149738-did-f2p-kill-the-community

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Did F2P kill the community ?
 
It may have kept the doors open, it helped improve many parts of the game....but did it kill the community ? Kill maybe a harsh word because hearts are still beating in small pockets of resistance, is it just me that feels we lost so much ? Or is it just a case of what comes around goes around ? The game seems to be picking up again, and hopefully that will continue.....but the community ?  	
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			On EU jabbit things feel the same just more people. Maybe I am just not cynical enough to notice?	
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Did F2P kill the community ?
 
It may have kept the doors open, it helped improve many parts of the game....but did it kill the community ? Kill maybe a harsh word because hearts are still beating in small pockets of resistance, is it just me that feels we lost so much ? Or is it just a case of what comes around goes around ? The game seems to be picking up again, and hopefully that will continue.....but the community ?  
 
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			Not really, no. Literally haven't noticed a difference in regards to community. I'm not even sure what you're specifically talking about in regards to community since you throw out very vague terms as if you don't even know exactly what you're talking about yourself. 
			
				
	Edited February 18, 2016 by Razhork	
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			The Q4 report suggests not, and thats the only factual data there is to gone on.So, no.	
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			Yes and no.Some parts of the community have fallen apart/lost a lot of its players, This is more likely due to carbine being slow on the content drops and because BnS and other games have been released or gone into open beta.Other communities however have grown and seem to be doing pretty well.So yea some parts of the community has died down while others have grown.PVP still ded though lol	
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Did F2P kill the community ?
 
It may have kept the doors open, it helped improve many parts of the game....but did it kill the community ? Kill maybe a harsh word because hearts are still beating in small pockets of resistance, is it just me that feels we lost so much ? Or is it just a case of what comes around goes around ? The game seems to be picking up again, and hopefully that will continue.....but the community ?  
 
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I thought the OP meant more behaviour than numbers?
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The Q4 report suggests not, and thats the only factual data there is to gone on.
 
So, no.
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			The community around me has been great!	
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			I dont think so, I think now we have the true player base this game needs. When this game launched I remember all the "tough guys", the "elite players" who filled these halls shouting and telling the "casual" players to get the hell out of here because this was a game for elite players only, I WAS HERE IN THE BEGINNING AND i LEFT BECAUSE i WAS DISGUSTED. I even remember some developers who also joined that crowd saying this game was made only for the top players no for losers like me a casual player. I remember very well those days, as a result after few months this game was about to die and the F2P crowd was the one who revitalized this game. So no the F2P didnt kill this game for the contrary I think the F2P crowd saved this game and the game could make more revenue if more stuff were offer in the store, because the F2P crowd ends spending more money than th3e regular crow when the incentive is there	
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Hell, the game has to move on increasing numbers. It'd happened either way. You can't just expect to stay as a social microsystem forever, if you try to survive increasing the numbers. And if those which have left WildStar aren't yet to come back, it's their decision. It's definitely not because the game went F2P.
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			From a person who played before FTP happened and just coming back since it went to FTP, the community seems more active in-game, now if only I could find a active semi hardcore guild to join (either side) I would be set.	
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From a person who played before FTP happened and just coming back since it went to FTP, the community seems more active in-game, now if only I could find a active semi hardcore guild to join (either side) I would be set.
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Not sure what that has to do with what I said? Please read the entire forum instead of just one post to get the concept of what has been discussed so far. The first response to the OP, being myself, I said "On EU jabbit things feel the same just more people. Maybe I am just not cynical enough to notice?". Someone mentioned numbers, and I responded with what you quoted. So again, not sure what that has to do with what I said?
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This is just a humble observation from a new player.
It feels the community are harshly split between  2 large groups.
1. The Veteran players - who seem some what social - and usually on lfg talking about raids. 
2. The New players - who seem as anti-social as you can get. In 48 hours I have only seen 1 thing ever being said in both zone and local chat.
 
Asking for help is essentially pointless for new players, since no one ever replies.
I remember yesterday I was looking for a Datacube on the map - which was shown on the mini map but did not seem to exist in the main game.
I searched up high, down low and even underground but found nothing.
 
I asked 4 - 5 other Scientists who passed the Area if they knew where it was, but no response from any of them.
The most social interaction I got was from a random doctor who healed me in the middle of a boss fight then left.
 
With all that said, I don't see Wildstar going to survive much unless there is more of a "lively community".
I think a "Group Search feature" may help. Where people can set them selves up in a UI if they are actively looking for a group - similar to how Path of Exile does it. 	
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I don't think it killed the community. We have one of the best communities in any game I've ever played.
 
However, I do think people are taking breaks or are not as active right now. I know, for myself, I have been dabbling in other games to alleviate a burn out that I know is coming. Next month there are quite a few games that are releasing, or starting beta, that people are interested in trying.
 
We have had periods of lulls before and people have come back happier.	
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I don't know how it was pre-f2p. But my experiences so far has been similar to my experiences from Rift: just awesome.
I've pretty much only come by friendly and helpful people. Sure, there are not many players left on dominion luminai, but the few I meet every now and then are friendly souls :)	
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I personally don't think F2P did anything but help the game. I gave it a try in beta (it went' not well). I then noticed WS again a few days ago and figured "FTP; what's the harm?" After a day of flawless and pleasant experience I subbed up for the monthly signature account as well as bought some coin for two mounts, a third character slot and some dye (not a fan of the dye stuff BTW). 
 
I've been making and deleting characters as I hone my toons races, classes and that other thingy to play my style and have noticed an increasing number of players in he starting zones. I may redo my stalker while he's young rather than grind the coin for an appearance change then I'll likely be out of the starter zones for a while. But the folks coming in seem a cordial enough crowd. I think that I'm of an acceptable sort. I hope that I am anyway.	
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The community around me has been great!
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Did F2P kill the community ?
 
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I'm not much of an active participant in it, but the game's community seems generally the same as it was before.  Some of the faces have changed, but the tenor and volume have not.
 
There are more people in the game that don't seem to be talking to other players, but I reckon a lot of them will come around (or filter out - most folks can't stay with a game like this without doing the other people thing).	
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Did F2P kill the community ?
 
It may have kept the doors open, it helped improve many parts of the game....but did it kill the community ? Kill maybe a harsh word because hearts are still beating in small pockets of resistance, is it just me that feels we lost so much ? Or is it just a case of what comes around goes around ? The game seems to be picking up again, and hopefully that will continue.....but the community ?  
 
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This is just a humble observation from a new player.
It feels the community are harshly split between  2 large groups.
1. The Veteran players - who seem some what social - and usually on lfg talking about raids. 
2. The New players - who seem as anti-social as you can get. In 48 hours I have only seen 1 thing ever being said in both zone and local chat.
 
Asking for help is essentially pointless for new players, since no one ever replies.
I remember yesterday I was looking for a Datacube on the map - which was shown on the mini map but did not seem to exist in the main game.
I searched up high, down low and even underground but found nothing.
 
I asked 4 - 5 other Scientists who passed the Area if they knew where it was, but no response from any of them.
The most social interaction I got was from a random doctor who healed me in the middle of a boss fight then left.
 
With all that said, I don't see Wildstar going to survive much unless there is more of a "lively community".
I think a "Group Search feature" may help. Where people can set them selves up in a UI if they are actively looking for a group - similar to how Path of Exile does it. 
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			Purely based upon what I've seen, the community had the obvious F2P surge then returned to Pre-F2P levels, I miss the people that would spend hours on here saying, "BUT F2P WILL SAVE WS". lol. Anyways, it's incredibly obvious how small the community is once again to say the least, and I don't believe anyone saying the population is increasing steadily either. Maybe drop 7 can change that but it's more likely declining every day for now.So you could argue that F2P could have "saved" wildstar if they had made better changes but as it was f2p just probably turned even more people off or rather, confirmed what they had heard.
			
				
	Edited February 18, 2016 by Naix	
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Purely based upon what I've seen, the community had the obvious F2P surge then returned to Pre-F2P levels, I miss the people that would spend hours on here saying, "BUT F2P WILL SAVE WS". lol. Anyways, it's incredibly obvious how small the community is once again to say the least, and I don't believe anyone saying the population is increasing steadily either. Maybe drop 7 can change that but it's more likely declining every day for now.
 
So you could argue that F2P could have "saved" wildstar if they had made better changes but as it was f2p just probably turned even more people off or rather, confirmed what they had heard.
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			Entity Dominion's community seems about the same. most the same big names and such	
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Did F2P kill the community more than early game bugs, game difficulty, or the grindy aspects of WS?
 
And without F2P, would there still be a community at all? Or a game?
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Let's try asking this question in a way that rates F2P against the other hurdles this game has faced recently.
 
Which of the following factors seems most likely to have caused a significant decline in "the community"?
1. Lack of persistent new endgame content.
2. Release of other games.
3. Bots running amok through PvP.
3. Lockdown on developer communications about the state of the game.
4. Letting people play the game without paying any money.	
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			No. It's more or less the same, just with more people lol.	
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F2P kill the community?  I don't think so.  Honestly every now and then you get someone named 'bagof d*cks' pipe into zone chat shouting expletives and 'geame's dead...' [sic] which get promptly reported/blocked, but thats no different than any other game.  On the whole if someone asks for help in zone chat, I try to answer and help as much as I can...sort of a pay-it-forward mentality and everyone I meet are super appreciative and nice.
 
So I think the WS community is pretty great, if the devs can figure out a way to get a steady stream of content out I think people would hang around more, then again, its nice to take breaks and come back for the new shinies once a quarter...	
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			I haven't noticed much of a difference if any following free-to-play - just more people. Which.... is a good thing?	
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Since the angsty "hardcore" PvP crowd left the community has become much better. The casual PvPer's and the PvE crowds have been much nicer to see around, and there's nearly always something fun going on (whether WB's, groups for contracts, raids, etc). 
 
IMO it's improved quite a bit.	
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Since the angsty "hardcore" PvP crowd left the community has become much better. The casual PvPer's and the PvE crowds have been much nicer to see around, and there's nearly always something fun going on (whether WB's, groups for contracts, raids, etc). 
 
IMO it's improved quite a bit.
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i think some still prowl the forums to spit vitriol every now and then.
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Purely based upon what I've seen, the community had the obvious F2P surge then returned to Pre-F2P levels, I miss the people that would spend hours on here saying, "BUT F2P WILL SAVE WS". lol. Anyways, it's incredibly obvious how small the community is once again to say the least, and I don't believe anyone saying the population is increasing steadily either. Maybe drop 7 can change that but it's more likely declining every day for now.
 
So you could argue that F2P could have "saved" wildstar if they had made better changes but as it was f2p just probably turned even more people off or rather, confirmed what they had heard.
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I came back ... twice.
 
Content draughts are a problem. I'm a VERY casual player that plays mainly with my hubby, so its contracts, daily expeditions (we love those! always go for gold!) cash in and blow it all on plot stuff. we're 'warming up' for arcterra (hubby needed a new gun, his DPS was awful and I cant tank like him)
 
We want to try dungeons but we're easing in. we did 3 rooms and a boss of stormtalon at launch but nothing more, i need a better rig, hubby got a better one but the memory leaks are killer. 
 
tbh we don't join the community heavily primarliy because were so limited on time but I kept coming back, buy n-coins, playing in housing etc	
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Immediately after F2P there was some trolling going on in WSRP. Since then the community has fleshed out pretty well. We lost some people, as usual in any MMO, but considering how late in this drop's life we are, I'm ~quite~ happy that we're still getting 40ish people at prime time and a dozen or two showing up to weekly events.
 
The building community is also doing pretty well. Activity has dropped off a bit since F2P but I think that's more content malaise. I also think it's been a mixed bag for builders... we're getting more decor available between drops than before, but it always comes with some failure or another. Most recently the Housing Supervisor— which should have been a great success and brought happiness to a lot of builders— has instead become a ridiculously rare item, generating more disappointment than happiness (from my view).
 
So yea, basically what Yasfan said. F2P is not the reason for this dip. I would say this long stretch between free content release, disappointment with the F2P events, and release of other games are the great culprits.	
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Do you actually mean community or do you mean population?
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			I made lots of new friends post-f2p :) The community got better, in my experience.	
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I mean, I feel the population is about the same.
 
We had a F2P bubble
 
now it's 50% the same people you have been raiding with for the last year and maybe 50% new people?
 
It's probably more 75/25
 
What distresses me is there is no mid-tier.  You have a lot of people who are new and have barely raided at all, and you have a lot of players who are either 8/9 or killing avatus.
 
There is almost nothing in between.  This makes recruiting very difficult for guilds as the players you'd really want (those 6/6 GA players who want to be in datascape) are hard to find.	
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I mean, I feel the population is about the same.
 
We had a F2P bubble
 
now it's 50% the same people you have been raiding with for the last year and maybe 50% new people?
 
It's probably more 75/25
 
What distresses me is there is no mid-tier.  You have a lot of people who are new and have barely raided at all, and you have a lot of players who are either 8/9 or killing avatus.
 
There is almost nothing in between.  This makes recruiting very difficult for guilds as the players you'd really want (those 6/6 GA players who want to be in datascape) are hard to find.
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There is almost nothing in between.  This makes recruiting very difficult for guilds as the players you'd really want (those 6/6 GA players who want to be in datascape) are hard to find.
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The problem is guilds dont want to teach the players how to do the raiding or dungeons, so at the end if you guild wants someone fully vested, train and teach them.
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The problem is guilds dont want to teach the players how to do the raiding or dungeons
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It isn't the guilds' progressing through GA jobs to prepare players for you to poach recruit. If you want to recruit people for your guild running Datascape, and you're having trouble finding people who are at Datascape, then put in the time to build some people up.
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It isn't the guilds' progressing through GA jobs to prepare players for you to poach recruit. If you want to recruit people for your guild running Datascape, and you're having trouble finding people who are at Datascape, then put in the time to build some people up.
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The problem is guilds dont want to teach the players how to do the raiding or dungeons, so at the end if you guild wants someone fully vested, train and teach them.
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The problem is people not sticking around.
I've seen it enough now since F2P has hit.
 
We've had applicants that simply dissapeared 2 days after making an application.
We've had applicants that dissapeared 1 wek after being accepted
We've had applicants that refused to raid because they couldn't get the mechanics right, even after having trained in dungeons
We've had applicants that raided once and then dissapeared because numerous reasons.
 
The problem is not guilds refusing to invest time.
Heck we run dungeons daily to get people attuned; geared or some practise on mechanics.
We raid twice a week in Genetic Archives; but every raid it becomes harder to just scrape people together.
Nothing is binding people to this game anymore. With the subscription people at least had the illusion they had to hop online because of their sub running.
Now? They jump from one F2P game to another; leaving as fast as they joined.
 
I hope people at some point realize that this is killing off every single game, one at a time.
And int he end; there's going to be nothing left.
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I should correct my answers because no all the guilds are like what I said, some are, some are not and there are some very helpful guilds out there, so I apologize for including all in the point I was trying to make.
 
The game as it is right now has a lot of potential but there are several issues in the game that make newer players to no stick around, to me the biggest issue I have found in the game that puts me off is the crafting, I love to craft, in every single game I have played I love the farming and crafting, here crafting punishes and penalizes players who want to learn that art, here in this game the devs went the lazy way to create a money sink and they are discouraging newer players who face the hardships of trying to craft and make a small amount of money, just enough to pay to learn the craft, every item you craft has a value that usually is 35 to 50% lower than the money you put in to craft the item, that ism ludicrous and ridiculous.
 
Also having crafting tied up to your level is ridiculous. In other games I usually have alts who are my main crafters, I buy expansion slots for them, I buy store space for them, I buy every thing needed to make their crafting experience easier. I buy all that with real money, so by designing crafting like it is right now, I dont have any incentive to invest real money in it.
			
				
	Edited February 23, 2016 by Kampalo Palo	
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This is just a really long and convoluted way of blaming the players and not the game. Fact of the matter is this. The majority of the audience for F2P games is fickle, yes, maybe even unfairly so. However, if a F2P game is made well, the players will stick around. There are plenty of games right now, that are F2P and are thriving. (The most popular and populous online game right is now F2P fyi).
 
The playerbase is not some kind of mindless hive of locusts that just consumes games and move on. They just don't have the patience to deal with bad games with incompetent dev teams that seem to excel at breaking more things than they fix with each successive update.
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As far as new player retention, for a DS guild I do think the problem is that the new players do skip a large amount of the really great content in this game, and end up swimming in the deep end with little knowledge of the fun stuff they missed along the way. After getting carried through huge gear upgrades, hitting that progression wall can be a little of a harsh reality. I actually had a player recently tell me "that's just sad" when I told him no one was able to pug GA a year ago (meaning, December of 2014). *sigh* kids these days. Because, you know, everyone should be able to clear it in 3-4 hours . . .
 
Our retention of new players has been pretty good, thus far, but I think we are also in the absolutely best place in the game right now: progressing through DS is awesome, and it's fun for the newer players. Trying to progress through GA when pugs regularly clear it, or farming Avatus are probably much more difficult places to gain and retain members.
 
That being said, it is funny when newer players think that Ohmna is easy or are concerned when we wipe on progression content a few times :)
			
				
	Edited February 23, 2016 by SlyJeff	
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I should correct my answers because no all the guilds are like what I said, some are, some are not and there are some very helpful guilds out there, so I apologize for including all in the point I was trying to make.
 
The game as it is right now has a lot of potential but there are several issues in the game that make newer players to no stick around, to me the biggest issue I have found in the game that puts me off is the crafting, I love to craft, in every single game I have played I love the farming and crafting, here crafting punishes and penalizes players who want to learn that art, here in this game the devs went the lazy way to create a money sink and they are discouraging newer players who face the hardships of trying to craft and make a small amount of money, just enough to pay to learn the craft, every item you craft has a value that usually is 35 to 50% lower than the money you put in to craft the item, that ism ludicrous and ridiculous.
 
Also having crafting tied up to your level is ridiculous. In other games I usually have alts who are my main crafters, I buy expansion slots for them, I buy store space for them, I buy every thing needed to make their crafting experience easier. I buy all that with real money, so by designing crafting like it is right now, I dont have any incentive to invest real money in it.
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It isn't the guilds' progressing through GA jobs to prepare players for you to poach recruit. If you want to recruit people for your guild running Datascape, and you're having trouble finding people who are at Datascape, then put in the time to build some people up.
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