Sesambrot, on 03 February 2012 - 07:03 AM, said:
Christ, why can't one have a serious discussion about something, without being called a "Fanboy" as soon as you bring up some other game as an example?[...]
Um, I don't go by the name of "Christ"
, but to address your point, the "fanboy" part was aimed towards claiming the "big success" which WoT is definitely not on the NA market. Main reason IMHO being the joke that is WarGimping's so-called "customer relations". But let's keep it at that, my admittedly slightly snarky "fanboy" remark had to do with specific WoT-ish matters.
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I'm not trying to talk you into trying WoT, as stated already, I stopped playing it a while ago, because of the campfest this game turns into later on. I for one haven't paid anything for WoT ever, and yet I have never found that someone had an unfair advantage over me because they paid for something. I also never said that the model they're using is perfect, but still way better than the one of most F2Ps out there!
I'll also repeate that, what you nay-sayers seem to ignore, that even tho certain items can be accquired which give players an advantage, those advantages are not gamebreaking. That said while being on the recieving end all of the time.
Okay then, guess I have to clarify my position. I happen to still be acting commander in one of the bigger (sub-)clans in WoT, while at the same time being an occasional vocal critic. Having been on and off with WoT since early closed beta, I think I have a rather decent grip on what's going on there. And, basing on that, I respectfully disagree with the "not gamebreaking" part. Could link you a very recent thread on the NA forums there, but as you quit already, not really worth it.
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Anyways, this is not about WoT, but the payment model, and I cant say anything about LoL because I haven't ever played it and am not interessted in it tbh. WoT actually does a lot of things right, while some others may be still questionable, but over all it works and is successfull, I wonder how you'd try to deny that!
Simple numbers. The parent company boasts about something like "4 million active accounts". Nice make-believe there, as an account in WoT never becomes "inactive" unless you get a permaban. So every account ever created, even those that were never used to play a single match goes into those 4 millions. Also accounts inactive for a year or longer now. If you look at the actual player numbers at peak times on the NA server, you get on average of about 20K players. And that on a server who caters to both americas, north and south, and the whole oceanic area except china. 20K players and change for that area is "successful"?
Numbers for their euro server are slightly better, but their real mainstay is the russian server. And we can surely agree that the "market" in russia is slightly different from the NA one, can't we? Thus despite whatever WG claims, I wouldn't rate WoT as a big success, except for russia.
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Anyway, all I'm trying to point out is, (and don't you dare ignore that once again!
) that most upcoming f2p-titles seem move into the right direction with the model, with WoT,
HatFortress2, and LoL examples for that. And since it seems to be going that direction even further I don't think we'll have to worry that much.
Feel free to disagree with any of those examples, but the underlying point remains valid!
Oh, I don't disagree about the hopes for efficient F2P models per say. I just think WoT is a particularily unsuitable model unless you want to show how to do things wrong for the international market. I could actually quote someone who used to work for WG/WoT on details, but that doesn't belong here really. I'll leave it at that, WoT has actually become more Pay2Win in the last months and thus should not serve as an example for F2P games.
Especially not if you want to put any effort into amiable relations with your playerbase/community, like PGI is IMHO making. You don't need a psychology degree to see implications of that (though it might help a little, hehe). I'd also like to state again that the market for subscription-based/mixed models is by far not as barren as it may seem. Especially with the mixed payment models there is still a huge potential if you can just find the right mix.
If any of those is the "right direction", like you put it, remains to be seen, though. It is not like the computer gaming industry determines the economical factors on a multinational level, so with eventual changes there we might very well experience a rollback. Just to bring up the one scenario where the whole credit card industry goes downhill due to another major financial crisis. That might require to go new ways in how tro get the payment for microtransactions. Heck, even these days it isn't all that easy to rely on credit cards solely, outside of North America. Think about the big deal Steam/Valve struck with that national russian provider of direct payment, Xsolla (think that is the correctly transcribed spelling). So it is still a system "in flux", and by no means in just one predetermined direction.
Edited by Dlardrageth, 03 February 2012 - 08:50 AM.
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