Guild Wars 2

id pay for/play wow only instead.

Not really worth the sub, IMO. Though to be fair, there aren’t any mmos that are worth subs.

99% of people would not have bought. Pretty obvious.

Red Falcon.8257:

Nope.
I’ve grown to hate stacking things that drain my credit card.
I’ve seen people going bankrupt by saying “oh well it’s just 10 bucks/month” and then end up having their monthly pay halved due to them.
I’m ready to buy expansions or whatever, just not monthly fees of any kind.

Plus Anet has shown that MMOs don’t need monthly fees to keep the game going, pretty much demonstrating that all those monthly-fee MMOs are big money-grabs.
We have been fooled until now.

I think early on it was justified. Back when UO came out for example running a server was expensive, and MMO’s were very much a niche market so they couldn’t count on sales to cover the running costs.

But these days it’s much more affordable, and when you hear things like Blizzard making back the original development cost of WoW every few months it’s hard to imagine they really need all that money.

Actually that could be interesting – a subscription game where they actually only charge what they need, so as the number of players goes up the cost per person goes down. And if they happen to make more than they need one month everyone gets a week free or something. The downside is it would be extremely hard for players to budget for that and you’d probably have to cap the cost to make sure people leaving didn’t turn into a chain reaction.

If anyone’s interesting I’ve turned the responses so far into a pie chart, because I find it easier to compare numbers that way.

Obviously I’ve summarised the responses, since each persons was slightly different.
- I would pay and I would not pay are people who said only that with no further clarification.
- No game is worth a subscription and this game is not worth a subscription are people who said that either explicitly or where that was the general impression I got from their post.
- I would pay occasionally and I would pay but cannot afford to covers all the people who said things like I’d pay one month in 3 or when an expansion comes out for whatever reason.
- Cannot answer that are people who said things like the game would be very different if it had a subscription.

Oh and I didn’t take the time to double check people who posted multiple times, unless it was obvious, so some peoples opinions may have been counted twice.

I’ve paid more than a typical monthly fee in gem purchases every month except for November, when I was recovering from a serious illness and the current month.

However, I’ve been a bit turned off recently over various development decisions and the sparsity of playable content in the last two monthly updates, which is why I boycotted personal gem purchases for March. April will really depend on the content of the pending patch and ongoing development decisions.

I’m a huge fan of the game and have logged over 1,100 hours across two accounts, but I have to admit that if this was a subscription game, I probably would have canceled my subscription this month.

The lack of subscription fees makes it a lot easier to maintain a player base among the natural ebb and flow that occurs with any MMORPG. The revenue numbers seem to show the business model works and players are spared the binary choice of paying to continue playing or cutting ties with the game when it no longer feels worth the subscription fee.

Hopefully this also makes Arenanet more responsive to players, since fresh content and design decisions can have an immediate and measurable impact, positive and negative, on the ongoing revenue stream.

I quit playing nearly two months ago. Considering my reason for quitting after 1k+ hours of play was boredom / lack of content.

If GW2 were subscription based and they utilized those funds for added content (at a relatively fast rate of updates) opposed to charging for expansions, I would have paid from the start.

But the way things are, once you do everything on multiple characters/playstyles in PVE, PVP, WVW, and the vast majority of achievements, there isn’t much left that interests me other than the players. But if it’s just the people, I have RL friends to hang with.

I’m sure future content will be great. I’ll probably check it out from time to time. But the content that’s been added lately isn’t nearly enough and it’s not coming out fast enough.

The additional income from subscriptions would (should) change that.

Xenth.2408:

I quit playing nearly two months ago. Considering my reason for quitting after 1k+ hours of play was boredom / lack of content.

If GW2 were subscription based and they utilized those funds for added content (at a relatively fast rate of updates) opposed to charging for expansions, I would have paid from the start.

But the way things are, once you do everything on multiple characters/playstyles in PVE, PVP, WVW, and the vast majority of achievements, there isn’t much left that interests me other than the players. But if it’s just the people, I have RL friends to hang with.

I’m sure future content will be great. I’ll probably check it out from time to time. But the content that’s been added lately isn’t nearly enough and it’s not coming out fast enough.

The additional income from subscriptions would (should) change that.

Giving Anet more money won’t magically stop time for the entire world except Anet studio so they can develop content and restart time again to release it.
Content needs time regardless of how much money you have.
Money can’t be translated into instant ideas, instant code, instant testing, instant debugging, instant compiling, instant releasing.

I’d pay for healthy GW1 PvP before Nightfall. That’s it.

Xenth.2408:

I quit playing nearly two months ago.

Indeed… two months ago…

Considering my reason for quitting after 1k+ hours of play was boredom / lack of content.

Or burnout – psychology and arithmatic says that without a serious OCD that amount of time (around 200hrs p/month) put into any one activity would lead to negative effects… or you know – boredom.

i would have left cause you refuse to put in a dungen finder so people can cue for dungens and dont have to look hours to get players to dungen run with them,and the end game where is it?

HiddenNick.7206:

Honestly gw2 prove me that no subs can work for an MMO… So I don’t want to pay for accessing the game any more. I rather support the game willingly and get extra stuff for it

Goodbye monthly fees!

Same here

I love the flexibility of not having a sub fee where I can choose to support the game when it fits in my budget and inclination.

If the game were better in places, had a trinity and more class definition, had a better reason to spvp than useless skins, I’d gladly pay a sub.

It doesn’t and it won’t have any ever. For the free to play status of it the game is amazing and worth spending your gaming time with it instead of other free to play games. It goes head to head with the sub-fee games in terms of quality. Your question is irrelevant.

alright, i would pay a $20 half-yearly subscription if that would support ANET in the better GW2 development. consider it as a payment for continuous expansion….

Nah, the game isn’t worth a sub. I wouldn’t play even if they paid me.

..I wouldn’t go anywhere near it. Equally you could ask yourself if WoW was free to play, which would you choose? Hardly a fair contest really.

I dont pay sub fees anymore, the only one i have is rift where i bought a long sub bundle.

I now prefer to pay for content i like, rather than pay and have to live with what comes out.

Nope. SPVP is practically a joke and if this patch tomorrow doesn’t fix WvW I’ll be seriously depressed. PvE is… well, PvE.

I think I would have paid a sub in the beginning, as I’ve played pretty much every AAA MMO in recent years and thus am used to the subscription concept and also don’t really have a problem with it.
But I think 2 months in I was getting seriously disenchanted with the game and would have left it then.
With the B2P concept I can still come back occasionally, whenever I feel like doing so, or whenever I want to join one of our server’s WvW events, without feeling the pressure to actually have to play to justify me paying the sub.

On the other hand, my wife and I both have an account and aside from the purchase cost and € 30 I spent on character slots, they didn’t see money from my side. Had it been subscription based I would’ve had to spend more money on it.
So, if my play- (and pay-)style should be the norm, I wonder how they pay their bills

Would not worth that, game is pretty(graphics) but nothing more…

Subs are ActiBlizzards voodoo i dont see any reason to pay game every month after ive already paid for it at release. You have to pay for expansion anyway so why you pay every month again?….on server maintance? in 2013??? dont be ridiculous it cost NOTHING nowdays and they dont add anything, they just fixing bugs and those services should be free. Its companys fault they didnt released bug-free game i dont know why should be players paying for it….

wookie.8934:

Nope. SPVP is practically a joke and if this patch tomorrow doesn’t fix WvW I’ll be seriously depressed. PvE is… well, PvE.

Concur. Today better impress.

Scarn.1703:

i wouldve canceled a while ago.

Same here.

If it were a pay-to-play model and this reflected the current state of the game, I most certainly would have canceled a few months ago. That being said, if it were pay-to-play we would probably have had more things fixed by now.

That being said, I fear this was the month where ArenaNet needed to fish or cut bait; it looks like they will need a knife sharpener.

Games with monthly fees are outdated, this concept doesn’t work anymore. I would never have bought it

But if you want the feeling of it, spend every month 30$ for gems. You gonna live like a King in this game ^^

No – I’ve played sub games in the past, but I won’t ever again. No MMO I’ve ever played had enough regular content updates to justify a monthly fee – at least the standard $15/month fee.

I bought GW2 specifically because I could stop playing and pick it up for a week, a month, or as long as I feel like without having to worry about shelling out more money. F2P models can work (Planetside 2 is a good example) but I’d like to see more MMOs adopt a B2P model like GW2. It works for most other games – buy the box and you can play it forever. Why not most MMOs?

I’m always fine with buying expansion content, if I feel like it’s worth the money. But barring something amazingly good (like a true rebirth of DAoC), I will not be paying a sub fee again.

dbgfeller.8120:

Games with monthly fees are outdated, this concept doesn’t work anymore. I would never have bought it

But if you want the feeling of it, spend every month 30$ for gems. You gonna live like a King in this game ^^

I would agree with you that monthly fees should be outdated, but WoW keeps raking in the money and has the largest population of any MMO. So, when you say that the concept doesn’t work anymore, clearly that is incorrect.

Considering all the things in game that require gem purchases you’re probably paying more per month playing GW2 than you would for any other MMO right now. Screwing the playerbase over with mandatory real money trade is actually worse than having a monthly fee.

Vasham.2408:

Considering all the things in game that require gem purchases you’re probably paying more per month playing GW2 than you would for any other MMO right now. Screwing the playerbase over with mandatory real money trade is actually worse than having a monthly fee.

Mandatory real money trade? Never spent a cent (beside the box price) on the game and my characters are equally as strong as anyone who bought gems.

caiomacos.1694:

Vasham.2408:

Considering all the things in game that require gem purchases you’re probably paying more per month playing GW2 than you would for any other MMO right now. Screwing the playerbase over with mandatory real money trade is actually worse than having a monthly fee.

Mandatory real money trade? Never spent a cent (beside the box price) on the game and my characters are equally as strong as anyone who bought gems.

Likewise. I’ve never bought gems and the only things I’ve exchanged gold for gems for are 2 bank slots, and that only because I horde too many items. I’ve never felt anything was required from the gem store to fully experience the game.

I would have to say that no I would not play it and that I would try to convince my guild to move to another game if that were the case. Tbh they are the reason I am still here.

There are 4 major things that really hurt this game imo:
1) Does not feel rewarding
2) Constant nerfs w/o regard to fun and to lesser degree balance
3) Too reliant on RNG
4) Community tools/support lacking

Those 4 w/o question would prevent me from paying to play any game.