Despite my distaste for being falsely advertised as a “Free to Play” game Free Realms is one of the best MMO’s I have played. Instead of focusing on combat and wasting 4-8 hours a day grinding for gear it has a MMO light feel where most of the game focus is on mini games. It also contains an online trading card game which is quite fun if you have the time and money to put into it. I just thought I should let the world know.
Well being a fan of MMO’s over the years has eventually led me down the path of try out some of the latest and not so late “Free to Play” MMO’s.
WARNING: This is a rant!
So just a quick shot of MMO’s I have played…
Anarchy Online - which was good for its time.
World of Warcraft - Still good for it’s time but 15 bucks a month gets old if you are trying to save.
Guild Wars - One time fee for long lasting fun.
Hellgate London - One time fee action RPG.
About half a year ago I started to play a free to play RPG called Perfect World which is very much a chinese style WoW like many people say it is. The best part about it is that the game was 100% free to play with no restrictions, you could acctually buy anything you wanted via the auction house with in game gold. It was nice but I eventually stopped playing to get married and work etc.
Since then I wanted to test out the waters of the Free to play market and the first one up is a EA game called Battlefield Heroes! which is advertied as a “Free to Play” Shooter. I discovered that Heroes was a fun shooter with light RPG elements and when I started playing free players had no disadvantage versus a paying player. Three days after I started the game that changed and a new price system was insituded to give paying players a weapons advantage over free players which pretty much makes the game feel like it is a trial since you cannot use the new weapons for very long without spending all your in game cash on them, leaving you with days to grind back the money to use the weapon again. So that killed the free to play for me and I decided to check out another free to play games.
Dungeons and Dragons Online! sound fun to me since I enjoy a good D&D game… well I discoved that 4 levels into the game free players have to get a rare item drop in order to continue to level up. Then you will need another at rare item at higher level and so on. No exactly my Idea of a fun way to spend my time. So I quickly uninstalled.
Following that annoying excursion I moved onto Free Realms because I read that it was free to play with little restriction. I figured that some stuff would be locked and there would be an item mall which is pretty standard for Free MMO’s. Shortly after starting the game it locked me out after reaching level 5 which is about 15-30 minuts of game play. That’s right! Hit level 5 and the game gives you an ugly popup asking for a subscription… this is a game that advertises that it is free right on the website.
So I’m at a loss for free to play games… I don’t mind paying for MMO’s when they are advertised as pay game and I’m ready for that kind of thing but I really feel that these free to play game companies are trying to take advantage of gamers’ impulses, like casinos trying to take advantage of gamblers, which gives me a not so nice feeling inside. To be honest, Heroes can be replaced my the million of shooter games in this world, DDO can be replaced with Neverwinter nights and all the awesome mods people make and Free Realms can be replaced by mini game sites like Kongragte. So my rant is why the !@#$ am I going to deal with these annoying, lying companies anymore. I give up! Aside from Perfect World, these game have offered me nothing but trails and disadvantages followed by ugly pop-ups. Why do they not understand what FREE means. FREE!?
Well I looked it up..
free [fri?]
adj freer, freest
1. able to act at will; not under compulsion or restraint
To me that means disadvantages and any other restrictions that restrain players from the gameplay would mean that the game is not free! so to all you free to play companies that lie only to waste my time, please STOP lying and start advertising your games for what they are…free trials!
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