This is the worst idea I've seen in this thread so far. 90% of people don't give a flying shit about 'tournaments', and of that 10%, only 1% are actually good enough to win anything. So go ahead and tell me what Joe Average Gamer, like me, gets out of your tournament idea? Some twitchy build-order-obsessed 13 year old gets to win money, I get... nothing? Why would anyone subscribe to this? The only people who get ANYTHING out of this are the people who stand a chance of winning money, and I highly doubt that if it came down to it, you, or anyone else in this thread, would even be in the Top 10.

You seem to think competitive gaming is both bigger than it really is, more popular than it really is, and more important than it really is.



... aaaaand we've come full circle to EA.



Even if they were released every 2 months, it's cheaper to pay $15 than $50. And at least I also get the satisfaction that some socially impaired kid who has reduced the game to nothing more than a mathematical numbers game isn't getting rich off my money.



The entire reason Xbox Live works is because it's a monopoly. Such a stupid system won't and never will work on the PC, because our internet is 'free'. No self-respecting PC gamer would fall for an Xbox money trap, and trying to cash in on Xbox Live would be an embarrassing fiasco.

The only people that would be stupid would be those justifying put a dollar sign on something that has been, for over ten years, free.



You must play a lot of Xbox. Break a $40 expansion into 4 parts, and you get the same game, for $60, that you can't play in one sitting for 9 months anyway. Enter Valve's "episodic content" scam. Buy smaller games, for more money, released slower.

EDIT: GO AWAY



I love how you call everyone either an idiot or a thief.

*sigh* Stupid forums.

I am with "Karryle" and others. The best updates are the one that not only modifies game play but also modifying the engine and over-all systems as well this game has a lot of room to grow so I would like to see major changes in updates not just a mod here or there. But in all areas of the game so a year or two or when ever they are ready is a good release schedule for me. I think if we let the developer's work they can come out with some other really cool stuff.

I'm not a pirate and I'm not lying when I say I would not pay a subscription for a game. I like playing games. I find it relaxing, but it's not so important to me that I'd be willing to pay monthly fees of any kind for a game. If it comes to the point where games require that, I'll stop playing new games and stick with the ones I already own. If you don't believe that, well, it doesn't make any difference to me what you believe. But I will not pay a subscription fee for games.

If you mean you just start with a subscription at x dollars per month and that gets you the base game, and subsequent updates/new content/whatever comes with the further x dollars a month (In other words, the base game only costs a month's worth of subscription fees); if that's the general idea, then yeah I can see that being cheaper for the base game only. Of course, that type of model is one I'd avoid, so it would be even cheaper for me, as my outlay would be zero dollars.

And if the subscription method does not benefit the business, then do you really think any business would even explore that as an option? Successful businesses do what's good for the business.

*edit* I'll leave my post as is, but I see you edited while I was writing mine. I'm unclear on your subscription model: are you saying that the initial outlay of (from your example) 8 dollars is going to get the consumer a playable game? If so, what's the incentive to pay 8 bucks the next month? And what happens after 3 months if you decide to cancel your subscription? Can you still play the game?

Aye, agreed. The only way I can see that type of model working is if the initial outlay for the game is at or close to the present day cost of a game at release. And that's what I've referring to when I say I'd not pay a subscription. The initial outlay is what I'll pay, but I won't pay more and more per month to keep playing the game.

I can see subscription fees for a multiplayer game (MMOs and the like, maybe even to access on-line play for this type of game if it's popular enough), but not for something that the consumer is looking at for either predominantly single player or LAN play.

Ban Uranium - 235 for being stupid.

He's started flame wars in like multiple threads now.

innociv: But his points are valid. It would also hate to see StarDock behaving like Microsoft or EA in that regard. The XBox live thingy will never work on PC and I don't like Steam even a tiny bit. The episodes cost more then a "normal" game, that's the only reason they are done. To milk the customer for more money, hoping that he is stupid enough not to notice it (and it actually seems to work!).

As for the subscription: Even if it costs only 1 cent per month, paying it a hassle (especially for Europeans like me) so I wouldn't subscribe, no matter the cost

Stardock used to have a game called Stellar Frontier that had a 'pay money to win' deal going on with it. Honestly, it was a fucking fantastic game, and if they released it today with peer to peer servers, LAN play, bug fixes, and balances and nothing else changed, I'd pay 50 bucks for it. The problem, however, with the 'pay to win' content was manyfold:

1. The developers have a conflict of interest on many fronts. Do we make the paid content better and risk crushing the spirits of those who don't pay? Do we make the paid content a little more balanced and risk inflaming our paying customers?

2. The paying customers felt no sense of accomplishment in beating others (it was a VERY competitive game with a ranking system and everything).

3. The non-paying customers had pretty much no chance to win and, further, realized the predicament of the paying customers - this created a self-fulfilling prophecy of 'we'll never reach critical mass of paying customers to play a good balanced competitive match'.

Like I said, Stellar Frontier was an INCREDIBLE game, one of my top 10 favorite of all time, but the community never gave itself a chance because of the difficulties presented with paid-vs.-nonpaid gameplay.

PS
(Stardock, please rerelease Stellar Frontier!)

... I think I love you, Mettra.

HOWEVER...



I disagree. While I don't 'follow' tournaments and competitive gaming, I have played many games that have had rabid competitive involvement. In my experience, competitive gaming is really nothing but detrimental to the game's health.

I really don't feel like going into elaborate detail, but I'll just mention a few things. The issue of game balance is a two-way street. While it's PLAUSIBLE that competitive gaming could complain enough to 'fix' balance, I've never seen a game that actually validates this statement. One could say Starcraft is a good example, but Starcraft also took years of patching to get into that balanced state. It's impossible to say that competitive gaming drove it, or if it was just a matter of time and the law of averages.

I'm really not sure what you mean about the "people more interested in more aspects of the game". You completely lost me there. Are you talking about modding? Because honestly I find the lamest, crappiest mods are the ones designed around competition.

Finally, you said it invigorates a game's community. Wow. Full stop. Abort abort abort! I've never seen this, or anything close to this. In fact, it's far easier to say that competitive gaming FRACTURES a community.

Call it generalizing, I really don't care, but I've decided over about ten years of online gaming that the 'competitive scene' is really just a euphemism. While yes, there are exceptions, by and large every experience I've had, and this comes from both as a player, community member, server admin, and server owner, in various games, that the competitive playerbase is the most obnoxious, self-centered, elitist, annoying, immature handful of social rejects I've seen. Be it from 'justifying' their opinions because they're in a clan and I'm just a 'scrub', trying to claim they can do whatever they want because they're "CAL-P" (whatever the fuck that means - I just know the A means Amateur which means dick-all to me), and other nonsense. It would get to a point in some games where I'd ban a player for being a douchefuck, and his tag-wearing retard friends would swarm the server trying to crash it, trying to ruin it with cheats, whatever (and my banlist got a little longer).

Furthermore, I have a real example. This might get a little wordy... Tribes 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. I believe it's one of the most underrated, best MPFPS games ever made. I played and enjoyed Tribes 1, but Tribes 2 really took FPS gaming to the next level. The game was a decade ahead of its time.

When Tribes 2 came out, all the Tribes 1 vets migrated over. Emphasis on 'vets', as the competitive scene for Tribes 1 was pretty big. Immediately they started bitching, to the point where Sierra shut down the in-game forums. The game was too slow. They changed this weapon. They didn't have this map. The bombers were 'unskilled'. The grenade launcher was 'noob'. Whatever. The whining was non-stop.

After some time, someone had the brilliant idea to make a mod for T2 that made it more like 'Tribes 1', and was thusforth dubbed as a competitive mod. It made the game faster, twitchier, and really chopped a lot of what made T2 what it was right out. Let's call it Base++.

However, not all the Tribes 1 boobs who were all angry because Tribes 2 wasn't just a copy-paste of Tribes 1 were happy with Base++. So Dynamix officially released an unofficial mod simply titled 'Classic'. There was also a second iteration of base++ around that point as well.

So now the game was fractured. On top of all the major mods like Shifter, TAC, Meltdown, ConsMod, and GTW, we had three or four 'base' games to play. Whatever flavor you liked had fewer players than the game as whole had at the beginning. New players could join, check the server list, and see 45 servers, each running a different game. The playerbase dwindled and died and now only a few hardcores still play.

I've never seen competitive gaming as anything other than a source of strife, conflict, and noise, and I could really do without any of it. The only exception one could make would be saying that competitive gaming 'keeps games alive longer', but again, that's not the case. Starcraft is still popular, but there were a lot of reasons for that that a lot of people forget or don't mention. Starcraft is not the norm, at any rate, and it should never be used as a justification, because frankly, no game, competitive scene or no, will ever be as big as Starcraft.

As I mentioned Tribes 2, and you brought up re-releasing, there's something I think more publishers should do with 'good' games.

Go in, update the engine to take advantage of new hardware, make sure it *RUNS* on newer hardware, pretty up the graphics, dust off old bugs, add in new features, and re-release that sucker. Imagine if Bioware did that with Baldur's Gate 2.

I wonder where these ideas came from eh?

I think the idea of a persistent multiplayer universe would be a good idea. However, I think that the tools to allow this should be put out to the player base and the players left to set up campaigns etc; particularly given some of the mods and intended multiplayer campaign systems being developed for them.

I would have no probs paying for such client and server tools, and officially backed campaigns with monthly prizes would be a great idea, but only in addition to the tools being put into the hands of the player base.

Im really against the idea of subscription.It has been bad enough for those non credit card owners to get the game and the subscription will just make it worse for us.

I still prefer the traditional expansion method.