26 replies to this topic

[Noccifer]

On one hand I've been waiting for a new MechWarrior for a long, long time and got super excited at the announcement trailer...

But on the other, I loathe F2P games--the whole concept is just garbage--and if I have to put down a penny to get bigger boots than the next guy, I'd consider the game a failiure.

I'd happily put 60 bucks down for a full game, especially if it's MechWarrior, but I'm telling you in advance, I'm not gonna buy any kind of cosmetic crap with real money, nor am I gonna buy a mech or weapons with real money.

If it's not available through playing normally (by normally I mean not painfully slow and weak like most F2P games, which basically forces you to buy their stuff to even compete), then you can forget it.

I mean, the prospect of no single player alone should be enough to deter me from even being interested in this venture, but I love this franchise too much to see it fade to this.

Can someone convince me that, in an age where people actually buy apple computer's garbage, tweet their personal information and consider angry birds and call of duty to be real games, that MWO won't be a colossal waste of time or stain on the franchise?

[GaussDragon]

Start here:

http://mwomercs.com/...e-free-to-play/

[Noccifer]

So, cookie-cutter PR, brilliant.

It says most of the things you want to hear, without the specifics.

Not impressed.

[Kaemon]

Noccifer, on 06 February 2012 - 08:42 PM, said:

On one hand I've been waiting for a new MechWarrior for a long, long time and got super excited at the announcement trailer...

But on the other, I loathe F2P games--the whole concept is just garbage--and if I have to put down a penny to get bigger boots than the next guy, I'd consider the game a failiure.

I'd happily put 60 bucks down for a full game, especially if it's MechWarrior, but I'm telling you in advance, I'm not gonna buy any kind of cosmetic crap with real money, nor am I gonna buy a mech or weapons with real money.

If it's not available through playing normally (by normally I mean not painfully slow and weak like most F2P games, which basically forces you to buy their stuff to even compete), then you can forget it.

I mean, the prospect of no single player alone should be enough to deter me from even being interested in this venture, but I love this franchise too much to see it fade to this.

Can someone convince me that, in an age where people actually buy apple computer's garbage, tweet their personal information and consider angry birds and call of duty to be real games, that MWO won't be a colossal waste of time or stain on the franchise?

For you, probably not, for the rest of us, if it's within a reasonable framework of a sustainable microtransaction model, then yes.

Because we're flexible, we have hope and we are working toward making it a better game, not using our first post to cry and complain that it's going to be a waste of time.

Because we take the time to repaint mechs, talk to the devs, create a very nice podcast, internet radio station, and constantly defend the forums from posts like this.

We fight the good fight against P2W in any form, we badger and pester and speculate on every word the devs say, we offer constructive criticism and crazy off the wall conjucture and wishlists, because in there somewhere a nugget of gold may reside.

We are building a community here, you're welcome to join it and give it a shot, or you're welcome to go play Amored Core 5 when it comes out and cry that you wish the game was more immersive.

[Lorcan Lladd]

What this game requires is to be comercially viable when its license is all but unknown by most modern gamers, and its gameplay abhorrent to this very same gamer majority.
Do you know of any format other than free-to-play which could achieve this?

[Cattra Kell]

They have already said that everything you can buy with real money you can get with in game currency, not even that but if you buy a mech with real money you still have to level it up (the investment of time).

The Devs are all familiar with battletech and play the TT in office (or so we know of one or two instances of this).

They hired FlyingDebris.

They have Russ and the support of S&T.

Read around the forums and the developer blogs, everyone is in high spirits and we get threads like this quite a bit. I say just read the developer blogs, the FAQ, and other communities have to say (such as MechSpecs and NGNG).

Edited by Cattra Kell, 06 February 2012 - 09:02 PM.

[Tryg]

With the game still in the development stage, they have little to offer in the way of hard specifics, anything they say right now has the potential to be altered or removed by launch, so as a company, it is far easier to offer little more then hints.

As for the free-to-play setup, it has a great deal of people concerned, the pay-to-win style that most of these style of games wind up with is rather rancid to people who play to enjoy the game.

However, in that same regard, more then once I've dropped $60 on a retail game release....and wished I hadn't. And unlike with console games, most PC games can't be resold once you've used the security key. The difference is, a game built on a free-to-play setup will have continued support from the development team, so there's the possibility that if something at the launch isn't right, they can fix it, unlike in retail games where, if its broke, it's very likely to remain that way and you just have to cross your fingers and pray enough people have issues to coax them into releasing a patch.

No 'pay scale' of game is perfect. But the system of buying games isn't what makes or breaks a game. Its the development of it. Done right, the free-to-play, pay-to-play subscriptions, or retail purchases can all succeed. Done poorly, any one of those can fail miserably.

[RynCage]

At the end of the day, you will need to wait untill the game comes out before you can confirm if it is P2W or not.
Yes, "everything you can buy with real money you can get with in game currency", But how much in game currency, and how fast you gain in game currency has not been established, And can very easily still make this a P2W experiance.
But it is good to know that everything important is available to a non-paying gamer.

Time will tell.

[Noccifer]

Lorcan Lladd, on 06 February 2012 - 08:57 PM, said:

What this game requires is to be comercially viable when its license is all but unknown by most modern gamers, and its gameplay abhorrent to this very same gamer majority.
Do you know of any format other than free-to-play which could achieve this?

(Going to ignore the previous reply, just letting you know that)

Frankly, I don't know. But there's gotta be a better solution than this.

Mechwarrior was always a full game and it was part of it's charm.

Selling it in cut up pieces just sounds like DLC and that created a horrible trend.

Setting a franchise in this direction may well mean it will never be possible to make a full game again because of a predicted profit gap.


I just don't like this.

Maybe season passes or something: pay the price of a full game, get all the stuff released that year or something. IDK

[Ravn]

Rename this thread to Negative Nancy. Give the devs and game a chance. At most you will be out zero dollars.

[Orzorn]

I played League of Legends for over two years since its first days of beta.

I never spent a dime on it.

I had 100 wins over losses and was rated 1600 and would have kept climbing but had other duties to attend to in real life.

Not all free to play games are the same. League of Legends is probably the best example of a free to play game where spending money doesn't give you jack for an advantage. You literally can't buy runes with real life money, so that's out the window. The only thing you CAN buy with real money is heroes, and those can be earned in about 20 or so good games of play (about a weekend) if you don't want to spend any money. You can buy rune pages, but that's a very very very small advantage, since you can just switch out runes before each game if you expect to play the same hero every game, not to mention, rune pages can also be earned as well.

In fact, the only thing in League of Legends that you absolutely could not purchase with the in-game currency was character skins, which cost anywhere from 4-15 dollars (the high end was for "Legendary Skins", which not only reskinned the character, but changed the visual effects of the character along with their audio lines. It was still the same character with the same moves, just differently styled).

I got tired of how Riot balanced League (poorly), but they never screwed up with their purchase system. You didn't have to spend a dime to be competetive, and spending any kind of money didn't really give an edge at all, since all it did was speed up how fast you got those small bonuses (that everyone else got as well).

[Tryg]

They originally tried to get backing for a full retail release game. That didn't wind up coming through. So instead they're going to try something different and see if they can manage it.

As has been said, try it, if it isn't to your liking, you're not out anything. And if your preference is so strongly against a purely online pvp environment, and would have preferred no game be released... then don't play. To you, it will be as if no game had been released. To the rest of us, we can still enjoy the new system they're building and hey, if its successful, perhaps they will eventually create PVE content for it.

[Demi-Precentor Konev]

Noccifer, on 06 February 2012 - 08:42 PM, said:

buy apple computer's garbage, tweet their personal information and consider angry birds and call of duty to be real games

I have an iPod. I use Twitter to follow people in the gaming industry. I haven't played CoD since MW1, but MW1 was genuinely enjoyable.

Honestly? You sound like you need to relax a bit - too much of the Haterade. F2P is a model that can work. Tribes: Ascend is probably the best current example. You're approaching this all wrong.

[Noccifer]

Cattra Kell, on 06 February 2012 - 08:58 PM, said:

They have already said that everything you can buy with real money you can get with in game currency, not even that but if you buy a mech with real money you still have to level it up (the investment of time).

The Devs are all familiar with battletech and play the TT in office (or so we know of one or two instances of this).

They hired FlyingDebris.

They have Russ and the support of S&T.

Read around the forums and the developer blogs, everyone is in high spirits and we get threads like this quite a bit. I say just read the developer blogs, the FAQ, and other communities have to say (such as MechSpecs and NGNG).

I've read around a bit, but most of my thoughts are "YES!" then "NO!" and so on.

Yes, new and interesting ways to interact with the fiction and I'm sure it will be mostly good and all.

No, don't take me into the murky territory of odd pricing models, I'd almost rather pay a subcription to avoid the hassle.

As somewhat of a game design scholar, I think the likelyhood of pulling off a F2P game that makes sense seems slim.

But we'll see.

Tryg, on 06 February 2012 - 09:00 PM, said:

With the game still in the development stage, they have little to offer in the way of hard specifics, anything they say right now has the potential to be altered or removed by launch, so as a company, it is far easier to offer little more then hints.

As for the free-to-play setup, it has a great deal of people concerned, the pay-to-win style that most of these style of games wind up with is rather rancid to people who play to enjoy the game.

However, in that same regard, more then once I've dropped $60 on a retail game release....and wished I hadn't. And unlike with console games, most PC games can't be resold once you've used the security key. The difference is, a game built on a free-to-play setup will have continued support from the development team, so there's the possibility that if something at the launch isn't right, they can fix it, unlike in retail games where, if its broke, it's very likely to remain that way and you just have to cross your fingers and pray enough people have issues to coax them into releasing a patch.

No 'pay scale' of game is perfect. But the system of buying games isn't what makes or breaks a game. Its the development of it. Done right, the free-to-play, pay-to-play subscriptions, or retail purchases can all succeed. Done poorly, any one of those can fail miserably.

We all agree that P2W is garbage, but the rest of the time it's just developer incompetence.

You know, a shiny new gimmick in a game or a way to do business (DRM, P2W, etc) comes up and everyone tries to copy it and fail miserably at making it interesting outside the original frame. Then 10 years later someone figures out that it will never work and it suddenly makes sense.

But I digress.

What I'm saying is I just hope they know what they're doing.

RynCage, on 06 February 2012 - 09:08 PM, said:

At the end of the day, you will need to wait untill the game comes out before you can confirm if it is P2W or not.
Yes, "everything you can buy with real money you can get with in game currency", But how much in game currency, and how fast you gain in game currency has not been established, And can very easily still make this a P2W experiance.
But it is good to know that everything important is available to a non-paying gamer.

Time will tell.

It would be great if developers followed through with their promises, but I'm not familiar with Piranha, so excuse my hesitance.

At the end of the day, we all want to just hop on a mech and fry other people and the measure of sucess will be how little the paying system feels like youre being legged.

[Elizander]

I like fruits but I really dislike oranges compared to other fruits. All fruits should be more like apples and bananas. Oranges really rub me the wrong way and I would never ever want to eat it for both aesthetic and moral reasons. Can someone convince me why I should eat something I have already decided (and clearly stated) to dislike?

Edited by Elizander, 06 February 2012 - 09:35 PM.

[Noccifer]

Tryg, on 06 February 2012 - 09:16 PM, said:

They originally tried to get backing for a full retail release game. That didn't wind up coming through. So instead they're going to try something different and see if they can manage it.

As has been said, try it, if it isn't to your liking, you're not out anything. And if your preference is so strongly against a purely online pvp environment, and would have preferred no game be released... then don't play. To you, it will be as if no game had been released. To the rest of us, we can still enjoy the new system they're building and hey, if its successful, perhaps they will eventually create PVE content for it.

Yeah, that's what I understand. No partners for full release.

It's a super negative train of thought, but what I'm seeing is if this works, it's always gonna (likely) be this way and if it doesn't it's never gonna happen again (Mechwarrior that is).

And that would make me sad.

That's just corporations.

[Noccifer]

Elizander, on 06 February 2012 - 09:34 PM, said:

I like fruits but I really dislike oranges compared to other fruits. All fruits should be more like apples and bananas. Oranges really rub me the wrong way and I would never ever want to eat it for both aesthetic and moral reasons. Can someone convince me why I should eat something I have already decided (and clearly stated) to dislike?

Help, my orange is suddenly blue, tastes like strawberry and has non-optional multiplayer.

[Noccifer]

lahyenne, on 06 February 2012 - 09:20 PM, said:

I have an iPod. I use Twitter to follow people in the gaming industry. I haven't played CoD since MW1, but MW1 was genuinely enjoyable.

Honestly? You sound like you need to relax a bit - too much of the Haterade. F2P is a model that can work. Tribes: Ascend is probably the best current example. You're approaching this all wrong.

Yeah, maybe I'll just sleep on it.

But I maintain my comments about these things >:|

[BarHaid]

Here's an experiment. Put sixty bucks aside; and when the game comes out, play your heart out. Buy stuff that looks cool. Enjoy yourself. And when the sixty bucks run out ask yourself, "Was it worth it? How long did my money last?" Heck, just put thirty away and pretend it was a used game. Relax. This'll be the first online game I've ever played, and I gotta tell you, the pay structure is the least of my worries.

[Ryokin]

I recently started playing All Point Bulletin since it went f2p. If this game has a similar system like the one in that game I do not see and issue. Basically there were several options of things to by and one option to subscribe. The subscribe allowed you to level faster and earn bonus income, and acted as more of a convenience then anything else. As for weapons there were 30 day options and permanent options. You could by a perma weapon with upgrades for a decent amount of cash or by a temp weapon for a much less rate. These weapons were on par with weapons already in the game. What the bought weapons did was save you some in game cash and allow you access to upgrades to the weapons. Understand though, upgrades for weapons in APB does not give you a better weapon, it merely gives up something to get something making a more tailored weapon. My point with this though is that one could just as easily get it in the regular game through well paced unlocks. Basically in that game the F2P option is nothing more then a convenience. If you suck, you still suck even with all the bought weapons unlocked.