Dhara

Welcome to the community. I hope you're able to find everything you're looking for here. 

Welcome to the fold. Mugghhaaaa

Hey there! Welcome to the community!  

Hello and welcome!  I look forward to reading any great ideas you may have for the community.

Well, in my experience... pay-to-play, and particular subscription-based games, have always delivered a better game for my money.  
 
I'd go so far as to say I'd pay upwards of $50 a month for the right kind of gaming service... I mean, think how cheap that is compared to almost any other form of entertainment, most of which last just one night! Dinner with my wife, movie with my nephews, hockey game with friends... $50 bucks/month would be a steal
 
Either way, I'm interested in paying people for services I use... ! But I don't like a monetization model that forces designers to consider it in their design.

To be as honest as possible the subscription model helps keep masses of unwanted trash players, that will never spend 1.00$ on the game, out of the game.
 
NovaQuark should not use the Titanic game model that has been going ever since WoW took over the MMO market.
 
Can anyone name me a memorable free to play / cash shop game that they have stuck with and played for any length of time? They don't exist.
 
Planetside 1 in its time was vastly more fun than Planetside 2 will ever hope to be.
 
TOR, Wildstar and all the others that start as pay 2 play and go free to play is because they overhype and break the ship in half. There's nothing wrong with their games staying pay to play, but they don't want to put any effort into making the game better so they cop out ditch the sub and put in a cash shop.
Nobody is happy with 50,000 to 300,000 active subscribers anymore its laughable that the industry thinks the gold standard is reaching 1 million active sub's minimum to keep a game alive.
 
WoW and EV.E are the only successful games out there, though both of them are bordering dangerously close to failure with their cash shop's.
 
If you overtap your playerbase for money they'll burn through the content and ditch the game, sure you get a quick buck, but eventually your' game becomes lost in the wind of all the other free to fail games.
 
Once you start putting shares, quarterly revenue reports, and stockholder opinions above the quality of your' game you've lost, you aren't a game anymore.
All they care about is hyping stuff up in order to drive "traffic" into the game, and subjecting them to the highest degree of advertising and pressure to buy garbage from the cash shops.
 
If you like the sound of this game, if you want a community, if you want content, support the developers in their quest to return the glory of subscription's.

That first part was a bit of an overstatement, and actually overwhelmingly untrue. The subscription model certainly has some problems, but it does not, as you say, force you to keep buying a game. Ferran's points are true...with a subscription model, developers have incentive to further update the game, or else players will simply stop paying and playing. Players continue to have access to better content, and developers have a steady stream of funds to further improve content. With buy-to-play, developers see a huge influx of money at first, but that soon runs out and players are left with the game as it is, or worse, even more expensive DLC and expansion packs.
 
Take Netflix - you pay monthly for access to its library of titles, not buying all of the TV shows and movies themselves - that would be enormously expensive. Dual Universe is similar - you don't pay for the entire game and all of its content upfront - you pay periodically for access to a constantly evolving and constantly improving system.

I can understand your sentiments on this mish, but it has been my experience that paying regular instalments actually keeps the quality of the game high and content consistent. In the past, I would not play any MMO that was free or micro-transaction based because the quality was usually equivalent to what you pay for, free = terrible. 
 
Now I have seen it mentioned that NQ is intending on implementing a PLEX system similar to EVE online, where players with extra in-game currency can purchase subscription time, and players will extra RL money will sell them in order to make up for less available play time. This I appreciate as I rarely have any amount of time to dedicate to any game, usually about 4-6 hours per month.
 
The trick with this system is finding the balancing point for the price, if buying the PLEX units is too expensive, or making in game money is overly time consuming were players have to devote considerable time in farming credits just to play another month, then this system could be bad from the beginning. I have confidence that the balance can be found early on though.