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[UXLZ]

I blame LoL for this.
Am I missing any other games that started the F2P craze?

[Sonlirain]

You can buy pets/mounts for real $$. Some pets are pretty decent fighters and most have backpacks you can store items in.
Also interestingly you can play as one of your pets and level them...

But that's paying only.

Free players get 2 pets (A horse and mountable eagle) without backpacks but are good for use as mounts.
Premium players used to have larger inventory, bank space and use speciality bags but that got released for free.

So... paying players get the following:
Better mounts usable as combat pets.
Some extra inventory space on their character.
Can play the farming minigame (one that's super tedious because you have to take care of crops for several hours/days in REAL TIME)

And that's all i can think of...

[Shadowlord]

IMHO Cryptic/Perfect World (developers/publishers of Star Trek Online and Neverwinter) are terrible people for showing a global message every time someone gets the ultra-ultra-ultra-ultra-rare item from a lockbox (in Star Trek Online it's a starship). The odds against it are astronomical, but every time I've been on either game enough people have been ploughing their money into keys to open lockboxes (out of misguided hope, or an overabundance of money (or credit and lack of willpower)) that it seemed like the messages were appearing almost constantly. Of course since they appear right in the center of the screen in bright yellow, the annoyance factor may be causing me to overestimate/misremember the frequency, what with human memory being fallible and all. The rate definitely varied, some times it seemed ridiculously frequent (multiple lockbox messages on screen at the same time), and others much slower.

I haven't played either in some months, though I doubt they've discontinued the practice.

Mind you, I don't think they're bad games MMOs, necessarily, but I think that it's irresponsible as hell. It's as if they went "Oh, you know, some of our customers might have gambling addictions. I bet we could totally take advantage of that! Better us than some casino, right?" or something.

It seems like most MMOs are run under the worst principles, though. They might as well all be following rule of acquisition #263: Never allow doubt to tarnish your lust for latinum.

[Virtz]

Mabinogi?

Aren't you unable to get a mount in that at all without buying from the cash store?

I know I got a horse without ever paying. I think it has a limited duration per day though. Not sure if it's still possible since I've bee playing on and (very) off since it was in beta in the US.

I seem to recall it has a lot that requires paying for though, if you want to get anywhere in a finite amount of time.

And, uh, pardon not merging the posts; my phone sucks for this.

Other than not having a pet I don't remember being hampered in any particular way by not paying.

That's kind of a significant hampering considering I don't recall any other means of travelling faster. And I recall having to travel a lot. Though if it's now possible to get one without paying real money, then it's fine, I guess.

You can buy pets/mounts for real $$. Some pets are pretty decent fighters and most have backpacks you can store items in.
Also interestingly you can play as one of your pets and level them...

But that's paying only.

Free players get 2 pets (A horse and mountable eagle) without backpacks but are good for use as mounts.
Premium players used to have larger inventory, bank space and use speciality bags but that got released for free.

So... paying players get the following:
Better mounts usable as combat pets.
Some extra inventory space on their character.
Can play the farming minigame (one that's super tedious because you have to take care of crops for several hours/days in REAL TIME)

And that's all i can think of...

Which game are you talking about, though?

[Ghills]

Hm.  Having played Guild Wars 2 for a few years, I think it meets your criteria. But I'm not sure I recommend it.  Nothing in the shop is essential or even super important for gameplay, and in-game currency can purchase the shop curency.  Nothing is locked behind a cash-only paywall.

That said, a major part of the game is locked behind an in-game paywall.  In the April update this year, the cost of a major part of character build - traits - was increased about 1,000% (or more - I didn't value skill points at the typical market rate because most players don't bother turning skill points into gold), or players were given the option of doing a crapton of random stuff to 'earn' what had previously been a natural part of leveling.  All previous characters had their traits unlocked, while new players have to suffer through this BS. 

So while I think GW2 has been good about keeping it's cash shop from messing up the game, I can't recommend the game to new players.  It's great if you were playing before the April update.  It's terrible to start now.

[Sonlirain]

Which game are you talking about, though?

Mabinogi.

[BurnedToast]

Cryptic does F2P right in my book, Star Trek Online and Neverwinter Nights are solid games. I have enjoyed STO on and off again for a few years now, I only occasionally spent real money but, I never felt like I needed to. You can earn anything that can be bought just by playing.

I also tip my hat to SOE's model, there's plenty to buy, none of it is necessary and you get your bang for for your buck.

This is what I was going to suggest.

The prices for stuff in neverwinter are bullshit overpriced (like $10 for a single bag slot or something), but you don't really need any of it and you can enjoy the whole game just fine without it.

You can also earn the cash shop currency from playing, though there's a limit on how much you can earn per day, and it's kind of a grind... but it's not *too* bad.

IMHO Cryptic/Perfect World (developers/publishers of Star Trek Online and Neverwinter) are terrible people for showing a global message every time someone gets the ultra-ultra-ultra-ultra-rare item from a lockbox (in Star Trek Online it's a starship). The odds against it are astronomical, but every time I've been on either game enough people have been ploughing their money into keys to open lockboxes (out of misguided hope, or an overabundance of money (or credit and lack of willpower)) that it seemed like the messages were appearing almost constantly. Of course since they appear right in the center of the screen in bright yellow, the annoyance factor may be causing me to overestimate/misremember the frequency, what with human memory being fallible and all. The rate definitely varied, some times it seemed ridiculously frequent (multiple lockbox messages on screen at the same time), and others much slower.

Yeah, lockboxes are scummy, and the whole "WOAH SOMEONE JUST WON THE JACKPOT" is annoying. I got numb to it pretty quickly and I apparently don't have whatever personality trait(s) cause people to want to gamble on them so I could mostly just completely ignore the whole thing though.

Rift F2P is also pretty good. I already owned the game before it was F2P so I was bumped up a tier, I'm not sure exactly what the pure F2P experience is like but the slightly upgraded tier I was at never seemed to limit me at all.

Warframe, lots of fun for a while but it gets boring pretty fast (they don't even try to hide the fact it's all one big grind). It's worth trying out, the F2P was pretty good (buying stuff was mostly either cosmetic or shortcuts to stuff you could grind out) and it's been about a year since I played so they've probably improved it quite a bit.

Edit: how can I forget, lord of the rings online. You can theoretically grind out enough points to unlock *everything* for free... but it would be a HUGE grind. However,  all the starting zones are free, and I spent $20 on some starter pack which gave me enough points to play till I was bored of it (and had a lot of points left over) so you can play for a bit to see if you like it and spent a little bit of cash to buy most of what you need if you do like it.

[werty892]

Eve online is pretty good, the model is subscription based, and is probably the only large MMO other than WoW that still has it.

[LordBucket]

How i'd like them to be if you didn't pay: You can get this Sacred Zweihander (The 3rd most powerful sword), but you can't get Excalibur. Also, here is a pet Cerberus (The 4rd most powerful), a big Mansion and yeah, you can create a clan...but you have to work very hard! (You're lvl99)

How i'd like them to be if you did pay: Just like how they really are, except people should work hard to get their gear, just like the guy who didn't pay, with some benefits, of course.

You might try Age of Wushu. Its free-player penalties are extremely reasonable, and mostly things you can play around. There are some secondary skills that aren't available to free players, but they're the cosmetic ones that you wouldn't want on your main character anyway. Some dungeon items only drop for paying players, but those items are all tradable, so as long as you have one paying player in your party, those items will drop. And if you don't you can simply trade for them on the market. The worst of it the offline "xp" (AoW has a totally different character building system than anything you've probably seen. It doesn't have xp. But we'll call it xp because you'll know what that is) penalty. VIP players get "xp" and their market stalls continue to operate while offline. If you're an every day kind of player, you probably won't even notice very much. And if you do, you can afk a bunch. And there's other misc stuff, like secondary gathering skill rates that are so insignificantly much less than a VIP player that you probably won't even notice the difference, you have to be I think level 5 before you gain access to global chat (anti spam measure more than a free player restriction), there's purely cosmetic "display armor" that...you get as a free player, but to put it on you have to manually put it on, whereas paying players get a "show my cosmetic armor" button on their paper doll that they can press to instantly swap it on or off. Minor stuff like that. The game is very playable as a free player.

Another possibility:

Eve Online is a monthly fee game, but game time is a tradable in-game item. So, if you're skilled and have the time, you can fund your gameplay by playing the game. Note however, that while playing for gametime is entirely realistic, and lots of people do it., I've done it, plenty of other bay12ers have done it..it is not realistic to expect to be able to do it from day 1 with a trial account. You will definitely need to pay for at least one month, and more realistically, probably 3-6 months. There's both skilling up your character and personal, actual-you learning the game curve involved.

But, the methods for doing it are very well known, and there's no secret about any of them. If you want to play Eve for free, you can, and plenty of people can hand you recipes for exactly how to do it. Just decide what your timeframe is, 1 month, 3 months, six months...decide how much you want to play...if you're willing to average an hour a day, absolutely that's more than enough time to fund an account. Probably 20 hours a month is enough. We even had somebody in our bay 12 Eve thread a year ago or so who, if I recall correctly, did an extended 21 day free trial, payed for one month, and then was able to fully fund three accounts with in-game currency averaging 2 hours of play a day. I recommend you don't take it to that kind of extreme, though, because doing that drains all of the fun out of the game.

[Uristides]

It's been ages and centuries and whatnot since I last touched it, but Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine only had clothing and some fairly tame boosts(xp and whatnot) on the cash shop. IIRC when I stopped playing they were adding bikes that seemingly were going to be for paying players only, but I didn't stay long enough to see whether that was the case.
To be honest, don't even know whether the game exists any longer.

[SirAaronIII]

It's been ages and centuries and whatnot since I last touched it, but Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine only had clothing and some fairly tame boosts(xp and whatnot) on the cash shop. IIRC when I stopped playing they were adding bikes that seemingly were going to be for paying players only, but I didn't stay long enough to see whether that was the case.
To be honest, don't even know whether the game exists any longer.

From what I saw, it was pretty P2W. The best equipment only coming from tickets you bought with real money and stuff like that.

It's gone now, anyway.

[Thexor]

Hm.  Having played Guild Wars 2 for a few years, I think it meets your criteria. But I'm not sure I recommend it.  Nothing in the shop is essential or even super important for gameplay, and in-game currency can purchase the shop curency.  Nothing is locked behind a cash-only paywall.

That said, a major part of the game is locked behind an in-game paywall.  In the April update this year, the cost of a major part of character build - traits - was increased about 1,000% (or more - I didn't value skill points at the typical market rate because most players don't bother turning skill points into gold), or players were given the option of doing a crapton of random stuff to 'earn' what had previously been a natural part of leveling.  All previous characters had their traits unlocked, while new players have to suffer through this BS. 

So while I think GW2 has been good about keeping it's cash shop from messing up the game, I can't recommend the game to new players.  It's great if you were playing before the April update.  It's terrible to start now.

Eh... I wasn't there when the change was made, so I don't know if there was a lot of outcry, but the change hasn't really bothered me. To expand on what Ghills is talking about:

• Previously, trait tiers were locked, and you had to pay in-game currency to unlock each tier.
• Now, individual traits are locked. You have the option of paying in-game currency to unlock them, or you can complete certain in-game objectives to unlock them for free. As far as I've seen, these objectives are completing specific open-world events for the first time.

So, if you want to purchase everything with gold, it's more expensive. Notice that buying all of them is definitely not required, though (you can only use a few traits at each tier anyways), and if you want a specific trait, you can go complete the objective and get it for free.

Either way, the traits are bought with Gold, which is the non-P2P currency, so this discussion is entirely off-topic. There's nothing in the Guild Wars 2 cash shop that provides a significant advantage. Yes, there are things bought with Gold that provide an advantage - that's called 'playing the game, earning currency, and spending it'. 

[Mono124]

IMHO Cryptic/Perfect World (developers/publishers of Star Trek Online and Neverwinter) are terrible people for showing a global message every time someone gets the ultra-ultra-ultra-ultra-rare item from a lockbox (in Star Trek Online it's a starship). The odds against it are astronomical, but every time I've been on either game enough people have been ploughing their money into keys to open lockboxes (out of misguided hope, or an overabundance of money (or credit and lack of willpower)) that it seemed like the messages were appearing almost constantly. Of course since they appear right in the center of the screen in bright yellow, the annoyance factor may be causing me to overestimate/misremember the frequency, what with human memory being fallible and all. The rate definitely varied, some times it seemed ridiculously frequent (multiple lockbox messages on screen at the same time), and others much slower.

I haven't played either in some months, though I doubt they've discontinued the practice.

Mind you, I don't think they're bad games MMOs, necessarily, but I think that it's irresponsible as hell. It's as if they went "Oh, you know, some of our customers might have gambling addictions. I bet we could totally take advantage of that! Better us than some casino, right?" or something.

It seems like most MMOs are run under the worst principles, though. They might as well all be following rule of acquisition #263: Never allow doubt to tarnish your lust for latinum.

I've pretty much stayed away from Cryptic/PW for... ever basically. I was in the closed beta of PWI and it was super great and fun, but they absolutely butchered the game. Tons of mounts and stuff that were cash shop only, health and mana charms that instantly regenned your hp/mana if they went below a certain % (had a cooldown of like 15 seconds but I'll explain more in a bit) and the ridiculous amounts of in game cash needed to upgrade weapons and armor to a decent level if you didn't farm the mats yourself for hours and hours. It was also entirely possible to get stuck at some levels if you try to solo and are one of a few classes. As a wizzy I got stuck 3 times around level 30, 40, and 55 where I couldn't level because I had died a ton finishing all my quests because nobody wanted to group up with anyone else and I didn't have hp/mana charms. I basically had to do what everyone did for endgame levels during the course of normal gameplay, which is just log in, do dailies for mediocre xp, and log out, because even with hp pots without that dang charm I would get 2shotted or 3shotted by any enemies my level with physical attack. Now basically all of my PvE was screwed by the fact that I was basically made of glass, but even once I got to PvP it was completely ruined by the time I reached endgame. Originally PvP had a decent rock paper scissors thing going on, where the archer ruled supreme but other classes could still get a little lucky and kill them, and wizards basically killed everything if you let them charge up an AOE. Sure, sometimes you would be robbed of a kill because you couldn't do enough DPS and an hp charm would tick over, and sure the hp charms basically meant everyone had (actual hp*1.5) but it was still entirely possible to PvP as a F2P member, you just got beat a bit more... then they added the expansions. Those pieces of crap added a few unbalanced classes, and the only way to PvP now was to be an assassin. The assassin literally ruled supreme. Every single class basically was completely steamrolled by the assassin due to overpowered stealth mechanics and those hp charms. If you managed to actually hit one of them down to losing a decent chunk of hp and their charm had already procced, they just stealthed and sulked away until the cooldown went away then jumped right back in no worse for the wear while you had almost no HP. Even the once mighty archer, which the community had been asking to be nerfed (it never was, but it didn't matter) was ripped to shreds by assassins. Since being any other class was pointless, tons of people rerolled assassins and PW ended up rolling out another expansion which basically fixed nothing and just added some more lame endgame content and had a few extra classes. Those classes didn't really matter much because they were counters to some of the original classes, which nobody was using anymore. I feel like PW was just rolling all over the floor laughing at how much money people were spending on this game, especially because players that already had an endgame level character were basically starting over with an assassin and buying from the cash shop all over again.

A thing I've noticed from Cryptic/PW is their cash shop exchange being so screwed up almost all the time, but in theory working out well. Like, in PWI you could level up certain crafting skills, especially herbalist skills that allowed you to craft extremely high level "potions" basically, which alleviated the HP/MP charm issue. You could then sell these for quite a bit of money to buy cash shop gold so you could buy HP/MP charms yourself. The only issue with this method is all the crafting skills required you to harvest materials that were extremely predictably spawned, so bots basically came in after a couple months and started harvesting absolutely everything. Despite playing for quite some time, I still was never really able to get into crafting because anywhere I went bots would just harvest everything as soon as it showed up. In theory that cash shop exchange would have worked great, I mean exchanging in game gold for cash shop gold is fine if you actually have an in game gold economy that isn't 100% based around endgame content or PvP territory control (which nets guilds cash).

Any time I play an MMO now I basically look at it, look at what PWI became, and if it is even vaguely starting down that path I just quit immediately and move on unless I'm playing with a group of friends... and then I just wait for them to quit and we all move on.

[JimboM12]

It's not an RPG, but I'd recommend Planetside 2 if you're into Battlefield-style FPS'es. You can earn any gun in the game with enough fighting, and the beginner guns are still viable until you find your "groove" and begin investing certs into guns that fit your style/what you think is best. The only cash shop stuff that's limited is stuff like extra character slots and some customization options like helmets and camo and stuff.
Just remember you will die alot and get horrible K/D ratios if you're that kinda player, and remember to invest your beginner certs into base class ability upgrades, like upgrading the Engi's repair gun and the like.

Long live Vanu.
And my NS-11P that i got for free.

[Arbinire]

There are some non-graphical MUDs which have plenty of content and are entirely free with no paid memberships or the like.  The only one I play is one that's nearly defunct, though.  Aardwolf appears to be a popular one though.

I'm curious what MUD you play.  I've recently returned to playing ArcticMUD casually.  Used to be pretty big population wise back in the 90's(anywhere from 400-600 on at a given time) but had died down the past several years to less than 20.  This current playerwipe though has seen a steady population of 30-60 though depending on the time of day.