Tiered pricing *will not work*

How do you feel about Tiered pricing and the like?

  • If it ISN'T in I won't play!

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    74
"if you do this I won't play" is not an opinion, it is a fact in most of the posts here...
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1)A discussion without bias *is* a discussion.
...
2)If there is no roleplay then it is just a soullesss game.

3)Tiered pricing in itself affects very little if they keep the core principles they have dictated so far."


1) A discussion of something in where there is no solid right or wrong answer is nothing with out bias. There is no way to objectively discuss tiered pricing since people have had experiences with it one way or another. It is not a figment that has not yet come to exist, thus people are biased one way or another about it based on experiences and previous discussions.

2) I agree 100%.

3) I disagree wholeheartedly. Tiered pricing is a form of price discrimination which very much changes the air of the game. It can separate friends who wish to play together but aren't willing to pay the same amounts, it divides up the community into real-life financial classes, and so forth.

Also, saying "I won't play it if they have tiered pricing" is indeed an opinion. It is the ultimate way of stating "I utterly hate tiered pricing"

And finally, I wouldn't go saying that people shouldn't express a certain opinion (or that it isn't helpful)... in a thread that was started as a poll containing that opinion as an option. By the very topic itself it is an integral part of the discussion.
 
3) I disagree wholeheartedly. Tiered pricing is a form of price discrimination which very much changes the air of the game. It can separate friends who wish to play together but aren't willing to pay the same amounts, it divides up the community into real-life financial classes, and so forth.

I'm going to say that "I won't play if they put this in." is a fact, due to wording. It is a person's response, not how they feel. If they stated "I hate tiered pricing.", then it would be an opinion, as it states how they feel.

It's like how saying "I just kicked some guy in the 'nads for being an ass." is different than saying "This guy was such an ass, I just wanted to kick him in the 'nads!".
 
The tier pricing is new to me. I do recall in EQ1 there was a premium subscription but the extra content granted did not pose limits to players with normal subscriptions. That is the key.

You do not want to see mega guilds that requires members to have high tier subscriptions make real life money by selling difficult to get items to gold farmer companies.

The other issue I see potential with is ticketed events that offer items that would enhance character power / ability. You see it would be quite worth it to the gold farmer boss ( these are little companies after all and not individuals) to buy event tickets and sell items for a lot of in game cash. Look how much time and money that will save him when he only pays his workers the worth of around $2 a day.

In this respect I have to say that the EQ2 model makes more sense to me. They charge a small fee for adventure packs that add extra content. The trick is anyone can do it at any time and its a one time fee. So its basically tacking on a few extra dungeons and quest series but you only pay for it once , not every month. Its a small bit of extra content but its not something you can not live with out and not something you have to buy by a certain time. If you just have to have it then you can get it later.

One of the side effects of fast track end gamers is if they are going to farm for real life money (and many will) its likely they will work hard to convince the dev team that the content is too easy once they are through it and have the gear that is granted though the events. They want to make it harder after their people are tricked out and eliminate competition that will follow. Here again it will be worth it to pay some extra if an edge will be given here.

I urge here along the way with what ever choice is made the question, how will this effect the rest of the players? is considered. It isn't the few subscriptions that support and keep a game alive after all but the many.
 
I strongly think, when you think of ticketed events and Hero's Journey, you should disregard what you'd expect a ticketed event to be in other games. And how you would expect the player base to react to said ticketed events.

Ticketed events in Simu games are usually storyline events, they're a dungeon with live NPCs, a storyline hook, a new place to explore, some 'fluff' loot, maybe a nice looking sword. By fluff loot I mean... dresses, jewelery, hats, mechanical birds that sit on your shoulder. By "nice looking sword" I mean just that, a sword with a cool discription that transforms into a pike when you do certain things to it, a hair pin that doubles as a lockpick. Items that don't make you a god in gameplay, just make people ooo and ahhh over you. It's often the same loot that you'd get from one of the traveling merchants that comes to the premium only areas, just rare fluff.

Ticketed events and tiered pricing has worked in all the other Simu games for years, because their games aren't "Godly raid level item" centric. They are, world and character centric games. If Nav is going to sit down for a day or two and whip up an especially cool dungeon with a neat storyline, if Divi is going to cook up some events specifically for my guild's storyline or help me plan a wedding for my characters complete with private location, invitations, custom wedding dress, unique party gifts for my guests and engraved rings, yeah I have no problem giving them real money for it. You sure as heck don't get that kind of content in a game for free.
 
The problem with fluff items in a graphical game is that somebody on the art team needs to make it, it needs to be uploaded to every client, and loaded into everybody's (still cramped) memory at all times. You could have the option to shut off fluff items to save your poor computer from spazzing out, but then fluff items lose their appeal because people won't always see them.

Even if technological limits weren't a consideration, you have to account for how different a market graphical games are in. Personally, when I'm playing EQ2, if something looks particularly nice, I enjoy it, but if it's obsolete I'll sadly put it away (and probably sell it off when I do another vault cleaning). When I play graphical I play in that mindset, in which I want to be as effective as possible regardless of looks. I mean, spiked shoulder pads? Do I look like an ogre? But it's the best I can use right now, so there it is.
 
A few coments on this,

Fluff items, big deal it doesnt take that much to have an option to enable or disable them. Just like on EQ, you can have the old characters who arent as demanding as the new ones. Same things with illusions.

I wouldnt think this a factor.


Now the tier system.

I've heard it all, from people claiming it gives advantages to folks who pay more. Well this is a moot point to begin with.

If you play 5 hours a month and i play 45 hours a month, i will be at an advantage over you either way! This is the same argument i've heard with folks who say why those that raids have better gear than those who dont. Spend more time, more energy into ANYTHING (not just gaming, real life too) and you will get more than the guy who sit on the couch all day and do nothing!

Myself i would love to pay for some better services, better gameplay and all. I would love for events to be run, just like if i was playing an old gaming session with my budies in D&D. Not some of those generic zone wide event that EQ used to do. Something with a story attached to it. I honestly dont care much if i get phat loot at the end but the story has to matter. That stuff i would pay for!

It's time to realise that those games we play arent made by some guy in his garage like 15-20 years ago. Time to realise that it takes millions and years to produce a good quality MMO and that those companies who create them, especially small outfit like SIMU more or less bankroll the operation without seeing much income for many years. Would you work without a pay for many years? So if they offer me the choice to have premium service, as long as they actually give me bang for my buck i got no issue with that at all.

In what ways would me having a fluff sword or even a better sword than you would lessen your enjoyment? In a PVP setting i could understand but in a PVE? There's this perception that because we all pay 15$ we're all entitled to the same stuff. Well, again that isnt true. The content is there but you have to work for it. If i pay more isnt it fair to say i should have something extra? Just as folks who pay for expansions have access to different content.

Honestly paying for premium service is not something that will go away. As more and more gaming studios create MMO this is what will eventually happen for MMO's i figure. MMO's are started to being seen as a serious business, so in order to make more money it's only logical to offer more choices to the players.


More choices take the form of tier services, pay for items and fluff stuff like flashy items, names etc etc.
 
There should just be one flat fee. I disagree with anyone paying differently for the same game and should get a different service, whether more or less. Just make it equal.
 
Why should it be equal? We arent equal in real life. Some folks have more toys, some folks have the familly, some are healthy etc etc.


Bottom line is that tier pricing is the way gaming will probably go. Folks ----- about buying items, gold, powerleveling and so on.

Yet. 2005 revenues for in game sales of services where in exceed of 350$ millions dollars. That number was on the low side and that's 2 years ago. So clearly some folks are buying the service.

I've bought gold before and i have no shame saying so. It allowed me to buy a horse! Has that made me in any way shape or form a worst player? It hasnt given me an edge really. I was in a raiding guild at the time and it would have been just a matter of time for me to get it anyway. It's fluff more than anything and it doesnt give me an edge in combat. Better mobility but well....is that such a HUGE advantage?

Like i've said before, we arent equal players and i dont see a reason why if the dev team is willing to provide other content for folks who want more, why not? This is a business, not some volunteering, so as such if they wana make money, they gota cater to those of us who want/can afford it.

You said you disagree, which is cool and all, but ...why?
 
Equality is seen by many as a sort of mystical ideal. In a fantasy game, it strikes our subconscious that ideals should be attainable, since we aren't bounded by reality. It doesn't quite work that way, but we expect it to at times. And while Equality does not equal Fairness, there are often things that shouls be equal in order to be fair. We all start at level one, for example. No one rolls a character and starts at level 209 with a soul sucking sword of doom.

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As for the trading of in game gold, I cannot condone that. It is not only illegal, but it also ruins the economy of the game, and that affects everyone. By making gold readily available for purchase, any gold based challenges or limits become superficial. Hell, you can buy a maximum level character in a game by going to certain websites. So now you get to run around with rewards that someone else "earned" in game and illegally sold to you.

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I'd rather have officially implemented tiered pricing that sends more money to the game maker, allowing them to create more content for everyone, than have illegal asian game-slave companies spamming me in game to buy their gold and powerleveling.

~Dune Walker~
 
Illegal? if it was illegal and they actually cared about it they would be serious about it. Everything they do is a token gesture, nothing more, nothing less.


As for equality and fairness, ohhh sure we all start at zero but after 5 mins of play this theory goes out of the window. We both can start the same character, same class and all. Then one of us will go ahead of the other. No such thing as equality/fairness in a MMO, if it was, the game would be boring. A MMO is what it is, partly, because we can all do what we want (to an extent). To whom is it unfair if someone buys a character already made from one of those outfit? In what way does it lessen your achievments? If you got your epic fair and square with some friends and had a great time with great memories, does it make it less that the guy next to you got it because he paid for his?

If anything he's the one who wont have the memories of good time with friends.

Let's be honest here, I have been playing MMO since 1999. I heard it all....gold sellers ruins the economy....well i dont see it. Everytime i log into eq i dont see how the economy is ruined. Actually, items are cheaper now then they were. Of course not so true for top end stuff, but that is perfectly normal. After all, just as in real life, everything new is always more expensive.

In WoW....one of my character is on one pvp server and the other on a rp-pvp server. The items are actually more expensive on the rp-server, economy screwed you'd say? Nope not really, the difference is due to a server being older than the other one and guess what, price are still well within ranges and not some huge gap apart.


This thing of gold sellers are ruining the economy is a fallacy. If anything it keeps money rolling. After all it isnt like gold sellers are *making* gold. The gold they get is farmed....just as most players farm for personal reasons.

Show me some proofs that it ruins the economy then i can review my point of view.
 
Gold selling is quite Illegal. You agree to Terms of Use and an End Use License Agreement. These dictate the conditions under which you may use the game engine, servers, etc.

By breaking these terms of use, you are, in fact, breaking a legal, binding contract. Perhaps Blizzard considers such contracts to be token gestures and thus fails to take legal action, but I assure you based on their past history, Simutronics will not.

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Secondly, I am not arguing for equality. I am arguing for fairness. Someone leveling faster or whatnot is perfectly fair. Only certain things need to be equal to be fair.

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Thirdly, the Laws of Economics dictate how gold farming ruins economies. Gold is spontaneously generated when found on a corpse. It is literally created from nothing. The five gold coins you pick up did not exist a minute ago, and now the Global Amount of Gold is increased by 5 gold.

With millions of players constantly generating gold from nothing, the value of gold decreases every minute. Supply and Demand. If there are ten gold coins in the world, and you have five, you have half the wealth of the world. If another ten gold coins are suddenly created from nothing, you now only have half of what you had, reducing what you own to just a quarter of the wealth in the world.

Unchecked, gold coming from nothing would soon make global gold pools so ridiculously large that gold would lose all value through inflation. The decrease in gold rarity produces a decrease in gold value. This means prices for non-gold commodites must go up, to get the same value exchange. Merchants have to charge more, but people don't mind, since gold is so readily available. The apple that used to cost 1 gold now costs 10. As more gold enters the economy, that price keeps rising, and we get inflation. At some point, it costs 10,000 gold to buy an apple.

Why is that bad if gold is so abundant globally? Well, because humans hoard. Imagine a new player comes along and wants to buy the same apple. It used to cost one gold, so if you killed something and found one gold, you buy one.
Now you have to kill for long enough to gain 10,000 gold, just for one apple.

This is why games have gold sinks. Whenever you buy something from a merchant, or repair an item, or whatever, some of your magically gained gold is magically lost. This reduces the total pool of gold globally. This helps keep gold rare, thus maintaining a stable value, thus preventing inflation.

Gold farmers, however, farm gold so ruthlessly and efficiently that no reasonable gold sinks can be implemented to prevent the growth in the global gold pool caused by the farmers. Any gold sinks put in would hurt non-farmers more than farmers, and would drive people to farm or buy gold themselves, so as to overcome these gold sinks. It all snowballs from there.

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As for WoW, you can really notice price differences if you look at different factions on heavily imbalanced servers. On a server with 5 Alliance to every 1 Horde, prices are much cheaper for everything Alliance side. More people have mounts, people are better geared, people have more money to spend on potions and usable buffs, and people have more luxury money to spend on frivolities. The Horde side cannot harvest resources as efficiently as the Alliance side, and everything is rarer and more expensive. However, monsters drop the same amount of coinage for both factions, so Alliance are at a huge advantage. Their gold goes farther.

This isn't fair. People can't directly control faction balance on a server, so they can't fix the problem. What Blizzard should have done in situations like a 5/1 Alliance to Horde server is cap the Alliance side before it got to such a huge margin. No new Alliance characters on that server until the Horde population reaches a certain comparable level. Need to balance the populations, and in the process, economies.

~Dune Walker~
 
Good point i guess there, However answer me this. Why isnit easier then to play the games now? If i go by what you said me starting a new game like EQ2 (which i did last week) would be really hard for me. I mean there's tons of plats sellers on the web. If what you say is right i couldnt buy an apple! Yet i got some really good gear. How is the player seeing this so called effect you talked about?


I played WoW.....and i havent felt like things were too expensive or too cheap but actually just right! Same for EQ1 when i created an alt 6 months ago.

How is the player base being crushed by this influx of gold? Because frankly i hear about it, but i simply dont see it! I dont see prices either skyrocketting or falling down. Ohh sure you may say it's because the companies took action. Thing is, buying online virtual thing is gona be a huge market for our kids. It already is for some games like Second Life, Even SOE has 2 servers that are dedicated for folks who dont mind spending real coins for virtual items.

The online economy is the next frontier, you think it's gona go away? Far from it with the ammounts of money being generated it wont. This is like P2P, it's here to stay, When you consider that the MMO business generates hundreds of millions each year, actually it's closer to Billions now. This isnt just subs...it's more and more virtual items. Need i explain virtual items?


You want some good eye opener? Go read the following article, but just for your own ease, i am gona quote an important part of the article.

http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=16322

Subscription revenue remains the largest portion of the market. However, by 2012 it is forecasted that consumer spending on digital distribution and virtual items will account for over 40% of revenue



40% of the revenues are gona be from items....this is HUGE! Nearly half the money they will make will come and is already coming but to a lesser extent to them.


SOE is about to launch Legend Of Norrath. A Magic type virtual card game within EQ and EQ2. If this isnt selling items then what is it? Perfect World and countless other Asian MMO you can already buy gear for most of the games legally! It's no small secret that when it comes to electronic the Europe and North America, heck the rest of the world BUT Asia is FAR FAR behind. On many levels not just video games, but electronics from cell phones to household electronics. We're like 6-8 months behind them, that's crazy!

Sometimes i wonder if it isnt envy that folks hate the most about folks who buy gold/items. Just like some folks cant stand seeing the house next door at Christmas with more lights, It's human nature to try to outdo the others. To have the best thing, the smartest thing, the most popular thing, to be loved more.


Lastly, if the market for this last year for online games was 4.5 billions. If we think that maybe 20% of that revenue was from items alone....we're still talking of a roughly (and this is just a guestimate....) 800$ millions in items sales ALONE!


Now you tell me, whose the market aimed at? Not Asian...it's mostly North American market and Korean market. How many folks in North America play online games? It isnt even worth it to calculate it but chances are that quite a few gamers have used such a service at one point or another. Gaming companies may say illegal right now, but they are just too blind to see the potential they can make if they were to offer it and regulate it. They can totally control the flow of money in the game and they already do so to an extent. So anyway, i got no shame in saying i've used the services. Chances are a lot more folks that you know have used them as well. They just are too ashamed to say so because of the stigmata we associate it with.


Anyway, i agree what you said made some sense, but this isnt the real world. It's a gaming virtual world were the devs control it. They can curb the economy if it needs it. They're already doing it.
 
Unfortunately, I think that if people are banking on making 40% of their profits selling virtual items, they're taking a massive gamble.

Procedural Generation and Player Created Content are starting to take off in an incredible way, and any company that thinks it can make substantial money by selling things in one game, when almost identicle things can be freely had in another game, is deluding itself. That may not be the case now, but it may be in the very near future.

I like how you mentioned P2P, because it ironically fits with these ideas. People will find free ways to get the music, or game content, or whatever it is that they want. If your game is designed to make money by restricting content to higher bidders, people will turn to free content however they can get it.

With more and more games like Spore starting to come out, we may just be about to witness a change in the computer industry, where gaming companies make money by selling or renting out their clients and tools, and where content is made almost exclusively by the players. Already companies are struggling to produce enough content to meet demand, and most of a game's production cycle is made up of content creation. By delegating that task to the player (who wants to be able to create content anyway) you save incredible amounts of time and resources. The only limit then becomes building tools to allow people to make more and better content.

~Dune Walker~

Addendum: About your point on companies making gold trading illegal. Trading gold is illegal because the people who made and own the game, own the game! I can't sell you a house I don't own. So what if I'm renting it? I can't sell it to someone else. That's illegal. Same with in game items and gold. You don't own those items. You are renting them.

Gaming companies aren't stupid. They purposefully make it illegal to sell their property, because they don't see any of the profit!
 
Look at all the very successful MMO out there right now, ALL of them have a monthly fee. Take a look at Perfect World in China, sure the 8-12 users playing it are playing it for free but ohhh surprise of surprises, the game support a store where you can buy items. Shot online has the same thing. The up and coming MMO from SOE "The Agency".....again same thing it will be free but will support an item store.


Content created is fine and dandy for a stand alone game but for something as complex as a MMO it's decades away. Sure we can make a UI but it's along shot from creating content. Look at all industry observer and they will all tell you the same. The industry is gearing toward items and special content.

Plus player content can only exist in an instance, how can 2 players create content for the same area? No game even has this yet.
 
Your point about "successful" MMO's having a monthly fee is just logic. Since people measure "success" by profit, you kinda need to be making money to fit the term.

*grins*

I agree that Player-Created-Content is a ways off, but I seriously, seriously, don't believe that people will put up with tiered content beyond a certain point. Look at the results from this thread's poll. The vast majority of those on this forum who have voted are Against or Neutral toward tiered pricing. Now, that's certainly not conclusive of any larger trends or whatnot, but I honestly think that most people do not want to pay more for content in a game.

Personally, I'm absolutely certain that the trend of Content Selling will continue rampantly in many places and games. But when everything is for sale, things lose their value and worth. People get bored with them, or run out of money. It won't be a lasting trend, I feel.

~Dune Walker~

Addendum: As for SOE, they're making a new MMO? Didn't Vanguard fail badly enough for them? Didn't they lose enough money on the PS3? Who is running this company that they keep shooting themselves in the foot?
 
^^^ they didnt make vanguard....just took over it.

SOE is making a James Bond'esque MMO called, The Agency. It will be free to play, however clothing is what will be your gear and you will have the option to buy better clothing. Clothing wont be needed to play but it will help.

Game i do believe is being built on the Unreal engine.
 
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