ESO base game should be free to play permanently

Twohothardware

While it's great that there is a free to play event Quakecon through August 19th, the base game should be free to play on all platforms at this point. We need increased player counts on especially console since there's no crossplay and the player base is split up 6 ways between 3 platforms and 2 regions each.

You make money off the DLC purchases, the Crown Store purchases, and the monthly ESO+ sub, so make the base game free and grow the population on the game.

https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/freeplay

^^^ make this permanent

TaSheen

No thank you. The free to play stuff just makes bots show up more. The game itself is so cheap there's no reason to give it away. Look what happened with the Epic giveaway.... It didn't make the pop grow for more than a month....

Twohothardware

TaSheen wrote: »

No thank you. The free to play stuff just makes bots show up more. The game itself is so cheap there's no reason to give it away. Look what happened with the Epic giveaway.... It didn't make the pop grow for more than a month....

There's bots regardless and most people aren't even aware of them unless they're resource farming in starter zones. Definitely not a reason to avoid moving to a free to play model and growing player population.

Also, the Epic giveaway was only available for one week and was exclusive to PC only. You're not going to get massive growth in one week, in the middle of July, and no accompanying content release that's exciting.

Nharimlur_Finor

edited

EdjeSwift

I'm firmly in the no free to play. Having a low barrier of entry price is worth it because even if bots and toxic players exist, it's a barrier to ensure we don't become overwhelmed with them.

Also, ESO, in my opinion, is not at the point where it needs to go F2P.

Nharimlur_Finor

edited

Twohothardware

Resource farming bots could also be almost 100% eliminated from the game with one change anyways. Stop giving gold mats from refining low level materials. Noone is going to spend the time to keep leveling up characters in order to bot farm after getting banned.

ESO_player123

No. If it's not gold mats, the bots will move on to farming alchemy materials.
Also, the gold selling spam will fill the chat form top to bottom (I played a game where the FTP servers were plagued by this).
Besides, as it was pointed above, the cost of the base game is very cheap.

Twohothardware

ESO_player123 wrote: »

No. If it's not gold mats, the bots will move on to farming alchemy materials.
Also, the gold selling spam will fill the chat form top to bottom (I played a game where the FTP servers were plagued by this).
Besides, as it was pointed above, the cost of the base game is very cheap.

I've never seen a single bot in the years I've played this game farming alchemy materials on Playstation or Xbox.

Free to play games pull in a much wider audience of players than games that simply have a low cost for the game. The average person is far more likely to download a free game they see in the Store than they are to spend $5 to see if they like it or hate it.

GuuMoonRyoung

That will hurt the game a lot, I mean, A WHOLE *** LOT! Bots will be out of control, cheaters in PvP will become a common occurrence, and so on. The merit is too little while the demerits are way too many for this idea.

vsrs_au

What the game needs instead is for the ludicrously high prices for crowns and crown-purchased items to be dropped (a LOT). They shouldn't be charging the price of a whole game just for a costume, house, armor pack, etc. It's completely unreasonable. If they can't maintain the game without dropping the crown prices, then something's seriously wrong.

spartaxoxo

Twohothardware wrote: »

ESO_player123 wrote: »

No. If it's not gold mats, the bots will move on to farming alchemy materials.
Also, the gold selling spam will fill the chat form top to bottom (I played a game where the FTP servers were plagued by this).
Besides, as it was pointed above, the cost of the base game is very cheap.

I've never seen a single bot in the years I've played this game farming alchemy materials on Playstation or Xbox.

Free to play games pull in a much wider audience of players than games that simply have a low cost for the game. The average person is far more likely to download a free game they see in the Store than they are to spend $5 to see if they like it or hate it.

Go to the starter Islands and you'll see bots.

spartaxoxo

I like the audience isn't as wide with this game. The small barrier to entry keeps out a lot of trolls.

twev

Twohothardware wrote: »

TaSheen wrote: »

No thank you. The free to play stuff just makes bots show up more. The game itself is so cheap there's no reason to give it away. Look what happened with the Epic giveaway.... It didn't make the pop grow for more than a month....

There's bots regardless and most people aren't even aware of them unless they're resource farming in starter zones. Definitely not a reason to avoid moving to a free to play model and growing player population.

Starter zones are one place low level newbs need to be able to pillage for a bit to acquire the mats and loots they need to get a toe-hold in the game.

Another problem that 'free-to-play' encourages is that you can't keep legions of bots, or griefers, out. If they do get tossed out - they just spin up a new free identity and give it another go with no money lost, or skin in the game they might care about losing.

Tommy_The_Gun

It should not. And it is not because I don't want players to be able to enjoy the game more as they could play with more friends etc. It would be bad to do as it would be like an opening of a Pandora's box.

- The 1st thing many players would do is they would make 9 free acouunts so they could have free guild bank for themselves on main account (some people even do that nowadays lol).
- Servers. Would serves be able to handle additional load ? Most likely not. And if is there going to be a special Server for f2p then what is the point ?
- P2W. Same as WOW often gets called for being P2W since it also is f2p, but there are so many pay-gates & Paywalls so that players who play for free are simply not able to compete in end game pve/pvp. ESO would be no different & it would gain a reputation of a p2w game.
- Exploits... and also actual cheats. I think someone mentioned it already, but with f2p account it would be on a totally different level. I am talking actual 3rd part cheats as even if someone will be caught & perma banned, then 5 minutes later they are back with new free account. It would be happening everywhere in PvE & PvP.

It is only a tip of the iceberg & I could probably go on forever on why it is bad. F2P for eso has maybe like 1 - 2% of pros and 99% of cons.

Narvuntien

I mean I bought it for a friend because it was $10 on steam

quinancia

For people who want to play, it is essentially free to play the base game. It goes on sale for 5.99 all the time.

Stafford197

TaSheen wrote: »

No thank you. The free to play stuff just makes bots show up more. The game itself is so cheap there's no reason to give it away. Look what happened with the Epic giveaway.... It didn't make the pop grow for more than a month....

^^^ Exactly this. The moment ESO becomes free to play, you will get an influx of everything bad, far outweighing any new player population gained.

Plus going free-to-play is an acknowledgment of the game being desperate yet again, just like way back when the mandatory subscription had to be dropped.

MachineGod

The 2 most common replies here are funny because they effectively contradict their own points made by the same crowd.

No, Free to play would make the game full of trolls and bots!
The game is very cheap anyway, this will surely discourage them!

So just how cheap is ESO? If I were setting up bot accounts to farm or to simply "troll" somehow (what?) You can find ESO for about 0.70 euros, effectively there are many for 0.5-3 $/€. Given there are many bots these prices are cheap enough for an easy return on investment.

So this imaginary impact would be far less than made out here because there effectively already is no barrier for this particular group.

MasterSpatula

I stil think BTP was a mistake; I'm definitely not keen on FTP.

Jaimeh

No, it's a very bad idea. There's already a lot of shenanigans with alt accounts in Cyro, and gold sellers will keep popping up. There's no reason to make it even easier for them.

Tandor

Absolutely not, for all the reasons already given. No advantages, plenty of disadvantages.

Nharimlur_Finor

edited

Ph1p

MMOs with a free-to-play option actually acknowledge that botting, cheating, spamming, or real-money trading can be an issue for their model. That's why they have restrictions on character slots, inventory space, chat/communication, trading, sending/receiving items, zone access, PVP access, etc. for free accounts. ESO would have to do the same, not just make the free play event permanent.

DinoZavr

No thanks.

Amount of trade scammers will increase considerably, because what costs a "disposal" account - zero.
There is already quite a lot of spam in zone chats, why to increase it and unleash an immense amount of scams.
Also the level of toxic speech will increase. social ban on one account - make a new one and continue. banned again - repeat.

Four_Fingers

ZOS would just raise the price on everything else, so no thanks.

LalMirchi

Respectfulöy, No Thanks, the game is occasionally FTP and is rather cheap already.

ghost_bg_ESO

this proposition probably comes from: "no need for console subscription if game is f2p".

how about free to play for ps(no ps live sub needed), eso+ without crowns included in game pass and no change on pc.

yet, from what i see on the forum ps is still healthy(as there i don't play it), xbox eu is "solo" server(due EU and sub+sub), xbox na seems healthy and pc has even bigger population than servers can handle half of the time...

colossalvoids

Game feels pretty dead compared to even two years ago so there are pros obviously. But my reasoning is more about it's monetisation, it's either should be toned down significantly or the game should go into the bin of f2p games. They're double dipping hard and that's a pretty huge turn off for new players as far as I've read on different platforms.

Tandor

ThoraxtheDark wrote: »

[snip]

Most do welcome new players for free trials, including in relation to ESO+, but opening up a game so as to be permanently free attracts different playerbase elements and is a completely different matter altogether.

[edited to remove quote]

Stafford197

colossalvoids wrote: »

Game feels pretty dead compared to even two years ago so there are pros obviously. But my reasoning is more about it's monetisation, it's either should be toned down significantly or the game should go into the bin of f2p games. They're double dipping hard and that's a pretty huge turn off for new players as far as I've read on different platforms.

I agree but also ESO min-maxes their monetization. Their main focus is to keep big spenders purchasing crowns and gifting them to people, so actual playerbase size is not as relevant as long as it “feels” like their are plenty of players around in our instances. IMO, they have just messed up too much and will never have a larger playerbase than they currently do (which would be massively more profitable ofc). Keeping a stranglehold on current players is why Gold Road has such excessive grind. IMO they underestimate the negative effect within the community when we receive a low content year like 2024 though.

They messed things up but we are 10 years into this game - no going back now.