Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
[GW2] Beta sign-ups closed at over ONE MILLION!
Posts
Also I never understood why modern MMO's "need" the standard monthly fee these days. Server costs do not exceed the money a behemoth like WoW makes, especially since they also have a cashshop where they sell overpriced crap that people buy in droves.
ArenaNet aren't trying to throw a load of bullshit in your face, is why. A lot of people might make the argument that those subs are required not only for new content, but also to keep the servers running. The truth of the matter is that is generally a flat out lie, ANet spends so little for the servers for the original Guild Wars that it doesn't even have it's own spot on a chart, it's rolled into the bottom with a handful of other things.
The same method was used with the original, and they provided content and support for the game including what was technically two entirely new games plus a big expansion for all three of them. Even now while they're working on GW2, the original still gets updates and new content. So to put it simply, Guild Wars 2 will make you wonder why most other companies were being dicks and taking your money every month.
(ANet did have a shop for the original, however the things sold within didn't really give much of an advantage except perhaps the skill packs. Those came along cause the game had thousands(?) of skills eventually.)
Why do you have to be so -silly-? As you said, it's a Japanese Oni mask, also heavily used in kabuki plays. It fits fine, and just because you THINK that it will cause some big ass "MYIMMERSION" breaking problem just makes you seem silly.
Silly.
Going for no helmet myself, you get pauldrons.
Servers are much less expensive than MMO players think they are.
Which makes the decision even more plain and simple.
C'mon, you just spent X minutes crafting that face/hair, and now you wanna cover it up with leather/bronze 2 choices later? Not me, bub.
Holy shit, the game isn't even in an open beta period, and someone's already dropped the immersion bomb?
No helmet = pauldrons.
So it's helmet, helmet, pauldrons, which is similar to Guardian: pauldrons, pauldrons, helmet.
Also, does anyone else think it's weird we get http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magdaer from Hall of Monuments? Like there are only supposed to be two of those double fire swords from Arah, but you're going to have a hoard of people running around with carbon copies. It's gonna make it a bit hard to take the plot of Ascalon Catacombs seriously.
edit: I guess you also get Stormcaller, which is just as bad, lore-wise.
All right then.
"gee, I wonder which one everyone's not gonna tick for guardians."
You can get a Fiery Dragonsword in the original game too when there is only supposed to be two, it's just the cool factor.
*brofist*
I fully intend to run around naked, except for those Pauldrons. They were given to me by a passing Guardian when I was a child! I can't let them rot...
Physical servers themselves aren't a huge expense nowadays, though the rackspace/power/bandwidth still can be (bandwidth has gone down a lot obviously). Virtualization is far more common than it used to be as well, and far cheaper and better, which makes scaling and balancing a lot easier. This is on top of the actual server needs of an MMO not jumping all that much in the last decade relative to the system needs of clients/hardware costs.
Basically, years ago getting the PO (purchase order) for a new server was a big deal, nowadays most companies won't bat an eye at buying a hunk of new servers, but negotiations with datacenters (for bandwidth and space) are intense.
Just Finished: Borderlands (waste of $7)/Mario Brothers U/The Last Story/Tropico 4
Currently Playing: NS2/ZombiU/PlanetSide 2/Ys/Dota2/Xenoblade Chronicles
On Hold: Prince of Persia: Warrior Within/GW2/Scribblenauts
Coming Next: Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones/X-Com Classic
Steejee's got it. In WoW's case, they also happen to have enough customer service worldwide to fill out the Vatican City on a slow day. EDIT: Well, had. Bunch just got laid off. Poor guys.
But when you give your community more leeway in managing themselves, it's hard to see where that money'd go aside from raw deals and lining the pockets of the parent company with valued assets.
My point is that this is only relevent to the beginning of the game... where all your gear is going to be similar anyway. And on top of that you're the only one here to have even expressed interest in the Demon Mask. The others have agreed that they like the other options better. So... maybe they won't be so terribly overlooked?
In the end though the point is... how will the game actually be affected by the number of people choosing one piece of starter gear over the other? The answer is, quite simply, not at all.
It seems like costs may be lower now, but the accepted price became $15/month so everyone just charges it because why not.
For reference btw, WoW's profit margins at like 50%. So it's not like the subfees are do or die.
This is getting put in the new OP.
My hope is that GW2 is such an amazing MMO that it creates a paradigm shift where other companies can no longer justify charging us the monthly, but we'll see. A lot of it depends on how frequently they put on non expansion content. It's easy for a company to say "We couldn't give you this new pvp area, dungeon, raid, armor set, whatever every 2 months without the sub fee!" until a game like GW2(hopefully) proves them wrong and is successful without it.
I know subscriptions have kept me from buying and playing many games I otherwise would have, because I wasn't going to pay monthly fees one more than one game at a time.
Big selling point for me. If I have a period where I get bored with GW2? Just drop it. Pick it up again whenever I feel like it, no need to throw 15 bucks at them to see if I'll like it better now.
MMOs benefit heavily from economy of scale - cost per customer drops as it gets bigger simply because a lot of flat costs don't rise. When you go from 500k subs to 2000k subs you don't quadruple your developer staff and CS staff, so the additional costs of supporting those people are very limited. Small niche MMOs very much need the monthly fee (or something equivalent, like steady box sales or item shop) just to cover salaries and base costs (it may not cost much to add a server to an existing datacenter, but it's damn expensive for the initial set up). A lot of costs go down as well, particularly in customer service, as a company standardizes their processes and gets more efficient. So basically, the bigger it is, the less it costs to support each person, and the longer it's been around, the lower many costs go due to efficiency improvements.
So they're not always out to rape your wallet, sometimes they're just trying to break even.
For ANet, I could basically be an example case for why it works - I bought Nightfall ages ago and got to the end, but put it down and didn't look at it for 2 years. GW2 catches my eye and HoM stuff is there, so I figure 'well I still have it might as well go give it another go'. After all, wasn't going to cost me anything. In the end, I bought Factions and the core skills pack. If there was a sub fee I might not have bothered, but being free to get back in not only let me play again, but enticed me to fork over more cash.
Just Finished: Borderlands (waste of $7)/Mario Brothers U/The Last Story/Tropico 4
Currently Playing: NS2/ZombiU/PlanetSide 2/Ys/Dota2/Xenoblade Chronicles
On Hold: Prince of Persia: Warrior Within/GW2/Scribblenauts
Coming Next: Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones/X-Com Classic
Exactly this. If I'm subscribed to a game and I get bored enough to unsub, it takes a LOT to get me to pay again, usually a wow expansion or something, but never usually just a content patch. However, if it's just buying the box, then suddenly buying GW2 is just like buying Diablo 3 or any other game I will play, then not play, then go back to whenever I want to, rather than feeling like I need to play it consistently to justify the fee, which in turn keeps me from getting burned out or jaded to it.
And their whole "you'll be down-leveled to the max level for the area" will make it fresh and challenging content even for veterans - they can't just faceroll through it all.
Will all go the way of the do-do when Trion decides to sell off licenses to use their server infrastructure. It's basically the most advanced used in gaming, helpful when one of the big dogs who make the blade servers are one of your corporate backers.
Not the most off-topic thing ever. Basically Trion was backed by, I think Intel, and they used state-of-the-art Blade Servers which from what I understand are more efficient and cheaper in general. As for why they charge a subscription fee... because that was still the thing last year when it was released. I also believe the servers give them the capability to update the game without having to take them offline.
This is a harder question to answer than you might think.
First off, a traditional MMO doesn't "need" to charge a monthly fee in today's marketplace. When the MMO concept first was born in the 1980s, internet connectivity was very costly, and the developer usually had to pay for share time on a corporate mainframe. At that time, you paid HOURLY fees to play. Eventually, the cost came down and the market switched to a monthly fee. Today, we are in another point of transition to a flat-rate price model. High speed internet conenction only cost a few thousand dollars a month, and serverfarms can be rented for a few tens of thousands of dollars per quarter. Any new MMO that charges monthly fees is simply lining their pockets in today's marketplace. According to EA stock reports, SWTOR needed to to sell 1M boxes to be profitable. That completely discounts monthly fees. So basically, the question here is not "How can arenanet do this?" but rather "Why isn't everyone else doing this already?"
Secondly, arenanet put in cosmetic microtrans items into their game in 2007 (ish) and were surprised to find that players not only embraced the model, they found that they were pulling in far more money overall, than they would have with a monthly fee model. This has happened time and again. When Turbine went F2P for LotRO, their income TRIPLED!! Yes, they made 3x as much money selling vanity gear (not stat gear!) than they did with a monthly fee. Free-to-play with microtransacations is actually a better income source than monthly fees (which are not reasonable in today's market anyway).
With respect to the cash shop items, if you look to GuildWars (the current arenanet game) you see that the microtrans stuff is mostly cosmetic items, skill unlocks, and DLC level stuff. One could argue that a skill pack make a character more powerful, but anyone who spends more than 0.0001 seconds thinking about it would realize that a character that unlocked those skills in the game and one who paid $10 for the unlock are still using the exact same skills, so it really isn't. The DLC quests are just more to do, like a mini-expansion, and don't offer any additional higher-stat gear. So no matter how much money you throw at them, you never get into pay-to-win territory.
TL;DR:
arenanet is not "cutting corners"
monthly fees are not a "given" for an MMO
microtransactions are not always "pay to win"
Helmet, for me!
The issues with micro-transactions are more related to the kind of content that gets focused on.
Although this is also largely a function of the developer. Arena.net is a developer I trust to keep their focus on what matters.
Though I remember mention that profits for micro-transactions fall off after awhile for the games that went F2P. Trying to find something about that on the google.
Was the original Guild Wars different from a regular MMO? For some reason I was under the impression that it was very heavily "instanced" with a little tiny persistent hub. I'm sure that's not entirely accurate, but am I wrong in thinking that it was less "Massively-multiplayer" than a "regular" MMO world?
You are correct.
GW1 was entirely instanced other then the cities. Really, it felt more like something like Diablo then a traditional MMO.
It was basically an instanced "dungeon" run with a fancy city-shaped chatroom.
It was very different, in that yes, every time you left town you were in your own private instance. Towns were, generally, the only times you could interact with people outside of your party. There are only a couple places in the game that break this rule, and I think they are both in cantha? (aside from pvp of course)
You're pretty spot on, though there are a -ton- of hubs around the world with a few bigger one's where you go for everything. I'd still consider it in the same genre as other MMOs, because you still have a lot of those concepts, but it played a lot more like a game of Diablo. Which kind of makes sense, a lot of the original team were the dudes who made Diablo/Warcraft 3.
I'm hoping GW2 has some very high server limits.. they already have that overflow thing going, but a really high player threshold would be great.
Just Finished: Borderlands (waste of $7)/Mario Brothers U/The Last Story/Tropico 4
Currently Playing: NS2/ZombiU/PlanetSide 2/Ys/Dota2/Xenoblade Chronicles
On Hold: Prince of Persia: Warrior Within/GW2/Scribblenauts
Coming Next: Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones/X-Com Classic
One thing I am so grateful for is that they have an actual auct- Marketplace in-game rather than having to stand around and spam chat in Kamadan. Mind you there's a website that basically keeps track of what people are spamming for, plus people use the looking for group UI in order to advertise their wares.