Making the Automatch Free-to-play?

I was just peeing and i became the idea after reading a lot of the hatethreads here, why not make the Autonmatch f2p?
I know, i know, but hear me out.

People want a bigger playerbase, and the way the game has gone it takes a lot of ideas from games like League of Legends or Dota ( exp, the commander rotation, which has been taken out again ).
Thing is, i doubt anybody would be sad if they made the Automatch system F2P, and implemented the commander rotation again, and then let the players come. If they want special commanders, they can buy it, and all the other singleplayerstuff can also be sold.
This way Relic would make more money than they are doing currently, with sales which are slowing down, and we gamers will have a bigger playerbase.
This is just a quick brainstorm, and i really like to hear your opinion in this matter

Best regards
Winterfeld

Relic will not think about it until it's too late. Relic have changed since vcoh. Im sure a lot of changes need to be done in relic team.

+ making it f2p would be not fair against thoose who paid for game.

+ making it f2p would be not fair against thoose who paid for game.

But couldnt they compensate people for it? :/ like giving them some free stuff? After all, the people who already have bought it dont loose anything...
But yeah, i guess a lot of people would bitch about it!

coho was f2p and it totally bombed (financially) so they probably won't do that.

Could make it free-to-play with the ability to unlock the ToV units. But I don't think they really want to encourage people to keep playing vCoH when their entire CoH2 business model revolves around microtransactions.

Could make it free-to-play with the ability to unlock the ToV units. But I don't think they really want to encourage people to keep playing vCoH when their entire CoH2 business model revolves around microtransactions.

Fuck, wrong room. This is meant for the CoH 2 room, not the first one Can someone move it? I am very sorry!

rip

Not a bad idea... they could sell a lot more commanders.

There are people who spend about 200 Euros. What free stuff would compensate them? A new graphic card maybe

What they could do is make coh2 f2p for like 2 weeks. That would boost player base and money income.

While I agree the future of the series probably is F2P content, I think Relic may struggle with introducing it heavily to the current CoH2 title, especially this far down the line. Also it's nota "quick fix" to the current title. It's a strategy that requires a lot of thought and a long term vision.

For it to work properly and from a fan of the series, I'd say it's probably a more viable option to have completely new title that is basically a heavily expanded version of vCoH, featuring all the factions from vCoH & CoH2 and players getting the option of just 2 basic factions for free and having to pay for every other faction (as well as other content such as commanders/units/bulletins/skins/clan features/face plates and much much more).

It is worth bearing in mind that Relic have previously experimented with an F2P business model with the ill-fated CoHo - while the game was awesome and had a lot of potential, their business model, which is probably what the CoH2 model was based around, just doesn't make it viable and they instead opted to release the retail CoH2 instead.

But for arguments sake, the first major obstacle of incorporating F2P to COH2 is balance - CoH2 is already quite unbalanced, particularly in larger games, which would have to be a major focus for a serious competitive F2P "e-sport". Their bread and butter would be competitive gaming and large clans and teams would be relied heavily on to keep supporting the game with micro-transitions that enabled them to be more competitive. That's not to mention the fact that the much needed additional content making F2P viable, would also need to be balanced and in it's current state it would mean it's more likely to be game breaking content!

Also there's the factor that there's a lot of gamers who have already paid for most or all the content by now, basically anyone who was or is capable of playing, or is likely to enjoy the game has probably already has bought it by now as it's been well over a year since it's retail release and seen countless Steam/key sales during that time. So this means Relic's potential market isn't likely to expand substantially.

For it to do so would mean us, the retail owning community reaching into our pockets for content that we don't already own. For this to happen there would need to be a massive increase in quality non-game breaking, micro-transition available content added. At the same time Relic would need to remain concious of the fact that they need to maintain a balance of free and DLC/Micro-transaction content to prevent those exposed to the F2P content simply just paying the £6 it costs on sale to get the majority of the game content immediate, rather than following the required longer term nickle-and-diming approach of buying the game one commander/unit at a time to provide that steady contribution. This of course is what F2P business models heavily rely on.

The next major obstacle I could see would be the retail-favoured current community. F2P ISNT FREE. F2P means at some point, somewhere down the line, for the game to be successful it relies on large amounts of people regularly putting small contributions into the game. I'm willing to bet there's a massive amount of people playing CoH2 who are probably quite anti-F2P. The fact they bought a retail RTS over the countless F2P ones that are more competitive and obviously FREE would suggest that. Ok yea, it's a specialist game title with a fairly unique WW2 content, but even then I don't believe this is the real reason the majority of people who play Coh2 bought it. At some level I'd say there's a good number of players who bought it to get the game outright. You only have to see how unpopular some of the DLC suggestions made on this forum are to get evidence of this.

Even those who aren't fiercely opposed to F2P/Micro-transaction purchases would probably take exception to a realistic change of direction to F2P as soon as they realised they don't get the new content for free or some sort of "compensations" after buying what they believe to be a full game last year. Or indeed complaining that all these F2P players are getting their game for free when they had to pay for it.

The next issue is, as I touched on earlier in this essay of a post is content it's self. With CoHO (Relic's previous toe-in-the-F2P-Water for the COH series), in order to get people playing the new free title and persuade existing vCoH players to make the switch, Relic were quite generous with what they provided for free. Everything you could buy was also available for free with the war spoils system (or whatever it used to be called) so there wasn't enough to encourage people to buy stuff, and that was with much better content - hero units/bulletins that really had a game changing impact!

How on earth would they expect F2P players to (the same people now who won't pay the £6-£8 for the full game now) to buy the very limited and largely useless commanders and pointless bulletins that are available presently?

As I stated at the start of the post, they would need at least a couple more factions (and then THEY would all need to be balanced too!) as well as a much expanded micros-transaction content such as commanders, bulletins, units. They would have to provide a lot better custom content too, especially for the clans where they could capitalise on their willingness to spend money on clan logos, roster slots, clan matching ladders etc. They may possibly even have to look at ways of limiting competitive game play for free gamers too - e.g. a limit to the amount of auto-matches that can be played daily/weekly or having priority passes for auto matching available - again all things that people don't like to have to buy and I could see going down like a Sh!t sandwich within the existing CoH community!

Even then though, because so many of us have already bought the full retail CoH2 package, they probably wouldn't be able to make it financially viable, not when you consider the costs it would incur to implement a F2P system to the existing game. Expanding servers, adding new content, balancing content, implementing community resources, additional staffing, promotions, events - and that's just the tip of the iceberg!

While it's plausible (and probably the best way for the series to progress for future releases) for Relic to have a CoH F2P game out, I genuinely don't think it could be part of the existing games now, they are just too heavily committed to a full on retail release now ans seem to have a pipe dream of expanding the current game with various DLC mission packs. A F2P game would have had to have been factored in from the start and there's too much evidence to the contrary to believe it has been, any major shit to it now would be a knee jerk reaction or an after thought that would only further disjoint the game.

Starcraft 2 did it with custom games. I don't think it helped them much. But even Blizz tried it. Some kind of limited version could worth a shot.

While I agree the future of the series probably is F2P content, I think Relic may struggle with introducing it heavily to the current CoH2 title, especially this far down the line. Also it's nota "quick fix" to the current title. It's a strategy that requires a lot of thought and a long term vision.

For it to work properly and from a fan of the series, I'd say it's probably a more viable option to have completely new title that is basically a heavily expanded version of vCoH, featuring all the factions from vCoH & CoH2 and players getting the option of just 2 basic factions for free and having to pay for every other faction (as well as other content such as commanders/units/bulletins/skins/clan features/face plates and much much more).

It is worth bearing in mind that Relic have previously experimented with an F2P business model with the ill-fated CoHo - while the game was awesome and had a lot of potential, their business model, which is probably what the CoH2 model was based around, just doesn't make it viable and they instead opted to release the retail CoH2 instead.

But for arguments sake, the first major obstacle of incorporating F2P to COH2 is balance - CoH2 is already quite unbalanced, particularly in larger games, which would have to be a major focus for a serious competitive F2P "e-sport". Their bread and butter would be competitive gaming and large clans and teams would be relied heavily on to keep supporting the game with micro-transitions that enabled them to be more competitive. That's not to mention the fact that the much needed additional content making F2P viable, would also need to be balanced and in it's current state it would mean it's more likely to be game breaking content!

Also there's the factor that there's a lot of gamers who have already paid for most or all the content by now, basically anyone who was or is capable of playing, or is likely to enjoy the game has probably already has bought it by now as it's been well over a year since it's retail release and seen countless Steam/key sales during that time. So this means Relic's potential market isn't likely to expand substantially.

For it to do so would mean us, the retail owning community reaching into our pockets for content that we don't already own. For this to happen there would need to be a massive increase in quality non-game breaking, micro-transition available content added. At the same time Relic would need to remain concious of the fact that they need to maintain a balance of free and DLC/Micro-transaction content to prevent those exposed to the F2P content simply just paying the £6 it costs on sale to get the majority of the game content immediate, rather than following the required longer term nickle-and-diming approach of buying the game one commander/unit at a time to provide that steady contribution. This of course is what F2P business models heavily rely on.

The next major obstacle I could see would be the retail-favoured current community. F2P ISNT FREE. F2P means at some point, somewhere down the line, for the game to be successful it relies on large amounts of people regularly putting small contributions into the game. I'm willing to bet there's a massive amount of people playing CoH2 who are probably quite anti-F2P. The fact they bought a retail RTS over the countless F2P ones that are more competitive and obviously FREE would suggest that. Ok yea, it's a specialist game title with a fairly unique WW2 content, but even then I don't believe this is the real reason the majority of people who play Coh2 bought it. At some level I'd say there's a good number of players who bought it to get the game outright. You only have to see how unpopular some of the DLC suggestions made on this forum are to get evidence of this.

Even those who aren't fiercely opposed to F2P/Micro-transaction purchases would probably take exception to a realistic change of direction to F2P as soon as they realised they don't get the new content for free or some sort of "compensations" after buying what they believe to be a full game last year. Or indeed complaining that all these F2P players are getting their game for free when they had to pay for it.

The next issue is, as I touched on earlier in this essay of a post is content it's self. With CoHO (Relic's previous toe-in-the-F2P-Water for the COH series), in order to get people playing the new free title and persuade existing vCoH players to make the switch, Relic were quite generous with what they provided for free. Everything you could buy was also available for free with the war spoils system (or whatever it used to be called) so there wasn't enough to encourage people to buy stuff, and that was with much better content - hero units/bulletins that really had a game changing impact!

How on earth would they expect F2P players to (the same people now who won't pay the £6-£8 for the full game now) to buy the very limited and largely useless commanders and pointless bulletins that are available presently?

As I stated at the start of the post, they would need at least a couple more factions (and then THEY would all need to be balanced too!) as well as a much expanded micros-transaction content such as commanders, bulletins, units. They would have to provide a lot better custom content too, especially for the clans where they could capitalise on their willingness to spend money on clan logos, roster slots, clan matching ladders etc. They may possibly even have to look at ways of limiting competitive game play for free gamers too - e.g. a limit to the amount of auto-matches that can be played daily/weekly or having priority passes for auto matching available - again all things that people don't like to have to buy and I could see going down like a Sh!t sandwich within the existing CoH community!

Even then though, because so many of us have already bought the full retail CoH2 package, they probably wouldn't be able to make it financially viable, not when you consider the costs it would incur to implement a F2P system to the existing game. Expanding servers, adding new content, balancing content, implementing community resources, additional staffing, promotions, events - and that's just the tip of the iceberg!

While it's plausible (and probably the best way for the series to progress for future releases) for Relic to have a CoH F2P game out, I genuinely don't think it could be part of the existing games now, they are just too heavily committed to a full on retail release now ans seem to have a pipe dream of expanding the current game with various DLC mission packs. A F2P game would have had to have been factored in from the start and there's too much evidence to the contrary to believe it has been, any major shit to it now would be a knee jerk reaction or an after thought that would only further disjoint the game.

What else is there to say?

That was an amazing "Essay of a Post"
The only thing i have to add is that you say everyone who would use money on it already has bought it. A lot of people dont want to buy a game, unless they know what its about, even if its only a few Euros. I have experienced that in my group of friends as well.
The F2P will bring new players, who will get hooked on the Automatch, like we all are, and then spent money to make the game easier for them. This is the new playerbase we should be interested in!

It wouldn't surprise me, with the things they've put into CoH2, like War Spoils and DLC Commanders it seems like it's a viable option down the line.

I get the feeling that War Spoils will become purchasable or trade-able and they could even make the F2P version only allow you to play 2 of the four factions each week/month or something on a cycle. If you paid for the original or WFA you can play with whatever you already own and with whatever commanders you have at any time. Everyone else gets a cycle like they did with the commanders per week.

I could see it working, and I wouldn't mind it even though I bought the game and OKW faction. It would increase the playerbase and I got a long run of gaming out of it before going F2P. It wouldn't be the first game to go F2P after being retail either.

Maybe enable the buddy sistem, just like on Starcraft 2.

If your buddy has the full game, you can join him on team games and play with vanila armies, like soviets and ostheer.

If he likes the game he will purchase it, getting access to the campaign and all ToWs.

If you get caught hacking or exploiting, your buddy with the full game would be responsible for you, so it avoids people creating fake accounts to test hack tools.

It looks like a very good idea, free multiplayer for everyone with War Spoils

It would be worth for Relic....

nope i don't think this is actually a good idea. given that i hate what happens to f2p game and there commuinities.

If we back up some 10-15 many years ago, int the late 90s it wasn't too uncommon to have get demos of games that in essence were the full game but you would only be able to play them for a set amount of time.

Was thinking of this as just a way to get new players to the series. Maybe combined with Showtaros idea of the Buddysystem.

You can get your non-coh2 playing friends to try the basic game for 4-5 hours and then they'll have a fair chance to decide if it is worth the purchace or not.

CoH2 really needs more players for auto-match, this is very true. Mismatches are common, I'd say maybe half or less of my 2v2 matches will be a fully even match in terms of skill level accross all 4 players. Its also apparent in 1v1 where a poor newbie will be matched with a top 10 player.

Going F2P would be awesome from a player perspective. More players, more activity, less mismatches (eventually when newcomers learn the game). Comprises would have to be made though. Maybe if they made a tonne of new skins and finally decided rainbow or chrome tanks were allowed in the game it could be profitable. Some other money sink besides commanders which people who bought the game are already buying anyway. Go the Valve route and let the community design their own skins, popular skins get voted by the players and approved by Relic, creators get paid for sales.

Personally I'd love some silly skins on tanks, I'd probably buy a pink heavy tank skin. Provide an option for people who are not into that to be able to disable those skins if they wanted. Going F2P wouldn't instantly bring in 10-20k new players (or maybe it will), but as Relic eventually fix the game and the $18k ESL tournaments bring some attention to the game, things would definitely start to ramp up. Doesn't hurt for Relic to ask (pay?) people like Day9 or other big casters in the other RTS/Moba scenes to do some coverage either.

I agree on almost everything that has been stated, but what we can see from all this is that we need some way to attract new players, and games like Dota and LoL have proven that this is easiest to do when you give them something free, not a lot, just something that gets them excited. This is even more important if we want the game to survive in the E-Sports world!
Making the Automatch F2P is a good idea, since the sales probably wont go very much up anymore, and we can get new players, and more money in for Relic! This is practically win-win, both for Relic and the Playerbase ATM!
Of course, if it fails, then we are screwed xD