Free to Play Cast: Blade & Soul, BioWare, and Guest Host Larry Everett Ep. 159

As you could guess from last weeks comment my preference is F2P, that way I can pay what I want. While not a fun of founders packs i got so exited for Aura Kingdom i bought one. 2 weeks after founders beta the game went into open beta. So if it is an X-Legend game assume a short closed beta. And speaking of X-Legend, they are one of the few publishers that has been able to consistently launch a new game about every 2 years. Dragomen hunters is their 4th game with Aeria Games and both Eden Eternal and Grand Fantasia have received new content this year.

Sub based with no cash shop. Because we all start with nothing at level one , and everything you get is earned through game play. A high level character with awesome gear worked hard and long for the rewards, and will probably stay with the game way longer than with any F2P game - Community.

I've got a da-bomb this week for Brawlhalla. Being a huge Smash Bros nerd, my interest was definitely piqued when I started seeing news about Brawlhalla several months ago. Having now played it for several hours, I have to say I'm pretty impressed. It does lack some of the mechanical complexity of the king of platform fighters. For example, instead of having a distinction between tilt attacks and smash attacks, quick and heavy attacks are mapped to different buttons. Additionally, there are no special attacks or up directional attacks. Nonetheless, it is a lot of fun just to plug in a gamepad and go at it against other players for a couple hours. Oh, and its online play is better than anything Nintendo has ever managed.

To the question of the week: I have to say my one model to rule them all for an MMO would be buy once and play forever. Before its, in my opinion, completely unnecessary conversion to free to play, Guild Wars 2 had a perfect example of the kind of model I'm talking about. Why do I like it so much? One word - pressure.

On the subscription model, you have a monthly pressure to either buy more game time or stop playing, and usually game time wins out.

With many free to play models, you have a lot of pressure all over the UI to get you to spend some money. Want a new character class/hero, but don't want to earn it the slow way? Here, you can buy it. Want your new sword or gun to be built faster? That'll be five bucks to buy the smallest package of premium currency so you can spend a tiny fraction of it to instantly complete your new shiny. Warframe, as much as I enjoy you, I'm talking about you right now.

Anyway, with Guild Wars 2, I never felt any of that same pressure. I could just jump in and play it to my heart's content without wanting to buy anything else. Even better, I could stop playing it whenever I wanted and never feel like I was wasting money on time I wasn't using.

First of all The Russian Server is 3 years old and was based off of Chinese Closed Beta Build. STOP Viewing the Russian Private server as an ACTUAL server please....

Just a side note... as it happens I am on Ebon Hawk so I will check out Larry's suggestion, thanks again guys.
And if you happen to see one of the ladies of the "Dakta'ahni Legacy", be sure to say hi.

A-bomb to another sort of auction house jerk... the guy that puts materials up 1 item at a time. UGH! I've been seeing this way too much and it's annoying as hell to flip through pages of 'onesies' to get to a decently priced stack. Just wanna slap those people.

I like sub mmos "WoW" because u get a good game!

i prefer the sub based model of mmos mainly for the percs you get for them like free monthly currency for cash shops ever though i avoid them like the plague, and the xp boosts among other things that you get from them. with that being said from an f2p player stand point when a game almost forces you to get a sub because some of the best content are locked behind a pay wall also sucks. for example Archeage no need to explain that one. but most recently Blade and Soul for making the ability to store you hard earned costumes in your wardrobe for premium users only.

watching Zach Sharpes talk is like watching is like watching a bad kungfu movie with horrible lip syncing. lol

ooh no Jason Winters im actually gonna enjoy this :D

The a bomb on auction house under cutters, have you considered that maybe the guy had been posting the items at normal prices and was getting under cut himself? severely restricting how much he can sell...if the server is busy enough undercutting to that degree may force other idiots to try undercut him at which point he'll buy them out and eventually corner the market