The bane of MMOs: Monthly fee?

I had to take the bias out...but it's partly true. PvE players also complain about balance issues as well, class X does more damage, has more utility, is being taken and my class isn't etc. Some are valid concerns, others not so much, but the general point is that players do bring up complaints about issues regardless of whether they are PvE or PvP balance. The problem then escalates where a change for PvE negatively affects PvP and vice-versa which brings up valid complaints. This happens due to an ability working the same in both PvP and PvE. The solution would be to have the ability work differently in PvE than it does in PvP, but that makes the game more complicated (possibly unnecessarily so) and could create problems with fixing balance issues and chasing down bugs in areas where players can engage in both PvP and PvE which is, I would guess, a lot of MMOs simply have abilities work the same in PvP and PvE. A few simply have a blanket 75% damage reduction for abilities when they hit players.

*places a well-hidden verbal cliff at the end*

Guild Wars 2 is P2win? Really? I have not seen that in the model for GW2. Do you have a source for this?

Free to play is a misconception.

The reason why a lot of popular MMOs went free to play is because private servers started taking a serious hamper on their profits.

Private servers really are the prime example of why free to play worked.

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/06/10

sorry but you are so wrong. F2P is the bane of all gaming. sure, some companies do it right, and i think guild wars may be one of them, but for the most part, it's just straight up bad.

i'm from eve online, and when micro-transactions were introduced, it nearly killed the game. thankfully ccp quickly realized their mistake (they actually read their forums, plus the riots in-game were sort of hard to miss). this type of profit fishing cheapens the game, and i hate that this is the new trend among most new games. i also hate how despite my qualms, the data regarding this topic suggests that f2p is a very profitable business model, simply because consumers are stupid fish who are attracted to shiny things.

the only time f2p is successful is if the transactions are merely for vanity, or if it is balanced in such a way that people can opt out of microtransactions and still play the game effectively. an good example of this is tf2, along with world of tanks until you get to tier 7 tanks, where the costs of such tanking are not sustainable unless you are on a premium account.

tl:dr: just say no to f2p, especially in MMO's.

I enjoy both types of games but monthly is cheaper

F2P is terrible. It sounds good but ends up costing more if you want all the content.

Microstransactions are the most terrible thing to hit gaming. Costly DLC is almost universally horrible.

This right here. i used to play a F2P game that offered a limited edition (hardly noticable) cosmetic item for $150. They sold the limited 200 of those in a few days. $150 is more than a years worth of SWTOR on 1 item. I have yet to see a F2P that is cheaper than a P2P.

If you pay money to buy a game, it is not free to play. A game that doesn't have a monthly subscription isn't by default free even though there are a lot of free to play games out there. The monthly subscription model isn't the successful model, it's simply been the available one and familiar.

Paying $10 to unlock a dungeon and $20 for a set of epic gear? No thanks. F2P mmo's are fun to muck around in for a couple hours but they're not the sort of thing you can get invested in long term. I'll stick to my $15 a month mmo's, thanks.