Kant's golden rule is rubbish as far as a moral imperative goes, otherwise, I agree. Free to play (especially when free players are highly limited) is pointless.

Android players still see that PRICE: FREE on the download, then get butthurt ingame they see their trial time start counting down, then start begging for a friend key when we tell them of that possibility.

Friend keys are a reward to continued subscribers to be given out at their discretion, not an entitlement to every trial player, tho that has become the perception. Getting some newb's email and having your vo account name and at one point, even your real name sent as part of the activation message from vo make vets wary of handing them out. If 8 hours free ingame time is not enough to turn a trial player into a paying player, then make the free trial longer.

How about a /vote extend "trial-newb's name" that gives promising newbs another 4 or 8 hours ingame? Only possible once per trial account, and only allow 1 vote per subbed account (i.e. not 6 alts voting). It would demonstrate to new players how *cough cough* wonderfully supportive the community is, but that we are interested in helping them decide to sub, not just handing out free time.

Or just make the friend-key system non-stupid, i.e. stop requiring the newbies to give us their email, and don't tell them our account name if you do that. And as for the newbie entitlement issues - they only feel entitled because we let them. If you aren't willing or able to give a person a friend key, don't even mention their existence. And if they start whining that nobody will give them one, point out that they are friend keys, and that whining isn't a good way to make friends. But if people keep giving them to anybody who asks, like they've been doing, then it will continue.

Personally, I only give keys to people who don't annoy me. If they annoy me and then demand a key, I say "No, you annoyed me so NO KEY FOR YOU!! LOLOLOLOL". Or at least, that's what I would do if they did annoy me and then demand a key. It sadly has not happened yet :( BUT I AM PREPARED!!

Since the recent friend key debacle, the system should no longer be giving out the account name of the person sending the key. Only the character name who actually sends it.

Yes, not requiring an email address would be good too. That will require more time to change.

Now, there's an old one from me. I do not want free play. However, since I do not have much time to play, I'd rather buy some number of hours instead of fixed time. That way I would be able to relax with this game and not feel the pressure of having to play the game "or my money is lost".

This isn't about the money - and to prove that, I once bought full year subscription, despite the fact that I played the game for about 30 hours troughout that year.

This is about my ability to purchase some number of playing hours and avoid feeling like I have overpaid the game because I had no time to play it. I'd like to relax - that's what games are for.

This suggestion of mine has been rejected and I believe it will be rejected again. It doesn't matter, I'll just drop in again in a year or so to see if anything changed. ;-)

-1 to OP

Here is my two cents.

I just checked. I signed up for this about 2.4 years ago. I played the trial -- about 7 hrs, 35 minutes worth. And frankly, found myself wondering why bother coming back to use up the last 20 or so minutes.

Here's the problem. To some extent, I don't care how good the gameplay of a game is. Good gameplay will get me hooked on a solo game. It's not sufficient for a multiplayer game.

A good community is needed to get me hooked on a multiplayer game. I cannot find a good community if I'm limited in login time.

8 hours is not enough. I got myself up to level 1 licenses in tutorials. I did some of the other missions after the basics, but checking just now I see that I never got up to license level 2. I found my way to the grey space neutral station and got level 2 equipment. I didn't see much in the way of other people.

I won't pretend to be a fast player. Detailed, exploratory, trying different things, yes. Optimized path? Nope. I don't even know what the optimized path is.

I didn't see many other people.
I also didn't spend a lot of time searching for them.
After all: If I spent time trying to find and interact with people, then I'm not playing the game, and learning it -- and the time to learn the game is very short. 8 hours is about three sessions.

I'm also interested in some type of free to play, for a simple reason: It gets people a chance to be hooked by the community as well as the gameplay.

I'm not going to suggest any type of "pay per hour". That's bad. The best type of people for building a community are socializers. Putting them of "pay per hour" defeats their purpose.

EvE has a "tradeable in-game subscription" item.
YPP has a "tradeable in-game play token" item.
Both of these system work fairly well for accessing/unlocking content.

But for people who are "free" -- as a way to make the free trial more meaningful, and as a way to keep the people who are "expired" around to maintain the community and give them a chance to return -- how about changing the "unpaid" behavior to "no effective license higher than 2 (or 3)". That's still equipment level 4, which I think (or so I thought I was told) was sufficient for playing around with PvP, while not being high enough to imbalance any serious combats. It lets people play and socialize without being penalized for it.

I wouldn't know how to suggest breaking the monthly subscription into parts for this game. (Does "pay for missions" make sense for this game?) I don't know if any sort of "pay as you go" / "pay for portions of content you use" model would work (the YPP doubloon system). I haven't played EVE (PPC mac), so I don't know how the tradeable subscription works in practice. I do know that either model significantly increases revenue to the game company, and have (in theory) a significant distortion of the game economy if the game economy wasn't designed with them in mind -- especially if you have the "exponential income" model of WoW-type higher levels.

I came back because I remembered the game after a long absence. I wanted to see what was new, and if there was a free play system by now. What do I see?

[quote]And maybe, just maybe... this flood of new unpaid players would be be a burden VO, causing problems, forcing the Devs to divert their attentions from improving the game, which in turn causes it to stagnate, which causes paying players to quit, making the Devs lose money, which causes a lack of development and ultimately VO goes belly up...[/quote]

[quote] If VO had better resources, this might be a viable idea. However VO is run by three people and ultimately this would most likely hurt VO.[/quote]

[quote]Long answer: The devs have looked at al kinds of differing F2P and P2P models, and found that the current one is the easiest for them to manage and predict income from.

The new *friend key* system is probably the best a new player is going to get. A 2 week trial instead of an 8 hour trial should be enough for anyone to decide if they like the game enough to stick around, [/quote]

[quote]Also, some of those newbs are just not observant. I've seen people complaining that they've never seen another player when I had just passed them up two minutes ago, and had already pirated three other people in the same system they were in. "Pup" was also prowling that system at the time, IIRC.[/quote]

This last one really makes me giggle, but for all the wrong reasons. A new player isn't aware of other players. So maybe the presence of other players near you needs to be more obvious. You can easily see a tauren or elf standing next to you, or passing you on the road to a city. A tiny dot of a ship, not so much. And, the three other people you pirated -- were they new players that never saw you coming, and didn't even realize what happened? (My first time in Moonglade, I was PvP killed before my loading screen finished. Not happy.) If you ask me if I saw other players, my answer would be: "Not outside the starter zone."

(At least, I think it was another player, not a bot)

[quote][quote]You want them to taste the ability to mine, fight bots, get money, take simple missions, buy some other equipment.[/quote]

If you can't do all that on an 8 hour trial, you probably are too mentally retarded and/or physically crippled to be bothering with computer games. Focus on feeding yourself without making a mess of your special chair, mmmkay?[/quote]

(Is this person a troll?) Frankly, I'd never assume to know anything about the speed at which someone picks up a new game. Maybe your first hour was a complete disaster, and you wound up deleting your character and starting over because you found yourself outside the space station, and could not figure out what to do next -- and could not find any obvious tutorial instruction to help you out when you were inbetween the "Departure instructions from the station" and the "Now that you've reached a rock to mine, do this". Maybe you figured you'd try redocking and getting instructions again -- after all, there's an entry port right next to you that you just came out of, so you should be able to go right back in, right?

And, for what it's worth, that's about all that I did -- a little mining, some basic bot fights, a tiny bit of money, and a couple of simple missions (frankly, the courier missions looked like they would become the most interesting, but also hadn't gotten to the point of being interesting yet. Combat looked repetitive, and mining looked boring -- bring a book while mining type of activity.) So no, that little bit of "what a new player should see" isn't enough to get someone hooked on a game with ongoing charges. What you've described is about as much as Star Control 2, and that's free now.

[quote]More on topic, since release Vendetta has followed the model of pay to play which creates a level playing field for everyone. [/quote]
Oh, bleep, not that again. No, pay to play does not create a level playing field. Some people have 4-10 hours in a month to play, some people have 30-50 hours in a month to play. Some people have lots of hours over the summer and very little during the fall/winter/spring. Some people cannot predict how much time they'll have to play a game during the future; other worry that since at any time they can be called to deal with an emergency, they will be disadvantaged in any PvP game (not so bad in PvE games).

Having had this argument many times, let me try a different approach: What do you mean by "level playing field for everyone"? What do you consider a level playing field? Why do you consider what you just described as fair?

[quote]This is about my ability to purchase some number of playing hours and avoid feeling like I have overpaid the game because I had no time to play it. I'd like to relax - that's what games are for. [/quote]

That is what the "pay to unlock content" model is about, ideally. You don't want "pay for hours" unless you have no interest in socializing in an MMO. Socializing -- hanging around the station, chatting -- doesn't play the game, but does consume hours. More than anything, in all the games I've played, it's the social environment that keeps bringing people back.

(And yes, I'm a fan of the model of "people with time to play trade game coin for play time with people who have RL cash". I'm also aware of how imbalanced it can become if badly designed.)

EDIT: No preview on the forums? And how do you quote someone else?

Keybounce: blah blah blah blah.

Yeah, tl;dr.

I remember you from your trial - good riddance.

Alright Mr. Lechter, consider this:

There may be something in here worth paying $10 per month for.

I didn't see it in my trial.

Mining may become interesting later; all I saw was boring.
Combat? I saw twitch, and I'm poor at twitch. No battle computer? No auto aiming that I can remember? Expensive ships, equipment, cargo, and no decent automata may make for a good reflex game, but poor reality simulation.
Courier? I saw enough to see that it would get more interesting.

Other PvE? Didn't see anything that I can remember.

And general PvP? What I remember was that the amount of time you had to spend in PvE to recover from a PvP loss was minor, so as a PvP game the setup works. But there's a big difference between a PvP frag match and a persistent world.

Does VO have a persistent world worth playing in? That's something that I never even got close to answering in only an 8 hour trial. And looking around the forums, seeing people complaining about conquerable stations not being worth it, the cap ships not being practical, the whole issues with inventory management at the high-end level (no trade inside a station, people talking about how they have gotten good at the current system because they have no choice -- what's the learning curve for new players on that?, etc.)

I came by hoping to find out more.
I guess I'll be back in another 18-36 months.

There is auto-aim, in the sense of minor corrections to your aim when you get close enough, which varies by weapon from 0 degrees to maybe 30 or so (ignoring the AGT). There isn't auto aim in the sense of not having to aim at all, other than in the case of the Advanced Gatling Turret, which has a very big auto-aim cone (around 120-160 degrees I think?) and homing missiles.

Also: ships are not expensive other than a few high-end models. Ease of making money has a very sudden change when you hit combat level 3. Before that you only have access to a small subset of the missions the game has to offer. Once you hit level 3, most of them become availible, and some can be very profitable. Convoy escort missions range from 20k to 800k or so, depending on how much they get for selling their cargo. Also, as you get bigger and bigger ships, your ability to trade or pirate (in the traditional looting sense) increases.

There is no learning curve for player-to-player trade. You get the items you want to give the other guy, and jettison them. The other guy scoops them up, and pays using either the "give money" button on your character page, or with the /givemoney command. What people complain about is not the complexity of trade, but rather the tediousness of trading extremely high volumes (thousands of units) of an item, since the largest cargo hold we have available in non-capital ships is 200cu.

Combat? I saw twitch, and I'm poor at twitch. No battle computer? No auto aiming that I can remember?

Don't let the doorknob tear your delicate rectum as you depart yet again. xoxo

The only time I appreciate Lecter's posts is when people suggest VO be free to play, along with other suggestions on a similar level.

with other suggestions on a similar level

So all of Alloh's. Got it.

[quote]More on topic, since release Vendetta has followed the model of pay to play which creates a level playing field for everyone. [/quote]
Oh, bleep, not that again. No, pay to play does not create a level playing field. Some people have 4-10 hours in a month to play, some people have 30-50 hours in a month to play. Some people have lots of hours over the summer and very little during the fall/winter/spring. Some people cannot predict how much time they'll have to play a game during the future; other worry that since at any time they can be called to deal with an emergency, they will be disadvantaged in any PvP game (not so bad in PvE games).

Having had this argument many times, let me try a different approach: What do you mean by "level playing field for everyone"? What do you consider a level playing field? Why do you consider what you just described as fair?

The number of hours you have available to play should not affect your cost of accessing the game. That is just my opinion. You don't want to penalize people for spending longer in game, which is why a pay by the hour model would not be a good thing as you pointed out. Paying a monthly subscription gives you a window of time in which you can access the game, and if you are able to pack 4 hours, 40, or 400 into that window that is entirely up to you.

I think for myself the biggest reason I paused before signing up was thinking about the long term. Well, if I was going to be paying 10 dollars a month where was that money going? Would I ever see quantifiable results? This gave me reason to wait long into the night before finally making the decision to subscribe.

Fortunately the answer is yes, many times over. The results are apparent when I open up VO on a mobile phone, see a mission tree I've designed being discussed over chat, or witness the construction of a player owned capital ship. If you can find me a free-to-play mmo that displays the growth, support, and long term objectives of Vendetta Online my hat's off to you. However until then I believe Vendetta got it right by giving everyone who decides to continue playing a chance at those objectives based solely on in-game performance. That is what I mean by a level playing field.

This gave me reason to wait long into the night before finally making the decision to subscribe.

Someone needs their head examined.

Re: Dr. Lecter

To quote from that movie Across the Universe: "Everything below the neck works fine"

-1 to F2P

"free" online games are not always free.
Quite a few of them have "cash shop" items that often break the balance of the game. The items are usually so broken that it's impossible to compete without them. It stops being a game and starts becoming a "who can spend the most cash irresponsibly" competition. If Vendetta ever becomes like that, I know I would leave and never look back.

To quote from that movie Across the Universe: "Everything below the neck works fine"

Would your spouse/significant other agree that everything below the neck works fine? All signs point to No.