Any old Eliminate pro players here? I've been playing Eliminate back in 2009 and 2010 and the strange thing is that I don't remember the free to play system being annoying or limiting my game experience in any way. Perhaps the system was really that "fair" or have we just gotten allergic towards the F2P model over the years? I don't remember there being such rants against timers in that game, but then again I wasn't really paying attention to the community's thoughts on the game back then. I don't exactly remember how it used to work, but I think that there were basically 2 currencies: credits and power cells and there were also energy timers. You got some power cells each day and you could use those to recharge your energy, or you could wait a few hours and the energy would recharge without using power cells. When your suit was energized you would earn credits (which were used for armor and weapon upgrades), but if your suit wasn't energized you could still play normaly, the only thing is that you wouldn't earn any credits. But you could also buy power cells with credits, which you got by killing opponents, looting them, sending game invitations, leveling up etc. Have I got that right? Anyway, I was really invested into this game back in the day and I never spent a cent on it. I simply treated the matches where I had no energy as training and when I had energy as tournament, where I would try to win and get as many credits as possible. The neat thing about that game was that it matched you with 3 other players of a similar skill level as yours, so even if you were to buy credits with real money and get all the upgraded gear you would soon find yourself in the higher skill level with better players, against which you wouldn't stand a chance and soon your rating would fall back. So you wouldn't be any better if you payed real money to upgrade gear, unless you were also skilled. The weapons weren't that expensive either, because I remember testing all of them and then upgrading the two I used most, same with armor. And I still had about 130 power cells and a lot of credits when the servers went down. My question is how do modern free to play systems, especially in shooter games (MC5), compare to Eliminate's?
I was a big Eliminate player back in the day, yeah. Eliminate was the first to really get the F2P model right, at least for a "serious" style game. Sad they pulled it. I never really understood why ngmoco's games weren't more successful. Star Defense was one of the best TD games on the App Store for a long time. Rolando 2 is STILL on my list of all-time great platformers. Godfinger was a clever god game, far better than many of the games that followed.
But do you remember anything about it? Like how much money did you spend on that game? If you didn't spend much, were the energy timers ever frustrating you? Did you ever feel like the freemium payment system was dragging your experience down? Did you ever get the feeling that that the game was pay to win?
No, not really. You could still play when the timers ran out, it wasn't really pay-to-play. I'd ALWAYS rather just spend money in advance to unlock the whole game, but for an online game like Eliminate that depends on other players being online, that isn't necessarily the best way to handle it - it leads to empty servers.
As I recall the energy system only prevented you from gaining XP or currency or something, but you could keep playing without earning anything when the meter ran out. Interesting system by today's standards.
