Waffennacht wrote: »

How could they? Console's mean Microsoft and Sony are involved and make a profit. I seriously doubt they'd allow it to go free to play.

They still have to pay for the consoles online subsciption even if they don't have to subscribe to ESO

Nope!
Too many leaches who make the game expensive to enjoy for the rest of us low-average spenders.

@attackjet troll farming forum status?

Who'd have thought it possible?

Best to wait a few days before weighing in again if you want to keep cover.

The good thing here is it must be the first Topic were almost all agree on something :P

Dragonking06 wrote: »

Hell no. Just no. The pay wall is the only thing keeping out the ones who would just spoil the game for others. Not to mention the drastic increase in botters.

Oh your account got banned for botting? No big deal, just make a brand new free account and carry on doing the same ***. Lets not forget about 'Gold sellers'. I heard this game in its early days had problems with them. But as it stands right now? I've never even seen one advertising in a zone. Those that buy from scams like that fail to realize that while it might seem 'legit', someone else's account was compromised and had everything of value stripped from it. That's where that money comes from.

*** that. I love that the game went Buy to play. The community is so drastically different than that of Free to play MMO's. It's warm and welcoming. Yes you get the odd player here and there who's a troll and is a jerk to people, but it's easy enough ignore them.

Yes the bots and gold sellers were bad at launch, most of the zone chats were taken up with sellers.

Waseem wrote: »

Its matter of time anyway
Performance of every dungeon/trial gets worst every patch, cyrodiil performance will never be fixed, one tamriel is worst thing happened for consoles players
They'll just move the game to f2p, sell whatever u can think of on crown store ..
Just hardcore addicts will remain around and performance will fix itself by itself because many will quit

Not going to work, especially when consoles are involved. Microsoft and Sony will not allow it.

And again, no.

That is all.

Buy is to play is the best option, but free to play will have a lot of disadvantages like the risk to become pay to win, limitations on chat and the worse of them all: lot's of kids and toxic creeps that's chose to play video games all day and live on their parents money will invade and kill our joy. You may say that I'm exaggerating, but I'm playing MMOs for years and I've witnessed this scenario many times.

I'm playing on PC EU and I have no idea how the community is on other servers, but here is formed by mostly mature players with some sense of humor, maybe a bit of trolling here and there or sometimes a childish joke on general chat, but most of the time the community is ok and I don't want to be destroyed by toxic people that will have free access to the game. And trust me, you don't want to see the chat spammed with racist jokes, spam bots, unfunny and old yo mama jokes or replacing a word from a title with something from the game and be spammed for three days on general chat (something happened on SWTOR with the word "Jawa").

MaKTaiL wrote: »

ESO already has a very profitable Crown Store. The money they get from Buy To Play is minimal compared to what they get from the Crown Store. If the game were to become Free To Play everything would still be the same as it is now.

With regards to game design ? Probably.
With regards to community / population ? Certainly not.

Prof_Bawbag wrote: »

From my very limited experience, Neverwinter looks a lot more populated than ESO (but i have no idea if that's just down to how populations and instances are handle in each game), so I'm assuming it would attract a lot more players.

The issue here isn't quantitative. It's more qualitative. Even though it's not a 100% guarantee, an entrance fee encourages the gathering of people with a somewhat common motivation and interest for the game. Free access means everyone gets in, being for 5 minutes or 10 years, with constructive or destructive motivations.

Also, the B2P status ensures that people who play the game must have access to some sort of payment method - which means, the youngest are out. Sure, ESO has its fair share of 10 or 12 year olds playing, those who have found a way to pay for it, but there would be far more of them if the game was F2P.