[Architecture-er]

(Original post by Heeck)
How has Starcraft 2 being free once you've paid for the game killed its competitiveness? Right now sc2 is one of or the most competitively played game on the market right now.

In fact one could argue that f2p games encourages more competition because if you have to pay a monthly subscription each month then it excludes players from poorer countries where a 10$ free per month is a lot.

I think you misread the OP

He was arguing that SCII has a greater competitive scene because it isn't F2P.


In generality to the rest of thread, Micro-transactions do not impact on the competitive scene of a game in any way, shape or form. Why? Because all competitors are given maxed accounts to play with >.<
Everyone playing Tribes: Ascend competitively will have the same stuff unlocked, because the pay model is Convenience Pay, rather than Pay-to-Win.

[Psyk]

(Original post by Architecture-er)
The games aren't designed to be boring. They're designed to allow people to under-go a progression path. However some people will want to skip that progression, either because they're impatient, have limited time, or are simply already good enough for the top stuff. For them, F2P models offer them the ability to speed that progress and get to the stuff they want to play. For example, I really needed the 30 levels of LoL in order to learn how to play well. There needs to be a way to filter noobs from pros, and levelling is a simple way to begin filtering (with ranking coming into play later on)

Well maybe they aren't designed to be boring, yet. But you can see that the developer has a financial incentive to make the "middle" of the game boring. It needs to be fun to begin with to get people hooked. Then content you can access much later on needs to be fun so people will want to get to it. But the developer stands to benefit from making the stuff in between quite boring to make people want to pay to skip it.

I'm not saying this is what they do now (I wouldn't know, I've never payed a "pay to not play" game before), but surely it's only a matter of time before they figure out how to design a game like that.

[Fenrirs_space]

Sorry OP, I once would've agreed with you, but imo you have picked the worst examples ever to make your point In fact, as your examples actually show, there is a big shift starting to happen in the FtP model, moving from the times of *Pay to win*, to more of a *pay if you want, or earn it through gameplay (except for pointless items such as cosmetics)* kind of model. Yes, the original *Pay to win* model sucks, but so far the second model seems to be proving its worth. So what if that dude has that "ultra killing weapon" now, when you can earn it within 1 week-1 month of gameplay? This way the game is more accessible to a larger audience, without providing any specific advanatges to anybody.

[like a boss]

I don't think these types of games will ever be too popular, so I don't think it's something to worry about.

[RyanT]

This is old as muds and gaming easily got through it.

Even pay to play games have microtransactions (just how many downloadable content packages does each paradox game have for eg?).

They aren't a problem because most PC gamers will play by preference rather then price. If the casual crowd like free to play then quite often they wouldn't of brought a game instead so it's not an issue.

To address your brought competitiveness theme, those games will always have limited appeal. Personally I'd be tempted to play a skill-based game with paid competitiveness just for the lol of beating people who pay. Beat then harass the **** out of them, job done.

But so what? You get that in all walks of life. When I was on the bottom rung of amateur cycle racing I saw a guy with £2000 wheels. People will pay for an advantage anywhere, but it's not a big issue and it's definitely not your melodramatic destruction of gaming.

Free to play might encourage a bigger gaming audience for paid-for games. Broadening the audience would be great, as the current narrow demographics is why we always get COD 15 then high budget alternative games.