Tradable subscription time salvage. Read for explanation.

Something that I've been thinking about for a while is, why not allow players to buy a piece of salvage that can be traded for game time? You pay $15, you get a "Paragon City Rent Card" salvage which when traded to an NPC, adds 30 days to your account. Make those tradable, and then people who like to organize events can have those as prizes, or have an easy way to keep friends playing. It would mean more money for NCsoft. EVE Online already has something like this.

Sure, if they are freely tradable, they would be exchanged for influence, too. I expect then to hit the 2 billion influence cap in the market and stay there (and even if you could split them into four one-week salvage pieces, they would still hit the 2 billion influence cap and stay there). I don't see this being bad, necessarily: for one, the influence is not being created out of thin air, it already exists in the game; second, it would seriously undermine RMTers, and give that money to NCsoft instead; third, the fees for selling those in the market would result in a lot of influence being drained. It would effectively be an influence sink, and give NCsoft more money to boot (because some people would be buying them just to trade for influence).

With the conversion for Notice of the Well costing 100 million inf, you can expect a lot of people to seriously consider RMT in order to afford all the incarnate abilities. This would give them a legit way to get inf without encouraging RMT.

Also, this would allow some form of free to play; some people would buy the salvage pieces just to exchange them for influence, and others would give that influence to avoid paying for the month. From NCsoft perspective, however, everybody's account is still being paid by $15 a month, though now the $15 don't necessarily come from the account's owner.

One problem would be people who use a fraudulent card to buy those or reverts the payment in PayPal. A way to deal with that would be to make the salvage untradable until it passes a certain window of time; if you buy it with a credit card, you can only apply it to your own account until a week passes and the transaction was fully verified; if you bought with PayPal, you can't trade it until whatever period PayPal has to revert transfers; if you apply a game time card, though, since you paid for it elsewhere, it would be tradable right away.

Thoughts?

interesting concept, i dont think poeple will rush to the RMTers for 100 mil inf, even the average person can make around 30+ mil a day selling on the market (one of my RL friends who knows almost nothing about this game just sells everything on the market and already has a respectable amount of money)

i do see what your suggesting though possible good for the game economy because it will move money around, and allow poeple who have inf in game, but lack the ability to pay monthly (credit cards/pay pal wont work, or hard time finding time cards) will have another route to be able to stay subscribed

no. Marketeers ftl

Interesting thought... And it's something I (and friends) would have used in the past. Someone having a rough RL time, might be dropping out of the game because of money? Well, you can't gift *anything* now (at least easily,) this way you could.

And with the craft cost for the NOTW, I've been thinking RMTers would start aiming at this game more strongly again - this would short circuit that a bit.

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In abstract I think it's not a bad idea. However in practice I'd be concerned about the impact it would have on the social aspects of the market. Prices on the market have always been a sore spot with a certain percentage of the game population. Allowing people to (effectively) purchase inf for real money is potentially going to make that worse. As soon as there is an officially supported real money value attached to Inf then there is a real money value attached to all items on the market. Do we really want to see threads where people complain about how many dollars it costs to purple their warshade?

For the curious, assuming that to purple your warshade you purchase full sets of: Absolute Amazement, Apocalypse, Armageddon, Hecatomb and Ragnarok to slot the most useful WS powers without running into rule of five this woul probably cost you something like 11 billion inf which, if you financed it entirely through subscription time salvage sold on the market for 2 billion each would, cost you about $90.

Make buying it a temp power. $15 for a single-use click power that you can use on yourself; or $15 for a one-time activation that you can use on someone else.

No market presence, keep it purely from donor to receiver.

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I think this is a very bad idea.
As the OP even notes, it seems a good way for RMT'rs to sneak cash around.
It also is a way for players to pay other players to do things for them.

Very bad idea.
I certainly don't see any reason that NCSoft would want to lose subscription time by allowing players to buy in-game salvage with real world money.
Why take the time to create End-Game content if players can just buy their way through it?

This smacks of Pokemon fever; symtoms include"Gotta Catch them all" (tm), "I have to have [whatever] now", and "I'm willing to pay as much real world dollars as it takes to be Uber Lee7".

It helps a rich person in the real world more than it does anyone else.
There are other games that you can play that allow this kind of activity. If "buying your way to the top" is what you think is fun, please play one of those other game.
I like CoH without the impact of real world dollars on the markets and in-game currency (which no longer has anything to do with your ethical values).

I think the idea has merit. I can see it being an issue, though, that you need to already have an active account to use it to add time.

On the other hand, some people make so much money that they'd use it exclusively as their method of getting game time, and their fervent inf generation could have the opposite effect of removing inf from the economy.

Heard of an interesting story about this type of thing in another MMO. Someone had about $1000 worth of their MMO's version of 60 day time card salvage, but they were destroyed by another playing with them losing that particular salvage. While it is a decent way for an official RMT, there are numerous problems from someone accidentally forgetting a couple of 0s at the end of their trade or accidentally deleting it.