This is true! He's only in channels where PR/legal and tech overlap out of necessity, the business and board of directors channels and, of course, the PR channel.

Really? You're going to pass over a coastal city for something more interior? Don't get me wrong Modesto or COI would be somewhat of a change of pace but you are on another coast with a completely different vibe from New England.

Exciting update, always happy to see more of what will be put into the city. I do have a few things I wanted to point out though. I will say about the Harlan Brown law center it is a cool building but those 2 doors that can be seen from the 2nd picture, are those really the entrances to a law building? They look extremely sketchy and I would imagine a law building to have some kind of sign or placard indicating the name of the building, perhaps that will be placed somewhere else. But this building doesn't look too official with back alley looking doors.

And if I had to take a guess at who the Mogul is for Black Star Tower, I would have to go with Lothic :)

Fireheart wrote:

Perhaps I was thinking of Monterey, but that area would be attacked by kaiju-class Sea-Otters, causing people to scream 'd-awww!' instead of 'we're all gonna die!'

Now I need to see a giant sea otter cracking open a car on its belly.

Tannim222 wrote:

DEPTH CHARGED wrote:

Redlynne I believe you hit the nail on the head.

In my opinion, it is what happens when the finance team and ceo become involved with the game designers in the game planning meetings.

It turns everything into marketing a product to buyers instead of making a game for players.

Game companies focused in business instead of making a good game. When game devs get to focus on game design and make a good game, people will buy it.

Now it seems it is more about designing a product intended to capture whales and siphon them for every lining they can get.

The monetization approach being described here, which I hate as much as anyone, is, I think, a reaction to the cash flow drying up. When you first release a game, thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people buy it, so you get money coming in quickly and you need to address the needs of the players quickly (bandwidth, servers, support, content, etc). Eventually, you get all of that figured out and you've got enough hardware, software, personnel, etc and a fair amount (one hopes...) of game content. But then the game saturates the market (or goes as far in that direction as it ever will) and player base basically stops paying you. At that point games have to flail around for revenue to keep the servers up, the support staff paid, and the lights on, not to mention having people designing and making new content. The game sells as a product you buy up-front, but has overhead costs every day of its existence. No company can survive that model without some form of continual ongoing revenue stream. Here is the litany of responses to this problem which I've seen, all of which are disliked by players because, fundamentally, they mean spending more money on the game, and nobody wants to have to do that:

1. Sell expansions to pay for the new content after it has been produced. This approach means, essentially, that the full game is now going to cost new incoming players more money to buy, because now you have to buy the base game and the expansion to get the full experience and to be able to participate in content with friends. If new customer sales is your only product, this means pricing people out of the market as time goes on and leads to fewer and fewer new players over time, causing the game to die a slow death as the veterans who got in at the beginning eventually get bored and leave for other new games.

2. Have a microtransaction cash-based store where you sell stuff for the game, i.e. skins, randomized superpacks (CoX reference), etc. People either ignore this and don't spend the money or accuse you of making the game Pay to Win. People who want to win, and can afford it, will pay. People who want to win, but can't afford it will rage quit, and the rest will ignore it. This approach caters to the whales and ignores the free-riders.

3. Require players to pay a monthly subscription. To me, this makes the most sense, as the money required to keep the game going is paid out in regular intervals so why not charge the players for the right to log on in regular intervals too? Well, players also hate this, because it costs money. Companies also think it's archaic and sub-optimal compared to the cash shop option, which can be used to nickel and dime people $1 at a time instead of asking them to commit to $15 every month, which sounds more expensive to the customer but has limited earning potential compared to the microtransaction cash shop which is unlimited.

I'm playing Overwatch now, I played Destiny 2 for the last few weeks, and I played Guild Wars 2 for a few months last year. Not one of these games has gotten me to pay for anything beyond the up-front cost of buying the game. I don't follow competitive Overwatch, and I don't buy stuff in any game's cash shop. I LIKE Overwatch, I want to see that game survive and do well. I just don't want to buy anything they're actually trying to sell me beyond the game itself. I've heard they might make the game free to play, but with more reasons to buy loot boxes etc for the cash shop. I personally don't care what they do, but I think people will hate this if it comes to pass for several reasons. First, because having the ability to make a new free account at will may cause people to troll more and just make a new account when they get banned. Second, they're likely to put entire characters behind the paywall with the excuse being that you need to play the game for a while to be able to play the steeper-learning-curve characters anyway. Since, say, Zarya is not an easy hero to jump into right away, you could justifiably let the free-to-players only have say Orisa and D.Va as tanks to start with, the force them to unlock the other tanks over time from loot boxes or straight money transactions. Then every time the devs make tweaks to heroes, the players cry bloody murder that it's a grab for money because a purchasable hero got improved while a free one got nerfed.

DariusWolfe wrote:

I have a strong feeling that there will come a time, sooner than later, when paying for the game simply won't be worthwhile for me

That could be said for any game, really. If you, or anyone, don't feel like they aren't getting their money's worth, then yeah, cancel the sub and only kick in for stuff that you want from the shop. It's not like you [i]have[/i] to remain subbed out of some moral obligation.

Redlynne wrote:

Anyway ... {rolls eyes} ... to drag this thread back on topic ...

We know that there's going to be a [b][i]CharGen[/i][/b] that will let us customize the appearance of our characters.

Any chance that there will also be a [b][i]BuildGen[/i][/b] that will let some of the more ... enterprising ... members of our community [b]MAKE BUILDINGS[/b] ... which could be submitted for consideration by staff?

Now what exactly did MWM ever do to you? Why do you want them to spend hundreds of hours every week trying to figure out how the community tried to slip the hidden penis past them this time?

I'm sure phallophobia is going to be first on the list of many issues of whoever gets that job. Imagine waking up in a cold sweat realizing that the player-built elementary school you just approved was an anatomically correct recreation of the entire male reproduction system.

DariusWolfe wrote:

My worry is that the model might not be profitable enough. Specifically, that the only difference between paid and unpaid is that Stars stipend. It's possible that I'm understanding that wrong, but I don't think I am. For people who want to buy a lot of stuff from the cash store, subscribing will be more efficient, because the Stars:dollars ratio will be better for subscription than just buying Stars outright. Now, some people, perhaps the utterly selfless desviper, will purchase stuff they never intend to use, just to support the game. I'm sure that those people exist. But most people are only going to want to pay for stuff they're going to use, and if the store is just customization, costume slots and character slots, eventually any given player is going to run out of things they want to buy, and very few of those players will continue to pay for the game once they've reached that point, because there's no value added.

You're not alone, Darius. I, too, worry about the profitability of the business model, especially if everything can be earned for free through playing the game. I don't expect a subscription to provide me actual value for money, but I expect -- provided the game is as much fun as I hope and as long as MWM continues to generate goodwill through good management of the game and improved communication -- that I will keep up a subscription more as a 'patron of the arts' than as a sensible budgetary decision. Seems to me the business model will rely on a combination of patrons and people who just can't wait to have x or y long enough to earn it in-game. I'm no expert on MMO business models, so I hope I'm wrong on this, but I find it difficult to imagine that those 2 categories will produce enough revenue to keep the lights on once the initial game purchase rush dies down to a trickle and it's mostly veteran players. Like you, the most important thing I desire here is for CoT to succeed.

Maybe PBS-style telethons once a year done in-game, where players can pledge and get exclusive cosmetics.

Hey I pledged once for a Red Dwarf mouse pad so it works.

desviper wrote:

Definitely gone long enough to start a "how will MWM be profitable with microtransactions" thread again :p

My personal thoughts on this:

1. I like the full-sub-required, Pay to Play idea the best, for me as a customer. You're providing a game people can play as much as they want as often as they want, with regular patches and continual support and maintenance, occasional updates containing new content, etc and you require a monthly fee to access that game, period, end of story. It's simple, it's fair, it's equitable, and it works for me, as a player. It has it's drawbacks, I know. It's a limited earning potential system, i.e. you never get more that $15 per person per month. It requires people to sign up for something that costs a whopping $15 at a time while the occasional, optional $1 purchase sounds better to most consumers. And worst of all, people never subscribe to more than one game at a time, usually, so you have to get their attention and hold onto it before they start getting bored and looking for a new game again.

2. I dislike the idea of only relying on microtransactions because I believe that good businesses will try to leverage their strengths and make money where there's money to be made. It makes no sense, in a board room, to devote tons of human resources to new content that you're not going to charge money for and then turn around and sell cosmetic items only. What you do in that paradigm is devote your time and energy to making more for-sale items and leave the new free content on the back burner. That which is sold for money is prioritized. If we as gamers expect to get new missions, new areas, new power sets, etc rolled out over time without paying for that stuff in some way, the devs have no incentive to make high quality versions of that stuff. If we spend money only on cosmetic microtransaction items, then they only have incentive to make more and better offerings of that stuff.

3. I personally WANT to pay a monthly sub fee to support the game, as of right now. I can't really imagine that I'd pay a $15 per month sub just to get extras in the form of cash shop currency and then actually be able to find $15 worth of that stuff to spend my stipend on every month. Assuming I want to save up my shop currency for the eventual purchase of a big expansion (like when they roll out a major update with a new zone and new missions, etc), I would want to know what that expansion was and what it was going to cost ahead of time, while I'm saving up. Even then, usually the new expansion is like $25 or so, right? That's not even 2 months worth of sub money. What are you going to be able to make that I will want to spend the other 10 months worth of cash shop currency on every year? You're creating a system where you can't possibly generate supply of new and original cosmetic items to meet the demand you've placed on yourself with the subscription structure.

DariusWolfe wrote:

Hey Radiac,

This is a well thought out post that would probably make an excellent start to a new discussion, and it's obvious that people still want to talk about it. Would you be willing to start the new thread on this topic?

Wow. I..... I don't know what to say here. Usually my thoughts on monetization are met with pure disdain. Anyway, this is all well-covered territory on this forum by now. The devs and forum lifers have heard everything I have to say about monetization (including the infamous "let's make people pay $1 per ride on the TFs and raids." idea I threw in there once upon a time...) and they're going the way of the new and industry-standard "up-front purchase of game plus microtransactions" model, or so it seems. I still wish there were some way to get happy players who like the game to make repeat purchases over time. It seems like the pay to play, hard sub required model is the only proven way to do that, old-fashioned though it may be now.

Also realize that we haven’t released all the info related to what subscriptions offer. We have only mentioned the bonus Stars, but that won’t be the only benefit related to subs.

ivanhedgehog wrote:

I know exactly when the alpha invites will go out...As soon as I leave on my cruise!!

Can you just leave now?

:P

If I wanted class division I'd play Life(R) :p

Redlynne wrote:

Life® is an overrated game.

Graphics and soundtrack are great, but the gameplay is very pay-to-win, and the story is boring.

Project_Hero wrote:

A thing is only pay-to-win if the microtransactions offer some kind of mechanical benefit. XP boosters, healing items, gear with stats, ect. Usually a mmo with a pay-to-win model finds their playerbase split between the haves and have-nots; a friend played Dungeons and Dragons Online and (according to them) high level groups wouldn't take a player along unless they had a bunch of premium healing items with them.

Cosmetics are usually fine as microtransactions as long as cosmetics aren't the only form of progression the game has.

Personally I'm not sure just the existence of those in a cash shop would be pay-to-win since to me if they can get equally strong/powerful item purely through game play then the one buying them isn't really "winning" imo. For it to be pay-to-win there has to be a game mechanical advantage to those items over what is available though drops. Not saying you are wrong or anything but I'm not so sure it's that easy to label something pay-to-win.

On the other hand I've seen someone argue that being able to turn cash-shop currency into some form of ICG (like premium/gated currency) and then used at the AH to buy drops from other players is pay-to-win. The main argument was that they hadn't earned it, but then what would be the difference to just giving away items since the recipient "earned" them to same degree imo.

blacke4dawn wrote:

Personally I'm not sure just the existence of those in a cash shop would be pay-to-win since to me if they can get equally strong/powerful item purely through game play then the one buying them isn't really "winning" imo. For it to be pay-to-win there has to be a game mechanical advantage to those items over what is available though drops. Not saying you are wrong or anything but I'm not so sure it's that easy to label something pay-to-win.

We get this discussion on the LOTRO (Lord Of The Rings Online) boards, and the general consensus is Yes, it IS Pay To Win. The one "buying" the goodie is usually skipping days if not weeks of grinding to get it, thus gaining that much more time for enjoyable game play over those working for them. At this point, there is a credible viewpoint among the player base that a lot of the recent development decisions are specifically made to drive them to the store as opposed to playing the game for the rewards in question.

We 'played' the game before there was a game!

Be Well!
Fireheart