Free to Play versus Pay to Play

Also known as "Why I dislike most MMOs' gameplay"

(and the return of the meme faces)

Hey all, Little Miss Squish here. Now, before y'all freak out and such that I'd be posting two reviews within one week... I'm not. For those that have poked around old posts and such, every now and then I put aside the reviews to discuss MMOs in general, particularly relating to the healing classes ("uh, durrrr, LMS. That's obvious, you retard."), and all that good stuff. I'd been thinking about what to review next, whether I wanted to replay something I'd played before or play something new entirely. I'd poked around www.mmorpg.com (which you should totally also check out!) and found an article on free-to-play versus pay-to-play gaming, specifically, RIFT versus WoW. While the article itself isn't exactly about free-to-play games versus pay-to-play ones, it did make me think about why exactly I play free-to-play ones specifically and question why I tend to review those more than the pay-to-play ones.

Well, there are a few answers, most of them fairly straight-forward, honestly.

taken from memes.at

The first is when I started playing MMOs (back in middle school... holycrapIfeeloldnow), I didn't have much money to my name. Hell, I hardly had any. Sure, I worked (I had a part-time job as a cashier at Publix!) but that was being funneled into my savings account and eventually into car payments. And, sure, $15 dollars a month for a game's subscription fee might not seem like a lot of money to most adults but when I was 14-15 years old, that was a considerable amount of change. Nowadays, I suppose, that's not a lot of money, now that I have a full-time job, I'm out of college, and such. But not everyone is in the same boat as me. Even still, I have other expenses and things I want to save up for. That $15 a month might not seem like much, but after 10 months, that's $150 and that could easily buy a new piece of furniture or something that I equally want. (Not to mention that the games are rather secondary to me, in terms of expenses. They're kinda the things that I'll pay for if I have a lot of spare change in my pocket after I've bought things I actually need or want more than that.) But that's more of a digression than y'all need.

The other, more prominent reason, is that the overwhelming majority of MMOs just seem... identical to each other. They all feel like they come from a cookie-cutter mold and the only difference is that the developers have slapped on some new graphics and changed up a few things here and there to make their game seem "fresh" and "different", but at the end of the day, they're all the same. Sure, there are quite a few games that have made certain features more or less industry standards; things like having multiple classes/races, the ability to customize your character, some talent/building feature, a crafting system, etc. have all become rather expected in MMOs for the most part. And so, yes, I look for those features in games, as well. But come on people, at least make your game different from the other 1,000 out there! (I see very little difference between Rappelz and Aika Online, for example).

And there are notable exceptions to this, of course. Games like Rift and TERA have made breakthroughs in the MMO world. But then you also have games like WoW and FlyFF (that abomination...) that feel so incredibly copied from and have been copied that one can't help if the game designers nowadays hardly put any effort into making their game unique. Even in the game itself, there tends to be "only so much" that is unique to any character you create.

this came from www.memes.at

Look at WoW, for example. Let's say for the sake of argument that its classes and races are unique. The racial starter zones offer the same quests to every character regardless of class (and they even offer them to other races in the faction), all other zones offer the same quests and content (though it is faction-dependent, at the very least), and even on an individual class level, everything's the same. My Human Priest will do the same quests as my Blood Elf Warlock for the most part, and if they're not the same exact quest, they're pretty damn close. Really game, really? You're not even going to try to offer anything unique to me? So that I'm no different from any other Worgen Druid walking around on the streets? Gee, thanks. And of course, WoW isn't alone. It's just one of many, many, many games that do this.

Most MMOs follow this format in terms of "core" gameplay:

Create character -> Level up through questing and such until you can start doing dungeons -> Grind like hell in said dungeons for the best gear you can get at your level -> Level up even more (through questing and grinding, of course) -> Hit next set of dungeons for your level, repeat grinding phase -> rinse & repeat until you hit end-game content (your private parts should be on fire by now. If not, you're doing something wrong OR aren't grinding hard enough) -> Grind through end-game content to get best gear EVAR!!!111!wut! for your character -> Catch venereal disease in the process -> Get shiny baubles and fuck around in-game once you've got the best of the best -> Create an alt and repeat the cycle

So if you really think that I want to pay a monthly fee for that, I'll take my aching lady-parts elsewhere where I don't have to do so, thank you.  And games like WoW don't really change, either. I noticed that in the MMORPG article I mentioned above. They statically sit there on their couch-throne of MMO godliness with their gut swollen off of the millions of dollars in subscription fees they consume on a monthly basis, and scratch their balls and that's about it. They don't really answer to the players, a lot of whom have quit the game since Cataclysm (and even more upon Pandaria) because of the game's linear development. At least games like Rift have developed and changed to meet player demands. So if you think I want to pay $15 a month for a game that, aside from a new expansion (which you also have to pay separately for), is exactly the same as it was a year ago, then you're mentally ill.

aaaaaand also from memes.at

People also have begun to look for "standard" things in other players and themselves, especially tanks and healers. If you don't have X gear sets or enchantments on your gear, you're automatically considered a "bad healer" or "bad tank." If you don't have a certain build to your character (stat allocation or skill points/talents/etc, whatever the systems are in the game), you're considered a "bad player" who "doesn't know their class." I'm sorry, but this is COMPLETELY FUCKING RETARDED TO ME. That some other person who, odds are, hasn't played the class I'm playing, has the balls to tell me that I don't know my class because I don't have a cookie-cutter character is complete and utter bullshit.

My case and point: my roommate played a Priestess in Ragnarok Online, made her own build, rather different from the "traditional" builds for Priests (Her name was Kanaia--spelling may differ-- on FeelRO, if you played there). She had high HP, high dexterity and/or luck and relatively low intel/mana regen (if I remember correctly) in comparison to other Priests. But she. fucking. owned. as a Priestess. Literally, on the private server she was on, she was in the top three as a Priest across the entire server. Her healing was unbelievable. But people when they saw her were incredibly skeptical about her healing abilities as a Priestess since she didn't have the usual build.

To me, being a good player as a class/role in a party is... well, exactly that. Being a good player. Just because you don't have the best of the best gear or the standard model that every other person of your class has doesn't mean you don't know what you're doing and doesn't mean you suck epically at that class. If you're a good healer, you look to see who's taking damage, communicate with your party, knowing your skills, and being able to react to someone taking a spike of damage at a moment's notice and adapt to any situation. And that's not something that a cookie-cutter build or the best gear will be able to tell you. Sure, you can read guides on your class if people have made them and sure, you can get advise from other players. I've done both in my time on numerous games, in order to maximize my abilities as a healer. It doesn't hurt to seek outside help to improve yourself.

from memes.at, too.

But I get seriously angry when people overlook me as a healer because I do things differently than other people of my class. And I've had it happen to me several times, by those who think they can tell a good player from a bad one solely by their gear and build. Sure, my methods tend to be unorthodox, and sure, I might be able to improve how my character functions in a game, but considering that nearly all I play is healing classes and I almost always look into how that class in a game functions, I think I'm entitled to say I know what I'm doing for the most part.

So, back to my original topic at hand: why would I do free-to-play versus pay-to-play?

The fact is, I throw out most games inside of a month, if not two to three weeks. My friends have always called me on it every time I mention that I'm trying a new game; they ask me how long I'd give this one and always look at me skeptically as they know I go through them faster than a morbidly obese child goes through their stash of Halloween candy. I shamelessly admit that I'm a "game whore." That's partially why my Games List is so long. So when I find a game that's pay to play, I'm really, really skeptical about how long I'll end up playing it. Why would I want to spend money to buy a game, then pay for a subscription, only to find out that I'll only play it for 2 months' time and chuck it out the window?

last one from memes.at, I promise!

Admittedly, when I first played WoW, I actively bought the game (got the vanilla/TBC/WotLK bundle chest) and played for 6 months roughly on a subscription. But after that, I stopped playing for over a year. And then when I wanted to get back into it, I found the glory that is private servers (All you "support the actual game and pay for it!" preachers can suck it, though I do understand your arguments.) Guild Wars 2 also makes me want to pay for it as it's only a one-time fee of buying the game (except for the fact that there's no dedicated healing class), and Rift and TERA have also made me want to buy their games. Some games tend to just suck me in and make me want to play it and only it (I'm looking at you, Skyrim! Honestly, if more MMOs were like Skyrim in terms of things you can do in the game, I'd have absolutely no life whatsoever and would never see the light of day again...). And those games deserve to have a subscription fee. 

But at the end of the day, I really don't want to pay subscription fees for a game that I'll play casually and only every once in a while due to other things in my life. And not to mention my crap-fucking-tastic internet--which literally flickers about 5-6 times in the span of 10 minutes--I'm even less inclined to do so. So, yes, I might bitch and complain about how MMO gameplay is all more or less the same and I might headdesk and beat my skull in on my keyboard. I might say that X game was worth only 3 weeks' playing. But at least I won't be paying $15 a month to do so.