Why not make Arena F2P?

@alexizuuu There is a very good reason why that making the Arena portion free to play would not work - there is not a good way to make a profit from it. All the other popular F2P games have a monetization scheme (for lack of better word) that makes them money, there is not really anything set up in Arena to accomplish this. The Emporium does not transfer well to the Arena since you use pre-made ship designs there and Pets are of little use (I'm honestly not sure if they are even used in that part of the game as I have yet to touch it since it was first released on Insiders).

Also you talk about making ranked matchmaking, but how would you measure the skill of a particular player to match them? You can't go by faction levels as that is no indicator of skill (even using Sea Dog faction rankings). Add into that the fact that the game is a team based format makes this a little more complicated in determining rankings. Not saying it can't be done, just that there is LOT of work involved in here to get something that has a semblance of balance as there are many different things/activities that can be used to determine a player's skill level/ranking.

@alexizuuu I think making Arena better and f2p would produce a lot of income while drawing more attention to the game. As it stands, it's not at all suited for f2p, but there are ways to make it work.
Most f2p games make their buck with microtransactions, and the Pirate Emporium is already a big money sink for some people. Emotes, pets, costumes and weapons could sell very well in a f2p environment.

@naynayso19 wait, I'm only talking about Arena being made f2p. I don't think Adventure should be f2p, ever.
But a good business model around Arena would be beneficial to both Rare (which gets the money) and the players (who get a better PVP mode with more players). Progression would be locked to just Sea Dogs levels and commendations, but players would still be able to buy items from shops and the Emporium.

@alexizuuu said in Why not make Arena F2P?:

@dlchief58 I feel that making a portion of the game free it will bring more people to the game, if arena gets it's proper treatment and make more changes to the combat system, and point system it could be a pretty nice game mode for newcomers to play.
Regarding the MMR system, things like wins, kills, cannon shots hit, chests dug and successfully cashed in could be ways to monitor their "ranks". Even if it is a team bases game mode balancing teams should not be hard with an MMR system.

But you forget the main point I made, there is no money in it. The monetization for this game is not appealing to a F2P model, especially in Arena where much of the Emporium's would be of no use to Arena players - ship liveries are unused and there are no pirate cosmetics in the Emporium. Emotes are about the only thing there that might be of use but I don't see them as huge money makers.

Companies make F2P games so they make money off the micro transactions. If there is not a good monetization model in place, then the game fails. This is probably the principal reason Fable Legends was ultimately cancelled - while not a bad game itself (for what it was, it was no mainline Fable game to be sure) I could see no way that the game was going to make any sort of profit as nothing offered the MTs seemed worth the investment when I tested it. If there is not a good way to make money from it, there is no reason to make a Free to Play game as it is just throwing money away at that point.