Sorry, I shoulda phrased it Grind 2 Win.
If youre not willing to drop real money, thats the only other way to obtain gameplay related stuff (champions, runes).
Riot still relies on profiting from those. As soon as you pay them its not as ‘free 2 play’ is it now? Its the same as Capcom selling Jill/Shuma and buy only gems in SFxT.
At least in LoL its nice that eventually one can unlock all of these without paying a penny but if this is an ideal business model for FGs is unknown yet.
I firmly believe if the game is intended for competitive purposes, everybody should be playing on equal ground. You should be able to access all characters, all grooves, all options etc. And dota2 does a fantastic job at this as.
playing a lot of Tek Rev atm, and since the patch it gains a practise mode which is nice, the game play is slick and is imo probably the best fighter one can get their hands on atm.
I do have a massive issue with the pay to win format. By using premium coins you get to play game after game if you win, if not even losing nets you a 500xp bonus. Recently they have added game modes that makes lvlin redundant but most peeps don’t use that mode, splitting up the gamer base a bit which sucks.
Gonna have to just suck it up, the saving grace is that its only £4 for 30 coins, which with the arcade feel your given, is a better deal than way back in the day when playing tekken 1 in the arcades would set you back 50p per game
Oh and unlocking new characters is the mother of all evil.
Yeah it doesn’t make you feel that it’s a free to play game. It really grinds my gears when I lose to a couple spammers. I know they are shit players but they do random shit and mix it in with their invincibility moves, it’s like I can’t really approach with any safe strings or offense unless I score a knock down of some kind.
But aren’t Invincible moves launch punishable? (correct me if I’m wrong)
If blocked Invinc move = big punish time, I don’t see how a decent player can succumb to that.
Not that I’m saying its a good game mechanic.
Sounds like DP/Ultra mashing in SF4
They are but you gotta block/sidestep/reverse it first. The thing is, they’ll throw out what looks to be really unsafe moves, but then when you go in for the mixup and launch an attack (normally a safe one at that), they’ll do the invincibility to blast you out of it. This is normally a terrible tactic, but since there is SO much invincibility on it, this scrub shit actually works.
One of the problems with having to grind to win, is that it makes it hard for TO’s to simply buy copies of the game and then pop them into consoles to run tournaments.
Remember, competitive play, fighting game tournaments are all run offline. In other words:
OFFLINE IS KING
This also creates problems if you want to add some sort of meaningful leveling. Because if these are tied to online and accounts, then these add ons are worthless in competitive play because it would be nigh impossible to bring them offline.
The key thing to remember is that the competitive play in fighting games are a community driven and run effort. This scene has survived for years now without corporate intervention, without central control from the developers (as is the case with LoL and other MOBAs). Having the need for accounts for levels and customizations violates one of the core building blocks of the FGC.
Then that’s it, mission accomplished for TN. Not every company needs to continually milk its customers. In this case, it seems that TN understands that it’s more important to expand the playerbase fort he long term health of the franchise.
I disagree with the sentiment that such a format for fighting games is realistically sustainable.
Given your flagging of my post, you obviously disagree.
Your disagreeing does not make me a troll.
Flagging me for not sharing your enthusiasm for what I happen to believe to be a foolish position in backing an untenable format and pricing structure for the genre, however, is far from flameproof.
And if you could have posted this way in the first place and not resorted to trollbait posting, then maybe you wouldn’t have been flagged in the first place.
I agree, which is why I said that a successful F2P FG would have an offline/practice mode where you can play offline only, need no accounts and have all the characters unlocked.
I heavily disagree with a F2P Fighter needing a leveling system. If a game needs to give players a false sense of progress to get them to continue playing then there’s something seriously wrong. What benefit would a progression system even serve for a fighter? Unless they plan to lock away moves (which I hope to god doesn’t happen) it doesn’t need to be there.
Any sort of leveling system would be for icons and stuff like that only, no move locking, no bullshit. Basically the titles that we already have via PP. I’m thinking from a business/marketing standpoint. People like leveling systems.
Even for crap like that a leveling system isn’t required. It can do what Injustice does and let’s players complete challenges to unlock icons, backgrounds and other decorative goods.
TR: Anyone who didn’t level up endurance pre-patch is going to have to reallocate their points, as endurance is worth more than attack power after the patch.
That said, I really like TR. It gives me my 15-minute Tekken fix in the morning while I eat breakfast. I play TTT2 after work.
Like you said though, Team Ninja is going in a good direction where they release a physical copy of the game and the free version of the game is an unaltered version where we only pay for the content we want.
Personally I like grind to win because it encourages you to play the game. That’s the true meaning of free to play. Not Tekken Revolution’s system where you pay to win and paying is discouraged because some spammer can ruin your whole day. The League of Legends grind-to-win model allows you to choose your champions and which runes and talents you want (and for free I might add). It’s that sort of player choice which is why it’s so successful.
In Tekken Revolution, there is no player choice. Gift points unlock random characters, more characters get added which in turn makes the problem worse. The game, in essence, isn’t even free because you run out of tokens and you’re locked out of the game. It’s not a true F2P game.
League of Legends did it. They have an offline tournament version. Same could be done for fighters.
It could have positive benefits though. Assuming Namco doesn’t screw it up horribly, we could get really nice, worldwide level events like LOL and DOTA2 does. With actual prizes in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
The problem with grind to win is that it rewards time spent over actual skill.
As Ono-san mentioned in his interview with 4Gamer where they asked him specifically about F2P, for fighting game players, the motivation is more or less about “wanting to become stronger.” In other words, players play to gain actual matchup experience and become better players, and not for some sort of arbitrary reward.
Also, online and online accounts has nothing to do with Namco/Capcom/TN having nice worldwide events with large prize pots. They can just infuse the same level of support to actual existing tournaments and/or work with existing organizers. There doesn’t need to be any link to any sort of central hierarchy from the developer/publisher. Look at pro Starcraft in Korea, which is arguably the highest, most professionalized level of competitive gaming (I don’t care if Riot/Valve/etc. pump more money into MOBAs the level of professionalism and organization in pro Korean Starcraft is simply on another level). Aside from collecting royalty fees from TV broadcasts, Blizzard has little control with how the leagues are run. It’s all run by independent organizations such as KeSPA. Yet everything is fine and players aren’t only well compensated, but they’re household names that can make lots of money from mainstream endorsements.
It only rewards you with the characters, runes and masteries that you want. It does not reward skill, in order to be rewarded for skill, you have to play ranked mode.
League of Legends does well with this because the more time you spend playing the game, the better at the game you become. You’re encouraged to learn about the roles you’re playing and how to build these characters according to those roles. Tekken Revolution is the complete opposite because you’re given an easy-mode button and you’re discouraged from getting better at the game because there is no practice mode and you only get 5 tokens to play, so you want to be as cheap/exploitative as possible in your strategy to increase your chances of winning. It’s LITERALLY setup for scrubs.
As opposed to League of Legends, the higher in level you are, the better the players are. At level 30, you’re playing end-game and at this point it’s about improving your skill level, whether through ranked or normal mode. It’s very similar to the fighting game rank system where the higher rank you are, the better the players get. Are there people who exists at end-game that doesn’t deserve to be there? Sure. In TR the same thing applies. There’s people at level 45-50 Pugilist that for the most part, paid to get there via premium tokens. Similarly, there’s people who bought EXP and IP boosts to get to 30 on LoL. It happens on every game, regardless of F2P or not.
The important message I got from his interview was that he is still looking for that “something” that enables him to do a F2P game, and a large part of why I made this topic. Pretty much, he’s looking for something to sell to players but that doesn’t hurt the integrity of the competitive scene, but yet it’ll make a lot of money for Capcom.
I just think he’s looking at the wrong spot (TR) and TN hasn’t released their game yet, nor do we know how popular and profitable the game will be, but out of the two F2P fighting games, DOA5 CF seems to be the superior model. But like I said, it’s not out yet and we don’t know if it’s successful or not.
While theres no doubt that LoL and dota2 are succesfull F2P models, its a bit short sighted to assume ‘if it worked for them, it will work for FGs!’ imo.
-MOBA genre due to its team battle nature, encourage people to play with friends. So many people I know started dota2 myself incl, because my friends play. Its fun playing on the same team and co-oping. You can’t do this in FGs that are designed 1v1.
-Perhaps the biggest diffrence is the freedom given to developers. Riot and Valve devs both have their own platform to do whatever they want without typical console dev limitations.
We all know how stubborn Capcom is. Want to make a new game or extend a current game? > get the green light from higher-ups.
Make the game under a certain budget and time-frame, no delays. We need to please our stock-holders and gain profit for fiscal year.
Want a update or patch? Pay Sony/MS and wait for their green light.
I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying, to take a look at the truly successful models and learn from them. League of Legends is great for sustainability because it encourages the player to keep playing the game. Tekken Revolution’s model is terrible because it’s based around the player NOT playing the game and making them pay more if they DO want to play the game.
You can learn a lot from other games and implement them into games from other genres. They don’t necessarily have to be a part of the same genre to use a business model. That’s the trap that Ono is falling into at the moment and I think it’s a huge mistake. We play and pay for these games and we want a good one, so that is why I made this topic.
The dev doesn’t have any restrictions. Look at Dust 514. They made the F2P game they wanted. It’s there. The whole point of this thread is to inform potential F2P fighting game devs that it’s important to create a business model that works for both us (the community) and them (the company).
That’s based off of physical disc based games where they spend a certain amount on development to get a shippable product out there, and they need to sell the whole product to recoup costs and profit. F2P games are providing a sustainable service.
Weird thing about that. Tekken Revolution has gone through a few updates and I haven’t had to download a single thing. Maybe they can hotfix and add stuff server side and change it client side as well?
