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[Flying Dice]

Meh, I personally like the GW2 model: buy the game outright, then have the option of spending real money on a cashshop full of cosmetics and conveniences like tokens for instant banking/itemselling and additional inventory space/character slots. It's already a pretty pro-fun game, considering that you can get a new toon to the levelcap in about a week and buy them a full set of exotics with the money you made doing it.

I've sort of got a bias against monthly subscriptions. I'm probably doomed to some sort of torment for this, but Runescape did alright in that respect back when it was $5/mo (and when you could make a pretty good amount of progress in F2P before you needed to start paying for new content), but when a game starts asking for $15-20/mo I start looking for something else to play, especially when they're designed to drag the grind out as long as possible.

[DreamThorn]

The trouble with making expansions a per-player purchase, is that that separates the player-base [even further].

Not being able to play together with my friends/family because they play more/less than me is another thing that has always bothered me.

I vaguely remember the time before I had played any MMORPGs, and what I thought it would be like.  I am gradually working on a practical way to create a facsimile of the experience that I originally expected and still desire.

I should probably formalise that into a set of goals at some point.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Voting
Pay2FuckTheWorld could work, in the sense that people who subscribe get a monthly vote on how various changes will occur. The company breaks ties if no one option achieves a 60% majority.

So for example, the players can vote on the volcano issue. Is it:

A natural phenomenon,
Caused by a great dragon roiling around which you can fight,
A gate to the Plane of Fire,
A gate to Hell,
Caused by a great machine about to emerge,
Etc.

And the developers will take that direction and develop it that way.

Similarly, gameplay could be voted on, for example what convenience is more important for us to develop next:

Mounts, which can also be used in fighting and can fight for you when you dismount,
Vehicles, which can carry cargo slowly and be used for trade between cities to improve their production, and assaulted to stymie military activities,
Pets, which can be tamed and trained with funny tricks and sent on errands,
Gear modification, things like color and tassels and devices on shields, crests on helmets, general shape of things, all cosmetic,
Etc.

The people who are willing to put their money into the game get a say. The people who don't have anything material invested in the game must make do with forum posts and meandering bitch-fests on party chat like they do now.

The choices available would not be write-in, it would be the choices the devs offer. They should have a text input linked to each account ID that you can offer suggestions freeform, and the devs can look through those and see which ones are most popular and eliminate the ones that aren't feasible.

In all cases spamming can't happen because in order to get 10 votes or make 10 suggestion-votes you would have to pay for 10 accounts. Without additional reasons to have multiple accounts, I doubt anyone would do this. And if they did, doesn't that suggest they have a serious investment in the game and perhaps you should listen to this person a little more? Finally, while "buying votes" seems repulsive in a democracy, this is more like having patrons who support and guide your work. If a patron emerges who pays for 100 accounts every month, paying attention to what he says is a good thing. And besides, you probably have thousands of accounts so while his impact will be noticeable it won't mean on player decides how things will go. And who would spend $1000 per month just to troll people?

Character Slots
I believe it's fine for a game to say that a paying account gets maybe 20 character slots but a free account gets just two. If you have alt-itis, you might wanna pay some dough. Everyone still has full access to everything in the game, but paying players can roll up a bunch of different characters to try a lot of different things without deleting old ones all the time.

There are other benefits you can give, like a boost to XP gain or loot drop rate, that seem invisible but people will totally pay for them. However freeloaders will also totally bitch about them. I think it's also fine for paying players to receive benefits in-game as long as they're a gradient, meaning free players have access to it but the paying players enjoy it more. Rather than "six mounts are free, another twelve are for subscribers" I would suggest "free players' mounts have 1x run speed, while subscribers' mounts have 1.2x run speed (which slows to 1x for 3 minutes if the subscriber has attacked or healed another player)".

Soft boosts like that are very preferable to locking off content for subscribers, or any kind of queue for content, or preferring subscribers for bandwidth or login. That kind of stuff a lot more people will complain about.

[DJ]

You can't really limit character slots in an F2P game.

[Sonlirain]

Great idea, cerapa!

In other news...

I see EVE has a 14-day free trial and pre-pay per-month subscriptions.  My main problem with that is that people who don't play regularly get much less value-for-money.

What about pre-pay per-hour subscriptions?  You only use up hours when you are in-game.

APB used to have that system before it bit a rotting asshole.
People just HATED it and it was one of the biggest MMO failures ever seen... at least it seems to fare pretty well as a F2P.

You can't really limit character slots in an F2P game.

You can't but it counts as a quality of life thing. Especially if they have a shared bank.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Sure you can.

1: A lot of games have a "bound to account" kind of thing, where loot you find can be traded between characters on a single account but can't be traded to another account. If you have six F2P accounts you're going to constantly be finding loot on one account that you would love to have on the other accounts.

2: The TOS can say you're not allowed to have multiple free accounts. There are ways to track suspicious cooperation between accounts, for example Account 1 is always mailing money one-way to Accounts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 who have low-level characters, none of the accounts are ever online at the same time, they all come from the same IP -or- they all suspiciously rotate IPs randomly, text input by the players of these accounts is all very similar, they party up with the same people all the time, they share friend lists, etc. This stuff can be analyzed automatically to give a suspicion rating, and for high-suspicion accounts the system requests attention by a human moderator. Just being in the same guild, partying with your guildies, and trading with them wouldn't be enough to arouse suspicion. I'm sure this could be circumvented by a reasonably knowledgeable and experienced hacker, but he's taking these risks and spending all this energy so that he can avoid paying $10 a month. Pretty sure it's not worth it.

3: Shared bank / shared house access / etc. already mentioned.

[DeKaFu]

I'm one of those people who simply can not deal with monthly MMO subscriptions very well.
I tried it once years ago and it drove me nuts because I couldn't escape the mentality that paying for an entire month of time = wasting money any time I spent not playing it. As a result I felt compelled to play constantly even when I didn't really feel like it, or else the money I'd spent on those hours had been for nothing. Burned out on the game completely in two weeks.

Given the choice between the two, I'd probably go for the pay-by-the-hour model over the pay-by-the-month model, since then I could play moderately and take impromptu breaks from the game and not feel guilty about it.

Realistically though, I choose neither and only play things with no subscription whatsoever.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Some people play F2P games by paying for individual cash shop purchases instead of the subscription which gives a broad array of stuff you could get from the cash shop. That way they control exactly how much they pay. Although you tend to get a better deal by subscribing.

I would think you would feel more pressured by the hourly charge than a monthly charge. I know if my Internet were billed by the mb I would find another hobby and just use it to check email. That kind of pricing structure would be one of only a couple things that could kick me completely offline.

[Flying Dice]

The only way I could ever accept a subscription-based model would be if it only ticked down your credited time when you were logged on to a character, and even that would leave a bad taste in my mouth.

[Sonlirain]

Well that's the thing about monthly subscriptions is that you have to have a proper mindset about them. For the time i payed WoW i cnsidered paying for the subscription to be similar to buying a new game.
Simply put if you got addicted to WoW and payed Blizzard their subscription you probably only played WoW and didn't touch other games at this point and therefore didn't play (or buy) any other game.
MMOs are constantly shifting and change their content and WoW is time consuming if you think about it anyway.

[Armok]

Another idea: developers list out hundreds of goals, anyone player or not can donate to them, and each month/week they do the one that had the most money into it at the start of it.

[Playergamer]

Improbable Island has something sorta like this, but that's not really an MMO. Just, make sure you phrase it as a bonus to donate, not a malus if no one donates.

(In case you play improbable island and don't know what I'm talking about, a lot of stuff in the supporter lounge is dropping crates on the island, or increasing global XP gain.)

[DreamThorn]

Lots of good discussion here.  I'll be keeping my eye on this thread.

[Jimmy]

Essentially you want to break down your MMO offerings into categories. We have a few traditional models already available.

1. Subscription. A monthly flat fee to access content.
2. Microtransaction. Free-to-play game, but convenience, content or cosmetics are for sale.
3. Purchase. You pay once to access the game with no limitations on content.
4. Hybrid. A variation on all of the above.

Since you mentioned EVE Online, we'll look at that.

In EVE Online, people purchase an item called a PLEX. It allows you to play the game for 30 days and costs real money. However, you can trade these for ISK, the in-game currency. If you play the game enough you can buy playing time from another player and not spend real money. If you want to avoid grinding for funds you can buy extra play time and trade it to another person for a cash boost. However at the end of the day every person playing their account has paid for their play time, whether they bought it or traded someone else for it. PLEX is only created by someone spending real cash for it, so the company will always make money from these. It is at the core a subscription model.

With paying for a game, there's strong opposition by many against giving the higher spending players uneven advantages, the so-called "pay to win" mentality. However at the same time a game needs regular funding to survive and continue producing content. Striking a balance between motivating the individual player to spend money and alienating the playerbase from your game needs to be finely tuned.

An ongoing crowdsourcing style donation system would be a novel idea. Essentially the community as a whole contributes towards the cost of unlocking new content, rather than restricting the content behind paywalls for the purchasing accounts. You could break it down into further categories if need be to avoid resentment at a lack of attention to various areas of the game. Something along the lines of new content vs. upgrades to existing content. Offer a subscription if people wish to have it which will automatically contribute to a section of their choice, or free access and the option to make a donation. Since most stores offer cosmetics and convenience items, I'd suggest hybridizing your model to allow each donation or subscription to grant credits towards the purchase of these items in addition to funding the new content.

[DreamThorn]

Good summary, Jimmy.

Where's the karma button? 

I've also been thinking about balancing an MMO economy, but that's off topic, and my results so far are a bit depressing: sustainable resources aren't sustainable.  In an MMO this is partially solvable, but IRL it's possibly really bad news.

I might start a thread about that.