I have been reading all over the place people complaining that bethesda will be launching TESO as p2p. I for one thing this can only be considered a good thing and here are my reasons:

Bethesda HAS to make money. Fact. you can not get around this, they spent millions on creating this game, they are not about to give it away. So we have options regarding making that money:

Option 0) Advertising revenue - This could work, but it would be ridiculous, and they probably wouldnt make enough. Come on, this isnt a flash game. Who wants adds popping up or clogging up the screen causing lag and ruining gameplay? No one.

Option 1) Real Donation - This is unrealistic. They will not many any money if based on actual donations. Everyone winging about it being p2p obviously isnt going to donate if it is optional.

Option 2) What most people mean by f2p these days. Fake Donation/Fake f2p : Also known as pay2win (p2w): This is where you have an entire gameworld free to play, but so many competitive aspects of the game you need to "donate" money to activate or use. This means buying items, buying content or buying extra turns at restricted events. This means when you have one guy who can spend ￡1000 a month on the game is vastly ahead of everyone else and uncatchable. Or you end up with a whole guild of these people and it ruins the game for everyone as they have no chance of competing whatsoever as they can not afford to spend the same amount. This means people leave the game as they reach a money wall and find there is no point them playing. You get enticed into spending money repeatedly and can spend more than a monthly subscription and not get anywhere.

Option 3) Pay2Play (p2p) - Paying a subscription or monthly fee, putting you on a level playing field regarding playable content and available items. The only difference in achievement ability is time and technique. Bethesda have steady income that can be relyd upon. You have game that is constantly updated and moderated and looked after because if they didnt, you would stop paying.

Even though i dont know 100% if i can afford to play (though i am pretty sure i can) i for one miss p2p games that have left the market or switched how they run their payments to p2w.

I am glad elder scrolls know what is best, even if some people who want to play it dont.

But thanks for not saying a B2P game is a F2P game. Regardless of P2W, B2P and F2P are still two separate payment models.

i didnt even contemplate adding b2p on there... its so unrealistic is didnt even cross my mind... lol!

also, i forgot to mention that they will be putting in a cash shop, though because of the pvp battlefield and the way it works this should not effect the competitive aspects of the game too much from what i can see.

Runescape is an example of a game that has a cash shop yet it doesnt actually effect the pvp aspect of the game as the majority of the items are obtainable within the game and most of the ones you pay for are just cosmetic.

Those who complain about p2p they don't care about the game. They just want to either log in once in a blue moon and they want that to be free, or they know that almost all f2p games are massive pay to win games, and they are planning to spend thousands of $$ to be ahead of everyone and ballance somehow their lack of skill.

F2P games are a disaster, because they are either fake free to play, or just money grabing organizations. In a role playing fantasy game, none gives a sh*t how much $$ you or your parent got. You either spend time on game earning what you should like everyone else, or you quit because you are too lazy to gear up your character.

Also I don't think any serious MMO with much playerbase ever launched as f2p game. <-- keyword here is serious.

agreed 100%

when there was 3 pvp topics most of them were closed down, so why won't these threads go down? it's ok to talk about payment model but not pvp?

i believe they are all discussing different aspects of the payment model.

http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j146/godsgift2atheists/deadhorse1.gif

I agree it shouldn't be F2P, but isn't $15 a month -and- a cosmetic shop a bit too much?

They should knock it down to five dollars or something. It really bugs me that they have the full price and an in-game shop that will presumably be beyond vanity pets.

15 seems about right when you consider that at the beginning most people wont be buying cosmetic stuff and just concentrating on the game. I think that it will definately have to be amazing to be worth that much, but i cant see it not being that.

It also depends how much they will charge for the ingame shop items , that it the real clincher on weather they are being over the top or not.

Buy to Play is a perfectly viable option. Guild Wars 2 uses it, and for those who like that game, it is well received and has kept ANet consistently in the black. The game is constantly being updated. So what if they are not talking about releasing retail expansions. You don't need them if the same amount of content is being rolled out in stages over several months, rather than going several months with nothing new and then dumping it all on the players at once, only for it to be all blown through in a matter of weeks. They've got plenty of optional stuff to buy, because people WANT to, not because they HAVE to. It works.

If you don't like Guild Wars 2, then fine. But gameplay mechanics and business model are not as connected as some may think. If TESO eventually goes Buy To Play, it does not mean that it will be converted into a Guild Wars 2 clone. To be quite honest, the stuff we know about Cyrodiil's PvP reminds me of Guild Wars 2's World vs World gameplay. Anyway...

Buy To Play works. It doesn't lock players behind a paywall on every little thing, and a cash shop filled with stuff people want to spend money on... And where endgame progressions is more horizontal than vertical for a change, It's a good system. In my opinion.

i didnt mean the model didnt work, i meant either bethesda would have to charge so much b2p to make their money back no one would actually buy it, or they would charge a normal amount and not make their money.

from what i can find out, guild wars spend much less on development and creation than bethesda (so far) at launch.

GW2 has almost no endgame, its a terrible example of an MMO. (at launch)

Even now its so so , non existant.