You can't patch away a payment model.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO · January 2015

For all the good the dev team has done with this game, there were still a lot of easily avoidable mistakes made. Most of which the community warned the devs about.

People warned the devs very early on about the veteran system being an issue. We're only getting patches to fix this now with the champion system.
People called the game floaty ever since beta, and we're at the second animation revamp and it seems we're finaly geting somewhere with this.
Very early on, people said that forward camps would be an issue, and they got removed not so long ago.
Same for the aoe target cap, and again, it will finally be fixed in the next patch.

The pattern here is that whether people were being vocal or if it was only a few well thought out posts, a lot of issues were brought up quite early by the community at large. And even if it took months to sometimes even aknowledge the issue, no matter how long, the dev team always had the opportunity to patch and fix them.

However, you cannot patch away a bad payment model decision.

It's probably too late to correct course.
All the press releases got published and the rebranding is fairly complete, but seriously, this b2p nonsense is not something ESO can recover from and you won't be able to patch this one away.

The community warned and explained how it was a very bad decision for months, yet you chose to go through with it.
It's a shortsighted move focused on short term gains, forfeiting any long term expansion possible. I guess that creating an MMO doesn't imediately qualify someone to actually run it effectively.
I hope your investors will be happy, and you won't grow to regret it too quickly.

e.chiesa73b16_ESO · January 2015

Mmm, many mmorpg before eso have turned to f/b2p, and most of them are alive and kicking.
I don't think eso will be any different.

I have only one problem with this decision: they'll remain committed to new contents or they'll shrink their team to just include the people in charge of the store.

NadiusMaximus · January 2015

If someone can do a better time line please do so, but if you look at how long it takes for them to do something after they announced it, and work backwards from the latest announcement, you can see this has been planned from the beginning, or close to it.

They released the game.
They announced new content, that was being worked on.
They said it would be live on x date.
Content was not ready, still being worked on, and pushed back two months.
Three months latter, content is live. Buggy and still needing work.
They announce a new system for ranks, and start working.
Three months latter, it's still being worked on and will not be released for another two months.

While that is happening, they announce the release of a new payment plan and the release of a fully working cash shop....

Now, looking at the record, for them to have a fully working ANYTHING, this had to have been in the plan from the start, but wasn't ready to go live until now.

We have definitely been paying to be console beta testers.

P. S.

Fix empire tower in Cyrodil, it's been a year and it's still undiscovered.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO · January 2015

e.chiesa73b16_ESO wrote: »

Mmm, many mmorpg before eso have turned to f/b2p, and most of them are alive and kicking.
I don't think eso will be any different.

I have only one problem with this decision: they'll remain committed to new contents or they'll shrink their team to just include the people in charge of the store.

I don't call that "alive and kicking". Most of them are just shadows of what they were or could have been. The necessary design decisions to sustain those payment model are destructive of sound game design.

If a large amount of the dev team is dedicated at managing the store and keeping revenue up, you just don't have the man power to create sustainable improvement for your game.
And let's not lure ourselves, that's what every f2p/b2p game has to do in order to survive and ESO will not be any different.

SFBryan18 · January 2015

The short term gains will be huge thanks to the new consoles having a very limited selection of games right now. Beyond that, I don't think they care, as long as they made a profit.

NadiusMaximus · January 2015

If releasing an mmo on consoles was a good and viable idea....

Then World of WarCraft would already have done it. It would even come with a keyboard for your console, instead of the game being gutted and shelled out to fit the console capability.

SFBryan18 · January 2015

NadiusMaximus wrote: »

If releasing an mmo on consoles was a good and viable idea....

Then World of WarCraft would already have done it. It would even come with a keyboard for your console, instead of the game being gutted and shelled out to fit the console capability.

No, that's a pretty bad assumption. WoW does not write the rules. This game is TES first and the franchise has done very well on consoles.

e.chiesa73b16_ESO · January 2015

SFBryan18 wrote: »

NadiusMaximus wrote: »

If releasing an mmo on consoles was a good and viable idea....

Then World of WarCraft would already have done it. It would even come with a keyboard for your console, instead of the game being gutted and shelled out to fit the console capability.

No, that's a pretty bad assumption. WoW does not write the rules. This game is TES first and the franchise has done very well on consoles.

This. They aim to sell millions of copies on console as they did with previous ES games.
But the problem remain: are they trying to offer a full-fledged mmorpg or will transform ESO in The Sim in a medieval setting

NadiusMaximus · January 2015

SFBryan18 wrote: »

NadiusMaximus wrote: »

If releasing an mmo on consoles was a good and viable idea....

Then World of WarCraft would already have done it. It would even come with a keyboard for your console, instead of the game being gutted and shelled out to fit the console capability.

No, that's a pretty bad assumption. WoW does not write the rules. This game is TES first and the franchise has done very well on consoles.

True, true, you are right.

WOW does not write the rules, but has pretty much set the system standards for the franchise. It's why you see everything compared to it. It is also the only one to actually gain players year after year, while still having the old subscription based plan all its competitors seem to gradually walk away from.
It's almost synonymous with the acronym mmo, like kleenex and tissue, jello and gelatin, maybe not to that extent but every mmo is compared to it as a measure. It has been here for years, and never thought of boosting it's base by a million by releasing a console version? No! Why? It's a pic based game. And they know it.

TES is a huge success, in the single player genre. It's to single player rpgs as WOW is to mmos. It Is hands down the franchise all other single player rpgs are held up to as measure. On both console and PC , it has reigned king for years.

Now, mix the two. Yes for sure you can have a ES version of WOW. Yeah, we can. We could also have a single player version of WOW. It's ludicrous to think, but it could happen, I guess. I think they are mixing the two genres pretty good, ES and mmo, but mmos are best suited for the PC. I hate saying that, but if porting to consoles was a good idea, Blizzard would have already. They haven't, because they know their place. That is something ESO is still trying to find, or not find, but making now. ESO will be one of the few cross platform mmos ever made. We will only know how well this pans out until they are done messing with everything. I guess, yeah it could work, it just depends on the player base.

I'm pretty loyal to the ES franchise, but this last year has been trying. It's gone good and bad. The future however is actually looking good as long as ZOS can deliver what they promise, an ES based mmo. They have done very well so far providing that, but if this new system makes them change to many of the core mmo mechanics to make the single player world fit into an mmo, then they should have just stuck with what ES does best, single player games.

Lord_Kreegan · January 2015

Reality check:

Like it or not, it's THEIR game, not ours. We've been paying to play it, not paying to advise ZOS on how to change it, no matter what our egos might want us to believe.

It's THEIR game and they make the business decisions associated with their product. They take the risks that their product might fail and they might all lose their jobs; not us. They spend their investors' money and they are accountable back to those investors; *** them off enough and ZOS will never see another nickel from them... and likely not from other investors, either.

I'm not taking their side, but it's more than a little presumptuous for players to make all these grand statements about how WE warned THEM about what to do. Who are you that they must listen to you? Think about it... Unless you're on the management team -- not just the development team -- you have no say in the matter. There's no risk to you.

So, get a grip. I don't like what they're doing, either, but you need to have a reasonable perspective. Your only choice is to play or not to play, not to decide their business model. If they made the wrong decision, the game will sink like a stone dropped into the ocean.

Rumba1 · January 2015

" Who are you that they must listen to you? "

Well Lord_Kreegan, while I agree with you that the feelings of ownership and entitlement often expressed in these forums is misplaced to a large degree, wouldn't you also agree that a business has a real interest in knowing what it's customers think about it's product?

Without the feedback how will they know which of many, many decisions they make are driving customers away?

staticstorm · January 2015

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

e.chiesa73b16_ESO wrote: »

Mmm, many mmorpg before eso have turned to f/b2p, and most of them are alive and kicking.
I don't think eso will be any different.

I have only one problem with this decision: they'll remain committed to new contents or they'll shrink their team to just include the people in charge of the store.

I don't call that "alive and kicking". Most of them are just shadows of what they were or could have been. The necessary design decisions to sustain those payment model are destructive of sound game design.

If a large amount of the dev team is dedicated at managing the store and keeping revenue up, you just don't have the man power to create sustainable improvement for your game.
And let's not lure ourselves, that's what every f2p/b2p game has to do in order to survive and ESO will not be any different.

SWTOR, LOTRO and DCUO making more and more players than when sub based.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO · January 2015

@Lord_Kreegan‌

It doesn't matter who I am.
Whether it is said by one person or a million, if something is correct it is correct.
This switch is a bad business decision, and they will come to regret it.

Yes it is their right to make a decision that endangers their livelihood, ultimately we're not the one that will have to face layoffs, they are.

And finally, we may not have a say, but as "long term" subscribers we have a right to be disapointed/annoyed/angry.
Newer MMO players may not know and some may not remember, but the tacite deal about susbcriptions is that you pay mostly for the future of the game.
You pay for what is with the box price and only a couple euros for the operating costs. The rest goes to fund the development staff.
Doing a bait and switch after all their marketing about remaining a subscription based game and making us pay again for content we already paid for (the 6 shown DLCs) is very bad for the company's reputation.

In this day and age, customer trust and goodwill is one of the most valuable comodity, and they just lost a lot of it from what was their most fervent defenders.

@staticstorm‌
Having more players does not mean making more money.
On average, only 2.2% of players spend any money on cash shops. It would take around 4M players to "maybe" replace 100k subscribers.

And at what cost? How much will the game have to suffer in order to pull this revenue? LOTRO and SWOTOR are a mess and poster childs of how the f2p model ruins otherwise good games.

And in f2p games, for instance Planetside 2, free players are content for paying players. But the way ESO works, with phasing and instancing and low population caps on AvA campaigns, having more or less players is completely transparent to us players.
So we get all of the disadvantages without any of the few positives.

staticstorm · January 2015

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

@Lord_Kreegan‌

It doesn't matter who I am.
Whether it is said by one person or a million, if something is correct it is correct.
This switch is a bad business decision, and they will come to regret it.

Yes it is their right to make a decision that endangers their livelihood, ultimately we're not the one that will have to face layoffs, they are.

And finally, we may not have a say, but as "long term" subscribers we have a right to be disapointed/annoyed/angry.
Newer MMO players may not know and some may not remember, but the tacite deal about susbcriptions is that you pay mostly for the future of the game.
You pay for what is with the box price and only a couple euros for the operating costs. The rest goes to fund the development staff.
Doing a bait and switch after all their marketing about remaining a subscription based game and making us pay again for content we already paid for (the 6 shown DLCs) is very bad for the company's reputation.

In this day and age, customer trust and goodwill is one of the most valuable comodity, and they just lost a lot of it from what was their most fervent defenders.

@staticstorm‌
Having more players does not mean making more money.
On average, only 2.2% of players spend any money on cash shops. It would take around 4M players to "maybe" replace 100k subscribers.

And at what cost? How much will the game have to suffer in order to pull this revenue? LOTRO and SWOTOR are a mess and poster childs of how the f2p model ruins otherwise good games.

And in f2p games, for instance Planetside 2, free players are content for paying players. But the way ESO works, with phasing and instancing and low population caps on AvA campaigns, having more or less players is completely transparent to us players.
So we get all of the disadvantages without any of the few positives.

it must be enough SWTOR as made more content and faster than when it was a sub.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO · January 2015

staticstorm wrote: »

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

@Lord_Kreegan‌

It doesn't matter who I am.
Whether it is said by one person or a million, if something is correct it is correct.
This switch is a bad business decision, and they will come to regret it.

Yes it is their right to make a decision that endangers their livelihood, ultimately we're not the one that will have to face layoffs, they are.

And finally, we may not have a say, but as "long term" subscribers we have a right to be disapointed/annoyed/angry.
Newer MMO players may not know and some may not remember, but the tacite deal about susbcriptions is that you pay mostly for the future of the game.
You pay for what is with the box price and only a couple euros for the operating costs. The rest goes to fund the development staff.
Doing a bait and switch after all their marketing about remaining a subscription based game and making us pay again for content we already paid for (the 6 shown DLCs) is very bad for the company's reputation.

In this day and age, customer trust and goodwill is one of the most valuable comodity, and they just lost a lot of it from what was their most fervent defenders.

@staticstorm‌
Having more players does not mean making more money.
On average, only 2.2% of players spend any money on cash shops. It would take around 4M players to "maybe" replace 100k subscribers.

And at what cost? How much will the game have to suffer in order to pull this revenue? LOTRO and SWOTOR are a mess and poster childs of how the f2p model ruins otherwise good games.

And in f2p games, for instance Planetside 2, free players are content for paying players. But the way ESO works, with phasing and instancing and low population caps on AvA campaigns, having more or less players is completely transparent to us players.
So we get all of the disadvantages without any of the few positives.

it must be enough SWTOR as made more content and faster than when it was a sub.

What about quality? True improvements and high replayability content?
And what about all the gimping and breaking of the core game?
And what could have been?
f2p is great at doing the illusion of change and moving air around.

But to swtor's credit, it manages to have above 500k subscribers despite having an f2p option.

shadowmilb14_ESO · January 2015

What will happen, is 1/2 of the dedicated players, who have been loyal though thick and thin will leave. Tons of more causal players will come take their place. But these casuals will lose interest in a few months, and leave too. Leaving a broken and unpopulated game. Which will soon vanish from sight and join the graveyard of dead mmos that all went down the same path.

novusprimeb14_ESO · January 2015

cash shop is just a way to recover or make up there lost revenue , also face it all that stuff were waiting for would, have to be released as dlc, thieves guild spell crafting, or no one would buy the console version, there as it stands know is no reason to spend 60 bucks on this game for play station, or x box, look at the reviews. we all know its a relay bad idea. wait till it flops . lol at zen,

OrangeTheCat · January 2015

All the more reason why we paying beta testers from beta onwards should be given free subscribed ESO+ status. It's the least they could do.

eventide03b14a_ESO · January 2015

They made a sloppy MMO and they should be ashamed that they cashed in on a solid reputation that was established by possibly the best fantasy RPG franchise. I'm so disappointed right now. I really thought maybe this game was heading in the right direction with update 6. The reason why this business model is terrible is because they are going to start focusing their attentions on the areas that make money. There is no other way about it. Look at how sloppy their content has been without the crown store P2W model. Yes I am calling it a P2W model because that's what it is. What we are going to get now is even more rushed content so that they can fill their coffers and completely disregard quality.

Abr4hn · January 2015

I find the whining about ESO going B2P very entertaining - the pulling of hair, the gnashing of teeth... the panties in a permanent twist... all hilarious.

I saw these same things happen with Rift, and then again with SWTOR, and guess what? Everything turned out just fine. Those games were dying under the pure subscription model, and the B2P plus optional subscription and cash shop revitalized them. GW2 has had a similar model from the very beginning, and I enjoyed the hell out of its WvWvW battles for quite a while... good times.

Anyway, the bottom line is that I think these B2P changes for ESO are awesome.

Personally, I will continue to pay the subscription plus buy mounts and whatever else I want from the cash shop whenever I feel like it - because I can... or at least will be able to come March 17th or so. I am very much looking forward to that.

For those that disagree, there is always WoW. It is still exclusively subscription based, so there you go.

Lord_Kreegan · January 2015

Rumba1 wrote: »

" Who are you that they must listen to you? "

Well Lord_Kreegan, while I agree with you that the feelings of ownership and entitlement often expressed in these forums is misplaced to a large degree, wouldn't you also agree that a business has a real interest in knowing what it's customers think about it's product?

Without the feedback how will they know which of many, many decisions they make are driving customers away?

Certainly not through forum posts from individual customers... they could give a rat's ass about those...

Likely from forum posts in response to phony forum accounts by personnel from the marketing department posing as players and creating threads deliberately to solicit that information...

Do you really think all forum posts -- especially from what appear to be "white knights" -- are real players?

Oh, how naive you are... ever heard of viral marketing?

Welcome to the world of underhanded, unethical, unprincipled marketing...

Darkonflare15 · January 2015

NadiusMaximus wrote: »

SFBryan18 wrote: »

NadiusMaximus wrote: »

If releasing an mmo on consoles was a good and viable idea....

Then World of WarCraft would already have done it. It would even come with a keyboard for your console, instead of the game being gutted and shelled out to fit the console capability.

No, that's a pretty bad assumption. WoW does not write the rules. This game is TES first and the franchise has done very well on consoles.

True, true, you are right.

WOW does not write the rules, but has pretty much set the system standards for the franchise. It's why you see everything compared to it. It is also the only one to actually gain players year after year, while still having the old subscription based plan all its competitors seem to gradually walk away from.
It's almost synonymous with the acronym mmo, like kleenex and tissue, jello and gelatin, maybe not to that extent but every mmo is compared to it as a measure. It has been here for years, and never thought of boosting it's base by a million by releasing a console version? No! Why? It's a pic based game. And they know it.

TES is a huge success, in the single player genre. It's to single player rpgs as WOW is to mmos. It Is hands down the franchise all other single player rpgs are held up to as measure. On both console and PC , it has reigned king for years.

Now, mix the two. Yes for sure you can have a ES version of WOW. Yeah, we can. We could also have a single player version of WOW. It's ludicrous to think, but it could happen, I guess. I think they are mixing the two genres pretty good, ES and mmo, but mmos are best suited for the PC. I hate saying that, but if porting to consoles was a good idea, Blizzard would have already. They haven't, because they know their place. That is something ESO is still trying to find, or not find, but making now. ESO will be one of the few cross platform mmos ever made. We will only know how well this pans out until they are done messing with everything. I guess, yeah it could work, it just depends on the player base.

I'm pretty loyal to the ES franchise, but this last year has been trying. It's gone good and bad. The future however is actually looking good as long as ZOS can deliver what they promise, an ES based mmo. They have done very well so far providing that, but if this new system makes them change to many of the core mmo mechanics to make the single player world fit into an mmo, then they should have just stuck with what ES does best, single player games.

@NadiusMaximus Yeah I agree. I believe that it would feel like a normal game on consoles because you have to pay for the costumes and dlc and just buy the box price to play it. Just like regular games on the consoles. Also the subscription is like a season pass instead there is a continuation of stuff coming instead of set amount of stuff coming. The only difference is that is strictly a multiplayer game where you can solo by yourself or play with others. It going to do well on the consoles.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO · January 2015

@Abr4hn‌
This is going to sound like sarcasm but it isn't.
I am sincerely happy for you and genuinely wish I could get back to your kind of innocence. That or you just have low standards, in any cases, I envy you.
Have fun as long as it lasts.

Saying that Rift and or Swtor's switches "turned out just fine" is just ignoring how broken those games have been by the f2p model. They both went from flagship products of the genre to "it's not shut down yet? Who cares" land and are just jokes of what they were or could be.
F2p doesn't create good MMOs, and those are certainly proof of that.

And about GW2, this is one of the blandest games ever and designed as such because it always aimed at b2p. It didn't need to be good enough to warant a sub so they could focus on making a lot of forgetable content to pad the longevity.
WvWvW is probably this game's biggest failure. It took all the wrong design decision possible, target caps, in battle revives, small maps with bad flows and just pissed on all the lessons learned from previous RvR games.
Even ESO's AvA is a better RvR implementation despite its own flaws and ESO sales have been boosted by GW2 players fleeing that game, hoping for someone to get it right.

Any way you look at it, these b2p/f2p changes are the begining of the end.
It may take months, but the game will stop being improved and will start devolving and decending into obsolescence.

Don't look at WoW for an example of succesful sub game, it is bleeding subscribers by the millions. Instead, look at Eve Online.
It started out with a worse launch than ESO with more bugs, less resources, , no large IP to boost its sales, a more niche product, yet by focusing on its core audience and improving gradually the game, it is now in the top 10 most succesful financialy games. It has been a tremendous succes for years, growing non stop and showing no signs of slowing down.
If Eve can reach 700k subscribers, ESO certainly can too. 10M euros in monthly revenue is nothing to frown about, especially if it goes on for a decade.

In order to compensate for 1 year of subscription, ESO will need to sell at the very least 2.1M copies of the game on console. And it won't be able to sell that much yealry for a decade. At most it will sell 11M copies, which is what Skyrim sold, but I doubt it will be as successful.
The cash shop will add some revenue, but it can't compensate either. Only 2.2% of free to play players actually pay anything, and 46% of the revenue comes from 0.22% of the playerbase.
This will not work out well for ESO, but the investors will get their ROI in under a year, forsaking a lot more money that they would have made over the years.