Subscription Fee

I know, I know, the point of guild wars is to have a subscription fee-less(<--is that correct, lol) based model. But think about it, the average price for a subscription fee is about $12-$15. Now, how many people go to the movies. At least where I live it is about 10 bucks for a ticket and i might buy popcorn. Thats around 1 and a half hours to 2 hours of entertainment. Maybe longer if you see 2012 which is around 2 and a half hours (i think).

The fact is, it is easy to "get your monies worth" and i would rather support anet through a subscription fee than micro transactions. Just my $0.02.

And then the game would die, since if people wanted to play a game with a monthly fee, they would probably play WoW or Aion instead.

The only reason GW survived at all is because it's free.

also many player have played gw for 40 months

who going to pay for that when they dont update game or even create new animals for us to kill ??????

If you want to support Anet, then buy their stuff?

Feel free to send them 15 bucks a month you can just make a check out and mail it in.



But I'll stuck with their current model.

Support Anet to do what? Are they some poor, starving kids who can't help themselves and could be our hope for the future that our money could make differences in their lives?

What are we now, a charity? What would you call such charity? Bad Games Foundation? Bait & Switch Inc.?

We're indeed a non-profit group, that's for sure.

The Bank of Mum And Da?

Suuuure

Because Anet will totally switch the business model while the game is live.

^ that's exactly right. GW is getting old, and it wouldn't survive without the model it's based on.

The community gets upset enough about the micro-transactions lately. No reason in pissing everyone off.

Okay, now make that 2-3 subs per month, because you don't want to play only one game.

Also, the amount of content/support GW has doesn't warrant a subscription fee in my opinion.

GW is showing her age and making her a pay to play game this late on won't solve that. It'd drive people further away from the game.


Far too much harm than good.

If you have half a brain, you know the business model failed as they can't even keep a team of 20-30 peeps up that can create true new content while Anet works on another game which is GW2.

It's true however that this game thanks its success on the no subscription model, but we do pay the price in terms of lack of proper updates and content.

Because of this experience I changed my view on pay to play games as in the past I didn't want to participate in a subscription based model, but I do know better now as long as I don't have the feeling they wanne milk every penny out of it. But that's exactly what's going on in GW lately with their micro transactions.

Richard Garriot, may be a douche, but he has been right from the start that GW's business model fails.

Yes, Anet tried with Sorrow's Furnace, but soon after they announced that it would be impossible for them to release that kinda content in the future and for free. It was a reality check.

I wish GW2 was subscription based, because the current business model doesn't deliver. They said it multiple times themselves, they don't have the recources.

Or off and on for 40+ months

Another thing about having no sub is players can come back or leave when they want without worrying about the credit card bind.

If GW had a subscription system since release, it would have been a success, and more money backing it for better/more regular updates.

Adding one now would cause people to leave, because they don't WANT to pay per month. By releasing new chapters as frequently as ANet did, players were practically paying a subscription ANYWAY, but players can be fickle about games, so you're better off not confusing them.

I would pay, if they would fix there servers sick of the lag hahaha

The first reason that i began playing guildwars was the lack of subscription fee. Altough I would like to see some new content I don't think that the game should have a monthly fee. Rather that you buy hours of game time so that you actualy pay for what you get.

I played subscription based games (Ultima Online, and then Everquest), and from my experience you don't really get better support just because it's subscription based.

I would support a "hybrid" model, say a minimal $5/month fee to support for more content updates. I would even support if $5/mo subscribers got access to new contents a month ahead of the no-fee players, then each player could choose their own preferrence.

How do you know it would be a success? I mean, it's a pretty successful game even now, but there's no telling whether the game would be more or less popular or successful if it had a subscription fee.

I know I wouldn't buy it.

I agree with this. the F2P nature of GW was what attracted me to it to start with. By making a game P2P you basically cut most of the casual players out and just leave ppl who are willing to grind away. I didn't start GW to grind out achivements (they didn't exist), so, sadly if GW was P2P, i wouldn't touch it.

Every time I hear about MMO fees compared to cinema costs, a part of me dies inside.

This has been argued to death over and over and over again, and nothing changes my opinion that paying around $100 a year to play a video game is a complete joke and a rip off.

P.S. No I dont buy cinema tickets either, yes they are even more expensive. The cinema tickets vs MMO subs argument is only valid to people who actually dont care about wasting their money on both.

Because obviously GW is a subpar game that would not survive the competition in the subscription game market by its features/game design alone

Honestly that assessment seems very true.

i would pay a subscription...if u got extra content for the 'paying player'...so if you pay u get an extra 5-10 dungeons with rare weapons etc...and the cheap freebie gamers get the usual trash lol.

I dont understand why people dislike the micro transaction model. With subscriptions, you end up having to pay $15 every month just to play one single game. With micro transactions, you spend however much you want, support the game and get something extra for your purchase. You would find in any micro transaction based game, that you only ever need to pay around 1/4 to 1/3 of what you would pay with fees for an equally enjoyable experience, plus you get something extra for the money you pay, rather than just being milked off $15 per month just to pay for the server costs.

I paid £45 each in both DDO and Battleforge recently which I consider fair as that is around the price of a full retail MMO and 3 months of subscription. As a result, I now have everything I need in those two games to carry on playing without paying anymore forever, and that was also cheaper than having bought everysingle GW campaign and expansion.

Because what they offer now is not actual content. It's good it's optional, but I want actual content like for example 2 new areas for the gods in ToA with a new elite armor like obsidian etc. Because of the business model, the best they can do now is the transaction model with a few overpriced skins.

So the point is not that I'm for or against the micro transaction model itself, but the lack of new content because they don't have the recources.

I don't care in what form the new content comes as long as it really gets delivered. If they can't, then the only alternative to maintain a quality game with quantity (new content) is with a monthly fee which prooved to be succesful in the past.

I have paid to play games before, and I'll never do it again. Games aren't better just because they have a subscription fee. (Talented) Developers make games better
In fact, some of the worst games I have played had a fee. Warhammer Online being the last one. Guild Wars stacks up for me against any of the others. I actually still enjoy it quite a bit, even after five years. War Online only lasted 3 months for me before my patience for paying for a buggy, barely-running, totally-unbalanced, and-full-of-year-old-excuses-piece-of-crap ran out. And don't even get me started on WoW..

Clearly, despite assertions to the contrary, ANet's model has worked. If it hadn't, Guild Wars would not still be running at all, a sequel would not be in development, and ANet would be sunk like the Titanic by now. Enough said.

Talented devs (Anet) + subscription fee = win

No new content since EoTN, enough said.

Even though i don't want to, i agree with this a lot. I am also one of those people who only started playing guild wars because of its subscription free business model and at the time, (and now to an extent) i hated p2p business models. However, i feel that whilst i hate them, i feel that an mmo cannot be hugely successful without them. Some of you may say that its' current model is the only reason why the game has survived but that's hard to say when the game has never introduced any other models. Had it changed or been an entirely different model maybe the game today would be vastly different because of updates. Whether it would have been a bigger success or not and whether it would not be considered a dead horse right now, i don't think you can tell.

I know that some/most of you will say that guild wars is already quite a huge success when you look at the sale figures. However, i feel that its success pales in comparison to other p2p mmos such as wow. Sure it's it got millions of one off sales, but wow has millions of monthly subscribers. This difference means that wow can fund resources for regular updates, whereas guild wars doesn't, which is why we have so many delays with things like skill balances, because the current guild wars dev team doesn't have enough resources available to work on multiple projects efficiently. With p2p models, the company will obviously be more likely to listen to the player base which is something it seems that this forum has complained about a lot.

Oh and yeah i agree it's too late for guild wars one...that and i think(not sure but) you may be able to file lawsuits against anet since it says on some of the boxes (mine anyways) that the game is subscription free. However, i sorta hope gw2 doesn't adopt the same model as guild wars one but i sorta hope it does because well...yeah i don't want to pay a ridiculous amount each year. Maybe they could do something like a cheap monthly subscription of maybe 5-10 pounds a month or two? would still be cheaper than most/all mmos atm and gives anet another reason besides customer satisfaction to listen to its players.

Whatever they do i'll probably still get guild wars two and i'm sure most of you will too...unless they charge a ridiculously high monthly/bi monthly subscription (which i doubt).

I don't think it's the business model that failed. There are plenty of game studious that live of fully released titles and are not subscription based. GW was supposed to be that, releasing titles in the same series of games. The business model is fine.

However their team went cheap and dumped GW development and ran for GW2. They could have kept a team busy with another expansion but they chose not to do it. It wasn't a failure as in they didn't have enough resources to do it, it was a choice they made.

I disagree with their choice as well but somehow I don't think a subscription model would have helped. I believe they would have cashed in the monthly fee and probably developed just as much as they did so far with some extra free costumes perhaps.

They are way too slow and no amount of money would make them faster.

I am inclined to disagree with all of it, there are to many holes but an opinion is an opinion.

The grenth and dwayna costumes are new content. The way that the micro transaction model works in other games is that you similarly pay for ingame content like armor and weapon skins, potions and whatever the game may use, also DDO did follow this idea and sells extra mission packs for money, or you can pay the sub and get all the mission packs included.

Subscription fees havnt ever worked for me because I have never carried on playing any such game. As soon as I need to pay anymore to play, I stop playing. And in all honesty, WOW is the only succesful fee based game. Others have a subscripion base of around 100,000 users which may be enough to pay for the game, but it makes all these subscription based games inaccessible to other gamers for two reasons, because a lot simply wont pay the fee, and others will only pay fees for one single game, meaning that they wont ever choose to play other fee based games.

Fees may work for the developers, but they do not work well at all for the people who play the games.

I agree with this. With GW, The business model isnt what failed, but rather spreading the player base over so many chapters, and being unable to keep each one and the skills balanced. Also Anet did ruin much of the game themselves with careless gameplay changes and unwanted updates, causing a large number of players to quit. This was the reason why GW1 was abandoned and GW2 was announced. It was not to do with the business model, but because Anet failed at creating well balanced content and good updates.

Not true, there are many other successful subscription based MMOs. You don't have to only look to WoW, how about NCSoft's own subscription based game like Aion?

That can't be true as most MMOs are subscription based nowadays and most of them DO work well for their customers who have chosen to support a subscription model.

GW is in the minority here catering to gamers who dont want to invest in a subscription model. Most MMOs follow the subscription model and that has generally been working well for most of them.

They didnt have enough resources because their revenue is much lower than other subscription based MMOs like Aion. This means they cant justify the cost of hiring as many people to work on GW1 as Aion can. On the other hand, ANet's customers have been complaining that they dont get enough content update so they have not been pleasing their own customers either. In that sense, their business model has already failed.

No, again, this is not the reason why the game started to 'die'. People started leaving GW around NF time particularly due to the oh so talented devs ruining PVP with changes such as 6 man HA and heroes in PVP arenas, and entirely dumbing down PVE with consumables, PVE only skills, and Ursan Blessing. The game changes that were made during NF were incredibly bad and far from talented decisions for this game, and much of the player base did not welcome these changes and left.
Again, GW being abandoned for GW2 had nothing to do with the business model, but rather because the game design and idea was not sustainable with simply adding new content every 6 months as it created far too many balance problems, disillusioned players, and a graduall degradation to the quality and enjoyment of the game.

You missed the point entirely that people who pay fees will usually only be limited to playing a single game at a time, and the number of people subscribing to and playing these games is hardly a significant number as opposed to how many people play WoW or any succesful free to play single or multiplayer game. I do not know how many people play Aion, but the total number is not an accurate measure as the game uses a fee based model in europe and america, but a different model in Asia where you buy game time in hours that doesnt expire while you are logged off.

This method I also support and would pay for instead of fees. Instead of giving me only a month of play time for $15, why cant I have 200 hours of play time instead so I can play whenever I want and get my moneys worth?
This also raises the issue that fees have never been succesful in Asia. People there also do not want to be limited in their gaming enjoyment by having to pay subscriptions.

If I am to pay a fee for an MMO, give me my play time in hours to use whenever I like, not in months which mean I would have to play one game everyday to get my moneys worth.

I cannot understand how fees ever became accepted in America and Europe. They are pointless for casual gamers who do not play too often, I suppose there are just a lot of MMO junkies who spend their entire lives playing MMOs every single day, or lots of kids who get their parents to pay for their fees.

The less time you have available to play games, and the less often you do (full time employment and real life say hello), the less and less attractive fees become.

Lets consider someone who only plays games for 2-5 hours a week. What is better - $15 for 1 month, micro transactions, or $15 for 200 hours? I myself would never accept the first option, but would gladly pay for micro transactions or hours which only expire while playing the game.

Don't insult me with such an argument if you want a serious debate.

Also they didn't need to make new campaigns, just mini expansions. There's enough free space on the maps of all three continents to keep things interesting till GW2.

The Koreans left 6-12 months after release and if those guys leave you know something is wrong with the PvP. So you can't really bring up PvP as it had problems even before Factions got released.

The main reasing GW has been in decline (PvE side) is because no new content is added since EoTN and because it's put on life support. An RPG like GW needs new content to thrive, but that's my opinion.

Define significant number. I think if games like Aion can be successful with a subscription based model, why not GW2 or GW3?

Apparently most MMOs are subscription based already whether we like it or not. It is difficult to find MMOs that are free to play, yet of the same calibre as GW.

Dungeons and Dragons online, Battleforge, Aion in China to name a few.

Dont insult me with your narrow mind. No game on the market other than DDO follows the method that you suggest, even in fee based games like WoW and Lotro, you pay fees AND still have to pay for new content from expansion packs.

As you say, it is only your opinion that GW would be more succesful with fees, when the games player base is based on people who want to play for free. Yet GW has still been more succesful than any other fee based game apart from wow, so I cannot see how you imagine that there is any problem with the current business model.
I only play GW because it is free to do so after buying the game once, I assure you I find it far more insulting for people to actually want this game to have fees than you refuse to acknowledge the current micro transaction model.

If you actually want to pay fees to support this game, then what is the difference with paying for a costume instead? You pay Anet, and get something for it at least.

GW is still a major success, and I cannot see what you think would be any more successful about it with fees. Anet chose to abandon the game to work on GW2 at their own decision, which is also going to be free to play. This has nothing to do with whether or not GW1 was successful or not.

You didn't get a thing of what I wrote down, did you?

There's a big difference between two costumes and for example an extra area for the gods which will prolly give me and my buddies hours if not a couple of months of fun to explore and farm some new gear etc. ToA is still a populated place as people enter the UW and FoW there, so the argument of the spreading playerbase is true, but can be somewhat countered that way.

The thing I said is that they acknowledged themselves they can't do Sorrow's Furnace type content anymore for free, but they can't even do it if it's not for free either.

I also already stated that I don't mind the micro transaction model or whatever else they come up with, as long as playable content gets delivered. I will gladly pay for it.

Like with most things in life, if you want a quality product, it may cost you some money.

Because the people who play GW are here because it is free. This is the reason for the games success, to offer an MMO that had no fees. If you attach fees to the game, the only thing this would do is cause the vast majority of GW players to leave.

Aion is succesful because it uses different business models in different parts of the world. Also, it got a lot of players who have recently left WoW and GW1. As to my knowledge, a lot of GW players left to play Aion 'Untill GW2 is released'. They do not expect GW2 to have fees, and will gladly make the change over to a free to play model over a subscription one if given the choice. The reason why a lot of people didnt do this with GW1 is because the game is too different to traditional RPGS, and they wanted to carry on playing games like WoW. I havnt tried Aion myself, but maybe it is a lot closer to WoW than GW is, hence people who enjoy WoW type games are willing to pay monthly to play Aion.