How to avoid Pay to Win for a Free to Play mmorpg

I'm going to start by saying this a blog post isn't how a player can avoid pay to win this is more about how a company can avoid putting a pay to win system into their mmorpg and how to make money without ruining the mmorpg over the long run. Why would a company want to avoid pay to win? The reasoning is because it will turn off many of the possible customers since they will not want to invest in a game that gives buy able advantages. The reason being is because as a customer everyone has most likely spent $20 to $50 dollars on a game they enjoyed maybe even at a monthly rate. But in a pay to win mmorpg it becomes a battle who can spend the most money to win. So there needs to be some limits on type of items allowed in an item mall. I'll also be tailoring this to what items can be in a shop based on what I will be adding as possible game features in the future.

Before I get into the items though people are usually confused about what pay to win actually is. Usually when ever someone sees a free to play game they automatically think that game is pay to win which isn't always true. The main thing which makes a game pay to win is having weapons or items which grant stats or bonus's which cannot be obtained any other way within the game. This means you can get the legendary +10 god blade from spending real cash and no one else can obtain it. But there's also another type of pay to win as well which is usually just as frowned upon these are the ones that have lotto systems which add chances to obtain items in game. For example lets say normally we have to upgrade an item to +10 by combining a massive number of +1's and that same item also has different grades of upgrades as well as needs to have sockets added to it. This process would take someone maybe a year to make such a mastered weapon and yet for people who spend money they have a chance to skip all of the work and effort and get it by spending money this would also be pay to win as well as frustrate a lot of players.

Lets talk about the types of items that are okay and aren't pay to win. Cosmetics is one of the major things that isn't a pay to win item cause you can do without them you don't need to have your character look like anything special. But this is one of the favorite for girls and for people that feel that to do more DPS you need to look good which is understandable. Items like experience boosts are another thing that isn't really pay to win since you just get an easier advantage.

So lets talk about things that could be added that other games might not have thought about before which would still be balanced.

Item name	Description
Experience Scrolls	Give various amount's of experience boosts
Gold hunting Boost	Increases gold received from monsters killed for a certain amount of time
Recipe RNG Box	Gives a random recipe pattern for the various professions but all recipes can be obtained from respected monsters in game.
Crafting speed Boost	Increases the crafting speed for all crafting decreasing time spent.
Mining Boost	Chance to gain better items during mining.
Fishing Boost	Higher chance to catch a fish and more chance for rare species.
Reputation Boost	Increases reputation gathering for factions in game.
Remote Vendor	Allows usage of different vendors without being in a town.
Infamy Point reduction	Lowers PK points for a person who has been killing people too much.
Cosmetics of Various Types	This can be anything from clothing to hats, back accessories, weapon skins as well as cosmetics which effect the surrounding character aura's and such.
Appearance changer	Hate how your character looks? Change it
Character slot addition	Adds more characters to the character window.
Item Refinement items	Chance to upgrade items using items which are obtainable in game by monster drop which allows balance.

Anything can technically be something added into a shop as long as one rule is always used all items added to shop with the exception of boosts, cosmetics and character appearance and slot additions should be obtainable in game.

By keeping the rule of only adding items to shop which can be obtain in game of course with the exceptions of just the boosts and stuff which are vanity items this allows fair play between people who can spend money and people who can't. It gives equal playing field. Some of the items above might make you think why would someone want that. But in a future topic I will add some of the game features which will also match up with some of the items here.

Pay to Play or Free to Play for a PvP MMORPG

So this is a very interesting question when it comes to mmorpg's cause lately most of your mmorpg's are moving into free to play. Why you ask? Cause micro-transactions end up being worth it much more then most standard pay to play mmorpgs. Before I go into deep details let me explain some of these terms this way you won't be lost and confused when I use them:

Pay to Play (P2P)- Games that you pay a subscription fee in order to play it these mmorpg's usually do not have an item shop to buy items from.
Free to Play (F2P)- Games that are completely free and cost nothing up front but are supported by an item shop.
Pay to Unlock- Games that have locked features which you need to pay in order to access parts of the game.
Pay to Win(P2W)- The term that describes free to play games that allow players to win the game buy paying large amounts of money in order to win in pvp or have high advantage against players.

These are some of the terms that I'll be using just wanted to explain them in case your new to mmorpg's and having heard about any of the above or might be confused about them.

Okay so pay to unlock mmorpg's usually are doomed to fail just because everyone likes to experience everything without having to spend money. Basically games which force players into this lose most of the dedicated free players cause they have many other free to play mmorpgs that are not content locked like these. An example of content locking is that of Starwars: The Old Republic another reason why you don't really hear a whole lot about that game is because of how bad content locking is. Of course people still play just because it's Starwars but they lost most of the people who realized theres better games out there.

Pay to Play mmorpg's are the type that seem to be dieing mostly cause developers got wise to the fact they could make more money with an item mall. Of course there's people who will claim to the ends of the earth this is not true. But lets make a math example out of this that way its easy to understand:

The average subscription is usually somewhere between $8 and $15 per month the average cost per expansion or at least the cost of the game itself is between $20 and $120 highest amount being your collectors editions which are usually not worth the money but for this example lets say we are paying:

$15/m  x 12 months = $180

If we spent $60 to buy the standard version of the game that's $240 in total for a full years worth of play. At the very most you might spend about $400 if you have to buy an expansion and the game itself. You might think that's a lot but your standard game console is much more usually 400 for the console and 60 at least a month to purchase each new game you need to have. You can google playstation 4 and do the math.

But when we talk about a free to play game the item shop is gonna make more money regardless of whether its pay to win or not. Cause if the stuff in the item shop gives players good enough incentive they will buy things. And people will sell things for the games gold or for trade of items even if your a "free" player and spend no money on items yourself if your buying the item mall items from someone you are paying for the game indirectly. Free players bring paying costumers and make a very active population. Then depending on your item malls usually just costumes and fashion alone will run someone about $100 a month or more depending on the person. Even if it's only $30 or $50 a month it's going to be a huge profit in the end this is why mmorpg's try to bring out weekly sales on items in an item mall.

Players are slightly to blame about it too the fact there are people out there who dump a lot of money into items help ruin a game which inspires many developers to go for the dark pay to win allowing them to gain stats and buffs which are not avalible to some of the free players. Tera Online is one of the mmorpg's which is still trying to keep the game servers free from pay to win at least for the English based servers but the game isnt doing that well in Korea which might end up being the demise of the mmorpg all together and then En Masse might decide to go full pay to win in order to get all that they can out of the player base.

The other issue pay to play has is the issue of money a few years ago people had the jobs and the money to spend for the game and pay for the subscription but most of the player base is on a tight amount of money so you have alot more players looking for the free to play type of games.

For a PvP Mmorpg honestly pay to play won't really work just because most of the community wouldn't have the money to pay for it and believe me when I say those nasty trolls and crappy players actually add on to fun when it comes to pvp games. But with that being said pay to win does not fit cause you will chase away most of your mmorpg community at the near sight of an item mall that lets people buy stuff that gives them an advantage over others in pvp.

I actually will provide some more information about how companies can avoid pay to win in a mmorpg later on but I'm pretty sure its a safe bet to say the mmorpg community will most likely have to be a free to play in order to get a proper player base to back it.

Storyline for a PvP MMORPG

So of course I don't plan on making one up cause the most Ive ever done was like quest stories and stuff like that nothing large scale for any mmmorpg. But at the same time I don't wanna just not mention this cause I'm pretty sure that everyone whos ever played any mmorpg has either seen the really bad story line's and have seen some of the good ones.

Let me start by saying regardless of whether people do more clicking and not reading though NPC's and all most players want some sort of storyline or purpose. We don't want to be thrown into a game without a introduction the reason is cause for most players they want to feel like they can either relate somehow to the story or they want some kind of build up. World of Warcraft did a great job with the storyline as well as making monsters which interacted with players.

Tera Online is an example of a storyline that isn't all that good. They tried I will give them that but you have no idea why theres all these races and while yes it tries to give you some purpose for fighting and doing your quests as the game progresses many of your normal quest stories are like find item or kill monster and it gets boring. Especially since you only have the few cut scene's though out the story quests. Of course we all know the more cut scenes and movies provided the larger the client will be but at the very least having NPC's and monsters that actually have some interacting with players either before the fight or during the fight gives them personality.

Mmorpg's have been lacking the personality when it comes to boss fights and monsters. Don't get me wrong having my screen spammed with some text that the monster is saying is cool and all but if I don't have to read everything it makes it more fun in the end. Players want the game to interact with them. Look at toy's in a toy store no one wants the toy which is a solid block of wood when they can have the one that's interactive and shoots lasor Nerf bullets. That's like asking a kid if he wants a pet rock or a pet dog one will sit and do nothing and the other's gonna be interactive.

Having well built side stories help too if you want a player to do something introduce him to his characters and side stories this can be important he doesn't want to just repeat the same kill 3 monsters over and over usually he wants to know why hes doing it.

One of the other things that games rarely do is have the NPC's in maps talk about the various pvp and battlegrounds the issue when this doesn't happen is your newer players might not know that they can participate in such events. Having some old man who wants to share his war stories with you and instruct you to seek out the main npc's to participate in an event or in some battlegrounds is a great way to direct players without them having to rely on global which is always filled with trolls and the worst players on the server.

To Faction or Not to Faction for a PvP MMORPG?

So ever since World of Warcraft came out the trend of all new mmorpg's have had some sort of factions with in the game. For example Tera Online has factions but these factions do not have any story revolving around the races in the game you actually would have to go online and read lore in order to actually find out information about them. But all of your newer mmorpg's all include factions, Blade & Soul, Yulgang 2, ect.

So the question comes down to whether the best pvp mmorpg would need to have factions. For the most part when it comes to story lines this is what determines races usually of course Tera Online is the kind of mmorpg that feels like factions are not really planned out.

When it comes to the actual PvP system while factions do provide some sort of mission for players. I don't think a games success comes down to having factions. The issue with factions is usually the imbalance of the player base since everyone usually wants to join a certain faction. A perfect example was World of Warcraft you had alliance and horde some servers it was 1 horde to every 100 alliance members and then some servers where more 1 alliance to every 100 horde.

The problem's that are caused by these imbalances is when it comes down to world pvp events or events in general. The lack of players during specific times makes it so there has to be some buff compensation in order to provide a good balanced playing field for both sides. But then theres always the abuse of the buffs and the constant shifting of people wanting to move from one server to another. That displacement means the communities are usually unstable which can be bad for an mmorpg.

Many of the mmorpg's before factions came out focused more on specific class quests rather then you being a different race like for example Ragnarok Online had many quests which revolved around skills and things based on the class of course some NPC's wouldn't talk to people outside outside of people of other classes or give other dialogs besides the ones for a certain class but it did provide something for players to do that was different each new character made.

Faction based systems according to World of Warcraft are supposed to be to help build story for different races and allows players to experience something that only certain races will come though. But with the older class based system it does the same thing. Ragnarok Online also incorporated some variations in storyline which allowed someone to experience a different outcome if they responded differently to something.

When we look at these ways of doing it faction's don't seem to really be all that important. A good mmorpg doesn't need to have factions you can incorporate multiple ways of allowing people to experience different content without needing to force factions on people.

The other thing which factions do kind of ruin is the guild system the reason for this is if you have a different faction race and lets say you got some elves and they hate humans for what ever reason that means that if you have human friends they can't join your elf guild that is gonna make you either start playing human or you'll have to make your friends play elf.

The guild system works better in many ways then the faction based system when its incorporated properly. I will go over more about that when I get into how the guild system should work and all. But from a PvP point of view factions only make things difficult. I think in some ways it would make more sense to have factions as a secondary event type thing.

What I mean by event type with factions is your faction doesn't effect anything in the open world other then maybe things like the vendors you can buy from stuff like that. The PvP part of factions could be a closed arena like a weekly faction war but outside of that area and war time factions have very little to almost no effect on the masses then your normal PvP and guild vs guild takes place.

That would not only make more sense but would provide more things for players to do. Cause the issue with open world and constant faction conflict is that some people will like it while others will feel like its boring or has no point. But if its some special event everyone will be likely to show up.

Graphics for a PvP MMORPG

Okay so I talked before about most people playing games based on how good the graphics are. So this is a very important aspect of the game if it's going to succeed. Honestly most of the player base will either play a mmorpg because it has good graphics or they will completely avoid that same game. Most people now a days want eye candy its one of the most important things.

Part of what goes good with graphics is the UI system but as long as the graphics are good the game will have players. I mean look at final fantasy 14 for example the detail of the graphics is pretty good. But even that game has some things which can be improved. The change from day to night and how bright things actually look can be a killer on the eye's. I kind of feel like they didn't really take into account that for the game but not saying the game is over all bad.

This is part of why developers who make a game need to allow players to modify certain ingame aspects not just from the "Will it run on my system?" point of view but also because of peoples likes or dislikes. But don't get me wrong they do need to make sure that it can run on players systems and it's very important to be able to make it so an older system can still play the game. Keep in mind not everyone is rich so you will reduce your player base by having really high system requirements for mmorpg's.

The best way to cope with that is to allow users to shut off some of the game features and sure it will leave them playing a very ugly game but they will praise the development team for allowing them to play at all without having to buy a brand new rig to play each mmorpg. One feature which would have actually been good was turning off effects in Tera Online. Many effects get very laggy the more players are on a screen with that terrible flash client. So it would have helped people if you could remove all effects from game. But this is not possible not even by ripping though the client. This is bad game design. I understand they want everyone to see pretty effects but your laptop's cant run the game well cause of lack of CPU power.

The design of art and such is a completely different topic but the models and art within the game should be made realisticly and things like grass moving when you walk though it tree's moving with the wind and weather effecting surroundings is all things which help make the game more enjoyable for the player. But for the low performance computers you can always add options to remove different effects this way you make the people happy who love a pretty game and please the person running on the dual core computer with the 5 year old video card.

Client Design for a PvP MMORPG

Client design is very important not just so the server runs properly but also so that players can easily play the game and that it's easy enough for someone to figure out how to install and such. For the most part installation isn't really an issue. Most mmorpg's have this fine since all packages usually install automaticly and download without issues.

The client side issues usually either come from bad patches example the development team not pretesting patches before they release them to the users. A perfect example of this would be Tera Online now that it's free to play. With every patch release they usually make some client side mistake that makes it so more then half of the player base has an issue. And then usually it's the community which comes up with work arounds of how to fix these bugs. I know cause I've had to help friends with this. That is pretty bad for a mmorpg. You shouldn't have to have your player base figure out how to fix your bad patches.

But the client itself is important we've also seen some pretty bad clients that seem to be built very poorly. One of the worst ones was that of Star Wars: The Old Republic. If you had a operating system that was 64bit it would memory leak causing it to crash and unless you had like 10 or 20 gbs of ram it would be impossible to run on these systems. Very bad coding for a client which was sapposed to be able to run with very low requirements. 32bit systems had less problems but still had crashing and memory leak problems which would take away from the fun of PvP.

Now not to bash Tera Online cause I still play it but the client is very poorly designed as well. Only the issues are not memory leaks. The issues with the client are because they choose autodesk as a product. The issue with autodesk is that it's a flash based system. People who know me most likely have heard many times that flash is CPU heavy and the mix between GPU and CPU is a bad combo. The user interface basicly has this flash overlay working on it which causes the user to lag really bad. This also ends up allowing people to exploit the user interface. You ask how? it allows players to walk up walls just like World of Warcraft's wall climbing bug using levitate only its achived just by spaming jump and some user interface key. So flash designs should just be thrown away cause your causing many players issues. Yes you can reduce some of the issues by various changes with graphics, CPU, client modification. But in the end it fails cause you can't make it perfect its flash its very broken.

Speaking of World of Warcraft one feature which no game has really implemented quite like WoW was the LUA based UI system. Being able to create addons really improved on the game itself. So it would be nice to actually see this implemented cause I could totally see some really unique ways for people to make addons in a PvP mmorpg which would really improve the game play. Like for example being able to make an addon which tracks people you've killed and the locations you've found them as well this way you can also make maps for hunting for your guild and such. Of course you would need to be careful about how to implement it so that it wouldn't be exploitable. But I think for the most part this wasn't that much of an issue for World of Warcraft. And I believe with a strict banning policy for people breaking rules this would not be much of a concern either.

Using a user interface which allows modification usually also allows people to customize it in various ways which will make the player base more happy over the more standard can't change much type interface which people will either have to love or have to hate. This is where allowing a user to be able to change various things besides the normal font, color, and size. Users want to be able to customize skins and do more with it and show off the art that they can create.

Server Side Design for a PvP MMORPG

I'm sure some of you are most likely thinking what would someone like me know about server side setup and design for a mmorpg. I actually had some experience running servers. And when it comes down to most mmorpg's they lack proper server side coding.

For example we have some pretty beast servers which are possible with multi-core processors but most mmorpg's are not built multi-thread and don't take advantage of having multi-core processors for processing data. Just imagine if a mmorpg was built from the ground up and could take into account a server with just two server cores. Your talking much more power being able to have more players in a single map and less server crashes because of performance problems.

For the most part I can't really comment too much about servers but there's one feature I have yet to actually see be made possible from an mmorpg and that's the ability to cross server and i mean with success. Tera Online had cross server event's but these caused the server to lag really bad and crash. Could be related to the lack of multi-core processor support or it could be because of how the server was coded. They of course removed the feature with the change of nexus but its one of those features which would have been really interesting to have work properly.

Another thing which I can't stress enough will also be related to keeping the server free from botters and hackers. And being successful in doing this will come down to the way players are delt with. Currently every single mmorpg on the market falls short because they only have the resort of banning someone by IP. The issue with doing this is that more then 80% of all ISP's allow a user to change there IP just by resetting the modem. You can also bot and hack using a proxy with hamachi to get around this as well. So all they need to just get a new proxy and you can download tons of proxies all over the net or pay 5 dollars to get a list of some good ones. So when a game server ban's by IP all they do is force these people to change how they are hacking and botting and they continue to do it again. Deleting the account just makes them make a new account not really any loss for a botter.

So how does one deal with people that bot and hack? Instead of banning by IP the login server during authentication should be recording a persons hardware address such as CPU, harddrive, ram that way if someone needs to be banned from the server the server will ban them based on the serial's of these key componets in their computer that way it would be impossible for them to return to the game unless they changed computers. You might ask why not just record the mac address of a computer since it's easier there's software on the internet to change mac address really easily so this is not a safe address to use for banning people and can be changed just like that of IP addresses.

The reason why you would be so strict to offenders in a mmorpg is take for example World of Warcraft this is a top advertised game but did you know they are actually one of the most known hacked games as well even with the game security known as warden. This is because the more offenders you just slap on the hand by giving them just a delete of account they will just use some of the money they made selling gold to buy a new copy of the game only to start botting and selling gold again. If the very first offender of hacking had his computer banned from playing the game he would have gave up on the idea cause no one wants to buy a new CPU to be able to play a mmorpg. The more strict the punishment people will go to the hacking community and be like guys don't hack cause your computer gets banned from connecting to the server.