I miss playing MMO’s, but micro transactions ruin any sense of progression for me.
Any mmo’s out there that fit the bill?
Cosmetics are fine, as long as you can’t just turn around and sell said cosmetics in game.
Starwars: The old Republic.
Totally free for eight excellent epic stories with no pay wall to overcome or excessive difficulties without subscriber benefits.
Subscription unlocks more content.
Microtransactions are for cosmetic only, and there’s plenty of cosmetic options without them too.
Keep meaning to check these out before it dies (how healthy is it? / how long do I have?).
Runescape was like that for the longest time and tbh k dont think bonds really impact my experience all that much
Really think you should give FFXIV a deeper thought beyond just looking at the store and finding the level skips.
Even if you were to buy a skip, there’s still a considerable amount of game in front of you to play. They are only meant to get people to modern content without having to (to some people) slog through hundreds of hours of older stuff. It’s not a p2e micro-transaction by any means — far from it.
Hopefully you understand why I was a little suspicious!
But I tried it out, and holy moly it feels like a different era. My brain can’t compute the fact that I just got a free to play game (Just have the demo, which honestly sounds like a ton of game) and it’s not trying to sell me anything in game? The tutorial was all about game play in universe, and never once told me about premium currency? My ui doesn’t have 5 different things? Crafting doesn’t involve long cool downs that I can 5 gems to speed up?
Like it feels like a different era of game, thank you for being persistent! I’ve only played a couple hours, but so far it feels like it’s going to become a comfort game at the very least.
The money makers here want you to play their game. The more time you invest, the more money they make in subs. If you want to skip all that game and thus, in some ways, get all that progress done without having to pay all that sub, you’ve gotta fork over some cash.
You don’t cost them anything for not playing part of their game, and you don’t owe them anything.
If your interpretation of why they do this is right, it meand they want you to believe that “modern content” is a reward for playing through the rest. Nobody should think like that. Playing the game is the reward for playing the game.
It’s like if Netflix made you pay an extra as you start watching a series on season 4, because you didn’t pay your subscription through the three previous seasons.
I agree with this whole-heartedly, there’s simply no way any reasonable person would consider skipping story content as buying power in the context of how FFXIV works as an MMO.
It lets players jump right into the new content without worrying about dozens or hundreds of hours of prior story they may or may not want to play through to get to the latest content at the same level as everyone else starting out, that’s all.
It is not a normal suggestion because the base game is probably the most pay to win mmo that has lasted more than a year or two. But both versions of Runescape (both old school and Runescape 3) have a game mode called ironman mode.
Ironman mode is an official account type that you can create where you can not trade other players items or money. Everything is earned and gathered yourself. If you want to make a bow you need to gather the flax to spin a bow string and chop logs to fletch an unstrung bow and then string it.
It is a slower mmo with most skills in the game having methods to train where you don’t need to pay much attention and you can mostly watch youtube.
Both games also have very mechanically different and difficult combat encounters you can work your way up to.
Maxing out every skill in the game takes year(s) to do and there are hundreds of incredibly unique quests that in my own opinion set the bar for mmo questing. There are no kill 30 boar quests or fetch quests (really) they are mostly very in depth stories with character archs and so much lore if you are into that.
