Allegedly Free Game: Difference between revisions

* ''[[Air Rivals|Ace Online]]'', also known as ''Air Rivals'' and ''Phi Doi''. You can sign up and fly from L1 to L100 for free, but you need cash credits to buy Enchant protect cards, item seeker units, and fancy holographic banner-like things you can attach to your airframe. At least they give you generous samples of these credit shop exclusives as you gain levels.

* ''[[Age of Conan]]'' converted from a subscription-only model to a hybrid model in July 2011. While much of the content was made available to free players; a substantial amount, especially at higher levels, remains available only to paid subscribers, or cafeteria-type purchase. This includes over half the character races/classes, and nearly the entire Khitai region; as well as several of the advancement and ability mechanics.

** Qualifies for this trope, as the game is advertised as "Free To Play!"; and it takes a little poking around the website to find out that a substantial portion of the game is pay-to-play only. Even then, it takes going into the official forums to find out just how much is content unavailable to free players.

* ''[[Battlefield Heroes]]'' recently underwent this. It used to be you could buy clothing and other extras for real money, and buy the guns and essential using in-game currency. Then, EA (of course) jacked up the prices in in-game currency by 20 times, no exaggeration, and made it a lot easier to buy stuff using real money, making it effectively useless to use in-game currency. Then added new, better guns, available ''only'' with real money. Interestingly enough, this is the exact thing they promised ''wouldn't'' happen when they introduced the game.

** They took out the cheaper bandages and wrenches. [[Dude, Not Funny|Not cool]].

** And made some weapons unrealistic and underpowered ([[PP 2000]] for one) so that they didn't compete with paid weapons.

** You can buy armor, heals, weapon attachments, guns where every single stat is better than the free or earnable guns ...

**** Lately, the updates have only seemed to be of the gashapon (called garapon in-game) variety. Some of the garapons require real money, and have a small chance of getting a bot that is usually considered [[Bribing Your Way to Victory|overpowered]]. As one [http://www.cosmicbreakfanforum.com/t8613p15-how-cyberstep-can-be-so-retard forum user] puts it:

{{quote| "On the other hand, [[Cyber Step]] continues to churn out Garapon updates non-stop, not even bothering with the Shop in terms of UC and Rt(it took months until an actual bot appeared in the Shop, and it was only 1 bot). Because 95% of the stuff people want are in the Garapon, people are unable to actually improve on their bots unless they were willing to sell their houses. Didn't help that the Gashapon was more or less a part of Japanese culture and that most [[Otaku]] are very willing to throw their money away on mostly useless stuff, so [Japanese] players were OK with that sort of thing and [[Cyber Step]] hoped that it would be the same case with the [English] players..."}}

** All of the above restrictions can be bypassed by spending real money to unlock the restricted content; but there are two aspects of The game which are only available to the subscription-based Gold accounts: power customization (what color is my energy blast? does it come from my palm, fist, chest, or head? etc.) and Freeform characters (which are superior in every way to the Archetypes, both in terms of how much freedom you have in choosing powers and how many powers you can choose). Silver accounts are definitely second-class citizens in the game; though they are not outcasts.

* ''[[Club Penguin]]'' is getting almost unplayable for free members; they can't continue to the next level on games such as Catching Waves or even Astroblaster without a membership, making the new stamp collecting feature very pointless.

* ''[[Evony]]'' advertises itself as "Free Forever", but the only reliable way to get special items is to buy them for real money. This includes the Michelangelo's Script, a requirement to upgrade a building to its highest level, for $5 per upgrade. It also includes medals, which you'll have to buy if you want to have more than two cities at once. They also have three separate "[[Blatant Lies|free gifts]]", the best of which requires the player to spend $100. The worst part is that the game coins are called "cents" even though each cent costs $0.10, to make things seem cheaper. (All figures in US dollars.)

{{quote| "Pay now, my Lord!"}}

** Some Facebook games come pretty close to Allegedly Free; you can get stuff you want or need in the game by paying money directly to the game or by completing real-world offers that sometimes require money. The upside is that some of the offers are things like product samples, so you're not ''just'' paying for that game upgrade you want, you're paying for a bag of coffee or a makeup kit ''and'' getting the game upgrade.

** Even big companies have begun using the masive userbase of Facebook to try to scrape a little cash. [[Dragon Age]]: Legends, which touts itself as "the first real game on Facebook," is entirely free to play... only, if you don't buy "crowns" to purchase gear, then you get about six characters who level slowly and can only be used once every 1-2 hours, need half a day to grind out a small amount of potions, and have your team limited to three (including you) characters per battle. Want to revive a character? Spend crowns. Want to use the same character two battles in a row? [[Running Gag|Spend some crowns.]] Gear that doesn't suck? [[Rule of Three|Spend crowns in the store.]] Want to be able to realistically play the game for more than ten minutes a day? [[Overly Long Gag|...you get the picture.]]

* [[Gunbound]] is a relateively mild example. Most equiptment can be bought with real life money or in game money. While there are plenty of powerful equiptment that can only be bought with live money, there's equally powerful in game purchases that you can make if you work hard enough at it. Interestingly there's also equiptment that you cannot buy with real life money and must grind in game currency to get.

** Or at least, it used to be. But Gunbound seems to get traded around by a bunch of different sites, and in the most recent version players who pay real money not only reach ridiculously powerful avatars, but get special cash-only items that can heavily unbalance the game. It's gotten bad enough that the "avatars off" server has a decent following once again, and frequently using cash-only items is widely considered to be a dick move even by people WITH cash avatars. When even your most devoted users stop falling for it, it's time to give up.

* ''Imperion''. Oh, sure, you can play your game for free, if you want to be raided ceaselessly and smashed into the ground by the three guys in adjoining systems who paid so that they could have increased resource production, instant building, additional building slots, and cheaper auto-trades. Basically, free players exist only for the pay-players to prey upon.

* The iPhone and iPod App Store used to specifically forbid the use of in-app purchases in no-price applications in an attempt to prevent developers from getting around Apple's 30% sales fee. Unfortunately, Apple have changed their regulations to also get 30% from all in-app purchases, which are now allowed in apps of any [[Buffy-Speak|expensiveness]]. So "free" iPhone games often have this, or at least encourage you [[Bribing Your Way to Victory|to buy some upgrades]].

* ''Kwari'', an former online FPS. The equipment that you couldn't get unless you paid real money? ''Bullets.''

* ''[[Mabinogi Fantasy Life]]'' by Nexon started out this way; with the main storyline quests, powerful [[Empathic Weapon|Empathic Weapons]], and character rebirths only available to paid members. With the "Pioneers of Iria" expansion, all game content was made available to free players; but there are still a lot of [[Bribing Your Way to Victory|non-essential but highly useful game enhancing items]] available for a paid premium.

** Oh, and you need to spend real money to buy more chapters of the story mode. Much like Star Chamber.

** Similarly, ''Magic Online'' also charges real money for in-game cards and for tournaments that give out prizes. Once you have the cards, though, "casual" play is free.

* Runes of Magic: You will never be as good as the guy sitting next to you who buys the in-game currency without paying the same amount or more, or a ridiculous amount of time.

** Assuming you choose the time route, you need to farm 10 turn-ins of whatever Daily Quest you choose, turn those in, and get 100 tokens which are basically a free version of the diamonds, but with half the item selection at like 5-20 times the price they cost in diamonds. a Purified Fusion Stone, 6 of which are needed to make the best gear possible, costs a whopping 1100 tokens, vs. 55 diamonds when they're NOT on sale, as low as 25 dias (in a 5 pack) when they ARE. that's 11 days for one stone, 66 for one piece of gear. Furthermore, you have at least 16 items to stat, if you use a two handed weapon. 17 if you're a knight with a shield. 18 for scout/rogues, who stat both daggers and use their bow as their main weapon. 1056 days of farming for the minimal amount of puri stones for one set of gear. almost 2.9 YEARS. 1188 for the aforementioned scout/rogues. That's 3 and a quarter years of farming. Did i forget to mention you'll end up statting at least three or four full set's worth? All this is ignoring the equally sized set you'll need for your secondary class, if you choose to stat a set of gear for it, too. Let's not forget the Arcane Transmuter charges, which are 300 for ten of them on the tokens. 3 extra days per armor piece, 1-2 more months. Then there's tiering your weapons, required if you want to do any real damage ever. Also gear refinement on top of the statting and tiering. You're practically required to farm the local [[Money Spider|Money Spiders]] and slowly earn millions of gold to buy statted armor, the best of which runs AT LEAST 4 million per piece. /rant.

** On the other hand, "worlds" (servers) are segregated between members' worlds, where all the pay-to-play features are active, and free-to-play servers, where pay-to-play features are inaccessible even to members, meaning that members don't have much of an advantage over nonmembers - if they're on the same world.

** A patch has actually made it so the only way to get a permanent item is the completely luck of the draw "Fumbi shop" which is far more likely to give you a random item you don't want for seven hours. Because of this, you have to constantly rerent your items. Weapons aren't so bad as their timers only go while you use them, but clothing items have timers that are always running.

* In an odd subversion of this Trope, especially for a Japanese MMO, ''SD Gundam Online''. The game makes no attempt to say, "You need to buy this to be BETTER than everyone!" The only things that cost RL money only are Paint, and you can find some of that with missions, if you're lucky. Buying Mobile Suits is interesting in that you select from about 10 different 'capsule machines' and put the in-game currency in to get a random MS. It's noted that the Capsule Machines and shop contain every MS available, buyable with in-game currency. And the best thing? You can purchase the Blueprints for some of the best MS... with In-Game currency only!

* Stick Arena: Ballisticks has a premium account thing. People without it are limited to 4 ITEMS IN THE SHOP. They also can't make levels. Premium members have more tile sets too.

* The online game ''Sqwishland.'' First off, it's tied to a series of toys, so there's already a purchase point of entry--but the toys are available as capsule toys that cost 25-50 cents a pop, so that's not so terrible, right? But then you find out that the "free" version of the game is essentially the ability to run around the game map, and little more--you can't even interact with your pets (and it is a virtual pet site) without having a premium account. The premium page does not mention this, of course--it just mentions the new clothes and house options you get, as well as more mini-games.

* [[Tibia]]. The game is free to play, but the people who pay for "premium time" in real life money enjoy a large number of advantages over free players. Paying adds several new islands, the ability to travel by boats and flying carpets, new spells, new items, a new server, new monsters, new quests, new outfits and probably [[Up to Eleven|even more stuff]].

* [[Disney]]'s ''[[Toontown Online]]'' limits you to gaining Toon Tasks (quests) and fishing in the starting Playground and 3 surrounding Streets (though you can wander anywhere you want), a [[Ingame Currency|Jellybean]] jar that maxes out at 50 beans, 25 Gags (weapons/attacks), only able to learn one extra gag track (toon-up/sound), and unable to buy anything from the Cattlelog, or play any of the games other than the one in the central Playground. Basically, a free user will get maybe two days of play out of what might actually be a pretty decent MMORPG.

*** Add to that the fact that Both Warforged and Monks are now considered "Premium Content" for some odd reason, and apparently Drow can be bought instead of earned.

*** Also, the "Turbine points" used to buy premium content can be earned (in small amounts) by completing (large numbers of) quests, so it's possible to eventually get all the content without spending any real world money at all. [[Bribing Your Way to Victory]] is much faster, though. You can only get a set amount of Turbine Points per character, since they're directly tied to the difficulty you've completed missions at. In order to grind out enough points to get decent rewards, you'll have to grind the same content over and over on multiple characters, and it's unlikely you'll want to play the game anymore once you've earned any respectable amount of Points that way.

** ''[[Anarchy Online]]'' has a free option that includes the early (circa 2002) content; but the expansions -- which add more areas and allow for ''much'' stronger characters -- are subscriber only and also require paying a one-time activation fee. As with other examples here, the game was supposed to be subscriber only, but declining population forced Funcom to open the floodgates.

** [[Eve Online]] subverts with their PLEX system. It's entirely possible for a player to play their way to a subscription by acquiring enough ISK to buy PLEX instead of paying the monthly subscription. You can also [[Bribing Your Way to Victory|sell PLEX on the open market]].

* ''[[Spiral Knights]]'' is this with its use of energy, necessary to do things such as traverse dungeons and craft gear. Each player can hold up to one hundred units of mist energy (which replenishes at roughly 1 ME/11 minutes), or buy crystal energy with real money or trade for it with other players. Paying players have significant advantages, and making enough money to buy energy usually requires using almost as much energy as you can afford, so the game becomes a slow slog of converting mist energy into Crystal Energy, grinding the one or two profitable boss runs. A free player can spend weeks trying to grind their way to a particular sword, while another can simply buy the energy and trade it for the same weapon and have it instantly.

** On the other hand, free players DO have access to everything that paying players have, so one can progress through the game without ever spending a dime. However, since the energy market is determined by players and prices can vary when buying with in-game currency, so if you don't like [[Bribing Your Way to Victory]] you can easily be screwed by the market, and stuck unable to play without bleeding money (or waiting 22 hours for your free energy allocation to regenerate).

* ''[[Nethack]]'' is a major aversion of this trope. It is one of the oldest video games still being developed, has always been completely free, the most popular servers record and archive your games for all to see, and some servers even let you watch other people play in realtime and even ask them questions. alt.org/nethack has countless archived games, does not have advertisements, and makes it very easy for a beginner to know where to start looking for help in climbing a very steep learning curve.

* [[Global Agenda]] just barely averts this - you're still competitive at lower levels, and the game is still extremely fun, but there are some game modes and aesthetic armors that it will take forever to unlock if you don't pay.

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