What if GW2 went to a fee?

Looking around the forums, I've found many players that believe that GW has started to go south ever since Nightfall was put online. Issues of balance mainly have come up time and time again because there are so many skills to manage.

This, I think, would happen every time new skills are introduced though, wouldn't it? The metagame would change to use new skills that may produce a more desired effect.

So, let's stop introducing large amounts of skills at once and move GW2 to a fee system world in which skills could be added in slow streams rather than large bursts, in order to create a more streamlined balance from one group of skills to the next.

I'm very certain GW2 is staying the way it is: pay for the campaign = done. What I'm really asking here is what if they tried to introduce the skills slower in order to make the balance a little easier?

If I had to pay a fee to play it I wouldn't play it.

Nah, but GW2 will likely offer a huge selection of online, in-store stuff.

By then, I'll be in college. I doubt I'll have money to spare every month for a game I won't get to play as much as I do now. Oddly, your post has nothing to do with fees unless I misread.

Hmm..

What if GW 2 had a few.. and How can we make balance in GW 2 easier? Why two different subjects? Lol.

I wouldn't play GW 2 if it had a fee, unless it could beat out LOTRO. As for balance, Anet just has to test their skills more thoroughly.

it wont, so you have nothing to worry about.

If GW2 had a fee, I'd just play WoW. They'd also lose MANY players as what attracts people to GW in the first place is the fact that it has no fee.

Hahaha if I had to choose between GW 2 (if it was like WoW) and WoW, I'd choose GW2 simply because the characters would look a lot better, as well as the armor and the world itself.

guild wars 2 wont have any fee ever. nothing to discuss about

lol it's funny how everyone raves about GW, but won't back their comments with cash.

I'd pay if it was a decent game, fee's tend to keep away undesirables.

Keep in mind, if GW2 had a fee, it's feature-set would be massively more robust, and extensive. Probably comparable, if not exceeding, WoW.

My guess is that they'll have a new model for GW2 that provides, major updates to be purchased, as well as small upgrades, or mini campaigns/content for a nominal fee. They may even get to the point of sub-contracting out content development to smaller companies for inclusion into the GW2 universe. They provide the frame work, the rest is either user created, or out of house development. Lots could happen, just to soon to tell.

When GW2 comes online if it were pay to play then sadly I would refuse to take part.

As for many people being dissatisfied by the way GW has gone, well you have to remember those who are unhapppy tend to complain while those who are happy remain silent for the most part.
Several dozen or more threads of complaint mean nothing, players should realise that change in such a game are inevitable.
I believe it totally impossible to produce a complex system such as this and get the skill balance right, if you add more skills over time then a periodic rebalance is not only inevitable but to be welcomed.

One good thing about GW2 is much of the work there has been done already.
The GW engine may need work but the balancing of skills have already been playtested by the GW1 players.

The rate at which skills were added was fine, the new skill lists in factions and nightfall may look daunting but many were the same skill under another name.
We would have to ask those who started GW in 2005 as to how many skills there were at the beginning and how many came in by 06 when I started.

thats exactly how i think, if the game is good and gives me a desire to play, then i would pay.
The thing about the undesirable players though, it kinda meh, because wow has a fee and that game is filled with horrible people .

Yeah, sure they do. Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, EVE, and even to a limited extent LotRO (they haven't turned into a COMPLETE hive of scum and villainy, yet) all have their fair share of jerks. A credit card isn't a magic barrier against asshats.

That's because most asshats are able to afford pay to play games, because they're in their 20s.

Also gremlin, do you think they're going to use the GW skills in Guild Wars 2? Because that doesn't make sense at all and that's what I got from reading your post. I'm pretty sure they'll have entirely different skills.

"asshats" lol most of the idiots are school kids ie the type that shout "ima rape u joo" joo = jew etc

If a 20 something shouts idiotic crap like that, they need a slap then told to grow up.

- I'd love to hear your reasons for this one.

If there's fee for GW2, then more sells for WoW.

More money?= More content?

Simple addition really, you know, the kind they teach in first grade.

Fee based games, as mentioned in the "litany" thread for WoW, are designed around their fees. I don't play games that are, at heart, designed more to keep me playing than they are to actually be fun.

I'd just spend my money on Stargate Worlds instead. I'd be ok if GW2 has content that you could buy from the store for real world $$, which I hope will be less than the cost of GWEN.

The OP hit on the head, Balance destroyed the game, and to what end?

so the PVP meta could be diverse, a fee will not change their ways, poor sales in their new game might.

A major influx of new skills being added was not the problem, it was the community of players adaptablity and laziness that caused the Balance BS.

A small group came up with quick builds that offered easy kills and good fame farming, a large group used those builds only, and also complained when they had a hard time mastering them and screamed Overpowered.

The same will happen reguardless of few or many skills being add, how will a fee stop that. The only thing a fee will stop is the babies who play the game.

Absolute truth. Enjoyable gameplay > means to an end, thankyouplease.

But of the OP's post- why would having a fee mean things were released in small streams rather than all at once? That doesn't equate at all. Yeah, more development money, more staff, more features, but streaming updates is always something that GW has done. This really isn't about a fee, it's about how they choose to change the game.

While I would prefer to see them keep the same concept for the game, it's not an issue of paying on a continuing basis in an of itself, it's tying payment to a fixed time frame for an arbitrary payment. I'm married father of two small children living on a single income, I get, at most, a couple of hours per day, sometimes not even that, for undisturbed play at the computer. Further, since money is tight, $15 represents over 1/3rd of my monthly personal spending money.

I wound up quitting WoW even though, hypothetically, I think it's a better game than GW because I just don't have the time to justify the cost to me (the hypothetically is removing time from consideration).

If MMO games would introduce payment for time played AND make that fee reasonable, I'd have no problem with a "subscription", but there's no way I'm going to pay the same amount as some no-life 17 year old who can raid six hours a night, seven nights a week. Plus, by paying per time played, you remove the notion of needing to play the game and give people the flexibility to stop and start playing at will, yet, you actually collect fees based on what a given player is costing the game company is server and bandwidth.

As an example, what if instead of the standard, buy this box at full price and get a month "free" and then pay $15/month continually afterwards or lose everything, you got something like 120 hours for the cost of the game and then paid $0.15 or so for every hour played afterwards. Then for every $15 you pay over the cost of the box, you're getting another 100 hours of game time, for the normal, active player, that's going to be about a month, the hardcore player might need to pony up $30 a month, and the 8 hour a week total player who isn't really putting any demand on the servers anyhow gets to play for $5 a month (after exhausting their "free" three months").

I don't actually know what running one of these games costs, and maybe these figures are over or under what they should be, but if GW can somehow afford to be up and running for going on three years for only one time costs, with a good development model, it can't be that much. Regardless, I've got no issues paying money for entertainment, I've just got issues being expected to pay the same fixed cost as somebody with 10X the free time I have along with losing access to everything as soon as I stop paying said fixed cost.

From what I could gather from my "Litany" thread, many play GW because they are too poor or don't want the psychological impact of monthly fees.

i.e. monthy fees would kill GW2.

Well if gw2 went to a fee the way it is, I would much prefer spending my hard earned *forked out of people* money on WoW, which is much much much (I could repeat this forever) more addictive then Gw with a much better storyline. And besides I doubt the Arenanet team is going to spend the time or money to hire better update scripters so they can make updates that will actually keep people playing and not drive them away, so if they did go to a WoW based payment system i would simply put my a thread up here making fun of the game and then promptly start playing oblivion again, or nwn (the original one, nwn2 lags like heck) and that'd be that.

and just for the heck of it *forkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkf orkforkgoforkf*

I'd still play it.

If they live up my expections for Gw2,here here.
montly fee's would also mean more game updates btw.

I like how some of you said you would just up and abandon GW if they ever decided to make it p2p. Honestly if ANet had made it p2p, I'd still play GW2 based on the fact that I have enjoyed playing Guild Wars, balance issues etc aside. However if they did make it a p2p game, I'm sure some of you, like myself, would expect a bit more meat to the game.

I'd still play, but the content would have to reflect the fact that I'm paying monthly fees: better support, auction house, more storage options, content updates that consist of more than 3x <insert maguffin here> weekends etc.

Map travel should stay come what may, one of the things that keeps me logging in is that I can log in and play for half and hour or 4 hours without spending most of my time travelling to where I need to be.

If it did turn out to be monthly fee based, which it wont, I'd just start playing EvE again! You just know that, even with a monthly fee, somewhere down the line ANet would stuff it it up.

EVE is great and all, but it ain't half boring sometimes. I use to set up one of the spare PC's and just mine 24/7 for a week or 2.

I'm already on the fence about playing GW2. I probably will get it, if not right away, but the introduction of a monthly fee would definitely turn me off the idea. The reason I started playing GW in the first place is the lack of fees.

No one said what the fee would BE. A small fee isn't a big deal to me. A higher fee ($10+ a month) might be depending, but remember that I game changes when there's a monthly fee, and as Vinraith points out that basically defeats the heart of GW, which is for it to be fun, not own me, and fee based games are designed more to keep people playing.

I started GW because it was risk free to pick up because of no monthly fee, and now that I'm in I'm hooked and love it. I'm definately not someone too poor to pay a monthly fee, but I have a life and don't always want to spend it gaming. Therefore I like no monthly fee because feel I can walk away, so Zinger's also got a good point on the psych aspects of monthly fees - they make you think you HAVE to keep playing (whereas the truth is you're paying $15 to play, yes, but you make the decision how much playing that has to be and the extent to which it owns you, aka "self control"). My husband's WoW account proved to me that $15 a month won't keep you playing if you don't feel like it, it's not always enough to guilt you into playing, sometimes you just keep paying because you can afford it so what the heck even if you never play. I'll walk away when I want, fee or no, but no fee definately makes me feel that maybe just a little someone somewhere gives a flying foo about the sanity of users in that they want to make a casual friendly game.

In turn I think that also makes GW a bit more family friendly because you can get even a huge Mormon clan on all at the same time together without having to pay crazy monthly fees (heh I am not a large family myself, we only have 3 people the house, but you get the point).

As for skills, the trickle idea is kinda nice because it would allow those to get balanced before others get in, but on the other the number of gimmick builds based on a recently released skill might spike badly. With a game that relies a lot on it's PvP aspect, I'd be nervous about trickling skills for that reason. If they're all at once you can work tournaments around major releases. But I guess on the other hand, you could work them around the little skill releases, too. :: shrug ::

If GW2 is Pay To Play then i wont be playing. I can find more entertainment in free games and going out in the real world with my money than pouring it into a huge game company.

Off topic your fork fetish is worrying and irritating and i'm not the only one that thinks so

As I imagine they would still (as with WoW) try to sell the original game and it's subsequent expansions/campaigns for an initial cost even with a monthly fee, I fail to see that the introduction of a monthly fee would allow slow release of skills.
"Buy this, and in six months you might have all of it if you're lucky"
Doesn't sound that attractive to me.

I also don't see how slowly introducing skills is supposed to stop a small group of them being favoured, as soon as something better comes along people will adapt quickly to use it. People are not going to think, "oh but it wasn't here a week ago so it couldn't possibly be better than what I have".
With a monthly fee people would expect just as many, likely more, skills than the game would have without said fee, so really your plan to fix this problem is making it worse. IMO

seconded,and the comic isn't even that funny.

Since GW2 is copying from every other MMO out there, I don't see why they don't just add a fee. Maybe they'd actually have the money to support some of the older games and go back and make the needed changes to them. *cough*jade quarry*cough*

There is no 'What if we'll have to pay for GW2', ANet already said they wouldn't do that.

Why are we even discussing this? You'll either play the game or you won't, period.

only if they would support no-CC users ..