Cryptic recently announced that Champions Online will be going free-to-play in 2011, but do they plan on appreciating their non-subscribers? Senior Staff Writer Chris Tom shares his thoughts on the topic.

You see, should a Silver player ever choose to become a Gold player for a month to fully customize their powers before reverting back to a Silver player, they will lose access to their character unless they transform that character back to one of the original eight archetypes (in other words, lose the power customization). Cryptic has also chosen to make these custom power archetypes exclusive to subscribers, so even if you plan on buying hundreds of dollars worth of other perks in the C-Store, you will never be able to gain access to the custom power archetypes that defines Champions Online for what it is.

I mentioned earlier that Turbine and Cryptic have fundamentally different ways of dealing with their players, and it is here that you can really see that difference played out. For Turbine, free-to-play was the concept of allowing players to pay for the game they love in a wide variety of ways. Both DDO and LOTRO offer alternative methods for players to enjoy their full game without needing to commit to a subscription fee. This allows players to advance along at their own time without feeling like they're "wasting" money for missing a day of playing. What irks me about Cryptic's F2P model for Champions Online is the fact players cannot experience the full game of Champions Online through microtransactions alone; there is, literally, a significant core portion of the game that will be forever cut off from F2P players.

Normally, I wouldn't have a problem with a game that tries to push its players to subscribe rather than playing for free and utilizing the C-Store for microtransactions, but because of the existence of F2P MMOs like DDO and LOTRO that truly allow players to choose how they play their MMORPG, I just can't help but think that Champions Online isn't so much free-to-play as it is offering a very robust endless free trial.

In the end, it just feels as though Cryptic is planning to treat their non-subscribing player base as second-class citizens, given the fact that they will never be able to enjoy the full Champions Online experience without subscribing. If Cryptic wants to let Champions Online make the full transition to a free-to-play experience, they should see it as offering a brand new way for players to experience the entirety of the game, and they should start by making custom power archetypes purchasable or somehow achievable without needing to subscribe. DDO and LOTRO have both proven that there is a robust community of gamers out there who are willing to pay even more money than your average subscriber, but they simply prefer to own their purchases rather than renting them temporarily via CO's subscription system.

I'm certainly not advocating that Cryptic give away their entire game for free, but this F2P shift cannot be seen as Cryptic offering two different payment methods unless players can experience the full game of Champions Online via both methods. As it currently stands, if you can't get the full experience of Champions Online without subscribing, then that's not the free-to-play that we've all come to know.

Chris Tom, Senior Staff Writer