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Free-To-Play Switch Going Well For D&D Online
babboo65 writes "Dungeons and Dragons Online is enjoying a second life in terms of player count and buzz, all thanks to its new business strategy: giving the game away. Turbine is making their MMO as accessible as possible, and that includes making players who don't pay anything as happy as possible. Subscriptions are up 40 percent. Ars explores how free can be very profitable."
This is where you clearly have never even looked at the game in question(DDO). The game does not revolve around player vs. player, though there are some very very limited forms of it in the game(in certain taverns there are combat pits).
The DDO method of free to play is really giving you an unlimited taste of the game for free by offering a bit of free content without making all content for free. You have the option to either play the free content on multiple characters to generate enough "Turbine Points" to purchase additional content, or you can pay real money for Turbine points which you can then use to get the content package of your choice. If you don't like being limited in what you can access, you can just become a normal $15/month subscriber to get access to all the content in the game. In a month or two, if you don't want to pay the monthly subscription any more, you can switch back to free to play, lose access to the non-free content you have not purchased, but you don't LOSE what you have accomplished. Those who pay the monthly subscription also get 500 Turbine Points each month they are a subscriber, and those points can be used to unlock content for the free to play if the player decides to go back to Free to Play status.
So, DDO offers the best of both worlds. You get free to play with micro transactions, and you get subscription based for those who want all the content the game has to offer. There are also no "player rankings" as such, so no one really cares about who has the absolute best stuff, as long as your skill at playing your character is at an acceptable level(clerics who don't heal, or who don't know how to use mass healing spells in a raid situation may upset others for example). There is also a tolerance for poor equipment levels to an extent as long as party members know about it in advance so it doesn't kill what the group is trying to do.
And, this is why DDO is seeing good subscription numbers from the release of Free to Play. Some people may upgrade for only a few months to get full access to the "premium" content in the low to mid levels, and then switch back to the Free to Play and then only buy the few high level premium modules they want access to after that. Or, if new content is released often enough, they may stick with their subscription so they don't have to buy each new content pack as it is released.