Plasma

I'm only really familiar with one other game, but WoW's vanity pets are all $10; only the mounts are $25. CoH doesn't have mounts, but if they were offering a "pet" which you could ride like a travel power, you might be able to get 2500 points for it. (Or not. WoW also doesn't really have toggles, and the rocket board is inconvenient because of the detoggling.)

But then again, I've never really cared about the MVAS, the other vet reward pet, etc. It's cool that people like them. It's a funny thing about digital goods. Say I'd pay $1 on a whim for the dog. NCsoft is clearly better off with my $1 than without, but there's no way to really sell it to me for the price I'd pay, while still collecting a higher price from someone else who likes pets more. So it makes sense for them to price it so their total revenue is the highest, even if that means I can't get it. (*Sort of. I made this point in another post, but it's better really to maximize the revenue from all products, which may mean selling individual products for less, so people spend more of their overall budget on the CoH store goods instead of other entertainment.)

Preface: I really am unlikely to have a beef with the market. I'll buy what I want and I won't buy what I don't want. It's all a bonus we didn't have before, I'm paying the same sub, more options, etc. I bought into that. (As long as the issue content for vips keeps coming, I'm happy.)

Second preface: I spent 5 years working at a company that sells purely digital downloads (3d art models/textures/etc), and I have two pieces of advice. The first is: you're right to be careful about sales, because people get trained to wait for sales.

The second is: be mindful that your competition is basically "everything else someone can spend their entertainment dollars on". You are competing against hollywood movies, dining out, music, other games (mmo or not), etc. You win by giving people "more" for their money. Let's say for example that you have an option to sell 2k german shepherd at $5, or 5k german shepherds at $2. Which is better? Well, 5k german shepherds. Because you're adding more value to the experience of more players.

That's my 2 points worth.
Which leads me to my final point: you may be tempted to look at the sales of individual items, and ask: "What is the most we can get for this item?" or "What price lets us get the best revenue from this item?" However, I'd say this is a very dangerous point of view.

- The more people spend on any given item you sell, the less they have for other things.
- The more value you deliver, the more likely someone is to spend more of their total discretionary cash on your items. Someone may only spend $5 to buy a german shepherd every other month, but if they can get a german shepherd for $2, and 20 hours of bonus xp for $2, and a costume code for $2, maybe they spend $6. The question is not: do you want to sell the german shepherd, the costume code, and the 20 hours of xp boosters for $2 each. The question is really: do you want $5 or $6 in revenue?

Of course, my example is simplifying the situation. Still...

Some people are going to be willing to pay tons more, but that doesn't make it the best option. We sold products that were $30 for years, and literally years after release garnered more revenue putting them on sale for $2. There really seems to be some hockey-stick line for certain products where people just buy them on a whim. It may be this behavior only kicks in for sales (because ours were not permanent price cuts; although we did buy out products we were brokering and then sell them dirt cheap and make it up on volume.) Running 50% off sales will not necessarily show you what you'd get for 80% off or 90% off. You may discover that you can see 1000 copies of a german shepherd at $5, but that if you sell it for $1, everyone and their mother buys it because it's just a buck. There are inflection points.

(But if you reach those inflection points by having sales, I cannot emphasize enough - people will get used to waiting for them.)

Yeah. The relative value is interesting only if you plan to supplement. (Say, you had 10 merits and got 750m for some LotGs, and then were going to add in 1.25b of other money and put up a big on the CH, or such.)

Funny you should mention it... yes.

My tabletop gaming group decided we'd play CoH together. And I remember being in the beta from preordering, maybe 2 weeks before go-live. And I make it to level 14, and bought fly... and was like.... hoooooooly cow, I'm going to be playing this game for a long time.

(8 years later...)

Now if only we could teach project managers that.

Yeah, but then you die. I'd actually really like to see a revamp to the ui in general that did this. One of the things I really appreciated playing That Other Game(tm) was how much you could customize the ui with mods; Power Auras is an amazing mod that lets you display visuals on your screen in a super-customizable way based on all sorts of in-game conditions. Less than 5 seconds left on a specific buff? Oh, look, there's a hazy yellow halo around the middle of the screen that reminds me it's about to wear off.

Something like a right click "Show this buff in the middle of the screen when it is expiring" choice would be awesome, so I could get a faded outline of a light form icon in the center of the screen at, say, 10s to go.

What's interesting is, I was thinking to myself, "Maybe I'd pay like $10 for an xp bonus that would see me through most of my leveling". And then I was thinking: "I could probably get through 1-50 in about 40 hours on a reasonable solo toon with some IOs."

And then I did the math, and lo and behold, $10 for 40 hours would be almost exactly 1/4 of this price.

So in a roundabout way, I found myself thinking exactly this.

(BTW, I have very little interest in xp boosters or self-rezzes per se, so I don't care a lot about the pricing, but I am a guy who had no problem dropping $400 the first week in the store, so when my gut feeling is, "Woah, that's expensive", that might mean something, fwiw. So my pricing feedback will hopefully be construed as for-the-benefit-of-Paragon.)

So, never minding that basically, on sale, this is $2 for a single in game rez...

There are a lot of powersets that currently have rez powers, and you have a very brief moment of vulnerability as you rez before the invulnerability kicks in. It's possible to die again in that brief moment between resurrection and invulnerability, and I've read a redpost before that talks about how this is a game engine limitation.

So, that's all fine and dandy for powersets, where no one intends to die and they are, after all, usually useful.

But if I paid $2-$3 to resurrect my character and literally died one second later, I would probably flip out.

Has the tech behind this changed to avoid that happening?

So, suggestion by way of making this more useful so people might actually give you money:

- Instead of doing it as a number of charges, how about offering a 30 day resurrection power on a 30-minute/1-hour timer? Basically, something similar to the jet pack. Or something similar to the newspaper/radio mission resurrection reward, perhaps. I think people would see that as a much better value, and someone leveling a character in a "high risk" way (say, lunatics like myself who were fond of trying to solo huge packs of mobs in Perez Park on fire blasters) might see it as valuable.

Or, alternately, you could make it a lot cheaper. I could maybe, just MAYBE see paying like $1 for 5 charges. (Maybe it's hard for me to value this, since I play a fire blaster who practically uses Rise of the Phoenix as part of his rotation).