I’m having a bit of a fever at the moment so I try my very best not to rant and keep things to the point.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what an F2P game would make. I’m not just talking about gameplay, we’re also need to talk revenue. We need to be honest about what would make us grab our wallet and spend money on this. I know we can be really defensive about this and barter about from a conservative position but that’s not what servers SD, which in the end, is what this Alpha is all about.
Ideally you want a system that makes people want to play hard and pay hard at the same time. Yes, collecting tokens is an important part of this. Something MMO’s like WoW found out after a few years of experience, is that not everyone collects tokens in the same way. WoW started out as the same contest for the same items and later on it started to diversify and allowed for different players to reach different items in their own way at their own pace.
Not only does this mean people can set their own achievable goals and have the feeling they’re working towards something. It also means that by diversifying your overall inventory, you get a vast range of very exclusive items. Exclusive content is highly important as it increases the novelty value as well as the envy of other players, prompting them to invest themselves more into this game.
A good F2P model welcomes all kind of players. You want to reward the skilled players, the players with lots of time, the players with a disposable income and yes, the lucky players.
However, and this is VERY important, you do NOT want to reward them all in the same way with the same stuff. The different ways you can invest yourself into this game should only be partially interchangeable with each other. This way you create different niches of exclusive items that are only able to be obtained one way or another.
Here you see the way content can be divided. I’m not sure about the ratio between the different circles, but let’s just keep them all equal for the sake of simplicity. You see that most items can be obtained through various ways but that there also brackets of items that can only be achieved through certain means.
With ‘items’ I mean ‘anything’. This can be clothing, weapons, custom stuff, but also entire classes. Yes, that’s right. This means that there are exclusive classes that can only be bought, classes that can only be gained through a lot of hard work, classes that can only be gained through achieving something special AND classes that can only be obtained through random chance. At the end of every match there needs to be a chance of some rare thing being awarded to a random player so players play till the end of the match and keep coming back for more (simply because random chance is highly addictive to our primal brain).
Now I already hear some of you bristling at the mere thought of exclusive content but bear in mind, there should be no advantage in the exclusive classes. They’re different in more than just cosmetics, they can even be completely unique and exotic but they’re not better.
Having unique and rare items is tantamount to a healthy game economy. Players need to get excited about seeing someone playing a very rare and unique class or using a very rare weapon. This is the stuff that really lights up the matches. This is the stuff that makes people pursue their own end goals. This is the emotion that makes people spend time and money on a game.
Then, and this is really something stolen from Valve. ALL content should be tradeable. Players that can spent a lot of time should be able to trade their items with players that spent money on the game or with players that have gotten lucky.
All this combined you have a way of monetising a shooter action game without breaking the gameplay or making it ‘pay to win’. I know there’s resistance to what I’m saying but that only demonstrates how emotional we get when scarcity and exclusivity is involved.
