Back to the future, paying for time used.

How would you design a F2P system that actually works? One that avoids the moral hazard of gold selling and also avoids the problem of market speculation?

Obviously, real world money has to change hands at some point, you can't run a game for free, so someone has to be paying for it. At the same time, the possibility of playing for free or close to free is appealing.

Naturally, there is a trial period where you download the game for free and are granted a trial period, say 2 weeks, where you can play free under some limitations. The intent is you can try it, and if you like it, you subscribe.

Once you subscribe, which basically costs you a one time fee for the first month of game time and removes the trial account restrictions, you have the option of continuing to pay a monthly fee, or use in game resources to pay for your account. Essentially, you introduce a gold sink into the game that you can, at your discretion, use to keep from paying real money.

Obviously, the game is not truly “Free to Play” because you have to, in essence, pay for one month of time to unlock the game from the trial version. Being unable to buy game time in game is one of the restrictions of the trial account.

So, how do you buy game time? You buy it from the web site. You never allow “partners” to sell it with the exception that, if your game is massively popular, to sell “game time cards” that are redeemed at the web site. But those cards never have a “multi-month” discount. This is your income from the game, people buying game time from the web site. Or you buy it with in game gold. A percentage of your players will be playing for free after that initial purchase. How much you charge for each “month” of time, and how much subsequent time costs will determine the percentage of free players.

To buy game time with in game gold, you just buy it from an in game interface. There is no token. There is nothing to speculate with, there is nothing in your inventory. You go to the interface, you select the months of time to buy, you enter payment information, you click Ok. Done. When the transaction is cleared, your game time is updated.

It is just that simple. Except for one thing. RMT. Some entrepreneur is going to come along and pay someone to farm the hell out of your in game resources and sell them to other players who want to use the gold to buy in game time. Or another entrepreneur will come along and figure out how to build bots to do basically the same thing. This works because once you pay for a month of game time, you can mercilessly grind resources 24/7 for the same cost as the player who plays a “normal” amount of time. Or, set a bot loose to do the same thing. Tracking and banning this is a huge Customer Service cost.

The instant you have any “gold sinks” in the game, you're begging entrepreneurs to abuse them through RMT and botting. Both of these can be fixed with the game time system.

While you are in game, you are doing one of three things, Typing in the chat channel, traveling from place A to place B for whatever reason, or using in game skills and abilities to perform useful tasks. Every skill and ability in the game has a period of time associated with it's use, and that cost goes against your purchased game time. If you use your time in low efficiency tasks like grinding or botting, it costs you more than you can get back. Making it pointless and stupid to bot. Activities that are “economy neutral” like questing or exploring, have a low cost, activities that have a high economy cost, like gathering resources for crafting, have a higher cost. You can't limit people from an activity with the heavy hand of stopping them from doing it, you need to just make it more expensive for them to do the things that are more expensive for you.

When you buy game time, you buy the amount the average player uses in a month. If you are doing low impact activities, basically using the game as a time sink like watching TV, you will be using your time up more slowly. If you're furiously grinding resources, you use your time up much more rapidly.

Another mechanic of note is the “daily cooldown” to obtain crafting components. I like daily cooldowns. They give a way to allow producing an item with a rarity that should require many hours of effort, but can be made quickly. This gives a crafter a starter income and promotes crafting, but it only works if you limit the cooldown to once per account. In WoW, you can have 11 Garrisons, and with them 11 sets of cooldowns going at once. An optimal system would give you a daily cooldown, then allow you to farm for more, but the cost of the “additional materials” is greater than the initial amount gained with the cooldown.

You might be thinking “But isn't this essentially pay to win? With richer players gaining an advantage?” Well, that's unavoidable. All you have to do to “Pay to win” in any online game is have multiple accounts that work symbiotically with each other. However, when you have multiple accounts, you have to pay for more subscriptions. Think of the increased fees on the heavy users as the same as playing several accounts to get the same thing done.