Chances are good they're going to fail miserably during the conversion so that it's not up to Free to Play standards either. Global Agenda had that problem, so did LOTRO and DDO - wherein, the free users are second class citizens who don't have any access to the majority of the game's content. Pretty much any game that goes from paid subscription to F2P runs into these issues, whereas something like League of Legends does it quite well due to being built from the ground up as a F2P model.
I enjoyed playing LotRO for a while. The two classes that were unavailable felt a little sucky but I was okay with that. The main thing that turned me off was the fact that after your two starting areas you had to pay to unlock quests. I was enjoying it, it was possible to earn 'paid for' currency by doing achievments, it just wasn't possible to earn enough to keep questing unless you did them repeatedly on numerous alts across multiple servers.
*shrug* It entertained me for a time, and was a decent way to 'demo' the game. I'll give DC universe a shot. Probably won't get heavily invested in it but hey, superheroes are awsome! ;p
That's more or less what I was getting at. It's not just quests you have to pay for, later on it's entire instances, and the ability to use a mount. We're not just talking the random bits of DLC, either, we're talking no heroics and no end game instances whatsoever if you aren't paying money. That's not free to play. They really get you with the mount, though. At level twenty everyone gets the quest that lets them get their racial mount... and you get to ride around a bit, before being told that you actually have to buy the riding skill. You have to buy the fast travel system, and that is a recurring payment to keep using it after a few weeks - no flight masters unless you pay every month
Global Agenda has the same sorta problem. You can't get any random loot from dungeons unless you pay, and they show you exactly what you're missing out on every time. You also only get a fraction of the XP and in-game money if you're F2P. You have to pay to use the auction house, and you have to pay to use the mail system - you can't directly trade items, so even if someone mails you something, you can't open the incoming package unless you pay.
I understand they've gotta make a profit off it, but come on. If the game isn't playable for free, it's not free to play. Charging players for essential capabilities and saying "Lulz, it's free!" isn't fair at all. I'm not even going to bother with DC Online, because of how frequently developers screw up F2P transitions. Champions Online I think it was went free too, maybe City of Heroes.. but I'm still not going to bother. Also, I'm not very fond of DC Comics to start with, their superheroes always seemed kinda meh compared to the Marvel ones.
You could buy a mount with points earned from achievements. There wasn't anything in the game that you couldn't buy with their point system. So, depending on how much you wanted to grind you could get access to all content for free. You just had to work at it.
Also, fast travel you paid gold for if I recall correctly. There was a person you just needed to talk to? It didn't really matter for me since I was a ranger and basically had teleports to towns soooo.... :D
I may be misremembering parts since I didn't actually bother playing once I saw how much of a hassle it'd all be. Still, I did read an article about a guy who managed to unlock all the content using currency he acquired ingame - it took him several years, and he had to wait for everything to go on sale to purchase it otherwise it would have taken even longer. The point of a Free to Play setup is to massively increase your playerbase - if someone takes one look at how little they can actually access and decides not to bother, the free to play model obviously isn't working for your game. This was my reaction to LOTRO, and it's how I felt after playing Global Agenda and DDO for a few days each.
This is what I like about League of Legends, and why it's an example of F2P done right. There are no ways that you can spend currency to outright buy an advantage over other players, and the only things you can't get from playing the game a coupla times a day are wholly cosmetic or simply convenient. In addition to that, a certain amount of content is free each week, and rotated so that people can always try something new, to test someone before spending points or money - I only own about half the game's content, but to be honest I'm not really interested in the rest. In other attempts at F2P, generally ones done during a conversion, a lot of the locked content is necessary to actually do well in the game, or advance beyond a certain threshold.
You never get that sense of the F2P system being futile in LoL, simply because the goals are easily achievable in game - it might take me a week to unlock the highest tier of character, but I don't have to do it to be successful, and it's never impressed upon you that you'd be a lot better off just spending money. Contrast that with not having enough quests or instances to level up without spending enormous amounts of time farming for them, or outright spending money. Oddly enough it's a much more effective method of getting people to pay in the first place - out of spite I never spent money on DDO/LOTRO/GA, but Riot convinced me they deserved something like 60-70$ at this point without ever even hinting that they wanted it. I like having the choice.
From what I can tell with DC universe from their website (http://www.dcuniverseonline.com/free/) a free acount has less character slots, inventory space, bank space, can't trade, and can't post on AH. If you spend 5 dollars on anything it bumps you up to more slots all around, trading items, etc. Otherwise it looks like I have full access to all game content.
There is a DLC that gives you access to 'light' as a super power (Green latern) as well as what I think are 3 Arenas, maybe dungeons. The open world and quests seem to be fully available. I'm not able to do 'Legends' PvP arena as to start it you need to get an item out of your mail. Haven't gotten too far in yet. If I do hit a brick wall I can stop and have a couple hours of free entertainment out of it.
I dont mind the money I spent buying it and paying for the month of time that I did. I recommend to anyone give it a try its worth going thru the quest lines and story stuff as well as the personal instances. Despite Biowares claim I think this DCU is the first fully voiced MMO. If it isnt fully voiced its pretty damn close. Running thru the city with the various travel powers engaging in open world pvp was some of my favorite times in MMOs. The only thing that drove me off was lack of end game content and some game breaking animation bugs and exploits in the combat system.
Well, its SOE so of course they're going to miss the point. They do it every step of the way, right from the start. If ever you wanted a guide on what not to do to run an online game company you need only look at their history. Look at their attempt to make EQ2 free to play.
Four tiers of membership; bronze totally free, silver a one-time $10 charge, gold is $15.99 a month, and platnium is $199 annually. If you're totally free you can't even use all the chat channels. That's right, you cannot even talk to anyone who isn't standing right next to you. Gotta question? Hope you know how to find the forum and are willing to wait for a response, new player. Also bronze and silver cannot use the auction house and are severly limited on much money their characters can even have. Imagine being limited to only having 5 plat on you in WoW at any time, that's about what you can carry as a bronze player. And if you like to craft good luck selling your stuff without being able to use auctions, unless you wanna pay for auction tokens. Silver at least gets to use some chat channels and can buy from the auction house.
Gold is a bit better, except that you still have to purchase most of the classes and races still. You get that with paying the same rate as the players on the non-free server do and they have no class or race restrictions.
SOE has missed the key point to that Escapist video that was posted here; players are content. If free players can chat then it means new players can ask questions and form groups and join guilds. If they can use the auction house that gives the paying players a bigger market to sell to and buy from. But SOE doesn't understand this. Just as they spent the last four years of the life of SWG trying to make it into WoW without realizing the reason for WoW's success has more to do with polish and lack of bugs than go here kill 10 of this quests.
Well. I downloaded and installed it. It's incredibly grindy and already fairly repetitive, but I'm assuming that's because I don't have many abilities unlocked. Tried doing a Nature-based hero with a bow and Flight. Think I'll try a Villain one and see what happens.
Alright, the game is much better with The Joker narrating it. Screw Superman, I never did like him.
Also, if you're just getting started, be forewarned that the powers you pick have very defined roles in the end game. If you're nature-based, your talents really only optimize you for healing.
I know. I've played through more or less everything so far. There are a hell of a lot of glitches, and the game is grindy as hell, but it's not as bad as I'd expected. It's a pity the developers were forced into a contract basically saying the PC and PS3 versions have to remain identical, or they could've fixed every issue and had a much stabler game. What I don't like is how completely undefined and vague everything seems to be - Ice tanks get told they can turn on "Ice Armour" by stacking Chilled five times, but not whether or not Chilled is on you or a target, what Chilled does besides simply existing, and what the Ice Armour effect really is. Add to this horrendous lag in instances since they consolidated every single PvE realm into one, and dozens of tiny UI annoyances that keep adding up.. there's just problems all around. It's fun, but it's not going to hold my attention for long, and I definitely wouldn't pay for it. Once I get tired of the character editor, I'll probably uninstall it.
Interesting bit. Wonder Woman is voiced by Gina Torres, who was Zoey in Firefly, while Inara's actress was going to play Wonder Woman in the actual movie that never got made. Guy who played Jayne voices Superman.
And looking into it more.. Nathan Fillion has done a lot of The Green Lantern's voicework in the past, Alan Tudyk has done The Green Arrow, Morena Baccarin has also done Black Canary, and Summer Glau has voiced Supergirl. The only ones that haven't voiced a superhero from the Firefly cast were Ron Glass and Jewel Staite - and Glass was still in the first Superman movie.
I'm looking forward to STO going FTP. I find I'm sometimes in the mood for the simulated space combat of star trek, which on its own is well done and fun. As a whole the game lacks content though. So the fun would be getting on when the urge hits to play the space stuff, then not worry about the subscription when I don't.
I learned something new today! If you level up as a Nature-powered character, while shapeshifted, it completely empties your ability bar, and renders you unable to leave that form, while simultaneously rendering the form itself useless. I now have a level 5 Pterosaur. Well, had. I deleted it to fix it.
This is like a druid going into travel form, and suddenly they can never leave that form. Ever. Also they can't attack. It's a pretty glaring flaw you'd imagine they would solve.
Yeah, saw this coming.
It's just not up to pay-to-play standards. I'm a pretty big comic geek, but this fell short.
!
Chances are good they're going to fail miserably during the conversion so that it's not up to Free to Play standards either. Global Agenda had that problem, so did LOTRO and DDO - wherein, the free users are second class citizens who don't have any access to the majority of the game's content. Pretty much any game that goes from paid subscription to F2P runs into these issues, whereas something like League of Legends does it quite well due to being built from the ground up as a F2P model.
I enjoyed playing LotRO for a
I enjoyed playing LotRO for a while. The two classes that were unavailable felt a little sucky but I was okay with that. The main thing that turned me off was the fact that after your two starting areas you had to pay to unlock quests. I was enjoying it, it was possible to earn 'paid for' currency by doing achievments, it just wasn't possible to earn enough to keep questing unless you did them repeatedly on numerous alts across multiple servers.
*shrug* It entertained me for a time, and was a decent way to 'demo' the game. I'll give DC universe a shot. Probably won't get heavily invested in it but hey, superheroes are awsome! ;p
!
That's more or less what I was getting at. It's not just quests you have to pay for, later on it's entire instances, and the ability to use a mount. We're not just talking the random bits of DLC, either, we're talking no heroics and no end game instances whatsoever if you aren't paying money. That's not free to play. They really get you with the mount, though. At level twenty everyone gets the quest that lets them get their racial mount... and you get to ride around a bit, before being told that you actually have to buy the riding skill. You have to buy the fast travel system, and that is a recurring payment to keep using it after a few weeks - no flight masters unless you pay every month
Global Agenda has the same sorta problem. You can't get any random loot from dungeons unless you pay, and they show you exactly what you're missing out on every time. You also only get a fraction of the XP and in-game money if you're F2P. You have to pay to use the auction house, and you have to pay to use the mail system - you can't directly trade items, so even if someone mails you something, you can't open the incoming package unless you pay.
I understand they've gotta make a profit off it, but come on. If the game isn't playable for free, it's not free to play. Charging players for essential capabilities and saying "Lulz, it's free!" isn't fair at all. I'm not even going to bother with DC Online, because of how frequently developers screw up F2P transitions. Champions Online I think it was went free too, maybe City of Heroes.. but I'm still not going to bother. Also, I'm not very fond of DC Comics to start with, their superheroes always seemed kinda meh compared to the Marvel ones.
Re:LOTRO
You could buy a mount with points earned from achievements. There wasn't anything in the game that you couldn't buy with their point system. So, depending on how much you wanted to grind you could get access to all content for free. You just had to work at it.
Also, fast travel you paid gold for if I recall correctly. There was a person you just needed to talk to? It didn't really matter for me since I was a ranger and basically had teleports to towns soooo.... :D
!
I may be misremembering parts since I didn't actually bother playing once I saw how much of a hassle it'd all be. Still, I did read an article about a guy who managed to unlock all the content using currency he acquired ingame - it took him several years, and he had to wait for everything to go on sale to purchase it otherwise it would have taken even longer. The point of a Free to Play setup is to massively increase your playerbase - if someone takes one look at how little they can actually access and decides not to bother, the free to play model obviously isn't working for your game. This was my reaction to LOTRO, and it's how I felt after playing Global Agenda and DDO for a few days each.
This is what I like about League of Legends, and why it's an example of F2P done right. There are no ways that you can spend currency to outright buy an advantage over other players, and the only things you can't get from playing the game a coupla times a day are wholly cosmetic or simply convenient. In addition to that, a certain amount of content is free each week, and rotated so that people can always try something new, to test someone before spending points or money - I only own about half the game's content, but to be honest I'm not really interested in the rest. In other attempts at F2P, generally ones done during a conversion, a lot of the locked content is necessary to actually do well in the game, or advance beyond a certain threshold.
You never get that sense of the F2P system being futile in LoL, simply because the goals are easily achievable in game - it might take me a week to unlock the highest tier of character, but I don't have to do it to be successful, and it's never impressed upon you that you'd be a lot better off just spending money. Contrast that with not having enough quests or instances to level up without spending enormous amounts of time farming for them, or outright spending money. Oddly enough it's a much more effective method of getting people to pay in the first place - out of spite I never spent money on DDO/LOTRO/GA, but Riot convinced me they deserved something like 60-70$ at this point without ever even hinting that they wanted it. I like having the choice.
From what I can tell with DC
From what I can tell with DC universe from their website (http://www.dcuniverseonline.com/free/) a free acount has less character slots, inventory space, bank space, can't trade, and can't post on AH. If you spend 5 dollars on anything it bumps you up to more slots all around, trading items, etc. Otherwise it looks like I have full access to all game content.
There is a DLC that gives you access to 'light' as a super power (Green latern) as well as what I think are 3 Arenas, maybe dungeons. The open world and quests seem to be fully available. I'm not able to do 'Legends' PvP arena as to start it you need to get an item out of your mail. Haven't gotten too far in yet. If I do hit a brick wall I can stop and have a couple hours of free entertainment out of it.
I liked it when it came out
I dont mind the money I spent buying it and paying for the month of time that I did. I recommend to anyone give it a try its worth going thru the quest lines and story stuff as well as the personal instances. Despite Biowares claim I think this DCU is the first fully voiced MMO. If it isnt fully voiced its pretty damn close. Running thru the city with the various travel powers engaging in open world pvp was some of my favorite times in MMOs. The only thing that drove me off was lack of end game content and some game breaking animation bugs and exploits in the combat system.
Well, its SOE so of course
Well, its SOE so of course they're going to miss the point. They do it every step of the way, right from the start. If ever you wanted a guide on what not to do to run an online game company you need only look at their history. Look at their attempt to make EQ2 free to play.
Four tiers of membership; bronze totally free, silver a one-time $10 charge, gold is $15.99 a month, and platnium is $199 annually. If you're totally free you can't even use all the chat channels. That's right, you cannot even talk to anyone who isn't standing right next to you. Gotta question? Hope you know how to find the forum and are willing to wait for a response, new player. Also bronze and silver cannot use the auction house and are severly limited on much money their characters can even have. Imagine being limited to only having 5 plat on you in WoW at any time, that's about what you can carry as a bronze player. And if you like to craft good luck selling your stuff without being able to use auctions, unless you wanna pay for auction tokens. Silver at least gets to use some chat channels and can buy from the auction house.
Gold is a bit better, except that you still have to purchase most of the classes and races still. You get that with paying the same rate as the players on the non-free server do and they have no class or race restrictions.
SOE has missed the key point to that Escapist video that was posted here; players are content. If free players can chat then it means new players can ask questions and form groups and join guilds. If they can use the auction house that gives the paying players a bigger market to sell to and buy from. But SOE doesn't understand this. Just as they spent the last four years of the life of SWG trying to make it into WoW without realizing the reason for WoW's success has more to do with polish and lack of bugs than go here kill 10 of this quests.
!
Well. I downloaded and installed it. It's incredibly grindy and already fairly repetitive, but I'm assuming that's because I don't have many abilities unlocked. Tried doing a Nature-based hero with a bow and Flight. Think I'll try a Villain one and see what happens.
Alright, the game is much better with The Joker narrating it. Screw Superman, I never did like him.
Yeah, Mark Hamill makes
Yeah, Mark Hamill makes everything better.
Also, if you're just getting started, be forewarned that the powers you pick have very defined roles in the end game. If you're nature-based, your talents really only optimize you for healing.
!
I know. I've played through more or less everything so far. There are a hell of a lot of glitches, and the game is grindy as hell, but it's not as bad as I'd expected. It's a pity the developers were forced into a contract basically saying the PC and PS3 versions have to remain identical, or they could've fixed every issue and had a much stabler game. What I don't like is how completely undefined and vague everything seems to be - Ice tanks get told they can turn on "Ice Armour" by stacking Chilled five times, but not whether or not Chilled is on you or a target, what Chilled does besides simply existing, and what the Ice Armour effect really is. Add to this horrendous lag in instances since they consolidated every single PvE realm into one, and dozens of tiny UI annoyances that keep adding up.. there's just problems all around. It's fun, but it's not going to hold my attention for long, and I definitely wouldn't pay for it. Once I get tired of the character editor, I'll probably uninstall it.
Interesting bit. Wonder Woman is voiced by Gina Torres, who was Zoey in Firefly, while Inara's actress was going to play Wonder Woman in the actual movie that never got made. Guy who played Jayne voices Superman.
Meanwhile Joss Wheadon is
Meanwhile Joss Wheadon is directing the Avengers movie for Marvel.
!
And looking into it more.. Nathan Fillion has done a lot of The Green Lantern's voicework in the past, Alan Tudyk has done The Green Arrow, Morena Baccarin has also done Black Canary, and Summer Glau has voiced Supergirl. The only ones that haven't voiced a superhero from the Firefly cast were Ron Glass and Jewel Staite - and Glass was still in the first Superman movie.
I'm looking forward to STO
I'm looking forward to STO going FTP. I find I'm sometimes in the mood for the simulated space combat of star trek, which on its own is well done and fun. As a whole the game lacks content though. So the fun would be getting on when the urge hits to play the space stuff, then not worry about the subscription when I don't.
!
I learned something new today! If you level up as a Nature-powered character, while shapeshifted, it completely empties your ability bar, and renders you unable to leave that form, while simultaneously rendering the form itself useless. I now have a level 5 Pterosaur. Well, had. I deleted it to fix it.
This is like a druid going into travel form, and suddenly they can never leave that form. Ever. Also they can't attack. It's a pretty glaring flaw you'd imagine they would solve.