In Magic Online, they have casual gaming, and they have events which require you to pay real money, in the form of event tickets that you buy with a credit card etc, to enter. The events have prizes in the form of packs of magic cards, and by that I mean the online version, so nothing physical, just more in-game cards, which would cost money to buy if you wanted to get them that way.
So, what if CoT had raids or TFs or trials that you had to pay, say a dollar to enter? What would the possible outcome of a raid or TF like that have to be to get people to do it? How would the money work? Does everyone have to pay, or just the leader (the one who has the mission, etc). Would we need to have higher rates of Inf or swag drops or a guaranteed "good" drop at the end?
I want to say I think I remember hearing Dr. Tyche talk about this sort of thing in non-specific terms in other threads, so I don't think this is 100% hypothetical, or if it is, it's at least being seriously considered.
The Hamidon guaranteed you a randomized HamiO at the end, if you succeeded it. Would people have paid $1 for the chance at that? What about the respec trials? What about the Statesman TF? What if there were a TF that got you a random PURPLE at the end, but cost MORE money to enter, and cost EVERYONE money, not just the one witht he mission itself?
Personally, as long as the monthly sub I fully intend to pay get's me some amount of this kind of thing as a possible perk of being a "VIP", I'm all for it. And I might be apt to play for the occasional "everyone must pay" raid if it's that good.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
The way it may end up working, at least one possible solution is that for one, any purchases would be made via the cash shop. It may be possible that a sub package includes any pay-walled content within the package. Other players not paying a full-sub may have micro-subs that gets them access to this kind of stuff. Players that don't would go by the leader's access. If the leader drops, once they exit the content (be it an instance or phase) or if they complete it, they lose access to it until they join up under someone else's access.
In addition, Stars, which is the cash-shop currency may also be sold within the game world's auction house for in-game currency. For players who don't want to spend real cash for Stars can get access to and use them to access any kind of paid content.
Yes, there's a lot of "ifs" and "mays". We still have to see how things will pan out with Stars and our in-game auction house, and if there will end up being pay-walled content.
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For what it's worth, I'm for this and I feel I would do it fairly often if it were popular enough to allow me to form a team or league with ease. The Incarnate Trials in CoX were the thing that kept me coming back in year 8 and the fact that people were mostly on doing that stuff at night was what made me want to pay for VIP during that last year of F2P. I feel if the popularity these things have is similar to that, you create en environment where there are a lot of teams forming for a lot of these paid raids every night and it ends up being the thing to do, and thus driving more subs and more cash shop purchases. And this despite the fact that people can still opt to just solo missions or team up for free content like mission or street sweeping, etc.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Wait wait wait. You want to pay to do raids and ON TOP pay a subscription fee? Am I reading this correctly? I apologize if I didn't read it correctly, I am just a taaaadddddd bit sleepy (exhausted) lol.
There is a full subscription to the entire game and all the assets that come with subs..
But there is a plan for micro-subscriptions as well.. ones that will give access to game content that is released like costumes, powers fx, access to walled content, etc.
While a full subscription may be $20/month
a microsubcription to only the walled off content may be closer to $5/month
Crowd Control Enthusiast
Oh okay hahahaha. I got a little scared lol.
The suggestion I had made was that there might be a super-awesomely rewarding TF or Trial that everyone (not just the mission-haver) might have to "pay" for, and by that I meant that the people in the mission would either have to use some of their monthly sub Stars or something to pay for it, etc. Also, I was cognizant of the "lesser subs" possibilities as well.
It may be possible that even a full sub might run out of stars in a busy enough month that they'd need to buy more, right?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
If it's super-awesome rewarding TF. It should probably be INCREDIBLY difficult. And I rather not have to pay anything if I'm already fully subscribed to the game.
Okay, but assuming a subscription gets you some finite amount of Stars per month to spend as you please, and assuming there are different things to do with the Stars, it's still possible that you might end up needing more Stars for stuff in a given month than you actually have. Thus, the need to buy more Stars with either real money or fake game money. I feel like that's always going to be possible.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
same here and a full subscription $20/month is lot
whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also look into you, -Friedrich
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The model we're looking at is that a "full subscription" would actually just be buying every single microsubscription. To simplify matters, we'll have a "buy it all" package, as well as possibly "lesser" packages of common/popular bundles of microsubscriptions. Each of these, however, is fully customizable by removing or adding other microsubscription options.
If we have a "raid" microsubscription, people paying for literally every microsubscription (a "full subscription" or what-have-you) would obviously have access to raids. As would anybody who paid just for that particular microsubscription.
If we instead had a "pay to play" raid or set thereof, they would be something your stipend of Stars (really its own microsubscription) could cover. I currently lean against such an idea, but it might arise if we had something that was particularly cost-intensive for us to run (e.g. something that required a live GM...which I don't see us doing any time soon, certainly not as any sort of regular thing).
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Sounds good to me. Like many others, I'll be a full sub as long as i can, but a 3$/mo (equivalent) "raid" sub. isn't a bad way to go about it.
Still feels a bit exclusive to have a VIP raid.
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It's not yet settled what content - raiding, premium missions - if any will be locked behind a pay wall. We're discussing it and weighing development costs and times against ability to maintain and provide ongoing content. I will say this: I continue to be strongly pushing for the ability for players to trade Stars for anything people are willing to sell to them from the game on the open market. That is, if some player wants to pay real money and acquire a Tyche Jar, but doesn't want to run the Cloned Heads mission arc just for the chance at one dropping, he can go to the player-to-player market and offer up the Stars he bought with real money. So all it takes is somebody who has a Tyche Jar they don't need to be willing to sell it for Stars for this gentleman to get it.
This also means that the player who sold the Tyche Jar now has Stars for which he never paid real money. This could let him, if he has enough, buy the (for example) Raid microsubscription, if he wants.
So even if we go this route, we will have mechanisms for players who don't spend real money on the game to gain access to the content alongside the paying players.
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In the interest of giving feedback as to "what to monetize and how to do it", to be honest, the Signature Story Arcs CoX had weren't very compelling, for me. I mean, I'm not a huge soloist. When I do solo it's usually because I don't have time for a TF or nobody's on, or nobody else wants to do the content I'm doing because they're off doing their own stuff for badges or whatever. The dedicated soloists just wanted more content they could solo, and I get that, but for me, it needs something more riding on it for me to get excited about doing it.
On the other hand, when a new Incarnate Trial came out, I was all over those. You generally got some new Incarnate XP unlocking some new Incarnate power, etc. That was awesome and, since it was largely team oriented, a win-win for me.
I think any content that does cost money ought to have a compelling reason to do it besides just "it's new". If I'm paying to do a SSA, then there ought to be some kind of really good rare recipe drop, temp power, unlock, or tangible thing at the end that the ones I did without paying for don't have.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
As long as you let me eventually pay enough to "Own" every pack. Even if this means I "paid" 5 years worth of monthly subs to own everything I could get free being a Sub over 5 years. I know that is being talked about but I would sell my rare Tyche jar to Own a single mission permanently. Also, let me buy content permanently even while VIP and able to access it free. This way I can VIP or 5 years and buy the content and then go free to play if I wanted to.
The line between knowing and understanding is often blurred.
Cute Kitsune the Anti Villain of Phoenix Rising.
I have more fervor then empathy, I still like you.~Me to a friend
It applies here too, I'm passionate not hostile.
i agree
whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also look into you, -Friedrich
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One (amongst many) ideas being bandied about is having older content becoming free to all with time. Microsubscriptions or pay-to-plays would be for playing [i]now[/i], covering new development, and some time later (months, maybe a year or so, possibly with each big update?) the older missions since the last one become part of the generally accessible content. There are obviously a lot of variables and factors to count here.
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Hmmmm...it would have to be a very long time (i.e. several years) not to be a disincentive for me to purchase said content. I'm a patient person: e.g. I'm very much looking forward to playing Civ: Beyond Earth, but I'll wait a year or more till it's on sale for more than 50% off. And this isn't just my being cheap: it's because I have plenty of other games to play in the meantime. I found the same sort of thing in CoX: I had so much to do in the game that I had a huge waiting list of "stuff I want to get to eventually." For example, even though I liked the idea of wings from the moment they were announced, I never got round to making a character with them till GR came out.
Not sure what you meant the word "content" to cover in this example, but If this idea of content going free applies to everything in a sub, it would actually make me re-evaluate the worth of a sub for me. If I could get access to everything in the game for free simply by waiting a little while, then I'd probably have little on which to spend Stars -- at which point subbing would become more of an act of charity to support keeping a good game alive, rather than a rewarding purchase experience. Don't get me wrong: I want to support this game (and have already made a start on the KS); it's just that paying for what would essentially be a form of early access to content is not something I find rewarding.
Getting back to the OP, having to pay real money for raids would simply guarantee I never participated in them. I was never a big fan of raids/trials to start with, so even at the cost of zero extra real money they had to have a pretty decent reward attached to entice me to try them in the first place.
Spurn all ye kindle.
This sounds good, to me, especially coupled with Segev's idea of having such content rotate on availability every week or month. That would mean even though it is now freely available, players don't have guaranteed access to it unless they've purchased the content. That would still provide some benefit to spending the money on it, especially as more such content becomes available.
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I like everything to be like it was in city of heroes with monthly Vip payment and earning monthly money for costumes.
Vero
I like the OP idea.
One variant, looping in discussions from other threads that make the point that we need to have sinks for influence, is that perhaps to be "special raid leader" one needs to "qualify" in some manner, which could (but would not have to) require paying a fee of in-game money. On example might be if the team is all highly experienced the price is "X" but if the team has two or three lowbies on it, then the price is lower. Or whatever the Devs want to incentivize. But special content could require both a subscription and an influence fee, at least to be the leader.
I am new here, so I have so much reading to do. I was an avid member of COH/COV and played til the end. I am looking forward to this game starting. To save me from endless reading, can someone tell me the projected start date?
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You lose a lot of resale value and revenue by turning things to available for free. Why incentivize people to not join the game until year 3.
A system where it's free over time based on player activity is different. Number of login days perhaps to value loyalty. Marvel Heroes has a great login/unlock system that works as a great incentive to login program. But instead of just giving you EVERYTHING it'd be much better to give a "200 stars on day 90" stipend or a "Unlock story token" if there is a token system available (Which I prefer.. specificity)
Crowd Control Enthusiast
Darth Fez and JayBezz's ideas do help mitigate the problem I see with stuff eventually becoming free.
My question is: what is to be gained by MWM by making stuff free after a certain amount of time? It's obvious how this benefits players, but how does it help MWM?
Spurn all ye kindle.
My guess. It avoid barrier to entry. WoW is currently suffering that problem when level 20's must buy 4 box sets to get anywhere. DDO is starting to see it as well. When the level cap goes up, there has to be a certain amount of free content to hook new users. No to mention old players that were once VIP and aren't anymore likely won't want to buy it cause they are sick of it. New person that is VIP then has 1 less person to group with. As long as they keep making new paid content faster then they make old stuff free then there is always an incentive to play through the not free portions.
The line between knowing and understanding is often blurred.
Cute Kitsune the Anti Villain of Phoenix Rising.
I have more fervor then empathy, I still like you.~Me to a friend
It applies here too, I'm passionate not hostile.
One part is as Cute Kitsune pointed out, it avoids the barrier to entry or at least prevents it from becoming burdensome. Another advantage is that it adds to the amount of content available before players run into a pay wall. That's always an important psychological factor.
Naturally all this will be a few years out, once the game has launched. By that point older content could also eventually be discounted (e.g. a six mission pack at 66% off, or six missions for the price of two) and made available only through the store, to avoid burdening the system with too many missions. Although if each area/zone has its own rotating set of missions, that ought to make for a lot of missions before MWM feels that the pattern is full. None of which precludes having sales in the mean time, naturally.
P.S. It occurs to me that such paid missions or story arcs will be competing with the mission architect. Should be interesting.
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Personally I want to see games go back to being everything is included with the subscription minus having to pay for services and packs that allow customization.
With CoT we already have tshirts and that's going to be some pretty good profit there lets expand it:
TCG (SoE had a ton of these and they were quite successful)
Statues and figurines of your character (I'm not sure who the company was that blizzard had doing this, but in wow you could have your characters made into statues and figurines)
Mousepads and limited edition keyboard and mice (contact razer for this)
I really appreciate the feedback on the "eventually it gets to be free" idea.
I admit, I am personally quite fond of the slightly less generous "this week, these missions/arcs are free" model. Subscribers to the "new content" microsubscription would have access to anything that counts as new content, possibly with a one-off ticket to run content that was new while they were subscribed but which they've not yet run that they get after the mission rotates out of "new." Either further microsubscriptions or flat-out purchases would cover gaining all-access to any missions you wanted that exist; for the free player, there would be a list of missions available this week (or fortnight or month; not sure on precise rotation period just yet...could even be a month of availability with a quarter of available missions rotating each week or something).
Assuming we stick with the "buy the box" model - which we're at least starting with - part of covering the cost of all missions becoming free (if we go that route) forever with each new Issue would be that buying the Issue would cover those costs. That said, this does raise the specter of needing umpteen Boxes by Issue Umpteen, which could be a tremendous barrier to entry.
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I'm now convinced I don't know nearly enough about marketing, economics, or gamers' purchasing habits to be able to touch this problem, quite frankly.
One idea I had is that you could reduce the prices on older content over time until really old stuff eventually is free by virtue of having been reduced to zero. So like if there's a new mission in Issue 2, by the time we get to issue 10, maybe that issue 2 mission is free by now, because it's so old. This way, the cheapskates who don;t want to pay for it are constantly in a state of "well, if I wait longer, it will be cheaper, but then I kinda still want to do it and it's pretty cheap now, so maybe I'll just bite the fairly inexpensive bullet and buy it anyway, what the heck." I don't know what kind of price reduction schedule you'd want to employ for this.
Edit: If you want to get really fancy, you could make the prices decrease over time as a tailing exponential function, which would mean the price has a half-life and only asymptotically approaches zero in the long run.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Sorry to continue with a somewhat tangential topic, but I'm not clear on several things. I think before I can really get my head round the idea of content going free, I need to know exactly what content we're talking about. A few SSA-like mission arcs (i.e. entirely optional)? Power sets? ATs? Something that would equate to actual "box" expansions?
Regarding barrier to entry, haven't we already created one the moment we decide to charge money for any content? Personally I don't see anything wrong with that.
But veteran players already had to overcome that pay wall. Why should latecomers not have to pay what veteran players had to pay? When it comes to the psychological factor, for me "Because I didn't pay I don't have access to the thing others have paid for" has negligible psychological impact, especially compared to "Why did I have to pay for this content when that guy got it for free?" I'd find the latter much more detrimental to my feelings toward a game.
That's something I can get behind wholeheartedly, because it sounds more like a free trial than a giveaway. "Try this for free. See what goodies you could have access to all the time if you paid up?"
I'm not sure I'm understanding this correctly. It sounds to me like you're saying "buy the box" doesn't just mean the initial outlay for the game, but that every Issue would be a new "box" that must be purchased. (Not something I'd necessarily have a problem with, assuming it would be covered under one of the subscription models.) Guess this goes back to the initial question of what "content" are we talking about.
Spurn all ye kindle.
In my original post I was talking about specifically pay-to-enter TFs, Trials, missions and arcs. Stuff you generally got for "free" in CoX (although the SSAs cost money and the iTrials were only open to VIPs).
As far as costume unlocks and so forth, that stuff isn't so much a barrier to entry as it is paying a little extra for extra perks. But 5 years down the road, if everyone's doing the various TFs and so forth that they paid for when they were new, the noob comes in and is like "I have to pay HOW much to do any of this stuff that people are doing? No thanks." which is a problem. As a game company, you want to get money for things, but you don't want the practical up-front cost to the newbie to escalate to the point that it will discourage them from downloading the game at all.
One reason I now kinda think "pay-per-play" TFs would be a good is that they treat everyone essentially the same. It's a buck a play each and every time you want to do the TF, so you're not disadvantaging the noobs at all. The subscribers may have enough monthly Stars or whatever to pay with that, but they're still paying for it somehow every time. I think you just need to make the rewards for succeeding good enough that people will want to do them despite the paywall, but have the paywall there every time and treat everyone the same.
Certain things in CoX which were basically free, like the Hami raids and the Statesman TF gave you some pretty cool rewards at the end, I could see charging a small fee for starting something like a STF or a Hami Raid. On the other hand, things that were really hard to do and gave somewhat disappointing rewards, like the Abandoned Sewer Trial and the Cave of Transcendence wouldn't have been worth paying for, IMO, so some thought needs to be put toward the price/reward deal each thing poses to the customer.
And then of course there's the question of whether everyone has to pay, or just the guy leading/forming the TF.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
The content in this context is something akin to the signature story arcs. Although it would be interesting to provide a kind of preview for ATs, power sets, animations, etc. that must be purchased from the store, they don't lend themselves well to such a rotation.
I presume that MWM will have sales, so this will be reality. Someone will end up having paid more for content than another person. In my view, whether some content is available for a rebate of 50% or 75%, or eventually 100%, comes out to the same. If someone is willing to wait a given period of time for a discount, or to perhaps be able to play the content for free, then more power to them.
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If that's indeed all Segev was referring to, I'm really not understanding the "barrier" idea or what advantage there is to making them free after a while. They're completely optional, unlike expansions in the WoW example that are required purchases to access zones, levels, etc. (As I mentioned above, I do like the idea of a "free this week only" rotation; what I'm trying to understand is Segev's original idea of stuff just becoming free after a certain amount of time.)
That seems a reasonable expectation, though I think there's a difference between "this might be on sale for a while at some indeterminate point in the future" and "this will be free in x months." But it still leaves open two questions in my mind: (1) What was the pay wall psychological factor you were referring to? and (2) as JayBezz mentioned, why do we want to encourage players to delay playing/purchasing content (again, looking at Segev's original idea of making content free after a certain time, not the rotating "free trial" version)?
Yeah, sorry -- that's why I was apologising for extending the tangent, because I was following up on Segev's "eventually free content" comment.
Spurn all ye kindle.
Lets us assume that each issue amounts to 60 missions. They are grouped in packs of 6 for $10 each. So $100 gets your everything. VIP for a year costs $99 if you pay once yearly. You get enough stars after a year to buy the content outright. Nice and simple. Lets fast forward 5 years. New player shows up and sees $500 worth of content to buy and a weekly rotation of 30 missions per week is awesome. The problem is that 30 missions used to be 50% of them. Now it's 10%. Lets go 5 more years. Now the free rotation is 5% of all missions and the cost to buy them all is now $1,000. This cost does not include outfits, vanity pets, base perks and all the other things you want to buy.
This is the barrier to entry that causes me to not be able to get new people into DDO. It is an old game and the prices on adventures have gone up not down and they keep adding more content. Also VIP doesn't get you all content anymore. Unwise moves. There is no need for Sharn chain to cost so much when no one can even run it without a rogue and the xp is laughable. Yet a much older, cheaper, and more played / purchased pack is in the same level range and it's cost went down. One pack I purchased years ago had it's price quadrupled at one point and now no newer people will buy it. It's 2 quests an obsolete raid and a timed 1 room dungeon.
Now using my example above, if 20 quests became free every year when 60 new ones were added then every 3 years 1 years worth of content would be free. 10 years into it the cost to buy is all is now only $665 or so and not $1000. Still a big pill to swallow but not as cost prohibitive. People who know the drill will buy newer stuff over older stuff but if their friends are all running the sewers of sludge slides and you want to join in, they'll buy it even with it being old.
The line between knowing and understanding is often blurred.
Cute Kitsune the Anti Villain of Phoenix Rising.
I have more fervor then empathy, I still like you.~Me to a friend
It applies here too, I'm passionate not hostile.
Agreed, there is a difference. I don't believe anyone has advocated providing a road map for when any particular content may be freely available, so I'll make no further comment on that.
When I have exhausted all content so that anything new is only available if I pay for it, I find that to be a downer. Even alting is a mediocre stopgap if I will mostly see the same content with different characters.
Additionally, if old content eventually enters general circulation then that is more content for everyone at no additional development cost. After all, the people who will have bought the game will have every expectation of new content for the price they paid.
As I've argued elsewhere, I doubt that many people will be upset if content for which they've paid becomes available for free after 12+ months. If they have not purchased it in that time, especially if it was also available at a discount, chances are that they were not going to be a customer for that content, anyway.
I do not understand this question. You have said yourself that you will wait a year or two to be able to purchase a game at a discount, even if you highly anticipate playing it now. Are you saying MWM should not have sales because, knowing that an item may eventually be available on sale, you are encouraged to delay playing/purchasing content?
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I guess it depends what the model will actually be. I was originally assuming that -- if Segev was indeed talking just about missions -- the pay-to-play ones would be an optional minority, like the SSA arcs in CoX, which could be entirely ignored if one were not interested. If, however, his comment above talking about buying issues means that *all* new mission content would require purchase, then I certainly see where you're coming from.
I believe that's precisely what Segev was telling us someone in MWM was advocating when he wrote:
At least that what it sounds like to me: Someone in MWM has suggested that content would become free to all at a pre-defined point in time after release of said content. I'm trying to understand how this would be good for MWM, and I realise a huge amount depends on the model, as mentioned in my reply to Cute Kitsune above.
Ah, now I see what you mean. Yeah, I'd feel the same, I think. Again, a lot depends on the model. If Segev's comment about buying issues means we all have to pay for all new content, then that's a huge new can of worms that probably deserves its own separate thread.
I, on the other hand, think a lot of people will be upset by this, or will wait till it's free. Again, to be clear, I'm still discussing Segev's original comment about planned free-ness.
What I took from Jay's comment was that, by scheduling a future free-ness of content at a time when MWM will still be charging for that content, MWM is incentivising delayed play of said content -- because players who don't have to have all the new stuff [i]nao[/i] and who have an eye for a bargain will just do other stuff till the content becomes free. To me, that just seems to be a plan that would reduce revenue for MWM. As I mentioned above, possible sales are different from planned free-ness, so I was making no comment about sales.
Spurn all ye kindle.
If you're worried about the "why pay now, just wait till it goes free" problem, I think the pricing half-life idea has some ability to offset that. Suppose a mission pack costs $10 when it rolls out and has a "price half-life" of one year. Okay, so in a year it will be $5, in two years it will be $2.50, in three years it will be $1.25, in four years it will be $0.63, in five years it will be $0.32, etc. Are you really going to wait until year 10 when its selling for a penny? The game might not be around anymore at that point (CoX wasn't....). I think most people would end up buying it long before then. Also, as time goes one, some things that are really old may get packaged together such that you're still able to pay $10, but get more stuff for it because you waited.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Good point, Radiac. That would indeed help mitigate the problem by never actually spilling over into free-ness.
Spurn all ye kindle.
Part of why it's nebulous as to what content will be "pay" content is because that, too, is up in the air. On the one hand, it's arguable that "buying the box" makes literally everything "paid for" content. But obviously, some of the discussion in this thread has gone into whether or not there will be missions or other content that costs more than just buying the box to access. So this is a lot of brainstorming and refinement of brainstormed concepts as we try to determine what sounds like it will work best and solidify the model around that.
I have my personal preferences, but nothing's etched in stone and even my preferences may change as amount of content and speed with which it can be produced is better determined.
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There are a number of different types of monetization possible there too.
1. You make people buy an expansion in order to access a new open-world zone (a la Preatoria)
2. You make people pay a one-time fee to unlock a set of missions (a la Signature Story Arcs)
3. You make people pay an ongoing monthly fee to unlock certain content (a la the Incarnate system)
4. You make people pay a small entry fee every time they want to start a particular trial or TF (a la event tickets in Magic Online)
5. You make people buy items they might want in the cash shop.
6. Stuff I haven't thought of.
As far as I'm concerned, the only things that need to come free with the upfront game purchase are some allotment of subscription time, the open world at roll-out, the basic set of costume pieces at roll-out, the basics power sets at roll-out, the basic emotes and animations at roll-out, and however many missions the game rolls out with, assuming those missions can get you to the level cap without having to do a lot of excessive grinding or repetition. It would be nice if there were some TFs included with that too, like CoX had. As far as I'm concerned, everything else can and probably should cost something, which would be the reason why I would pay a sub, so as to get a better deal on most of that stuff.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of content being used for monetization. I'm ok with a sizable expansion, another box to buy. I also don't mind something akin to the SSAs from CoH being a pay to play. But content is what should be keeping us here in the game, keeping us subscribed and/or spending stars. Sell slots, sell power sets. sell animations, sell emotes, sell costumes, sell additional storage space, sell vanity pets, sell more slots for the mission creator. But please let's keep new content flowing into the game without putting it behind a pay wall.
-----------------------------------------
I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
"Being used for monetization" .. that's a stretch.
Development costs money. Period.
If they pay 4 developers 400,000 per year (100K each).. that's 100K per quarter for that amount of game development (before overhead, maintenance, insurance and more). We can sell that content at $10 per update or we can rent it to players (via subscription) at a lower cost per month.. but the idea is that we need to make back MORE that quarter (and over greater time) than the $100,000 was spent to develop it.
Players want game development they should be willing to pay for it. That means the base game has value and ALL of the subsequent content updates (costumes, powers, missions/story, etc) should come at a cost. You can rent that content and have access to it all for a limited time.. or you can buy it outright. If you prefer to pay a subscription good for you. If you want to buy it and be sure to have it forever EVEN BETTER!
At NO point do i think users are being "used" for monetization. They are simply speaking with their wallets as to what they want. If you LOVE costumes.. but don't necessarily run every new lair/story that is released.. then by all means, buy the costumes or rent the "costumes micro-subscription". Game development has value; your money has value. Its an even exchange. It's not exploration to buy goods at a store.
(Gambling however...)
Crowd Control Enthusiast
samehere i like dc universe online pay 9.99 for dlcs or expansions
whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also look into you, -Friedrich
[img]http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/mm106/hinata1032/Kitsune.jpg[/img]
I do not believe that MWM can schedule such content well enough to allow them to predict that they can (or will want to) make such-and-such content free in 6 / 12 / 18 / etc. months. Every developer who has expressed a desire to uphold a schedule of new updates every month has dropped that idea in favor of the more realistic updates every two to three months. Add to that the need to provide regular updates and I don't see MWM producing such paid content very frequently.
I certainly don't anticipate some kind of clock that shows: "SSA #3 will be free in 258 days 13 hours 38 minutes".
A far more reasonable approach is to use all that data they will have available to them to determine which content is not selling, or no longer selling, and eventually push that to become free content.
On the topic of paid content in the form of story arcs versus an expansion (however one chooses to define that), I think MWM themselves may not know what is reasonable or realistic for them for the first year.
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Initial box purchase price, monthly fees, and paid content expansion packs are fine with me, assuming the game is at least of CoH-grade quality and replayability. I only have 3 requested limitations on monetization:
All pay-to-unlock features...such as content, mounts/vehicles, costumes, and crafting/advancement systems...should be available for a reasonable price at the account level and not just character-based, so as to encourage alting.
Don't nickel and dime me with a pay-per-run or similar scheme. There should be a reasonably-priced way to have all content constantly available to run on all of my characters. If forming a team means making sure that everyone else has paid for the content too, or has enough "stars" banked to run it this time, it will make team formation a very un-fun process. A team leader's access to content should probably count for the whole team, unless there's some alternate means of handling this without a hassle.
No gambling required to get anything, unless there's solid and reasonable streakbreaker that sets an upper limit on how many packs / boxes must be opened to get the desired item. Best answer - also provide alternate methods to obtain it (outright purchase with stars / in-game money, and in-game drops).
Avoid those 3 pitfalls and I'll be happy and a long-term paying, playing customer!
I disagree with Scott Jackson in the sense that I would welcome the option of only paying for as many Incarnate Trials or so forth as I actually end up doing. For example, maybe I decide I want to go "cheap" and not buy the "Task Forces" microsub. But then I find I want to do it JUST ONCE because a friend asks me or whatever. It would be nice not to have to pay for a whole month's supply of TFs when I only want one.
I also think that a trial or TF that has pretty good rewards might be a thing people would be willing to pay "off the rack" to buy when they OCCASIONALLY want to do it, but they might not want to have to join the VIP club to get that right all the time, like in CoX with the Incarnate system.. Some people hate being locked into a long term deal where you're forced to make a decision about your future spending habits, and I think offering those people the ability to buy individual run throughs of a trial or TF is a good thing.
I'm not saying all missions/tfs/trials/raids etc should be pay-walled, there should certainly still be missions and street sweeping and even some TFs etc that come free with the game when you buy it, maybe some more you get access to with certain microsubs, etc but I think some of the stuff that CoX had could have been pay-walled and would still have been run by people assuming the reward at the end were good enough.
I personally would have paid a buck to do the Underground Trial if there were a guarantee of a purple recipe, PVP recipe, or something similarly hard to get at the end, for successful completion, even if I WASN'T a highly Incarnated-up VIP.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I would really rather not see content gated behind monetization. I'd hate to try to team up with somebody only to find out that they can't run a TF or Incarnate Trial because they didn't pay for it. I'd rather the content be included in the Box Fee. Once you buy the game you should have access to all the content available. Micro-transaction everything else if need be, but not content. I hated having to wait for people to get certain badges just so they could join us in doing a certain Task Force.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
i agree
whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also look into you, -Friedrich
[img]http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/mm106/hinata1032/Kitsune.jpg[/img]
Just say [b]NO![/b] to gamble-boxes that require real money to open.
Be Well!
Temporarily switches off redname and goes to fan mode, I have no special knowledge on this.
IMO this shouldn't be gated but could be available. I didn't buy any packs in CoH with real money, but did open plenty using my monthly stipend.
Thinking aloud:
If free players were given a pack or two a month so they had a small chance of getting the shinies, with more available by microsub or star purchasable, would that avoid the stigma attached to lockboxes ? The "pay for box" nature of the game should avoid people creating hundreds of accounts to abuse this, but you could also make many things that come out of them bind to account if it was felt necessary.
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team and Forum Moderator[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
One thing that is interesting to me is how M:tG handles random packs vs. buying what you want: The official stuff is all gambling. You buy sealed packs and get whatever happens to be in them. If you want to buy a specific thing, you have to go on the secondary market and buy it from somebody who opened it up randomly. If anything that is in "random packs" is also tradable, that would render items you want to "just buy" as something you'd go to the AH to get, effectively.
I'm not sure we'd want to go that route, but if we are going to try to satisfy both those who like the "open the random pack" and those who like to just "buy what I want," that might be a way to go.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Are you guys trying to min-max game game revenue (and those two 'game' aren't a typo) or maximize player enjoyment?!?
I'm all about maximizing player enjoyment, people hearing about it, getting more players, and getting more revenue that way.
Like Static, I'm not wanting content to be behind paywalls that means friends can't play it together. Because that kills the wonderful teaming environment that's one of City's hallmarks.
Have the basic subscription cover basic operating costs, including physical plant, support staff, core developers, and reserve fund. Have visual addons--like the CoH costume packs--sold as extras to pay for their artwork as well as accumulate funds for major expansions. Hell, ask for donations and put players names up on ingame plaques to raise funds for expansions.
I'm not a big costumer. I like 'em just right. But I bought *every* costume pack for CoH, even ones I didn't use anything from, because I liked City and wanted to support it.
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: It's primarily about trying to find the sweet spot between maximizing game revenue without (unduly) impacting the players' enjoyment and experience. There likely won't even be a consensus, but the discussion could help provide a starting point. Once the game is live, the data MWM will collect will obviously be king.
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
I think it's awfully presumptuous to assume that a given revenue stream can and will cover a certain operating cost as in "let the sub cover the general overhead...". What if that sub, in order to cover that overhead cost, needs to be $75 a month? Are you going to try to sell people that? I'm not. I wouldn't pay that, and I sank some serious cash (over $1000) into the Kickstarter for this game already.
And I refuse to believe that this game can subsist on the kindness of strangers to the point of assuming that donations should be expected to make up the rest. I think it's a very unreasonable demand to place on MWM to say "I'll pay a sub like CoX had, which I now proclaim can and will cover all of your operating costs, and I'll agree in principle to be expected to pay for stuff that's totally optional, but don't make me pay for stuff I feel I really need, `cuz I feel I should get that for free. Also, you can let people donate if they want to, that ought to be enough."
They have the legal right to charge what they think is fair for the stuff people want to buy, however that ends up rolling out.
That established, I think we can all assume that people in general would prefer to pay less money for the stuff they want in all cases, all the time, everywhere. This, to me, is the reason the customers don't get to wield the price-tag guns in stores.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Frankly, if MWM is looking at $75 subscriptions, then maybe they need to stop listening to people who ask for more development for entirely optional projects such as the Danger Room discussed in a separate thread. Personally I believe that they are not planning on that type of subscription amount since every post from a Developer I've read has involved a reasonable amount of intelligence.
To assume that anyone on this forum has a more important voice than the rest based on their ability to "invest" more money into the game is presumptuous. Everyone here wants a good game, regardless of differing viewpoints of what that means to each person. We should all remember that we are discussing ideas with actual people on both ends.
I'm of the opinion that a subscriber should get at least a majority of the content at launch included in the price, whatever it ends up being set at. To ask for a subscriber to pay for a large portion of content on top of the subscription and "Box" price seems like a way to encourage people to go elsewhere. I would pay a fee on top of subscription to have access to late game content, new costume items, vanity pets, etc. I would even pay to run the "new TF", if it gave me access to it until the game shut down. I can't see paying for every single run through, and I don't think a "guaranteed purple" is a good thing unless you are buying it from a vendor or off the Market from another player.
I see Jacke's point. I see Static's point. I agree with them for the most part. Since I don't have a better way in mind, I guess I'll just leave it at that.
That's an interesting way of looking at it, Darth Fez. I'd say to ensure revenue, the game has to tilt towards player enjoyment, especially in the beginning. And we don't just have to wait for future data, as there is the past (City of Heroes) and the present (other games) to look at (see below in my other comments).
I think it's awfully presumptuous you think City of Titans lives in a vacuum. And that you throw out numbers like $75/month.
If the game isn't a good enough enjoyable enough Superheroes game, especially with other games out there to attract players, it won't survive whatever its financing. And there's plenty of indication a sub cost of $10-20/month is more likely.
City of Heroes a few years ago ran profitably on $15/month subscription. And people shelled out extra dollars for visual improvements and expansions (I bought them all). And funded the kickstarter that's giving us City of Titans (both you and I funded it).
Two MMO games right now, World of Tanks and Warthunder, run on a free-to-play model. Where you can get premium time (for about $10-20 month depending on how bought) which gives you a 50%/100% bonus on experience in the game. Where people shell out lots of real dollars for premium tanks/aircraft that are really just cosmetic variety.
And a lot of people still pine for the days they could play City of Heroes. In other words, ready customers. As long as that desire and goodwill isn't alienated.
So I'd say once established, the basic infrastructure of the game can be funded for a subscription of somewhere between $10-$20/month. And more revenue could be gotten, from time to time, by selling visual improvements. Or even asking for donations in return for some recognition.
As long as City of TItans doesn't fsck it up.
It has to be at least a reasonable game. Fun for the player base and not frustrating. Because alienating existing players and not attracting new players is what kills games.
World of Tanks and Warthunder don't gate content behind paywalls. Because that means players couldn't play with all of their clanmates.
Here's the core of what made City of Heroes great:
1. A fun immersive game system that doesn't have irritating frustrations as much as possible.
2. Very flexible costume creator and editor with multiple slots per character.
3. Allow varying developed (ie. different levels) characters to play together by buffing the less experienced ones closer to the team leaders so they can contribute to the fight.
4. Teams of 8 or more.
5. Multi-channel chat system.
6. In missions, use of those big popup comments so the whole team knows what's going on.
Having and maintaining that is half the battle. A good superhereo game system comes in \#1 and \#2. A fun social environment comes in \#2 to \#6. And not paywalling content is covered by \#3.
If the game don't have most of what's in those, it's got a problem.
The truth is that the more players we have, the less we "need" to charge in subscription fees et al to make a profit. Our costs remain relatively flat no matter how many customers we get. But we still will need to make enough to cover them. We have some ballpark ideas as to what those costs might be, but they're order of magnitude estimates, nothing remotely concrete. Our goal, money-wise, is to make a profit because profits allow us to grow our dev staff and improve our technology to serve more customers with bigger and better servers (amongst other things). But we will only do that if we make such a great game that not only do people want to play it, but that they bring their friends in to play it with them, and their friends also subscribe and buy things in the c-store.
The game being fun and MWM making money off of it go hand-in-hand. We really won't succeed at the latter if we don't do the former.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
I also want to ensure that forumgoers don't presume the opposite - that the game would be a financial failure unless we insert proposed monetization scheme X or Y.
Economics of digital production are at work here. We're better off appealing to more players who each pay a modest amount, since these items / content have a high fixed cost to produce at first, but can generate ever-increasing revenue through sales volume at almost no added cost to MWM. I'm fairly certain that Jacke was applying this principle when making reference to word-of-mouth advertising and building popularity as the means to get revenue above costs.
Human psychology has to be considered as well - what will be perceived as fair and non-intrusive to most players' game experience, so that players keep playing - and paying? I submit that occasional, reasonable payments will be more successful than frequent, interrupting reminders that every aspect of the game has a fee that must be paid.
Enough of us have seen other games get pushed past the line of reasonable monetization, souring community relations and driving players to try other games. Not everyone will be 100% happy, but we can learn from the errors and successes of the past to do better. For example, CoH had a low-turnover subscriber base over years; maintained profitability with two direct competitors, and did so without any particularly unusual monetization methods. Did a few mistakes get made? Perhaps, but those provide useful data as well.
[Edit - ok, I type about as fast as a turtle. Outposted once again. Heh.]
Modern business must have its finger continuously on the public pulse. It must understand the changes in the public mind and be prepared to interpret itself fairly and eloquently to changing opinion
whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also look into you, -Friedrich
[img]http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/mm106/hinata1032/Kitsune.jpg[/img]
http://youtu.be/MS4VRbsjZrQ
Let's not do this.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
You're talking about purchasable booster-packs. Those are fine.
I'm dreading the damnable Lockboxes that drop in place of real loot, take up room in your inventory, cost real money or the equivalent to open, and often contain junk, 'but you have a Chance to get something good!' They have no value as loot, the vendors won't buy them, and you can't trade them for something useful. Moreover, you cannot opt-out of the things and say, "That's okay, I don't want these, give me the regular loot."
They may as well operate a slot-machine, rather than trying to obfuscate the gambling.
Be Well!
Fireheart
As a Canadian, I object to the portrayal of Canadians in that clip.
Also, it's damn funny. :)
Funny sad, in that's exactly how those free-for-the-first-taste-like-from-a-drug-dealer mobile games work.
Those games also don't have an ingame social component. Which is corroded by what paywall barriers and such blatant monetization do to games. Online games tend towards giving a great free/base subscription experience and make the paid/extra cost items cosmetic and nice to have, and not divisive of gameplay and the game's society.
I am not a fan of the idea of lockboxes. However, as with any problematic concept, my scientific nature drives me to try to understand [i]why[/i]. Not just a gut reaction, but an actual investigation of the particulars.
The known issues of a lockbox are that they are perceived (probably rightly) as a "money grab," they take up inventory space, and you can't even sell them as "vendor trash." They shove themselves into your line of sight as an almost admonishment that you're not spending enough real money, and replace actual loot drops. The supposed upside is that whatever is inside them is theoretically better than a "normal" loot drop. But the fact that it's still random, and you don't know what you've gotten until you spend real money on it makes it frustrating more often than not.
Can lockboxes be sold on the player-to-player market? If so, do/would people buy them? If they could be sold to vendors, how much would they have to sell for to "feel" like they're worth the space they take up in your inventory?
If vendors sold them for in-game currency, would people buy them? (All other rules about having to spend real money to open them apply.) For how much?
If they dropped as a pure "extra," not taking up inventory space and being known to be dropped not instead of other loot, but in addition to whatever loot there was, would they be as irritating?
What if the ability to unlock them was a subscriber perk rather than a one-purchase-per-unlock?
Would the fact that we plan to allow Stars to be traded on the market change how they're perceived? The ability to open a lockbox and "get something good" might translate to something one could sell on the market for Stars equal to or greater than the cost of the key to open it. Or does that seem likely?
If lockboxes always contained something that could normally only be bought in the Starmart, and the keys were priced such that X% of items possibly in a lockbox objectively cost more than the Stars spent on them, what would X have to be before they seemed "worthwhile?"
Again, this is a lot of questions trying to give me a better picture of WHY they are negatives to the gameplay experience as they are, by probing to see what aspects are actually problems vs. what are just miscalibrated. I do not care for them as currently implemented in MMOs, myself, and would not encourage their inclusion as such in CoT. But I like to know WHY so that, if ever somebody comes along to say, "you really should do this," I can do more than say, "My gut says 'no.'"
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
For the record, I never meant to imply that my opinion should carry more weight than anyone else by virtue of the fact that I sank a lot of money into the Kickstarter. My point was that I am not a broke teenager, I'm a grown man with a carer and I make a living by working for it. I pay over $100 a month for cable TV and modem service to my home. In short, I am a "high roller" and even I have an upper limit on how much I'm willing to shell out for a game like this every month.
Given that a monthly sub is going to be optional, given that some amount of the game and stuff in it will come included with the up-front purchase price of the game, and assuming that one does have to "buy the box" so to speak, and assuming there will be unnecessary perks available to purchase in the cash shop, I still don't think anyone who hasn't seen the actual accounting numbers for this game can claim they know that a reasonable monthly sub will 100% cover the cost of running the game and keeping it well maintained.
On the subject of pay-per-run trials or TFs, if that content is totally optional (no one's FORCING you to do a Hami Raid, right?), then I see no problem in charging for it on a per-run basis and giving it ultra-good rewards for successful completion. It gives high rollers like me something fun and engaging to do and saves us from having to plow through hours upon hours of brainless farming to get the same swag like the dedicated-free-to-players seem to prefer. If there's going to be a significantly more efficient route to the swag, why not make it overtly so and charge a little for it? The only thing you need to do is balance the rewards against the pricetag to the point where "rare" stuff is still "rare" after factoring in the rate at which people pay to do the content that get's it more reliably.
Magic Online charges the equivalent of $12 per person per tournament to do an 8-man, single elimination booster draft. At best about 2 of those 8 people end up getting enough rares and prize packs to make their money back , and that tourney might last about 40 min if you lose fast and it might take you 3 hours if your opponent has a slow connection and you get to the finals. That's $12 per person per tourny, and that game is running those things CONSTANTLY. Compared to that, I don't see how charging ONE person (the TF leader) a Trial entry fee of ONE dollar is so onerous as to offend the gamers participating in it. That said, making one guy pay is fraught with the problem that as soon as you get your team formed, they abandon you, so making everyone pay (a dollar, 50 cents, a quarter?) to join would be better, IMO.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Why U No Like Gut? :(
Me Gut Feely Guy! :{
You may not be familiar with this, but sometime you should head over to the World of Tanks forums, register an email for an account, log in, and search for "wallet warrior" and "welfare warrior" and read the tales of woe.
It's rather irritating and infused with immature gamer culture, but it represents a real problem. Which stems from real feelings poorly expressed about a privilege spectrum. And that's in a game with a weaker social atmosphere, with only premium tanks, a cosmetic variety only, as a visible sign to judge. And I've been grieved in many games driving premium tanks.
And when you add in the good social aspect of City, you get the worse issue, mentioned many times already, that friends won't all be able to play the same content. That happened back in City of Heroes when it went free-to-play and people came back. And couldn't play the Incarnate content with their friends still subscribed. I've seen similar things happen in DCUO when players get toons to the level cap and realise it's hard to play the end-game content without a subscription there too.
I think adding those paywall barriers into CIty would be caustic and a mistake to its success and players' enjoyment.
I see your point, but it makes me wonder, is World of Tanks mostly a PVP driven game? Because if it is then I can see why people would get upset over being able to buy better tanks, etc. I'm not saying they shouldn't be able to do that, just that I can see the frustration of the "have nots" in that case.
As for pay-walled content, what some people see as placing the yoke of monetization on something that could be free, I see as adding the new feature which has the ability to drive sales. Not in the "buy a sub" sense where you have to sign up for a month of it in advance, but in the "vending machine" sense that you can buy just one if that's all you want.
Imagine if one of these pay-to-play TFs could be done by a reasonably well organized team of 4 toons in like 90 min, and during that time you got double XP, double influence, and double rare drop rates (including doubling the rate of purples dropping) during the TF, then a reward at the end, or a menu that includes some high end merch, like a respec token, a new costume slot, a hamio, a purple recipe, double the normal amount of Reward Merits, etc. People paying a sub probably have the spare stars to buy a few of these a month, so it's not "extra money" unless you end up doing a ton of them; and people who are free to play and don't want to buy a sub can still kick in a buck now and then as they see fit to have some fun. I think that's a superb way to cater to the different gamers with different money issues. I think this would allow MORE people who aren't paying a sub to do the occasional trial every so often instead of making it an all or nothing proposition like CoX did with the Incarnate system. And CoX was never a PVP driven game, so hopefully the jealousy of the have-nots won't cause so much vitriol in the game and on the forums.
People are looking at this as "you're talking the Statesman TF and charging money for it, boo!" and I'm really more saying "What if you could have NOT been a VIP in CoX but you could still have paid a small entry fee to do ONE Incarnate Trial when you wanted to?" this adds more options and probably additional revenue and gives people more freedom as I see it. Granted, my original example was the Statesman TF, so I can understand the reaction I got.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
World of Tanks and Warthunder are indeed both all-PvP arena games (lots of nuances and differences that don't quite bear on this matter). And like any PvP game, unless you're mind-bogglingly good, most players have a win-rate of around 50% and a full-match survival rate around 30%. And with those numbers you're going to have runs of winning a lot. And runs of losing a lot. Which can be hard on people.
The premium tanks and aircraft in both games are not better than the others in their battles tiers. They're a bit better than same-tier as-purchased stock tanks and aircraft, a bit worse that fully upgraded vehicles. What they get is usually better matchmaking and always greater in-game currency and XP earnings. Even with that, a lot of people (like me) collect a number of premium vehicles just because they're interested in that vehicle historically. Or they think it's cool.
You want to get a benefit for paying more into the game. How about the same as going premium account on World of Tanks and Warthunder: some combination of earning more in-game currency and XP? And like it was brought up in another thread, you also could get extra drops, stuff potentially tradable in the player-to-player market or transferable to another alt.
The nuance of the details in these other measures are important too to prevent other issues, but they have the benefit of leaving the game content accessible to all. There's still a spectrum of privilege, but it's less blatant than saying you must pay to access or no task force for for you!
And all these extra revenue measures should be looked at after the game is well through beta. Although some games have radically re-invented themselves while active (whatever they call themselves, beta or release) without pissing off the player base, that's a tricky thing to do. And the worse received change is when something is taken away.
City of Titans needs to get the basics done first. There should be funds budgetted to get through that period (with subs adding in at some point) without trying financially-driven experiments that could poison the community and waste away goodwill.
Seriously, no content should be pay-walled. That just limits people from being able to play with each other. That is just not Kosher in my books. I don't want to start up a team and be running basic missions then decide, "Hey! Let's run this TF!". "Okay!". "Yeah!". "Cool!". "I can't, I didn't buy that.......". "Oh." Why would you want to do that to somebody? Why would you want to do that to your player-base? That's just bad mojo in my opinion.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
As I understand the basic premise IF we were to have paid-for content in any manner (something that comes with one of our micro subs or main sub, or in addition to subs...), if the leader has access and the group members haven't purchased it, the group members would still get to play under the leader's access. Should the leader go off-line for some reason - the current portion of the content could be completed by the team, but they could not re-enter any istance for restart the content until the leader returns.
This way friends who haven't purchased it aren't locked out and get to experience it, but are limited in that they cannot access this content whenver they desire. The idea being is if players who have access to the paid content can invite friends who don't have the paid access it like it, they can go and purchase it.
And if players don't want to use real cash to purchase things like any paid for content, they may be able to use in-game currency to by Stars (our cash-shop currency) if anyone sells Stars in the in-game auction house.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I don't want content that is *exclusively* available via individual microtransaction per run. Either let me unlock it at the account level permanently or by month as part of a sub, to run as many times as I wish, with timers that limit the rewards can be earned per time period, if appropriate. This was my "nickel and dime" objection. If Radiac wants to pay per run of a task force or special story arc that I can access through an "unlock everything" sub, I don't have an issue with that, but it seems to be adding complexity to the payment system that isn't demonstrably necessary...especially if the subs and other one-month/perma-unlock options are reasonably priced as MWM has so far indicated.
Let's assume that my unlock-everything sub can run the content without per-run fees, and the potential team formation hassles - that several of us have noted - are completely eliminated from such a system...
My remaining objection would center on the proposed "loot bonus" used to drive sales of these to non-subbed players. If failure means that the per-run microtransaction is lost without obtaining a reward, these players with real-money results riding on the success of the team are more likely to demand gearscore-like optimization of anyone being invited, and further stratify the community.
Simply allowing players to buy the loot bonuses directly with stars or gamble for them via card packs safeguards their money from being so directed affected by the performance of other players. Thus, the game design itself would not accidentally encourage more elitist tendencies - beyond what will happen anyway due to some player's personalities. Haves & Have-Nots stratification is unavoidable since some players have more time to play (and thus accumulate rewards) or more money (to buy the rewards or to pay for unlocks to the fastest-rewarding content). I think we should avoid reward systems or monetization methods that would make CoT more stratified than what we saw in our CoH roots, and strive for less if possible.
That's a very good point about having pressure to "win" if paywalled content requires arcade-like quarter-feeding to get [i]back[/i] in after a failed run. Thanks for bringing it up; as much as quarter-feeding is theoretically good for profits, annoying players and making them feel cheated is decidedly NOT, and runs against the goals we have for this game.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
make dungeon free play but if u want good items drop u buy from Store i.e if u want legendary items drop $25
whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also look into you, -Friedrich
[img]http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/mm106/hinata1032/Kitsune.jpg[/img]
Here's a notion for you Segev, regarding the Pay To Raid option.
Anyone can PLAY the content ... but the Rewards for completing that content bifurcate. Accounts that haven't "paid" to enjoy the rewards of that content get Standard Drops. Accounts that have "paid" to enjoy the rewards of that content receive something Above And Beyond. So instead of having a Barrier To Entry, instead you have a Preferential Treatment dynamic, such that subscribers "get more" for their (real?) money.
To put this into context, assume that there is a Special Reward for completing Task Force 19. To be eligible to receive that reward, you need to be a Subscriber (in some form or fashion). Simplest example I can give for this sort of thing is that Subscribers receive extra Merits, which can then be redeemed for Loot Of Choice. That sort of thing.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Okay, so again the main thrust of the idea here is basically this: buying a whole case of sodapop is probably the most efficient way to buy sodapop, if you want the most bang for the buck. But that said, people still buy individual bottles of sodapop from vending machines when they only want one bottle of sodapop. I think there's untapped potential for the game to get money from people on a one-raid-at-a-time basis here, especially among those people who prefer not to buy a whole bunch of them via a sub or microsub. At the very least it allows people to TRY a new thing before agreeing to devote a lot of monthly money to it from a position of complete ignorance of what it is they're signing up to buy a large quantity of in the first place.
People talk about the concern over stratifying the player base vis a vis the "healer heal!" problem, etc and as a formed non-healy defender (rad/rad) I want you to know I fully understand that. But problems do exist on the other side of that coin as well. CoX had free content like the Synapse TF for example which you often had difficulties with because it was on the long side, needed more than one person to finish (at least I never was able to solo it), but it was free so there was no real need for individual team members to be really committed to it. People would agree to join, then take half an hour to show up in Skyway to get started because they just HAD to finish that mission they were doing. People would start, then drop unexpectedly because their TF needed them for something else. People would straight up just troll and grief people, etc. I feel a lot of this behavior is bad too and think that having the participants pay a small event ticket fee to do the TF might mitigate the amount of "unprofessional behavior" among the participants, because those who did pay to get in will want to get their money's worth out of the TF.
So that issue is really a double edged sword. You need to strike a balance and find a happy medium for the general population in the game, whatever that is. For me, I don't have a problem with "everybody pays something to get into the TF" because of the serious commitment the people involved ought to end up having as a result.
Another thing that might be good is to only use "pay per play" for brand new content, then after a while when something NEW rolls out, the thing that used to be new becomes officially "old" now and is added to the list of free access content finally.
I still think that if there's ever any content that needs to be paid for to be done, a la the SSAs and Incarnate Trials in CoX, it should bring with it special better rewards, like the Incarnate powers, etc. I just think you could make some money by offering that on a limited basis without making people pay for VIP to maintain their Incarnate goodies like COX did. I believe some rednames on this site have mentioned in the past the desire not to have to "turn off" stuff like Incarnate Powers when people let their sub lapse, etc.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
So, you are suggesting Pay to Win?
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
what he want Pay to Win
whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also look into you, -Friedrich
[img]http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/mm106/hinata1032/Kitsune.jpg[/img]
Was CoX's Incarnate System Pay to Win? All I'm really talking about here is basically letting non-sub people pay on a per-TF basis for things like Lambda Trials and so forth. That stuff, in CoX, was pay-walled by the monthly subscription and there was no way to just do ONE Incarnate trial if that was all you wanted to do. And even if you did decide to just pay for one month of VIP, you would have needed to do a lot of trials etc in that month to get your money's worth out of it, AAAAAAND wost of all, you'd lose access to your Incarnate Powers after your sub month was over.
The whole purpose of cash shop microtransactions is that you don't force people to pay for a dozen donuts when they only want one.
That said, I fully expect there to be free content to play (that is, content that comes witht he base purchase of the game itself) that one could get one's toons from start to level cap with and never have to buy anything (e.g. open world street sweeping, missions from contacts like CoX had, mabe a few TFs like CoX had in the beginning). So if there are going to be "pay per play" missions, TFs, trials, raids, etc then they ought to carry some added rewards or I predict everyone will largely ignore them to the point that they become a burden on the devs to make that never pays for itself in terms of real money.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
You didn't have to have Incarnate Powers to play CoH. They weren't necessary to the game. Did they make life easier for some, sure. But IO's and Incarnate Powers were not something you had to have.
What you are suggesting is Pay to Win. If you provide people with a better reward because they bought something, that is by definition Pay to Win. I can not stand behind that at all.
Again, I say micro-transaction other things. Do not pay wall content. Everybody should be able to play all the content they want. I wasn't a big fan of CoH locking Incarnate content behind VIP either, or IO's for that matter.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
I'm not sure I follow. How is something which makes the game "easier for some" less "pay to win" than "a better reward because they bought something?"
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
I don't like paying money for things either. Unfortunately, games like this need programmers, game designers, graphic designers, artists, customer service reps, servers, internet connections, electricity, janitors, etc to continue to run. In short it costs money to produce and maintain an MMO, and that has to come from the customers (gamers) somehow. Assuming some people are paying monthly subs, those subs have to pay for something that the non-sub F2Pers DON'T get for free, or else NOBODY has any compelling reason to pay a sub, so nobody does.
In CoX the Incarnate System and the IOs were the only compelling reasons why anyone paid a sub after that game went F2P, as far as I can tell. They were certainly the biggest reasons I continued as a VIP after the free option opened up.
I think it would have been MORE inclusive to the newbie incoming gamers in CoX to allow them to do a Lambda or a BAF Trial just once for a small fee, and maybe get something (not an incarnate power unlock, but something) at the end that they could use if the trial were successful.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
i think my favorite free to play model i've seen so far is for the game Warframe (it's free to download and play from steam) you can go through the entire game without paying a penny however you can pay platinum (cash store currency) to get most weapons and characters from the cash store however some weapons, characters and nearly all mods (think enhancements from CoX) are random drops from enemies
now what i like about warframe is that you can trade platinum with other players to get those RNG drops which means the cash store items are available to players who dont want to pay real money however trying to get platinum via trading is a slow process so a lot of people end up buying platinum for real money when they get a discount from the daily log in rewards
encase wondering getting the weapons/characters for free involves getting hold of the blueprints then crafting them the crafting process takes 12-84 hours depending on the item (can be rushed with platinum)
Are you suggesting that the DVD/Box version asks for $29.99 and gives a 2 to 3 month stipend for use in the In-Game Store?
Alternatively, for Steam like services, let players download it for FREE, and not have any Stipend to start with?
I wonder, how much could Steam charge MWM if CoT was freely downloadable? :P
Steam takes 20%?
I'm not an idiot Radiac. I know that things cost money. I know that the makers of MWM need to be paid. I also know that if you want to keep getting paid you have to make sure that there is an incentive for people to give you your money.
Home improvement stores sell 80 lb. bags of concrete at a loss. Why? Because they know that people will buy other things besides just the bags of concrete. People will also buy trowels, knee pads, buckets, grouting tools, 2x4s, etc. They provide you a basic item at a loss, then make up the money elsewhere. To me, the base item for any MMO is content. People need content to play the game. After that MWM can design all kinds of other perks, niceties, and shineys to make up the money. If you put content behind a pay wall you hurt your player base, and your player base is your income.
Segev,
I understand your confusion. I may not have worded my response properly. Radiac is suggesting that if you pay for a TF or Raid that in doing so you get an added benefit of a better reward than someone that didn't. Pay to Win. With Incarnate and IO's in CoH the Devs made sure to emphasize that it wasn't a necessity for people to have Incarnate Powers or IO's to be able to play the game at all. Having both of those did make the game easier for those people that did have them, but it still wasn't necessary to have them in order to complete the Statesman Task Force, Recluse Strike Force, Imperius Task Force, Hamidon Raid, etc. I was VIP. I subbed from Issue 3 until close. I never changed that. Not because I wanted extra benefits over everybody else, but because I saw no need. I had been happily giving CoH 15 bucks a month for several years and saw no need to stop giving them that 15 dollars a month. I did not like the fact that because I did sub that others who did not couldn't play some of the content I played. That bothered me to no end. I want to be able to play with all of my friends in all content regardless of how much money is being spent. Now when it comes to other things such as costumes, QoL, enhancements, new powers, modes of transportation, bases, emotes, funny gag abilities, etc. I have no qualms about packaging those up and selling those as deemed fit, as long as they don't provide the buyer with an advantage over someone that doesn't have those things. That is Pay to Win. That's a road I don't want to see MWM travel down. Which is why I have made my statements about desiring MWM to have a monthly sub much like CoH did rather than be a F2P with micro-transactions from the get go. That's a debate that is of course on a different thread and has already been hashed out.
I do want MWM to be able to make money and provide for all the people involved in MWM. I am not opposed to MWM making money. I just don't want everybody else to suffer just so that money can be made. There has to be a balance in making money and making players happy. I don't see pay walling content as a proper way of doing it, I fear that it will lead to alienating your player base and dividing them up into the Haves and Have-Nots. Creating discord and causing people to leave the game because they can't play with their friends since they didn't have the money to buy that content. Furthermore, if you give the players the ability to join in on a pay walled TF or Raid but then give those that did pay for it a better reward there will be bitterness between those that didn't get the same kind of reward. If you are going to pay wall content, then by all means pay wall the crap out of it and make it so that those that didn't buy it can't play it. Can not stress enough how much I hate that idea though, just so we are clear.
This whole idea and discussion really leaves a very bad, bitter taste in my mouth. I really do hope this idea never gets implemented.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
/takesoffdevhat
Speaking strictly as a player of games, not as a dev on this game, any time a game allows for the option of using real cash to purchase in-game goods which can be used in anyway to improve performance of characters in the game, particularly if players can combat one another, to me is pay to win.
As a player, if I were to play CoT and came across content that I could play for free but was told, pay X dollars and you get Augment ++ above the normal stuff, to me would smack of pay to win.
Even in examples where say pay to access content for these cool new powers (like Incarnate stuff), and if those same powers were capable of being used in PvP, then at some point, those powers become almost necessary to be competative in PvP because all the best builds use them. Without intending to, the game has a cash-gate to PvP at this level of the PvP game. Those who pay have advantages in these special powers over those who didn't pay to access that content.
Cash for cosmetics, definitely ok in my book. Cash for conveniences like xp boosters, recons, inventory space, user generated content space are all fine to me. If all powers / power set are basically balanced, even the purchase of a power set is ok (to me), though I find it to fall in a grey area. Cash-gated classes, well that's a harder nut to crack. One had CoH cash-gated classes because of the resources those classes caused under the hood. On the other, not only did this result in a class lock out, but also a lock out to power sets designed around entire play styles (the performance issue with the class and the power sets used are hand in hand in this case). But also those classes provided some of the more potentially capable performers.
/devhatbackon
One of the larger differences for CoT is if Stars are marketable in the game auction house and players can use in-game currency to trade for stars, and thus purchase that which is cash-gated, the cash-gate becomes slightly more accessible. Essentially, the cash-gated stuff becomes not so much different than the rare item drop which can be made available on the player market.
The other is if non-payers can play cash-gated content under a friend's access, IF that cash-gated content comes with a special reward, the non-paid player may see the reward locked out at the end and know if they get stars, they can purchase for Stars, or hit up the auction house for Stars to get the special reward and run that content without needing to piggy-back with a friend.
And yet another possibility that's being considered is anything purchased and anything earned is kept. A player who subbed / purchased the special incarnate stuff and unlocked 2 out of 10 incarnate powers, can keep and use those 2 incarnate powers. They can't play the speical incarnate content on their own anymore if the don't purchase access again. Though they could play with a friend, get the standard game rewards, but not the special rewards tied to said content.
Note, this is in no way an endorsement of making special rewards for cash-gated content. We're a ways off from planning or implementing anything of the sort.
My question would be considering the 3 differences noted above, would it be ok if there were content yielding qualitive performance rewards?
Given my preferences, I as a player would be ok with it for PvE. PvP being a different beast I'm unsure as anything that affects performance would still end up making a barrier to newer players trying to get in on the pvp action at some point. But if we can set the PvP side of things up well enough to minimize this impact (relatively speaking of course), then I can see it as still an ok thing (as a player).
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Speaking more in theory mode than in "this is definitely what's going to happen" mode, I would like to see cash-gated content be something that can be accessed via: microtransaction (buy N plays of a given piece of content); microsubscription (unlimited plays of this content as long as you're subscribed to it); and through possible "tickets" or another mechanism whereby somebody with paid-for access to it can bring in friends (maybe they have N people they can bring in per [time period] based on their microsubscription, or can bring in M friends per play of that content).
And yes, if we have our druthers, Stars and other items will be tradeable on the open market, so if you want to access the gated content for "free," it just takes getting enough in-game stuff of whatever sort to trade on the market for sufficient Stars to pay for the access (whether via microtransaction, one-off purchase, or however we do it).
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Segev ... here's an idea for you.
Suppose that the equivalent of Task Forces in City of Titans awards Merits. Merits can be exchanged for certain rewards. Subscribers earn more Merits than non-subscribers when playing Task Force content.
One of the things that you can buy with your Merits [i]as a subscriber[/i] is "Guest Play Tokens" which can be given to other Players, temporarily giving those Guests an opportunity to earn rewards for content as if they were a subscriber rather than a non-subscriber as a consumable item. If the Guest completes the content with their Sponsor, the Sponsor gets back their original investment in the Guest Play Token plus a little bit extra (like, say +10% over and above).
The whole idea behind this is that subscribers receive Special Treatment in preference over non-subscribers ... but you then have a way for subscribers to allow the non-subscribers to experience the difference and decide for themselves if a subscription is what they want to do. This way you can have "gated content" which can be a DRAW rather than just locked behind a barrier (you must pay This Much to enjoy this content!).
Of course, my personal preference would be for any subscriber gated content to be made available to non-subscribers eventually ... usually once there's New Stuff to take its place.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I like Tannim222, Segev, and Redlynne's ideas above. One thing I don't 100% like about the whole "Sponsor/Freeloader" thing is that the person riding the TF for free on the Sponsor's dime can still just drop out of the TF randomly for no reason or to go do something else and kind of screw the Sponsor on that deal. I mean you're asking me to spend my Stars/merits on another person who might just decide "to hell with this, I'm leaving" and then the TF falls apart. At least on CoX when someone got DCed or had to leave an Incarnate Trial, you knew they had paid for a sub like you did, so they weren't shafting you any more than themselves. With Red's idea the sponsor could theoretically come out ahead on that deal when it goes well though. So I like that.
Also, I'd like to reiterate that no amount of costume pieces, power sets, respecs, or other individually purchasable optional stuff (much of which was available for Inf on the auction house or went free after time passed) is compelling enough to make me pay a sub when I could buy as much of that as I really need piecemeal and maybe save money in the process. I don't need ALL the costumes, etc., just the ones I actually want. The Incarnate and IO systems combined were a compelling reason, for me, to pay a sub when the game went F2P because paying that sub entitled me to hang with the cool kids and do the cool trials, etc at night when people were on to play group content with. I can only speak for myself on that, but I doubt I'm completely alone in this regard.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
How do you guys feel about "re-entry fee" instead of "entry fee"
You can go into gated content.. lets say.. once per week for free. You fail you're out. Want back in then you need to have bought (or rented) unlimited access..
This allows players to plan content together on say a weekend.. but for the more serious gamers who want to re-run the content they like (hardcore maybe, maybe just "fun-core") to go in as often as they want.
Content doesn't lose its value and players are rewarded for purchase. Game is still "accessible" to those who just buy the box.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
Or make all the content, TFs, and Raids free and you won't have to worry about being butt hurt if somebody decides to drop out of your mission that you paid for. As I've said many times before, I'm not above requiring someone to buy the box to play the game and pay a $15.00 a month sub on top of having a cash store to make optional purchases as well. It's everybody else that wants to make it F2P with Micro-Transactions so that they can basically get away with playing the game for as little as possible.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
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