Warcraft, your subscription gets top class content

First off we will look at associated costs with many of these games. Most subscription games nowadays tend to go for the old $15 or £8.99 model, which is pretty much a rough standard give or take a small amount. The precedent itself was apparently set by world of warcraft (like everything else), but I can pretty much say it wasn’t because I paid around the same as this for almost all other subscription games I paid. What I can easily say is WoW probably capped the subscriptions at around this rate or just a bit higher (Vanguard is £9.49) as most people will not want to charge more than an industry leader.

A free to play game is apparently just that, although really we know it isn’t because if it was entirely free, it wouldn’t make money and it would inevitably go under very quickly. An actual free and good game really just would not work, because the more popular it became the worse of it would be, and this just doesn’t make sense. So maybe the real term people should be using is “Choice to Pay” you can play the game or free, or you can choose to pay for item mall items and improve your character by said means. These games tend to have various items on offer, but the money makers are the time savers, such as increased XP items, increased drop items, various things for movement speed, and other nice things. There are also the usual cosmetic crap that nobody should buy, ever, cos if I just wanted a character that looked nice I would be playing the Sims. Associated costs with these games are down to user preference, however it has always been my finding that should you spend your monthly fee ($15 or £9-£10) on one of these games you would be able to get benefits for approximately 2 weeks (XP/drops/etc) So for someone who wants a permanent bonus for their hard earned subscription, your looking at $30 or almost £20.

The next item for comparison is the actual quality of games, in terms of expansions and patches. This time we will hit up the free to play first. I think its fair to say that actual content or content expansion does not happen a massive amount in your general free to play game. The most popular free to play I had personally witnessed was Silkroad online. I think the game has had one major expansion in its lifetime, which would, to be fair have been comparable to an expansion around the same kind of level as “The Burning Crusade” for World of warcraft. The issue being that there had been hardly any other significant updates in that time.

In comparison to this you have the pay to play market who will often and regularly update their games, although in some cases thing like expansions really do take the piss. Everquest 2 anyone? Most of the time you get what you pay for, and when everyone is paying every receives a lot more in return and this is very often the case. New features and content on a regular basis means people have a lot more to play through and it keeps people happier for longer. The fact patches can be more frequent, means that content is generally eased into the game and can be tested tweaked and edited before the next patch. Notable exceptions would include EvE online which likes to deliver a massive bomb like patch every now and then, but this is usually tested to a high degree before released, and tweaked upon release. Something they have mastered to be fair.

Buying your way to win in SRO?

Sticking to a concept similar to patches, we can go for content in general. I’m going to keep this one short and sweet, because I really think there can be little argument in terms of concept, but a fair amount in terms of preference. I personally believe that Pay to play games are generally far more content rich, and superior in most terms to their counterparts. Usually Pay to play games have better graphics, better gameplay, and better story lines. There will always be exceptions to rules and comparing all the possibilities would obviously throw up a few against the trend.

Support is the next feature, and again I think this is a no brainer. Blizzard have call centres for support on may of their issues, they have gamesmasters ingame who generally respond in a quick enough manor and are actually paid and work like professional call centre staff (ignoring complaints, giving one line robotic answers, and missing the point also included). Generally though when you have an issue with a subscription game they ARE better at solving it, they are faster and they are more useful and friendly. The simple reason for this is money, nothing more nothing less, and its not because they have more money, its because they want more money. When you lose your ability to play a subscription game, you stop paying, and they lose out. In a free to play, they have no idea if you pay or not, and cant discriminate on that, they also technically make less money and generally if your not going to pay its not a massive issue at all for them. Some games just do take things too far, recent nods to the game “Legend of Mir” run by gamepot USA who I have been advised by several people have extremely biased gamemasters who have been handing items and such to their friends, I would like to dispute the fact, but ironically I played the game when it was run by the previous owners and the same thing happened so I wont bother. In truth, I didn’t want to dispute it!

Vanguard: Pay to Play, not pay to win!

Finally we get to the last part, Pay to Win. Many people play games, MMO games for fun, to escape from the real world for a few hours, or in the case of the chronically unemployed, days on end. The real world is a place filled with advantages for those who can fire some cash around. Those with money are better off, have a better standard of living and so on. In world of warcraft everyone is on an equal footing, and although people can buy an advantage, they are more akin to the criminals who steal for money, than those who earn more. So my question is, why should someone be able to buy an advantage in a game? There are always arguments like “what difference does it make if you earned the item and someone bought it, surely you still enjoy the achievement?” Well no, not really, because its cheapened your achievement, and people don’t seem to get this.

If you had the world record for say, the 100metre sprint you stand out, you worked and were better than the rest and you are recognised for that. If everyone else bought a magic drug that enabled everyone to run as fast as you, and the record was shared between 1000’s of people, your nobody again. To make matters worse, if there was no way to tell who took the drugs, and who didn’t then nobody would know if you were a genuine achiever or another win-buyer.

The pay to win sector also has another darker side, where people are not happy at just paying to win legally, but paying to win illegally as well. I’m talking about cheats and botting. Free to play games are rampant with cheats and bots, and this is known to almost everyone. The games cannot control the cheating, because they have less gamemasters and less staff. The fact is as well, most of the players can get a new account (free) get a bot (cost) and level to fuck knows what and hopefully not get caught. If you get caught (aw darn) then you make your new free account and try again until you get max level without getting caught for free. For World of Warcraft the same thing can happen, but the risk is much higher, and the scope of the game means its kinda not worth it for most people. Cos 1) you are far more likely to get caught and 2) once you hit max level your a nobody without items and you cant bot them!

So I guess this concludes everything, I’m pretty sure there are counter-arguements to all these, and people want to voice their opinions on it. If that’s the case leave a comment, or better yet hit the forums and register and you can find the thread about this topic, and argue your point in there all you like. As far as i concerned, Pay to play is the superior game, and the only thing thing I dislike more than F2P Item mall rip-offs are the next generation of money-sucking-bastards, like Champions Online, who have advised that they are going Pay to Play, with an item mall which sells both cosmetic items, and items that improve your character (their excuse is that you can earn items that can be bought, oh fucking wow).