Personal storage space was not unlimited, but I never had a huge problem with the limits that were there. Sometimes you had to delete some crap from your tray in the early days, or else go sell stuff off in between missions, but I think that was good. People looked at that as an unnecessary pain in the axe, but I saw it as a way to promote travel powers and make them more relevant. In terms of XP per hour, being able to super speed to the nearest vendor was better than having to walk there.

I liked the interface part as it was in CoX but it was to small to my liking. Nothing is more annoying than going to the vendor after every two missions to sell your junk.
However the thing the troubles me the most (although this might not have been the case in CoX) is when you have limited stacks of lets say 100 items. You'd have 5 stacks of the same item claiming all the space.

In general I aproved of the storage in CoX although a bit small. I think it's a good example for the MWM dev group.

While the question of "how will CoT handle item inventory/storage" seems basic enough it really hinges on an even more fundamental question of what kind of "loot" will CoT even deal with. Unlike the typical fantasy MMO where you can pretty much automatically assume it'll deal with physical things like swords, armors, magical gems, etc. in a superhero MMO it's not really obvious what "loot" can or should be. Even CoH evolved quite a bit over the years with the way it handled things like salvage.

Despite not knowing the specifics of what CoT will do we can at least speak in generalities that make sense. We should have a system of individual character inventories which hold a reasonable amount but shouldn't be so much that we could carry anything without consequences. Part of the game should involve choices of when to sell things and when to worry about running out of room. But by the same token I'm all for being able to buy/earn extra space to give players something to achieve with that. Same holds true for any kind of SG "bank" space - it shouldn't be infinite but it could be expandable with things you can buy/earn.

The words "shouldn't be so much that we could carry anything without consequences" in Lothic's post gave me an idea. What if the amount of stuff you were carrying around in your personal "wallet" had a tendency to encumber you such that it made to walk/run slower if you had too much. You could still carry a lot, but it makes you less combat effective to be hefting all that loot around on your person. It would reek of old school DnD too.

Radiac wrote:

The words "shouldn't be so much that we could carry anything without consequences" in Lothic's post gave me an idea. What if the amount of stuff you were carrying around in your personal "wallet" had a tendency to encumber you such that it made to walk/run slower if you had too much. You could still carry a lot, but it makes you less combat effective to be hefting all that loot around on your person. It would reek of old school DnD too.

Like you say the idea of "inventory encumbrance" is a classic mechanic from old school RPGs. I've seen various games base how much weight you can carry directly on your strength score for decades. While that kind of thing works as a game balancing feature in some games I would actually shy away from it for CoT if for no other reason we probably won't have character stats like strength.

The issue for CoT (that Segev alluded to) is that as a superhero game you can have a much larger range of character strengths than your typical human-type characters. It could go all the way from the tiny ant-man who technically couldn't lift a pound to a Hulk who could technically carry multiple tons. In that light it's probably easier to keep things abstract and make everyone start with same max arbitrary number of items for their inventory.

When I was talking about having inventory "consequences" it was more like what I think Redlynne was implying with her Goldilocks reference. The default amount ANY character should be able to carry should be geared more on how much loot a typical character is going to be able gather in a period of time and/or how much a typical character is going to need to carry as standard equipment. I think these kinds of numbers can be determined once the game starts its Alpha/Beta testing.

The ultimate goal should be to set the default inventory to a value that would let average players collect a reasonable amount of loot without having to go sell stuff every five minutes. On the other hand the default value shouldn't be so large that you could go multiple hours/days without selling or demotivate people from at least considering the idea of wanting to buy/earn additional space. The Goldilocks zone of inventory.

As far as allowing people to be "over encumbered" I suppose they could keep it relatively simple/strict. As a hypothetical let's say the default inventory limit is 50 items. Maybe the game would actually let you carry up to 70 items but any time you had from 51 to 70 items in your inventory you suffered an arbitrary across-the-board 50% speed reduction. That way you'd have the choice to carry too much but the penalty would be fairly severe and noticeable. Maybe there could even be an optional setting that would let players choose if they even wanted the game to automatically let them pick up too much loot or not. With a penalty this severe it would serve as another motivator to want to buy/earn more inventory space.

I'm pretty sure - but not yet positive - that whatever our in-game currency winds up being, it won't be representing "money" in a literal sense. That said, I do hope we come up with something that makes sense to be able to trade around LIKE currency, because it WILL be traded like it, and I frankly found "inf" as defined in CoH and CoV to be nonsensical in concept as something you can literally trade with other people.

I agree about the currency. For game purposes, you need a currency, but in the role playing sense it's almost anathema to what heroes are supposed to be doing. You pretty much have to have a currency, so I personally wouldn't even try to explain it. Just have it and give it a name, like "superbucks" or "looties" or something and be done with it.

Radiac wrote:

One thing I would have liked for CoX to have had would be the ability to set your Enhancement tray to use some form of comparative logic in deciding what to pick up, what to ignore, and what to delete to make room for new stuff. So like, being able to rank the different SO/DO/TO stuff in order of importance to you, by category.

In general, I was happy with inventory as it was in CoX, but I would LOVE to see this kind of idea implemented. I'm thinking of it a bit like Tactics in the Dragon Age games. OK, maybe not to that level of detail, but I'm thinking a similar implementation would do the trick, in that it's not completely free-form (to help simplify developement) but it gives a lot of choices for prioritisation.

Interdictor wrote:

influence, infamy, information, money, whatever.

You mean ... [b]INF[/b]luence ... [b]INF[/b]amy ... [b]INF[/b]ormation ...?

City of Heroes did that one already.

I think CoX did pretty good with their Inventory as well. I always felt like it was just big enough to not have to worry about it all the time and just small enough to have to worry about it some of the time. lol. Seriously though, I can see keeping it pretty similar to CoX's inventory. And for those that want more room, well there could always be an option to buy more inventory slots from the local Star-mart.

Personally, I despise the "Inventory Management Online" aspect of most MMOs. Too much like doing a RL office job, minus the paycheck and minimal sense of accomplishment. In other games, sometimes I find myself stuck spending hours trying to figure out what to store where, what can be dumped, what needs to be equipped, what looks like it can be dumped but I'll kick myself later for doing so... Games are supposed to be about having fun, not simulating cleaning your apartment.

It would be cool if you could pay INF or whatever we're calling it to rent out storage space in specific bank vaults instead of having them all be magic doors to the same pocket dimension storage locker like in CoX. It would feel more like getting a bank box in real life. Then, if that bank get's robbed by NPCs, some or all of YOUR stuff that's there might get stolen. So you end up getting emergency alert missions (but only while you're actually logged on) that give you the option of "drop everything and get to the bank ASAP!" or "No, saving the world is too important, I may have to let some of my stuff get stolen while I defuse this doomsday bomb". People would have to decide on their own how important theiur stuff is, only stash the somewhat low value stuff in banks, try to get boxes in the more secure banks, etc.

Let's not forget, I intend to enjoy playing this game myself, so the better word for it is probably "masochistic" :) I usually assume questions like that to be rhetorical, but in this case whether it is or not I think it bears discussion on its face.

I like a base rules set that's fairly harsh and fraught with (I hope) realistic-feeling drawbacks and limitations. That way, you can design other parts of the game that make them "better" by reducing the impact of the drawbacks or offsetting them in various way, or even making them WORSE as a way of obtaining some advantage in some other area.

In a world where all bank vault access works like CoX, you have a certain amount of storage space and can access it from all the banks interchangeably. In the system I've proposed, you would need to decide which banks are safest and which are located in the most convenient areas for your toons, and then there's the problem of the INF cost to rent them out, which might be different in different banks. All of this becomes fodder for missions, NPC interactions, etc. Not to mention the fact that you could then sell people game store items that work better and are less fraught with peril. Subscribers could get way better vault space perks as opposed to non-subs, etc. Thus the game store makes money by providing an alternative that is either more secure, or lower rent, or more convenient, or all of those etc for real world dollars. Not to mention the idea that you the hero might actually give a damn about which bank is being robbed because you do YOUR banking there. It would definitely make you feel more like part of the city. You could have events that spawn where a particular banks gets robbed and the heroes online at the time need to respond or EVERYONE loses some stored stuff, etc. It would pull the community together, I would hope, best case scenario.

If you disagree with the basic premise that "harsher is better, as a core rules set, then you can add stuff to ease the pain here and there" consider the crafting system CoX had. If you wanted to make a rare IO you needed a recipe which dictated what level the IO would be, and some salvage pieces that you had to gather up, and you had to pay influence to craft it all together. It would have been a lot less work and drudgery on our part if the recipe itself was the already-crafted IO and there was no salvage or influence cost needed to make the IO (like how SOs worked). And yet, the IO crafting system was "better" in the game sense. The more already-efficient and pre-shortcutted the game rules are in their basic state, the less room there is for the devs to make more cool stuff to add on later and make our lives easier via upgrades, etc

Radiac wrote:

It would definitely make you feel more like part of the city. You could have events that spawn where a particular banks gets robbed and the heroes online at the time need to respond or EVERYONE loses some stored stuff, etc. It would pull the community together, I would hope, best case scenario.

Awww.. FDIC no longer covers that City? :(

Plexius wrote:

Izzy wrote:
Radiac wrote:
It would definitely make you feel more like part of the city. You could have events that spawn where a particular banks gets robbed and the heroes online at the time need to respond or EVERYONE loses some stored stuff, etc. It would pull the community together, I would hope, best case scenario.

Awww.. FDIC no longer covers that City? :(

I LOL'ed!

;)
I was hoping for a response of.. "Well, See... that city is a High Risk, so the FDIC lowered the coverage amount from 100,000 to 10,000." So Heroes, it's On You! to protect your Own Ass'ets! ;D

I certainly understand the problem of nickel-and-dime-ing people at every turn. I don't want the game to feel like it's constantly setting me up to have to pay again at every turn either. Not ALL of the different possible "make it harder" suggestions are going to fly after all, but it helps to see the opportunities that exist within the limits of what might be called "realistic role play" and then pick and choose from there which things you want to do and which you're going to just skip out of a sense of "enough is enough already". I mean, I'm not proposing we make each toon have to fill out a tax return and find a good preschool for their kids and try to maintain their credit rating and so forth, but any and every idea in that vein, if it occurs to someone, is at least something to mention and discuss here now, I feel.

This gear storage issue is also a thing that, to me, goes back to the reasons for and implementation of the hybrid (Free to Play / Subscription) model that I'm assuming might be in place when the game gets underway. For me, I personally feel that the "Free to Play" (which of course is a misnomer if you had to buy the box in the first place, and since I KNOW someone will bring that up in response if I don't mention it here, I'm mentioning it here) ought to be the option for people who don't intend to play a lot, are pretty casual about it, only play because some of their friends are into it for the time being, aren't really "invested" in the game (either emotionally or intellectually), etc. For those people, the amount of inherent "harshness" in the game that can be overcome by subscribing ought to be a good reason to either subscribe (if you're going to actually play the game a fair amount) or just not play so much that you end up caring about all that "hash" stuff in any meaningful way.

I don't want to grind the casual players gaming to a halt, but I think that a swag storage system like I described doesn't really punish the casual people who only have a few bits and bobs to haul around, the amount of personal wallet space we get will likely be enough for that type of player. On the other hand, the people who want to try to economize the gear/influence/market system and acquire vast amounts of everything to amass a financial empire are going to have a lot of harsh logistical work and legwork to do when trying to manage large portfolios of stuff like that on a free account which forces them to deal with this stuff in its base state while a subscription player might have the advantage of a larger personal wallet, cheaper and more secure storage in their personal lair and/or SG base, etc.

In previous posts I've mentioned my own personal thoughts on the idea of making people *GHASP* pay for content, and most people hated it. Some of those people suggested we only make people pay for other stuff, like for example storage bin space and whatnot. It occurs to me that if you're going to make people pay for that stuff, then you ought to give them a reason to want to have it in the first place. Also, I just love the idea of having to drop everything and save the bank from being robbed in order to avoid losing any of MY stuff. I feel like the role play/PVE game implications of that sound really fun. Instead of having yet another Rikti Invasion nobody cares about, you could have them attack the banks and watch the players go nuts trying to repel them, etc. I would love that. More fun big-group play where we all try to save the city together.

Okay, but whatever the established baseline "standard deal" is for this game, by virtue of the base game rules they write, anything that represents an improvement on that would then be considered a "reward". I mean, I think all rewards are some form of "better than usual/expected result" from doing something. Nobody said you COULDN'T have rewards drops for saving the bank, and if its a repeated event like an invasion there could be badges for doing different parts of it (defeat X bank robber bosses, get a badge, if the vault remains intact, everyone gets a badge at the end, etc).

I don't believe in the "comparison shopper" theory that says our game has to have the most free stuff and the least drawbacks in order to attract the most gamers. I don't think anyone picks and chooses their games based on how easily the devs will hand you everything you want. If they did, everyone would be playing that new awesome game called "You WIN!" where all you do is download and install it for free and you automatically win. That game sucks precisely because there's nothing to do in it. Making people work for the rewards (XP, INF, gear drops, etc) is the basic meat of games like this in the first place. People DEMAND the right to farm the same mission over and over for swag. Would you rectify that repellant grind and save the poor gamers from leaving CoT by just flat-out giving them the swag they want without having to grind for it at all? If so, I don't see how that makes the game more fun or engaging. To the contrary, I think it takes all the fun OUT of the game to do that. I think devs will be able to determine somehow what things are "too much grind" and what are "not enough work for it to be a game in the first place" reasonably well. I also think that not all people are as averse to all risk as you think they are. I mean, I might store my less valuable stuff like some salvage or whatever in a "non-secure" bank. Anyone who puts their purples in there knows what they're getting themselves into when they do that. There are, or should be, other (more secure) options, just maybe not as much as you'd probably think you need.

I hoard all the stuffs so I can make all the things and give them to all the peoples freely. Don't make me throw away the unmade stuffs cause I hate selling the stuff or the things and not everyone needs the things right away but they will.

Cute Kitsune wrote:

I hoard all the stuffs so I can make all the things and give them to all the peoples freely. Don't make me throw away the unmade stuffs cause I hate selling the stuff or the things and not everyone needs the things right away but they will.

I would assume that if you're giving away crafted objects as soon as you're done crafting them, in that case you'd be LESS worried about storage space than someone else. After all, you ought to have no great difficulty in making room in inventory if you're just giving stuff away for free.

In any event, the argument you're making here is "I want unlimited space" which is what everyone wants, I would think. Even if you're willing to concede that "unlimited" is probably not realistic, you still sound like you want "so much inventory space that the limit on it is nothing to worry about" which is no different than "unlimited" as far as the game mechanics are concerned.

There will either be a desire/need for more inventory space or not. If there is not, you've given the players so much space up-front that they don't feel they need any more. I don't think they ought to make that the "standard deal", I think they should give people "limited" space for free (and by that I mean "a limit so low that you DO Feel like you want more", in most cases), then charge them "money" in some way(s) to expand the inventory later.

This could be done by subscription, microsub, one-time transaction, vet reward, in-game fake money "rent" on SG base, personal lair, bank vault space, etc.

Cute Kitsune wrote:

One time cost, sure fine, monthly, no.

+1

I am totally for spending real money for expanded Storage. I would also hope that CoT give people the "right" amount of storage to be just enough. What is that amount? I do not know. I don't even claim to begin to know. I just hope and trust that CoT will be able to figure that amount out and implement it. Perhaps they should start low in the beginning to see how people respond, then increase it gradually until the right number is found.

I'm thinking of a compromise. Part of my idea is to have two different scopes of storage: character storage and account storage. The two would be separate and would be monetized differently.

Character storage would work much like it does in World of Warcraft. Each of your characters would have some default amount of storage space which could be increased with "bags" that grant your character more item slots when equipped. Bags could be acquired through normal play via crafting, drops, or special rewards. Those willing to spend real money could buy high-capacity bags from the cash shop.

Account storage would be more like a "bank vault" that every character on your account could access. The only option to unlock account storage would be via a subscription paid with Stars. The cost per vault should be minimal in my opinion. A lapsed subscription would only allow you to remove items from account storage until you renewed the subscription, and items would expire if left in unpaid storage for too long. Converting INF to Stars would allow everyone access to this storage.

This gives players the best of both worlds. Players unwilling to spend real money could expand their characters' inventory by collecting bags through normal play or by converting some of their earned currency into Stars. Players willing to spend real money could buy high-capacity bags for their characters and subscribe to as much account storage as they need. This creates a clear choice between paying a subscription, paying per upgrade, and paying nothing at all.

Note that I've said nothing in regards to guild/supergroup storage which I have no immediate opinion of. I've also made the assumption that all items will share a common storage medium as opposed to separate storage for each type of item as it was in CoX.

I'm a cheap man, so I would make the excuse, if if takes up disk space on the server it should be paid for. Even if its just a tiny Database Entry. ;D

Minotaur wrote:

At the height of what I was doing (as well as storing stuff for my characters, I was buying recipes, crafting them and selling hundreds of enhancements a day across maybe 20 characters), and that demanded storing a lot of salvage to even out the price peaks.

I see this and I cringe. I would GLADLY limit myself to 1 character and have that single character receive the inventory space of all you twenty combined. Is that even an unfair request? Give up a character slot to gain it's inventory space on 1 other character?

Radiac wrote:

Minotaur wrote:
Radiac wrote:
It sounds like you're defining *reasonable* as "so much that I don't feel like I really need any more" which is, practically "infinite" . I didn't find the amounts of storage in CoX to be unreasonable. I mean, if you looked at the salavage and SOs and whatnot and think about what they were ostensibly supposed to represent (Nectanebo's Gourd, Circuit Board, Gold bar, Adaptive Flow Control, Mathematical Proof) the role play implication there is that you're hauling around like a metric ton of random junk wherever you go.
And where is it written that everyone SHOULD be able to make a huge batch of IOs whenever they want without running out of space? Are you seriously suggesting that a level 50 toon should have had the storage space to make and slot the over 75 IOs you would have needed to fill all of your slots after a full respec in one go? That sounds like WAY too much space to me, and not just "way too much for the base, free to play deal" but actually "way too much for anyone, period." A job that big SHOULD require multiple trips to and from the various places you need to go to do that work, to me.

I liked to keep enough salvage round the base such that if alchemical silvers went up to 500K I had 20 that I'd acquired through adventuring or bought at 100K. Once you're doing that for lots of things you need a lot of storage. Let alone keeping all the crafted IOs you made and knew you would use later. IIRC my main personal base (hero side Victory) had 6 salvage racks permanently full and 12 enhancement tables. The overflow (villain side Justice) had something similar. I also had several other bases on various servers where I had enhancements stored.
At the height of what I was doing (as well as storing stuff for my characters, I was buying recipes, crafting them and selling hundreds of enhancements a day across maybe 20 characters), and that demanded storing a lot of salvage to even out the price peaks.

It occurs to me that no matter how much storage space they gave you in CoX, after 8 years you had plenty of time to stockpile enough stuff that whatever storage you had would be full, so that's not a compelling argument for more free storage space. Whatever they give you, you CAN fill it, eventually, that much is already assumed.
On a related point, I don't think allowing people enough free storage space to be able to keep 20 Alc Silvers handy just to churn the market for them is good either. I think the people who have THAT much space to devote to pure market speculation should probably be paying for that added space somehow, since it's making them "money".

Storage space was only an issue post IOs, before that it really wasn't necessary to store great amounts.

And you misundestand me, I wasn't churning the alchemical silver market, I needed it to craft IOs and didn't want to be at the whim of market prices to buy it so stocked up when they were cheap (or more often took one of my 50s down to 30 in ouro and went to old DA to kill BP for it).

Segev wrote:

I wonder how much people would pay per month for one additional storage space. It would seem to be a good way to let people calibrate how many storage spaces they want vs. what they're willing to pay, if they can rent them individually. Want just one more? Rent just one more. Need it just this month? Rent it for just this month.

If the dollars to Stars conversion rate set's Stars at some fairly small dollar value, say 1 cent per Star or 10 cents per Star, I could see doing this, if it's more like "$1 = 1 Star" I can't see that happening. I would want more than 1 new storage space for a whole dollar per month. At that point, for a whole buck, you'd need to give me a permanent unlock of the extra space probably.

Of course, this is also highly dependent on how many storage spaces we get for free every month as well. I that number is "zero, you have to rent each slot you want" then I would cry foul. If it's so many that I don't feel cramped at all and don't need any more, good luck getting any money out of me for any more slots.

Segev wrote:

I wonder how much people would pay per month for one additional storage space. It would seem to be a good way to let people calibrate how many storage spaces they want vs. what they're willing to pay, if they can rent them individually. Want just one more? Rent just one more. Need it just this month? Rent it for just this month.

It depends on what a single storage space is. Can it hold just one item or a stack of items? And how much is one storage slot, compared to drop rates and inventory size? If there is no perceivable difference I would not bother with one rented slot. If that one slot can make my life a little easier, maybe. But I guess I would rather look for a package deal of more slots for less money per slot. I suffer from the 'but I might need it later'- habit, so I will always have to little inventory space.

What I would really want would be remote access to storage, (sell only) vendors and auction house. I would happily pay for that kind of convinience.

Well, if you ask 100 people "How many inventory slots is the bare minimum to not feel 'cramped,'" I think you'd get between 90 and 150 different answers. The idea behind renting additional ones would be to allow each person to weigh the monthly expenditure vs. their comfort point, so they have as many as they need to feel "not cramped" and no more.

As for how it would work, I imagine it'd be just like any inventory slot in the game, so if there's stacking, it would hold stacks.

For those who feel this way, why would it be acceptable to charge for extra "bank slots" but not for extra "character inventory slots?"

There is a commitment to the idea that the things you buy you own displayed by CoT BUT some small Quality of Life things like extra storage give a great way for players to add revenue (in game revenue or IRL revenue) to show where that "enough" boundry lies.

Without the metric of "who's bought em" how would you, as a developer, find the top of that bell curve?

Personal non-dev opinion.

I also hate the idea of renting space, I'd much rather just pay up front for a goodly chunk forever on all my toons.

One thing NW got horribly wrong was making buying bags/bank slots on a per character basis, they'd have got a lot more money out of me if they'd offered me 24 slots on all characters for say 3-4x the price of 24 slots on one character.

I wouldn't rent storage space only. I'd buy more storage, but not rent it. Now if there was a subscription base that allotted more storage space per month than a non-subscription I could see doing that, on top of allowing me to buy additional storage as well.

Renting anything is a bad idea. Worst thing I've ever seen is MMOs that let you purchase temp whatevers.

I think the people who are taking a hard line against rentals are looking at this from a bad angle. Assuming those of you against renting space are still okay with paying $15 per month for a full sub, that sub represents the rental cost of EVERYTHING there is about the game that you don't get just for paying the up-front fee to download it. Nobody on here that is against rental fees has stated that they're averse to paying a $15 sub every month, and I know for a fact that I intend to do that, or whatever the sub cost is. Assuming there is the option of NOT paying a sub, while still being allowed to log on and play the game, the sub cost MUST buy you something that you don't get without it. The sub, which we all agree we're okay with, is in fact therefore the RENTAL COST of everything you wouldn't get without a sub. All that remains is to break that down into which items should cost which amounts of money.

Imagine a system where you play $15 not for a month's sub but for Stars. Then you can spend those Stars on anything and everything there is that the game has in whatever amounts you want. you might want to buy a new costume set that just came out this month, do you buy more Stars to cover it or do you just cut back on wallet space, or crafting, or market slots to offset th costume set costs? Entirely up to you. Assuming $15 would buy a month's worth game VIP play, plus rent on whatever wallet space you would consider "adequate", plus the right to send and receive tells, plus crafting rights, plus slots on the market auction house to buy and sell stuff, plus all of the other things a full sub ought to buy you, how many dollars worth of that $15, in your opinion, is that wallet space alone worth to you? That is the question.

Because the way I see it, if they want to charge me an extra 10 CENTS per month for a couple of added wallet slots, I'm willing to fork that over (assuming we're talking about all of my toons here, not just one) upto the point where I feel like I have enough slots. At 10 cents per month each, I might even round it up to the nearest 50cents and buy more than I think I need, just in case. I would assume that you get some very small amount of wallet space for free every month just for buying the game up-front, then to get from "cramped" to "reasonable" you have to spend some of your $15 on wallet space, with the rest going toward other things.

The fact is, people on forums hate paying money, hate talking about paying money, and hate putting price tags other than "$0.00" on anything they actually want, but the game has to make money somehow to survive. I personally reject any and all "just buy it once and own it forever" pricing preferences as stated by players as being replacements for ongoing fees that would, taken in their totality, amount to a monthly subscription. CLEARLY that is a cost you pay one time and then play the game free of monthly sub charges forever afterward. GREAT deal..... for YOU, the player. How does the game company survive in years 3, 4, and 5 on that? It doesn't, period. The game makes no money in years 2-3, dies shortly afterward. Even when you buy something in the real world for money and it's permanent, it isn't really permanent, not after you take durability into account, things get banged up, or become obsolete. I'm currently sitting in my computer chair looking at my LAST computer chair which is all torn to shreds in the corner of the room. With real stuff you have to buy s new one when the old one breaks. That doesn't happen with virtual stuff in games. If the furniture industry sold stuff that never wore out, like video game virtual objects, we'd all be sitting on chairs that were made in the 1500s.

As for the wallet slots themselves, I think their marginal value starts out high for the first few and then they get progressively less valuable as you get to the point where you have enough to make do. Thus a single price tag on that is tricky, because if I have ZERO slots, I want those first few very badly, but when I have about what CoX gave us as subscribers, I'm not paying for any more simply because the added space is unnecessary to me. Also, you can't shaft people by giving them zero slots as a baseline. The purchase of the game and the fact that you have a toon at all means that toon ought to be able to carry some very small amount of stuff inherently. Beyond that each added slot you buy is less valuable than the one that came before it, and eventually you hit a point where people just don't need any more. And that's going to be different from person to person.

So do I, which is why they will likely offer and I will likely buy the "Top Shelf VIP Monthly Package" or whatever every month and then not think about it. I pay my $15, I get my usual outlay of stuff (which is basically "ALL of it, with the eggs on top", and I forget there were ever other options.

People who need to economize and have to save some money here and there might be more willing to think about which bits and pieces they can live without for a while.

The question of what happens to stuff that is occupying storage slots when those slots disappear is a valid one. Whomever is designing the storage rental system definitely needs to address that. I'm in favor of locking the items indefinitely until the rent is paid again, then offering a cash shop item for a small fee (way less than a month's sub) called "Item recoverer" which pulls your items out of frozen slots and puts them in useable slots, assuming you have enough useable slots empty to accommodate them by then. That way you can pay a SMALL fee to get your stuff out of impound one time. When the recovery tool does this function, it should probably give you the option of liquidating any or all of the assets in question for INF or something. Like when you respecced in CoX and it gave you "NPC going rate" prices for enhancements you didn't have room for anymore.

Of course, things like costume pieces, character slots, storage space, etc mechanically tend to work in such a way as to make renting them an awkward proposition (as we're discussing here). That mechanical property of slots is one valid argument for taking the position that maybe we should just make this a "Buy it once and own it forever" type of thing, at least on a per-character basis, maybe. I still dislike those types of items due to the fact that they do not provide a stream of income for the company nor do they provide the subscriber a reason to keep subscribing in a world where continuing to play while NOT subscribing is an option.

What I keep coming back to is the problem that in order to provide people with a good reason to want to pay a sub every month, you're stuck with either A) make it, essentially, a sub-only game like WoW where you can only get to say level 10 without paying a sub, or B) if the non-sub play is a really viable option, you have to give people a continued reason to keep paying every month, and there a finite amount of stuff you can do to make that happen, all of which feels like taking away quality of life stuff from the non-subber to make paying a sub the only way to play the game without it being really limited and annoying to have to wade through.

Segev wrote:

How do people feel about one of the subscription perks being more inventory slots?

Supposing I drop my subscription one month and my slots go from 25 down to 15 at a time when I had all 25 slots full of stuff. Which slots do I lose access to and what happens to the stuff in them?

Assuming I go and pay for a sub again later, is that stuff gone forever by then or is it still there when I get the slots back?

Is there any way, short of paying a sub again, to just get my stuff out of escrow (if it still exists at all) with smaller one-time fee?

Or how about this, maybe when you "lose" those extra slots, you only lose the ability to put stuff INTO them, but you can still take stuff OUT freely? That might work better.

increasing inventory/bank slots for folks paying a subscription makes sense to me as it is included in the sub. it also keeps my payments and overall general administration of my account simple versus having to keep track of a billion lil payments having to be made all over the place.

I'd still like for there to be some way to permanently increase your storage capacity by making a C-Store purchase. I even gave an example one time of how I thought it should be done.

These are just random numbers, so don't read too much into them.

No Sub = 25 inventory slots expandable up to 50 with purchases through the C-Store.

Sub = 50 inventory slots expandable up to 75 with purchases through the C-Store.

This way people who don't Sub can get through purchases what the Sub person initially gets and then if someone does sub they get even more storage through subbing with purchases.

Radiac wrote:

Segev wrote:
How do people feel about one of the subscription perks being more inventory slots?

Supposing I drop my subscription one month and my slots go from 25 down to 15 at a time when I had all 25 slots full of stuff. Which slots do I lose access to and what happens to the stuff in them?
Assuming I go and pay for a sub again later, is that stuff gone forever by then or is it still there when I get the slots back?
Is there any way, short of paying a sub again, to just get my stuff out of escrow (if it still exists at all) with smaller one-time fee?
Or how about this, maybe when you "lose" those extra slots, you only lose the ability to put stuff INTO them, but you can still take stuff OUT freely? That might work better.

The last one was the CoH solution, they dropped one of the storage devices from 100 capacity to 30 and that was how they did it.

Agreed with Segev. What you're "buying" is the permission/right to PUT things into slots/places, not the permission/right to PULL from those slots/places. You can always PULL, but you can't always PUT. Keeps a lot of things tidy that way.