Things looked so good for Tribes Ascend when it was released in early 2012. Wonderful, breath-clutching games of chicken happen along the z-axis in Tribes: Ascend, wrote Evan Lahti in our review. We loved it. We played it. But it needed love from its developer, too—bug fixes, new maps, tweaks to make it more fun, major changes to the F2P economy. Instead of getting better with patches and updates, Tribes: Ascend got worse. A year later, it was all but abandoned by Hi-Rez Studios, which moved on to its now-successful MOBA Smite. All but a few players were gone, too, and the ones who stayed were angry and bitter.

Now, out of the blue—the apt name for Tribes: Ascend s first patch since 2013—Hi-Rez has returned to the game to fix its many, many missteps. It s a small team, and they don t expect to make money off the game. But they may be able to make things right.

We made a lot of mistakes in a lot of different places, creative director Sean McBride told me on a recent trip to Hi-Rez. Pricing definitely was off. Way too expensive in the beginning. Both for XP, our earned currency in the game, and gold. And money was just one of Tribes: Ascend s problems, which McBride talked candidly about. It was a refreshing conversation—you rarely hear developers so openly talk about everything they did wrong.

It s death by a thousand cuts, right? McBride said. In the early days, Hi-Rez patched Tribes, but the patches were bad. Weapon releases bloated the game. So he s ditching those. Ascend s perk system included some overpowered abilities and some worthless ones. So they re getting rid of it. Everything was too expensive, so they re refunding every player the gold they spent to re-buy weapons and equipment as they please.

We re pulling back on a lot of the patches we did post-launch, he said. They had tons of weapons in them. At the time our numbers always bumped up when we had patches with weapons on them. People come back for new content. But it wasn t quality content at all. We were just scrambling to get content in the game, and we had this tiny team. So we created variants of the weapons, basically. And they were useful variants, it wasn t like they were just junk. But it bloated the game.

"It's death by a thousand cuts, right?"

One example: The Jackal, a triple-round burst sticky grenade launcher. Unlike the rest of Tribes: Ascend s weapons, you could detonate it in the air whenever you wanted. That made it a lot of fun—and completely broken in the hands of better players. It wasn t designed to be pay to win, but it ended up being pay to win. Because people are better at your game than you are.

Surprisingly, even at the height of Tribes: Ascend s development, it was being handled by a very small team. I think at our biggest we were like 15, but it didn t stay at 15 for very long, said McBride. It was a passion project from the beginning. I think there were many weeks where I pulled over 100 hours just to try to get Tribes done. That wasn t just me. That was people I was working with as well.

Hi-Rez was a much greener studio at the time, and in a way the positive reviews and buzz for Tribes proved to be its undoing. We didn t really listen to the community, McBride said. Once the high scores rolled in...PC Gamer gave it Editor s Choice, and we got a couple 10s and a bunch of nines and a few eights. We did pretty well on the scores. I think at the time we were very resistant to changing the game. We were like, people like it, it scored really well. It wasn t until the numbers started to fall that we really would consider even changing it. There was a big resistance to listening to feedback from the community, which wasn t the right call.

Another tactical error: releasing Tribes a mere month before Diablo III. McBride remembers being worried that the older PC playerbase, which had played the original Diablo and Tribes in the late 90s, would leave Ascend for Diablo.

As soon as Diablo came out our numbers tanked and we never recovered from those numbers, he said. That definitely wasn t the reason we didn t take off. We were already starting to dip, but once you lose the players it s hard to get them back.

As Tribes floundered, Hi-Rez moved what remained of its small team to work on Smite. Two years later, Hi-Rez has ballooned from a studio of around 50 to more than 200 on the back of Smite. That s given them the resources to dedicate a small three-person team to Tribes, with programming and art resources occasionally borrowed from other teams, even if the game can t turn a profit. When McBride took charge of Tribes a few months ago, he dug through forums, reddit posts, and old Youtube videos to assemble a massive list of changes the game needed. There was, as he expected, a lot of hate.

But I listened to what the competitive community wanted, and all of it made sense, he said. It was a lot of the things we were already saying internally. Which is usually the case. We see the game first and look at it and are like, these things are screwed up.

Last week, after a few months of experimenting with the community on a public test server, Hi-Rez released the first new patch in two years, and a lot has been changed. The nine classes have been condensed into light, medium and heavy. The loadout system has been revamped and everything has been rebalanced. Perks were removed and distributed among the armor classes. The hitbox toggling cheat was finally addressed. There are three new maps and fewer useless weapons.

The out of the blue patch isn t a funeral dirge for Tribes, either. McBride said another patch will follow. His hope is to see a bump in player numbers, but he doesn t know if they ll stick around. That s partly why we re experimenting with game modes right now, he said. If we bring back the middle core player, the people who really loved the game but didn t stick around for very long, if they come back around and there s nothing really that new, like a new game mode that is a very different experience, they re probably going to drop out again after about a month.

But this patch, at least, is not concerned with players who might come back and dabble. It s for the hardcore guys that stuck around, he said. There was some concern that the hardcore guys were going to want things that made the game a lot harder. A bad experience for new players. I found that to not be the case at all. They actually wanted things that made it a little easier. They weren t asking directly for things to make it easier, but what they were asking for made it a little easier.

Since its patch, Tribes: Ascend hasn t seen a big enough uptick in players to settle into Steam s top 100 most-played games, but it has grown (and not all of its players launch the game through Steam). I myself, am loving the abundance of players...the return of old players, and of course, the acquisition of new ones, wrote one player on the Tribes subreddit. There is no denying that T:A has seen a dramatic surge in popularity since the launch of Out Of the Blue. The new wave of players has undoubtedly brought both optimism and hope to a subreddit that was previously full of wry humor, bitter sarcasm, and dwindling creativity. While I do not expect this second breath to last forever, I do plan on riding this wave as far as it can take us, wrote another.

The community seems energized—and hungry for more updates, which Hi-Rez says are on the way. For now, people are finally playing Tribes again.

At 5pm EST today, Tribes: Ascend will undergo six hours of downtime as its first patch since March 2013 is applied. It's a substantial overhaul of the free-to-play, physics-defying shooter that has been cooking on the public test servers since September, when Hi-Rez Studios announced it was ending Tribes' long abandonment.

The full patch notes can be found here, although there's enough to form a small patch-cyclopaedia. The most susbstantial changes concern classes, maps and the premium currency, Tribes Gold. Three new capture-the-flag maps—Ice Coaster, Perdition and Terminus—join the roster, while the class system has been simplified into light, medium and heavy armour-wearers with full loadout customisation. Weapons themselves have also undergone major rebalancing.

All Tribes Gold and XP used to purchase items at any point in Tribes' lifespan is being refunded. If you've purchased Gold or the Game of the Year edition at any point, you'll automatically be given the Ultimate Weapons Pack—every gun in the game.

Hi Rez president Stewart Chisam told us that the team isn't expecting to make much money from the Tribes revival, and the patch does have the feel of doing right by a stonkingly good shooter as opposed to a savvy business move.

Hi-Rez has made all the Tribes games available for free, as well as the Earthsiege series that predated it. They're all PC titles, with the exception of Tribes: Aerial Assault, which I think might be the first PS2 game released as freeware by its developer. (It comes as an .iso file, so you'll be able to play it in an emulator and on chipped/modded PS2s.)

I'm not sure how active or functional the multiplayer is for the previous Tribeses, but there's some single-player stuff in there, and I'd imagine it would be quite fun to download a few and take a nostalgic jet-pack-powered trip down memory lane. I've not played a Tribes game before, as you may have gathered, but the first-person, mech-based Earthsiege games have caught my eye here.

Here's the full list of newly free stuff (Tribes Ascend, the most recent in the series, was of course already free-to-play):

• Earthsiege
• Earthsiege 2
• Starsiege: Tribes
• Tribes 2
• Tribes: Aerial Assault
• Tribes Vengeance
• Tribes Ascend

It's not clear if this a time-limited offer, or whether these games are free for the forseeable future, so git downloading, if you're interested. (Thanks, Reddit.)

After a period of absence, Hi-Rez is now working on Tribes Ascend again.

Tribes: Ascend is finally being supported again. With absolutely no warning, the aptly named Out of the Blue patch was announced earlier this month. Currently playable on a new public test server, the update is going to revamp the class system, add maps, and make balance tweaks. 

Much of the Tribes fanbase stopped playing a long time ago, feeling that developer Hi-Rez Studios had abandoned the game and its players in favor of supporting Smite, caring little about the state Tribes was left in. Hi-Rez president Stewart Chisam told me today at TwitchCon that they've been wanting to come back to Tribes for a long time.

"None of us felt good about the state it was left in," Chisam told me, saying Smite had been consuming most of the studio's attention. Now that Smite has seen a considerable amount of success, they "finally got the chance" to restart work on Tribes, according to Chisam.

Even with the Out of the Blue update, and with more updates on the way, Chisam isn't especially optimistic about Tribes' popularity. "I don't think we'll ever make money off of it," he said, describing it as a "passion project" in comparison to Hi-Rez's other games.

I asked if they planned to continue updating and balancing Tribes: Ascend and Chisam told me "that's certainly the plan," as the game now has a small but dedicated team within Hi-Rez. "[We have] four or five people working on Tribes full time, and I'd love to keep that team around for a while ... It's starting to feel more like the old Tribes games."

Here are the patch notes for the second public test server, and the download instructions.

Tribes: Ascend is still a lot of voice command spamming, people accusing each other of being scrubs for using automatic weapons, and big Reddit debates about balance. Those things won't change, but Tribes is changing—finally. Hi-Rez has barely touched Tribes over the past couple years, and the upcoming patch is called 'Out of the Blue' because no one expected it. I did an actual double take when I saw the announcement, glancing away before realizing what I'd just read. Tribes? Update? What?

The patch isn't implemented yet, but it is available to play on Tribes' new public test server (it's a separate download, so don't go reinstalling Tribes from the main launcher). The community is more energized than it's been in a long time. The debates about which weapons should go and which loadouts are 'honorable' never really went away, but now there's some hope that Hi-Rez is actually going to act on them.

The update on the current test server changes a few things, but it most importantly overhauls the way loadouts are configured. Previously, there were classes like Pathfinder and Juggernaut, each with two weapon slots, a belt item, a pack, and two perks. Now, there are simply light, medium, and heavy builds, each with much more liberal rules, and the number of potential loadout combos is huge. And that's going to break stuff, hence the test server. I'm not sure anyone is fond of my spinfusor, sniper, stealth build.

The UI is still clunky as hell, which Hi-Rez admits, and right now the patch is essentially a reorganization of what was already there. It allows for different combos, but there are still plenty of ideas about what Hi-Rez ought to do—aside from bug fixes, which are a given. Some say chainguns should be nerfed across the board—specifically the hitboxes—or that nearly all damage should be nerfed, or that shotguns were overnerfed (actually it seems everyone agrees on this). Some say that snipers should be required to use an Energy Pack, like in Tribes 2, or that lights should be allowed three weapons. There's talk of removing the Quick Draw perk and giving everyone a faster weapon switch speed, or giving only light armor a faster weapon switch speed. There are a hell of a lot of decisions to make—reams of community feedback to weigh and prioritize—as Tribes finds a route to redemption.

And the surprise patch announcement hasn't earned Hi-Rez instant praise from Tribes players. There's still a lot of anger that it left Tribes behind, and skepticism that anything will really change, or that anything will ever convince players to return. But there's also been a lot of constructive discussion, and creative director Sean McBride, who was previously Ascend's art director, has been talking fairly openly about the state Tribes was left in, and his plans to build it back up again. "We are very excited about bringing Tribes support back, and look forward to hearing what everyone thinks," he wrote in an introduction. "Thanks everyone, I'm sorry it's been so long."

When I joined the PTS last week (the first time I'd played Tribes: Ascend in a long time) I started by skiing around a bit, looking for good routes on the new map. There were only a few other players in the server. One was complaining about his mouse, insisting that he could beat us with a spinfusor—but he was using an auto. Another was just making flag runs and occasionally dueling in the midfield. Someone was destroying our generator. I was spamming [VGW].

It felt like visiting an old apartment—somewhere I lived for a couple years in a transitory stage of life—and noticing the unchanged light fixtures and the chipped bit of the kitchen counter. Even as a cloaking sniper, Tribes: Ascend feels the same. I'm not sure what it has to become to renew my 2012 dedication, but doing something is a start. 

I'd suggest first that Hi-Rez fix the longstanding bugs, as I expect that's the best way to start winning over the players. After that, I hope it performs extreme experiments on the PTS. Mess with the chainguns, give lights a grenade launcher, pare down the weapon selection, take drastic steps to figure out what will make Tribes more fun. For me, the fun is in going fast (of course) and, outside of sniping sometimes, landing difficult shots with slow-moving projectiles. I don't know exactly what changes will encourage that kind of play and make it more fun for me, but as I said, there are a ton of suggestions to test. And McBride has been talking about testing them, saying that nerfs and weapon adjustments are coming in the next public test server. I'll happily be a guinea pig, because it might be a tad optimistic, but I could really go for a Tribes renaissance. 

In July 2013, Hi-Rez co-founder Todd Harris said that the studio was going to take a six-month break from updating free-to-play shooter Tribes: Ascend so that they could focus on Smite. Fast forward more than two years, and the studio has surprised us with patch notes for a new update due this month.

Among other changes, we know from the preliminary patch notes that this upgrade includes a new Capture the Flag map (Terminus), class changes (e.g. that all have been condensed to three choices: Light, Medium, and Heavy), and other tweaks.

Hi-Rez hopes to release Version 1.1 for public testing on or before September 14, so they can gather feedback and fix bugs before doing a proper release. Over at the Tribes sub-reddit, creative director Sean McBride has pointed out that the changes listed so far are "just the early changes and do not represent the entirety of the actual patch".

McBride is new to the creative director role. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was art director at the studio from 2006, until last month, when he got the new job. His job description suggests this new update represents significant reinvestment in the game:

"I oversee development and set the new direction for the Tribes:Ascend revitalization project. I'm passionate about Tribes and with a high level of involvement with the community we intend to move the game in a direction that works for everyone."

Given that Tribes: Ascend was good enough to get an 88 when Evan reviewed it for us, that looks like good news to me.

The MOBA genre already has colossal communities in both League of Legends and Dota 2, but what's missing is an arena where the greatest gods of mythology toss magic fireworks at each other and roast a couple thousand mortal minions. Enter Smite, Hi-Rez Studios' free-to-play god-on-god rumbler, which launches in full today after a lengthy beta period and is available for all to download on its official website.

Smite changes up the player's perspective for its tri-lane skirmishes by dropping the camera behind the shoulders of your chosen god and using WASD for movement, a more action-oriented angle echoing Hi-Rez's FPS roots from Tribes: Ascend. Playable deities come from various pantheons, such as Greece, China, and the Roman Empire. Otherwise, it's typical MOBA fare of farming minions for increasingly powerful abilities and waging a tactical tug-of-war into the enemy base.

Hi-Rez also shared a batch of stat highlights from Smite's beta period. The game had 3 million registered users and over a billion player kills. The Mage class turned out the most popular choice followed by the gank-tastic Assassin class. On the cosmetic side, one of the most popular skins was this little number for Poseidon.

Smite became Hi-Rez's full-time focus after the studio decided to relax further development on Tribes: Ascend last September, with CEO Erez Goren claiming the extra profitability a MOBA provides is what Hi-Rez needs to continue weekly updates and content additions.

Have a look at more Smite info on its official website, or head here to download the client and get playing.

Tribes: Ascend was unfortunately llama-dropped by developer Hi-Rez studios earlier this year, but now the community has rallied to build an unofficial software development kit and server hosting solution. As posted in a thread in the Tribes subreddit, this will allow the community to host and support versions of Ascend in place of continuing official support from Hi-Rez. Hi-Rez s reaction, however, is the big unknown: players using modded software and hosting modded servers could be vulnerable to bans or cease and desist orders from the developer.

As we reported in July, Hi-Rez is focusing on its new gods-battling MOBA, Smite. This left Tribes: Ascend, one of our favorite shooters from last year, somewhat out in the cold and its players upset. Hi-Rez said earlier this year that it will work on official map making tools, but updates on the effort have been sparse.

We spoke to Hi-Rez co-founder Todd Harris in July, when work on the community SDK was already underway. I don t know enough about the details, he said, so we've kind of talked through that on a community show, and at this point, it s not clear to me whether that effort is trying to get around the server authentication and basically the monetization scheme or not. So, it has to get further along, and we've got to do some more discovery on our end to understand how compatible we could be with that or not. We support anything that s not enabling players to unlock content that would normally only come with time or money, that s getting unlocked for free. So we just have to understand whether there s a path we can work with that project to make that happen, and right now I don t know the answer to that.

That unfortunately leaves the newly revealed SDK with a big, fat question mark hanging over it. We ve reached out to Hi-Rez with a request for comment, and will update this post when we hear something back.

"Free-to-play" and "microtransactions" are dirty terms to some. That's understandable. Famous Facebook Skinner boxes like Farmville have clouded attitudes toward today's free-to-play games, and there's an assumption all microtransaction-driven game design is handicapped by the need to create ways to charge players. For some games, this is certainly true, but there are excellent free-to-play games out there that represent good value for money. Below we've assessed some of the most common methods used by free-to-play games to make money from players, and highlighted some of the fairest examples of free-to-play that are worth your time.

Convoluted shops and fake currencies



A lot of the distrust toward microtransaction-driven games comes down to the way they habitually obfuscate both what exactly you'll be paying for, and how much you'll be paying for it. This starts with the standard practice of exchanging of standard currency for fake fun-bucks equivalents. In Rift, it's "Credits", in The Old Republic, it's "Cartel Coins", in War Thunder, it's "Golden Eagles", to name just a few. The deliberately awkward exchange rates are of course designed to hide the actual value of the items you're buying, but hiding the value of every transaction at this fundamental level appears dishonest.

There's a widespread lack of clarity around the payment systems attached to free-to-play games. The price and payment method of engaging with a game should be quickly apparent, and expressed in a way that lets players know exactly what they're getting for their money. It should not, like Star Wars: The Old Republic, require the careful study of three different screens to unravel the various interlocking currencies, subscription deals, expansion packs and "preferred status" upgrades available.

If you're inviting players to make a purchase that you believe is worthwhile, why hide the price? Quake Live has two tiers of membership, which grants players various levels of access to premium arenas, and the ability to host matches, but look here, at the top of the page, a clear list of features and a price tag.

In short: We see this practice everywhere, even in otherwise decent free-to-play implementations like Card Hunter. The cost of playing a game should be clear, and that starts with straightforward price labelling.

Crates/card packs and random chance drops



If you hand someone a closed box full of promised goodies, many will happily pay you for the crowbar to crack it open. The tremendous power of small random packs of goodies has long been known the creators of physical collectible card games and companies that made football stickers a decade ago. For some, including our former reviews editor Rich McCormick, the allure of a closed box full of goodies is too powerful to resist. Whatever the worth of the randomised prizes inside, the offer of a free chest and the option to buy a key will make a small fortune out of these personalities. For those that like to gamble, these crates often offer a small chance of an ultra-rare item.

In Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, a chest will drop into your inventory every so often. Keys can be bought with real money, or traded for, and are very popular - five of the seven TF2 store bestsellers are keys right now. As with card packs, the process of discovery and anticipation that goes into opening a box is as exciting as the item inside. Everyone has to decide for themselves whether that's a valuable reward, and whether £1.50 / $2.50 is a worthwhile price for that rush. The important thing is that players know exactly what they're gambling for when opening a box, and have at least a sense of the odds involved. The Team Fortress 2 wiki exposes estimated percentage odds for each crate, but as any Vegas slot machine designer will tell you, revealing all of the maths maths can ruin the glamour of the gamble, and make no mistake, this is gambling.

Boxes are easily deleted and ignored, but receiving one isn't a good experience. At worst, it's a taunt that pops up in the same space ordinarily to message gifts. Receiving a crate for the first time, and then learning that it requires a purchase to unlock, is a betrayal of the expectations that the rest of the drop system instils. The positive side, in the case of TF2 and Dota 2, is that revenue from crate sales goes back to community item creators, and the items you can earn don't unbalance the core game. Team Fortress 2's random drops also shower you constantly with gifts, which balances everything out somewhat.

In CCGs like Hearthstone, Fifa's Ultimate Team and Mass Effect 3's multiplayer mode, you can unlock random cards/players/guns from packs earned through in-game money as well as real currency. This accepts payment in the form of a chunk of your spare time, which is a good deal if the game is good. It operates more like a randomised unlock system that you can speed up with money if you wish.

In short: card packs and crate drops are a form of gambling. If you're okay with that, then there's no reason not to enjoy games like Hearthstone. It's worth checking to see if packs can be earned with a sensible amount of in-game progress before investing lots of time.

In-game item stores



There are two main questions to keep in mind when a game is asking you to spend real money for specific items.

1. Can they only be earned by paying up?
2. Are they better than what you have already?

The answer to both, if a game is being as fair as possible, is no. Games like Team Fortress 2 have a selection of alternative weapons and gadgets you can unlock for your class. That's alternatives, not straight upgrades. Many combine certain situational benefits at the expense of a well rounded, overall build. The Sniper being given a rifle that shoots piss is not at an obvious advantage, especially when against one that shoots bullets. And, in League of Legends, it's hard to know if the angry polar bear is inherently better than a girl with the shark cannon, but both have their uses when played effectively, and the rotating roster gives you options regardless.

Not that pure upgrades are inherently wrong. In games like World of Tanks, where a natural tier system denotes each country's best metallic beasts, it comes down to matchmaking to keep things fair. Put the paid-up kings against the outgunned newbs and you start edging towards a pay-to-win scenario. Keep everyone grouped around their unlock level, and the only advantage for those that pay is a quicker trip to the top tiers.

Even good in-game item stores can go bad over time. The community's faith in a game's integrity can be destroyed by a single update, and in competitive games weapons sometimes have to be rebalanced. That means the items you're buying might not retain its characteristics.

In short: Item stores that sell objects that affect your in-game performance are risky. If a game sells guns/cars that can't be earned any other way then treat that as a big alarm bell. Even if those items can be earned through progress, it helps to favour games with good matchmaking services and large playerbases, which can smooth out balance issues.



Cosmetic item stores



Offering players ways to stand out is a lucrative business. In the Dota 2 Steam Workshop, item creators compete for audience upvotes and Valve’s approval, and the successful ones have made a small fortune in the process. If you spend a lot of time in a game world with friends, cosmetic items like hats in Team Fortress 2, or new player skins in League of Legends, can set you apart without tipping the game’s systems. At worst, new outfits can corrupt character silhouettes or dilute a game's aesthetic, making battlefields harder to parse at a glance, but this is a minor trade-off for a system that lets developers support themselves and keep games running.

Buying cosmetic items is also a very transparent, obvious transaction. Buy the item for the clearly labelled cost, get the item, it’s yours until the game loses popularity and expires, or the heat death of the universe occurs. There’s no trickery, the integrity of the game is maintained, and everyone gets a nice hat. Cosmetic items make money out of happy players who want to express their fandom, which makes every purchase positive.

In short: A straightforward, easily understood transaction that doesn't unbalance the game. Ideal.

Energy bar restrictions



Energy mechanics take various forms, whether action points that expire with every interaction or a continuously dwindling energy meter that stops you from playing when it expires. The crudest variations attempt to encourage the player to buy more energy at the point of expiration, oodling out a few bucks of the sheer frustration of having a game cut short. Subtler time limiting devices are designed to encourage "sessioning," in which players devote five or ten minutes of their time every day to tending to a garden/city. The intent here is to turn the game into a regular life fixture that increases the player’s contact with other the monetisation mechanisms built into the game’s economy.

Energy bar systems straightjacket players with arbitrary systems. You’re not failing to progress because of a lack of skill, but because of the expiration of an invented abstract resource. Besides all that, the amount of time you choose to engage with a game should be your choice alone, and a pop-up message that says you’re done unless you buy X or wait 12 hours just feels insulting. Sure, game demos will stop you when you’re having fun and ask you to buy the full game, but players know the rules when they start the download. Energy mechanics, can be hard to spot until you've spent a certain amount of time playing. Very unpleasant.

In short: No no no no no no no no no.

Expiration



Expiration systems cause components of the game that you use regularly to wear out and break unless a certain amount of money is spent on repairs. In Fifa’s Ultimate Team mode, players are benched if their contract expires, and you need to apply new contract cards to get them back on the pitch. These are dropped randomly in card packs that can be bought with in-game money or real money. If you pay for contract cards to support a player you bought through a card pack or on the transfer market then you’re essentially paying ongoing rental costs for a virtual product you’ve already bought. Sometimes expiration is designed to drain your reserves of in-game currency. A game might ask you to spend in-game bucks on restoring expired items so that you run short, and might feel the need to top up with a real money purchase. In the worst cases, there are shooters that charge players for ammo to fill their guns, and even offer premium varieties of ammo to give them a battlefield edge.

Being charged money to maintain the status quo earned through play is terrible, and can undermine any sense of achievement you may have enjoyed earning your gear. It creates a persistent, unpleasant pressure to pay and is an unsatisfactory purchase if you do cave. You know that you’ll have to pay again to recharge that item/player/gun soon enough. Expiration creates that poisonous sense of being slowly nickel-and-dimed.

In short: A great way to annoy players fast. Watching items expire isn't fun, paying to stop them expiring isn't fun. Putting money into a game should feel rewarding; paying to stave off the entropic decay of your virtual possessions isn't.

Item rental



You could frame the renting of in-game items as a more transparent take on the expiration mechanic. In most cases you’ll understand exactly how long you’re getting an item, which can be tricky to ascertain in energy systems when you’re buying an abstract resource that’ll deplete as you play. The difficulty with rental items is that, in order for them to be desirable enough to purchase for a limited period, they need to be powerful. Need For Speed World let players rent blindingly fast supercars to take into races with ordinary cars, ruining the experience of the majority for the benefit of the paying few.

Even if a rented item isn’t overpowered, the perception among players that it must be is almost as damaging. The same effect applies to any in-game item purchases. If there’s a price tag attached, it’s natural to assume that it’s more powerful in some way, and if a competitive game doesn’t feel balanced it quickly becomes more frustrating than fun. Also, the notion of paying for a virtual item is enough of a barrier for many, the idea of paying for one that’ll disappear in a few days is even more absurd.

In short: If you're only intending to play for a short burst, a temporary item might be a cheaper option, but the cost of renting cars in games like Need For Speed World is surprisingly high. Rented items normally just aren't a good deal.



One-off account upgrades



The one-off upgrade offers a limited feature-set to new players that expands when you pay a one-off sum. In Team Fortress 2, buying an item, any item, at any cost, will upgrade a free account to a “premium” one. Free players have a backpack limit of 50 slots, doesn’t have access to rare and cosmetic items, and have access to limited selection of crafting blueprints. Buying anything from the Mann-Co store expands the backpack to 300 items and removes trading and crafting limits. Star Wars: The Old Republic’s free-to-play transition added more severe limits, constraining free players to handful of space missions and dungeons per week, forbidding new players from sprinting until level 10. Those limits could be lifted with any purchase of more than $5 on the in-game store.

The cost of transitioning to a less limited set-up is often minor, the intention being to familiarise players with the game’s shop and, in some cases, get players to enter card details. Team Fortress 2 is entirely playable with its free-to-play limits in place, but The Old Republic’s draconian restrictions leverage player frustration to incite a purchase. Not good. If you're looking to familiarise players with a store, then Guild Wars 2's tactic of gifting XP boosts and items provides a much better experience.

There is something to be said for one-off payments that unlock everything. Players put off by the complications juggling ongoing micropayments can instead just buy the game in an ordinary way. In Card Hunter, you can play a flat $20 fee and unlock all of the missions. This lets players treat the free-to-play element as a demo, and still gives players that don't want to spend a big lump sum a way to play for less money.

In short: Contrived limits like the The Old Republic's give new players a handicapped experience, which makes it unlikely they'll stick around, especially when the competition includes MMOs like Rift and Lord of the Rings Online. These offer a huge amount of playable content without charging for basic features.

Account Buffs



Buffs give a temporary percentage increase in the amount of gold, XP, or other desirables that the player can earn through regular play. It's another example of microtransactions allowing players to pay to reduce the time spent between rewards. Unlike energy, though, buffs are a bonus applied to someone who pays, not a penalty against someone who doesn't. That's a key difference in their philosophy that, for the most part, stops them being exploitative.

For them to work, it requires a careful balancing of item prices and levelling progress. There's a strange psychology here. If a game is enjoyable, then a lengthy spell between rewards shouldn't be a problem. But if progression and upgrades are built into the DNA of a game, having to wait too long for them can feel frustrating. In games like World of Tanks, progression is swift to begin with, but slows greatly as you advance. This deliberately plays on impatience to incite a purchase, and is a classic example of game design serving a monetisation system rather than the player. If a game is perceived as a grind, then a buff becomes a requirement rather than a bonus.

It's not just currency that can be boosted. In the case of Card Hunter, your account subscription provides you with an extra piece of loot for every quest you complete. It's an upgrade that neatly sidesteps the balance problem. It doesn't feel like a significant loss compared to the 2-4 rewards you get in regular play, but a guaranteed rarity makes for a nice bonus for those who do subscribe.

In short: In free-to-play games, XP boost items can be symptomatic of an overly sluggish levelling curve, but for patient players there may never need to go near account buffs. If a game is entertaining enough, putting a lot of time into it shouldn't feel like a chore.

Mini-DLC



Blurring the line between microtransaction and full-fat DLC are these purchasable packs of extras and bonuses. Rather than a free-to-play focus, you'll generally find these attached to AAA releases. We're talking the added profile portraits of Crusader Kings II, the silenced sniper of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the Air Propulsion Gun of Just Cause 2, and the squirting blood of Shogun 2 (to name just a fraction of a percent).

As a practice, these mini-DLC packs are the most variable in quality of all the microtransaction methods. There's nothing inherently wrong with providing fans with a fun extra to flesh out a world they're enjoying, but too often they're created with little attention to balance or value. The worst, inevitably, were once pre-order bonuses leveraged as an incentive to tempt early buyers. As well as the aforementioned sniper rifle, DX:HR's Tactical Enhancement Pack added 10,000 credits at the start of the game, effectively destroying many of the game's early purchasing choices.

For non-narrative led, systems-driven games, mini-DLC seems to fare better. Crusader Kings 2's profiles and music packs focus on aesthetic improvements in a game about strategic depth, while Civ 5's extra civilisations expand user specialisation, without changing the core of the game. But that doesn't mean that other types of games can't utilise mini-DLC in a way that adds something enjoyable for the user, that doesn't make the original game feel lacking without.

In short: Mini DLC like the Total War blood pack and the inventive Just Cause items are a bit like professionally built mods. There's a perception that mini-DLC is stuff that's been held back from the final game to screw a few extra bucks out of players, but more often they're ideas on the developer's big brainstorming board that they can't justify putting resources into during the development of the main game. Mini-DLC is easily ignored, at least, but beware of pre-order DLC that gives you guns and gadgets at the very beginning of a game like Deus Ex - they could ruin the balance of those opening hours.



Games that get microtransactions right



At their worst, free-to-play monetisation systems create a negative experience that the player has to pay to resolve, but you'll miss out on a few great games if you steer clear of anything with a microtransaction in it. Here are a few quality examples that offer great value for money. In no particular order...

Dota 2 - You can buy cosmetic items like character armour and alternative announcer packs, none of which alter the balance of the game. Dota 2 can be played to a highly competitive level without any need to pay. Valve's in-game stores are clearly labelled with real-money pricing and profits are shared among item-creators, rewarding an involved and productive community.

Team Fortress 2 - Team Fortress 2 isn't terribly coherent these days, but it's still huge fun. Given the number of items that Valve have added over the years, it's a miracle that TF2 remains competitive, but the hard counters that defined its nine classes at launch remain intact, and it's still frequently the funniest game on the internet.

Card Hunter - Card Hunter's premium items feel like a sugary bonus on top of a heap of good loot you'd earn through play anyway, and you always have the welcome choice of being able to pay a flat $20 fee to unlock all of the quests and content, making it a traditional pay-to-play game. It's a friendly and satisfying CCG/turn-based strategy hybrid that's certainly worth your time.

Guild Wars 2 - You'll have to buy the game to play Guild Wars 2, but there's no subscription fee, and many of the XP boosts, dyes and other store goodies are regularly awarded as levelling gifts as you play. Your character's level is less important in Guild Wars 2 than it is in other MMOs, which makes its XP bonuses less essential, and most of the shop is full of inventive cosmetic items.

League of Legends - LoL's rotating selection of playable characters gives players a broad slice of the game, and works well on a try-before-you-buy basis. Aside from buying heroes, you can put money into new skins for your favourite heroes.

Planetside 2 - If you catch a good battle, there's nothing quite like Planetside 2. The huge sci-fi wargame gives new players a lot of war for no money. Players endured a catatonic levelling curve early in its life and its currency system was hugely confusing, but that doesn't dent the spectacle or the experience when you're actually on the battlefield.

Those are just a few. MMO fans might enjoy Rift and Lord of the Rings Online. Tribes: Ascend developers Hi-Rez have moved onto Smite. Action RPG fans should look in on Path of Exile. World of Tanks commits a number of the sins in our list, but has a huge playerbase and a tiered matchmaking system that'll support competitive matches at any level.

Do you steer clear of microtransactions on principle? If so, why? Have you had any particularly bad or unsatisfying experiences buying items in games? Have you been playing a free to play game that you'd like to recommend? Share away in the comments.

A few months ago, Hi-Rez's Todd Harris announced that development on Tribes: Ascend was suspended, with the studio focusing its efforts their third-person DoTA-like Smite. With fans of that game growing concerned that its own continued development would eventually be in danger, the studio's CEO Erez Goren has posted a candid address to the Smite Reddit page, addressing Tribes' development, its financial troubles, and Smite's success in comparison. His comments also call into question their initial plan to release map-making tools for Tribes: Ascend.

As part of the post, Goren delves back into the history of Hi-Rez releases. "Global Agenda was our first game and it lost a lot of money," he writes. He goes on to explain how that loss was mitigated by the fact that its technology would support future games. "We continued to fund Global Agenda for more than a year after it was released and losing money, we continued to create content and new features but no matter how much work we did the user base kept declining."

That leads to Tribes: Ascend. "We created Tribes Ascend since we love Tribes," Goren writes, "we made it F2P so everyone can have easy access to it. We didn’t think Tribes Ascend would be a financial windfall but it was worth a risk to try." Unfortunately, the game was ultimately "break-even at best". "Tribes received exceptional reviews, we kept adding new features and content, but just like Global Agenda the user base kept declining no matter what we did." Goren's perspective is that "most games fail", with him comparing Tribes: Ascend's fate with "99% of the games".

In regards to the planned map-making and mod tools for the jet-powered FPS, they're looking unlikely. "Some people have asked for us to provide more tools for community content creation, but our infrastructure and development platform does not support that ability well and the cost and time to develop those features is extremely high. Contrary to the belief that we were ‘milking’ tribes to support the development of Smite, if we didn’t develop another game that could support the studios the company and the Tribe servers would have closed down."

And Smite? According to Goren, it's proving the exception. "Smite is one of those rare games that’s actually growing every month, and is also profitable. This is allowing us to grow the Smite team and deliver weekly updates and content (from 15 people initially to about 80 people now). In addition, many outside publishers were interested in Smite and we are fortunate enough to have made a deal with Tencent who is the most prestigious partner we can have for our type of game.

"Given everything we know Smite should have a long and successful future which is why we are very excited as a company and continue to work our butts off to make Smite the best Moba game in the world."

To read the full statement, including why Tribes: Ascend was apparently a bad fit for traditional publishers, head over to Goren's Reddit post.