In my opinion, eso should be b2p Now I assume the main problem you p2p players have is that they wont be able to maintain the game without constant streams money. also other things as well. but on money when you think about it, for those who just play the game and leave after three months, they just paid 45 dollars rather than if it went b2p an assumed 60 dollars. now on cash shop. there is most likely going to be a cash shop either way. there will be some who will buy cosmetic items or other things in the cash shop. also dlc's are bound to be in which we must pay for and I assume extra areas besides official dlc(like just a new zone. not any huge area to explore with its own trailer and large story). also enjoyment. ever since I got morrowind in 2010, I've loved and played it ever since. while I played oblivion first and loved it to, morrowind just felt superior. though if I had to constantly keep paying for morrowind, I wouldn't of played it at all because I had more important things to buy(like the gaming computer I write this on). point is I think b2p is better than p2p. state your opinions whether you agree or disagree

I'm old fashioned. I want my big name mmo's to be p2p.

Leave the f2p and b2p to the indy developers.

Maybe use the existings thread?

I mean you are bringing no argument why B2P is better, and one thing is totally off, just because it is P2P doesnt mean you will get the hole software for free.

You pay the box price 40-60 € with one free month, afther that you pay 15 € a months.

B2P is never a good think for MMO'S, Guild Wars 1 worked with it because it had no item spiral and the focus was totally on pvp. (Guild Wars is a ORPG not an MMORPG)

Eso on the other hand has a item spiral the focus is mixed that means PVP and PVE, and we will need a lot of content so there is no way arround P2P if the game should be succesful.

I despise cash shops, they're completely ruining MMOs. Its not an accident that the 'best' looking fluff items are bought with cash rather than actually 'playing' the game. Or you could go the SWTOR approach with those recently released Jawa companions that are only obtainable for players that have amassed a gazillion credits, been playing the game for a long time and have high reputation (or whatever its called) and get shafted by making it for sale. That is a complete kick in the lower region to their diehard players that have been playing and enjoying the game since release. It could have been and should have been a 'status' companion rewarding those players that have supported BioWare.

I agree that this is about the hundredth time a thread like this has been made.

I agree that you don't know what you are talking about when it comes to p2p and pricing.

I agree that you have no clue what it takes to maintain an MMO and the huge cost it takes to keep constant updates to an MMO.

I agree cash shops are completely ruining MMOs.

I agree with Brain Woodstock.

There is pros about shop too... give the game for free and drop the sub (Rift just did this, game is free and sub is off, they needed to add 2 server more..) so you can bet you get enough people to play this forever. I say start as very expensive and see how it goes from there, they can always start dropping game price or give it free or drop sub fees.

Very bad idea. Most of the games that did that eventually started to develop around the cash shop items. Suddenly it was more important to make new funny hats than actual content.
Also: Often that means play2win, which nobody likes.
Besides that: There already is a huge base of Elder Scrolls Fans who like one thing about the brand: immersion.
Cash shops kill quite a bit of immersion and many many fans will complain about it.
And by this you offend a huge crowd of people absolutely willing to pay a sub. I can't imagine that Zenimax want to offend them.

For me cash shops are a absolutely horrible idea. I totally disagree, as many here do.

And for once I find myself agreeing with your agreements

Well listen to this. I still support B2P.

http://www.gamebreaker.tv/chat-bubble/free-to-play-buy-to-play-or-subscription/

Hmm.. well I disagree, when people leave, they dont even think what devs are gonna add to it later nor your game. So ONLY way to get people actually check your game is to give the game for free and drop off sub, then hope, people give you some money.

If they do what I tell, Im sure we should get more people in a heartbeat for long time to come. I plan to stay here 2 year at least.

She flat out said over all she prefers p2p.

She even said with micotrasitions, it comes out the same as p2p. So, why are you still against a better game?

The only reason people stop playing a game is because they get bored with it. I would not play a free game if it svcked. I would pay for a game as long as it is fun.

I have posted this before but below is the explanation of the difference between B2P/F2P and P2P by Yoshi-P who is the Director of the new ARR (FF XIV) that is releasing next month:

There are many different types of MMOs. There are two big types or groups that we see. You have one group with games like your Rift or your Star Wars, which are very large-scale MMOs with established IP. Then you have your smaller MMOs, which are maybe new IPs that don’t need as big a user base to be successful. So we can start off with the big group, the large-scale MMO group, with your Rift, your Star Wars, your Guild Wars, your Age of Conan and The Lord of the Rings. These games all started out on a subscription model, or were planning for a subscription model when they were in development. Then, partway through, they switched to free-to-play.

Then again, you have games like Rift and Star Wars. Even though people have been saying that yes, there is this change in the market, everything’s moving to free-to-play, they still – up until recently – were developing a system that would be subscription-based. Even though everyone is saying the industry is going free-to-play, they still were developing these huge games with subscriptions in mind. Again, we’re not saying that one is better than the other, that free-to-play is better than subscription or subscription is better than free-to-play. But for a large game on that scale, what’s most important – more important than making a lot of money – is making a stable income, a stable amount of money over a long period of time. And so to develop a large-scale MMO like this, you need to spend a lot of time with a lot of resources and a lot of staff to make this game.

To do that, you need a lot of money, and to get a lot of money to do that, you usually need investors to invest in your game. Because you’ve spent a lot of money on getting this game ready and borrowed a lot of money from these investors, when you release the game, the investors expect to see returns. If your game gets a lot of users and a lot of subscriptions right away, your investors will be happy and you can pay them. But what happens if you don’t hit that number right away? You have a bunch of staff members waiting to get paid. You have a bunch of investors waiting to get paid. You have a bunch of contents that needs to get made because you have to have updates, but you can’t do it because you don’t have enough money, because you didn’t hit that number you were aiming for. And so what do you have to do? One option to get instant money is free-to-play, or selling these items. To get that money so you can pay off your staff, pay off your investors, and start making new content, switching to free-to-play, selling items, and using that money is one way to do it.

So why didn’t Rift or EA with Star Wars do this from the beginning? Why didn’t they start with free-to-play? There’s a reason behind that. With free-to-play, because you’re selling these items, you’ll have months where you sell a bunch of stuff and you make a lot of money in that one month. But it’s all about what happens during that month. Next month, the person who maybe bought $100 worth of items in the last month could purchase nothing at all. You don’t know what you’re going to be getting, and because you don’t know what you’re going to be getting, you can’t plan ahead. You don’t know how much money is coming in. If you can’t plan ahead, then you can’t keep staff, because you don’t know if you’ll have enough money to pay the staff next month.

With a subscription base, if you get maybe 400,000 members, you know that you’re going to have the money from that monthly subscription for the next month. You also know that you’re going to have 400,000 this month, and it’s not going to go down to 200,000 users next month. That type of jump really doesn’t happen with a subscription model. So you know that you’re going to have a steady income. Because you have a steady income, you can plan ahead further. You can make sure you have staff members to create that new content. By creating new content, you’re making the players happy. If they know this game is going to keep creating new content, they’ll continue to pay their monthly subscription fees. So rather than going for the huge $100-million-a-month hit that you might get with the free-to-play model, having that steady income allows us to provide a better product to the players.

Now, you have Blizzard and you have Square Enix. We’re the only two companies in the industry, basically, that are making MMOs with our own money. That gives us an advantage, because where other companies have to get money from investors and have to pay that back, we don’t have a lot of time to build slowly and be able to pay that back. Investors want their returns right away. With Square Enix and Blizzard, because we’re putting our own money into it, we don’t have those investors to worry about, and that means we can release something and maybe take a little bit of a hit at the beginning, but as long as we’re increasing the amount of people we have, then we’ll get that money and make the players happy. We’ll get into that cycle I talked about before, where we’re creating good content and have that steady income to keep the cycle going.

With version 1.0, even though we call it a failure, we still had a user base. During the time that we were developing this game, 2.0, we were able to increase the amount of subscribers threefold as well. Again, it takes time. It takes showing the users that we’re really into this and giving them that new content. But we’re able to see a rise there. That’s what we’re looking for in this. Again, we’re not saying—The market didn’t change. It’s that there are two different types of models. Choosing the model that’s right for your product and being successful with that is what’s important. We believe that the bigger the game, the larger the scale of the MMO, it’s going to be better for the game if it’s on a subscription model.

That’s why you see a lot of companies that chose the subscription model, that wanted to do what we were doing, but were forced to free-to-play. They didn’t go to free-to-play by choice, because if that was the case, they would have gone free-to-play at the beginning. They’d develop it for free-to-play, not full subscription, instead of being forced to go free-to-play. We hear a lot of people saying, “Star Wars is free-to-play now, it’s great!” But then you ask them if they’re playing free-to-play Star Wars and they say, “No, not really playing it.” Everyone talks about how great it is that it went free-to-play, but then you ask around and really, there aren’t that many people who are playing it since it’s gone free-to-play. If you spend all that money on a game ,release it, and it’s filled with bugs and you don’t have enough time to do your updates, people will leave. Players need that new content. Not being able to provide it is fatal. If they were able to produce as much content as players wanted, then people would have stayed there. We don’t really believe it’s a problem with the business model. It’s how that’s handled.

Agree her with you, thats why accessibility is gonna be your top priority when people start to get bored and leave. They should aim for free game and sub-less but thats like after first year.

Most people don't think 15 bucks a month is inaccessible.

Why would they ever go free to play if they have a lot of people playing the game? Why would anyone play the game if it svcks?

Making the game free to play does not help the company or the players.

Like Frak said: To make the people start the game it hast to be good. I started Tera, Rift and Neverwinter. None of them kept me longer than 1 week because for me it was a boring MMO-Experience like
many before. And I didn't pay anything for it, because it was plain bad.
I totally agree though they should add a 10-days-trial or something. I was missing that in GW2. But to make the entire game "free" only because of people who aren't sure about the game
isnt necessary. Besides: Like I said: There are already millions of potential customers on the Elder-Scrolls-Side.
So Zenimax will take care of them first and won't include an important cash shop
(Yes, it will come, I know. But I am not expecting it to be as annoying as in other games.Hopefully.)

Devs cant make so good games... WoW havent been defeated in almost 10 year and is still a champ. Let me repeat 10 YEAR. Thats awfully long time.

Nice. Why are you even here?

History lesson.

Everyone said for 6 years that Everquest would never get taken down as king of the MMOs. Many MMOs tried and failed. Then WoW came along and dethroned EQ. So, now you have people saying WoW can never be taken down.

It will happen.

I WANT THIS. I WANT THAT. I WANT THESE, TOO!

Stop this and wait for Zenimax's decision instead of starting the thousandst b2p/p2p discussion.

So because some past games haven't done so well every new game now should just be a free to play and not even try? yeah makes perfect sense....

Again, Frak was faster:
You say "devs cant make a game so good".
Then you say Blizzard did that.
No more to say.

Dont get me wrong guys.. I just say devs need to get another 1-2 year of more time, thats why I think sub itself is a great idea.

I just got into the beta. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I can't calm down.

Too excited to function normally.

Everyone who keeps posting why games should be B2P I don't think realize what MMOs actually are. You guys should learn that MMOs require WAY more upkeep on them compared to single player games. Money doesn't grow on trees, it's not like ZOS just goes up to their money tree in their lobby and take a million dollars a day from it so they can make their game. Money doesn't just show up people, they need to make money somehow to keep this game up and running.

It wont be B2P you don't secure 300 million dollars in development and hope you sell 5 million copies to just break even. Its not going to happen nor should it. they are offering a premium game with premium service(or so I hope it is).tjhey deserve to be paid for it and I am willing to pay for it. the people who are screaming financial hardship. Seem to be the people who are going to spend 500 to 600 bucks on a new console should consider not buying the new console if you cant afford 15 bucks a month. you seriously need financial counseling. Its a business and the very least they should offer is freemium and charge out the eyes for the things the subscription gets for free. Its the only way they will make their money back and be profitable. People are under the assumption TESO is going to sell 10 million copies out of the gate, No MMO has ever done that and matter o fact the record holder for sales on a MMO at launch is actually TOR with 2.3 mil, and much much larger world wide I.P. They spent 180 million on their product and look what happened to them they barely broke even and just now started the profit margin.

Lets not be ridiculous with our thinking on AAA MMO's and don't be so damn cheap or expect ZOS to rub our feet while we play and give us free pizza's because we spent 60 dollars on their game. Its ludicris, cancel your console pre order get a job and quit comparing this to GW2 and Neverwinter or single player games for that matter. none of those cost anywhere near what TESO is costing to develop. GW2 was 50 million and the content patches are a joke when compared to a premium game. and Neverwinter cost about 20 to 30 million lol it was designed as Co op game to be played with 6 people.