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Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs

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Re: Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs

#41

Post by Cthulhu_ »

paulific wrote: post #10

I guess this is why I have free to play games sitting on my phone but never play them. They take me through a tutorial full of tasks and menus and resources and I subconsciously feel intimated by all the work.

Yeah, I've tried a few and after a while they feel like they're mainly aimed at returning players - you get pummeled by notifications, events, login bonuses, all kinds of terms that as a new player you're not yet familiar with. But that's the new player experience which they can just optimize if they choose to do so.

Re: Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs

#42

Post by Konnstann »

xbkingx wrote: post #18
Konnstann wrote: post #4

Path of Exile, which is mentioned in the article, stands out as one of the only, and from my viewpoint the best way to do free-to-play. The only things that affect gameplay are specific stash tabs which offer additional storage, with the rest of the microtransactions being cosmetics. Even the lootboxes are time-exclusive, with all of the items moving to the store individually a few months after the box comes out. Peo…

I have ~80 hours in PoE and started because it looked fun and the microtransaction system seemed reasonable. I stopped because it's pretty clear that what their system lacks in straight gambling mechanics, it more than makes up for in sly psychological tricks. PoE's "micro"transaction system is much closer to a paid mod or DLC model. Yes, they're mostly cosmetic and QoL items for sale, but they certainly don't feel o…

Firstly, if you run out of 4 stash tabs during the story you're picking up way too much. Easy mistake to make, but POE drops way too much loot and most of it is useless. If you're attempting to sell what you've found in the story you're also just wasting space.

Supporter packs aren't there for value, they are there as a "supporter pack". You buy it to give money to the dev, and you get some cosmetics, as well as most of the price of the pack as premium currency, which you can spend on more cosmetics, or stash tabs. I'd argue that character MTX isn't even worth spending money on given the amount of flashy skills and effects there are, that obscure your character, but that's a different argument.

If you're happy to pay $60 up-front for the game, why not just buy the stash tabs and be happy? $60 buys you more than you'll ever fill up.

As someone who played for ~3 years before dropping a dime on the game, I have to say I don't see the "quirks" other than stash space. The only other incentive is the regular "spend points to get a free box" where everyone just spends the equivalent of $0.50 on a bug to get theirs, using up the leftover points they had.

Re: Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs

#43

Post by mdrzn »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #29
tempestn wrote: post #13

This is a good article, and I very much agree that the second trade-off is the really dangerous one. I play Clash Royale, and I enjoy the game, but it does strongly exhibit these qualities, I definitely notice that ladder play is consistently irritating, because (being a decent player) I'm always stacked up against players with higher level cards at the same ladder level as me. So, most of the games I lose are agains…

Back in my high school days myself and a few of my classmates used to play OGame - a poor man's 4X space MMO in a browser, or more accurately, a glorified rock-paper-scissors with a ton of timers (previously we also played AstroWars, which was the same, but simpler - the HN vs Reddit UX way of simpler). Since construction, research and fleet navigation were all "click, wait 30 minutes to couple hours for completion",…

oGame, so many memories. I kinda wish there was an app based version to play in closed universe with friends.

Re: Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs

#44

Post by [deleted] »

xurias wrote: post #21
xbkingx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have ~80 hours in PoE and started because it looked fun and the microtransaction system seemed reasonable. I stopped because it's pretty clear that what their system lacks in straight gambling mechanics, it more than makes up for in sly psychological tricks. PoE's "micro"transaction system is much closer to a paid mod or DLC model. Yes, they're mostly cosmetic and QoL items for sale, but they certainly don't feel o…

> store bought armor at level 2 looks infinitely better than anything you can actually earn through skill or play time You touch on the two things that make me hate free to play games. It seeps into the design philosophy in a way that makes the experience worse for everybody because they need to incentivize buying stuff. A lot of people like playing dress-up, but there's no way to do that in PoE without paying crazy…

[deleted]

Re: Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs

#45

Post by wormslayer666 »

wizzairflyer wrote: post #24
wormslayer666 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you approach it as a casual single-player game, it is certainly a wholesome free-to-play model. For everyone else, microtransaction tabs are 100% mandatory to progress without spending inordinate amounts of time managing scarce inventory space. Since 2.4, many of the 3-month content updates (which are always either good content or at least good-faith mistakes) have introduced mechanics which effectively require mo…

I see your point but I don't really see this as a problem. If you're going to play this game for a significant amount of time, I think it is only fair that you pay it. The question is then if it's worth $70, which I would guess it is.

When I recommend this game to friends, I introduce it as a $70 game with a pay-as-you-go model.

My point is not that it makes the game bad, but that it's disingenuous to assert that the microtransactions are purely cosmetic or unnecessary. For my case at least, I would prefer if I could just buy the game for $70 and not have to buy more microtransactions if/when some future patch makes them advantageous.

Re: Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs

#46

Post by logfromblammo »

icosa wrote: post #9
logfromblammo wrote: post #8

Asymmetric's Kingdom of Loathing is free-to-play, with paid premiums. The pay-premium items generally translate into being the first to access new game content, and obviate any need to collect the in-game currency to access it. The developers explicitly set a goal that all game content would be accessible by spending only in-game currency, which is usually accomplished by those players who paid real money selling the…

The daily limit on adventures is an example of trade-off #2. Their implementation is generous (40 adventures per day to a max of 200 means you need to check in every 5 days) but it still means that you can't take a full week off the game without losing adventures. The more +Adventure stuff you have, the sooner you hit that max. Having a daily limit means that play sessions are artificially shortened, which prevents p…

You don't have to spend the adventures. If you absolutely cannot stand to miss the opportunity, there is a mechanism to spend multiple adventures in one action. There's a job board in town that uses 5 adventures at a time, and you can work at the bar for N adventures. You can straight up trade adventures for meat in one click. Log in from your phone, spend all your adventures at once, then log off. Or write a script that will log in and spend all your adventures for you, without bothering you at all. It's all https requests.

The 40 rollover adventures combine with daily consumption limits to give you an easily attainable 200 adventures per day per character. That's about 3 hours of play, if you aren't using automation aids. If you accumulate adventures to the cap, and then play them all the next day, you can use about 360 adventures. At the risk of the statement haunting me later, 200-360 should be enough for anybody. If you want to play more adventures, you can always play more than one character. Or, as you mentioned, if you want to play for more time, you can spend more time playing each adventure, to be more optimal.

You can't ever escape tradeoff #2 if your personality is susceptible to obsessing over things. If you play Tetris too long, you might dream about falling tetromino blocks. The important thing is the Asymmetric folks aren't trying to profit from obsessive player behaviors by throwing wildly non-synchronized countdown timers on everything.

Re: Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs

#47

Post by AtlasBarfed »

pochamago wrote: post #12

I'm not wholly convinced that it's actually a problem. Collectible card games pretty consistently beat out living card games in popularity. Needing to grind, collect, and sometimes pay more for the things you want increases your investment in the game. I hear a lot of criticism about how these things exploit our natural desires, but isn't that sort of the point of games in general? Isn't creating an addictively fun g…

Gambling addiction is a serious and well known societal and human psychological problem that has touched every family I've ever known in some form.

To the point that gambling (used to be) strictly regulated for payouts and monitored by state gambling commissions. Either that or it was the purview of the mafia.

I notice you ignore any mention of money attached to the mechanisms you think "aren't a big deal" in your comment. That strikes me as willful disregard and intellectual dissonance. Are you a FtP games dev?

Re: Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs

#48

Post by AtlasBarfed »

My experience with FtP/PtW was thankfully probably 100$ total. It was one of the Machine Zone games, final fantasy something or other.

Machine Zone games are some of the worst (and most popular!!!) of the genre, but certainly MZ is not the only bad actor here, and they did not break laws from what I saw...

But these games 100% need to be strictly regulated. Based on a couple others my girlfriend has played they are all gambling based in some ways with variant payouts (slot machine mechanics), enhanced with something even more nefarious: social rankings and status, and mechanisms that encourage you to pay to ascend the rankings of the specific subculture (or subculture shard usually) of the game.

I have no proof of MZ employees doing this since the game mechanics producing addicted whales could produce the equivalent behavior and overpowered accounts, but in an unregulated environment, MZ could easily seed each of the shard worlds with employees equipped with superuser accounts to prey on people that had not paid money to try to get them to buy packs and survive.

While this probably isn't racketeering in the legal sense, it sure as hell seemed like it.

Other tricks, such as fomenting conflict between "clans" and other tactics could easily have been "naturally" arising for the rules of the game, but without regulation any self-serving company would have provacateurs in each of the major clans starting wars and getting whale players to participate and pay out money.

All told it was a very creepy experience, topped off with a week-long "cold turkey quitting" psychological experience. Not that I had cold sweats or anything like that, but there was clearly addicted neurons that needed to wither away.

PtW needs careful regulation and oversight. The numerous levels of subconscious mechanisms and exploits in use are very concerning. It would be fascinating to take a group of psychologists and former CIA employees and let them play these games and get their perspectives.

Re: Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs

#49

Post by mrguyorama »

willis936 wrote: post #14
BEEdwards wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warframe is a grind designed to make you spend money. If you like grind then it's free, if you hate grind and won't spend money the game is bad.

The game didn’t feel like a grind until about a thousand hours in, when I quit. Up until then it was a fun series of learning curves and minmaxing builds. It’s a grind from day 1 if the gameplay doesn’t interest you.

The game felt like a grind from the 10th hour. Playing in public, people don't even play the game, they jump-dash through the entire level, kill a boss, and head to the end, over and over and over, every three minutes, all day. What's the point?

Re: Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs

#50

Post by mrguyorama »

xurias wrote: post #21
xbkingx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have ~80 hours in PoE and started because it looked fun and the microtransaction system seemed reasonable. I stopped because it's pretty clear that what their system lacks in straight gambling mechanics, it more than makes up for in sly psychological tricks. PoE's "micro"transaction system is much closer to a paid mod or DLC model. Yes, they're mostly cosmetic and QoL items for sale, but they certainly don't feel o…

> store bought armor at level 2 looks infinitely better than anything you can actually earn through skill or play time You touch on the two things that make me hate free to play games. It seeps into the design philosophy in a way that makes the experience worse for everybody because they need to incentivize buying stuff. A lot of people like playing dress-up, but there's no way to do that in PoE without paying crazy…

Like the halo 3 days where the "cool" looking armor was because you completed difficult challenges, or you could dress up however you want, without spending $150
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