I didn’t think much about it when Team Fortress 2 became free to play (especially with all the other crap that’s happened to the game already), but I think F2P is the single most damaging thing to happen to the game. Worse than weapon unlocks and hats.
1. The majority of servers are full of F2P players who are terrible at the game. At first I was thrilled to stomp them all into the ground and go entire rounds without dying once. It’s kind of getting old though. Even when I’m off my game they still can’t do anything about it. When you don’t even have to dodge enemy fire, battles are about as interesting as Call of Duty, where all you do is point and shoot while standing still to get kills.
2. Being on a team of F2P players is frustrating. When you spend money on a game, you usually invest some effort into learning the basics. F2P players don’t seem to do this. Teams are full of Medics who don’t heal their teammates (even though their offensive weapons suck, and healing eventually gives you an invulnerability charge), Snipers who run around with their SMG (a crappy, last-resort weapon to fight off ambushes), Spies who don’t know wtf they’re doing (back in the day I sucked at Spy until I watched one Youtube video that explained his gameplay), Scouts who think their melee weapon is good (it’s terrible), and overall, players who overextend into enemy fire all the time and get themselves killed.
3. Valve Anti-Cheat is completely useless now! VAC uses delayed bans to confuse players about which cheats/hacks got them banned. Fair enough. They still have to pay for a new copy of the game on a new Steam account to play again… except now their new copy is free. So in a few weeks when their free copy is banned from secure servers, they just fire up a new Steam account and grief servers again for free. Way to go Valve, you idiots.
4. Updates to the game now take longer to download because all the free players download them too, even ones that probably don’t play anymore but haven’t uninstalled it yet.
This is why having to pay to play a game is good. All the participants tend to value the game more when it actually cost them something. When nobody values the game they are playing, this is what happens.
Funny thing though: soon after F2P was implemented, someone created a server plugin to automatically kick F2P players. I haven’t found one of these servers yet, but I hope to soon! It’s apparently the number one reason to upgrade to a premium account. That’s right, nobody gives a shit about being able to trade and get hat drops and hold more items. The players themselves had to create a good reason to pay for the game.
You make a great point in how Free 2 Play is incompatible with multiplayer games. When the game has no value, the customers will not value other participants. Video games depend highly on multiplayer ‘societies’ where bad behavior could ban them.
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