Newsletter Discussion: Free-to-Play Quality?

In the world of MMOs, there are standard subscription games, and there are the free-to-plays - which have a reputation for poor quality that's not always undeserved. This week, we'd like to know:

Can free-to-play MMOs ever be of the same quality than big-budget subscription games?

Share your thoughts with us and post in the discussion thread!

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I think some of the recent Asian offerings compare favorably to the P2P MMOs.

Games like Atlantica Online, Flyff and many others have high production value.

I've played a lot of MMOs and i've never played a free one as good as a subscription based one.

That includes flyff and atlantica. As a general rule they're aimed specifically at the asian market, usually being ported shoddily to western gamers. Huge grinds do not make a good game.

Ive tried quite a few of the F2P Games over the years, and liked none of them really. They are usually buggy, have poor translation, are grindy, and have poor gameplay (in my opinion).

Then I tried Runes of Magic. It's got a few bugs here and there (technically still in beta I believe), but overall its pretty smooth, and I've only seen one or two translation errors. It's not grindy at all (at least at the level I'm at), and the gameplay is far more similar to the big western MMOs.

It's the first F2P that I've gotten past level 10 in before deleting it. And I'm still playing it :)

Id say its got pretty high production values, and they are patching and adding things to it as often as a pay-MMO, if not more often.

While P2P tends to provide more immersion and overall better gameplay, F2P can explore more creative ideas as most MMORPGs are costly and most developers would rather have average game with good steady money rather than having an uncertain hit/flop game.