I'm against F2P UO for several reasons, but one of the main ones, is the rampant cheating. I played Lineage II when it launched, like 2 months after it launched; I bought the game and played it. The cheating wasn't too bad; and I only caught a guy clipping through the walls one time, and I was able to report him and he was gone in the next 5 minutes. He was cussing me out just for looking at him; truth be told I would have just not even paid attention till the guy started cussing me out. Anyhow; about 8 months down the line; you began catching guys botting and hacking non stop in that game. It was terrible. Adena spam (which is their gold), every 5 seconds; along with a server wide spam every 30 minutes "Attention players, this is a reminder telling you that illegal use of 3rd party software and RMT will result in immediate banning of your account" which at that time was total bs, because you could watch trains of bots running the same spot for days at a time accumulatin.. ok I'll stop my L2 rant.
Anyhow it went free to play (and holy omg wtf bbq) is it so filled with bugs, the server is super laggy, and I didn't meet a single person who hasn't botted or bought adena. All the while they all talk trash about people who do it; and no I've not seen any type of repercussion for it, you either break the rules or get your butt kicked in that game. Like, I've experienced periods of unplayable lag here in UO, and seen a gold spam here and there with the occasional same guy shouting for 2-3 days every couple of minutes; along with the very rare these days scripting lumberjack/miner/skiller upper but Lineage II is just un-enjoyable at it's base levels; once you hit 85 (which surprisingly can take as few as 1 and a half days if you are totally unobligated to do anything that day) you get into the "grind". 85 to 86 solo can take upwards of a week for some; 86-87 is where most quit the game or decide they have to bot, and 88+ 99% afk botters who are in the "top" clans talking trash to everyone else worse than you could imagine any trash talk in UO.
Let's move on to Aion; another NCSoft game gone F2P(which is a total failure imo). The game is 100% completely free as far as being able to make I think it's 5 characters per server, access to all content every area, any skill use, all classes etc. What pay for in that game is costumes (and lordy do the women basically get down to a see through bikinis in some places, straight to japanese schooll girl mini skirts with panties sticking out the bottom etc.. they sell to perverts) The people that play that game are constantly of the lowest tier of human existence, who have no grammar skills, argue with reason and stray into packs of creatures you intend to avoid when speed running through dungeons, kinah spam (I believe they have tried to contest the kinah spam a little, first it was a 30 second cooldown to speak in global chat, in which the RMT'ers began making 40-50 kinah spamming accounts to spam; then it became a you have to be level 20 to use anything other that /say or /guild but they still all over) speed hacks rampart wall clipping hacks, completely non-existant gm support if you get stuck good luck, occasional loss of your "NC COIN" which is what you buy with real money to get access to stuff in the cash shop. Granted there are some things you can purchase in the cash shop which affect how quickly your earn experience points, Abyss points (their method of keeping track of your progress in pvp and the currency with which you buy your "pvp gear") and perhaps some totally uncalled for overpowered potion (which is like 20 bucks per 5 iirc) which I've not met a person buy yet. Oh yeah, and your typical botting problems, but they do not bot for xp on Aion. They get up to 55-56 and move to an area called Sarpan and fire up the bots to farm kinah.
I only read about Dungeons and Dragons online; but having read what I have read, I have gathered that unless I want to play in a very small portion of dungeons and don't care to have any kind of inventory space then F2P is the way to go. Perfect World Online seemed to cutesy for me, even though I am a cat person that just seemed way out. Granted that is not a solid argument for why F2P doesn't work, I believe the game is wildly successful for what it is, and I've seen a few interviews of the guy who started it up and he seems pretty sincere about most of his claims. Then there's Age of Conan. Oh AoC. I bought it at launch, and aside from having to upgrade my computer I didn't have a lot of problems with it at first. Once I left Tortegal (I think that's the name of the start area); I immediately saw the tarnish which drew me away. The pvp. Completely imbalanced and extremely exploitable. I ran into people who chain killed eachother for 3 days until they hit rank 5 ( I believe that was the highest rank), and were able to purchase gear that completely outclassed anything available both for pvp and pve. I experienced extreme lag, and was on the highest tier of cable we could get where I lived, and the class I played was Assassin. Hide was completely worthless. Someone had created a macro not even a 3rd party program that would loop when pushed that spammed reveal. A person with 1 reveal could detect a person with 200 hide unerringly from the moment they pushed that 1 key til they logged out at which point, they just had to push that key when they logged back in. Several classes could hide, assassin, ranger, and barbarian if I remember correctly. Anyhow this was at launch and a good while before it went free to play. I recently retried AoC, purely to see if it had improved. I had to purchase all the expansions (which I got an email telling me because I was a launch person and they went to F2P i was given access to those... guess not), hide was still completely worthless, I had monsters which were no where near my level just revealing me and attacking me. They wouldn't attack unless I was in hide. For shame. Anyhow; combat was pretty sluggish; way worse than at launch. And I eventually saw another play leaving a town I was in. Keep in mind, my character is an assassin, and I had my run skill maxed out. I was infront of this person and began moving toward them. I opened with a nasty combo, and started working them over. They did something to get out of the wildness and began running down the road. I could not keep up. Were they higher level and had more skills in run? I don't know. But that seemed kinda shady to me. So that was my return to AoC. Same crap that kept me from getting into in the first place.. not made better by F2P. Anyhow, I've ranted enough on F2P games.. let me move onto my point.
Reasons why UO should not go F2P; even though bugs and lag exists, you'll have a slew of people who don't give a damn about anybody or anything at all; with no money flooding your server and finding every single hack they can and possibly even making their own to get in an ruin your play time. I should mention the vocabulary and pure sense of entitlement amongst the people in Aion alone is shocking; and I had previously mentioned the chat in another F2P game on facebook which is text and still pictures "Dreamworld". These guys are elite rapists who will find out where you live and kill your mommy. They said so.. OH NO better watch out! Granted you aren't just thrust into the chat in DW, you have to click a button for it and it pops up after that; but there's literally no pvp in that game outside the arena, in which you participate against a computer controlled version of another player. So there really isn't pvp. Just kids with no sense. (Like most of us, just 20-25 years younger hehe).
I think maybe 1 or 2 positive things will emerge from UO going F2P though, people who spend their 13 bucks a month on subscription may spend 13 bucks (or so) in the little cash shop that's already there, more people will play the game and you won't log into ghost towns as often. The flip flop of that, people who've paid all these years may just up and leave because of the betrayal!! And their replacements are people who don't spend anything but demand fixes to bugs and other problems already existing with the game. It's a lot more difficult than just saying, F2P; it's time. Well, maybe not; but it should be.
Oh yeah, LoTRO @ _@. I won't even go there.
