dark-side-free-play-gaming good article what do you think

http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged...194851996.html

Kind of interesting article, but not a real eye opener. More appropriate title might be "The obvious side of Free to Play"

I read that this morning, and i'm glad our game wasn't hammered.

I understand from a financial standpoint that there should be restrictions for free players, however, i do think they could have been less restrictive of the talk options.
I said this many times, and i'll say it again:
If a free player makes a global friend, that means that two parties accepted a friendship, no reason to keep them from sending tells to each other.
This will not give a RMT spammer free access to annoy VIPs, but it would allow free players to ask their friends for advice, help or ask if they want to join a team.

I have seen it a few times that i just teamed up with a free player, and he didn't even know what team chat was, since he only used help and local chat.

Restricting chat is a big no no in my book. Limits should be in place, i totally agree, but cut the poor free players some slack and stop cutting their vocal cords till they cough up some cash.
I bet you'll get more people to try VIP if they could actually talk.

Regarding content:
the basic game (Heroes/Villains) is playable for free players, and that is a boat load of content. I totally understand that the Going Rogue, Invention, AE system and Incarnate contents are locked. And ONLY the Incarnate content is locked for Premium players, the rest can either be unlocked due to Tier progress, or there is a license that people can buy.
No complaints what so ever.

They even opened up most of the forums for Free and Premium players, another great move.

I also suspect that even though VIPs have the faster Customer Service when needed, Free and Premium still have a solid Customer Service experience when they need it too.
CS has been problematic in the last few years. Slow response, limited help, but i have noticed, even before i21 came out, that they are doing their best to improve upon it.
These people are doing their best to help us, and some of them are newer to this great game than the players. All we need to do to make it better for the both of us, treat each other with respect, be patient and be thorough. The more info you can supply in a ticket, the faster they can start looking for an answer, before they even get in contact with you.
If you think they are slow, mind you that you are probably not the only one in need of help, and they are limited in staff, be patient, and they will help out.
I always say thank you for your quick response when they talk to me in game, esp when they contact me within 15 minutes. If they take a bit longer, i still thank them for their response. They could have easily left it to the e-mail part, however they still made the effort to get in game and see if we still need help.

This said, i think CoX is starting to stand out with their hybrid model.
Yes, they could still make some changes here and there, get a few things sorted out, and don't think they don't know that. Rome wasn't build in a day, so we need to give them a little time and respect, because they do care, and they have proven to us that they do listen to us, esp when it really matters.

We can't always get what we want, they are more than willing to compensate, so should we.

What's most interesting is how little of that seems to apply to CoH... especially the pay-to-win section. (So far at least...)

I am concerned, though. Not about griefers, but about subscribers. There just doesn't seem to be that many. I know a lot more vips that let their sub lapse because the rewards program gives them everything but incarnate stuff (long term vets)

And it's the incarnate stuff that I want to do. I even transferred a couple of my toons to more populated servers - but I found that those servers weren't as populated as I thought! It still took over 15 minutes to get a league of 10 together just to do a Lambda.

Personally, I don't mind the f2p. But as far as I'm concerned the level 14 restriction - they should have kept that for f2p. Let premium cap at 25 or 35. There needs to be more of a carrot to lure old vips and new freebies and premiums into subscribing.

Times are tough, as we all know. But the game should not be as free as it is.
I sure would like to know how many new subscriptions have started since f2p. That would really give us an indication of whether the model is working. (and what's the % of sales compared to subs)

I wonder if I'm one of those whales mentioned in the article.

Often I buy extra points around $50 or $100 at a time while also subscribing. not so often now that I have mostly everything. If I were out of reward points when the next 3 for the 9th tier costume unlocked, I'd spend $50 for them.

I quite like the system we have, and I've played lots of free games in the past that had the issues listed in the article. The only main issues I noticed through most of them were unbalanced pvp or getting around level40 or something then being too underpowered to continue. Most of those games are grindy anyway, like a certain MMO that is often compared to.

CoH does it pretty well, they probably make a lot of profit from it, which lets them bring out more and more content much faster than before. Things ranging from powersets, costumes and random other things(flying carpets) are coming out much more often thanks to our system I think.

I've seen some systems where you had to pay like 40c to be able to type one thing into global chat(actual global, not CoH global) before. So going upto premium for permanent chat bonuses is better than that, and premiums don't seem to mind their chat features. I haven't really noticed it being an issue to freemiums, but then again, I mostly play on Exalted.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=249085

the reason i posted this because I knew this was coming it had to based upon other posts i made and saw the writing on the wall.


Do you think the posts in this thread are any indication about what happend in this article vs. what happend to our game.

The article in question deliberately sets out to paint a scary picture of free-to-play, and succeeds at it since it considers only potential negatives and several extreme examples of those negatives.

I'm not sure what else to say about it. It has an agenda and it achieves it. It's only going to be alarming to anyone who can't see that it's fulfilling an agenda. Maybe it will make some people be more selective about their "free" MMO's.

I'm not really sure why the article was written, frankly, other than to fill space. It doesn't offer any sort of objective analysis or advice. It's 100% FUD for no particular reason other than to scare MMO newbies and/or parents of MMO newbies.

"It's 10pm. Do you know what YOUR MMO is doing?"