Would Dark Age of Camelot prosper more if maybe it went f2p? Maybe no sub fee but have it to where people can purchase stuff in game to give them something more? I dunno, seems a lot of games more popular than DAoC are going this route ... EQ2, DDO etc etc. This isn't a flame thread *yea I know ... that's a first for me* but could anything along these lines work you think? Just seems like something like this might be better for this game than where it currently stands.

#1 No monthly subscription would bring a lot of folks back you would think.

 

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i would love to see daoc go f2p with some sort of itemized shop or whatever they feel is best. as long as players could have access to anything they need without using a cash shop to attain it i think it would be great for the playerbase. but i have a feeling they would lose money doing that right now. possibly if the playerbase was lesser than 1/3-to 1/2 of what it is now, when they wouldn't be getting the amount of money from subscriptions as they do now. i don't have any hard data but i think they still have a good amount of subscriptions currently to be profitable enough. however if they lost much of those subscritptions it may be a good idea to go f2p. i know several people who would play daoc if they didn't have to pay a monthly fee. actually i bet a significant amount of people would start to play or return to play daoc if there was no monthly fee.

For F2P to work for DAOC, it would have to bring in a lot more revenue than the current subscription model -- enough to allow Mythic to open a new server (because Ywain is already fairly crowded and couldn't handle all the new players plus every current player being able to have multiple bot accounts for free) and enough for Mythic to start making substantial updates to the game again. I'm skeptical they could accomplish this merely by charging a few bucks for stuff like MLs, race respecs, Dragonslayer armor tokens, etc. If any of the next gen MMOs with PvP are any good especially GW 2 which has no monthly subscription, things will get bleak for DAOC and WAR anyway.

 

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Maybe f2p could allow access to PvE lands and BGs but not NF?
I dunno, just thinking on the run here

 

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yes mythic would probably need to lose a substantial amount of subscriptions before a f2p would probably make sense on their end. would be nice however!


f2p with limited access to content/areas as damaja suggested would be something to consider i think. maybe even a level cap of 40. it would make the lower levels of the game seem more alive, active and busy, and probably spur some additional subscriptions.

Nah I would not limit levels to 40, that would be a turn off. let em hit 50, just keep em outa NF. Thats the most important aspect of the game, maybe keep em outa the epic dungeon, or at least most of them. Let em get 50, let em template, just limit access to key areas.

Also what they could do is give new armor skins that can be bought, they would sell, people always wanna be different than the rest. Create some new "different" items, not more powerful, just (different) and let folks buy those also.

 

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What you're not considering is that it would take a lot of dev resources that they don't appear to have right now to create all the good stuff we all could think up they would sell in a cash shop. For instance new armor skins would require a graphic artist. I doubt they even have one of those on the dev staff atm (they've all long since been reassigned to TOR ). Plus they would have to redesign the account center to implement the microtransactions. Now obviously going F2P has worked out financially for some other major MMOs recently, but I don't get the impression that EA is the kind of company that is going to invest a lot of money upfront into taking DAOC F2P in the hopes it will pay off down the road.

 

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this is true. what if they had the playerbase pitch in? i'm sure there are some aspiring graphic artists out here that would chip in their time and talent. maybe reward them with free in game items or something.


a f2p may cost mythic money at least in the short term but i think it would definitely grow the population. i would hope that mythic would put in place a benchmark for subscriptions and that if it dipped below that mark they would begin to turn to a f2p model, if nothing else just to see if it revives the game like some of the other major mmo titles that went f2p has.


a little off topic, i wish there was a better way for people to try the game out for longer. two weeks isn't that long to experience the best parts of this game and really get an idea of what daoc is about to me, especially new players who have a lot of figure out with this game. wish they'd bump the free trial for new players to a month or so. even if you have veterns showing new people the game and guiding them, two weeks still is a very short period of time to give the new player a chance to really see what daoc has to offer as a mmorpg. as old as it is, it's still up in the top ranks for mmorpgs in my opinion.

Server already has a hard time enough to support the current playerbase... imagine what will happen if the game goes F2P and it were to be popular.. they can't put those new players on Ywain.. so they'll have to make a new server.. but quite a few people would cancel and re-roll on the new server, potentially destroying the healthy playernumbers Ywain has.. meaning actual paying customers would be left with a server that can't support RvR anymore due to lacking population.
Punishing your paying customer base isn't exactly a good idea!

All said.. I really don't know how they could make DAoC F2P work... doubt many people play it for the PvE, so that just leaves RvR.. but if you start making items people can buy for RvR, you risk of becoming a Pay To Win game.

BTW have you seen the restrictions on EQ2 Extended Edition (ie the F2P one).. those are extremely limiting.. and if people decide to subscribe, they will be paying more than the paying customer base on the normal Pay To Play servers.

Sony really botched that one up.. paying servers are dying since most new people just start with the free to play version.. and you can't xfer from the F2P server to the normal ones (the other way round, you can.. but they charge like 35 US$ PER character your transfer... way to screw your loyal customer base, rofl)