Just a quick thought, this one. I’ve been reading up on Allods Online, seeing what others have to say. Consistent among them is the notion that AO is “good for a free to play game“, occasionally noted as being better than a subscription game. As if the business model inherently makes a game better or worse.
Mark me as a dreamer, but I look forward to the day when games can be judged on their own merits, rather than being “good for being a member of some arbitrarily contemptible lower class” of game, whichever side of the holy wars one subscribes to. This reason alone is enough to champion the increasing democratization of the business model.
Then again, I think racism, “solo vs. group”, “Democrat vs. Republican” and football rivalries are dumb, too. *shrug*
Oh, and my dad can totally beat up your dad. Neener, neener.
I think it’s just the way a lot of people think.
It’s historical, quality western games like Guild Wars generally were not called free to play, the term being used before this year almost exclusively for imports from Asia that were generally badly localised for English-speaking markets and designed as grindy and non-WASD.
Obviously that’s false now, the line having been blurred completely in September when DDO stepped from one side of it to the other and now offers both free to play and sub-based models (and is fun and successful).
It still has some merit for the customer as a basis for making judgments.
For some people they can only access F2P. People who don’t have credit cards or indulgent parents may find it difficult to play more sub-based games. Only WoW has readily available game cards in shops throughout London as far as I know. If you don’t have a credit card and want to play EQ2 or Eve you can’t.
Some people have one sub but balk at the idea of taking out another one. $15/month is good value, $30/month might be getting too expensive for some people.
So again if they know they aren’t going to leave their main game their only MMO options are F2P games.
I think “quite good for a F2P” is partly a statement that there is a pool of games whose average quality is lower than the sub-based games even if the best of them are just as good. And it also reflects that some people are restricted to F2P and a vast bandwagon of people will try any game that is F2P and good even if they never spend anything.
Should the expression die? Well maybe when games like Evony and Shaiya do, until then F2P will retain a stigma of lower quality because such titles drag the average quality down.
It is an unfortunate mindset. And it does not really apply for games. Who plays a game that is mediocre because it is free? I would rather pay for a great game.
This is why I never understood people who played GW because they could not afford WoW. This really hurt me, as I played GW for its merits and appealing deisgn, as you said, and not because it has a certain payment scheme and is for free. Sigh. It is also a totally dumb argument, GW=WoW is even worse than comparing apples and oranges.
I think your reading it wrong. Aren’t people just looking at what it costs for what you get (cost meaning both time and money)? I mean, don’t you do that at the supermarket already?
I wish my dad could beat someone up… but then again…
well, my mom can browbeat your dad any day, so there!
Ooh, trumped. I’ll have to get back to you on that one, Thallian…
Stabs, there are indeed bad F2P games. There are bad sub games, too. The proliferation of both gives players more choice, which is a good thing. My core point remains, though; judge a game on its merits, not by prejudice. (Yes, people do live by prejudice… that doesn’t make it right.)
Longasc, GW is great, but it’s different. People like to compare and contrast, but all too often, gaming comparisons are just fanboy wars rather than anything more objective and useful. ‘Tis unfortunate.
Callan, poke around and see what you think. You’re right, in some places that may well be the reasoning. In others, there is a very real undercurrent of the sort of prejudice I’m noting. It’s not unlike “you play well, for a girl”, or “your game is pretty good, for a white boy”. It’s an insult and a compliment rolled into one, and more than anything, it illustrates the speaker’s prejudices rather than providing a fair evaluation of the subject. It also assumes that the reader shares a pithy or poor evaluation of the category of games in question, which may not be accurate.
So it’s not very precise language to start with, and it illustrates a somewhat ugly classist view on games. No, this isn’t the end of the world, and racism and sexism are far more troublesome. It’s just something that I hope to see die out as the playing field evens out into a more meritocratic spectrum of games. If players can get over that, maybe there’s hope for a more meritocratic society in the other things as well.
Yeah it’s an odd one when you put it like that isn’t it. I wonder why people’s views of F2P plays are so poor? I think it’s probably because you see tons of adverts for those cheapo Chinese F2P games everywhere and I think it gives the business model a bad reputation.
Eh, perhaps I’m a bit too innocent for the internet and read it as a fair evaluation, when it’s a backhanded compliment? I can definately see that “good for a free to play game“ could be meant in either sense.
Funny thing is, I don’t know that anyone using it as a backhand compliment really *means* to denigrate or insult, it’s just something that slips out. I suspect that they just literally look at the whole category of F2P games as second class. That’s what I find unfortunate, judging a game based on its business model. (Case study: DDO has been proclaimed as a bad game when it was a subscription game, but is now hailed as a Pretty Good game. The business model does have an effect on the game, but ultimately, it’s still the GAME that you’re playing, and the monetization side is just a public perception game. The GW situation as Longasc describes is another prejudice.)
To be sure, some are likely making a fair evaluation, and there definitely are plenty of bad F2P games. Guilt (or awesomeness) by association just isn’t helpful for truly honest evaluation.
Y’know, it’s not unlike saying Batman: Arkham Asylum is “good for a comic/movie based game”. It’s actually a solid game in its own right, but just the association with all of the bad games based on similar IPs in the past has a way of saying “you’re the best of a bad breed”. That undermines a critical, honest evaluation of the game as a self-contained entity.
It’s also why comparing every MMO to WoW doesn’t really help all that much. Sure, it’s nice in broad strokes and to communicate ideas in shorthand, and it’s something I do often enough that way. People have called me on it, though, noting rightly that such comparisons don’t treat the subject fairly on its own. That’s one reason why I’ve been a bit more careful in how I write about games. Notably, the Torchlight mini review I wrote a while back doesn’t mention Diablo; I wanted to just write about the game itself, not how it fits into the fanboy pantheon. There is a place for both, to be sure, but I find that I crave a bit more objectivity than can be garnered by prejudice and endless comparisons.
Tesh, most of them are horrible. F2P games vastly outnumber sub MMOs, and just are poor experiences in the majority, even the successful ones. I think its somewhat of reverse classism, based on playing the best in the genre and thinking they are the norm. DDO and Allods are tiny blips in the genre, games like Maple Story and Adventurequest worlds define it. It might be a funny experience to try 30 f2p games in 30 days sometime to see.
*shrug*
Even if the majority of them are horrible (and I tend to agree, since my ratio of like:dislike with F2P games is somewhere around 2:15), the point stands; judge a game on its own merits, rather than prejudging it based on classist caricature and assumption.
It’s the same reason that you shouldn’t judge a person by how they look if they happen to resemble a group that you disagree with or have had bad experiences with.
Yes, this is a totally understandable and common pattern of human judgment. That doesn’t mean it’s right.