In this edition of SWTOR Weekly, I’m going to examine one of the biggest pitfalls of playing MMO’s: a lack of time for the money you pay.
Having missed this last week’s posting of SWTOR Weekly, it reminded me of one of the biggest issues I regularly run into when playing this game. As an adult, with adult responsibilities, I’ve often run into a severe lack of opportunity to seriously play. Lack of interest has never been a problem for me with The Old Republic or World of WarCraft, but time has always been my biggest problem.
If you’re not an MMO player, you may have only a cursory understanding of how much time you have to invest in an MMO in order to get the most out of it. Sure, single player RPG’s require a fairly large time investment as well, but due to the need to keep people invested, playing, and paying, they make the progression longer and harder. You could finish the story of a single player RPG in a relatively short length of time, if you played a couple times a week for a couple hours each time. MMO’showever require daily logins with several dedicated hours each time in order to meet the desired level of progression.
MMO’s are designed to really start being at their best when your character(s) hits max level, you join a guild, and you start running end-game content like Raids or Operations. When you hit level cap in a single player RPG, you’re probably nearing the end of the campaign. Sure there may be extra content from DLC, but that only lasts a short period and you’ve almost certainly reached the new cap, if there is one. It’s a very stark design difference.
That design difference really separates players by demographics. That may seem an odd statement to make until you look at the time that is available to the different age brackets and financial situations. High schoolers and college kids have far fewer responsibilities than they likely will ten years from then, barring certain eventualities, of course. Not that adults with children, bills, and jobs can’t still enjoy MMO’s, but, unless they are a professional podcaster or games journalist, whichever MMO they play may be their only regular recreation. I personally enjoy many types of games across many types of platforms, and, thusly, MMO’s, as much as I enjoy them, SWTOR particularly, are not my only or main recreation.
The MMO world has also seen a dramatic paradigm shift in recent years. Freemium has become the new standard for multiplayer experiences. Freemium is the model in which the initial client download is free, access may be free, and then there are opportunities to pay for various in-game goods and services. This model is most seen in the world of MOBAs (multiplayer online battle arenas). This genre has largely taken the place that MMO’s held from the early 2000’s up till about 2012. SWTOR changed from a regular pay-per-time model with an initial client purchase to a free client download and an option to play for free. This change was maybe not quite a year after it originally came out. At the time, it was speculated that it was a sign of the game ending, but, since the lead-up to patch 3.0, it’s only gotten better. That doesn’t detract from the very alluring “play free and pay if you want” model of MOBAS, which also offer considerably shorter play sessions. A great many of the people who I had been playing SWTOR with have since switched to this genre and if my friends are currently engaged in a game of Heroes of the Storm, odds are high that I’ll try to play with them.
Nearly every other MMO has switched to a freemium model, including Elder Scrolls Online, which requires a client purchase, but has free server access. The only MMO that continues to have an entirely pay-driven model is World of WarCraft. It will probably be the last MMO to continue to have an exclusively pay-per-time-period model.
To reiterate, I do love SWTOR. It is my favorite MMO of all time. I love playing it… when I have time. That’s really the whole issue here: I have so little time for a game that inherently requires a significant time investment. Even with the class mission experience boost, which makes the long slogs through leveling feel like nothing, I am left with the reality that there may be times when I simply cannot play, maybe even for days at a time. I’m also getting old, so it’s not as easy to stay up till one or two in the morning, then get up around six-thirty or seven a few short hours later and expect to perform well at my job the next day.
So, where does that leave me? Am I going to quit paying for SWTOR? I don’t want to. Heck, I would be only too happy to contribute to World of WarCraft, also. I have no problem paying to play, but when I play maybe fifteen days out of thirty in a month, and then maybe for only one to two hours, I have to evaluate if it’s worth the ongoing expense. I’m sure Joe and Leo would be quick to tell me that fifteen bucks a month I’d spend on SWTOR could get me a new medium-sized X-Wing miniatures ship!
Again, do not take this as a judgement against SWTOR. This is the same dilemma that every 30-something year-old has to deal with when they find they cannot wholly justify a monthly gaming bill that doesn’t get utilized as much as they’d like.
UPDATE: I wrote this at the tail-end of the previous week, and while I am still feeling a little on the edge with continuing to subscribe on a monthly basis, I am typing while listening to the April developer live stream while I wait for the latest game update featuring Fallen Empire Chapter 12 to finish downloading and installing.