To me, the greatest privilege and greatest accomplishment I can have in an MMO is to create a memorable character; one that enhances everyone else's immersion and fun.  To do this, I have to break out of myself, because I'm not someone who is typically "memorable."  I also have to be able to act the part, and that's the best thing about character creation: you get to create a personality from the ground up, jump into Castronova's "magic circle," and test it out.

I had two main characters in Star Wars Galaxies.  One was a tall dancer who was a socialite and an Imperial.  The other one was almost exactly the opposite: a short green Rodian smuggler and a Rebel.  I kind of figured out who these characters were by simply playing them...the more I did it, the more developed they became.

This is why I miss chatting in spatial, and the down time we used to have in these games.  You only really figure out what you've got in a character when you can chat it up with another character.  That's when you invent the backstory, see how you might fit in with other characters, and build up stories.

I loved both, but neither character was "me" per se.  I felt they had their own lives, and it was up to me to ensure they lived their (virtual) lives to the fullest by directing them well.

The only other two games where I ever had a deep roleplay experience were EVE and City of Heroes. EVE was alright, but it isn't a very intuitive roleplaying platform. City of Heroes was very good, but only because I got in with a roleplay group on the Virtue server. ?

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Originally posted by Beatnik59

Fair point, and this is the reason why I expect this genre is going to move ever further away from the "massive multiplayer" aspect of MMOs.  Diablo 3 is a perfect example of games that have an "MMO-like" flavor, without being an MMO.

The only direction publishers can go to make the games more accessable at this point is to take out or water down all the remaining MMO elements: the persistant world, the guilds, the multiple users: make it a chatroom/lobby and put all the content in our own user created instances.  Because what Satre said is true: "Hell is other people," and the only way we can take away the remaining "Hell" is to take away the "other people": the ones we don't know, the ones we don't care to know, and the ones we don't like.

That way, nobody has to tolerate anything.

Because I agree that, as an entertainment product, nobody has to tolerate anything.  Unfortunately, however, we do need tolerance when playing with other people, because all people are different and they all have slightly different conceptions of what fun is.  What one person finds fun is not something another person finds fun.

 

Couple of points.

I think in terms of dealing players interaction, controlled lobby matching is the way to go, in terms of assessibiliy. More lobbies, more instances, more battlegrounds. Diablo 3, and MMOs are certainly going down this direction. The issue is to make playing with others painless including a) no need to spend time to find group, b) no need to stay around for people you do not like, and c) less need to constrain our own behavior (like the new loot system in WOW take away the ability to ninja).

However, i think it is DIFFERENT in terms of interaction with the enviroment. There is no need to take away the open world. Devs only need to add a choice to SKIP long travel time (like what Blizz did). In this case, people who like to explore and walk around in the world still can, but those who hated the incovenient do not have to tolerate it.

More choices is good. The key is not to impose one's choice on another. The key is to control the interaction between players so that one does not have to tolerate much. Consensual pvp is the best example.

 

This is the route that games have been taking for the better part of a decade, but I don't think that these "choices" make the games richer.

It seems to me that giving individuals, individually, the choice to omit certain things they don't like creates a game that has, collectively, less choices.

There's no way to play a villain if you can't rob and kill innocents.  Conversely, there's no way to play a hero if you can't save the innocents from the villain.  That's what we lose when we put PvP on reservations for the exclusive use of the twinked out and über.

And there's no way to be a sojourner on a long and dangerous journey, if there is no dangerous journey.  Just like there's no way to create a trading outpost in the middle of point A and point B, if there's an insta travel superhighway from A to B.

The reason we have such a hard time finding groups is that, simply, there are too many people clustered around hubs, group size is limited because of balance issues, and no good solo options like crafting or foraging.  That's what we get when we stress "convenience" and "choice" over authenticity.  Because if there's a choice to get goodies from the loot generator (and the loot generator is the only thing that provides any value besides the cash store), and everything else is optional, there's no reason to do anything but stand in line LFGing to get your loots from the loot generator.

As a result, everything becomes a stat-mash, because it's the only thing that players don't have the capacity to ignore.  At that point, one player is just as good as any other, and there's no reason why anyone ought to tolerate you over the two tanks just like you spamming LFG.

And really, the only point of today's MMO is to stand in lines LFGing, because everything else that players used to do (like roleplay, ganking, crafting, and travelling) have been made "optional," and therefore, unused, unsupported, and unappreciated.

Seriously, there's no point in developing large worlds, when even 50% of players just teleport from instance to instance (and the number is probably far higher).

Back in the early days, you could say that we had little choice on whether we could PvP or not.  But I see things differently.  In those days, I had the choice to be a villain, a hero, or an innocent bystandard.  I don't have that choice anymore.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

 

Apt observations.

From a player's point of view, there is really no reason to tolerate anything in an entertainment product.

If being a target is no fun for me, damn right I am not going to play a game to be one. And if there is a game that does not require me to commit my life to it before i can have fun, damn right i am going to choose it over another that requires me hours and hours of camping.

I have no problem some dev creating games i do not enjoy BUT damn right i will never play/pay for games i don't find fun. The good news is there are plenty of GAMES, mmo or not, that i like. Diablo 3 will be an awesmoe gaming experience that will last at least a few months.

Fair point, and this is the reason why I expect this genre is going to move ever further away from the "massive multiplayer" aspect of MMOs.  Diablo 3 is a perfect example of games that have an "MMO-like" flavor, without being an MMO.

The only direction publishers can go to make the games more accessable at this point is to take out or water down all the remaining MMO elements: the persistant world, the guilds, the multiple users: make it a chatroom/lobby and put all the content in our own user created instances.  Because what Satre said is true: "Hell is other people," and the only way we can take away the remaining "Hell" is to take away the "other people": the ones we don't know, the ones we don't care to know, and the ones we don't like.

That way, nobody has to tolerate anything.

Because I agree that, as an entertainment product, nobody has to tolerate anything.  Unfortunately, however, we do need tolerance when playing with other people, because all people are different and they all have slightly different conceptions of what fun is.  What one person finds fun is not something another person finds fun.

That's something we forgot in the "great playstyle flame wars" in the latter half of the 2000s.  We kept on seeing things from our own points of view, but we never considered that the things we wanted to take away were fun for somebody, somewhere.

That's why the PKers fought like crazy against Trammel.  They were the easiest targets, the PKers, but they weren't the last ones.

The roleplayers were the next to go.  Games like EQ II had less roleplay tools, SWG refused to crack down on AFK entertaining, bots were rampant, and the encounters got so fast paced that everyone was forced to put a headset in their ears.

Then the world builders and crafters were the next to go, with the insta-travel, the lack of housing or politics, and the loot-based economies.  It's what the combat crowd majority wanted, and they got their way.

But even the twinks and powergamers were not immune, as the games started to scale back their encounters for the best loot, and started to cater to the casual player with a fat credit card limit and little sense with the RMT stuff.

And so, all we are left with in our games is a kind of cookie-cutter, boring virtual "tourist" type who has no personality, no passion, no sense of fun, and is rather uninteresting to game with for any extended length.

All the interesting people (the gankers, the roleplayers, the world builders, the community folks, the twinks, and the über) have been gone for half a decade, and for good reason.  They have no place to "live" anymore.  Their homes have been taken away and turned into tourist traps.

I think that gamers have to change before the games change.

Gamers have lost tolerance for things they don't like.

1)  PKers need targets.  The problem is, the majority doesn't like to be targets.  So they lobbied hard against open world PvP, the developers listened, and now the gankers have no more new games.

2)  Roleplayers need environments and tools to weave complex plots.  The problem is, the majority doesn't like complicated plots.  So they lobbied hard against wasting developer time of social aspects, the developers listened, and now the roleplayers have no more new games.

3)  Crafters and world builders need decay, markets, regional niches, good crafting systems, and patience.  The problem is, the majority doesn't like decay, doesn't like to spend time in markets, likes to get everything instantly without having to travel, would rather get to the action, and have no patience for an economy.  The developers listened, and as a result, nobody designs games that encourage crafting and complex systems anymore, and now the crafters and world builders have no more new games.

4)  The powergamers and powerguilds want big encounters.  The problem is, the majority isn't a part of a powerguild.  So they lobbied hard against powerguild content, the developers listened, and now the powergamers have no more new games.

So what do we have left?  In an attempt to not displease everybody, the new games don't really satisfy anybody, at least not the people who like MMOs for the things MMOs do well (PK, immersive roleplay, complex systems, achievement).

In the early days, you had to be a tolerant player, subjecting yourself to things you didn't particularly like in order to get the good stuff you liked.  But you were rewarded for this tolerance by getting the things you did like in a way no other game could match.  This was a genre that encouraged a diverse and cosmopolitan notion of fun, but when those who really didn't understand this genre came into the picture, this notion of fun got destroyed.

The downfall started with what I call "the great playstyle flame wars" that were waged between 2003 and 2005.  The wars generally started with threads that looked like this:

"It isn't right that I have to pay $15/mo to subject myself to (PK, roleplay foofoo, timesinks, decay, spawn camping, gated content, sticking a headset in my ear to get in a guild)."

And the piling-ons, pseudo-intellectual arguments, pleas for pathos, trolling defenders, and various insults meeting or exceeding Godwin's Law were heard from the plains of Trammel, to the heart of Coronet, to Paragon City, to Queynos, to Kalimdor, and many more places without end.  And the community managers, producers, designers and VCs shook with horror at what was unleashed, vowing never again to make a game which subjected anyone to anything even the slightest bit inconvenient.

They created games where players don't have to be tolerant of other playstyles, because they took out all the material that caters to different playstyles.  They created games where nobody ever has a reason to be offended at paying the publisher for things they don't like, but they did this by taking out or watering down all the material that caters to different playstyles.

Who can blame them?  It's the only thing they could have done for players who refuse to be tolerant of another's fun.

I think the history of games is going to look at the period from the early 2000s to the early 2010s as a time when people tried to make an MMO out of anything, simply because WoW was grossing so much money and publishers wanted "in."

And so we went into the whole "turn your IP into an MMO" phase.

What I think we've discovered is that not every IP is good MMO material.

You have to have room in your lore for individuality, for self-sufficiency, and for the quirks of online play habits.  You have to sit down with your IP and ask yourself, "does this IP naturally lend itself to individual characters running around making names for themselves?"  If not, then you can't turn it into an MMO without seriously disrupting what the IP is all about.

Take Star Trek Online.  Star Trek Online is all about playing a captain, with crew members as automated scripts.  But when you look at what makes Star Trek appealing, it's all about the dynamics between the crew members.  So unless you can duplicate this in an MMO, your MMO isn't going to do the IP justice.

As I said before, Warhammer 40k is all about legions of faceless soldiers that have had all their individuality and freedom drummed out of them.  Here's what I wrote on May 27, 2010 when I first heard of a 40K MMO:

I think 40k translates very well to a FPS, RTS, or TBS format.

I don't think 40k is an IP that translates well to the MMO format except as a Global Agenda or Planetside-style multiplayer FPS.

MMOs are all about character progression. The soldiers in 40k don't "progress" into soldiers, they're "manufactured" into soldiers. If you are a tyranid, you are grown into what you're supposed to be, and all you'll ever be. Same if your a Space Marine, or an Ork.

People like MMOs to produce a unique character identity. In 40k, every soldier from every side is pretty much the same. Individuality is pretty much frowned upon.

MMOs tend to get players interested in unique loot. You have some gear that's better than others, but they're still the products of mass production for the most part. They certainly aren't "quested" for.

There's no economy in 40k, at least no economy that players would want to participate in.

So for these reasons and a myriad of other ones, the 40k MMO--if it is to be true to what 40k is truly about--will be a bad MMO.

That doesn't mean it will be a bad multiplayer FPS with a cash shop attached. 

In short, I think it's a really good decision to not turn the 40K game into an MMO, because turning it into an MMO would either promote something that isn't 40K, or it would be so boring and pointless, you wouldn't care to play it for more than a couple days or so.

If I go back, it'll probably be CoH.

I've played EVE.  I've played EQ2.  I've played Warhammer Online.  I did the free trial of WoW, quit after four days, and never will touch the thing.

Out of all the games I've played though, the closest to the Pre-CU feel was from CoH, and I've tried to figure out exactly why.  Maybe you can all help me out.

This is what I think it might be.  When I played SWG, I didn't play it like a game.  I played it like I used to play with action figures back when I was a kid.  I'd invent plots, create playsets, imbue the characters with personalities, etc.

Can't do that with EVE so well.  Can't do that with WoW, EQ2, or WAR so well either.  I can, however, do that with CoH.

CoH allows me to do that same thing.  Is the crafting as good as SWG?  No, but there's some crafting.  Is the player housing as good as SWG?  No, but there's some player housing.  Is the character customization as good as SWG?  No, but there's a lot of character customization.  Is the roleplay as good as in SWG?  No, but there's a whole lot more roleplay going on in CoH than anywhere else right now.

Does this seem to make sense?

I think a distinction has to be made between "agile development" and "agility in operations."

"Agile development" is just bad for morale, bad for the product, bad for customers and bad for the bottom line.  Case in point, SOE's mishandling of Star Wars Galaxies.  They were agile, no doubt.  They changed direction 180 degrees, pursuing a new design philosophy in record time in response to the success of games like WoW.

They had such an agile culture there that anything, literally anything, could (and did) change at any time.  But what happened?  Some of their best designers left, and who could blame them?  It's hard to create something that works in response to the design philosophy, only to discover that it counts for nothing, because the producer decides to take the game in a new direction.

And while it seemed like good sense at the time to rework the game in response to WoW's success in 2005, the product itself  became a haphazard mess of code with poor quality control.  On the one hand, they were agile enough to change, but this agility in design showed in the hapazard nature of the product.

And the customers were utterly confused and many, to this day, felt betrayed.  Who can blame them?  Their confidence in what they bought and played was sacrificed to SOE's need to be agile with all aspects of their development.

As a result, the game not only failed to accomplish its objective to increase subscribers to over 1 million, it lost a significant amount of the 200k subscribers it had.  And for what?  All to prove a point (or rather disprove a point) that developers possess a prerogative to change without notice, which is the essence of agility in development.

There's something to be said for having a solid plan and sticking to it, of knowing who you are and believing in the vision. Agile development doesn't enhance these qualities, it undermines them.  It causes developers to be reactive, not proactive.

Of course, there's a difference between "agile development" and "agility in operations."  The article shows how "agility in operations" can be beneficial to a development house, but I would argue that you can only have agile operations when your core plan and identity is rock solid and not subject to change.

I'd like to thank Coyote for saying what I've been saying for the last five years or so.  Unlike what the industry says, F2P is not designed to be enjoyed by casuals.

Instead, F2P is designed to transform casuals into hardcore, MMO junkies. 

So let me see if I get this straight...

Smed thinks that TOR is going to be the last big budget MMO to use a subscription model because it's too risky to fund big budget MMOs via subscription?

And how is developing a big budget F2P less risky?

At least with the sub model, you have a whole lot of ways to generate revenue before the game is launched and after the game launches.  You also have a direct correlation between subscriber interest and revenue.  It's what Nassim Taleb talks about as 'non-scalable": your revenue is directly related to the number of boxes and subscriptions sold.

To develop a free to play game, however, takes a lot of money up front in the hopes you'll get paid...eventually.  There are fewer ways to generate revenue pre-launch, and a huge risk that interest won't be high enough to get players to commit to the item store.  While the revenue model is "scalable," or not linked to the number of subscriptions sold, this cuts both ways.  Yes, you have the potential to make more, but you also have the potential to bomb with the demographic that really matters: the hardcore spenders.

At least with the sub model, you can see that x amount of players is going to generate y amount of revenue.  But with the FTP model, x number of players can in no way predict what y revenue will be.  It could be more, it could be less, it could be that you are the most popular game under the sun, but go broke regardless.

I think Aihoshi made an exceedingly good point towards the end: "Although F2P operators are getting better at monetizing their games, they simply don't have any way of immediately generating comparable cash inflow. "

And that--more than anything else in my opinion--is going to make the "box & sub" model much more preferable than free to play when it comes to developing games (not necessarily running games), especially in this uncertain economic climate.  Indeed, most of the AAA F2P games we have now started as P2P, and there's a reason for that.  It's because you have to understand what you have before you can start to speculate, realistically, about what you could have.

And how can you realistically justify the $200 million for a top notch F2P game when you'll never quite know what you paid for...until it's too late to do anything about it?

Do you think we've pased the point where we are still one nation?  It seems to me that we have two nations: each with their own version of the Constitution, their own foreign policy, their own morality, their own economics and their own education theory.

Would we be better off if we created two countries: a red America and a blue America?  I mean, it just seems to me that we've reached a point where we just don't want to live with one another in the same nation.  So why don't we create two?  That way, each American way can do what they want.

Seems a whole lot better to me than simply waiting for a crisis.  When that happens, you'll find people shooting liberals and liberals hanging conservatives.  Why not create a divorce before any of that happens?

At the very least, it'll show which side was correct.

Originally posted by BarakIII

Originally posted by Beatnik59

I don't think infaltion is a problem for n00bs.  They have problems, no doubt, but inflation isn't one of them.

I think in order to truly grasp whether inflation is a problem or not, we have to ask the following question:

Does the currency work as a medium of exchange?

Because we certainly don't have to trade in the game currency.  Diablo II is a game where inflation is a problem.  Why?  Because trades on the realm lobbies aren't conducted in gold.  They are conducted with Stones of Jordan, because gold is so easy to acquire, it's worthless.

But as long as people still trade gold (or credits, or whatever medium) for items, the currency still works, even if the desired items are expensive.

I don't think a situation where a lot of money can buy a lot of good stuff is an inflation problem.  A lot of well functioning currency should be able to buy a lot of good stuff.  Its when no amount of money can buy the really good stuff that makes inflation a problem.  In other words, inflation is a rich vet's problem, not so much of a poor n00b's problem.  If anything, inflation brings n00bs up to parity with vets, because the currency of both groups is equally worthless.

The very fact that it costs a lot of game currency to buy the loot players want shows me that inflation isn't a problem.  Why not?  Because if inflation was a problem, no amount of money could buy the preferred loot.  You'd have to get it yourself or trade some equally rare and valuable loot to get it.

The worse problem for n00bs is deflation, not inflation.  In fact, a lot of the things this thread calls inflation is actually a product of deflation.  Because what we are talking about isn't so much that the currency fails as a medium of exchange, but that there's just not enough of it for a player to get the things they need.

So what is deflation?  That's when there are too many goods on the market and not enough currency to go around to buy the goods.  You see, the problem with n00bs isn't so much of a currency problem, but a loot problem.  The games tend to reward n00bs with a lot of items, things that in an ideal economy could be sold for extra cash.  The problem is that these items tend to be numerous, temporary in nature (since you level out of it quickly) and low in quality.

As a result, two things happen: the market is filled with a lot of loot, and you find that nobody is really interested in buying the n00bie loot that is there.  It just isn't worth it to buy a +1 leather armor fit for a level 7, when you can just go out and have a good chance of scoring a +3 chainmail fit for level 9, or buying it outright for a pittance.

As a result?  It isn't worth it for a n00b to trade for gold.  It's a more fruitful use of a n00b's time to acquire gold, and lots of it, because gold is so necessary to get the only items worth paying for: the rare drops that sell in the millions.

Inflation is a general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money.

Deflation is a reduction of the general level of prices in an economy.

You seem to be changing the definitions of these words to suit your argument. Also if it were a problem of new players having too many items they wouldn't have to be going to an AH looking for items appropriate to their level. The problem isn't an excess of items, but an excess of currency at high levels which is then passed on to alts at lower levels. Anyone who has no high level main will find they can't upgrade their equipment fast enough making their character rather weak while in those lower levels.

The only reason this really doesn't matter that much in a game such as WoW is because they've made the lower level content so easy that the items don't really matter that much. In addition in a game like WoW players tend to level very very quickly. But in games where items continue to matter at lower levels this can be a problem.

The only game I've played where inflation didn't exist to some degree is Eve Online and even in Eve it can be a problem depending on what you're after. If you've ever tried to buy a faction mod in Eve then you'll know what I mean. Those things cost billions of isk and only veterans can afford them. I don't understand why anyone would risk something that valuable by using it in a ship, but apparently they do.

Good post, but Inflation and deflation do not describe pricing, or at least not very well.  Some goods maintain or even increase their prices, even in a deflationary period.  It's just that we don't use currency to acquire them.  Some goods maintain or even decrease their prices, even in an inflationary period.  It's just that we substitute barters or payments in kind for the goods.

Inflation and deflation describe conditions of a currency, not pricing.  Of the two conditions, deflation explains the difficulties of n00bs far better, in my opinion, than inflation.

I think the difficulty here is that I don't think inflation is necessarily a problem, for n00bs or anyone else.

MMOs need inflation, especially when more and more new players matriculate into the game.  If you don't increase the availability of money when the population increases, you have a money shortage, hoarding, and a broken economy.

Inflation can become a problem, but only if we start to see people reject currency altogether as a medium of exchange.  You find this sometimes when rare items are traded on eBay instead of in the auction houses.  But as long as people are willing to accept currency for the best items, I don't think we have an inflation problem.  Why?  Because a lot of currency should be required to get the best items.

Deflation, however, is always a problem.  It's more than a simple reduction in the general level of prices in the economy.  That's the effect, but what's the cause? The cause is not enough money, or not enough opportunities to acquire money, or not enough money gained from the opportunities that are available.  When this happens, the economy shrinks and exchanges only happen between a relative few, because only a relative few have access to the currency necessary to be a full participant in the economy.

I think the legacy alt situation you mention highlights the problem quite nicely.  I don't believe that the reason legacy alts can buy equipment that their n00b counterparts cannot is because of too much currency floating around.  It's because currency is hard to acquire.  It is so hard to acquire, in fact, that you can't purchase the level 16 gear you need until you've quested enough to be level 30, and so on.  Hence the advantage in having a 'sugar daddy' alt at endgame.  People don't need these alts when money is worthless.  They need them when money is valuable.

I'd much rather have the devs sell gold than sell cosmetic items or fluff.

I don't think infaltion is a problem for n00bs.  They have problems, no doubt, but inflation isn't one of them.

I think in order to truly grasp whether inflation is a problem or not, we have to ask the following question:

Does the currency work as a medium of exchange?

Because we certainly don't have to trade in the game currency.  Diablo II is a game where inflation is a problem.  Why?  Because trades on the realm lobbies aren't conducted in gold.  They are conducted with Stones of Jordan, because gold is so easy to acquire, it's worthless.

But as long as people still trade gold (or credits, or whatever medium) for items, the currency still works, even if the desired items are expensive.

I don't think a situation where a lot of money can buy a lot of good stuff is an inflation problem.  A lot of well functioning currency should be able to buy a lot of good stuff.  Its when no amount of money can buy the really good stuff that makes inflation a problem.  In other words, inflation is a rich vet's problem, not so much of a poor n00b's problem.  If anything, inflation brings n00bs up to parity with vets, because the currency of both groups is equally worthless.

The very fact that it costs a lot of game currency to buy the loot players want shows me that inflation isn't a problem.  Why not?  Because if inflation was a problem, no amount of money could buy the preferred loot.  You'd have to get it yourself or trade some equally rare and valuable loot to get it.

The worse problem for n00bs is deflation, not inflation.  In fact, a lot of the things this thread calls inflation is actually a product of deflation.  Because what we are talking about isn't so much that the currency fails as a medium of exchange, but that there's just not enough of it for a player to get the things they need.

So what is deflation?  That's when there are too many goods on the market and not enough currency to go around to buy the goods.  You see, the problem with n00bs isn't so much of a currency problem, but a loot problem.  The games tend to reward n00bs with a lot of items, things that in an ideal economy could be sold for extra cash.  The problem is that these items tend to be numerous, temporary in nature (since you level out of it quickly) and low in quality.

As a result, two things happen: the market is filled with a lot of loot, and you find that nobody is really interested in buying the n00bie loot that is there.  It just isn't worth it to buy a +1 leather armor fit for a level 7, when you can just go out and have a good chance of scoring a +3 chainmail fit for level 9, or buying it outright for a pittance.

As a result?  It isn't worth it for a n00b to trade for gold.  It's a more fruitful use of a n00b's time to acquire gold, and lots of it, because gold is so necessary to get the only items worth paying for: the rare drops that sell in the millions.

Isn't risk management part of the dynamics of risk?  I mean, for those who argue that buying a term-insurance plan on cargo eliminates the risk, it really doesn't, because you end up paying more out of your profits than you otherwise would have if you didn't purchase the insurance.

The risk in this case is buying insurance when you really don't need it.  And for those who are concerned about inflation,  I would argue that term-insurance premiums like this have the potential to take out far more ISK from the economy than what you have now, which really doesn't take ISK out.

It doesn't prevent things like Gankageddon.  All it does is give hauling (which is some of the most underpaid and highest risk non-combat work in EVE) some extra tools to help manage risk, should they choose to exercise the option.

It still doesn't eliminate risk.  Not by a long shot.

CCP isn't publically traded, it's a private equity deal.  So unless you have a million dollars in free assets lying around, or have an annual income of $200,000, you aren't qualified to be an investor in it by law.

Just sayin'

I should feel a lot worse than I actually do.

But yes, I agree with everyone here that SWG was the greatest game I've ever played.  It gave me a vision of what could be, and I relished in it.

By the way, does anyone have a link to that old video that had the developer chat with Raph Koster and Rich Vogel before the game launched?

Originally posted by Gdemami

 

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Originally posted by Phry

at the moment the demand for plex is fairly high, and the supply... not so high.. so the cost of a plex is rising..

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Actually, according to recent QEN, people are stock piling PLEX so the supply is more than sufficient.

 

 Excellent questions and observations.  I'll try my best to explain my fears a little better.

Let's say the price keeps rising and more and more people buy PLEX.  Let's sasy more people stockpile PLEX because they say it'll increase in value.  Let's say people buy up PLEX like mad.  Is this going to make CCP rich?  For the few months people go PLEX wild, sure.

But like in the real economy, bubbles burst.  Perhaps there's some change in the rules that drives people to quit.  Perhaps a new game comes out that takes a good portion of the population away.  Maybe they dump their PLEX or give it away.

Now all the sudden the price drops.  As an investment in a fictional space game, PLEX may tank, but PLEX is worth more than its fictional exchange value.  PLEX has use value, perhaps it's the only thing that's traded that has real-world use value, because it allows you to keep playing.  You see, when Armor Repairer IIs and Feroxs tank, the game doesn't file for chapter 11.  But if a PLEX bubble bursts, it has the capacity to take the whole company down.  That's why it's dangerous to mix payment scheme with the volatility of in-game economies.

If a PLEX bubble bursts, you have a situation where there's a lot of PLEX floating around, with very little incentive to buy more PLEX from the EVE store.  In fact, there might be less incentive to even maintain a subscription.  In other words, people are finding that it's easier to use the PLEX that's already floating around, paying ISK, than it is to pay real cash.  And it probably wouldn't even take that much for problems to arise, maybe as low as 10% of people changing their paying habits might affect CCP's revenue models.

Now we can hope that CCP used all that revenue made from when PLEX was being bought to maintain its overhead while the surplus PLEX is used up.  Hope.  More likely, they would have already earmarked that influx for other projects, for they seem to have two right now (World of Darkness and Dust).

Now I'm not saying any of this is going to happen.  But it could happen.  PLEX makes EVE and CCP vulnerable in ways it wouldn't be without PLEX.  Whales, metagamers, mules, and players outside of the traditional subscriber model have a much bigger impact on the health of the game with the introduction of PLEX.  That's all I'm saying.

Originally posted by evicton

 

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Originally posted by Beatnik59

 

 

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Originally posted by Gdemami
 

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Originally posted by Beatnik59
But once you start enabling people who haven't purchased it to consume it in exchange for ISK, some very scary possibilities start to arise from a revenue standpoint.

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And those scary possibilities are supposed to be?

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 There could come a point when there is so much prepaid time out there, and so available, that nobody would have to pay CCP a dime to play for years on end.

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But CCP was already payed for that time when the prepaid time was originally sold.

 

True, but it wasn't free money.

It also came with a service obligation to be redeemed at some point.  When?  Anyone's guess.

Originally posted by Gdemami

 

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Originally posted by Beatnik59
But once you start enabling people who haven't purchased it to consume it in exchange for ISK, some very scary possibilities start to arise from a revenue standpoint.

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And those scary possibilities are supposed to be?

 There could come a point when there is so much prepaid time out there, and so available, that nobody would have to pay CCP a dime to play for years on end.

I left EVE right around the time that people were debating the whole 'game cards for ISK' thing.  You see, the concept of prepaid game time for ISK was legal long before CCP came out with PLEX.  I came out against the practice because of the potential damage it could do to the game integrity in long term.

You see, a lot of people are under the assumption that prepaid game time is the same as subscription money.  It isn't.  A subscription is a specified amount of money for a service obligation at a specified time: what you pay in January is what you get for February.

Prepaid time like PLEX isn't like that.  Whatever PLEX is purchased in January can be stockpiled and redeemed at some future date.  This is fine if PLEX can only be consumed by the customer who purchased it.  But once you start enabling people who haven't purchased it to consume it in exchange for ISK, some very scary possibilities start to arise from a revenue standpoint.

How much potential PLEX is out there in the form of game cards, in hangars, in the game markets and on closed markets?  Is it enough to keep the population of Tranquility playing for a month?  A year?  Ten years?  If nobody, from here on out, payed EVE one cent more in subscription fees, how long could they potentially keep playing before all the currently available sources of game time dried up?

That kind of thing probably kept CCP up plenty of nights.  So, it's no wonder to me why they came up with this Aurum business for the Tommy HellmarFinger jeans and whatnot: to chew up more of the PLEX that sits around like a ticking time bomb.

But this all could have been headed off, I suspect, if CCP was smart enough to not even get into the 'prepaid time for ISK' business in the first place.  The PLEX system hurts the traditional subscriber; he has to put up with service demands from those who don't pay and he has to compete in economies of scale with those who don't play.  It makes the financial viability of the game hinge on attracting and maintaining 'whales' over your traditional pay-as-you-go subscriber.