World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria

[Highlord Laan]

Damn. I was hoping Fallen Earth was faster paced than that. Oh well. thanks for the info.

[Broomstick]

Nope, wouldn't call it "fast-paced". If you were with a dedicated group you could probably speed many things up but I doubt that's how it is for the average player.

[Vendetta]

I think Vendetta's point is that this is actually a more effective revenue model. It's better at sustaining the interest of people who don't play the game continuously, it's got a lower investment barrier to entry, and it lets players choose their own level of $/month spending that they're comfortable with.

It's an effective revenue model if you build for it early and charge for the right things at the right point in the player's experience. If the player sees the limitations of being a free player too early they're less likely to upgrade, which is why WoW's free to level 30 didn't give them a boost and why ToR's free model got so much flak.

But WoW has existed too long on its current revenue model to effectively switch.

The only games getting long term success with subscription models are ones that have had them since it was normal. Every recent game that has launched with a sub model has gone free to play after 6-10 months (after farming the initial wave of gullible idiots willing to pay £8 a month for nothing better than they can get for free in fifty other places). The subscriber model doesn't have a future, really.

[Sharp-kun]

It depends. I'm happy to pay for WoW because I feel I'm getting my monies worth. The patches throughout MoP have consistently been good and have had a load of content (one of my mates and I compared to previous expansions and wondered what the hell they were doing back then). Same would go for any other MMO. If you provide me with good content on a regular basis I will pay a subscription.

When I compare this to the F2P MMO's I play I don't see it. I wouldn't pay for STO since while I have fun playing Internet Spaceships there's a dearth of content and balance issues that I don't see them ever fully addressing.

[TheFeniX]

While I don't think that subscriptions will drop as fast as Vendetta's predicting, Mists launched in Q4 of 2012. That drop of 2 million happened early in the Mists of Pandaria expansion cycle. Some of that drop can be explained as correcting for the pre-expansion spike in subscriptions, but even then it's not a good sign when close to 20% of the player base unsubscribes in the first six months of the expansion. Especially when each expansion has historically had a 2 year life before the launch of the next one (which, considering that Warlords is not even in Beta yet, is probably not a streak that will be broken this time around).

Early Panda Land was a great questing experience, but endgame gear and content was stuck behind brutal rep grinds and they pulled the ability to wear tabards in dungeons to slow-grind your rep. The only way to get it done was to pound dailies like it was going out of style.

LK and Cata (with a few exceptions) did a good job of giving a player multiple ways to go about farming X or Y. To go back to the old "dailies or nothing" model pissed off a lot of people who had time to invest but did not want to invest in it that way. They've cleaned up a lot of shit in late expo without completely going "here's a bunch of free epics that will get you through normal raids" like they did at end Cata.

[Highlord Laan]

Nope, wouldn't call it "fast-paced". If you were with a dedicated group you could probably speed many things up but I doubt that's how it is for the average player.

I think I'll still at least give it a try. One of the best things about FTP is that one can test the waters before taking the PayPal Plunge.

[TheFeniX]

WoW is weird. We go from failing flexes one week (and me having to pug them) to going one (or two) shot 8/14 in 10-man SoO. Now my DK is a core part of our raiding team... that didn't exist as of 2 weeks ago. However, as part of this, my pally has now been volunteered as a tank for another guild tonight because we took some members from said guild for our 10-man. None of this was run past me. And now there's a continuation of SoO tonight in our guild, but I'm "supposed" to tank someone else's 10-man.

Once again, WoW is weird. And I can't say I'm all that ok with our guild leader portioning out my gaming time and I plan to have a talk with her tonight. These people are lucky I have nothing to do until our house is built. But they are in for a shock in mid-Feb when I start logging on a lot less, if at all.