Whats with people hating F2P?

[Khyan]

The best that can do a company for their customers is subs or P2P. F2P aka P2W is not really good for the game in term of quality. You can see that in a lot of F2P currently.

[TaranTatsuuchi]

...

No Armory Bonus, no rested bonus, no GC scrolls to increase DoL and DoH exp. Instead you can buy 50%, 100%, 150% and 200% EXP charms in a cash shop to help you level up those pesky alts. These are also tradeable, so you can pay for gil by basically selling these.

Best MP and HP potions would be cash shop as well. Max Ether and Max Potion will be cash shop exclusive, $1 for a pack of 5 or so. Tradeable again.

Only mounts you get are the main story ones. So only Chocobo, Black Chocobo and Dragon from 3.0. Everything else cash shop. As time goes on, rare mounts with faster movespeed than other mounts are released as cash shop exclusive. Tradeable again, best way to get 50 million gil is to spend $250 in cash shop to buy these faster move speed mounts and sell on market board.

Less minions in game, most are in cash shop. All tradeable.

How about having to pay for items to increase the hq chance when crafting..?

[CGMidlander]

Like, they say theyd quit if it was.

Why? You like spending loads of cash and wasting money every month/two months/three? I hate it. Its a waste but I do it because I like the game.

It's not a waste if you're enjoying what you're spending your money on.
Unless you go around with an eyepatch and a pegleg, you'll almost invariably spend money on some form of entertainment.

F2P models often monetize in ways that favor "whales", rather than the average player. (Players who spend a huge amount of money, rather than players who spend more reasonable amounts)
So, in a sense, they're "free to start", but not "free to enjoy".

[Kit-Kat]

Why is that Ms. Terrible candy bar?

Tera is one of those games from my previous post in this thread. With some differences from NA to EU, character restrictions, every mount/pet/outfit from RNG boxes in the cash shop, everything from achievements removed and moved to the cash shop, monthly elite status to gain adventage on dungeon runs, extra dungeon reset scrolls on cash shop, selling enchant powders/identify scrolls on cash shop. Your average monthly cost is 100+ if they release new outfits and other things you want (if rng loves you). All of that is of course optional, but when you're at max lvl and you do your daily run of that hm dungeon you only have 1 entry a day of but your friends have elite status and keep buying reset scrolls, you no longer can play with them and it's time to sit in town dancing and afking :]
Ps: forgot to add, when things like enchant and identifying items are sold on cash shops, success rates are lowered, pushing you to buy them from the shop.

[ElHeggunte]

snip

Yup, I played TERA from closed beta up until it went F2P. I subsequently decided to attempt a comeback when they added their new Reaper class and I was shocked at how much they butchered the game. The only remotely cool thing was having a "founder" account from having been a subscriber before the game went F2P so I kind of have a mid-tier account between their free and paid options (that I subsequently can't login to because I had Account Armor enabled, but the code never arrives in my email).

[AriaEnia]

Problem is when we have already spent $100,000 in an F2P game, they will release more stuffs, weapons and armors, rune, etc. that will make our previous $100,000 spent obsolete. And if that isn't enough, they will merge servers, so you'll find opponents (most often in PVP) who are probably stronger and have spent more $500,000 than you, and you have to spend more $1,000,000 to beat those people to stay afloat in PVP rankings.

[kuma_aus]

-snip-

Yeah XIV already does that stuff in regards to cosmetics. But to a very minor scale compared to how it will be as F2P. We have 1 mount in the Mog Shop. If this was F2P, can you imagine how many would be in there? Don't worry about getting mounts from Beast Tribe quests. Don't worry about getting mounts from playing tanks in high level content. Don't worry about getting mounts from Extreme primals. All would be cash shop and tradeable.

Do you enjoy leveling up alt jobs and classes? Rule #1 of F2P games, make leveling a pain in the bum. Then introduce EXP charms. Everything to make leveling easier like leves as well will need to be nerfed, so people have reason to buy these tradeable EXP charms. Works even better for FFXIV because of all those alt jobs you got to work on.

Also how much do you like seasonal events? Well that's great, you can do the quests like normal, but the glamour? Cash shop of course, got to have holiday themed items in there for limited time so people know that they need to buy it quickly. You will still get a glamour from in game normally. Say the leggings from the event, that's a nice free costume to give away but the rest is needed to be sold so the game can run.

Like look how many people are subscribed to the game. Now you remove the subscription, how is FFXIV meant to make up all that money from the cash shop only if they don't make the game experience living hell for us?

[Starbirth]

A banana sticker for u sir.

Lets compare all the business models for MMOs based on past and present games.

F2P has a terrible reputation based on business model and player limitations. In extreme cases they will even lock you out of progression and/or double the grind through exp boosters and what not; Lotro comes to mind. You can blame a lot of the bad F2P models on Korean companies like Nexon whose practices border on shady and in most situations its better to stay away from any Korean online game. NCsoft is prob one of the better ones but given whats been happening to their games these past few years it looks like they will succumb to that slippery slop. I also see many companies that do this model offer a subscription service that makes me want to puke.

B2P (Buy to Play) is a bit better than F2P, or so you would think. GW and GW2 are the leaders for this model and GW did it right with a reasonable amount of cash shop items that were pure cosmetic to support the game towards the end of its life. The same can't be said for GW2 that suffers from horrible flaws like bad AI programming but the cash shop gets regular updates with new weapons and skins... in a rng box u need to buy keys to get. Let's also not forget the whole fiasco where they boxed the original GW2 game with the expansion for the same price as the original when it came out. You get an extra character slot if you own the original and buy HoT now...

P2P (Subscription) in most cases is the best way to go. You pay a box price and $15 a month to play a game that is fully unlocked. Most have a small cash shop but its frivolous things like minions, mounts and sparkly outfits which I don't mind as long as they keep it solely cosmetic and at a reasonable price. FF14 is a good example of almost everything done right except for unreasonable prices in the cash shop like the $15 Minfillia outfit. WoW does this to mind you and it has dropped far below ff14 in quality imho.

[Kit-Kat]

To be honest, the only F2P game I've seen good so far is Skyforge. Everyone has the same weekly limits on resources you can farm. Paying and having a premium account only makes you reach that weekly limit faster, but at the end of the week, both free and paying players will have reached the same. Except a couple of mounts (typical founder pack and first purchase rewards), you can obtain everything by playing the game in the same pace as everyone else. Also those weekly limits stack every week, so you can take a break and come back months later, and have a huge limit from all the past weeks (in other games you would have "wasted" those weeks you didn't farm, eso tomes for example). However the grind is real and is not a game that people stick to for too long, so repetitive.

[Umo]

Its a waste but I do it because I like the game.

Then it's not a waste? u_u'