Tree of Savior Forum

I predict an announcement of iToS dropping F2P within a week and a half

General Discussion
#1

With the removal of regional pricing and the official announcement that IMC intends to use a high price “wall” to keep bots and undesirables out, combined with other the other aggressive anti-bot measures we’ve been seeing rolled out in a matter of weeks, it seems very clear to me that IMC intends to do whatever it takes to stop botting - even sacrificing entire regions of potential players.

I personally applaud this ruthless stance, and the recent activity has reinvigorated my interest in the game and my confidence in my full price USD purchase of Founders 1 - but no one needs to care about my opinion. It isn’t important.

What is important is a question: How will a price wall keep out bots in a F2P game? Doesn’t make much sense, does it? What good is a price wall without a price?

The change is going to take one of two forms:

  • True B2P, with absolutely no access to the game without paying a universal, region-ignoring entry fee that is prohibitively high for most botters, or

  • Trade of all kinds locked behind a wall so high that it effectively disconnects botters from the silver market. Think $20.00 USD to list anything, ever.

I expect the first option, obviously. It’s simpler, and more naturally solves the problem presented by botting because it eliminates their target sales demographic: People who are playing but can’t afford/refuse to pay the normal price of the fully featured game.

6 Likes
#2

I truly expect they turn the game into a B2P mode. It would be AWESOME!

#3

I actually wouldnt mind if they made it B2P. They can keep the tokens too. Or just make it subscription based.

#4

I do miss the p2p (pay to play) games. they filter out so many things/players.

#5

I would seriously pay up to 40 a month for this game. This game will die as a f2p game, but survive as a b2p.

#6

Yeah, I’m starting to think that given the climate of the industry, you can’t have a currency-based trade system in an F2P title. Not anymore, anyway.

I can’t see it working without IMC hiring dozens of full time employees who don’t have any other duty but to stand around and ban bots. So what happens when they succeed in driving away the bot menace? Does IMC fire them all? That doesn’t make any sense and would be financially absurd.

If only there was a business that contracted bot hunters, who operated out of the home as temps. … Did I just hear coins jingle?

1 Like
#7

Sign me up, I’ll be all over that hahaha.

#8

I’m just over here facepalming at all the idiots who think B2P will stop bots. It’ll stop the legit RMT companies but it won’t stop the ones who thrive off stolen credit cards to begin with.

Plus B2P is awful for profit, especially if they try to throw a cash shop in there.

5 Likes
#9

Or;

  1. They postpone the F2P access until their anti-bot system has been perfected. As they mentioned, they keep extensive logs so they can verify botters and are using a machine-learning classifier to detect them. Machine-learning classifiers require a lot of data, so the longer they wait the better they will be at detecting bots. If they postpone F2P long enough, perhaps they will be able to auto-ban 99.9% of bots with few or no false positives by then.
3 Likes
#10

I’m just over here laughing at your narrow field of vision, thinking that somehow because B2P alone doesn’t stop bots, transitioning to B2P would do nothing. Which is easier to deal with? An infinite horde, or one limited by its ability to obtain stolen, working credit card numbers?

The differences between these two groups are extreme. B2P is a major filter, and would make dealing with the ones who do get through via fraud far more manageable.

[quote=“dawnintodark, post:8, topic:205782”]
Plus B2P is awful for profit[/quote]
Says who? You? You’re the authority, on what? What are you going on, with this claim? Your rich Maplestory career?

You’re stuck in the past. Your experience is obsolete. F2P games of this style with monetary economies can’t survive what bots do to modern titles. If you don’t get what I’m saying, it’s because you lack the imagination to visualize what Founder’s launch would have been like if it was an Open Beta with no wipe. The servers would have been destroyed by bots. There would have been nothing at all.

#11

Game is already a niche game, keeping it B2P would be appropriate in my opinion. Keep some of the riff-raff out, and make it hit the bank of botters and gold sellers when they are banned.

#12

Game’s been b2p for the last 3 weeks, it was such bot free enviroment, yeah making game b2p will definitely keep the bots away.

1 Like
#13

You don’t read so good, do ya’, sparky? Maybe want to check the rest of the thread before you try to throw down with the big boys?

#14

I’d be happy if they went P2p actually. It’d keep out a lot of the riff-raff. Nothing big, 8-9$ would be fine so others can afford it. Or even token based but the free is more so just trial til you buy a token.

#15

Give me an example b2p game,hell even a b2p+p2p game. AAA title if you wish w/o bots/gold sellers.I wonder how it works in other games…

Gold sellers exist because people are lazy to grind for themselves, and can’t get access to everything instantly(you check forums people cry with drop rates).If you want to solve the problem, you shouldn’t try to restrict everyone.

Do you know why WoW has so many bots/gold sellers?Because players there can afford its monthly fee+ expansion every year(?), so they must have way more money to throw into games,compared to f2p game playerbases, so for botters the monthly fee or expansions aren’t even a setback.It’s a fcking business with billions of dollars revenue, you can’t block it by making game b2p,you’ll actually encourage it.
As black desert online is region locked for me , I can’t check it for myself but from the things I heard, the newest “the big thing” b2p game also suffers heavly from bots/gold sellers.

#16

You still ain’t reading, pal. I’ll give you a hint on your way back up the thread:

Number of stolen credit cards available for exploitation?
Limited.

Number of bot accounts you can make for f2p?
#Infinity

If you haven’t played in Founders Access’ and seen how bad it got and how big a target this game is for botters already, I’ll forgive your ignorance.

#17

Hm, we already have practically an unlimited horde and yet… yet, look at all the bots! Also implying bots are infinite is hilarious, every MMO that is successful has RMT. Look at Final Fantasy, look at WoW, Guild Wars 2… Need I go on? Sure these aren’t necessarily currency services but they’re still RMT.

B2P isn’t filtering anything right now. You’re very deluded if you think it is.

As for why B2P is awful for profit, simple because you’re not giving free players a chance to get into the game and much less encourage them to use your cash shop. You’re forcing them to pay to get in and then you’re with-holding features that they’d want with paying for game access. Really these services are only successful because it keeps happening to titles that are unique in every way… However the failure of this motto eventually catches up to them. Pretty sure Black Desert Online for example is beginning to lose players due to this failure of a motto.

You’re giving the bots way too much credit the only reason they did as much as damage as they did is the fault of the developers of the game. The net-code was poorly coded and because of that the bots overloaded the no character limit yells which were clogging and holding down the server’s bandwidth. IMC also has stated that the method most other companies use to deal with bots are too primitive for them and are trying to do things their way hence the restrictions and what not.

#18

No, you’re deluded if you think it isn’t. With the regional pricing axed, and the brazilian exploit shut down, the bans are actually, finally beginning to have an effect. Previously, two more would crop up for every one bot banned. It was getting worse and worse, as more and more botters found out how to exploit the above issues. Now things are getting better.

You don’t even seem to understand what I mean by infinity bots. I mean the total absence of any barrier of entry to a would-be botter. Do you understand how barriers of entry have a filtering effect? Do you think all botters have the exact same resources? Do you think there’s an unlimited number of credit cards up for free grabs? There aren’t any credit cards up for free grabs. They pay for them.

Do you have access to the game? I mean, have you been in there and seen the effects of the most recent changes, which are causing the price wall to work? Actually noticed things in action? Or is all of this just flying right out of your ass of a mouth?

As for B2P being awful for profit, I can think of a large list of hugely successful B2P titles I’d call MMOs. If you can’t think of any your brains are broken. I’m not going to debate this bit with you because you’re so far in fantasyland that you might start quoting unicorns.

#19

I still see plenty of bots, sure not in shout chat too much anymore but I’ve still seen SEVERAL bots in various maps as I’m heading for the 90 dungeon or through some of the 100+ maps. I haven’t looked at the lower level areas but in the past they were straight up infested.

Plus, look how long it took them to deal with a known exploit. For a game that wants to charge people to access that’s extremely unprofessional… and hey look another reason Black Desert is starting to fail!

#20

So you’re back to “hey they’re unprofessional therefore don’t deserve money therefore it better be F2P so I don’t have to pay anything”.

Get out of here. You’re exactly the kind of freeb I despise.

Lol @ SEVERAL bots btw. Wow, several! Thank you for the open admission you didn’t even investigate the situation.