argument is: “I don’t have £10 per month to spend on a game!” My reasonable retort is: “If you can’t spare £10 PER MONTH, then you don’t need to be playing video games. You need to be working on your cash flow”
F2P games aren’t ever more entertaining than P2P games because the company has a vested interest in making you fork over money constantly in order to play. They, in fact, hate you as the player.
You are, in fact, rewarding them for kicking you in the groin. Why?
F2P games have radically lower production values. Most of these games are built on the cheap with packaged graphics packages and/or physics engines. Some of them are turn-key systems with graphics pasted in.
F2P producers are only interested in making the cheapest game possible as this is just a front for scraping money from your pockets. Longevity in playing doesn’t mean much to them. Either you fork over the money to up your investment and thus keep playing no matter what or you quit. Either way they win.
So there is absolutely no reason to play a F2P game. They are a cheaply built, non-fun, sleazy, pile of rubbish. They are always more costly, less enjoyable, less balanced, and less polished than a comparable P2P server. The player base is always the lowest possible scum and orders of magnitude more contemptible than a comparable P2P server. They have an active incentive and the means to rip you off and you won’t know it. F2P gaming companies are generally disreputable to boot. You notice they never offer refunds no matter what. Ever wonder why?
If all P2P games go the way of the Dodo or put in item malls, I will just go do something else with my time. It is what I’m doing now anyway.
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/Cor4x/022010/5782_F2P-Games-Are-Bad-or-How-to-Pay-Someone-to-Kick-You
Ok after that rant I'm going to walk my dog, discuss. PS please try to remain civil.
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