Is GW2 the new business model for MMO's?

B2P ("buy to play")

It's a good model, and may well be the way forward, even for top-tier titles (if GW2 is any indication). GW1 has worked out well, with an up front cost and then only very large, campaign-level updates requiring purchase (other updates are free, and download from the patcher like a subscription game). The cash shop stuff is pretty much just utility and vanity items.

I stand corrected, but I was mostly talking about the buy the box and play free model. I don't think I even knew they eventually added a shop to GW.

I must bitterly point out this is already the case.
Two words: Mistfire (F@#$%ing) Wolf. And if you're unaware, those stats are pretty damn good.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Er, they're a little less than twice as good as a Hound of Balthazar, which is a corresponding human elite which gives you two Hounds compared to one wolf.

And really, I'll pass on a 30 second DPS pet elite that I have to pay money for, considering the better pets and awesome support/form powers the professions already get naturally. The only reason I even considered it was for looks.

And the Hounds aren't even really that good. The racial skills generally aren't fantastic. So the Mistfire Wolf compares favourably to a racial elite skill that is, by design, not supposed to wow you. That doesn't sound like Pay2Win to me.

The Hounds are actually quite good in practice. Every dungeon group I've been in has used them.

You know, I didn't even find that out until recently.

I've often wondered if people look at F2P models differently depending on whether or not they were subscribed beforehand. I only came to LOTRO after F2P came in so and I've no complaints - though I see a ton of criticism of it from long term players on their forums - whereas as a former subscriber to CoH before F2P I find the CoH model lacking.

Just an idle thought.

True, but as even the most ardent CoH fan will likely admit, the vanilla game is the weakest part of it - a lot of the old zones are still rather clunky, especially blueside, and basically all of what I'd call the 'modernised' parts of the game - Praetoria, SSAs, the alignment system, IOs and Incarnates - are VIP and/or cash shop only.

I think by now it's clear that exec wanted the game out in 2011. It does not matter if the dev team says it won’t be ready until Sep 2012, the guys up top set the deadlines and GameStop had to announce a quarter delay on the game (they dont speculate this stuff, usually when GameStop makes plan for preorders and floor shelf space, its because they were given a date.)

My point is not that they can’t do work fast, it's that the entire quality of work, art assets and code, have gone up so high in GW2 that it will take them way longer to produce huge content expansion packs.

We can't take GW1's track record as evidence of the capabilities of speed to expand GW2.

A huge part of the success of GW1 was that each expansion (but the last one) was a full stand-alone experience that was as complete as the original game itself. GW2 is much more ambitious than the original GW, and I think it's nearly unrealistic to expect a GW expansion next year that is as large as the base GW2 game is.

Again you look at the past. This is not going to be entirely up to ArenaNet, this will be dictated by NCSoft. Eventually, they will be demanded to do so. It's the road the company has been taking with their games in the last year and they will likely keep pushing further that path. Would not be shocked to see more pay-to-win things added to GW1 in the next 2 years, btw.

First we need to see at least 3 years of consecutive expansions being released without delays.

I find that may be true. I know when LOTRO went F2P there were several moves that many of us could only describe as "hostile" to the veteran playerbase, as if they were trying to get rid of people who remembered how the game used to work so they could remake it entirely. It certainly left a bad taste in my mouth. I had a few friends who came to try out the free game, but it was so crippling that they quit in short order.

I actually can't entirely agree with that. To me, the blueside revamped zones are my favorite content, the ones with several NPCs that make up a story tree - Faultline, Croatoa, Striga, RWZ - and leveling up just by taking these zones one to the next is my preferred method. SSA is basically just for grinding hero merits - the writing is clunky and the story's only interesting the first time - and if you don't have access to IOs, you don't need HMs. Praetoria's a well-made set of zones, but since they're really just flashier version of the zones with built-in storylines, you don't miss much if you don't have them.

However, I would not play without IOs, that's for sure. But a new player doesn't know the difference, and DOs/SOs worked for me for years, before I knew the difference.

The Incarnate system was anathema to me in every way. Putting WoW's grindy old raiding end-game in COH is what made me drop to Premium. It was the only thing I couldn't access, and I hated it. I thought it ruined the game.

The people with 10 year old Duke Nukem Forever gamestop preorders will probably beg to differ. And I've never been under the impression that Gamestop, Amazon, or any such sites "don't speculate on this stuff". They tend to be wrong a lot, and in reference to GW2, the devs had to answer questions constantly about when the release would be, and had to keep noting that any third party sites claiming a release date were speculative, and that no date had yet been given.

Um, okay. You can't just say "we have to ignore all of the past seven years of ANet's behavior in managing their game, but we'll look at the past year of NCSoft's corporate influence over a variety of games that their management ostensibly oversees in different capacities from game to game". Especially since ArenaNet has, in the past, had a fairly independent relationship with their publisher, as they've said in several interviews. This is an especially suspicious request since you only want to consider past behavior that you feel supports your argument.

But hey, if you want to totally ignore the past behavior of the company and think there's no point in discussing this until we see 3 years of consecutive expansions, or whether GW1 will see pay-to-win things added to GW1 in the next two years (and again, any pay-to-win, not MORE, because Merc slots are hardly pay-to-win), then that's cool. We can just end this discussion here and pick it back up in three years, because without any past info to work from, you're just engaging in baseless speculation.

I'm actively playing it now... and on the whole I get where you are coming from but I wouldn't call it a bad game... just a poor MMO.

While there's the occasional teaming and the market, I'm largely playing it as a solo game and loving it. I loved KotOR, and see this as a great sequel, and it has everything that Bioware has done well in solo games (except I really want more than 3 dialogue options). That probably reinforces your point that when I run out of new story, the shine will fall off, but it'll go F2P about then and I won't have to pay more, which will be nice...

But, outside Bioware's established space I can say I see that it is limited in the grindy/grindy space

And customization is somewhat limited. Adequate ranges of customization for a solo game don't hold up well when everyone runs by looking like you do... CoH has definitely spoiled me in that respect.

Yeah, I'd say Bioware had an opportunity to redefine the MMO space the same way they did the solo story games, and missed the boat.


(In a perfect world, full Bioware story telling ability techniques with CoH customization and loot/market model running in a nice pretty enivonrment/model engine like the Secret World's.)

Yeah, I think I've said before I would have loved it as a single-player or co-op LAN type game. But as an MMO, not so much.

I didn't say to ignore the past, but y ou cant use GW1 as reference due to how much more complex GW1 is.

Also, you cant look at the past on business desissions when the current model business for the company has drastically changed since then.

Tell that to all the employees reviewing the company badly, and tell that to Paragon Studios.

To be clear: short term past behavior (since the present is the past by the time it hits our brain.) Look at the mothership. Look what it is doing currently with all its IPs. Don't use references from what they did 5 years ago. Think 1 year ago tops.

Frankly, I'd rather play City of Heroes without some of the Market perks, specifically without Inventions. I like the game considerably more before them, and for a while that even gave me the excuse to argue that they shouldn't be required for content... Until Incarnates, which require a VIP subscription to play, thus guarantee you'll have access to inventions. There goes my excuse...

As for the Guild Wars model? Eh, if it works, why not? I get to pay less, generally speaking, so why would I refuse? I just have my doubts on how it even works.

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.

It has worked in the past. There's no reason to doubt it will work in the future. GW1 was a successful game, and GW2 is being run by the exact same studio.

The only thing that might throw a wrench in it is NCSoft, but you know, GW2 is doing really well. NCSoft has yet to strangle a cash cow.

Sure. We can do that.

GW2 has been an NCSoft game for its entire 5 year development cycle, including the past year. They were committed to having an in game store without pay-to-win items that entire time, including in the past year. They have launched the game while under NCSoft's watchful eye and released the gem store's basic stock, IIRC, weeks before pre-purchases began, well before they knew what sort of monetary return they would get on their investment. The gem store has not included any pay-to-win items to date, in spite of it being an NCSoft title in active development of everything - including the initial content of said store - for the entirety of the past year.

So. Going by the past year, I guess we have no reason to worry about them adding pay-to-win items! That does make it a lot easier to end this debate, you're right.

Same. I'm not and never have been an endgame player, and for a time - I19 and I20 in particular - it felt like all Incarnates all the time, to the exclusion of the rest of the game. That said, I always intended to come back, though as it turned out, out of game factors kept me away longer than planned.

The annoying thing is, coming back now and looking at what's been added to the game since Freedom, it feels like the devs have (had?) got to the point where the Incarnate system was fitting in with the rest of the ongoing development rather than overshadowing it. Personally, I'm a lot happier with the direction the game is going in now compared to a year or two ago, or would be if it wasn't for... y'know... the whole shutdown thing.