CoX Quarter Earnings - Q1 2011

An option would be for subscription based accounts to have access to perks that can't normally be gained within the game.

You're still going from having the base game at $15/mo to $0/mo. There will still be a significant number of subscribers that will take that option if presented.

Blood Widow Ricki * Tide Shifter * T-34 * Opposite Reaction * Shaolin Midnight * ChernobylCheerleader

Entropy Legion * Hyperion Force * Hero Heights

Truthfully, for some it might be a necessity. I have an SG mate who I've been playing with since CoV launched - and for them, they are so financially strapped that the $15 really is an expensive purchase - and they love this game. They've played it on/off for years with their child (it freaks me out that their son is now a teenager and I remember when they were 7!)

Yes, making the game free makes it much more accessible to a wider pool of people who for reasons may not have played it before - one such group of people who may not have been able to afford it.

Are they suddenly any "less" of a "worthy" player? Do they become auto-noobs because they couldn't afford it before?

This isn't a moral argument. From NCSoft's perspective, people who are using the company's servers and not paying for it are worth less than people who pay. That's just the way the world works.

The trick with F2P is to hit that fine balance whereby non-paying customers get enough mileage out of the game that they want more, and paying customers get enough more that they don't feel like they're being put upon. I don't believe that's an easy balance to strike, though some games appear to have succeeded.*

Certainly, it's a gamble to switch to a F2P model mid-stream, and in fairness, the F2P model's reputation may have suffered unduly because it tends to attract desperate enterprises that would have failed either way.

[* - Obligatory forum-compliant disclaimer: that is, some games would possibly have appeared to succeed with F2P, if we lived in a world where other games could exist, which of course we don't.]

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Bitterly, yes. F2P evangelists rarely talk about the have/have-not divisions that invariably crop up in some form, especially with games that convert over to that model.

{Citation needed.}

Or at least define "significant" if you don't have any market studies available for CoH. Because I can guarantee you that NCSoft and Paragon have studied this and have yet to convert any of their games to it (in fact, they'd rather shut down the servers of one long-standing title than convert it to F2P).

Honestly, though, this thread might as well be closed at this point. No-one is examining the Q1 2011 financials any more, and the perennial F2P argument is hamstrung since nobody can cite concrete examples, which leaves us arguing about hypotheticals, generalizations, and case histories with the serial numbers filed off.

The value that such players add in F2P MMOs is population volume, which makes a real difference in those that have either wide-scale economies (which CoH doesn't) or large-scale conflicts (and CoH's League system isn't nearly in this category).

Bigger doesn't always mean better when it comes to gaming communities.

Do you wait until the economics forces you to do something, or do you do it when you decide the benefits outweigh the deficits? Do you wait until you are economically forced to institute ED, to implement the invention system, to create the architect, to release an end game? Or do you do those things when you know they will be good for the game and before you're externally forced to do them?

The thing about the financials is that as an analyst there is some information I can glean from them, but there are limits. NCSoft and Paragon certainly have more and more precise information than any of us can have, and long before we saw anything in them that would suggest to us they were "forced" to do something, they would have seen the same signal coming from other data a mile away. Correlating what we see with what they do is like seeing an actor injure their arm in the news and then watching a movie that releases a few days later to see if they are favoring it.

It depends on the design, really.

Some MMO models are very data-lean, very static worlds, or are structured to be tolerant of infrequent map/chatserv updates (maybe 2 per second instead of 4, for example). This lets them get away with very little bandwidth cost or hardware investment per person, and THAT lets them offer F2P at only a marginal risk of "too many moochers."

Other engines don't have the infrastructure necessary to keep the server resources or bandwidth down-- think of systems where player-made objects litter the landscape (they have to be communicated to the user before he gets within visible range for them to appear seamlessly) or every object has its own properties (you can't just send the id for "rebel helm"- each crafted rebel helm can have different properties. you have to send the id for 'rebel helm,' then send the relevant properties for the 'rebel helm').

CoH is a bit of an odd mix. There are some really lean elements and some pieces of the intercommunication that seem to be at their max threshold. It would need a thorough internal analysis to determine whether the "cost per user-hour" meshes with the anticipated revenue-per-user-hour rate.

I don't question that there's some value in freebie players. In theory, yes -- the F2P model insulates paying customers against whatever gameplay problems might arise from low population volume. F2P also can attract new customers, either in full or in part (microtransactions).

All of that is fine, but a fully paid customer is unquestionably more valuable than one who doesn't pay at all, on an individual level if not on a collective level. And that's what's tricky: you don't want to alienate your existing, paying customer base by seeming either to give too much away for free, or by restricting the free players so much that the paid customers effectivey can't play with them. Worse still is the prospect of making your paying customers feel like they're volunteer salesman.

And then there are the obvious concerns about introducing a segment of the playerbase that has no stake in the community. RMT spammers, griefers, etc. None of the above means F2P can't work, as I've already acknowledged*, but there are risks involved.

[* -- Hypothetically acknowledged, because we know that the possibility of other games on this plane of existence is about on par with the laughable prospect of a moon landing.]

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Let me share some more items of note:

Of the Subscription -> Hybrid F2P transitions I've seen that seemed successful, there were three ways of obtaining 'store points'. One was through straightforward purchase (CC on the website, point gift cards in stores, etc). One was through community awards (i.e. contests, but this doesn't get used as much as maybe it should). The third is important:

You can earn them in game.

In the tabletop-inspired game, every completion of a specific mission (they're all unique in that game, for the record, no semi-random or mad libs style creations) is worth a certain amount of 'favor' for a certain faction. At certain milestones of total favor building (all faction favor combined), you get store points.

You can even do this multiple times on different characters on that server (albeit for reduced benefit), or on different servers (for full benefit).

... it's slow. It's painful. But it's POSSIBLE. You can actually get the entire game this way, "free". It costs a lot more personal effort, and some people might go "Well, I'll just go mow a lawn then buy some turbine points." That isn't the point.

The point is that you CAN earn things. That's an excellent selling point for a lot of people. You don't HAVE to pay, you can CHOOSE to pay. It sets up the expectation in players that they can 'just play' and still be able to get more stuff.

I've seen this fact change many players' perception from "Meh, but I'll have to BUY stuff in order to play anyway, so what's the point?" to "Oh, really? I'll give it a try." Of all of my friends I've had try the game, almost all of them have a few days later gone, "So, the higher price points have a better deal on points, right?" And they're deciding what price point they're comfortable with.

Obviously, this doesn't work if there isn't a solid game in there to begin with, but having the ability to earn what you want gets more people in the door with an open mind in the first place.

Regarding the trolling/griefing/etc, there's ways of handling that. I've seen developers take a few approaches, but honestly, treating people who've paid absolutely nothing as slightly better than second class citizens is the most effective and fair.

Given an environment where they CAN earn things takes away the feeling that they are somehow not being 'allowed' to get what they want due to a price barrier, so they seem far more tolerant of things like trade and communication constraints, money caps, and less storage. More of them seem to 'get' that there's a genuine reason for that.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

To be honest, I'm speculating that free-to-play will be the general model for MMOs in the near future. I envision groups of players who own several different games and jump from game to game together, as players, as gaming communities.

I have no knowledge to this effect, but I'd guess it won't be long before we are free-to-play here on CoH, and I don't necessarily see this as d00m, but merely changing to fit a new paradigm.

Actually, I'd contest that's more of an intrinsic problem to MMOs. Most games have a solution method for such problems, the common being zoned-walls and instantiation. It's when facing 'zone-less' space that we tend to encounter scalability problems.

Also, I'd strongly contest that heavy customization presents a problem for F2P. I'd argue that heavy customization works decently well with F2P, just perhaps not in a model we're used to seeing in traditional games. Personally, there's one f2p mmo out there that I'm really hard pressed to think of any other game that even approaches it's level of customization.

That's actually a bit of a failure imo. They have to be things that are nice to have while playing, but you can make do without.

Summonable Nuns with Guns. 1 time use. They last for 45seconds.

The customization isn't the issue. How that customization is COMMUNICATED is the issue.

There are techniques and tradeoffs that can lead to lean communication, but if those techniques aren't in place, you're going to be hard pressed to add them after the fact.

Strongly disagree, and there are contrary examples out there. It's entirely possible to have all of the temporary things be purely 'this is a nice extra' type things, alongside permanent 'I REALLY want to have this.' items that unlock account wide.

Of the three MMOs I've played that made the transition, the one I think is the strongest has no 'must have' temporary items. They DID at one point and decided they didn't like it so removed them from the game.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

That's an interesting conjecture, as City of Heroes currently offers purchasable game enhancements that are permanent, yet not necessarily things F2P players will always feel they need to have to play. The upcoming Steampunk pack, for example, could have been released as a microtransaction item if CoH was F2P, and it would not match your requirements. And yet, evidence suggests its likely to generate a lot of interests and a signficant income, which are the actual only two properties MT items have to possess.

We've been looking at things like the Turbine model for guidance, but wouldn't NCSoft, if they decided to start thinking about an F2P conversion, look to what works *here* first, rather than what worked elsewhere and may or may not work here? Wouldn't they be asking: what do our players tell us - with their wallets - people will pay for? What is too much to ask, and what is too little to give? Where do we draw the line between the standard content and the ala carte content? Shouldn't we try to draw the line fairly close to where City of Heroes currently draws it?

Other MMOs can give us an idea of how an F2P system might be structured but as to the content decisions that go into it, I think you first start at home. We don't have to randomly guess at what the existing playerbase will accept, because the existing playerbase has been giving NCSoft data for years now on what they will accept and not accept, by virtue of the sales numbers and community feedback of every boxed expansion and booster pack City of Heroes has ever sold.

That's actually an advantage City of Heroes has that most F2P conversions did not have: a lot of data on what works and what doesn't work prior to the conversion. We've actually been living in a hybrid model for several years now, just not specifically a F2P one. The transition from a pure subscription model to an F2P model is actually two transitions in one: a transition from subscriber only to tiered access (from VIP subscription if it exists down to free to access), and a transition from buffet gaming to ala carte gaming. That's a big set of jumps. But we're already at least half way into the jump from buffet gaming to ala carte gaming: we wouldn't have to make both jumps completely blind.

However, those need to be in place for any MMO in general. Population segmentation being the most common and visible example of such methods. The issue I am seeing you describe is one far more intrinsic to the MMO platform in general. And it's simply not an option to not consider solutions to population density.

And having an economical server model is desirable regardless of population levels. Although you can argue it's less important when you are making more currency per concurrent user. I feel it's still something that should be optimized for .

Do I have a Shivan? Well, not exactly...

Please go back and reread what I posted. I didn't say that MT's should be things that were needed to play the game. I said they should be things players will "feel" they need.

I'm talking impulse purchases like the stuff you find at the Checkout line in a store. The "OOOH! I gotta get some more of those!" things.

The problem for F2P games is that if they have too many permanent items in their stores, then once bought they'll never get that player to buy it again because he won't need it, especially if the item is an account wide purchase.

That's why most F2P models restrict permanent items to things like costumes and some even go so far as to restrict them to individual characters.

Then your idea of "feel they need" is different from mine.

I don't consider a candy bar that I buy in checkout something I felt I needed to have, I considered it something nice. On the contrast, a membership to Sams Club is something I feel I need to have if I want to shop at Sams. Similarly though, I also don't believe I need to "super size" my value meal.

I still believe if the item is something that is perceived necessary, then it is acting as a barrier to entry instead of an opportunity for profit.

That's what I feel forboding about. What do we have in this game that isn't necessary to play but can be switched over to be something sold over and over as a microtransaction that players might feel they want/need to play on a regular basis.

Inspirations?
Temp Powers?
Recipes? (soul bound to individual characters)
IO Enhancements? (again soul bound to individual characters)
Base items/decorations?