Originally posted by jtcgs

Originally posted by Foncl

Is it really necessary to sell advantages to get people to support a MMO? :/

 You use the word advantage loosely...

 

I just wish they could sell cosmetic items only and that people would support such a game if they liked it. Apparently they feel the need to sell currency that can be used to buy ingame items, to me that is selling an advantage.

Originally posted by Foncl

Is it really necessary to sell advantages to get people to support a MMO? :/

 

How else would you do it? people don't want to pay monthly sub either. How does one runs the business then?

Originally posted by Doogiehowser

Originally posted by Foncl

Is it really necessary to sell advantages to get people to support a MMO? :/

 

How else would you do it? people don't want to pay monthly sub either. How does one runs the business then?

 

Well I prefer a subscription but if you go F2P then I would prefer the way Path of Exile does it, sell cosmetic items, character slots, stash space. No MMO I know has done it though and I'm not sure it's viable either. I just think it's sad that the only way you get enough people to support a F2P game is by selling advantages. I wish people would support games that don't sell advantages.

Originally posted by Foncl

Originally posted by Doogiehowser

Originally posted by Foncl

Is it really necessary to sell advantages to get people to support a MMO? :/

 

How else would you do it? people don't want to pay monthly sub either. How does one runs the business then?

 

Like Path of Exile does it, sell cosmetic items, character slots, stash space. Stuff like that.

They have that planned too for NW. 

This is the future of mmo's and its a great future.

its b2p or f2p for mmo's from now on. Except those that want to have p2p for the first months see that it fails and then go over to b2p or f2p

Originally posted by spawn12345

This is the future of mmo's and its a great future.

its b2p or f2p for mmo's from now on. Except those that want to have p2p for the first months see that it fails and then go over to b2p or f2p

All F2P MMOS still have the option for P2P and usually that gives you best bang for your buck.

what I've seen is that you have to use Astral Diamonds in the game.

What to ride the lvl 40 or lvl 60 mount?  Need to fork of Astral Diamonds.

Want to buy something off the AH?  Fork over some Astral Diamonds.

Companion upgrades?  Astral Diamonds.

Want wome good quality gear?  Fork over some Astral Diamonds. (There are some seal/token vendors)

Want a new companion?  Give em some Astral Diamonds.

Early impression is that one might be spending considerable money via their Astral Diamonds.  From what I say  I found only a Zen and Astral Diamond exchange, not gold to Astral Diamonds like in GW2.  And I have not come across any form of reliabely generating some Astral Diamonds beyone a cleric's evokation that is on an hourly CD and subject to diminishing return that starts at 1,500 but is reset on a daily basis it seems like.

Not that none of the items are mandatory and technically they can be called 'cosemetic' and I have not found any use for gold or silver besides skill consumables or the lowest quality of gear that is only relevent till bout level 20. 

I think we are gonna be in for a shocker of how the currencies will be and that the Cash Shop currency will be used in everything not restricted to Cash Shop items but in everything of quality in Neverwinter.

Originally posted by Benbrada
In theory I love this approach as well but my concern is always how do they pay the salaries of their development staff? Assuming everyone who plays drops a 5 or 10 spot now and then maybe that's enough. Do players feel obligated to drop a 5 spot once in awhile? I do in GW2 in hopes of helping keeping the game moving forward, e.g. I've spent 5 to get gems to convert to gold to buy crafting mats, etc. I feel it's a worthwhile investment because it saves me some time plus hopeful helps propel the game forward on a financial curve.

Don't worry about them paying their bills. Zen (PW's generic cash shop currency) will still be purchasable to be spent on itmes for this game. All he was saying in this article (and I think most people missed it) was EVERYTHING will be earnable unlike some F2P games where you HAVE to buy somethings (IE etra character slots, skins, etc). So if you want to still drop a 5 spot from time to time to support the cause then feel free. I probably will be right there with ya. I love what I am seeing and I will support it with some real money form time to time.

as long as it does not limit the currency cap for free players, it wont go wrong.

Like SWTOR. sell something for 20-50 bucks and limit free players to only carry 200k ingame money. So people will sell them in the auction for 1mil and continue to wait till the cows come home for people to buy.

Only the 'oh yeah we are listening' type of company will do this type of f2p model.

I was always fully against F2P in the early days. I was paying a subscription to avoid all the P2W that was being released. But those days are being left behind. Sure some people still think theres a stigma attached to F2P, and automatically assume if somethings F2P then its also P2W. Sadly those people are just ignorant, and unwilling to accept the truth. The industry is changing. 

 Even when games like EQ2 converted from Subs to Free, they put a major restriction on gameplay. I dont know if you ever played EQ2, but you cant raid or even do harder dungeons with Treasured armor and unleveled spells/abilities. Thats F2P the wrong way. When you have a glorified "free trial" with gated content, and still expect people to end up paying the sub anyways if they want access to the content, or to even be effective in the gated content.

Now companies are seeing they dont have to gate content. People will pay for costumes and cosmetics or consumables, that dont offer advatange, just conveniece. The first real idea of "Truly Free" that I played was with Aion. I had played for the first 4-6 months of release, and stopped because the entire game was designed for PvP end-game. But what they did when they went F2P was not to gate any content. You still could hit level cap. You can wear all the end-game items. You could still be the most powerful player on the server, and you never had to spend a dime. More recently, I have heard the same thing from Tera. They have gone F2P, and nothing is gated. You can go anywhere, play the entire game in its entirety without ever paying. GW2 has done it with B2P. There is nothing you could buy that gives a player an advantage over another, but the game still makes plenty of income from the cosmetic cash shop.

I applaude NW in recognizing the change. If they had tried to charge subs, they would have limited thier income, Im not going to make up a statistic, because we just dont know, but they would have severely limited the people who would be playing. And I guarantee they would have had to convert to F2P anyways, probably within 6 months. Then get laughed at for being a failure, and converting. I hope ESO recognizes this as well, and they are ignorant enough to charge a subscription. Other upcoming games are all seeing the same trends. P2P is just a death sentence. Converting will always be seen as negative, a sign of failure, but if you start F2P or even better B2P you skip that part. B2P is my new preferred since it still offers some barrier to entry which keeps alot of the riff-raff out, and generally makes people act more matured because if they get suspended or banned they have to pay for a new account. F2P seems like people are way more immature, because they know if they get banned they just create a new free account.

A couple of things that are left out.

You get Rough Astral Diamonds.  You have to refine them into the actual currency.  There is a daily cap on how much you can refine.  You only get rough astral diamonds from certain things, and some of those are on daily cool downs as well.

You can exchange buyable ZEN for in-game currency (Refined Astral Diamnods)....guess who controls the exchange rate.  By controlling the actual price on EVERYTHING, and controlling the amount that can be gotten AND refined daily, PWE has turned it into a massive grind fest.

By removing the actual subscription model (which in STO you got free points every month to spend) you will now be grinding away on every aspect of the game.  So you get your basic 5 classes and races, and have to unlock other classes and races...and items....and features...etc.

I don't think people are understanding just how long you are going to have to play in order to acquire things without actually paying one dollar.  They control how much you can refine and how much you can get....

In the end, if you want to get a sizable chunk out of the game, you are going to be paying a lot more than the normal monthly subscription....that is the entire goal of PWE.  To get YOU to pay more than the standard 14.99 per month you see in other games.  In order to do that, they provide you the basic game, take away any subscription and then control your currency refine rates.

Just wait until the game goes live, you create your first character and open up the store and then start calculating your time invested VS currency acquired while factoring in the insane prices on certain features sub games provide for free.

Originally posted by koboldfodder

....guess who controls the exchange rate. 

I wrote the same thing, only I tried to remain optimistic :) we'll see the actual prices and items after launch, if it will cost below ~10 bucks for a month to play without any hiccups, that'll be good enough for a great game imo.

And furbans "I found only a Zen and Astral Diamond exchange, not gold to Astral Diamonds" of course, since that way you could get way too many Zen for free, and Zen is the equivalent of real money. No company would tie it to an infinite in-game currency :) That's the point of "time currency", it's limited heavily, it's bind to you, and the amount can be controlled by the company. I'm pretty sure there will be a way to convert in-game money to Zen, it's in STO as well, through time-currency of course, this way implementing the limit to the converting process.

in STO it's working through contrabands, contraband is a limited (not bind) item which you can trade. So you buy it for in-game money, then you can convert it to dilithium (astral diamond) via a process (which also has a time limit), and then you can sell the dilithium for Zen... and contraband is limited by numbers, it can only acquire via DOff assignments, in average you can get 3-4 per day if you have a klingon too. (Klingons can find more contrabands than the lawful Starfleets :) )

Edit: on a second thought it's also good to push you toward spending. If you quickly need lots of dillys / astral diamonds for something, the only way is to spend real money, buying Zen, and with it buying the time-currency. (since both farming it or converting it from in-game currency are slow and limited ways)

I have to admit that after watching the livestream, Cryptic may actually have a good game on their hands for once. I will definitely be giving this game a chance due to the action combat sytem with no tab-targeting like Tera and the ability to create dungeons and possibly make Zen currency as a result. 

the game already will have mounts which I like, I am only hoping they add housing of some kind.

I don't see anything positive in this system. If you can get everything through playing and you can get everything through paying it's not balanced, not by a longshot.

You should be able to earn micro-transaction points in the game by itself not from other players and only allow people to purchase micro-transaction points not to trade them.

Simply put,

You should be able to get everything in the game through playing.

You shouldn't be able to get everything in the game through paying.

agreed, whats the fun in being able to buy everything with real money.

Its fun if u see someone walking with cool armour and know he accomplished that by playing the game and not thinking 'hey he might have bought that for real money.

Originally posted by SuperNick

It's a similar system to Guild Wars 2 - you can choose to invest immediately or farm your way up to get what you want by 'trading' currency.

As long as they don't go nuts and have the best endgame gear purchaseable with diamonds, it'll be fine.

I've seen systems like this before and sometimes what happens is you can choose to farm 200 hours and hope you get the best gear or invest 5 dollars for it.. sure, you can achieve it without paying real money but the system is engineered in such a way to make that task so daunting you'd sooner get your wallet out.

The same thing could apply to the foundry, which will potentially cost diamonds (much like how it cost currency in STO) - sure, you can farm for it but you're still restricted because the amount of time you need to invest to reach that stage is ungodly.

 

It's good to hear their model is somewhat decent but this article from the CEO feels evasive to me.

 

As somebody that's played a significant amount of STO I have to say this is not that much like GW2. I like both games too so don't get me wrong. When GW2 came out I was hoping it's cash shop would be more accessible than it is, the fact is I've noticed that the cash->gold ratio seems really off, I think Arenanet is charging like 20% to change money into cash, which makes the inflation really bad, Cryptic doesn't have this charge, you can actually play it like a stock market when new stuff's coming out on STO.

Personally I have a LOT of STO cash items I didn't pay a cent for and I love this system over there but I don't feel GW2's works as well. The other difference too I think is that on GW2 you're worried about your general money supply if you trade too much, on Cryptic's titles, the game currency traded for cash is a non-tradable specialized currency, much like what badges in wow use to be, or whatever they're calling those these days "justice points" or whatever goofiness it is I haven't played since Cataclysm lol. But yeah I feel that the rates for conversion on cryptic's games are much more realistic to regular play than GW2's.

The other reason I like this too, is if I play enough I can earn things. It's a form of progression that keeps me having things to do without paying anything. And while it's mostly fluff that some people will bypass by paying cash directly, it gives me more play time to progress with by farming the currency instead, sometimes it can take a while but it can be worth it. I'm curious to see how NW will turn out, STO's recent Dilithium (astral diamonds, what have you) changes have made it a bit easier for me to afford cash points and I'm loving it.

Originally posted by Artair83

Originally posted by SuperNick

It's a similar system to Guild Wars 2 - you can choose to invest immediately or farm your way up to get what you want by 'trading' currency.

As long as they don't go nuts and have the best endgame gear purchaseable with diamonds, it'll be fine.

I've seen systems like this before and sometimes what happens is you can choose to farm 200 hours and hope you get the best gear or invest 5 dollars for it.. sure, you can achieve it without paying real money but the system is engineered in such a way to make that task so daunting you'd sooner get your wallet out.

The same thing could apply to the foundry, which will potentially cost diamonds (much like how it cost currency in STO) - sure, you can farm for it but you're still restricted because the amount of time you need to invest to reach that stage is ungodly.

 

It's good to hear their model is somewhat decent but this article from the CEO feels evasive to me.

 

As somebody that's played a significant amount of STO I have to say this is not that much like GW2. I like both games too so don't get me wrong. When GW2 came out I was hoping it's cash shop would be more accessible than it is, the fact is I've noticed that the cash->gold ratio seems really off, I think Arenanet is charging like 20% to change money into cash, which makes the inflation really bad, Cryptic doesn't have this charge, you can actually play it like a stock market when new stuff's coming out on STO.

 

Personally I have a LOT of STO cash items I didn't pay a cent for and I love this system over there but I don't feel GW2's works as well. The other difference too I think is that on GW2 you're worried about your general money supply if you trade too much, on Cryptic's titles, the game currency traded for cash is a non-tradable specialized currency, much like what badges in wow use to be, or whatever they're calling those these days "justice points" or whatever goofiness it is I haven't played since Cataclysm lol. But yeah I feel that the rates for conversion on cryptic's games are much more realistic to regular play than GW2's.

The other reason I like this too, is if I play enough I can earn things. It's a form of progression that keeps me having things to do without paying anything. And while it's mostly fluff that some people will bypass by paying cash directly, it gives me more play time to progress with by farming the currency instead, sometimes it can take a while but it can be worth it. I'm curious to see how NW will turn out, STO's recent Dilithium (astral diamonds, what have you) changes have made it a bit easier for me to afford cash points and I'm loving it.

 

That's about how I feel as well.  So far I really like the setup in STO.  The one difference in Neverwinter that I'm eyeing is that Astral Diamonds are used as a main currency in places where energy credits are used in STO.  I think one place I read or watched that this occurs is the auction house.  It might end up working fine, but it does concern me a bit as dilly (and I'm assuming ADiamonds will work like this) is a more limited resource.

I totally agree about the GW2 cash shop and gem trade system.  I love GW2, but their cash shop isn't very interesting to me.  I would rather just buy gems to expand character slots and inventory/bank slots and not much else is really interesting in there to me.  On the other hand, there are all sorts of cool things in the STO Cryptic store and on the dilly npcs.