Tombaugh said:
Hi all, I've been recently looking up a large number of MMO's to get me and some friends their fix, the problem however is the dozen or so I've been interested in all have cash shop like parts to their games, forcing players that want to play competitively to have to use real life currency to stay even, or even having items that far surpass anything you could possibly get that is free.
I'd rather not be forced into paying up when already investing large amounts of time will do. Any there any of these games that don't have this sort of... 'feature'? If so, how are they and what do you think about them?
Notice I am talking about the MMO genre at large, it wouldn't specifically need to be a RPG in order to suffice.
The ideal example of what I'm looking for would be the way that League of Legends sets itself up. It does have a store, but the only things you can buy are simple convenience features, and characters that you can spend time playing in order to gather points to buy these things anyways, though it takes much, much longer and also customization that doesn't do anything game-play wise. The seller to me is the only thing that would give you an unfair advantage in a game are Runes and these are ONLY bought using in-game currency, making for a very fair free-to-play game.
Well, remember that anything that takes a signifigant amount of time, money, and effort, not to mention the costs of running and operating servers, by definition cannot be put up for free. At the very least the guys doing the game have to cover the server costs, and if they put a lot of work into it, chances are they also expect to profit from their efforts.
That said, there ARE exceptions, though you might not be pleased with the results.
The first exception are MUDS, or Multi-User Doors (from Door games on BBSes) or Multi-User dungeons. I haven't messed with them for many years now, but they are apparently still out there. These games are bare bones (text and numbers only, no graphics) but can have surprisingly deep systems. They typically operate for free, as they are relatively simple to build, and people treat them much like a DM treats a personal D&D campaign. They get around the server cost issue by a lot of them being hosted on people's personal home computers, or off of things like university mainframes. By being text only, they are of course pretty light weight. Of course the downside to this is that even a large MUD probably won't have more than a few dozen people online at one time, and might even have serious limitations as to how many players can be using it at once. These things are also the havens of egomaniacal creators... and things can get very strange and very political very quickly despite the relatively small size of the games.
The second exception is harder to find, but you have people who run either very old MMOs or pirate the code from existing ones and run private servers. I have never been involved in these but they are out there, and being illegal in most cases I recommend avoiding them, there have been some nasty busts over the years. Rarely you might run into someone running something like Sierra Online's old "Shadows Of Ysebrius" and "Fates Of Twinon" game on a private server as they have become abandonware, or were at one point, with sites like Home Of The Underdogs having the software to do so availible from download, however I haven't heard of anyone doing that for quite a long time now.
In short your not likely to ever find exactly what your looking for, but you can find some things that probably come fairly close if you look. Given my lack of interest nowadays I can't make any MUD referances unfortunatly.
