The massively multiplayer online RPG: Some swear by it, and some call it a detriment to society, breeding a world of hermits. When you think MMORPG nowadays, you’re likely thinking about games like World of Warcraft, Everquest, City of Heroes/Villans, and so on. All of these have one thing in common, you must pay some sort of fee, whether it be buying the game itself, paying for a subscription to continue playing it, or a lot of the times both. However, not all are like this:

There are probably as many MMOs out there that are “free to download, free to play” as there are ones that require you to pony up, if not more. Many times, this ends up making the game more accessible to all, however these games have their own set of challenges, all which contribute into how “Free-to-play” MMOs are run and the community that plays them.

That being said, I’ve been playing various MMOs for close to five years now, and I have my share of good and bad experiences. This list covers some of the more apparent bad experiences that you’re likely to come across. Hit the jump to find out what they are:

1. Whiners
It’s really hard to come in as a newbie and start reading forums, only to find the long-time vets complaining about a skill, job, weapon, etc… that was nerfed, or that their favorite “cash shop” item was removed or made more expensive. Or, maybe they’re just complaining that there’s not enough cake. F2Pers have this odd knack for just finding the most random thing to complain about and threaten things like cash strikes, sit-ins, or to just plain quit. (Good riddance) If it isn’t a trivial thing, it’s something that probably needed to be done, just like MapleStory needed to add a cooldown to a certain skill and add stat penalties for non-light element wands for the grossly overpowered bishop class.

2. Cash Shops
It might be free to obtain, free to play, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways to spend money on these games. In order to generate revenue, these games usually run on a microtransaction business model, which allows you to buy certain items for a small cost that can get you anything from a simple costume to an exp. bonus. These things can typically cost you in the range of a buck to around 20. However, most of these games have made it so that people who spend money in the game have a clear advantage over those that don’t or can’t. (Some games, however, allow you to trade or sell these cash-bought items in game, which eases this a bit.) Sadly, there are some publishers out there that put their efforts solely into generating revenue, and so most updates seem to simply just be cash shop additions, leading to gripe #1.

3. Griefers, Trolls, and Drama Whores
Griefers and trolls, in my opinion, have no place in a video game, on the Internet, or anywhere else for that matter. That won’t keep them from trying to make your experience a living hell, though. They will go about their business, try to stalk and harass you, steal your mobs, pretty much do everything that the “MMO bible”, also known as the “Terms of Service” tells them not to.  Most tend to not care if they get banned as they can just create a new e-mail address or a new account, and the publisher can’t stop them from making a new character on a second account. Ah well… that report button would come into good use. As far as drama is concerned, don’t even get me started on drama.

4. Hackers
Unfortunately, many F2P games tend to become a breeding grounds for hackers, not afraid to get banned since they won’t be losing any money by doing so. Most F2P games tend to have anti-hack solutions such as GameGuard and Hackshield, most which only seem to become effective at blocking legitimate programs from running and with hackers able to bypass them within hours of an updated version going up. Still, developers won’t come around to developing their own anti-hack solution and go with these third party ones, resulting in people messing the game up to the point where the game masters have a hard time keeping up with them. Some of the more popular games go through mass hacker crises on and off while some of the smaller ones tend to not really have hacker problems at all, though, so this happens more on a game-by-game basis.

5. Broken English
The majority of F2P games usually come from South Korea, the so-called Mecca of online gaming. Obviously when they come over here, they have to be translated, right? Usually when a new game enters the beta stages and starts to go into its early official service, it tends to contain a whole slew of grammar gaffes that can only remind us about Zero Wing sometimes.

 

6. Bugs
For some reason, there’s always two departments that seem to be lacking in F2P MMO’s. The first of those seems to be quality assurance. Although some are better than others, there isn’t an F2P out there that, at one point it’s been crippled by a bug in which the game has needed to be either brought down for an extended amount of time or rolled back. Some games have various major bugs pop up almost every patch, others every once in a while.

7. Lack of Presence From Game Masters
Companies hire GMs to promote and moderate the game. Most players see them as a PR person and usually base how they’re doing with how much they interact with the community at times, though it turns out that the job description of the game master is more than just hanging out in-game and banning the evildoers.  Some of these duties tend to leave the game unmoderated and things tend to get out of hand, and after constant problems with this the community starts to lose hope.

On the other hand, some publishers are really good at having their GMs respond to issues on the official forums, or by spending some time with the community that they’ve been hired to take care of. In other cases, publishers have created volunteer programs as well to recognize outstanding players and to provide a “player contact” for some of the more simple things, such as Nexon America’s “Maple Watch Leaf Brigade” for MapleStory, or Aeria’s “Game Sage” program across all their games.

8. Scammers
Scammers can pose a real problem. Fast. although I’m sure P2P games have this problem on a large scale as well, it’s a fluctuating issue in the F2P realm, especially with the playerbase usually being quite a bit younger due to the game’s availability.

9. “Update Lag”
Going back to the fact that I said that most F2P MMOs originate from Korea, the most advanced versions of these games are usually overseas as well. In just about every game there’s at least a small community dedicated to figuring out what’s happening in these Asian versions of the game in order to see what we may get. The only issue is… when would we get this content? For many games, it takes months or even more than a year to get that content out in the American versions, and usually that leaves the community in a shroud of pessimism.

Still, though, a few months isn’t all that bad, given the time it takes to localize a game for the western market to begin with. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise sometimes.

10. Customer Support
Customer Support is that second “lacking” department with many publishers that I was getting at before. Don’t get me wrong: Many publishers like OGPlanet, Aeria, and GamesCampus have excellent support. (All of which I’ve had to deal with at one time or another) However, there are horror stories with other companies who seem to have left customer support out of their budget. Automated replies, extremely long response times of weeks, even months or even not at all, and replies that have nothing to do with the issue are all things that we see in the F2P world.

On the contrary, the community does bear slight fault to this, as I’m sure each publisher gets a handful of tickets that are either hard to understand, don’t have enough information, or is for something that they can’t do. (Usually dealing with people who lose their accounts because they forgot their password and the e-mail they associated to it, but that’s why you only keep one e-mail for personal stuff, people!)

All in all, these gripes are all a collaberative effort: Some are the fault of the community, some of the publisher and even the developer. Keep in mind that this doesn’t reflect on any publisher out there. As I’ve said a couple times there are some good publishers. Don’t take this is a “F2P MMOs are bad” kind of thing because a lot of them are actually pretty good. How do you think MapleStory got so popular despite the shortcomings of its developer?

So, go ahead, find a good free MMO you wanna play. Just beware some of these things if you know what I mean. You’ll have fun.