Sitting here at work, kinda bored atm.... I am wondering what you people think about the direction many big studios took designing their games. And mostly i want to talk here about F2P.
Some time ago there seemed to be a lot people very enthusiastic about F2P and the fact that great games, many times big budget games, could be play absolutely for free. After a while, it seems like we can see where it has brought us and where the game industry is going in this regard. Here are some points i have noticed myself.

1
Many games, that otherwise could have been really fun to play and a fair, joyful single-player experience, are being bend to always online requirement deliberately. E.g. lately i was looking at Warframe. That game reminds me of Mass Effect. And really, let's be honest, it's gameplay is a single-player experience or co-op at best. It doesn't even have a PVP mode. But they re-worked it that way so it is always-online cash-grabbing tool. Not to mention you can spend money already, but the game is still officially in BETA...

2
Many good MMO games are transformed from subscription to "free" to play. Usually it destroys the game's community and makes the game pay-to-win

3
To keep people playing, mechanics behind the game are deformed. Here's what i mean. I am used to play games for fun. Take a look at Unreal Tournament. That game was about sheer fun: choose a map, choose your avatar and start shooting to others :P All have same chance for victory, it's only about skill, tactics, memorizing the map, etc.
But the idea has changed. In games like Hawken or Call of Duty you are gaining EXP, buying new weapons, or items, to have a better chance in a fight against other players. Now what is this "RPG" crap have to do with shooting? It's silly...Of course the end effect of that is players focusing on grinding EXP and waiting for that one great weapon, that will make them better. It has stopped being about fun. Now it is about grind. Playing to achieve something LATER, not to enjoy the game NOW.
I would love to see Hawken made as a stand-alone, single-player game with multi-player (LAN and/or Internet) attached, made the same way as, e.g. Unreal Tournament . Such a shame it won't ever be that awesome even if it has that potential...

4
Ironically, in FREE-to-play model, it's all about money. Games are designed to bring continuous income. This cripples the experience and many times also their gameplay. For example a limit on number of entries to dungeons in an MMO game is something i hate. Suddenly i find myself playing the game which actually I am not allowed to play...

Thanks for reading this long rant. Any thoughts and comments appreciated!

I have no interest in free to play gaming because free to play gaming is really people who pay money are better than you gaming.

Oh my, and here you told the story of TERA. I've been playing it since the release in Europe. And it's exactly same deal as you described. The game is being constantly nerfed beyond my comprehension. Lately I have created a new character, but leveling is no longer fun: it has been that much crippled... High tier gear has become so accessible and cheap that every newbie can afford it right away. There are tons of people who have no idea how to play and yet running around with almost best equipment. So much about RPG part... :/
There are bugs and really HUGE performance/optimization issues, but developer focuses only on putting new outfits to the cash shop.
The game is still so much fun when played with friends and rather fair (no striking pay-to-win) so I continue to enjoy it. But all what they are doing with it, gives me a headache...

I am not against Free to Play, I am against it done badly. TF2 is a great example of free to play done well (enough). Also alien swarm (though I'm not sure I understand the business model there).

Interestingly I found (in Australia) the biggest problem with UT2004 was people treating it as a free to play game. Because the demo was free and network compatible with the full version there were always people on the demo servers and getting anyone to play on a full game server was too hard. As a result, what was the point in buying the game?

I dislike it when "free-to-play" seems to mean practically the same as "restricted demo version, pay to get more relevant content". I guess the original Doom was free-to-play. With money, you could get some more content, two more episodes. :)

I guess TeamFortress2 is a pretty good F2P example. While there may be some things to buy for it (hats?), as far as I know they don't affect the gameplay nor give you any edge in the game. TF2 seems to be mostly the showpiece for Valve to lure even more people to Steam. And I am fine with that, since it is still free for all practical purposes.

Anyways, "free-to-play" seems to mean strictly account-based online games. I guess free single-player games are simply just referred to as "freeware", even today. Like the original Spelunky or Slenderman, for example.

Warframe lets you acquire all normal content during play without spending ridiculous amounts of time. Some items are rare for plot reasons (Prime and Vandal variants) but do still drop when applicable. The only things that are totally cash-only are the purely aesthetic changes (pet wings and additional colour schemes) and additional warframe/weapon storage slots; credit and item storage seems to be infinite unlike many F2P games.

This is about the best you can hope for from the free to play model overall; a game where you can get all relevant content without having to grinding for hours on end. There's always someone out there willing to pay $2 to paint their horse blue or whatever and it is those players that make the F2P model work. "Free-to-play" is generally used to mean the game has a cash shop in place of a standard purchase price or subscription; regular freeware games have no such functionality (you get the whole game, no strings attached). Multiplayer is not crucial to having a cash shop and indeed many mobile, Facebook and browser-based games have cash shops while having little or no direct interaction with other players.

I'd expect to see some serious single player games built around F2P in this new generation. There have already been small packs of single player items as DLC (such as Bethesda's infamous Horse Armor) and these must be selling quite well since publishers keep releasing them; it would be quite logical to go to the next step and have a totally single player game built around a cash shop.

inc09nito, I think you have some good points, but point 3 is completely unrelated. Call of Duty is a paid game (series of games), in fact it's one of the best selling full price games, and rarely gets discounted much. Offering progression is a development you might not like, but that's no reason to bundle it with an unrelated rant. It seems you might actually care about that more about F2P changes, because that's the longest point on the post.

Regarding point 4, in most games sub games turned F2P you can still pay a subscription, and that lifts all the limitations. So the difference between the subscription only and F2P versions of the game in this respect is that it just adds an option with limitations which costs less. It's possible that there are games in which such a sub option doesn't exist (let me know if there are any), but hopefully you're not complaining that you're not getting everything for free.

Regarding 2, that may be true, but the problem is that the existing community isn't enough to sustain the game or its further development. That's what led to F2P in the first place.

Regarding other people's point about games getting easier, that was true even for subscription games, which over time became easier. The problem with an MMO that one people finish the content, they remain for the end game. New players find rather barren low level areas, and so developers try to help them reach the high levels more easily.

Secret World could've gotten my money if it was a single player game.
As an MMO, I don't want it even for free :)

I avoid almost all if not all F2P games like the plague.

If as an isolated solo experience, I don't mind F2P. But I think there's potential in providing a game that has a F2P core gameplay that is distinctly different from the paid gameplay experience. That way, you're not getting a limited demo or restricted game. You're getting a different game that runs on a different model.

Call of Duty isn't free-to-play, but I think it's going almost the same way (at least as far as I know, because I don't play it). They are putting up some sort of online service and I bet you will be able to buy items and EXP boosts, etc. It's just that they strip you off additionally to buy the game every year. But well, nevermind, focus on Hawken in that case: it's free-to-play and it works the way you grind EXP.
And i think this is very related to F2P model. They put an RPG-ish / EXP mechanics to the game to lock some items, so you can either spend hours upon hours of playing and _losing_ against better-equiped players or... skip the frustration and buy them straight away with real cash. I have nothing against progress-based mechanics when it's justified (e.g. a good RPG game), but when business model comes first and rest is bend to it, then things aren't quite right for players. No, I am not complaining about that. I pay for what I like. I play TERA a lot and I never wanted it to go F2P because I knew what that would mean. Unfortunately, it is Free-to-play now, but i still pay the "sub" to be a member of TERA CLUB, which gives some bonuses, etc. So for example, i can enter the hardest dungeon in the game twice a day now, instead of only once. But my point is that these games are made so you can't play too much at once (these limitations), but you are supposed to come back often. I don't like it and i don't like it even more because I pay for it. Yes, I agree completely. What I think is that there are too many games and they are too much similar too each other. And people like new stuff, so they jump from one thing to another. After grabbing as much money as possible through pre-orders, selling game shortly after release and subscription, once people start to leave, devs switch to F2P to try to grab even more money, from different players. What i very much dislike here is how developers treat their creation. I really feel they don't give a sh*t about their game, they just treat it as a machine for generating income, nothing more... It's really sad, because some of those games are really beautiful and you can feel there were people that put lots of passion to create content in them.

I don't think that it comes from that. It comes from the same place that achievements come, RPG levels, weapon upgrades... It gives the player a feeling of achievement and of character progression, and this in turn encourages the player to play more.

I googled a bit and found someone saying that Everquest had cooldown since a least Lost Dungeons of Norrath, which came out in 2003. So cooldowns themselves aren't a new concept. I admit that F2P could have made them worse, because some people realised they can make money selling resets.

I agree with your assessment of how things develop, I just think you're wrong about developers. Developers love their creation, but any creator knows that a creation isn't any good if nobody sees it. Developers don't want to see their creations die. They want to continue to develop them, to further their vision, and if this means adapting to a changing market, that's what they'd do.

It's purely a matter of implementation. Path of Exile is an excellent example - a brilliant aRPG where all the monetization comes from purely cosmetic items. All the content is actually readily available in the free to play version. That's the perfect F2P model, but not the most common one sadly - there are loads of other F2P games which don't do it quite as well. In the end tho, it comes down to this: Do I enjoy the game while I'm playing it? If the answer is yes, I'm going to continue playing it, regardless of how it makes money. If the answer is no, well...

Im in the camp that thinks that pay to play games that go F2P kill the game pretty often.

Ive noticed in a few games that the F2P ones generally have a higher retard to normal ratio than the Pay to Play games, I would like to point out I do not and have not played WoW, I gather that games retard to normal person is about 95/5 favoring the tards.