Anyone ever heard of a subbased MMO (or game in general)....Follow

Many of the F2P games, such as lotro, swtor, etc, offer this. You can sub and have access to everything in-game, but there are still items, costumes, packs, etc that you can buy separately, or you can be F2P and buy everything through microtransactions. I don't think there is a sub-only game with microtransactions however.

Would say WoW and some pets fit this bill. FFXI and the Tidal Talisman and CD/furniture piece did, too.

The Secret World launched as you say Duo. It quickly reverted to F2P.

You can't have your cake and eat it too as TSW found out. To do this is like proclaiming that your product is superior in every way to the competition.

WoW is probably the only game in terms of quality and subscribers that might pull that off. They just started doing it though. We will see if those subs plateau or rise or plummet even further due to this.

I don't think Duo meant optional sub. I think he meant a P2P that has microtransactions on top of the sub price.

Edited, Aug 7th 2013 3:26pm by sandpark

DC isnt a game that requires a monthly fe eto play (like FFXIV for example) yet still has microtrancastions..

now you CAN pay for legendary status (monthly fee) and have microtrnascations but legendary status is not REQUIRED to play

I can get behind this, but at the same time, can potentially understand the need as the size of the expansion and the newly created assets may warrant some injection of cash. XI was pretty terrible about releasing expansions 20% done or so, though. At least they were kind of honest about breaking Abyssea up into parts.

Eve online is a required subscription, with minor microtransactions, and the ability to buy game time increments with cash outside of game, transfer them into an In-game item, and resell that item for game money. Or as a player, pay for your subscription with In-game cash through a CCP controlled system, that is balanced by massive Perma-loss in game.

All expansions ( big or small, there are a lot of minor bits) are included for the sub.

Of course... there is the fact that you're then playing Eve, and obviously insane, or obsessed with Excell masquerading as a Spaceship game.

(insert Woody Woodpecker laugh here)


Edited, Aug 7th 2013 4:28pm by OtosanOokami

Not all problems are obvious. Not all solutions are simple.

Their rationale for packaging major class changes into expansions is to make sure classes work fundamentally the same way within a single expansion. For instance, adding Holy Power to paladins mid-wrath would have been profoundly stupid because suddenly every paladin in the game would have to relearn their character-in the middle of a raid tier or pvp season. Instead, they package major changes like that into expansions so that players have some leveling time to get to know their class again.

World of Warcraft has some of the most well-balanced class mechanics of any existing MMO, and class balance in that game is constantly improved.

LotrO store came out after F2P.

Didn't WoW charge like $25 for a mount a few years back? That counts right?

Right, but I specified problems whose solutions had been explicitly identified by developers, and in many cases were very simple things to fix. For example, doing away with ammo or soul shards taking up inventory space, or tuning down the magnitude of mortal strike abilities, etc. Those are the sorts of things whose coding and dev time cost is less than a typical bug fix, yet were kept from being implemented until they could be rolled into a new expansion.

I can't speak for MoP, because I quit halfway through Cataclysm, but every expansion prior to that, their entire list of class "features" for the expansion read like a list of complaints from the previous expansion. They deliberately avoided fixing things in many cases so that those long awaited fixes could be part of the next xpac's hype machine.

All things considered it wasn't enough to prevent me from playing the game for a long time, but it was still kind of shady.

WoW has a cash shop already. It has for quite a long time. It's just not in-game. Same with FFXI's. I'm sure FFXIV will probably have microtransactions and we just don't know what they will be.

Nothings wrong with that!