OK. First of all i don’t like the looks of TF2. Looks so cartoonish and childish. Second thing which i don’t like is movement which feels awkward. Now let’s talk about most important thing - classes.
The main problem is that TF2 classes lack depth. They lack their role in a game. In ET/ET:QW soldier destroys stuff while engineer covers with mines or covert op snipes and provides radar or smoke. Medic runnin arround to heal u and revive u. Or field ops waiting for proper time to drop the air support marker to stop approaching enemies. Those classes have their unique role in a game. And in TF2 all u have to do is move train or whatever from point A to point B and basically it does not matter which class u pick. If u pick sniper well u can run invisible and stab few people or snipe someone, but u provide nothing for team in my opinion. No radar, no smoke, nothing that would be important to team. u basically play for fun, but i don’t see that fun. I might be wrong though about objectives in TF2 because i have only played it like 10 hours i guess… But as i said already i just don’t like it.
So its gonna be free2play...
Last news about F2P:
- The free-to-play relaunch of Star Wars: The Old Republic has failed -
The game is near death (5 Dec. news from playground.ru)
- Mike Morhaime about Starcraft 2 F2P -
http://www.gamefront.com/blizzard-boss-rules-out-starcraft-f2p/
Some AAA games fail, some succeed, some indie games fail, some succeed, some f2p games fail, some succeed… it’s pointless looking at one side of the coin.
It’s just a news Dark, both are dated 5 December, If there was a news about a great F2P pay model game I would post it here to. I really believe that we can learn from other ppl mistakes after all.
The question is, will the game be pay2win (upgrades) or just pay4hats (cosmetic)
The founder pre-purchase seems to only give access to alternative player models for in-game changes, so no clues there.
[QUOTE=JIM_BOB7813;414508]The question is, will the game be pay2win (upgrades) or just pay4hats (cosmetic)
The founder pre-purchase seems to only give access to alternative player models for in-game changes, so no clues there.[/QUOTE]
That’s a good thing though. This means that they don’t offer let’s say: “Double Exp” or “an extra weapon”.
I hope they look at League of legends’ business model. You need to play a LOT to unlock everything for free, but not unlocking everything doesn’t stop you from playing the game on an even playing field.
The founder pre-purchase seems to only give access to alternative player models for in-game changes, so no clues there.
This is strange that there is no information about virtual currency. I hope that the pre-purchase will give some advantages in “money” (Like in tribes or mechwarrior)
[QUOTE=Dysfunkshion;414510]This means that they don’t offer let’s say: “Double Exp” or “an extra weapon”.
I hope they look at League of legends’ business model.[/QUOTE]
+1
One note about this: LoL is based in a model that continuously adds new content every few weeks in the form of new characters and skins, which keeps the game alive and interesting. It takes a lot of work and commitment from the developers to keep the game constantly updated, although, to be honest, new champions are almost always overpowered for some time, so people will buy credits to unlock them and win more easily.
AND this brings another question. How could a shooter like DB implement a content update model like LoL knowing that it’s not a game based on different characters, but a limited selection of classes?
[QUOTE=KlausMorgenholz;414671]+1
One note about this: LoL is based in a model that continuously adds new content every few weeks in the form of new characters and skins, which keeps the game alive and interesting. It takes a lot of work and commitment from the developers to keep the game constantly updated, although, to be honest, new champions are almost always overpowered for some time, so people will buy credits to unlock them and win more easily.
AND this brings another question. How could a shooter like DB implement a content update model like LoL knowing that it’s not a game based on different characters, but a limited selection of classes?[/QUOTE]
They could offer a basic set of skins and models for let’s say the barrier and the vehicle. Let’s say you rather want a WW2 tank instead of a modern one and you want barb wire and concrete as the barrier.
This could also be applied to certain class specific items. Rather have a syringe than a defibrillator? Buy it.
Another thing they could do is giving you the ability to spray your icon (like in Counterstrike) for a small fee. It’s simple, you pay and you can spray your personal icon over the map.
There’s so many possible routes they can go without affecting gameplay a bit.
I worry about the free to play aspect as most of these games take away the functionality of server lists, playing maps you want, developing mods, and tend to have some sort of grind to create incentives to pay money. Those that do pay money in Free to Play games tend to pay way more money than you would for a normal $60 title which is also off-putting. I’m playing Mechwarrior Online and frankly their business model is trash and the game is already on what appears to be a death-spiral while still in “beta”. That this game is modelling the founders pricing from MWO scares me. The $120 package is silly to me. I’ll give Splash Damage credit that they know how to make a game, although their success rate since Wolf:ET has been on a decline. I loved Quake Wars, but I was one of the few in the general population, and Brink had potential but it sadly fizzled faster than any game I’ve seen to date. I like that this game is PC only, but I’m personally sick of Free to Play games, I’d rather pay 50 bucks and be done with it, rather than having a bunch of un-invested people trying the game. Maybe they will finally have another success with this one, I hope so as Wolf:ET was one of the best game experiences I’ve had ever, but I hate games with boosts and premium time where I’m nickle and dimed artificially to have what I feel should be the normal game experience.
What is so silly about the $120 package, I would get it if I had the money. The only thing that is silly is they have not announced what the ingame currency is going to be, and it isn’t in any of the packages. As for F2P, if you had the choice between a $50 game, and a F2P game with the same amount of content that is eventually unlockable including the full support for more from developers since the game is getting a constant stream of players since it’s F2P, and $50 worth of cosmetic items which were well designed and worth the money, which would you choose? The result is a no-brainer for a lot of people, F2P not only helps developers but also players. Now I am not talking about terrible F2P taboos such as pay2win or taking away freedom from players with the game having no server customizability of dedicated servers, but it’s highly unlikely that Dirty Bomb will have any of this so it’s nothing to be worried about.
You make a lot of assumptions in your post about F2P. There will not be a constant stream of players, maybe it will at release, but then it will trickle and likely fizzle unless it’s lucky to be one of the few F2P games that’s wildly successful. I’d rather pay 50 bucks and have a constant game experience that doesn’t feel like a grind, rather than pay $5-$10 chunks here and there to keep the experience from being mind-numbingly static. Grinds can also encourage exploitations by players not willing to play, which ruins the game for everyone (farming, AFKing) and free to play games are also rife with griefers who have no financial consequence to their actions.
In my experience with F2P you need to pay $10-$15 a month to have the game play progression feel like a normal $50 game. Frankly I don’t even like my MP games to have progression other than in small doses. What ever happened to just playing the game for the gameplay itself instead of these weird psychological mini-rewards and achievements everyone seems to need to make themselves happy?
How do you know this game will be different than the others? What is the incentive to play? If it’s modeled like TF2 then maybe, but that went free to play after they made their money selling Orange Box, focusing only on aesthetic rewards.
What worries me about $120 is that there would be $120 “worth” of unlockable content to pay for. I could be wrong, but my experience tells me otherwise.
I don’t mind it being f2p, it makes sense in order to compete with other more popular titles. As long as it does not become p2w, it’s not that I don’t have money to buy my super powerful toon, it’s that I do not like having an advantage over other players. I like to know that when I am killing someone it is because I am a better player than them, not because I payed more money. If it becomes p2w I will not spend a dime, and just leave for another game.
I believe the thing you all are failing to see, which is the true down fall of most F2P titles, is that making an account is free. I’m hoping SD has a very strong cheat detection software or this could turn into a Planetside 2/Blacklight Retribution environment. Basically, people will hack in every game no matter what. A big deterrence for the common cheater is having to pay to play. With the F2P system there is no loss in getting your account banned. They will simply make a new account, tweak their cheat to make it less noticeable, and then try again until their cheats are mastered and it is incredibly difficult to determine if they are legit or cheating.
I’m sure SD has already thought about this and if not they should start moving on it. They will need a solid anti cheat system implemented in order to keep the casual crowd which is where the money is at.
I’ve played a lot of Blacklight Retribution and Tribes Ascend, and I always saw people complaining about this, but I almost never saw a hacker in-game. I think I saw like 1 hacker during my time in BLR, we vote kicked him and it was over. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a hacker in TA. What I have seen is a lot of hackusations towards legit players. Of course they need a good anti cheat, but from my experience in other F2P shooters, they usually do. Go play a buy2play title like CoD and see all the cheaters there! It’s bad, much much worse than good F2P titles, really, it is.
Exactly. People seem to call someone a hacker way too often. I’ve rarely seen hackers, except some of them on Cod2 recently and Cod4. In W:ET a couple of aimbots, but there were always admins or players ready to kick 'em.
Sad thing is, I’ve probably been banned from more servers for “hacking or cheating” than that I’ve seen people actually do it.
People tend to think everyone “worse” than them is a noob and everyone better than them is either a No-lifer or a cheater.
I guess way more people use wallhack in wolfenstein than an aimbot. But it’s so hard to proof if someone is wallhacking. Aimbots are easy to catch.
You didn’t play Blacklight much then. We caught a lot of hackers. It goes further than just a wall hack/aimbot. Their is no spread, FoV changes etc. I actually made a series on my youtube channel but stopped recording because PWE stopped banning cheaters. I ended up recording as much as I was playing because it was so rampant.
There were players dumb enough to record themselves playing to prove they’re legit but were caught in their own videos using no spread, trigger botting, and aimbotting. Anyway, that’s another discussion for another thread I guess.
I don’t consider FoV changes hacking, I even tried it myself in BLR to play with nVidia Surround, but the game does not support SLI so I couldn’t maintain 60 FPS in a 5760x1080 resolution. So I didn’t bother using it.
But if there were so many cheaters in BLR they were pretty ****ing terrible even with cheats. I topped most games I played, and there was only a few guys that would outplay me, and they were clan players. Maybe they were hacking, I don’t know for sure, but they didn’t make it obvious so I didn’t really care and just thought they were better players than me.
I’d really like to see your YT channel though, if there were as many hackers as you claim I’d like proof.
The implementation of F2P has to be somewhat pioneering I think. W:ET was probably the first F2P game ever right? It was insanely successful because of the fact that the entirety of the game design and the experience it was meant to offer was completely free to everyone. Nobody is doing F2P completely right at the moment (far from it in my opinion), so there’s potential here to stand out as the first title to be a real gamers GAME, and not an attempt at an MMO cash cow.
Here are the negatives of F2P
[ul]
[li]Pay2Win = All obvious history as to why this is bad aside… this also cheapens the game’s reputation to the Nth degree. Pay2Win shooter makes me think cheap disposable Chinese/Korean shooters with horribly cheapskated communities.
[/li][li]Rent2Win = Is quite possibly worse than Pay2Win, and is the bottom of the barrel even for those Chinese/Korean shooters. Even if this were implemented with an ingame currency that could be earned… that introduces a grind mechanic… leave that to the World of Warcraft. You either grind or you compete, they are completely at odds with each other in the realm of mechanics.
[/li][li]XP Boosting = Castration. I like Tribes, but even with the persistent VIP XP multiplier on an account, XP progression is excruciatingly slow. It’s the only sensible approach to a F2P business model to date, but it still introduces that sensation of grind gameplay.
[/li][li]Multiple Currencies = Slow grind freebie currency and Pay2Win currency. I don’t like this aspect of Tribes Gold… some items are Gold only, some are both Gold and Points purchasable. If you’re after my money, at least be honest about it and put a $$ only value on it. The lure of grinding out points to be a cheapskate… quite frankly its an attempt to appeal to a demographic that is not welcome for this type of game. Be honest, many of us are here because we want a real game, and we’ve developed a great deal of hostility with the Players = $$$ mentality that has overtaken the games industry, and at the expense of GAMEplay to boot. Luring the newer age of nubs that are consumers without the economical means… it’s just going to add poison to the community. Not having cash is one thing, being a parasitic leech is another… leave them to their grand-ma gifted copies of CoD 4.15 and BitTorrents piracy. They won’t be welcome!.. Plus, attention spent on trying to grind out points for unlocks WILL be a distraction for many new players from the actual purpose of the game. Tribes is good, but once you unlock enough stuff for what feels like a well-rounded-enough variety of loadouts… you really notice the massive gap between what the game’s mechanics intend for team co-operation and class exploitation… and what people are actually doing. Let’s not forget the Brink-effect… all those numb nuts that just glazed over how the game really worked and made the eedjit comparison “oh it’s like TF2.” Enemy Territory mechanics make for a thinking man’s FPS… let’s not pretend general gamer intelligence has improved, it’s gone down with the increase in market numbers if anything!
[/li][/ul]
What are reasonable things to consider chargeable
[ul]
[li]Clanning: Something low and reasonable like the idea of Quake-live, but esports specific… setting up a clan and all the features that come with that… if it were to incur a $2 per month fee kind of thing? Hell, $2 per month from each contributing clan member. Been a long time since I was in a clan, but wouldn’t this also be an incentive for members to remain active? I remember that was one issue I had trying to find a clan back in the W:ET days… folks that were (in)consistent in following through with being competitive. And I don’t mean $2 per month to be in THAT clan, but to be in the Clan system period, that way there’s no monetary dispute regarding someone getting kicked from a clan, by their clan.
[/li][li]Cosmetics: To each their own, if people want hats (not in this game I hope), let them doll up their toons. Tribes does alittle of this right… custom voices, class skins.
[/li][li]User Cosmetic Marketplace: Let’s say a $1 one time listing fee per item, then 50/50 split for end sale value… a marketplace where we can hawk our reskinned whatevers. An upfront listing fee might help eliminate most of the garrish crap the clueless or just as-yet-unskilled would be posting were there no risk of financial commitment to that “product” of theirs. It’d work like an initial screening process if you will (but would require some screening process as well… to avoid offensive/inappropriate/generally-idiotic ‘things’ getting into the game). A reskinned weapon sold from that point on for 20cents, or $10… just add the clause that items found to imitate and then undersell a currently successful/popular item could be banned/etc. Optimistically it’s a good idea I think, but this one is 50/50… you’d have to be wary of the chinese gold farmer style exploiters coming in trying to defraud those among us that are actually keen on interacting with eachother on a MOD level.
[/li][li]Events = Kind of like Track Days in racing sims. I’m specifically thinking of what I’m seeing in Project CARS at the moment. Like PUB based events… these can even diverge from the core game mechanic… a special event only map where you perform whatever timed objectives. Like the Brink challenges or your typical first-level-of-CoD-MW obstacle course. Obstacle course with one class, one gun -> performance based = time/XP earned/Ammo used/Objectives accomplished. Events that promote skilled gameplay… but people ONLY get to play these event maps during an event. That way, not only is it a fresh challenge, it will curtail exploiting… at least to some degree. Perhaps 20 cents, maybe $1 per attempt/entry… perhaps a fee for base users and free lifetime entry to founders/contributors (this is how some of the Project CARS contributor packages are setup… lifetime priority access to track day events… that’s my P:CARS reference)
[/li][/ul]
That’s all I can think of off the top of my head… but I’m reminded by the current seasonal stuff coming on Steam… Killing Floor and their seasonal maps and remodelled zombies… those kinds of things really add to the life and character of a game. Killing Floor I think is a perfect example of that type of thing working in an FPS, not just MMORPGs. Is it possible to make my events suggestion transmutable into an seasonal events things too? There’s probably potential there once the game has been out for a year or so.