Cheers Frak! enjoy make it better.

WOW is taking itself down lol

This. Also, WoW hasn't even been out for nine years full years yet (launched November 2004), so it's literally impossible for it to have already been the top MMO for a decade. There's also the matter of attrition--WoW will lose players as it ages (it lost 14% of its playerbase in the first fiscal quarter of 2013). Blizzard's plan to combat that attrition is basiccaly to release more expansions more often.

Its not because the market is changing . the market refuses to pay for [censored] games , if they quit making bad games and hoping we will pay. Develop what you promised during your market hype and expect us to pay, that's a better plan. don't go the route of TOR ( im still trying to figure out where the spent the 180 million dollars on ) Make 8 single player games with Bolt on multiplayer features and tell us its a MMO. As for TOR I wont play it anymore its not worth the sub fee and its not worth spending hundreds of dollars on game packs to get items I cant actually obtain by playing the game even though its free.

Dispise cash shops all you like, nearly every single player game has one now, let alone MMORPGs. They're here, no matter what format your game is in.

I didn't catch that before, but Guild Wars never had and never planned for a subscription model. That it was B2P was one of the key selling points in nearly every developer interview. Yoshi-P needs to work on his Google-fu.

The last game that held my attention for more than 6 months was Tera while it was P2P. Now that it's F2P, it's still a good game... not much has changed, but there's your issue. -not much has changed-. There's no content, there's nothing to do. The game deserves to be F2P, because no one continued to pay for it.

Prior to Tera, I played Rift for about 6 months when it was P2P. I wasn't impressed with it, but it was WoW with a new coat of paint, so I tried it. The problem was, again, it was just WoW with a new coat of paint... so why continue to pay for it when I was already happy at the time in WoW (wotlk). Now Rift is F2P, and I went back for about 3 days... again I wasn't impressed with it, but now I saw that I can flat out buy gear. It sort of ruins the experience... why work in game for that carrot far out of reach, when I can just buy the damned carrot and be done with it? No thanks, uninstalled.

Prior to Rift was WoW... I played for YEARS like many others. WoW is still the go-to game although I don't play it now. I enjoyed MOP for a while at launch, but ultimately, WoW will always be WoW... you always get the same thing, but on the upside at least it's always something new because updates come in regularly thanks to the P2P model.

Prior to that, DAoC kept me for many many years, and it's still a P2P game. I still believe that DAoC is the best PvP game on the market (and I love the PvE too), but unfortunately I've had trouble finding a new clique, which is needed imo in DAoC.

In the end, from what I've seen after playing countless F2P, B2P, and P2P games... P2P is king. Quality games are P2P. Once the game fails to deliver quality it seems to become F2P, and if the game launches low quality... it launches F2P. THere's only one B2P that I'm aware of... and again, I was less than impressed in the 2 weeks I spent with it before becoming incredibly bored.

IIRC, it was an Ask Us Anything question a while back. That 300 million was on top of the money Zenimax had already put into it. Odds are, a significant portion of that investor capitol will be going into marketing and hardware, and possibly towards the development of other online titles.

Its on Zenimax's company page one of the moderators linked it. Zenimax studios secured 300 million form a private investing firm. Now will the spend all of that on TESO at release not a chance but im betting that total funding for TESO for future content too. http://www.zenimaxonline.com/faq.html

$60 + free month + $15 +$15 = $90

vs

$60 + b2p with no guaranteed money ever

$90 is more than $60 - plus that $90 keeps growing.

Did not read a single post in this thread.

Strongly disagree.

Well this conversation has been done to death and my opinion is well known. I will say that I think payment model gets far too much focus. What I care about is whether the game is fun to play. There have been great B2P games and there have been great P2P games. There have also been terrible B2P games and terrible P2P games. The payment model doesn't determine whether its a good game, at least not by itself.

But here's one thing worth adding. It is absolutely false that a B2P game can't generate enough money for developers to release good content. It is also absolutely false that B2P and cash shops mean games will always be pay to win. GW2 had released better and more content than any other MMO during the same time period. In GW2, all items that can be bought with real money can also be bought with in game currency.

Here is what MMORPG.com had to say about GW2 (which was rated best MMO of 2013):

B2P games still make ALOT of money off their cash shops and their Gold-RMT exchanges; with the extra players they bring in, this can be quite a bit more than subscriptions in the long run.

Mind you, I'm nostalgic of the era before all that crap. Paying your sub and getting access to 100% of the content was awesome.

But the industry changed alot and its pretty obvious its a dying model. My best guess is that ESO will follow the usual pattern and start with subs, only to become F2P within 12 to 18 months.

I find 995 of MMO's that are free to play or Buy to Play end up becoming a pay to win game via a in game shop. This maybe ok for non pvp games but for mmo's based on pvp it will kill the game quicker than slapping a EA sticker on the box.

I will never play a pvp game that is free to play or buy to play because of the cash shop and items players will buy to make over powered characters and items. That includes EXP boosts as well as potions.

If GW2 is the best example of a good F2P game, you can tell your story walking.

Pay to win shop. The game is it's own gold seller.

Personally I've softened to the idea of P2P. If the game has a subscription, I'll probably still buy it.

I just have to much invested in this game to give up on it for something like subscription model. I've built a guild, followed the game since announcement, ect.

But while your statement may be true in general, it isn't always. Again, GW2 is not buy to win in any sense. And its a great game.

Simply untrue.

I'm always willing to pay for the best service possible. And saying 'there's going to be a cash shop either way' is...just pure opinion. I would say the likelihood is far, far, far greater there will be one if the game doesn't have a sub. And a cash shop and horrible MT system will send me packing.

Keep it simple: standard monthly sub. It works, and players like it. I mean...look at the WoW playerbase flipping out right now because of an in-game cash shop being implemented. And those are dire [censored] with years of commitment to the game. This game has no such loyalty. The franchise, yes. The game, no. They need to earn the playerbase's respect...and quite frankly, a cash shop is the ultimate disrespect to me. So start with just a sub. If after some years of quality new content, great service, support, and general improvements of the game they want to implement some extra items for sale...I'd tolerate that.

Edit - Lol, can't say 'fan boys'?

The only thing I got out of the OP is There is going to be a cash shop anyway so . . . . .

Why does a cash shop have to be there either way. Most mmo's I played never had one and did just fine with a straight up sub model. MMO's are a competitive environment and I feel strongly that a characters strength should come from the player working ingame at character progression. Not from (real money transfers) "rmt" injections to bolster the character.

Yes people who put in more time progress further. That is the whole point of Role Playing Character Progression. Why try and demean it by selling it?

fixed some of the spelling

We honestly don't have any idea what will be in the cash shop though. Matt Firor just said to expect them to sell pets in it and that's about it. The cash shop could just be purely vanity and only sell pets and mounts. Or it could sell all sorts of things. We honestly have no clue. But since I think this game is going to be P2P I think it will be just a vanity shop and only sell pets and mounts, possibly costumes (since there is a costume tab), but I don't believe they will sell experience boosts, or potions, or armor, or weapons. If they did put those type of things in this game I will only play it to see the content of the game but quickly leave as soon as I am done.

Well that's an opinion, so it can't really be assigned any sort of factual judgement. I enjoy the game along with a lot of other people. Its been critically acclaimed and still has an active player base. I don't want to debate whether GW2 is a good game with you. This isn't a GW2 forum.

But even if you personally don't like it, you have to admit that millions of other people and tons of industry reviewers consider it a great game. At minimum that proves B2P doesn't necessarily make a game bad. That was the only point I was trying to make.

And many others, like Carde and I, are trying to point out that B2P MMOs doesn't mean that it's bad, what it means that it doesn't make a steady stream of income so it can be hard for them to make good quality content patches compared to MMOs that are P2P. It's as simple as that. You can try and sit here and argue with me, but it's true. When your income comes solely from people buying stuff from your in-game store, compared to an MMO that gets it's money from a subscription, sometimes you will be just barely make green. It's much harder trying to prepare for the future when your income is very sporadic compared to a steady stream that you have a rough estimate that you know you will make. There will be times where B2P MMOs aren't making enough money in a long time making it hard for them to be able to push out content. That's the gamble you take when your entire income for the game is in the cash shop.

Again, this isn't me saying that B2P MMOs are bad, I'm just trying to convey that B2P MMOs can't always produce the same quality of content a P2P MMO can because of how unpredictable their income will be from quarter to quarter.