Competitive games, F2P model and the integrity of "eSports"

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
1

Imagine Street Fighter 5 comes out in an F2P model and WITHOUT the option to pay 60$ for the full game. Pay attention to the numbers because I have picked them very carefully. (Read: This is real data applied to an imaginary fighting game.)

SF5 has a robust roster of 110+ characters. You can play 10 characters for free, but the developers choose which 10 characters and it changes every week. You can get permanent access to them via BP you earn by playing online, or by purchasing them with real money. Their price is not the same across the board. You have characters like Chun-Li which don’t cost a lot, but you have characters like Zangief which cost a lot more. What determines the pricing? No idea. But hey, you can also wait for a specific character to be on sale which means half real money price! (Although you may have to wait for half a year for the specific character you wanted comes up…)

For every ~40 minutes of playing online, assuming you win 50% of the time, you earn about 75 BP. So let’s say 150 BP takes about 1.5 hours when adding the waiting periods of the matchmaking and the loading times. (And let me tell you they are actually way longer than that in SF5 so I’m being generous here.)

Let’s assume you are only going to care about game altering stuff, not costumes etc.

Chun-Li can be earned with either 4.5 hours of your time, or by purchasing with 2$.
Zangief can be earned with either 63(!) hours of your time, or by purchasing with 7.5$.

9 characters out of the 110 have Chun-Li’s pricing. About 40 have Zangief’s and the rest are somewhere in between.

Overall if you are going to buy access to the full roster it’s going to cost about 400-500$.

Let’s say you don’t like walking around with a heavy wallet and SF5 is THAT good, so you are willing to spend that money. The problem is that it doesn’t end here.

Even if you do have access to the characters, you get them in a lesser form because your player account is just level 1. Your characters only start with a choice of 1 super and one ultra, and both of them suck in most cases. As you play matches and slowly earn EXP (no money option here!) your account ranks up and your characters gain access to more super/ultra moves, some of which are a must have for their character. You also gain points to put into passive stat bonuses for the character. Such as “make medium have 1 frame less recovery on whiff”. Each bonus by its own is not a big deal but when you get enough points and stack them you can feel the improvement in the character.

And other than that you got about 30 slots for Gems which you must buy with BP (again, no money option) and you equip on your character for more passive stat bonuses. Your player account must be level 20 (takes about 30 hours of play to reach) to use the best tier of gems (any purchase of a lesser gem is a waste of BP since it’s bound to be replaced anyway) and the BP prices of these gems go from 2 hours to 20 hours.

Let’s say Capcom provides fully unlocked accounts for (approved) tournaments and for selected star players, but when the rest of us want to practice the game we have to deal with all the above. Will you consider this version of SF5 a good game, a fair one, a competitive one? Is it suitable to be picked up as the next craze?

For me a good multiplayer game is first and foremost a purely skill-based game, not a game that rewards the player who puts in more money or more grind with access to a better character. It may be good for some mindless fun on the side but I could never take it seriously, especially when it comes to tournaments.

But the eSports people (The organizers, the players and the masses of spectators) seem to think otherwise because the game I have described here takes their #1 spot now…

Another lesson that you (the younger generation of players) can learn from it is that the existence of tournaments (or lack of) is a by product of pure popularity, not of the game’s quality.

2

Your ratios for BP gain and character cost, and the amount of time to takes playing to grind the points, are way off.

Don’t forget that SF5 would also get near bi-weekly balance patches and bug fixes. Take that how you will.

Aside from that? I’d play the ever loving shit out of it. Put it on PC.

3

Well with LoL the reason why they can get away with such a release plan is because compared to many other games, the execution is rather low, so what they have to work on when a new champion comes out is usually just matchup knowledge, team composition, and working out team tactics. For matchups and changes, I believe if a new set of champions or patch comes out right before a tournament, most of them actually use an older version of the game so it doesn’t mess with the players who were practicing since they didn’t have time with the new patch yet.

But with a fighting game people need to practice a character just to get them to a decent playable status. In LoL a week is usually a good enough time to know if you like the feel of a character and would like to buy them, while a week in Street Fighter a person probably doesn’t even know what the hell someone like C. Viper does.

I remember one of the casters commentating on why he doesn’t like Riot’s method of controlling the game though because they constantly release patches, which means they control how the game evolves, instead of the players.

4

I made 1 error which I’m gonna fix now. Anyway the data is from:


http://www.reignofgaming.net/blogs/a-different-view/vvinrar/20213-how-much-rp-does-it-take-to-buy-league-of-legends

But whatever other data you may have, compared it to 60$ to get everything and 0 hours of grind needed.

Because knowledge and tactics are boring and can’t stand on their own? Well in fighting games they certainly CAN stand on their own. But I’m aware that many people think like your comment.

5

tataki is a fucking god

6

Fighting games being treated as LOL?
fuck that…

What I like about fighting games is that you have to find improvement within yourself to enjoy them, because you are given all the characters tools upfront, that means that if you’re losing its because you’re not making it work. I think that makes fighting games pretty unique. Adding an upgrade/level up system for characters is a really bad idea for fighters IMO.

7

In a world where our community goes out of its way to fuck itself…oh wait, already live there.

8

Definitely knowledge and tactics stand on their own. Hell, I have had pretty hype Connect-4 matches before and that takes no execution. Just saying that in LoL once you know how to skill shot and last hit, you probably know how to work other skill shot champions and such, so within a week you can get the character down and try to come up with something. In a fighter you probably wouldn’t know all the properties of your moves in a week, or even have the execution specific stuff to a character, so the free week to sell the character to you wouldn’t work as well. Even though Ken and Ryu are similar in moves, you still have to learn different bnbs and such. Basically execution is less of an equation (still there since not everyone can do stuff like land skillshots), so it’s one less obstacle in selling something.

Having something like free week fighters would not just seem right, especially since when a game comes out a lot of people flip flop on characters many months after release.

9

Long story short, if they take the exact same pricing as the LoL model, not cool.
But for all you know, Capcom or whichever company may decide to offer ALL characters for 2 bucks and can still purchase them via BP, and there is no Gem purchase or locked content of any sorts.
Suddenly, no ‘pay 2 win’ and reasonable pricing.
Of course, having 110 goddamn characters fully made and available for starters is hilarious to consider.
Organizers for such events also pick shit according to spectator value, and you can never know which game following what model will rise.
Starcraft was fair and was damn popular.
Rather pointless discussion, really.

10

If a f2p fighter were to come out they could do like a lot of Nexon games and basically you pay money to play dress up. There are a lot of people willing to drop money for a new suit or dress for their character.

Thinking about it, DFO is a sprite based fighter but how they do avatars in that game is basically overlaying the costume parts over the character, I wonder if that would actually be feasible or how long that would be to do with a decent sprite work like from SNK with KOF13. Customization would seem pretty great in a 2d fighter.

11

LoL is getting mentioned way too often here lately.

Anywho, it’s not Riot’s fault for people spending their money on their game or unable to math.

12

The 60$ game could also be sold for 1$ if Capcom turns into a charity organization. So what? But I’m talking about current standards. The standards of F2P games is that all the content together costs way way way more than the full game should cost, and even then you are still forced to grind. The standards of F2P games is that they DON’T give you the “get all for 60$” option. As of today, this model does not fit our needs as players.

I never said that Riot is “to blame” for anything. In the closing sentences I put the blame on the consumers who eat it and ask for more.

13

The thing about LoL is that they create a game and a marketplace simultaneously. Any consumers who did not enjoy the initial offering can be kept around with promises of goods that will cater to their tastes. In a very odd way they are creating an addiction and supplying you the drug.

Pretty interesting. Hope the developers have “Make it Rain Fridays” where they just throw money in the air and order pizza.

14

They didn’t really create something new. The way the game’s progress works is basically World of Warcraft ver. 2.0, with the only difference that the monsters you raid are actually other players trying to do the same to you. WOW’s PVP was also “eSports” so it’s not like the grinding ever mattered there.
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15

LoL isn’t the first freemium game; you still have all the MMO’s like Maple Story, LaTale and the other endless horde of Korean grind. The innovation comes in applying it to a competitive game. Where as other games have a fixed amount of characters, Riot has a continuous cash flow to create new characters and broaden their appeal. Even if you don’t have a character you like but enjoy the game, you could potentially wait around for one to get there.

16

Also to add to your statement the free players are also part of the economy even if they put no money toward the game at all. Just by playing the game, they give a playerbase for the people who do pay for it competition so they would stick around and probably pay even more money. It makes it so that there will always be a sizable pool for the people who are paying to be matched up against people to play against.

17

Except that’s not how competitive LoL works. You’re not rewarded for grinding because you’re effectively locked out of competitive play until you reach max level and buy a minimum number of champions. All the players in the competitive ladder share an equal footing. As for the new characters, they are always meant to be in line with the other characters, not stronger nor weaker, in either case they are usually fixed the following patch if the discrepancy is too big - also all champions are unlocked during tournaments

Also, let’s not forget how many fighting games also have time consuming ways to unlock characters - and some newer ones even offer the “pay to unlock” option.

On a side note, I’ll give you that being forced to level up in LoL before being able to have full access to the character customization is a very common complaint that I feel no LoL player will deny. It’s basically meant to be a tutorial, problem is it takes dozens of hours.

18

Ironically, the long amount of time that must be spent in leveling up to achieve the “competitive” rank in League of Legends and to get enough IP to buy proper rune pages helps to force you to focus on one or two characters that you would really like to play.

For those that just want to play everything ASAP, the option of buying champions (through bundles and sales) exists, and everyone can also at least get Tristana and Alistar for free (who are both pretty decent, mind you).

At the end of the day, the core game is fun, interesting and competitive enough that it gets past its shortcomings (one of them being that you’re forced to level up).

19

Why force the player to get max level before letting him play the real game? Are all the players retarded babies that can’t decide what to do on their own? The only feedback you need in video games is to see if you win or lose. And also what about runes?

What if I don’t need someone to help force me to do things? What if I want to try the whole cast on a whim to be able to decide. You know, like I can do in any video game and even in other dota clones.

Sale is 50$ price. That’s still 200$+.

Skins, not the actual characters.

But that doesn’t exclude other dota-clones which don’t force you to grind.

20

If SF5 worked the way, say, online Yomi does now, where I can play for free if I stick to free characters or pay for specific ones to always have access to (but without needing to grind levels), I’d be okay with it.

No way I’m spending three figures on one game though. I’ll spend that on a custom stick which I’ll use on multiple games. Or, you know, buying food.