
Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs - fremden
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/09/10/free-to-play-games-two-key-trade-offs/
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Konnstann
Path of Exile, which is mentioned in the article, stands out as one of the
only, and from my viewpoint the best way to do free-to-play. The only things
that affect gameplay are specific stash tabs which offer additional storage,
with the rest of the microtransactions being cosmetics. Even the lootboxes are
time-exclusive, with all of the items moving to the store individually a few
months after the box comes out.

People look at POE and see the $30 wings and complain about the prices, but
they ignore the fact that Chris Wilson and GGG have consistently put out
excellent content (with a few exceptions) every 3 months since the game came
out in ~2011. This is the way to do F2P correctly.

~~~
cavanasm
I'd similarly call out Warframe for this. No required buy ins, but their
premium currency can be used for inventory expansion, crafting instant
completion (although you can simultaneously craft as much as you want), or
trading with other players. Meanwhile they continually improve the game. The
trading component also means people with time but not money can still get
premium currency just by trading valued loot.

~~~
BEEdwards
Warframe is a grind designed to make you spend money.

If you like grind then it's free, if you hate grind and won't spend money the
game is bad.

~~~
willis936
The game didn’t feel like a grind until about a thousand hours in, when I
quit. Up until then it was a fun series of learning curves and minmaxing
builds. It’s a grind from day 1 if the gameplay doesn’t interest you.

~~~
mrguyorama
The game felt like a grind from the 10th hour. Playing in public, people don't
even play the game, they jump-dash through the entire level, kill a boss, and
head to the end, over and over and over, every three minutes, all day. What's
the point?

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tempestn
This is a good article, and I very much agree that the second trade-off is the
really dangerous one. I play Clash Royale, and I enjoy the game, but it does
strongly exhibit these qualities, I definitely notice that ladder play is
consistently irritating, because (being a decent player) I'm always stacked up
against players with higher level cards at the same ladder level as me. So,
most of the games I lose are against less skilled players with stronger cards,
which is frustrating, and most of the games I win are vs less skilled players
as well, which is better than losing, but not as much fun as winning against
an equally skilled opponent. The only way around this is to reach the 'top' of
ladder, where everyone has maxed out decks, which requires a lot of grinding
or spending money. Tradeoff one in action.

More pernicious is tradeoff two though. There are myriad timers in the game to
unlock various rewards; if you want to take advantage of everything you're
playing something like an hour to 90 minutes a day on average, but it's spread
out in little 3-6 minute chunks so it feels like less—but you're having to log
into the game very regularly. This aspect is not fun, and it can tend to keep
it back of mind all the time, just like the article describes.

I deal with it by just not worrying too much about optimizing everything, but
that's mildly irritating too. If it gets too much so, I'll likely just stop
playing. Really do miss the pre-FTP days though, when you bought a game and
then you owned it and could get the full experience without any of this
bullshit.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Back in my high school days myself and a few of my classmates used to play
OGame - a poor man's 4X space MMO in a browser, or more accurately, a
glorified rock-paper-scissors with a ton of timers (previously we also played
AstroWars, which was the same, but simpler - the HN vs Reddit UX way of
simpler).

Since construction, research and fleet navigation were all "click, wait 30
minutes to couple hours for completion", every break we'd rush down to the
computer room to log in and manage our space empires. We were also playing
during computer lessons, and of course at home. The game was extremely
addictive but also grindy; it was fun primarily because we could talk about it
together and compete against each other.

Now to my point. That was all before the iPhone, and it was already
significantly affecting our school and after-school life[0]. I can imagine how
much worse it would have been if we had Internet-connected smartphones with
OGame on it, and if the game would send us push notifications about finished
timers. This is, however, the reality today's high schoolers find themselves
in. I wonder how disruptive timer-based games are to their education.

\--

[0] - At that time, we though it cool that our friend from one class up had
once stayed up to 02:00 AM just to log in to AstroWars and send his fleet
somewhere. Subsequently, many of our nights were disrupted by very late or
very early actions in AW/OG.

~~~
mdrzn
oGame, so many memories. I kinda wish there was an app based version to play
in closed universe with friends.

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musicale
I'm trying to figure out what the (presumably bad/unpleasant) f2p game trade-
offs described in the article actually are; I think they are:

1\. Fun vs. money (you can pay less money, but then the game is less fun)

2\. Game success vs. wasted real life focus/time and constant
worry/interruptions (if you don't constantly babysit the game and grind daily
tasks then the game punishes you harshly)

3\. Spending time/money on one game task/resource vs. another; this seems like
an intrinsic trade-off, but segmented, non-tradable tokens and currencies
increase the penalties for making a "wrong" decision

Out of the three, I greatly dislike 1 and 2. 3 is tolerable if the game is
reasonably transparent about cost/time vs. reward The issue of a game
surprising you with awful grinding/spending roadblocks seems like a special
case of 2/1.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I think 3 really boils down to the same thing as 1 - it's a fun vs. money
trade-off. Going the wrong path due to inexperience and having to grind your
way back is just not fun.

2 is what worries me most, primarily because constant interruptions and
distractions are disastrous to player's mental faculties, which are usually
needed elsewhere (school, job, relationships, etc.).

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logfromblammo
Asymmetric's Kingdom of Loathing is free-to-play, with paid premiums. The pay-
premium items generally translate into being the first to access new game
content, and obviate any need to collect the in-game currency to access it.

The developers explicitly set a goal that all game content would be accessible
by spending only in-game currency, which is usually accomplished by those
players who paid real money selling their unlock items for in-game currency
via the trade/market/mall system. For instance, when visiting "That 70s
Volcano" via a permanent pass, the paid player can collect "volcoino" tokens,
trade some of them for a single-day ticket to the zone, and sell that in the
mall for meat. The unpaid player buys the ticket with meat, uses it (consuming
the item), and can visit "That 70s Volcano" for one day.

There are no timers. Every day, at a specific time, everyone gets a quantum of
"adventures", which are kept if not spent, up to a cap of 200. Certain actions
in the game can add additional adventures. You spend your adventures, at any
time you please, and then you're done until the next day.

This system has been the best free-to-play game setup I have ever experienced.
The devs actively try to avoid pay-to-win. It's mainly pay-for-convenience and
pay-for-prestige/fashion. Everything you can buy for real-world cash can be
bought for meat, and a lot of the items that were attainable for real-world
cash in the past can still be bought for [more] meat. It intentionally avoids
all three of the three trade-offs in the article.

~~~
icosa
The daily limit on adventures is an example of trade-off #2. Their
implementation is generous (40 adventures per day to a max of 200 means you
need to check in every 5 days) but it still means that you can't take a full
week off the game without losing adventures. The more +Adventure stuff you
have, the sooner you hit that max.

Having a daily limit means that play sessions are artificially shortened,
which prevents playing until satisfied. It encourages players to spend the
time until next refresh planning how to use their adventures effectively.

~~~
logfromblammo
You don't _have_ to spend the adventures. If you absolutely cannot stand to
miss the opportunity, there is a mechanism to spend multiple adventures in one
action. There's a job board in town that uses 5 adventures at a time, and you
can work at the bar for N adventures. You can straight up trade adventures for
meat in one click. Log in from your phone, spend all your adventures at once,
then log off. Or write a script that will log in and spend all your adventures
for you, without bothering you at all. It's all https requests.

The 40 rollover adventures combine with daily consumption limits to give you
an easily attainable 200 adventures per day _per character_. That's about 3
hours of play, if you aren't using automation aids. If you accumulate
adventures to the cap, and then play them all the next day, you can use about
360 adventures. At the risk of the statement haunting me later, 200-360 should
be enough for anybody. If you want to play more adventures, you can always
play more than one character. Or, as you mentioned, if you want to play for
more time, you can spend more time playing each adventure, to be more optimal.

You can't ever escape tradeoff #2 if your personality is susceptible to
obsessing over things. If you play Tetris too long, you might dream about
falling tetromino blocks. The important thing is the Asymmetric folks aren't
trying to profit from obsessive player behaviors by throwing wildly non-
synchronized countdown timers on everything.

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pochamago
I'm not wholly convinced that it's actually a problem. Collectible card games
pretty consistently beat out living card games in popularity. Needing to
grind, collect, and sometimes pay more for the things you want increases your
investment in the game. I hear a lot of criticism about how these things
exploit our natural desires, but isn't that sort of the point of games in
general? Isn't creating an addictively fun game the goal? I sometimes feel
like reducing our interactions with these things to their chemicals and base
psychology ignores the human experience and the reasons we've spent so much
time pursuing things that people will enjoy to the detriment of other things
in their life. WoW seems like a good example. We have lots of stories of
people who were unhealthily addicted to the game, but it seems like those are
expected outliers for a game that could create such a passionate and invested
playerbase.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Isn 't creating an addictively fun game the goal?_

Addictively _fun_ , yes. That is, the addiction is supposed to come from the
fun you're having. Contrast that with the games criticized in the article -
they have some fun aspects as a cover, but they're optimized for pure
addictiveness through psychological trickery - which, as the article notes,
often involves making them _less_ fun.

The difference in the relationship between the two types of games and the
player can be compared to a difference between wanting to be with someone
because you love their personality and enjoy being together, vs. wanting to be
with them because they're your heroin dealer.

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
It's hard to argue with the results. If it was less fun then fewer people
would be playing them.

~~~
banannaise
I'm necroposting, but this is aggressively missing the point. The problem
described in the article is that many games advertise fun, but provide
addiction. You can have tons of addicted players not really having fun, or
putting in disproportionate effort relative to the fun.

------
AtlasBarfed
My experience with FtP/PtW was thankfully probably 100$ total. It was one of
the Machine Zone games, final fantasy something or other.

Machine Zone games are some of the worst (and most popular!!!) of the genre,
but certainly MZ is not the only bad actor here, and they did not break laws
from what I saw...

But these games 100% need to be strictly regulated. Based on a couple others
my girlfriend has played they are all gambling based in some ways with variant
payouts (slot machine mechanics), enhanced with something even more nefarious:
social rankings and status, and mechanisms that encourage you to pay to ascend
the rankings of the specific subculture (or subculture shard usually) of the
game.

I have no proof of MZ employees doing this since the game mechanics producing
addicted whales could produce the equivalent behavior and overpowered
accounts, but in an unregulated environment, MZ could easily seed each of the
shard worlds with employees equipped with superuser accounts to prey on people
that had not paid money to try to get them to buy packs and survive.

While this probably isn't racketeering in the legal sense, it sure as hell
seemed like it.

Other tricks, such as fomenting conflict between "clans" and other tactics
could easily have been "naturally" arising for the rules of the game, but
without regulation any self-serving company would have provacateurs in each of
the major clans starting wars and getting whale players to participate and pay
out money.

All told it was a very creepy experience, topped off with a week-long "cold
turkey quitting" psychological experience. Not that I had cold sweats or
anything like that, but there was clearly addicted neurons that needed to
wither away.

PtW needs careful regulation and oversight. The numerous levels of
subconscious mechanisms and exploits in use are very concerning. It would be
fascinating to take a group of psychologists and former CIA employees and let
them play these games and get their perspectives.

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Pistos2
This article would have been significantly easier to comprehend if the author
had given the tradeoffs names instead of constantly referring to them by
"first", "second", and "third" tradeoff. (Granted, he finally does so at the
end of the article.)

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paulific
I guess this is why I have free to play games sitting on my phone but never
play them. They take me through a tutorial full of tasks and menus and
resources and I subconsciously feel intimated by all the work.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Yeah, I've tried a few and after a while they feel like they're mainly aimed
at returning players - you get pummeled by notifications, events, login
bonuses, all kinds of terms that as a new player you're not yet familiar with.
But that's the new player experience which they can just optimize if they
choose to do so.

