There’s a lot to be said about the rather false belief that “F2P game must be unplayable without payment.”
F2P stuff
Warframe was already mentioned, but one can also mention TF2, LoL, Dota2 as easy off-the-cuff answers. FF14 is not F2P, but their “Free trial” offers incredible quantities of content spanning many months of active and regular gameplay and Eve was mentioned to which I contrast Old School Runescape. In old school runescape 2-3 hours of raiding on saturday/sunday will not only cover your premium time indefinitely, but give you increasing subscription time (in fact, you might get lucky and get 160+ days of subscription on a 0.25% roll every ~10 minutes doing difficult content that has no supply cost beyond your patience and skill.
But that’s kind of off-topic. Let us simply agree on the following:
List of statements
- A competetive, multiplayer game requires players to be present in sufficient quantities to act as content.
- It is possible to play Air Arcade, Air Realistic, Ground Arcade, Ground Realistic, Ground Simulator, Naval Arcade, Naval Realistic all day long exclusively without ever having to play any other mode to support your continued gameplay of that game mode regardless of what tier you are playing as a free to play player. Your rate of progression may be significantly hampered by doing so, but you will never go persistently negative in income unless you literally spawn in, do nothing and j out after 10 or so minutes. Even head-on suiciding into enemy fighters a hundred games in a row with a 10.3 plane will not lose you SL due to repair costs scaling with time alive and even minimal score (glancing shots) will get you positive (barely)
- It is NOT possible to play air simulator with rank IV and above planes on its own as a free to play player without seriously hampering both you AND your opponent’s gameplay (You go for 600-800 score to get 75-86% reward, disengage and circle in orbit around your runway for at least 2 full useful action cycles per spawn).
- Air sim EC is abusable with PvE lobbies, lobby/match fixing, lobby-shopping for easy stomps. Abusers can earn incredible SL and progress, while people actually playing in populated lobbies against near-peers or superior opponents will begin losing SL unless they engage in anti-fun activities
- The ideal competetive multiplayer match is one where near-peers face off against each other in a close battle where the victor is only determined after a long and engaging back-and-forth struggle - stomps are boring for the winner, discouraging for the loser.
- For a game mode to be healthy, it needs a constant new players. New players are less skilled and need to learn. If learning is punished, they will not come.
- The techniques, intuition and reflexes developed for flying World War 2 aircraft is not well-transferrable to early korean and vietnam war aircraft
- Air sim EC is not a constant action, it lacks constant availability of ways to score. Objectives appear randomly, finding players has techniques but also not a guarantee. It’s also possible to rack up 4 kills in 15 minutes contesting an A point, RTB and by the time you’re able to engage an objective again you ended up with an over-satisfied UA cycle and an empty UA cycle
So, with that declared… I was thinking - how can we encourage new players to fly a wide variety of planes, how can we encourage healthy gameplay behaviour that leads to mutual engagement and fun, how can we prevent this system from being abused?
Well, In the F2P stuff I mentioned OS Runescape and thus the idea came to me:
DEATH BANKS
Originally, I thought “What if score rolled over between useful action cycles?” but that’s clearly abusable and would just solve the issue of “People leave lobbies” as getting the full reward requires sitting out multiple UA cycles until the roll-over runs out.
Still, this is one of the biggest issues: It takes 30 minutes of very anti-fun flying to afford 1 respawn (due to initial spawn cost) that hurts both the player and their opponent’s experience and it’d solve that quite well.
How can we avoid it being abused?
It’s simple.
When you gain score, you are REWARDED like you currently are. Logarithmic function with a maximum of 92% at 1050 for 15 minutes’ survival and landing.
However, if you exceed 1050 score in a 15 minute cycle you start being rewarded a “death bank” for individual excess actions. This means you accumulate silver lions you will never earn or otherwise “take home.”
Instead, it’s used to pay for spawning new planes and it has no maximum cap and does not expire within the match.
So! You spawn in. You see an A point. You sneak in through the clouds and dive down skillfully on a train of enemies and get four kills in rapid succession. You are awarded for ~2.5 of those kills (1050 cap), while the overflow fourth kill adds ~5500 silver lions to your death bank at the rank IV/V (and whatever you get for rank VI/VII/VIII planes in ARB for severe damage & kill ). Lingering and winning the air superiority point earns you another 5500 silver lions (fully capping a point gives you same score as a kill, so same SL makes sense)
This means lobby-shopping is now punished as you lose your accumulated death bank. You are still encouraged to survive the full 15 minutes and land to receive your REWARD, but you are not discouraged (in fact: you’re encouraged to over-perform) to stay fighting and take risks. Worst case, your death bank goes down by ~15K SL (if negative, you pay your actual balance). Best case, your death bank gets another 5500 SL allowing you to take even more risks.
I’ve no idea what’s an equivalent SL quantity for base bombing or ground targets we could yoink from ABR. We could go with ~5500 (at rank IV/V) for a full base kill excess of the 1050 maximum (only base kills - not bomb damage to avoid airfield farming), and ~500 SL for each ground target destroyed. A.I bombers/survey planes/attackers could go for ~1250 sl/kill IF done after reaching the 1050 score maximum.
This does not entirely help completely new players to a new brand of planes they are struggling to learn - but that would instead be helped by my earlier suggestions of “Underdog discounts” (Flying a 8.0 plane in a 8.0-9.0 lobby gives a 20 to 40% spawn cost discount if you died to an enemy plane at least 0.6 BR higher than you) - encouraging the use of “trainer planes” and making lobbies more varied.
