I will try out the free stuff, but I won't subscribe. One time unlock fees aren't that bad if they are priced pretty low, but if there is anything that's required on a regular basis, I won't be spending anything. The whole point of F2P is we don't want to pay a subscription. That doesn't mean we don't want to spend money. We just don't want to "rent access". There needs to be a way to permanently unlock everything even if piecemeal (one dungeon, zone, etc. at a time). The whole weekly pass thing is a joke. I hope it fails so they are forced to offer permanent unlocks to endgame content like LOTRO does.
How this works is the free option is much more expensive upfront than the subscription option, but if you play long enough, it ends up being a better deal than the subscription. A while back I added up all the unlocks it would take in LOTRO for a free player to have roughly the same access to everything as a subscriber. It came out to around $500-600. That's a pretty big number, but then I thought about how much I paid for 5 years of WoW.
$15 X (5 years X 12 months) = $900
$600 is a nice discount compared to $900. Even if you always paid 6-month subscriptions, it still comes out to $780, still more than $600. So $600 is roughly 3-4 years of subscription. If you play LOTRO more than 3-4 years, you actually save money over subscribers. Of course most F2P MMOs don't go this route. They have actual required consumables on the cash shop. Things that you will always have to regularly spend real money on. That's no different than a subscription. It's disguised so that most players don't realize this, but it's just the same.
Weekly pass is just that. This game may be fun 1-50, but they've just pushed back the decision point (should I subscribe or not?) to endgame instead of the leveling game. They will get a temporary influx of players until those players get to endgame. Then, the playerbase will shrink again just like before.
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