I am of two minds when it comes to this, one I think the population of the servers has been less than great, and two, many friends who wouldn’t purchase yet would try it for free will be picking it up.
yet I also can see some negatives on the horizon, I have heard about the influx of cheaters to Gta online when it went free, and I more worry that given the community managers have been fielding auto ? replies on cheating infringements taking longer than usual at current, one does wonder if we are going to be absolutely inundated with cheaters for some time to come.
and the real fear here is it will actually harm the playerbase long term overall, as new players first impression may be cheaters, while old players will be getting hammered by the previously banned.
Perhaps there is a few solutions to this like IP banning, but I am not sure the infrastructure of dealing with cheating infractions is currently strong enough to deal with this inevitable wave.
So do you think this will be overwhelmingly good for the health of the game long term or bad?, perhaps it may stimulate more new map sales if the current version is overloaded with cheaters.
Wider game acceptance is a good thing. Through additional DLC sales it could give a healthy revenue shot in the arm for the game. The concerns about cheaters I can understand, but sadly that’s how free PVP/PVE services go, and isn’t a problem with the game itself; its a problem of the environment.
Like all things, I don’t think it’s entirely positive or negative. Somewhere in between lies the reality. Cheaters tend not to stay that long, so there’s that. In a month, they’ll find a new free game, and head over there.
I play on primarily private servers, and Free Weekends turns into a bit of a clusterfig for those guys. This is sort of “Eternal September”, since those players who get it from Epic will have it for free… forever.
I’m expecting 1x1 boxes all over, daily admin deletions and bans, random murderhobos flocking the newer players and charging higher level players stone-cold naked with a stone pick…
On Officials, I don’t think it will be all that different. All things happen on officials in waves, so you get weeks where the undermeshers, all the rest have come and gone on NA PVP 1590, so we’ll see the guys who raid nightly, try to rob you blind while you’re just getting some brick cooked up, and again, the random murderhobos charging higher level players stone-cold naked with a stone pick…
Right now, I’m probably headed to the private server for a few weeks, as they have active admins who swing the banhammer on pretty much anything which annoys them (including frivolous reporting).
I am very much like you I am seeing the positives and the negatives, my biggest worry is the cheaters on official, I play primarily on officials myself and sure while I can start a new on a long weekend and be endgame pvp ready by monday it really is demoralizing when I have seen in the past the cheaters run through, and its not even really ever effecting me, I can survive cheaters but theres little point in surviving them if the rest of the server just dies.
I very much have welcomed the new policy by funcom on the community guidelines for playing on officials it is the best move they have made imo in the past few years, it is a shame it wasn’t like that from the start, I just am hyper worried that it being so difficult to get effective swift response now on cheaters, what it may be like in a weeks time.
part of the problem is if it takes 2 weeks to respond it benefits nobody, the evidence of the cheating infraction is gone, the server is dead and all the stolen gear is body-vaulted.
Yeah, that’s a problem with officials. There’s really no solution to that, since you need active moderators to handle these guys who swing the banhammer like they’re playing a game of mini-golf.
Cheaters will eventually move on, and the pop generally goes back up. It’s just sort of a natural ebb and flow on officials. It’s not ideal, but I don’t see it being handled anytime soon.
In my opinion conan is tencents and funcoms new horse they use to finance their newest project. They don´t care about balance or the players. All they do is fixing the urgents stuff the game needs to run decent enough so people will not complain and still buy the dlc´s and the new map. Sadly most people are not yet at the point to realize that truth. They ignore the facts, keep buying and hoping that at the end of the day everything will be fine.
Well yes, but that would be really stupid from them in terms of marketing. If the game has poor reviews and discontent from their players, many people that haven’t played it would not even try, even if it’s free. Poor reviews and bad reputation are terrible for business, no matter how much they spend in another game, those ideas stick in the mind of the players and even if they do a decent job in their next titles it’s really difficult to reclaim a good reputation. Sadly, funcom has been fighting against that since the release of age of conan or even before.
For Funcom and Tencent is of great importance to give a better service and i try to believe that’s what they are trying while they have to set the game ready for both platforms, i don’t know how difficult it could be but for what i’m seeing it is indeed difficult for whatever reason.
At this point i don’t really care anymore, i’ve been playing something else while they fix all this mess, i rather wait patiently and have a better result than rush it for poor perfornace as, it seems, has been happening for now.
The coming to the Epic store as a free game for limited time is great for getting new customers that may or may not buy their DLCs. yeah that could bring negative effects as some people has pointed out, but in general i believe it’s good for the game.
What I know from the modding community of MechWarrior 5 (which is EGS exclusive for a bit yet) is that EGS will eventually have its own workshop equivalent.
However its not implemented yet. So CE players on EGS will likely not have access to mods unless they manually install them.