I dont agree with having to pay to play online.

[ciproxr]

I dont agree with paying to play a game online ......Theres no reason for it.

Look at battlefield , some manny people have their own servers that you can play on.....i cant see how its that much different than WOW, i mean how much more bandwidth could wow consume ? Theres always people will lots of spare bandwidth that are willing to host servers, or people that would relly on donations alone, that way who ever can afford to donates....Look at all the bittorent sites that rely on donations for dedicated servers......

anyone who sais paying to play wow online is the only way dosent know what hes talking about , theres always ways around things.....your trying to tell me their not making any money off the monthly fee ? its only to maintain servers ? bullsh!t.........

there are tons of free WOW servers you can play on , and as a matter of fact i have played on a few of them for short while.....of course there is a possibility that your character might be lost do to the server going down but hey for free is worth it......most of the time the servers are perfectly stable, I would even post a link to 100's of free servers if anandtech supported warez

Prices are getting higher and higher but our jobs arent giving us raises.....Do you guys honestly believe most people who could afford to pay would choose to pirate something ?

If i told u guys how much I make you would probably laugh ......

Paying for a cellphone , cable, internet, car payment or a gas bill is not the same as paying to play a game online......

So if someone is less fortunate and cant afford to pay to play i guess that just too bad huh ? let me guess, life isnt fair, well you're right life isnt fair thats why people "unfairly" pirate software and games......

please excuse my typos....

 

[Noema]

I don't mean to sound like a Blizzard fanboy but...

It's not only the bandwidth, but it is a factor as well. With over 5 million costumers world wide that's some serious pipeline they have to keep up. I doubt those emulated servers host as many people as the Blizzard ones. And even if they do, who is monitoring for hacks? Who is being paid around the clock to see that the servers are working fine? A lot of people like that kind of certainty and that's why they pay.

Blizzard has to recover the cost from the new servers. They are not cheap, and they open at least 5 or 6 new ones per month.

MMO's are in ongoing development. WoW has been subject to 10 major patches now (1.10 was released this tuesday). The game has changed substantially and new content is added constantly. So a lot of those monthly fees go into that. 'Free' games like Guild Wars charge for patches and upgrades. So it ends up being the same thing.

Why is paying for your ISP or your cellphone any different? You seem a bit too biased toward simply not wanting to pay and apparently hold a double standard. If you can't afford to pay to get something as trivial as $15 per month to play an online game, I think you should start looking for ways to improve your quality of life instead of trying to justify blatant piracy.

ALSO: A game like WoW is mind-blowingly massive, much, much more than any single player game you could think of. It had very high development costs and it was under development for over 5 years. That also has to be absorbed by subscription fees.

And believe it or not, WoW has actually SAVED me money.

An single player game yields around 30-40 hours of gameplay, tops. More often than not, they are 10 hour experiences with little to no replay value.

I've played WoW for over a year now. I've devoted over 350 hours to it. I figure I must have spent around $200 bucks on it, including the actual game and the monthly fees.

$200 buy roughly 4 single player games. If each gives me 15 hours of play, that's 60 hours. WoW has given me much more, and I haven't bought single player games since I play WoW as WoW has all my gaming needs covered.

 

[Fenixgoon]

bandwidth - expensive when you have millions playing
servers- dear sweet jebus... $$$$$
support - paying both tech support and patch coders... $$$$
finally - profit... a game's purpose is to make money, they aren't trying to break even, WoW is meant to generate profit

 

[Bulldog13]

NM : Thought this was OT.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: Bulldog13
NM : Thought this was OT.

It actually made me laugh

:laugh:

 

[JujuFish]

Even the BF servers have to be paid for by someone.

However, I do think MMORPGs should be cheaper.

 

[ciproxr]

Noema you did raise some good points but i still believe there are ways to make everyone happy....

Also finding ways to improve your quality of life is not always that easy, if it was no one would be poor.......

but i do appreciatte your honest and well thought input.

 

[ciproxr]

Originally posted by: JujuFish
Even the BF servers have to be paid for by someone.

Im not arguing that , people who can afford to, run their own server and people who cant afford to, play on other peoples servers without being charged.

I do believe that if people want to pay for a more maintained and stable server they should be able to , but i also believe their should be free servers......Free WOW servers should not be illegal....

Whatever happened to having fun ? why does everything always have to be about money ?

Correct me if im wrong guys but i just dont get it , feel free to enlighten me

 

[CKent]

Don't pay then, problem solved.

In the meanwhile, I'll continue to enjoy the rich, immersive, persistent world a nominal monthly fee buys, which can't be replicated in any way. I'll continue to pay for it with a fraction of the money I save by not having a cable bill. Not being able to watch people eating slugs is something I can live with.

 

[nageov3t]

if you've ever played on a private server, you'd see pretty quickly how much they suck.

glitches run rampant because there's no one maintaining the servers 24/7, the servers themselves are generally crap (ie: someone P3 box hosted from their basement), and the game is boring as hell because there's no more than a dozen people on the entire server to interact with.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: RBachman
Don't pay then, problem solved.

In the meanwhile, I'll continue to enjoy the rich, immersive, persistent world a nominal monthly fee buys, which can't be replicated in any way. I'll continue to pay for it with a fraction of the money I save by not having a cable bill. Not being able to watch people eating slugs is something I can live with.

Nicely said.

WoW>>>>many, many things that cost more than $15 per month.

WoW is actually quite cheap. About $0.50 per day. Even cheaper if you buy 2, 3 or 6 month packages.

 

[erikistired]

you can't compare bf2 to wow. it's been done with other games in the past, and you can't make that comparison. it's a completely different game. there's no ongoing storyline with bf2. you jump on, shoot some people, log off. collecting badges and medals isn't the same as leveling up.

if you don't want to pay, try guild wars.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Paying for a cable bill is not the same as paying to play a game online

You are right, Cable TV is far more expensive than paying $12 for an MMO. Cable TV also does not offer the same degree of social interaction or fun (IMO).

 

[notfred]

Then don't pay to play online. Oblivion is single player, go play that instead.

 

[Chompman]

Free WOW servers should not be illegal....

So you think you should get this free?

This is the same as DL games, mp3's, movies, and software.

Not only do the servers suck but alot of people have had WoW after them for hosting and for playing on these illegal servers.

Much cheaper paying the montly fee then paying a few grand in fines and have a record with the police.

And it's worth it, look at much fun Diablo 1 and 2 was the first few weeks until they became cheat fests and patches took months if not years.

Like many people have said, if you don't like it don't play it.

You can't compare a free BF2 server that 20 ppl are on to what Blizzard has.

 

[nageov3t]

my understanding was that it isn't so much the servers in and of themselves that are illegeal, but rather, the fact that the only way to get them to work requires reverse engineering the blizzard server-side code.

 

[Chompman]

Originally posted by: loki8481
my understanding was that it isn't so much the servers in and of themselves that are illegeal, but rather, the fact that the only way to get them to work requires reverse engineering the blizzard server-side code.

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/Chompman/tou.jpg

Also check out this link:

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/02/21/1344204

What these do is breaks the " Digital Millennium Copyright Act".

Like you said that the "reverse engineering the blizzard server-side code" is mostly what they go after they have gotten quite a few people playing on the servers once the said servers were taken into custody.

 

[Zugzwang152]

It's almost sad the OP has no grounding in reality whatsoever.

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

you're a fool then.

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: notfred
Then don't pay to play online. Oblivion is single player, go play that instead.

Word.
Or FF7.
I think I racked up 100 hours or so in FF7 in my one play through.
I'm heading for 50 odd so far in Oblivion with a lot left I can do I think.

 

[Fingolfin269]

Come back with facts and then make your statement. You can't make an argument by saying 'I feel and I don't think' and expect people to agree with you if you don't provide facts to back up your assertions.

By the way, you don't HAVE to pay for anything. Don't buy the game.

 

[skace]

You are comparing an FPS to an MMORPG.

FPS servers cost money. The only ones that stay up for significant portions of time are run by guilds who split the cost across their entire group, by the companies trying to sell more game servers (ie: wolfservers), by the actual developer itself trying to keep their game afloat, or the ones run off some unknowing companies idle servers by an overzealous admin. Just because you are a leech on the system does not mean someone isn't footing the bill for you. You are the same guy who leeches off BT and then bitches when there aren't any seeds.

FPS servers do not need to store and maintain data. Although BF2 does have an account server, it handles very little actual data. They don't need to populate a mob's loot table or what an NPC vendor is selling. They don't need to protect against item duplication, make sure the items on an auction house are legit, or worry about restoring a character who just lost everything.

FPS servers do not handle thousands of people. MMORPG servers are complex clustered environments that are required to load balance a world that holds thousands of people. FPS servers are often any spare piece of hardware lying around running linux. The obvious architecture differences here alone mean massive differences in cost.

FPS servers do not have GMs. You cannot petition in BF2 for a GM to appear and fix everything wrong in the world. You probably can't even get a delayed response from Dice a week after whatever went wrong had occured.

FPS servers require far less bandwidth. When you go from serving 64 people to serving 6000, bandwidth prices jump a bit. Especially when you increase how much data is being sent. Have you ever seen a small website link a really funny video, get 2 million hits and then have to shut down because they can't even afford the bill their ISP just sent them? Ok, then maybe it is sinking in, incase you missed it I'll say it again, bandwidth is expensive (and I wish that weren't the case).

 

[Maximilian]

As much as i agree, i have to admit, i just simply dont wanna pay for anything other than an internet connection but WoW is definately a fantastic game. I rank it right up there with diablo II pre 1.10. Its probably worth the money.

As for the free servers.... Well, running into another person on them would be a massive milestone and people might go crazy by themselves in the woods for so long... never good. The blizzard servers are far more populated.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: skace
You are comparing an FPS to an MMORPG.

FPS servers cost money. The only ones that stay up for significant portions of time are run by guilds who split the cost across their entire group, by the companies trying to sell more game servers (ie: wolfservers), by the actual developer itself trying to keep their game afloat, or the ones run off some unknowing companies idle servers by an overzealous admin. Just because you are a leech on the system does not mean someone isn't footing the bill for you. You are the same guy who leeches off BT and then bitches when there aren't any seeds.

FPS servers do not need to store and maintain data. Although BF2 does have an account server, it handles very little actual data. They don't need to populate a mob's loot table or what an NPC vendor is selling. They don't need to protect against item duplication, make sure the items on an auction house are legit, or worry about restoring a character who just lost everything.

FPS servers do not handle thousands of people. MMORPG servers are complex clustered environments that are required to load balance a world that holds thousands of people. FPS servers are often any spare piece of hardware lying around running linux. The obvious architecture differences here alone mean massive differences in cost.

FPS servers do not have GMs. You cannot petition in BF2 for a GM to appear and fix everything wrong in the world. You probably can't even get a delayed response from Dice a week after whatever went wrong had occured.

FPS servers require far less bandwidth. When you go from serving 64 people to serving 6000, bandwidth prices jump a bit. Especially when you increase how much data is being sent. Have you ever seen a small website link a really funny video, get 2 million hits and then have to shut down because they can't even afford the bill their ISP just sent them? Ok, then maybe it is sinking in, incase you missed it I'll say it again, bandwidth is expensive (and I wish that weren't the case).

Great post, said it much better than what I could have said myself.

The OP is probably too much a numbskull to get any of it however.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: ciproxr


Im not arguing that , people who can afford to, run their own server and people who cant afford to, play on other peoples servers without being charged.

I do believe that if people want to pay for a more maintained and stable server they should be able to , but i also believe their should be free servers......Free WOW servers should not be illegal....

Whatever happened to having fun ? why does everything always have to be about money ?

Correct me if im wrong guys but i just dont get it , feel free to enlighten me

how about YOU working for free.

and you are correct - you just don't get it

Fine . . . but don't try your BS justification of theft based on your "poverty" . . . clearly you have a nice computer and broadband - or do you think they should be free also?

Perhaps you should truy "saving money" by not paying your Income tax.
:roll:

If you don't want to pay, find a free game . . . or perhaps try Oblivion . . . looks like 200 hours of gameplay for $40 . . . and mods and Xpacks cpuld keep you playing cheaply for a year or more.