Is COH: Freedom Putting the Cart Before the Horse?
By
8-J,
Posted on: 2011-08-04 24:56 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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I think this is the straightest post GG has ever made. and I agree with it.
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Originally Posted by Golden Girl
There's also the problem that villains want to change the world into something bad, but heroes want to keep the world as it is - which makes the more static game world of an MMO way more suitable for heroes than villains - Paragon City is always being threatened by Villains, but it's still always there - so the default setting is that the Heroes have succeeded and the Villains have lost.
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Here is what happened to me quite a bit before said limitation was put into the game:
*Random Invite by RMT Player*
Me not knowing its an RMTer *Accept*
Me: Hya, what do you need help with?
RMTer: Blatant advertising for their website.
I quit and report said player.
Moments Later another random invite from the same RMTer not banned yet.
I deny the invite.
And then another random invite.
It can go on and on and on and in any zone. Sorry, I put up with this in WoW for ages before they began insisting trial acounts have the same limitations we do.
A great solution I heard for this is a chat channel everyone can see that acts like a Help/Broadcast for these players. The thing about it is, if it does seem to be abused by RMTers VIPers, and even other Free Players, can simply remove the chat channel via an edit to the window. No harm no foul and it gives the Free players a voice. Not to mention an avenue for Paragon Studios to monitor RMTer abuse.
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They can when the moralilty is about a video game. Teenage boys rule there I should now I use to be one |
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
Teenage boys can't be used in studies about morality
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For all those free players out there Ima go around and form teams for them cause honestly its BS that/if they can't. If your gonna let people try your game permantly for free may as well let them make teams.
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You don't like the Rogue isles because they're annoying to navigate, but you like Nerva of all places? That ... just doesn't make sense.|
Originally Posted by RoleplayerX
Personally, I rarely play a villain because I find the Rogue Isles depressing and annoying to navigate. Nerva is the only redside zone I like at all. I know a lot of people who feel the same way I do.
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Weird post to single out in this whole discussion I know, but it amused me.
@True Metal
Co-leader of Callous Crew SG. Based on Union server.
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People who do not pay to play the game are not customers.
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Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
It's my contention that treating customers in that fashion is bad for business.
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You can't take that attitude when you're running a freemium game. The whole point is to show them that it's worth crossing the line to become a premium or VIP. The free line is not there to somehow demarcate the worthwhile people from the less worthwhile people. That's the kind of elitist attitude that caused so much trouble when EQ2 Extended launched. No matter what the existing subscribers and even the developers desired or intended, the free players did not view themselves as "non customers", nor did they view themselves as potential subscribers for the most part. They viewed themselves as potential purchasers|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
People who do not pay to play the game are not customers.
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You might as well say that your local grocery store shouldn't speak to or assist anyone wandering the aisles looking lost until they buy a pack of gum first.
I honestly do not think these changes are largely focused on housing F2P players.
I think the majority of focus is simply on housing a pay-for store within the game to generate more income (from paying customers) to create more resources in order to develop more stuff (in return).
Enticing new players is always a goal, but I do not believe the whole FREEDOM/freemium,/F2P aspect of it is that important in the grand scheme of their plans.
Things are set up far too much for being Premium vs Freemium... and VIP vs Premium.
And I am not saying any of this as though it is a bad thing.
Yes, as things are planned, this will attract some people to download and try it out...
But I think that is all bonus and that they are looking far more for that to bring them to plunk down $15 and see what happens after that, as opposed to sticking around for free.
And I don't think they're too concerned with people who are unwilling to pay at least once.
Mostly, this whole thing is to sell more stuff to VIPs, period.
Additional revenue from Premiums, second.
And a slightly (or more) improved scenario for bringing in new players/potential subscribers.
Looking at CoH:Freedom as a true Freemium game seems to be missing the point.
I could be wrong, but that's how I'm reading it.
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
Eh, there clearly have to be limits and $5 to gain Premium status is clearly a small price to pay. I can quibble about what those limits should be but I have no problem acknowledging the above listed facts.
I will argue vehemently, however, with anyone who says "Free players are not customers and don't deserve consideration as customers." Even someone I have tons of respect for.
One of the worst side effects of a development staff with that attitude is that it gets communicated to the players, on both sides of the line. Two things happen.
One is that many of the free players end up leaving because they feel unappreciated and while you can argue that any of them are worth appreciating, you can't argue that each one is a lost sale.
Two is that development staff ends up loosening the restrictions and offering bennies to the free/premiums to stem the tide of their departure and the VIP's who have been accepting that they were second class citizens start getting upset that the freebies are being catered too now and treated like a valuable commodity; something that the VIP's thought of as their sole provence.
I hope for the sake of Freedom that the staff of NCSoft and Paragon Studios do not subscribe to the belief that free customers are not actually customers.
I just see the free players as being on indefinite trials.
I'm assuming that Trial players cannot form teams either...
I can't say I am for or against this decision (not being able to form teams).
I just think they are completely deadset against allowing ways for free "players" to mess things up. Even at the cost of seemingly disrespecting legitimate free players.
I certainly see where you're coming from. And certainly don't agree with it across varying business practices. However, I also see it from their side and don't think it is a problem. But hey, it could turn out to be!
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
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Actually now there are more than a few long running badass villain comics. Irredeemable being just one off the top of my head.|
Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
How many long-running villain-centric comic books are there?
Villains tend to be "This is who the good guys beat up for the next 1-10 issues," then they get rotated out while you stick with the same "good guys." Add to that - how many times have the villains *permanently* won? Sure, they kill Superman... temporarily. They take over the world... which gets reversed due to some space-time its-magic hand-wavey nonsense. Villains continually get written as "They will lose - maybe it'll get rough for the good guys, but they'll lose." I can't see that *not* playing a part - no matter how good the content, etc. - of why more people in this game genre make heroes as opposed to villains. Not to mention that the bad guys that DO get away with things for a long time don't really lend themselves to games. They do... what? They plot and scheme, buy people off while looking like a respectable businessman who gives to the community, etc. while behind the scenes he's getting protection money paid to him and sending out minions to get beat on. Now put that in COH... how do you level? What are your powers? The closest we come to that is the Mastermind, and that's so far off that example (what's the last thing your character got to plot?) that it's not even in the same time zone. The only games I can think of that came anywhere close were Dungeon Keeper and Evil Genius... and even those were pretty limited. Fewer people play villains because *we don't get to be villains.* We get to be thugs. |
Whether we get to be thugs or villains I'd argue that more folks would still choose to be heroes simply because they come to games for escapism. There's enough evil in the REAL world.
Also it's VERY difficult to create an mmo setting where the villains have won permanently. The closest this game has is Praetoria. And funny how it's now mostly abandoned.
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Yes, yes you can.|
Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
You can't take that attitude when you're running a freemium game.
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Customers are spending money. That's what they are there for.
If it costs you $5 to be able to team, because you're bumped up to Premium, and you can't be bothered to spend that, then no. You don't get to demand anything. You're a tourist, except you're not even spending tourist dollars. You're a bum.
I can't stand blind invites. Cannot STAND them. The less people allowed to randomly invite others, the better :P
For me personally, I just can't play villains...or evil...I've tried...but evilness in games seems to be pathetic. In most games it isn't more then kicking a dog repeatedly till you get some dark side points. A recent example would be a game where you could get kind of famous... Being evil wasn't much more then doing being evil for evil's sake...draining innocent bystanders, kicking street musicians...I mean come on!
And I love the MM archetype but when I played them(back when you couldn't switch) they weren't villains. I always played them as undercover agents who would make sure not to harm innocents. Lame? Probably but I just cannot play villainy type of characters in game.
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Today's bum is tomorrows VIP. Players remember how they FEEL they were treated.|
Originally Posted by Feycat
You're a tourist, except you're not even spending tourist dollars. You're a bum.
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If you launch a freemium game you are acknowledging that you are making a game where 80% (to pick a number at sort of random) of the players do not generate revenue. You do it because the other 20% DOES generate revenue and you figure that you can eventually convert some portion of the other 80%. The 80% are the loss leader; same as selling four cases of Coke for the price of one, because you also expect those shoppers to end up buying $100 of groceries to go along with all of that cheap coke they just bought.
Making an official policy of treating freems as bums is poor business practice and a great way to insure that you NEVER convert them into paying customers.
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Sorry, I can't agree with you.|
Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
Making an official policy of treating freems as bums is poor business practice and a great way to insure that you NEVER convert them into paying customers.
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I AM the demographic that you folks have been talking up. My husband and I shop around MMOs (this is home, but we visit other places!) and quite often that involves downloading the free trial, or freemium version of the game. Most MMOs have the 7-10 day trial deal these days. There are ALWAYS heavy restrictions places on those trials. Some of them won't let you level/rank past a certain level, some won't let you send tells, some won't let you join guilds, some won't let you use vendors, etc.
In no case have we EVER been dissuaded from buying a game or subbing to it by those restrictions, because we recognize that's part of the point of the trial. In fact, I subbed to one PvP-based MMO (based on a popular miniature game) because I enjoyed the lower-level game so much that being restricted to unlimited time played at rank 10 wasn't enough for me. I was incentivized to pay by the fact of the restriction. Had it been possible to play all the way to 40 without paying, I wouldn't have paid. When I played the MMO-based-on-the-oldest-P&P-RPG, we never subscribed. You didn't need to. You could play as long as you want, for free, and leverage the game in ways that allowed you to do pretty much everything without ever paying, so we didn't.
Incentivizing the freebs by showing them how great the game is and letting them see how much BETTER the stuff just out of their reach is, is a GOOD idea. Especially considering how cheaply Paragon is selling a Premium membership for.
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See, I think you're not really seeing my point, here.|
Originally Posted by Feycat
Sorry, I can't agree with you.
I AM the demographic that you folks have been talking up. |
I'm not really down on limits. There has to be some sort of limit and the "right" mix is going to be different from game to game.
I'm talking about an attitude that free players don't deserve to be treated as having any value before they've pony'd up some cash.
I wonder how quickly you would have subscribed to that PvP WARgame if the development staff and the subscribing players had made a point of treating you like a freeloader who didn't deserve any consideration at all, let alone the consideration that you were already being given?
How about this? Give the VIPs a way to deny Free Players from sending an invite their way. Sorry, but my past experience with Trial players and Free players, on others game, puts the RMTers in the majority, at least the majority as nuisance instigators. Is this me discriminating against said players, no, but trust is a two way street. I rely heavily on PuGs to level and I do not want to be (as my previous example showcased) inundated with invites by "Snoxbry123" over and over along with his or her fellow RMTers waiting for me to deny one so the other can invite.
This advents were put into place to give us peace from the RMTers and I do not want to give them Freedom to begin all over again. Yes, I can report them, and report them, and report them... See where I'm going. I don't want to spend half my time reporting RMTers. I'm all for giving Free players a measure, but give the VIP and Premium members a way to lock it off if it gets horrid.
And before some other things are brought up for Free Players. No, they should not be able to send me mail unless they are on my friends or SG lists. No, they should not be able to send me tells. I'm sorry, I log in to play not avoid the telemarketers (RMTers) like I do in my day to day routine. Am I being hypercritical and blanketing blame before it happens, yes. Why? Because I have left other games because of lack of contol over RMTers. Here, I finally have control and I will not surrender it.
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No one's said they don't deserve any consideration.|
Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
See, I think you're not really seeing my point, here.
I'm not really down on limits. There has to be some sort of limit and the "right" mix is going to be different from game to game. I'm talking about an attitude that free players don't deserve to be treated as having any value before they've pony'd up some cash. I wonder how quickly you would have subscribed to that PvP WARgame if the development staff and the subscribing players had made a point of treating you like a freeloader who didn't deserve any consideration at all, let alone the consideration that you were already being given? |
What's being said is that they are not CUSTOMERS.
They clearly have value, and will hopefully enjoy themselves enough to become customers. I think the game is good enough that it will clearly attract them to do so.
But the fact remains that, before they do spend that money, they are not customers. They are potential customers, and enticing them to become customers is the name of the game.
I was not given any consideration as a human being in that Wargame, believe me! Have you played it? LOL
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I've thought this was a better solution pretty much since the chat & teaming restriction was announced. Speaking as someone who will be maintaining their subscription, I *want* free players to be able to invite me to teams - but I understand that many would not.|
Originally Posted by LadyGrimrose
How about this? Give the VIPs a way to deny Free Players from sending an invite their way.
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I do think putting this many roadblocks in the way of free player teaming is not conducive to getting them hooked on the game such that they stick around and end up making purchases in the store. It's such a basic functionality that I think many will be put off by its absence before they reach that point. I can see paying to unlock supergroups, or pvp, or task forces, or leagues, or whatever, but basic teaming just seems like something I'd want to experience way before I'd decided whether to stick with the game or not (certainly before I got my wallet out). All that being doubly so if I were trying the game with a group of friends.
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More broadly, I'd say it actually showcases the reason why pretty well. That the 'bad side' tends to be better written. Because it has to be better written.|
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
That's because Vader and Boba Fett are way cooler than Luke tongue kissing his sister on Hoth.
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With CoX, I'd suggest the quality is pretty comparable. The problem is, with few exceptions from the player perspective, the writing doesn't pass the higher minimum quality component for a villain story.
I do, however, think that the issue of 'the good guys' being more popular is something more related to it being a super MMO. Most of the fantasy MMOs that I've played I get a real distinct impression of favor towards the evil side of things. Or towards the 'neutral' side of things [of course that was solely because of mechanical benefits in the one example I remember]. Perhaps because in those other games it's far more acceptable to be the Thug towing the line than for a Supervillain to be a thug towing the line.
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Lemme guess... the game you're speaking of was Aion? |
Originally Posted by Zwillinger
Anecdotaly speaking...
I've experienced a situation where a development team tried through various methods to encourage players to play one faction vs another faction, for the purpose of balance. Now in the situation I've experienced, it was key to the way the game worked, crucial in fact, on a level that does not apply to CoH. What was said about players playing what players want to play usually rings true. Inflated incentive can only do so much to entice people to do something they would otherwise not do. Of course we will always continue to develop compelling content for both factions to play in addition to our continued development of co-op content. We do anticipate that many of the new players will be very interested in the experience of playing a nefarious villain rather than a sappy do-gooder  . |
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Apparently people do NOT know going free to play is the death knell of gold sellers. The devs are already planning on selling "special" IOs in the store that we saw for specific ATs just a matter of time before the rest go in. Incarnate powers, salvage, threads can't be traded the gold sellers aint gonna have no thang but a chicken wing on this game soon.
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Yes, actually. I think that if you went back and analyzed your newbie experience that you might change your perception about how much you were being treated like a "customer". As a "human being", I couldn't say. heh|
Originally Posted by Feycat
I was not given any consideration as a human being in that Wargame, believe me! Have you played it? LOL
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According to Thinkexist.com, it was Will Rogers who said "A stranger is just a friend I haven't met yet." Whether he did or did not invent that old saw, it's applicability in a business like CoH:Freedom is "A Freem is just a Customer whose money I haven't taken yet."
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And that's a bad attitude to take. I firmly believe that the first step towards coercing a Free player into becoming a Premium player is to get them to stick around and invest time into the game. People who get into "free" to play games don't do so with the same mentality as a player who out-and-out purchases a game. They get into these games, a lot of the time, to see if they're worth playing to begin with. If you can convince a player that, yes, THIS game really is worth playing, only then can you realistically go out and start convincing said player to pay money, too.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
People who do not pay to play the game are not customers.
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I've already paid money to a variety of "free" to play MMOs, from Spiral Knights to World of Tanks, and almost every time this has happened several days to a week after I first started playing them. If I wasn't having fun with said games, I'd never have gotten to the point where I felt like the games were fun enough to invest money in.
Treating Free players like garbage is a bad way to get them to become Premium players. You can't run a "free" to play game the same way you run a game which requires you to purchase it first. That makes the Free option meaningless.
*edit*
And on the subject of the villain experience, I'll try to express my stance in a single sentence:
Playing villain-side should make me leave a session as happy as if I've played hero-side. And right now, it's intentionally designed to do the complete opposite.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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It's my contention that treating customers in that fashion is bad for business. There's only so much damage that a really determined troll can cause in this game. This isn't Everquest or WoW where one person can wipe a once-a-week raid for 100 people. The current limits on communication already accomplish all of the necessary policing. I don't see why newbies need to be prevented from forming teams also.