Discussion Main / AllegedlyFreeGame

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Clean up, started by Sinnox on Apr 8th 2011 at 8:54:09 PM

Image does not fit trope. You can't buy any kind of significant advantage in League of Legends. You can buy new champions instead of unlocking them the hard way, but that just means you'll get your ass kicked with more variety. You can't buy runes or any kind of gameplay advantage. They're real sticklers about that because it would otherwise ruin the eSport aspect of the game.

Is Grand Theft Auto Online becoming allegedly free? In the early days of Grand Theft Auto Online, there were plenty of missions that payed high and were pretty quick (notably Coveted and Rooftop Rumble). However, through various updates, Rockstar made changes to the missions, such as nerfing payouts and making the missions longer and more difficult. Now, it's much harder to make money in GTA Online, with Rooftop Rumble and Coveted now very difficult after 1.14. Things like cars, guns, modifications, etc are quite expensive. GTA Online does have something called "cash cards" where you pay real money for in-game money.

Kingdom Of Loathing's had a few relevant changes over the past few six months, and I don't feel quite up to compiling a proper, succint "**" in the main entry - it might even still be too early to tell the new community attitude. It's still definitely true that if you're a speedrunner (I'm uncertain that this even makes up a majority of the Ko L playerbase but that's still probably the group relevant to this trope) you're going to want to be paying money.

What they've done is make it so that in the currently "competitive" run type, any resource a player who started a year ago couldn't have obtained somewhere than from another player (aside from Iot Ms this includes things from limited-time events or things which just got retired in some remodel) is disabled. This:

• Simplifies game balance in the areas the developers care about balancing, and potentially lets them partially reuse ideas.
• Limits the potential magnitude of the divide, although as now Iot Ms tend to be designed for current relevance a minimal divide is also now being enforced.
• Annoys players who are technically in a competitive run for reasons other than speedrunning or competing (other changes have provided new reasons to do so).
• Led to complaints that competing now requires not just spending money but spending money on an ongoing basis.
• Helps mess with the calculation and planning speedrunning requires, just as the concept of a current competitive run does. (Speedrunners approach the game from a sequence-breaking frame of mind; they reflexively do things to save turns a new player would never think of. Iot Ms make things smoother or more interesting for a non-speedrunner but don't significantly affect run time if you just play through the game normally.)

From the noncompetitive standpoint things are shifting a bit in the pay-to-play direction. The standard's been that when new game content is Iot M-linked, in some way buying the Iot M allows a player to produce temporary "access keys" to that content, more than that player will in the long run have any use for. This has resulted in a steady market supply of pretty cheaply priced access (think ten minutes of grinding instead of two months). The most recent system (Iot Ms as permanent access passes to the Elemental Airlines) has made things rougher: players will have to do considerable work to buy temporary airway vouchers for other players, and the type of work is sufficiently metagame-based (these quests are persistent across ascensions and the region difficulty keeps rising if you don't ascend) that access will be a lot rarer, at least until players with permanent access run out of personal rewards to pursue there. On the other hand, the game world is steadily expanding and there's a greater variety of ways to play whether you're paying or not.

The Wow entry sure is biased.

Yes, the "demo" version of wow was retooled as free to play (when they removed the time limitation on free accounts). The ad may fit this trope, but Wow isn't heading that way by itself.

The second entry though, Yes, you can get currency that is effectively capped week (as in you get currency X, and can trade it for Y once per week). There are lots of ways of getting it though, it is really only a grind if you want to try and optimize the way you get it though. So, yes several hours of grinding (if your slow), but it is over a week. If you play a decent amount outside of raids, you will easily get the currency you need to cap that week.

Putting this here, since it's at best a historical note and definitely doesn't count as an example:

• The iPhone and iPod App Store used to specifically forbid the use of in-app purchases in no-price applications in an attempt to prevent developers from getting around Apple's 30% sales fee. Unfortunately, Apple have changed their regulations to also get 30% from all in-app purchases, which are now allowed in apps of any cost. So "free" iPhone games often have this, or at least encourage you to buy some upgrades.
  • Originally, the App Store didn't allow free items at all, which meant that it was necessary to SELL demo versions for the minimum $1 price.

Re: Adventure Quest — removed a misremembered example. The final event of that chain was definitely available to everyone.