Everquest II Joins The Free-To-Play Brigade

…with a new service called Everquest II Extended – a free-to-play version that will run alongside their subscription servers.

Extended is not a replacement to the live subscription service and while the game content is the same, access and restrictions are different between the two. Extended is a gameplay option targeted towards certain players who are willing to play within a limited feature-set service with additional content purchase and upgrade options, rather than pay for the full service via a standard monthly subscription. The live $15 EQII subscription service is unrestricted full access to the game world for those accounts in good standing, a valuable service, just as it has always been. The EverQuest II Extended service has restrictions based on your membership level. Limited access to the EQII Extended world and certain content is free, while other content, access, and items are available only for purchase.

Definitely seems to be a bandwagon effect happening.

  • http://www.arksark.org/blog/ Arkenor

    Except that they seem to have completely ignored how DDO did it.
    It’s going to be a completely separate service, and even on that service, if you don’t pay a subscription fee you’re going to be heavily penalised by being restricted in spell upgrades and equipment. It’s bizarre, and I’m not sure why anyone would choose it over the regular servers unless they were so broke that they would never pay a penny anyway.
     

  • TPRJones

    It does appear to be their usual “here’s the worst way you can do this” approach.
    Their problem is they never really commit to this sort of thing.  They want to make a half-way move and hope for the best.  But that never works.  They need to jump in with both feet or not even bother.
    However, it could be a good way to get rid of EQ II in preparation for something else while also using it for some experiments before they kill it.  Perhaps they are smarter than we give them credit for.

  • Caya

    I don’t think they either want to get rid of EQ II (this is in addition to regular servers, not instead of them) nor do they seem particularly smart. This new “service” sounds godawful and I can see no real reason to play that instead of normal servers. To me it looks more like those Station Cash and Item Transaction oh-so-brilliant ideas, aka “let’s throw this at the playing populace and see if there’s money in it”.

  • http://www.poesies.com Cedia

    I think the suits must be trying to figure out ways for people to still be able to play in this economy.
    But I agree, this doesn’t seem to be too well thought out for the long term.

  • Otis

    Building on Arkenor’s points;
    “A Gold membership is a $15 per month recurring membership. This is very similar to that of the traditional subscription-based game, but specifically built for the Extended service”
    The game is normally $14.99 a month. Why would I pay the same price for less features on a different server? Either I’m missing something or this is a blatant attempt to get most of the players to switch to the Bronze or Silver, kill off the subscription game because of “low population”, and then reap profit when people are willing to go Gold or Platinum because it offers more then the lower tiers.

  • Grimjakk

    I think its a damn good bandwagon to be jumping on, myself.  And it IS beta (alpha, really) so the current restriction levels aren’t the final word.   I can see problems for the current servers, but realistically they weren’t exactly thriving under the current service model.
    Given the option of a character copy to the new service, and depending on how the marketplace is set up, I can’t see a downside to giving it a shot.  Doing it this way, at least they aren’t giving their current players the NGE “finger”.
     

  • Jeff

    I have to say that while I am not interested in playing EQ 2 again, of all the free 2 play systems I have seen I tend to like this hybrid kind the best. Give the people that are more comfortable with the subscription model their full access, and give people that are used to some sort of tiered f2p their way too.

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

    I wouldn’t downplay SOE’s involvement here.  Smedley has been a F2P advocate for awhile.  FreeRealms was basically a giant, expensive experiment along those lines.  One that, if millions of players are any measure, was a largely successful one.  Like others, Smedley has observed how the business model of Korean F2P games is actually quite prolific, and FreeRealms predated DDO going F2P by a considerable margin.
     
    That said, I really don’t like paying a subscription price for MMORPGs anymore.  It was cool to pay $9.89/mo when there was a relative exclusive virtual world access.  It was like a rent to accessing another world, which was cool.  Now, it seems like there’s a billion and one little virtual worlds to access, and 99.8% of them are merely imitators of virtual worlds I’m already bored of.  It only required one of those virtual worlds, one not particularly lacking in adequate features, going free to play for me to no longer see the point of subscribing on a month-by-month basis to it.
     
    So, you’re letting me play EverQuest 2 without a monthly charge?  Sign me up.  I’ll even shell out micropayments on more content if the game has me good at hooked.  Why not?  I look at it in the same light as buying an expansion pack, something gamers have been doing since time immortal.  This approach might even pull SWG out of the post-NGE nosedive.  Of course, the devil remains in the details, they can’t be too stingy.  Looking down that FAQs I don’t see any obvious flaws.
     
    I’m sure all this pro-SOE sentiment is rankling amongst folk who remember SOE CSR bungling of the past.  Well, I’m not trolling, I just don’t hold a grudge as long.  Have you seen the DC Universe Comic-Con trailer?  SOE’s in a good position to pull a second wind for #1 MMORPG developer.  (Well, not really, Blizzard is so deeply entrenched you’d need a quantum singularity to pull them off that throne.)

  • Scatch Maroo

    I still pay $13/month to play EverQuest on my Mac… I play maybe 12 hours a month, but I consider that a steal considering I could play more if I chose to.

  • Robin Kestrel

    I don’t see a problem with this, either.  Isn’t it basically just a free trial period that never ends?  People are used to free trials having limited feature sets.  People also don’t always get to play a game much after they sign up for a free trial, like when they have too much going on in real life at the time (I know that’s happened to me.)
    If you gave people as much time as they wanted to decide to move up to paying customer, at the same time doling out more benefits for incremental prices, I would bet you’d have a) more people checking out the game and b) more people eventually giving you at least some money.
    Former classic EQ player here, and this made me want to check out EQII for the first time.

  • http://wowpanda.blogspot.com/ wowpanda

    I don’t think they can get much new subs even with this free mode.  It is just a bad time for them because Starcraft II is here now!

  • Boanerges

    The larger news (which somehow got missed) is that if you pay $200/yr for Platinum EQ2 ($16.67/mo) you can get a higher level cap than anyone else (90 vs 80 for the $15/mo rubes). I don’t know if that’s new or not but that’s a first in that you can now get a better main character by paying more than your fellow players.
    The biggest problem with the EQ2 F2P is that most F2P uses a “time vs money” concept (not dissimilar to RMT) where you can have you nice free account but, if you work long enough and hard enough, you can be as good as anyone else. Or, if you want to be ub4r now, you pony up the cash. With the whole “gimped vs ungimped” differential you really destroy the benefit of F2P, which is building your community. In all honesty, what SOE should have tried here was not gimping the characters but gimping another resource: playtime. Give free accounts 4 hours a day. Won’t hurt during weekdays but on weekends, when you really want to play, you’re limited. Then you move in for the kill: get another 4 hours for $2.50. Assuming you extend Sat and Sun, that’s potentially $20 for one month of extended weekend play. Makes that $15 subscription with unlimited play look really good. The price point is right and you now are offering a real value to F2P players, plus you’re not offering “EQ2 Lite” where you have to pay to be one of the big kids.
    The bottom line is that free needs to be a gateway to some method where paying makes sense. I suspect SOE’s F2P here will not make much of a difference in their bottom line.

  • Freakazoid

    That is just really, really badly planned.

    You know how we all used to say that pvp in most mmos are an afterthought?

    With this, free-to-play is now the new afterthought.

  • koro

    @Boanerges: The level cap of 90 was actually introduced in the latest expansion, which the lower tiers of Extended doesn’t seem to include (it specifically only goes up to Shadow Odyssey, which was their previous expansion). You can currently get to 90 on Live.

  • Mark

    F2P is a double-edged sword. I’m a bit more likely to try it if I don’t have to buy the $50 box to get started, but because it’s free, I don’t feel any urgency to spend much time in the game. When I buy a new MMO and have 30 free days, I feel like I need to give it a good try in those 30 days. With F2P I can make an account, spend 20 minutes in the game, and then not even think about it for a few weeks.
     
    Fifteen dollars a month doesn’t kill me. If I like an MMO, that is well worth the money and I like not having to make lots of small buying decisions — do I want to pay $1 for a double XP potion? Do I want to pay $2 for a mount that lasts 30 days? Etc.
     
    I like F2P and I’ve seen some decent F2P MMOs, but so far a game like WoW outshines them and at $15/month, it’s hard to beat the price. I want a F2P to be better than WoW because I value my time more than I value the $15 subscription fee.

  • Amber

    Bizarre, I was just talking with a friend the other day about how cool it would be if EQ2 went F2P.  I do occasionally miss EQ2, but my playing time is very limited, so it would be perfect.  Unfortunately it seems SOE are, as usual, tone deaf in its implementation.  Bonus points for the Orwellian double-speak “Extended” title, no doubt hatched up by the Ministry of Truth.

  • http://tagn.wordpress.com/ Wilhelm2451

    They seem to be quietly closing off all of their current subscribers in their own little room to wither.  That will teach them to object loudly to expanding Station Cash sales to include items with stats and such.
    Once Extended goes live, there will be no more 14-day trial on the EQ2 Live servers.  Anybody who wants to try the game out will be on an EQ2 Extended server, and while you can (for $35) transfer your character from Live to Extended, you cannot go the other way.  Extended grows, Live slowly fades away.
     

  • Otis

    @Wilhelm: that was my take-home point also; this is intended to kill off the normal servers entirely and convince everyone playing on Extended that less is more.

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

    Leaving the old players in a room to wither doesn’t seem like an entirely fair analogy when I try to look at it from other perspectives than the old players’.
     
    From the perspective of a new player, if you gave me a choice between “find a code that lets me play for 2 weeks and then pay a monthly fee or GTFO” or “log in to the extended server and play as long as I like and only pay if I want more features” then the first choice might as well not exist.
     
    From the perspective of SOE, a cursory Google search on “EQ2 server merges” reveals that while merges have yet to occur (outside of the PvP servers) there’s a great deal of clamoring amongst the existing playerbase to perform merges due to an overall lack of dearth of players.  (Part of it might be an engineering problem: too many expansions will stretch even a formidable server population too thin.)  When this is the scenario, those old servers start looking like an eyesore in the face of bold new payment plans.
     
    I’d say that the problem the oldbies are facing has less to do with the suspension of the 14-day trial offer and more with the decision that live and extended are not to mingle.   It’s something being done in order to avoid ruffled feathers all around.  Newbies would resent trying to compete with guilds of oldbies who have laid claim to the top tier of the games.  Oldbies would resent newbies on their lawn.  However, if you don’t change with the times, stagnation hits you no matter who you are, newbie, oldbie, or SOE.

  • dartwick

    Its hard me for me to judge this rationally because unlike DDO, WOW or LOTRO – EQ2 was NEVER fun when I played it.
    It seems that maybe they have chosen the best approach to add players with out losing current subscribers(although I dont really understand the level cap thing) but maybe the worst approach to to growing the game all around.
     

  • Joe

    Turbine does something well, the rest of the MMO industry copies it poorly or not at all.  What else is new?
     
    Seriously, are there any other first-tier studio working on MMOs worth even talking about right now other than Turbine and Blizzard?
     
    Best action MMO – DDO.  Best top-tier, story-driven MMO – LOTRO.  And AC1 has just gotten pants-on-head cool in the past year or two.  Failure that gave them the tech for two of their other successes – AC2.
    Seriously, who else in the business can even approach being 3 for 4 like that?

  • Random Poster

    At what point/level do the gear and spell restrictions kick in? Since I’ve never played EQ2 no idea what adept or expert spells are or when you get them.

  • Rickard

    I play EQ2 and have for years.  It has matured into a very solid game.  The leveling is good and the end game is great IMO.  The raid encounters are unique and mostly interesting.  Finding groups is quite easy and there are 15+ instance dungeons at the level cap to go into.  That isn’t to say SOE does everything right (for those in the know, having contested hard mobs being killable as easy mode, and thus remove the chance at a hard mode mob is just lame).  I am not sure what the F2P will bring for those of us on paying servers.  I certainly understand the idea that new players will be funnelled to the f2p servers and that probably isn’t good for the paying servers health.  If, in the end, this requires server mergers between the f2p and pay, meh.  I am ok with that as long as my play experience doesn’t change and the game is survies I am OK with it.

    As long as the best gear is achievable only through effort then I am ok with the marketplace.

  • Disk Mailer

    Your google fu is shit.

    EQ2 merged a ton of servers.

    http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/54915

  • JuJutsu

    I played both EQ2 and DDO from launch for about 18 months before leaving both. When DDO went freemium I went back immediately and have had a great time so far. SOE’s deal doesn’t do anything at all to attract me and unless it changes pretty dramatically I’ll blow it off.

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

    @Disk Mailer
    I forgot about that. The 2006 merges are sort of a different situation though, more of a “post box-release hype” merge. That’s less significant than the Google-Fu indicative of their being on the verge of a second major merge, at least when you’re talking about how the “extended F2P plan” factors into all this.

    Random Poster: At what point/level do the gear and spell restrictions kick in? Since I’ve never played EQ2 no idea what adept or expert spells are or when you get them.

    Right away. “Adapt” and “expert” spells are pretty much straight up power increases to your current spells. Read a scroll, and upgrade your spell. Obtaining them is relatively tricky as it’s something you’d get as a rare drop or from crafters.

  • Rickard

    I looked at the matrix.  The free version is pretty dailed back.  No legandary or above gear, and only up to adept spells.  This wont matter much leveling but at the cap some of the 80 instnaces (the Guks and WOE) will be pretty hard with shitty gear and spells.

    The biggest distractor for the free version I see is the lack of ANY public chat channels.  How will these poor souls find groups.  If you are a new player and can’t ask about the game or find groups I suspect you wont stay long.

    Perhaps some of this will change as it is alpha.

  • DSJ

    The clear trend for everyone is to go to a model for content purchase that is graduated instead of “one size fits all”.  The simple fact is that the current economy is accelerating these trends by forcing every MMO company to look for ways to enhance revenues.  Entertainment purchases by consumers are almost always the first expenditure cut by those in difficulty.  The only way to keep those customers is to look for ways to lower the costs to them.  The clear difficulty is doing so without losing the customers that are in fact paying the full freight.  In addition any company looking at rolling out a new product is going to face customers that are making a decision where an initial box cost in $50+ range may not be as feasible as before.  A F2P model allows you to keep your marginal customers and still generate new ones … whether it arrests player loss among older accounts is still to be tested.  The entire process of F2P is a debate masking the larger reality that the entire video game industry beginning with MMO’s (because of the subscription based model they are on) are going to be forced to find a lower price point or yield the market to those willing to do so.  You are still going to have premium content and subscription services, but F2P is going to be more than just a trend soon … it may very well become the industry standard.

  • http://twitter.com/D_0ne D-0ne

    Last year in January I’d heard from a couple of SOE old school insiders saying that they were going to shut down severals games.  As we all know a couple did close.  EQ II was on the list they gave me last year, so was Vanguard SOH.

    I suspect this is a last ditch effort to save EQ II from closure.

  • http://www.mmomisanthrope.wordpress.com Dblade

    DSJ what seems to be happening with the Korean F2P market along those lines is the rise of the net game and the decline of the MMO. So many new products are not true MMOs, but multiplayer games with a cash shop tacked on. My big worry is that we might start seeing this mirrored in the domestic market.

    D-One, wow. Sucks if that is the case.

  • Iconic

    I just picked up EQ2 a couple days ago after ignoring it since launch while I focused on WoW. I am at least mildly impressed with EQ2, because it retains the old EQ “flavor” while improving a ton of areas and being much less grindy. I don’t know if it would really appeal to any one who didn’t play the original EQ, but if you did play EQ and want to revel in a combination of nostalgia and new features, this might be the way to go.