Watching yet another marketing team destroy a game.
Free to Play is the death of just about every MMO I've seen because instead of dev's working on problems concerning game play which keeps the subscriber's paying the monthly the dev's are now directly beholden to the games bottom line: profit.
What you won't see is anything that improves game play from now on. Disappearing spawns like the hulker in Sol excavation, despawning vehicles, UI fails, and the bath house excursion stopping at round nine aren't bugs now: they're features of the game. The only thing dev's will "fix" is anything that prevents players from spending money.
And that's not the dev's fault.
When your job, your paycheck, your ability to support your life depends on answering to the marketing team. You develop all the ****ty mechanics that make money, instead of making / up-keeping a game. Before FTP the devs kept the game stable, fixed bugs, and implemented new features to keep the current playerbase playing the game. The marketing team looked for ways to bring in new players, to generate revenue. FTP puts the marketing teams, who have a major say in how a game is developed based on what is currently making games money to begin with, in direct control of a game because now they have to find ways to utilize in-game mechanics to generate revenue.
Don't look to developers for community support either. The game industry is historically well known to be a place where your job is always ready to be taken from you. The industry is built to be nomadic. Once your job is done you expect to have your team laid off or the company downsized until the next major title comes around. You're always looking at who's hiring. You're always looking to jump ship. Stable game industry jobs are hard to come by. so if you don't agree with the direction a company is going you leave or keep your mouth shut because ultimately you're expendable.
For defiance, which utilizes a ****tier version of the Borderlands billions of guns gimmick, the only way they will make money on FTP is to limit any kind of in-game reward we receive. Arkforge, item drops (frequency and rarity), scrit, salvage, and lockboxes are all now potential profit generators for the company. These features which the game is built off of are a commodity to be squeezed by the Trion marketing teams. And they will because they don't care about the game, the players, or the experience. They only care about profit and their obviously already not making enough because you don't make a game FTP unless you don't have enough subscribers.
As players they only way to send them a message they will hear is to affect their bottom line.
There's a great quote from Dune that is appropriate here:
He who controls the spice controls the universe.
We as a community have to take the spice away from Trion.
Boycott the store completely.
Stop watching the show.
But don't stop playing the game. If we don't spend money but keep playing the game they still have to pay for the back end processes like space at server farms and paychecks. If we don't watch the show they don't generate revenue through their advertisers and SyFy will pull their slot because they aren't generating revenue either.
You want to show them you're pissed? Stop posting to the forums. completely. dead stop.
they will have to keep paying for hosting that no one uses.
Hit them in their bottom line. Take their money away because we are their money but keep making them pay to keep the game going.
Play but don't spend.
Consume their product... just stop them from making a profit off it.
