“We also want to enhance the quality of service within the game, so that even though they’re playing a free to play game that they’re also receiving the same sort of quality that they might find out of a subscription game,” Victor continued. “I’m working closely with the service operations team to make sure that the community gets a fully fiesta gold out set of patch notes and also working closely with the customer service team to track user complaints, resolve them quickly, and upgrade the time it takes us to respond to them.”

Although Victor’s announcement came very recently, he had actually been working at Outspark for a number of weeks, taking in all of their operations and getting a feel for what his new community would be like. Since he had had a couple of weeks to acclimate himself, I asked Victor what he thought of the differences between the pay-to-play communities and the free-to-play ones.

According to Victor, there aren't too many differences between the F2P and subscription communities.

“At the end of the day, we’re all gamers, right?” Victor responded. “We obviously want our players to have a good time, and that doesn’t necessarily change with the business model. However, the activities that occur with the various business models definitely differ. Free to play models tend to be more interactive with their customers, and I’ve been more involved with the community so far. We do do live events and we interact with our users much more than the typical pay-to-play game does.”

As a purveyor of both free-to-play and pay-to-play MMOGs, I’ve always been intrigued with how often F2P games pushed out live events to their users. It seems like every weekend features some new XP bonus or fancy loot drop, and Victor and I discussed this fact, since live events are really a large part of any community management effort.

“The subscription business is just a much more passive model,” he explained. “As long as their customers are paying their $15 / month, it’s easy to forget about that. Free to play games make fiesta gold by keeping our users occupied and always giving them something to do. It’s a much more active business than a subscription game.”