P2W is the best business model for MMOs

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By that logic mobile shits are perfectly acceptable as "games"
Fuck off, OP.
Go justify shit policies somewhere else.
Surprise faggot, they're both garbage. Off yourself.

I wasn't making the argument that bad games were good. I was making the argument that p2w is not only an acceptable business model for MMOs, it's the best business model for hardcore gamers.

Then why do they make such great games?
age of wushu is literally the best game I've ever played, in spite of the p2w

You claim to know whats best for mmos yet don't know a single thing about one of the remaining semi old mmos, putting aside how retarded calling eve a themepark mmo is, you would argue it too was a p2w mmo on the basis of how you can sell subscription time for ingame currency if you had slightest idea about what you're preaching.

The real reason you're here is to shill for your no body chinese mmo because you need to prove to your self you're not wasting your time as you grind and watch people just pay to reach where you are in seconds. No one cares if you like taking the p2w dick, go make a general or something and watch how dead it'll be.

Thanks for proving my point by the way.

"Hardcore gamer" is an anticoncept
It conflates people who enjoy mastering systems with people who dump gratuitous amounts of time or money to make their numbers go up. MMOs already draw too much of the second type of person, designing them to siphon oil money from retarded sandnigger whales is not going to help.

Who gives a shit about business models?

I want a fucking mmo built for people who enjoy legitimate MMOs, not some "working professional" (read: average joe who is stupid about spending his money) with the patience of an ADHD addled downie.

If you don't have time for an MMO what the fuck are you doing playing an MMO? An hour or two a day queueing for random dungeons with people you will never meet again is not social, and MMORPGs certainly aren't all that interesting in terms of gameplay mechanics compared to other games you would be able to more easily pick up and drop to fit your EXTREMELY HECTIC WORKING SCHEDULE (because you are the only one on the earth with a job god bless you sir).

Regardless of the mystery of why these people play these "games" I have no doubt the trend will continue as it is a cash cow. A fool and his money are soon parted indeed.

was a joke tbh
eve is one of the few exceptions, as with anarchy online and a few older MMOs.
New sandbox MMOs are very rare nowadays, but if western markets could get over their stubborn resistance to p2w, we could see a proliferation of great sandbox MMOs again. Otherwise, there isn't much of a market to compete for.

you too
?!

Starting a post like this, especially in the OP, is a good way to sound incredibly pretencious and underage\BR. Whatever point you'll make next sounds like it comes from someone angry at people not liking X, implying a personal investment in it.
Don't do this ever, learn to formulate your posts better.

You're gonna get a lot of shit for this not just because it's wrong but because of how it's wrong.
Just because a player spent more money in a game, that does not make them "hardcore" by any stretch of the word. It doesn't even make them particularly good at the game either, you can't buy skill in any game whatsoever. In fact, it's often the oposite where players will buy some boost that gives them an advantage over everyone else because they can't compete otherwise.

Nice buzzwords there, and wrong as well. Your premise that "hardcore gamers" are the core playerbase is already wrong, but you go doubly wrong with your naive look on the industry.
The only thing in common in their playerbase is that their core players don't mind spending extra money in the game for cosmetics or advantages over other people. It's not in the interest of the company at all to "mechanically enrich" the game at all, it's in their interest to make every boost and every cosmetic they sell to seem worth the price those players gave them. This usually goes to the detriment of everyone else that can't compete with paying customers or has to enjoy very bland cosmetic options all the time.

Sandbox MMOs have literally nothing to do with this, their problems are of an entirely different nature.
You're wrongly mistaking "spending more money\time in a game = hardcore gamer" and even believing that a company cares about how much you love a game or how much time you play it, not just how much money you can make them.

Theme Park MMOs are the usual and more sucessfull approach because they are easier to make, easier to get into and the default MMO experience. There's still a place for "hardcore players" since lategame sees everyone going to the same city for raiding and PvP anyway, the rest of the park is redudant at that stage.

Buy2play is the definitive best business model for an MMO, especially if it's a cheaper price with a subscription.
A company can get a decent cash boost with the first sales and sustain the servers and production costs with the subscriptions. What's more, since they know how many people are currently subscribed, they can more easily predict how much cash they are gonna get next month, giving them economically stability, whereas cosmetics is a crapshoot in knowing just how much you are gonna make this month.

Furthermore, it builds the best community, since everyone is on equal footing in terms of available content and nobody has unfair advantages he bought. Even cosmetics end up all being available to everyone instead of being locked behind paywalls and the best part is that you avoid a very large amount of underage kids and third world players that never do anything but make the game horrible for everyone else.

There isn't a single good thing that P2W has over B2P, despite the plethora of problems it brings to the table.
And ThemePark\Sandbox is an entirely different discussion, it does not have necessarily anything to do with this.

Oh please nigger you're not fooling anyone.

You should care, because the business model largely decides the direction of a game's development. People don't tend to make games for free.

Not all whales are lovers of mechanics, but really it just depends on the type of whale that the game is marketed to. There's more freedom in this business model than in buy2play.

You should keep in mind that, the kind of people with enough free time to play an MMO like that are usually the kind of people that shouldn't be allowed near anyone else, even in virtual environments.
I've met my fair share of NEETs and most where really cool, fun people that gave me many fond memories. But I've also met some of the most obnoxious turds here and IRL has little to no competition to them. We are talking about people that do their best at ruining fun for as many people as possible and will complain if anyone tries to stop them.

If you made an MMO where players had to go outside city walls to gather materials, you can be sure there would be one autistic fuck that would make dozens of bot accounts just to farm everything for himself and laugh at everyone not having materials for themselves.

I'd very much like an MMO like Mabinogi, where the focus would be in crafting, politics and world building, but I'm not so sure that it would be such a great idea with the players we usually can find online, unless there was some heavy moderation. But you know what heavy moderation means and how it's seen by everyone else…

Sandbox\Themepark has nothing to do with P2W or B2P. You are mixing up game design with business models.

No I shouldn't because I don't touch MMOs anymore. P2W is fucking cancer, normal players aren't ever "on equal footing" they are locked out of content completely in almost all situations even if the game starts off by giving them some alternative, incredibly grind way to get the same shit instead of paying 4.99.

Moreover the majority of P2W is koreashit, koreans haven't made a good MMO since Ragnarok Online, which was subscription based and died upon going P2W.

All P2W does is encourage lazy development of carbon-copy WoWclones with fancy sexy anime grills with mass advertisement to milk the shit out of idiots with things like founders packs and cash shop boosts before drastically stripping away resources as the playerbase trickles down and starts looking for the next fix, which will conveniently come along very shortly, do the exact same shit, and milk the same fucking players until they come to their senses. It won't matter when they do though because there is always new idiots buying into the newest korean anime grill fantasy game.

Subscription based is a fine system if the developers continue to support it, problem is the only MMOs to come out nowadays are themeparks, and the problem with themeparks is its incredibly easy to get to "endgame". Moreover when they try to appeal to a wider audience (read: retards) and make ALL content easily accessible you have shit being cleared incredibly fast and people getting burnt out and whining about their being nothing to do, which creates a content demand that development absolutely cannot keep up with.

Its almost like MMOs are virtual worlds or something and people vary drastically in personality.

I'd welcome such a game personally, though I can understand why other people would like something to be done about said players I don't see why some autistic douchebags should be enough to deter people from playing. Back in the day you had and found alternatives while the autism-lords played their games, thinking about how to do it was part of the fun.

There's only one type of whale: the one that will spend cash instead of time to get something. You can try to appeal to someone else and not make as much money, though…
The love for deep and complex mechanics has little to do with how much money one is willing to spend.

Now you're just being naive.
Whenever a company makes a F2P game, their game becomes the bazaar and the product is instead whatever you can get in their cashop. It's in their interest to make the product as interesting as possible because that's what's gonna make them money. Why would they make an interesting gameplay available to everyone when that shit is free? Why wouldn't they just give everyone different shitty shields and put one for sale that defends everything?

It's in their interest to make sure whatever you buy from their cashop feels like a good buy so you go back again. They will fuck with the game balance to give you the idea that the skill boost you bought is actually powerfull and a good purchase, they will put out cosmetics with triple the polycount to make it seem much more pretty and atractive than everything the base game has.

Whenever a game goes F2P, the company is now restricted. They can't make the gameplay too complex or whatever they sell is gonna look weaker since skill matters more than equipment. They can't make anything too pretty or players won' buy shiny shit.
Stop being this fucking naive, for fuck sake, the entire Nexon library is a showcase to this.

A big distinction should be drawn between games which offer paid cosmetics, and games which depend on whales for the majority of their revenue.
I didn't state that it was necessarily incentivized for these games to enrich their mechanics, rather that this business model gives them the freedom to do so, since their only real concern is retaining the whales that the game is marketed to (and to a lesser extent the non-paying players so the whales aren't alone on the server). This is notable because giving a buy2play themepark MMO esoteric mechanics would be a poor business decision, but in a p2w game it isn't necessarily so.

sure, but we don't live in an ideal world. Games cost money to run, and with a smaller demographic of people who play these games, p2w can be a necessarily evil.

When is anything in an MMO ever equal? You can make everything easily accessible and "fair", but in so doing limit character progression and development, or you could avoid placing restrictions on character development, thus handing the server to the play-to-wins. In what sense is handing the server to the play-to-wins (who have more time and willpower than anyone on the server) more desirable than handing it to the pay-to-win whales?

actually, I guess that games with cosmetic stores could still depend on whales for a majority of their revenue. What I meant is that a distinction should be drawn between games with just cosmetic shops and true p2w games.

There are only two good MMOs. Guild Wars 1 and EVE Online.

bump
play-to-wins btfo

You're making me want to stop being polite with the amount of retarded shit you are writing…

Why? They are one and the same, those cosmetics are there because they need the whales to fund their game.

And to do so, they will include new mechanics that the whales may or may not be able to master or have to learn? So they feel like all the extra weapons they bought are a waste because they don't know how to use them?

For fuck's sake, THINK before you post. They could include several different weapons all with different characteristics and uses that you'd have to learn in order to master the game. And then they'd put a few weapons for sale that are better than everything else no matter the situation so you can buy your victory. And they have to do this so those weapons are actually appealing to buy, so the players that can't be arsed at gitting gud at the game can just buy them and win, even if they are worse than regular players.
How do you think they retain the whales? By giving them OP shit that puts them above the regular players. This doesn't expand the game, it restricts it even more.

How? Did you actually though about this before writing this sentence? How would this be in detriment to the game? They already have the money, they can literally do whatever they want with the game now. They are truly free to implement whatever mechanic they want with no burden on their decisions. How would it be a "poor business decision"? What would it ruin?

Which is why I also mentioned subscriptions. Runescape does fairly well with a subscription of 10 dollars for 2 accounts.

Try not to put both in the same sentence, please. Things can be fair but still hard to get, therefore not "limiting character progression and development" at all, you just require that people actually play the game to get that content, instead of simply buying it.
I thought you were talking about "hardcore gamers" before? Is playing the game instead of buying the content too hardcore for you?

Are you seriously fucking asking this question? After your narrative being about the "hardcore gamers"?
Why shouldn't the people that spend more time and have more willpower not get the content either? Or better yet, why should someone that barely plays the game get the content that the players that actually play it never will?

What kind of fucked up narrative is this you are trying to spin here? The whales are entitled to the server because they are the ones spending the cash? Well guess what, fucboi? If the game is Buy2Play, everyone that bought it should therefore be entitled to the content in the game by the same logic.
But if you're going down that path, most Buy2Play MMOs have a fairly small price at 60$ the most expensives, while P2W MMO's would be somewhere in the thousands of dollars if you summed up all the options you have for sale.

If servers belong to those that pay for them, don't be surprised when people pick the best value-to-dollar conversion, who just happen to be Buy2Play MMOs.

kek

All my favorite MMOs were sandbox buy2play MMOs.

The problem isn't the buisness model. It's that WoW was so successfull that any company trying to make an MMO felt forced to ape WoW for 80% of their game design in order to chase that dragon. I think companies are starting to realise this is stupid only now, but most of them are instead deciding to just fuck MMOs off alltogether, or make wierd shitty hybrids where everything is sharded and you never see more than 4 people on screen at once.

The whole thrust of your argument rests on people making sandbox b2p mmos and them not doing well. No one has made a propoper sandbox MMO that I'm aware of since EVE (I've not payed much attention to MMOs to be fair though). And EVE did fine for something like a decade.

You're focusing on one aspect of a complex massive problem and assuming everything stems from that one thing. For example you say casual gamers want themepark MMOs. Which means B2P MMOs have to be themeparks. But casual players are more likely to play P2P mmos, since they're free to try. And casuals will gravitate towards the most popular franchises and most heavily marketed games, which are always massively budgeted ones made by AAA publishers, and thus have a zero percent chance of deviating from the traditional rote game design. These games are made to be WoW clones, and casuals don't know of anything else existing because all their game news comes from TV adverts and maybe IGN or Gamespot.

see

The whales desire to make their characters as powerful as possible, which in one capacity or another requires learning mechanics, yes. But without these mechanics for the whales to learn and master, they'd get bored and stop playing. There has to be an element of gameplay here as well, whales don't want to be handed everything on a silver platter. When I made references to mechanics, I was most specifically referring to mechanics that aren't specific to a certain character loadout or configuration, which are necessary for all players to learn.

Giving a themepark MMO esoteric mechanics would be a poor business decision because a game needs to appeal to its target audience to succeed or sustain its playerbase. This is especially true with games that have subscriptions or games with expansions (further buy2play nonsense). If your assumption is that the content of a game in no way determines its success in the market, then buy2play is evidently the worst business model, since there is no financial incentive to guarantee the quality of the game.

Subscriptions are another option, but it's really the same issue as with buy2play games, the incentive is towards appealing to and retaining casual players.

Different people have different preferences and limitations. P2w games can suit hardcore players and hardcore workers, which is far more ideal than buy2play games, which accommodate only play2wins.

Regardless of whether you value your time, time is money. For some people, whose time is more valuable, it's more economical to simply pay into the game to progress than it is to invest the necessary time. You can invest time, or you can invest money, but it's an investment nonetheless.

Is it fair to the person who has to support himself with a 9-to-5 that NEETs living in their mothers basements control the game that they play? Definitely.
Is it unfair to the NEET who lives in his mother's basement and poops in socks that he can no longer control every game's server simply with a massive time investment? By no means.

This is why I've been saying pay-to-win can be a very fair and equitable business model. I find it funny that people view pay2win as unfair, when in reality, games have been unfair for a very long time: they've been unfairly controlled by the play-to-wins who poop in socks and invest massive amounts of time into playing. People are so accustomed to this model that when they see a truly equitable model, like pay2win, they mistake it for being unfair. Not so.

meant to say that it's unfair to the person working the 9-to-5, but you can just read my response in a sarcastic voice tbh

The video game industry has been replaced by people who enjoy making video games with failed movie execs.

Vidya crash when.

Or instead of catering to either, you could cater to skill2win.

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OP, did you seriously make this thread just to tell people Age of Wushu is good?
And you hid this shit behind a wall of text about why the whaling model is superior, fuck right off, retard.

Just play Neverwinter. It's the least mediocre.

No, this thread is about p2w. If I wanted to make an age of wushu thread, i would've done so.

It isn't often that someone goes full retard this hard and doesn't later try to play it off as merely pretending. My hat is off to you OP for sticking to your retarded guns.

The things you're saying are only true in games where time investment matters more than skill. In which case, quit playing shit games and git gud, you fucking scrub.

in which game is a person not able to get better by practicing?
*scratches chin* *isn't sure*

Time investment generally correlates with more skill, but does not necessarily. In these games, skill is almost irrelevant and time investment is used as a replacement. There are plenty of games where I spend less time playing them than other people, yet I'm much better than they are.

How you build your character is skill-based as well. If you build your character well enough that another person isn't able to actively use their "skill" to defeat you, then that's fine too, because they've already been outplayed (you built your character better than they did).

EVE turned to shit and is pretty dead now.

The best MMO is Wurm Unlimited.
Checkmate, faggot.

is that so?

While we're on the subject of p2w MMOs, anyone got a BDO guest key they'd be willing to give me?

Fuck off gook

sure is reddit in here

There is a difference between p2w and f2p. This is an argument you could name about f2p in general, but you specifically said p2w, so fuck off.

Also, completing this logic, wouldn't subscription based mmos be objectively better than both in every way?

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but user kun eve was always shit

I seriously hope you aren't that same user that made a p2w game and advertised it here.

No. It requires having a sword for sale that does 100 times the damage of everyone else. Why learn the game mechanics when you can buy the Legendary Sword of Fuck You?
Whales don't care about being better at the game, they care about winning. And if they can win by buying victory, they will do so and make the company extra cash.

This is the part you don't understand. All whales, every single one of them, do not want to learn how to play the game any more than just the basics. They don't want to learn deep complex mechanics, they want an easy way to win and the company WILL give it to them because they are willing to pay for it.

All F2P degerates on free gear being utter shit compared to what you can buy and no matter how skilled you are at the game, a complete noob with 10 dollars can buy a massive advantage that makes all skills and all mechanics useless against him. That's the business model, that's what they are selling.
Stop being a fucking apologist for this shit.

What the fuck? What does "deeper more complex mechanics" has to do with Themepark audience? Why would they like or dislike the first based on the second, where are you extrapolating this from?
That is not my assumption, that's what you assume my assumption is. Content is what differentiates ALL MMOs from each other, but buy2play gives all of it's content for a low price or subscription, while F2P gives you it's content for retarded amounts of cash once you sum it up all up.

HOW DO YOU FUCKING MAKE THESE CONNECTIONS?
Casual players aren't interested in keep paying money every month to barely play a game a few minutes every day. They have so many free games to do so, why should they be interested in paying at all? F2P games are the ones filled with casuals, since they require literally no investment to start playing and they can ditch it at any time they feel like it.

No. If if you can buy advantages, it suits people willing to buy victories instead of getting better at the game. This is the complete oposite of hardcore player.

And you call these "hardcore players"? People that can't even be arsed to play the fucking game?
This isn't even an argument in your favour, what if instead of grinding for months, I much prefer a game that gives me all the content at launch for 60 bucks? What if instead of having to buy retarded keys to unlock shit in the game, I prefer to pay a monthly subscription and not have to worry about that shit?
The concept of "investing money vs investing time" does not imply at all that P2W is better than B2P at all, both are compatible models with this.

Pay2win is fucking retarded because once you sum up everything that is for sale, you'll always get something in the order of HUNDREDS of dollars, and yet you think it's such a great business because it's just 1$ per item. You're fucking retarded and falling for the dumbest scheme ever.

You keep talking about "hardcore gamers" but at the same time, you complain about "not having enough time to play the game". What the fuck is an "harcore gamer" to you? Someone with a deeper wallet than the competiton? It seems that you like MMO's (because you're a fucking retarded trying to validate his purchases) but you don't like that you're not a "real gamer".
Tough shit, you bought into a dying genre and even started with the worst model possible and now you're trying to justify it like someone buying the wrong flavour of yogurt and trying to argue you actually like this flavour. The only serious skill that you can develop in MMOs are social skills, talking with other people. But from your posts, it's pretty obvious you're not even "harcore" at that.

You're fucking delusional, there's no place for deeper and interesting mechanics in the game because the stuff you buy in the cashop ALWAYS has to be more powerfull than those skills and mechanics. If it wasn't, nobody would buy it and the company would lose money. So why waste time making those mechanics in the first place when nobody is gonna use them and they don't even matter?

The ones that are just inflated numbers: the game. Most MMO's, actually.
Your character will unlock some skills as he progresses and you'll have some new combos available to you, but you'll quickly assemble a rotation that maximizes damage and use it exclusively.
This is something that is done fairly early and barely changes with more levels, at some point your entire character growth comes from stat upgrades. Get a better armor and more stats, your rotation now deals more damage. Not because you changed it or applied it in a more "skillfull way", but because your stats are bigger and that's it.

Except in most MMOs a good chunk of character growth is either random or it must follow a very strict Meta to reach it's best potential, so it's linear anyway.

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bump

If it were only cosmetics and the games didnt suck ass, yes

But P2W means RPG garbage affecting the gameplay, all the content behind grinding walls and faggots grinding to get better weapons so they can abuse new players, and spoiled klids using their dad money to pay for the insta kill weapons and armor\items that makes then basically immortal. And the games sucks ass but the faggots dont even care because once you put grinding into a game the rpg casuals appear like flies atracted to shit.

You really like that Three-Kingdoms CaoCao gif user.