The Elder Scrolls Online Will Have Subscription Fees

[Dragonbums]

And now i have no interest in having anything to do with this MMO.
I didn't expect F2P, but I did anticipate pay $60.00 for the game, and then get to play with no extra cost.

No sense in buying this game when it's literally banking on brand loyalty.

 

[endtherapture]

If I'm not mistaken though, doesn't GW2 also have an in-game store with microtransactions? If that's the case then it's probably not really the one time purchase that's keeping the servers online but the microtransactions. Even if GW2's microtransactions are less Pay to win oriented, aren't there still moments where they try to tempt you with purchases or offer certain perks if you pay a bit extra? I've never played GW2 so please forgive me if I'm wrong about that, but if I'm not terribly misinformed, then I think I'd rather just pay a constant subscription than be constantly enticed or guilted into paying micro-transactions.

I don't really have an intrinsic problem with microtransactions, unless they are pay to win, in which case I hate them; but a game that's supposed to be about immersion and building your own story and adventures like TES:O would be really immersion breaking to me if I'm constantly being reminded that I can pay $5 for this or that. I also play Dota 2 a lot and even though those microtransactions are entirely optional and merely cosmetic, I probably get suckered into buying way more in microtransactions than I would have if it had like a $5 a month subscription or a $60 flat price.

GW2's cash shop is full of skins and "fun" consumable items such as party boxes, cosmetic backpacks, XP boosters, etc. To increase the space your bank account you can pay cash to get "gems" and then buy an extra slot in your bank. However I've leveled up to 80 and haven't felt like I've needed any more space yet.

Also to counteract it, you can convert your in-game gold to gems, and then spend the gems on stuff from the "cash shop". This means that you can go through the entire game and even get stuff from the store without ever having to use real life money.

No content is gated either. Everything is accessible to all players from the moment you buy the game. It's not like they're like "you have to spend money on gems to unlock levels past 50".

 

[Makabriel]

Play a game without having to pay separate for bank space? Or anything extra? Yes please.

Enjoy having paid $90 over 6 months, or $180 over the course of a year.

Sorry, guess I'm old-school. Having played WoW since beta, subscription fees are nothing to me.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

It will fail.

It will be F2P within a year.

It's the TORtanic all over again.

I as much as I despise this game and the giant shit it is taking on the entire franchise, a part of is still giddy in anticipation for it.

The Transcription Error Scrollocaust will be a marvel to behold.

Wait it can't be worse than Skyrim albeit for the lack of mods which is the only thing that made Oblivion,FO3,FO3NV and Skyrim tolerable much less good.

 

[Ishal]

God dammit Bethesda!

You're competing with GW2, a game which offer more updates and more content every month than any other MMO, doesn't have a sub at all, and is by all accounts is doing pretty well for itself.

If you want to shoot yourself in the foot with a .50 cal, at least do it with a less potentially interesting MMO.

I don't know how you think GW2 could compete with TESO. TESO has professional customer support.

How do you compete with that.

Bad experiences I take it?

Anyway, this game looks like its set up to be another ToRtanic, sad as it is to use that tired term. What they are promising and attempting to accomplish almost NEVER works when they roll it out, especially this whole "megaserver" thing. It's placed considerable hurdles for itself to jump over and if the past has shown us anything its that doing so almost always ends in tears.

I have little faith, but GW2 was a breathe of fresh air to some of the tired old MMO mechanics, its just tripped over itself and hasn't gotten up since. I'd put the blame 50/50 on ArenaNet and NCsoft.

 

[Yuuki]

Why is it called ToRtanic anyway? I get it's ToR + Titanic, but it didn't exactly "sink" and kill everyone, it's still going, it was merely an F2P switch

I mean we don't hear people saying RIFTtanic

Sorry, guess I'm old-school. Having played WoW since beta, subscription fees are nothing to me.

That's more like it

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

The reason I hate the subscription fee model: It's completely irrespective of how much time you find to play. I have a job, I go to school. If a month goes by that I play one or two hours, or don't get to play at all, well, I'm still out $15 for having had the option to play. Meanwhile for something like GW2, I can plop down some money, and get my money's worth at my own pace.

When I have a job, I have no time to play MMOs.

When I have no job, I have no money to pay subscription fees.

Might look into the game if there's an F2P option.

 

[Maxtro]

Do you think there would be more people in GW2's servers if there was a sub fee?

Obviously not. My point is that TESO isn't competing with GW2, and that not having a sub does not guarantee a large player base.

All MMO's are competing with each other.

Not having a sub does not guarantee a large player base, nor does having a sub guarantee a large player base either.

They key is to have enough regular new content to keep people playing.

For me, the ideal situation would be to have no fee for ESO other than the purchase price, but have regular "DLC" come out every three months or so that keeps things fresh. Heck, charging $45 for each DLC is fine as long as there is enough new content to justify that cost. It's the same exact cost as paying $15 a month but it forces the devs to stay on their toes and keep making quality content. Because if someone doesn't want to buy the DLC, they still get to keep playing what they paid for.

 

[GAunderrated]

This is good news. Most games that have gone to F2P have so many pay gates at different content, be it customization, accessing your in-game cash, respeccing, basic content, or just levelling at a normal rate. Also, many F2P games basically only get new payed content.

Having a subscription allows me to put money down on a monthly basis and not worry about every little feature in the game nickle-and-diming me. I can accomplish stuff in the game without it being completely obscured by a cash shop.

Also, I think I read that the monthly price would not convert to euro and pounds 1:1, but I can't find any confirmation of that. It'd be nice if everyone outside the US wouldn't be price gouged for once.

EDIT: And I found the confirmation about halfway down the page: http://m.gamestar.de/artikel/the-elder-scrolls-online,3026853.html

"Since you've been so forthcoming, could you also reveal the available subscriptions? How much will a month of ESO cost?"

"We'll go into details on this later, but the basic monthly charge will be $14.99/?12.99/£8.99 and expect some discounts if you buy multiple months at a time. We'll also support game time cards as well as a variety of payment methods."

This is NOT good news. Just because one model is being abused and shitting on consumers does not mean an equally shitty practice (subscriptions) is the way to go.

Honestly my cousin got me excited about ESO. I'm a HUGE ES fan but I never play MMO's because I hate the overpriced, repetitive stupidity about them. I was willing to give it a shot but Subscription based purchases is one of the major reasons why I never got into MMO.

The game may have hundreds of hours of content but you know what also does? Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim. I could get all those games on sale for the price of 2-3 months subscription. There goes your perceived value Zenimax.

 

[Ulquiorra4sama]

No way, i'm out.

Do send me a postcard from Tamriel... if you can afford it.

 

[Aeshi]

As much as I'd like to see this succeed, I think F2P games have spoiled us in this regard somewhat. I don't think today's gaming scene has room for a Subscription MMO that isn't WoW or EVE.

 

[Zeren]

I'm not going to pay for any subscription let alone one that adds up to $180 a year. I'll just mod the hell out of skyrim some more and call it good.

 

[Nocturnus]

I don't understand the resistance to a subscription model.

Guild Wars 2 supports itself by putting all that shiny stuff for you to buy on the store, and it's not cheap either. A new armor skin is 10 dollars, and a new weapon can be about as much too. To even change your character's appearance costs 5 bucks, and don't get me started on how they managed to monetize the ever living crud out of dyes.

I, personally, don't like that. When I pay a subscription, I know that when I log in, I get all those weapons, all that armor, all the functionality and inventory space, everything for one cost up front. I don't have to play the "Let's roll the dice for the dye I want" at 2 dollars a pop. That dye will drop from a mob, in game, or be accessible to me through a tradeskill.

Subscriptions also give the company more peace of mind in the long run. They're more stable, easier to predict the bottom line of.

15$ a month is NOTHING, also. The cost of going to a movie for two hours of entertainment costs about as much. If the game is good, and has a wealth of content, you're going to spend dozens of hours a month on the thing should you have the time, and hundreds of hours a year, all for a little north of 100$ per year. Hell, a new game at launch costs about as much.

Again, looking for a good reason to rally so hardcore against something like this. If someone tells me that "They just don't get the time worth the subscription", I will ask if they have seen a film in the theater at all during that timeframe... because you just spent more for less overall entertainment.

 

[Nocturnus]

As a complete aside... I have no idea how they're going to manage this on Xbox Live, with MS still insisting that they gate their servers off to the outside world entirely. (IE: Elder Scrolls Xbox Live will only run with Xbox Live, if Microsoft keeps their current policies.)

That means Xbox Live Currencies. Xbox Live payments, and Microsoft taking a nice, big, fat cut of everything that Zenimax does.

I wonder how long it will take them to regret wanting to port the thing to XBOne with that known...

 

[DEAD34345]

Spoiler: Spoilered quote due to length

I don't really get why everyone is so gung-ho against the very idea of subscriptions. Sure, the price for this partiicular subscription might be a bit steep, that's a legitimate concern, but to complain about the entire financial model is weird to me. Subscription services are a legitimate alternative and offer plenty of benefits that other MMO monetization methods do not. As long as companies don't "Mix and match" payment methods and throw in Buy to Play and microtransactions, subscriptions are nice because they guarantee that you can access all of the content available in the game without worrying about being nickel and dimed or subjected to pay walls to access content. It also avoids having the ever floating temptation in "f2p" games of being able to just drop money to win the game for you or buy super rare items for a few dollars. It provides some level of balance because all players are on the same footing.

A common argument is that some people dont have time to play it as much as they'd like and feel like that subscription is wasted on them. If you predict that you won't be able to play much for a certain period in extreme circumstances you could just temporarily drop the subscription until you have more time. And even if you regularly only have a few hours a week to play, $15 a month still isn't THAT expensive. That's less than the price to see two movies (minus any snacks or food), which combined would only amount to at most 5 hours of entertainment, yet I'm sure many people still go to see movies at that price. Even if you only get to play it for 10 hours a month (~2.5 hours a week) I still think that $15 is a reasonable value for your time. I pay more than $15 a week just to buy lunches at work and they don't provide me with a months worth of unlimited enjoyment whenever I feel like it (or have time to)

Is it because a lot of us (especially PC gamers and myself included) have become spoiled with how cheap games are with steam and humble bundles and all of these other platforms of great sales, that we don't appreciate how much value we get for our money anymore? I just don't really get it. Sure, the game is more expensive in the long run (read: more than four months of play) than a new AAA release game unless they give discounts for pre-purchasing longer subscriptions. But this game (if it's good... if it's bad then it'll fail subscription or not) will likely provide tons more content and enjoyment opportunities than most AAA games will over those 4 months.

If you don't like subscription games, then that's fine I guess, nobody is forcing you to play it. I just don't understand why its such a turn-off to so many people and why so many people are already declaring this game dead in the water before it even launches purely because the game is subscription based. If the game is really good, people will pay to play it and it will succeed. If it's not good enough then people won't and they'll either have to adjust their business model or take the game down. I don't think the subscription itself is a death sentence though...

I'd like to hear other peoples' opinions on this matter.

Whether subscriptions are good or bad is pretty irrelevant. ESO had a chance to attract its own fanbase, the people that liked The Elder Scrolls in the first place, and with this move it has pretty much instantly blown it. Every TES fan is used to paying £40 (at most) and getting hundreds upon hundreds of hours of gameplay, which they can play whenever they want, for as long as they want, and which even has an endless supply of both free unofficial and paid official content to go alongside it.

I think @Maxtro had the best idea. By abandoning the monthly subscription and replacing it with paid "DLC" you could get pretty much the same profits for the same amount of work without alienating the TES audience. Now it seems like they want to compete with World of Warcraft instead, and that only ever ends one way.

 

[Ishal]

Why is it called ToRtanic anyway? I get it's ToR + Titanic, but it didn't exactly "sink" and kill everyone, it's still going, it was merely an F2P switch

I mean we don't hear people saying RIFTtanic

Sorry, guess I'm old-school. Having played WoW since beta, subscription fees are nothing to me.

That's more like it

It's because of the massive hype and direct opposition it's own community had with WoW. While playing the game, the most common insult for detractors was "Go back to WoW."

Also, Bioware... nuff said. The name alone causes drama.

They promised a lot of stuff and never delivered. Rift had endgame content, ToR had basically none at the very start, and what was there was bugged to all hell. They had to completely remove the end game open world PvP area since it was so broken.

Not to mention all the other areas where other MMO's outclassed it. It really seemed like Bioware didn't know what they were doing. I've heard that Disney gave EA a set amount of time to either clean up the mess, or their going to shut it down and remake the entire thing. Don't know if its true, but its what I heard and I can see Disney saying that.

 

[kenu12345]

I don't understand the resistance to a subscription model.

Guild Wars 2 supports itself by putting all that shiny stuff for you to buy on the store, and it's not cheap either. A new armor skin is 10 dollars, and a new weapon can be about as much too. To even change your character's appearance costs 5 bucks, and don't get me started on how they managed to monetize the ever living crud out of dyes.

I, personally, don't like that. When I pay a subscription, I know that when I log in, I get all those weapons, all that armor, all the functionality and inventory space, everything for one cost up front. I don't have to play the "Let's roll the dice for the dye I want" at 2 dollars a pop. That dye will drop from a mob, in game, or be accessible to me through a tradeskill.

Subscriptions also give the company more peace of mind in the long run. They're more stable, easier to predict the bottom line of.

15$ a month is NOTHING, also. The cost of going to a movie for two hours of entertainment costs about as much. If the game is good, and has a wealth of content, you're going to spend dozens of hours a month on the thing should you have the time, and hundreds of hours a year, all for a little north of 100$ per year. Hell, a new game at launch costs about as much.

Again, looking for a good reason to rally so hardcore against something like this. If someone tells me that "They just don't get the time worth the subscription", I will ask if they have seen a film in the theater at all during that timeframe... because you just spent more for less overall entertainment.

You do realize you will also be paying that initial 60 on top of the subscription cost right