122897-my-10-day-eval

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Actually the model does work quite well. It is the mmo community who is just blinded by the words "free to play". You should check out some of the f2p forums and see the complaining. SW:ToR is a great example. People complaining a lot about lack of content, bug fixes, things promised to them that won't happen since switching f2p, and the list goes on. What is also funny is I bet a lot of those who complain about a monthly sub, put in a lot more a month on the cash shop and things that normally would be included on a sub based game. The quality of the games drop a lot because they don't put the time in to fix things as much and focus on cash shop stuff. If you prefer pvp then have even more fun with f2p pvp. Classes get so imbalanced at times that it takes awhile before they fix it. The biggest problem is companies are spending a ton of money for an mmo and trying too hard to replicate other mmo's instead making it their own. Yes definitely take some things that work from other mmo's but tweak them a bit. Why people simply can't or don't want to pay $15 a month for a lot better quality game along with faster content is beyond me. If you can't afford the $15 then there are other issues you should be worrying about and not gaming. I know times can be hard, but video games are a hobby. Hobbies cost money. There are plenty of other free games to play out there.


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As an addition to this, I went to lunch at Arby's today. It cost me just shy of 10 dollars for a number 5 and a small shake. Just so we all understand what we're paying every month. I paid about 15 dollars the last time my wife and I went to get takeout from Wendy's. I ordered a pizza from Pizza Hut that cost me 15 dollars to carry it out. The khakis I'm wearing are from Meijer, and are Meijer brand (because seriously, they're pants), and those cost me 20 dollars a pair. The polo shirt I'm wearing cost me ten. The peanut butter, raspberry preserves, and loaf of bread I bought to make sandwiches here at work when I don't want to go out will cost me 10 dollars and will, if I'm lucky, last me two weeks. A AAA console title these days will cost you 60 dollars. That means that, to get what you get out of Wildstar, you would need to play that game for four months without purchasing any downloadable content (because all upgrades, updates, fixes, and content is included in the cost of the subscription). As a further aside, I just dropped about 475 dollars on a new motherboard and processor. Just those two components. For comparison's sake, just those two components price tags would pay for Wildstar at a monthly sub for well over two and a half years. A Playstation 4 costs between 350-400 dollars. Even at its cheapest, that means that because I don't want to buy a PS4, I essentially can play Wildstar on that money for two years. That means that before you even buy a game for a PS4 (which, again, can cost you four months subscription to Wildstar), you have essentially cost yourself two years of Wildstar up front. My car costs me 350 dollars a month, rent at my current apartment is nearly a thousand a month. Power and internet both will run me somewhere around 60 dollars apiece. I have to fill up once every week and a half or so, and that, even with today's lower prices, will cost me 45 dollars. Even when I was working the most menial job I ever worked, as a starting cart attendant at Target when I was sixteen, I made 7.50 an hour. That means that, at the lowest rate I've ever been paid in my entire life, I could pay for Wildstar for an entire month on two hours of work, and I worked 5 hours a night three days a week, plus a further 16 on the weekends. I paid for my own car, own insurance, own music, own gas, own electronics, own computer, and subscriptions at various times for EVE, WoW, and FFXI while working that job. Even before that, when I was younger, my mother was giving me five dollars a week in allowance for doing all my chores, so I could even afford a Wildstar monthly subscription when I was six years old And right now, you can go to Battle.net and purchase an in-game mount for 20 dollars. If you do the EMP point translation, you can purchase an exclusive mount in Tera for 20 dollars. Ever wonder where their money comes from? Gouging the player and telling them they can play for "free". Nothing's free, someone's paying and the rest aren't getting what they need. Meanwhile, 15 dollars a month to have everything released in-game for us is less than you'd buy one mount for in another shop. And F2P players are obviously buying that crap deal and figuring they're getting out ahead. 15 dollars a month for the entirety of the game's development, support, and upkeep, with nothing released behind a paywall, is a really good deal for us. I don't know why companies don't advertise that more often. I suppose I know why NCSoft doesn't blow the lid off their other schemes, but man it'd be nice if someone did the quick math and said, "You know, you can have full game access to everything we dropped for you for less than most companies will sell you a cosmetic mount for." But it's easy to leash people up and lead them on by telling something is free. That's why TV infomercials still work when they tell you about all the "free" stuff you'll be getting.


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Subs do work. EVE Online is really the game Wildstar sits in the same hot tub with. They're a subscription game that has fought for ten years to get up to 500k subscribers. They made enough money to fund two further games and finally have to cut the World of Darkness MMORPG they were working on. Yeah, people thought that game would need to go F2P as well. Hell, World of Warcraft, right now, has threads on their forums talking about how WoD is a failure and it'll never survive and the game is headed for F2P. All of us in our enclaves with games that aren't throwaways seem to live under the gun. The F2P trolls never go away, whether your game has 12 thousand or 12 million subs. Still, there are a lot of good reasons for NCSoft not to take Wildstar F2P. For one thing, the game's growing and it's proof positive that, with systems changes and consistent content drops, the game can not only recover but build the way EVE has. Wildstar swims in the deep end of the pool with the big kids, but there aren't as many of them. More than that, Wildstar is a standout from NCSoft's portfolio. If Wildstar does get moved to the kiddie pool instead of learning to swim, it's going to be in there with a lot more kids, some of which are NCSoft's other products. Wildstar, even if it does succeed as a F2P game is likely going to come at the expense of games like Guild Wars 2. As far as NCSoft is concerned, that's a net-zero gain. That means Wildstar has to pull players from Tera, SWTOR, et al. Any revenue they take from players currently playing the Guild Wars games, Blade and Soul, the Lineage games, or Aion is a complete waste of effort. Hell, if Wildstar releases in Korea and succeeds as a F2P game, it could absolutely kill Lineage 2, which isn't faring an awful lot better than Wildstar even as a F2P game (I imagine worse since Drop 4, we'll see in the next quarters' reports). So NCSoft, just by virtue of trying to silver bullet every game with F2P or designing them that way from the ground up, are creating a situation in their portfolio where games will be competing with each other and gaining NCSoft far less with each one they add. At least, for now, there's less cross pollination because Guild Wars is the original "play for free" game (it was the biggest one that was said to be the F2P WoW killer back when the first was released) and Wildstar seems to compete more with WoW, FFXIV:ARR, and EVE, which are more commonly listed as its contemporaries. Most of Wildstar's players came from WoW; in fact most of the returning players are returning from WoW as well. Every WoW sub that NCSoft gets into Wildstar actually IS pure revenue gains, and quite a few of those people would not be here if it wasn't for the sub. So where does the diminishing return kick in? Maybe Wildstar can scrape by enough extra revenue as a F2P game to justify it. I'm not sure that's the case, though; the game's definitely doing better than winter quarter and that's when it would have been best to send it completely B2P. It might still happen. None of us are fortune tellers or NCSoft execs. But it's far from inevitable and could turn out to be a bad move on NCSoft's part. Lots of the F2P games' profits are falling as the market is saturated. It certainly hasn't done any favors for Lineage 2. Wildstar does, however, have a good shot at success as a sub game, even if they maybe have to add supplementary income (I've already enumerated some ways they can do that without dipping into F2P territory). It may take time, though. EVE Online is still around, and here's what their subscription numbers looked like over the years: 2003: 25k 2004: 50k 2005: 75k 2006: 100k 2007: 150k 2008: 200k 2009: 300k 2010: 365k 2011: 350k 2012: 400k 2013: 500k It was only last year that they stopped releasing the subscription numbers, as FFXIV:ARR, ESO, and Wildstar all broke onto the scene in the subscription world. Now there's actually some kind of competition in that more hardcore market. We've got a few EVE players here as well (I'm one of them). Still the game proved you could go from zero knowledge (WoW and FFXIV:ARR had the backing of huge companies and decade-old franchises behind them when they launched) to numbers if you kept at it and did well. And that was in a sandbox primarily-PVP game. So Wildstar's definitely doing better than that (it takes a real doomsayer to say the game only has 25k subs). And NCSoft does have better recourse than CCP does. Really, NCSoft and their expectations are the only wildcard here. I'm not entirely interested in making assumptions; if the game goes F2P I'll leave and if it keeps the sub-on-top model they've got me for the long haul. That's really all I can say about it, because NCSoft could be entirely pleased with Wildstar's progress post Drop 4 or could be dismally disappointed and planning on pulling the plug. We don't know. Until then, I just continue forward knowing that the game's improving, the population is growing, and they're not F2P yet. The best short-term evidence I have that they're not going F2P yet is their focus on PVP and the huge upcoming drop. That will literally make them no money if the game goes F2P because that's technically free in that model, so their insistence on completely rebuilding their entire PVP process doesn't seem like a step towards F2P. That seems like they're trying to reclaim subs with the next drop.


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I think that, despite the moderate uproar at the time, switching from monthly to quarterly drops was a good move.


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quarterly is good. but it depends on the QUALITY and INTELLIGENCE of the design. the Defile was a little bit of a continuity of their bad design philosophy: the prime example here is "omnicore-1". what a waste of resources... and the defile "daily zone" was not super fun to be honest. drop 4 is smarter, even if not as big on raw content as drop 3 was.


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I don't think he's in the minority at all. Back when it came out, I heard nothing but positive things regarding Journey into OMNICore-1. Personally, I loved it! Not everyone is going to enjoy every bit of content that Carbine releases because its all targeted at different types of players. Obviously, not everyone is into solo, PvE content but there are plenty of players who are. Carbine has always intended to cast its net wide and, since drops 3 and 4, has been doing an excellent job of it.


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