Stay away from free to play games?

[HomerJ]

Some two years ago there was a thread here that brought to my attention a fun little game called Duels.
Duels is a free to play browser game, meaning that you can play it without paying anything, but you can get much better stuff if you invest some real money. I played around a little then stopped for maybe 18month but recently went back to the game.
The company behind the game hosts also another few free to play browser games, and some resources can be earned and spent cross-platform which brought me to playing Warstorm, which was quite an enjoyable game which actually made me spend more of these resources there instead on duels what was the original plan.

Warstorm will be shut down tomorrow. There is a facebook version of it, but.. yeah whatever, the point is: WTH! Imagine you were active in this game and spent some real money there to build up a good collection of rare cards and then BOOM it gets shut down. The "we're closing down" announcement is from July 28th, thats six days before the lights go out.
Sure, the company (Zynga) will reimburse you on your ingame (also cross-platform) currency (Challenge Coins), but what about all that resources of whatever kind you used to build up your collection? Nada, bye bye, so long dear friend.

Seriously, I would be so p*ssed if I was not sane enough to not pay real money there. I still feel frustrated because I could have spend my resources on Duels in the meantime. Btw Duels is also due any day now, since according to the community it has been dead for at least a year now.


What kind of Free to Play games do you play and how will you feel when they close down?


Greetz
HomerJ

Edit: typo

[Anonymissimus]

There's this German browsergame company GameForge in Karlsruhe for which I would definitely give advice to stay away from. In some aspects it's the exact opposite of wesnoth, meaning they do not care about the opinions of their community. They regularly announce things that presumably give them money and few days later it gets implemented without any chance of protest. Yes, playing is free, but then you're forced to invest real money once you want to move up in the ranks. Been playing their ogame quite some time, which was one of the first world-wide successfull browsergames afaik, but now I have the feeling (and wish ) that it's slowly dying. In the old days this one was special because there were no such features you could buy for real money.

[doofus-01]

What kind of Free to Play games do you play and how will you feel when they close down?

Does Wesnoth count? I will feel sad when it is closed down...

[Gambit]

Well there's Minecraft that is free to play (but I play the paid version). I won't be sad if it closes down, because he plans to open source it if it ever stops selling well. It's also not micro-transaction or monthly fee. It's a one time fee for all the updates forever. So I'm not in it for much money, and I've already gotten my $12.80 worth of enjoyment and then some.

If it closed down (assuming he keeps his word on releasing the source) I will feel like "Okay time to go learn me some Java."

[Herduk]

I play Urban Rivals that works like Duels or Warstorm.
But the nice thing is that you can easy gain credits instead payng real money so you never fall back from the big stack of others players.
Sure, if you want to pay about 80$ you can be A LOT MORE competitive, but, for me, there's no real gain.
But i'm atipical, I play a couple of moths then stop for 5-6 months and so on.

I'm not really pissed off if there is a reasonable amount of time (like 1 or 2 months) before the shut down of the game.
But, as i said, i not invest real money.

[HomerJ]

Does Wesnoth count? I will feel sad when it is closed down...

Not really since my understanding of "Free to Play" is that there is content that you can pay for, which is not true for wesnoth.


Greetz
HomerJ

[Kalajel]

In my case, it would be Onverse which is an interesting spin on the whole virtual world concept. Since the game as been active for slightly more than a year now and has only recently started growing, I'm not too scared to see it go kaput anytime soon… Sure you can pay for premium content, but you won't really be handicapped all that much if you don't; for example, you can go through the temple of shuul with only the level 1 hammer which you get for free during the tutorial… And as for the famous Cash Coins, there are plenty of ways to get them for free such as winning online events, internet promotions, and getting friends to join in…

[Hulavuta]

I used to play AdventureQuest. It REALLY sucked when you don't pay, but I used my friend's account and he paid. But I lost the password...so...bleh

It kind of sucks that it's not multiplayer though.

[Zarel]

Not really since my understanding of "Free to Play" is that there is content that you can pay for, which is not true for wesnoth.

No, "Free to Play" means exactly what it says. Wesnoth is free to play.

The difference is, Wesnoth is open-source, so if it's closed down someone else will just start it up again.

In general, all multiplayer games that aren't open source suffer from the flaw that they might one day be shut down. All you can do is hope they don't do that while you're still playing them.

[HomerJ]

Not really since my understanding of "Free to Play" is that there is content that you can pay for, which is not true for wesnoth.

No, "Free to Play" means exactly what it says. Wesnoth is free to play.

Clearing that up for you.
It is just the fact that any (browser)game I have ever noticed to be advertised with the words "free to play" actually has paid bonus content.

Or did I miss something on the wesnoth.org, or warzone homepage?


Greetz
HomerJ

[Zarel]

Clearing that up for you.

Most people who use the term "my understanding" also carry a connotation of "correct me if I'm wrong".

It is just the fact that any (browser)game I have ever noticed to be advertised with the words "free to play" actually has paid bonus content.

That's just because no one wants to operate a game while earning no money, so most free-to-play games have a business model involving paid content.

Certainly not all of them, though. Here's a list of free-to-play games with no paid content at all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fr ... #Free_play

"Free-to-play" is a term with connotations that it's an MMO game, but there's definitely no connotations of paid content.

("Connotations" as in, you wouldn't say "Wesnoth is free-to-play", but if someone asked you "Is Wesnoth free-to-play?" you would say "yes".)

[HomerJ]

("Connotations" as in, you wouldn't say "Wesnoth is free-to-play", but if someone asked you "Is Wesnoth free-to-play?" you would say "yes".)

Ok, now I'm lost.


Greetz
HomerJ

[cretin]

Eh the real danger with f2p is that you can potentially drop so much more money into the game than in a pay to play game. There was one person i talked to who played Atlantica Online who dropped thousands of dollars into the game. Games only been out in the west for 2 years. Doesnt help that whatever you buy in the item mall is based on luck, it was roulette for items. That's why ive moved back to playing games that cost money, production quality is generally of higher value, with less emphasis on milking the players. Dont get me wrong there are some awesome f2p games out there, but ive found that content is slow to be produced for many of these games much of the time, with a heavy focus on adding new content/skins/items that you have to buy.

[Gambit]

Ok, now I'm lost.

I think he might be talking about the different levels of free software.
shareware->freeware->open source
Dunno though.

[Joram]

("Connotations" as in, you wouldn't say "Wesnoth is free-to-play", but if someone asked you "Is Wesnoth free-to-play?" you would say "yes".)

Ok, now I'm lost.


Greetz
HomerJ

Well, you said you wouldn't consider Wesnoth a "free to play" game, but if someone asked you if Wesnoth was free to play, would you answer "Yes"? I think that that is where Zarel is coming from.