Don't go Free to Play(F2P), COH

[QUOTE=Residentx10;3287600]This is thin ground but it's a valid comment.

What does the USER get with F2P?
What does the Dev get with F2P?
What is the value of the Lifetime Sub?

Users get less content and have to pay more with F2P
Dev get more money with less content with F2P


As for the changes in the industry, some of this reflects the cash value of the micropayment system-- you can make some decent cash in encouraging frequent mini-purchases. F2P'ers that DON'T buy anything tend to be very occasional players- meaning they're very low cost, not consuming as much bandwidth as a regular user or taking up customer support time. Add to the fact that that the cost for hosting and bandwidth has dropped dramatically, and you find a reasonably profitable niche.


Will CoH go that way? It'll require quite a shift. All three of the others have their own 'currency' so you make one payment into your virtual wallet via credit card (or game card purchase) and then spend at will. That helps avoid Credit Card processing fees for every single micropurchase. All CoH stuff goes through the NCSoft store, which, as we've seen, collapses under volume traffic, is a charge-per-each-purchase system, and doesn't have a very decent in-game interface. Heck, the reliability of it alone would make me wary of adding an ingame-engine interface to it.

MAYBE it'll come, but the investment needed to fund this change won't be worth it for CoH alone... maybe one of NCSoft's upcoming titles will warrant it and then CoH will port to that new infrastructure (GW, maybe? I had half-expected it with NCSoft's last MMO release... )


Either way, until that beast of an account management / online sales system gets an overhaul, I think OP has little to worry.

I would rather CoH avoid the F2P trend.

It may get them a slight revenue increase, but it would very much detract from the quality of the game.

Speaking just for myself, I don't care HOW awesome an online game is if the people I'm interacting with are rude, abusive retards. F2P tends to attract the worst kind of gamer, the ones who only play to grief other people and in general be a jacktard because they aren't paying anything to play, and a ban just means they move on to the next F2P game to behave the same way.

CoH's playerbase has a minimum of that kind of player. Sure, they exist, but they are in the minority, and the worst ones get weeded out pretty quick when they get themselves banned. Most of the people I have ever encountered in-game have been decent enough, and I'd rather not see that change.

Also most F2P games offer both subscription AND F2P. If CoH did this it would basically mean that the subscribers would get given a decent chunk 'NCsoft Bucks' every month and could spend them on the optional extras (aka booster packs) that came out (normally works to the equivilent of $10 worth of 'NCsoft bucks' judging by other games) while the F2P guys would have to shell out for the booster packs with cold hard cash.

I do agree that F2P generally does bring in a usually crappy crowd though.

[This is just as true for City. A dedicated player can blow through City's content in a month, maybe six weeks tops.

Prepay doesn't necessarily have anything to do with content at launch, though. I can think of at least one other mmo that offered prepay and managed to deliver innovative and regular content.

The developer that most people cue with "misusing" prepay was also releasing at a time when the business credit crunch was at crippling levels, and release deployments have a HUGE cash requirement. Prior to that period in time, it was very common to get short-term-credit to pay for the servers & launch, then pay it back with the initial surge in sales.

It might have been that the developers catering to that market planned accordingly, with the idea of adding enough content to cater to the surge, then see what the regularly-recurring base (and one-time-purchases) would be able to pay for in sustained development. If the pundits were wrong, they'd have the resources for more development. If they were right, they wouldn't have added more to the game than necessary.

Not saying that's a GOOD strategy, just saying that you can't attribute what happened there solely to prepay. There were many more factors involved there.

I had a friend on another board suggest that modern setting games should do in game adds on a f2p model, then a monthly sub to opt out of the in game ads. This with micro transactions could create a pretty healthy game.

I personally am not a fan of the f2p model. My experience has been the same as others in this thread. All of the f2p games I have played tended to have a less mature player base.

As is, I don't think CoX will go to a f2p model any time soon.

I'm surprised it hasn't happened in this thread yet but I might as well cross the conspiracy theory that "CoH is going to be F2P any minute now" with the "What's coming in the super-secret I20 update?" speculation.

It's all so clear now... I20 is going to be the introduction of the new-and-improved F2P version of CoH.

Truth is, CoH is ALREADY Free to Play, and has been for a while. The devs just neglected to stop charging people for access, and hoped no one noticed.

Free to play is has the advantage that it allows the skeptics in, but rather than asking for a price upfront before allowing them in for an evaluation. However, this game has trial accounts already to do this.

Free to play is a gamble, in that rather than allowing access for 200 paying players, it allows 2000 hoping that 11% will pay at least $15 a month in purchases. If more than that pay, it's the obvious business choice. If less, then it's a failure.

At that point it's all about how good the game comes off to those 2000 players that they actually want to stay and pony up for stuff. ..And if it's too good, they have no incentive to pay for extra. What would CoX do? level cap 40 for non-payers? No power pools for non-payers? SF/TF's for a fee? No IO's for non-payers? One or two characters available unless you pay? The trick is that there's a fine edge between luring in players with palatable goodies for a price, and annoying the entitled new crowd by locking stuff away that seems arbitrary.

Nevermind the PR balancing act that happens when long-time customers feel cheated after paying hundreds of dollars, some over a thousand, for the game in the past.

The even worse outcome is when people don't like your buyable content, and you're forced to either (a) restrict free stuff even further, so that the new players have to pay for stuff that was once free, or (b) go back to a subscription model, removing everything that the free player once had.

I'm not sure I see NCsoft wanting any of these options just yet, as there's a lot of uncertainty and headaches involved. The fact is, it has to bring in more cash than the subscriber+booster sales already already does, and have a low probability of actually reducing game income. The game is lower in population, but not to the point that I see the bigwigs rolling the at this time.