Making the Automatch Free-to-play?

If you don't want to make your F2P game Pay-to-win. You must monetize things that aren't gamebreaking.

-skins and Audios
-Personal tags
-New Commanders (according they aren't OP when release)
-Virtual Money to use/recharge some abilities. This money can also be earn from playing.

The main issue with Coh2 in particular is the asymmetrical balance and factions locked.
It is way easier to balance a game if you have a perfect symmetrical balance and all factions can fight each others.

Let's imagine you replace AMMO with that money. In the current meta, factions using a lot AMMO to fight would be disadvantaged with other, like USF strongly disadvantaged and Soviet strongly advantaged.

If you don't want to make your F2P game Pay-to-win. You must monetize things that aren't gamebreaking.

-skins and Audios
-Personal tags
-New Commanders (according they aren't OP when release)
-Virtual Money to use/recharge some abilities. This money can also be earn from playing.

The main issue with Coh2 in particular is the asymmetrical balance and factions locked.
It is way easier to balance a game if you have a perfect symmetrical balance and all factions can fight each others.

Let's imagine you replace AMMO with that money. In the current meta, factions using a lot AMMO to fight would be disadvantaged with other, like USF strongly disadvantaged and Soviet strongly advantaged.

But why make it THAT MUCH moneydependent. The sales of Commanders alone should give a good plus if alone 10.000 new players buy 1 of them ( price is right now 3 euro ).
Locking factions is risky, look at games like dota which only lives through sells of skins, or lol, who sells the characters, but has the "rotation" system, which we could reimplement in CoH

^That's what I was thinking. I would have the factions and commanders on 'Rotation' on a weekly or monthly basis. They already did this not so long ago with the premium commanders, don't see why they couldn't do similar with F2P model.

As for what to monetise, I would think they can stick to what they currently have, commanders and factions need to be paid for to unlock to use at will rather than on rotation.

I feel like they could monetise bulletins, faceplates and skins more than currently as well, so you can 'win the lotto' by getting them in war spoils or just choose the ones you want and pay for them.

But why make it THAT MUCH moneydependent. The sales of Commanders alone should give a good plus if alone 10.000 new players buy 1 of them ( price is right now 3 euro ).
Locking factions is risky, look at games like dota which only lives through sells of skins, or lol, who sells the characters, but has the "rotation" system, which we could reimplement in CoH

Woot 30 000 euros for 1 shot. You'll need to sell 3 commanders per month per player at this rate to be economically viable.
Dota2 isn't the best example because that game is more visual - mechanics are always the same and all characters is independant from faction - so it is easy to tune, Thunder war is maybe the closer if we say 1 special plane = 1 commander.
So you need to monetize some game aspect, to maintain your army and use some specific abilities.
Or you need to make different version of each unit - but with the same stats. So you can sell those different skins and the painting.
But I think you need to make sure you've got a 5-7 euros investment per player. Maybe an subscription of 5-7 euros - what is called "Premium account", So you access to everthing with few limitation. And people not willing to pay have more of them.

^That's what I was thinking. I would have the factions and commanders on 'Rotation' on a weekly or monthly basis. They already did this not so long ago with the premium commanders, don't see why they couldn't do similar with F2P model.

As for what to monetize, I would think they can stick to what they currently have, commanders and factions need to be paid for to unlock to use at will rather than on rotation.

I feel like they could monetise bulletins, faceplates and skins more than currently as well, so you can 'win the lotto' by getting them in war spoils or just choose the ones you want and pay for them.

Faceplates... I don't know how people can love it. It's just so useless, not even visible in game.

No.

You don't give out free pizza offering only paid extra cheese or other optional ingredients.

You either force people to get the ingredients or simply sell normal pizza and offer optional ingredients for additional fee.

Same with CoH2. Quality of service is a whole another story and if that will improve to acceptable level, so will improve player numbers.

I think this Topic should be revived.
We have undergone a lot of change in the last few months, and i think a lot of people fear that Relic is stopping developement on the game, or at least downsizing it.
What are your opinions on making MP F2P? It could make CoH2 viable once again.

I am all for making COH2 F2P and I see this as a necessary step towards COH2 involving into an esport. CoH2 has great potential and for all the bugs and balance issues we are not far off fixing most of them.

What COH2 seriously lacks is popularity due to the fact that the brand manager is none existent and the marketing for the game sucked. If Relic decided to make COH2 F2P and went on an advertisement campaign to let the world know of the game's great potential I'm sure thousands would flood in. It's not like SEGA is struggling for money right now, I'm sure they could risk a venture like this.

It's not like SEGA is struggling for money right now, I'm sure they could risk a venture like this.

ahem, http://metro.co.uk/2015/01/30/sega-of-american-downsizes-120-jobs-at-risk-5042165/

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.

Its not just custom games. Terran is free to play on a limited map pool.

I have stated my humble opinion before. It MIGHT be a good thing for CoH2 if done right. Transferring to F2P without becoming P2W is very hard, developers become greedy and the game will become FUBAR.

There are a lot of things to talk about, and some have been talked about on this thread. One of the major issues regarding the community is "What about the people who paid for the game"??

The answer is simple:
-You have spend a lot of good time with the game.
-They will make it up to you, just like Valve did. A lot of content based on how much you have spent on the game.
-Which one do you prefer: Your game dies after a few years, or it lives for many years with constant updates and support for many years?

PS: It's not about the game becoming F2P, it's about "How are they gonna do it?" Make it P2W? Or polish the game and release new content?

I sincerely consider F2P as the last hope for this game. The problem is it hasn't been designed for that at the beginning and requires a lot of change in the meta to make it viable.

Viable means economically viable.

Like any other Free to play, gamer designers have two options, or making it more or less Pay to Win or Pay for cosmetics.

Valve, with its large player base and graphics available in game has done a great job with TF2 and Dota2 but I'm not sure Relic can do the same. Because in those games it is far easier to implement cosmetics, those games doesn't need to be realistic, they can pain their characters in the pink if they want and I'm not really sure it is possible for Coh2. they can do event for christmas, halloween or whatelse if they want, that's just going the make the game funniest or with some minor change in rules etc...
In Coh2 you can probably design 2 or 3 type of armor skins but not more and it would become really redundant. Assimetrical balance make any change in rules completely impossible.

So they probably need to design a kind of P2W version of Coh2 to make it viable. A good way to do that is probably to design a dedicated money to use specific abilities or call-in.

two options (can be mixed)
1- A money to replace munitions, so any time you want to use a special ability, you use that money and when you run out of money, you pay. You can also play without using any abilities but it clearly more difficult. of course you still need to cap territories to make the money available during the match, but when you run out of money in your account, you don't have it anymore in match.
2- A money to pay for any commander's ability. So you want a reco, you pay, you want a call-in tank, you pay etc... (same idea as 1-)

The problem with the actual design that not all factions are equal facing abilities or commanders abilities consumption.

Not a bad idea but I feel like the free weekends already introduce a lot of people to the product.

going f2p would require them to have an increase in content so they can keep the revenue going but it would be interesting to see.

Coho seemed to bomb because no one knew about it I feel like.

Not a bad idea but I feel like the free weekends already introduce a lot of people to the product.

going f2p would require them to have an increase in content so they can keep the revenue going but it would be interesting to see.

Coho seemed to bomb because no one knew about it I feel like.

Relic suck at marketing we all know that... I'm vCoH player and I wasn't aware of COHO until it was canceled.

Are we really going to waste time discussing coh2 going f2p?
Why would any fan say no to that? What kind of discussion are we gonna have?
And it's never going to happen, why would Relic even consider that?
Seriously guys, stop being so naive with this kind of ideas or endlessly comparing coh2 to LoL or Dota, jeez.
This game just needs some love from Relic and it will possibly, slowly gain a better following (staring from the players it lost along the way and the vcoh oldtimers), that's the only practical discussion you can have.

I think the problem here is people are asking the wrong question.

Its not "Will Relic make the game F2P?"

Its more so "Does anybody actually want it?"

They've had several free weekends and very little traction - people basically don't like the game and don't want it, even if it is "Free".

People play it when it's free, the game has around 7000 players on average and that number spikes to around 20000 during free weekends. People just don't like the game enough to buy it afterwards.

I will be surprised if the base game doesn't become free-to-play eventually. Unfortunately, CoH2's economy is so shit that I don't see Relic making enough money off of commanders right now to be able to justify doing it.

I think the problem here is people are asking the wrong question.

Its not "Will Relic make the game F2P?"

Its more so "Does anybody actually want it?"

They've had several free weekends and very little traction - people basically don't like the game and don't want it, even if it is "Free".

Actually, there are always huge spikes in population during F2P weekends, so people do want to play it, but in current era of "pay 50eur for AAA title that require 30gb of patching, because it was released as alpha" and coh2 being... coh2 its no wonder no one buys it.

I mean, would you buy a product that even publisher and developer completely refuse to advertise?

20k?

Whenever those weekends were on I'd say the max I saw was 10-12k.

Then again, depends on the time of day.

Still - even when free thats not a large amount of players when you compare to other Steam titles.

ahem, http://metro.co.uk/2015/01/30/sega-of-american-downsizes-120-jobs-at-risk-5042165/

Thats from their sonic dev teams, they said the would focus more on digital pc and mobile platforms E.G Relic, CA, and everyone else

f2p = More players

More Players = Better auto match

= one happy Queen