World of Warcraft finally steals the WarHammer Online “perpetual limited free trial” hook.
Too little, too late, says I. The time to flank the F2P tide was a couple of years ago if not earlier.
It’s still probably a smart move. It will be interesting to see what effects it has.
As for me and my house? I’ll have a new baby Druid to play with when the itch strikes, and I don’t have to plunk down a sub for the privilege of picking up the game whenever I darn well please for a bit of sightseeing. Oh, and I can patch the blasted thing without feeling like I’m wasting a couple of days of a month’s sub or firing up a new dummy trial.
Holy Bugbears, Batman!
I haven’t played the game in over 5 years or so now, but my impression was that they have increased the leveling speed since then, so you would hit level 20 quite fast anyway?
I think it is a good move still to not time limit the trials; short time limits will not likely work any longer for a “subscription only”-based game, perhaps even for a game like World of Warcraft.
Someone commented level 20 means 1 hour of play nowadays. OK, maybe a little longer but it’s quite true and not just a figure of speech.
Most interpret it as a sign of weakness from a dinosaur that sees the mammals coming. 600K subscriber loss and suddenly things like “Free Account for a friend for our veterans” and “level 20 free trial” come along. And that’s way before SWTOR and GW2 even have a release date.
Long short story: competition is good for the customer?
I left for Rift and I can’t see me going back to WoW, I’m getting the experience I wanted out of WoW but in a better game (i.e some decent RP). I know many people can say that Rift is a carbon copy of WoW but I find it much more interesting and as people have said here 20 levels in WoW doesn’t take long at all.
I’m inclined to set up a couple of accounts (wonder if I can use my old account without re-subbing?) so I can play with my 11 y/old son over the summer holidays. It would be preferable to him kicking my arse in WH40K Dark Crusade
Being trial accounts I’m sure we probably cannot send Group invites, trade, buy/sell on the AH, etc., but being in the same house we can still communicate, help each other with quests, etc.
As someone who unsubscribed then spent almost a year creating numerous Trial accounts, replaying the same lowbie content over & over & over again without really ever being bored, I could totally go for this.
You can even get to this little gem of a quest, and see a lot of the lowbie revamped content. It even includes Dranei and Blood Elves, though they are now technically the oldest content, not having received a touchup for Cataclysm.
This will be perfect for dabbling, to be sure, though I don’t think we’ll see many level 19 twinks out of this, thanks to heirloom gear that breaks low level PvP. Not sure how much of a conversion rate they will see on subs, though.
Still, I think Longasc and Sente really get the heart of it; level limits will likely be better for demos in the saturated MMO market (Wizard 101 does this as well, and it works well), and absolutely:
competition is good for the customer
Oh, and I can patch the blasted thing without feeling like I’m wasting a couple of days of a month’s sub
Truth!
Can a trial use their LFD service? I did make a few dummy accounts and play them up to twenty in the past, well within the 14 days. I think the lack of auction house interaction grated the most – and frankly the auction house is where alot of peoples interplayer interaction happens the most.
Yes on the LFD tool. That surprised me actually, but it’s nice. I’m thinking of it as level-locked tanking practice.
Well, that’s interesting then – because I never really did alot of dungeons when I played wow. Probably because of my timezone not matching when alot of other people were awake and it always seemed to take a couple of hours to get a dungeon together. I didn’t really want to spend my personal time and sub time waiting on particular princesses to get their act together, so I didn’t.
Mind you, reinstalling WOW would eat two months of my internet download allowance. Have they brought out a ‘lite’ client yet? I think warhammer did, kinda?
With Warhammer having done this for a while and now WoW jumping on the band wagon it feels a lot like the spiritual successor to Shareware from the nineties. I must have played through the first chapter of Doom a million times before I ever bought the full game and titles like Descent, I never bought, but played the shareware copy quite a lot.
LoL, good point, Zombiepirate! I’d never thought of that but yeah, I did the same with the first chapter of doom myself!
[...] 7, 2011 by Tesh In one way of looking at it, level 20 is the new “endgame” for the F2P slice of World of Warcraft. Characters are locked at level 20, and progression past that point will be largely based on [...]
There is a fair bit to do at level 20. I’m on a f2p account now after being a subscriber for almost 3 years. i had already left the game before f2p came available. So far I have:
-”Ambassador” Title (exalted with all alliance playable races).
I’m also friendly with the Silverwing Sentinels
-(3) bank slots
-(7) 16 slot bags, that is 6 from quartermasters (unique) and a quiver bought w/ honor.
-(18) mounts
-(28) companions. The run to Stormspire was interesting. More to get still.
-all blue armor except two BoA pieces and a green lvl 32 ring
-Secondary skills over 100. (they are not yet limited like the primary skills)
-I’ve maxed tailoring/enchanting for enchants, and leatherworking/skinning for medium armor kits. I’ll go with smithing/mining next. As alliance, the best rogue range weapon is a crafted spear. then I’ll go herbalism/inscription so i can make thistle tea and Darkmoon Faire cards for rep. and last herbalist/alchemist for potions i can’t farm.
-I’m at 620 achievement points now and still going up. I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to kill a horde DK for “that takes class achievement”. Hmm…
check my toon out at:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/blackwater-raiders/Naomibeth/advanced
Sky, how did you wind up with the Heirloom shoulders? It’s my understanding that only new or old trial (unpaid) accounts could do the F2P thing. Did you just tie a new F2P account to your battle.net account? If so… man, heirlooms on F2P twinks changes things a bit from what I was thinking earlier.
Still, thanks for chiming in. There’s definitely plenty to do at lower levels if you just look for it. Plenty of challenge, too.
trial accounts gold is maxed at 10, but honor is still limited to 4000 like a pay account. so you can buy the the honor items, or trade in the honor for justice points to buy the PvE BoA items. you just have to earn it on the toon though. you can’t send it to them. just play hard in BGs when they have Call-to-Arms.
oh, miss-read your question. You are right, you can not have f2p toons on your old pay account. I closed my pay account and started a new trial/f2p account later. they can all be on the same battle.net account though. but you still can’t send stuff to them. no mail on f2p. I had some old trial accounts from before i started my pay account too. those converted into f2p as well. I had to delete arrows, and flint and tinder. it was that long ago. couldn’t remember all the old accounts though. i know i had rogues with full defias sets then, before i bought the game. would love to find them.
I have an old account somewhere, too. Two, actually… somewhere in the aether. Neither amounted to much, though. Certainly nothing cool like a full Defias set.
Thanks for clearing up the honor/heirloom question. I had no idea; I’d mentally written off heirloom gear as something I’d need a paid account for. I wonder if that lack of an honor cap is an oversight or by design. Either way, that’s an interesting option for someone willing to put the time in. Not sure if that’s me, but still, I like to know the extent of the game design.
[...] long been a proponent of making WoW F2P and even offline or in W/JRPG format simply because subscriptions never offer me enough value for [...]