Would you buy a statue?

Not so much a suggestion as a straw poll -

If you could pay to have a character immortalized in Paragon City or the Rogue Isles as a statue, would you do it? Assume you can pick a single server and that other details like zone, location, etc... might be variable and might have a variable cost or might not.

What price point would you do it at? $10? $20? $30? $50? Keep in mind that a high price might be a kind of "throttle" to naturally limit the number of statue requests.

Not the first time this was suggested.

Think about it, if the player base is 50k, if 10% of the player base purchased 1 statue we'd have to find spots for 5000 statues... and that's if they only purchased one. If the player base is 100k, now we'd be looking at 10k statues. I'm not saying that 10% would purchase, but you've got to look at it from that possibility. 10k statues would fill the zones up a bit even over 15 servers. It wouldn't be so bad for some of the lower population servers, but imagine how this would impact the higher population servers. (I wouldn't be surprised if the CoH/CoV subs are over 60-70k.)

I think that if this was implemented in some form, statues in bases would be the way to go and keep the zones fairly clear of added statues.

I don't think he was suggesting this be implemented, judging by the fact that the first line he said was "Not so much a suggestion as a straw poll".

Honestly, I wouldn't pay for a statue of any of my characters.

Not for money but let say I could pay about 500 000 000 inf.

Change it to a statuette that you can put in your base for 2 billion inf and I can sign it. But /unsigned to a statue in the cities.

As a suggestion appended to the OP: If the most basic statue was only life size, then finding places for 5000 of them (As Rangle M. Down suggests) would not be difficult at all, 'specially so if each one was server specific. If they were larger then they would have to be MUCH more expensive. Also location & placement could be sold, with prime locations in Atlas Park commanding greater prices than the swamps of Perez Park or Eden!

I would think it should be done with cash to help keep the game afloat with a few in choice locations given away as contest prizes. . .

Whiles it's not anything that I could afford, there are certainly players who could and would, and I certainly don't see any harm in that. People get to have a modest bit of game immortality and NCsoft gets a push to support the game. Win-win in my book!

I have to side with Rangle on this issue. this has been suggested before and one at least one occasion the individual felt that every single 50 level in game had the right to be immortalized in marble somewhere in Paragon. Heck I know for a fact I am no where near the top in number of 50s earned but I have close to 30 now. So as we attempted to point out to that guy imagine 10,000 players with 30-40 level Fifty characters.. Yeah the devs want to spend ages figuring out where to place as many as half a million statues. LOL

As for your poll.. NO I wouldn't buy a statue for any amount. And making it available for purchase with INF instead of real cash wouldn't make a differnece either. Sure I have billions scattered out between characters but I can think of a lot better uses for it than putting up a statue.

Here's another point to consider.. How many statues do you see of Statesman? Manticore? Back Alley Brawler? Would the answer to that be none? The statues we see scattered around the city zones are of heroes that have either retired or are dead. So were you, and by you I don't mean the OP but just anyone playing the game in general, planning to never play this character again? Okay well you let us put a freeze on it so you can never actually use it again but it will still take up a slot in your server and then pay us $40 USD and we'll find a nice spot to erect your statue. lol ..

Now lets look at another part of your survey.. It isn't possible, or okay possible bu not probable, to put a statue in any zone on just one server. Server maintenance is probably involved enough but one area the Devs can pretty much take for granted in .. Building are buildings, roads are roads, rivers are rivers, trees are trees and statues .. are STATUES. they are the same on every server and can be quickly looked at for flaws and then they move on. No we start adding individual statues of players heroes on specific servers in specific zones and suddenly ever server is a completely different set of maps they need to review for potential errors. I don't claim to know a thing about how the game is programed but that just seems to me like it turns every single server into a unique game that the devs need to maintain.. sure they do a lot of that where it involves the actual players on each server but now they'd need to expand to include LANDSCAPE differences as well?

I'd sign if instead of having it in paragon/rogue we could instead have it in our sg's.

No, I wouldn't - and I'd agree, if something like this ever DID come about, it should be a base-only type of thing.

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Honestly, the question only came up in my mind in relation to another thread, where I happened to mention that some games deliberately sell big-ticket items that only big spenders would buy because that's the kind of thing that big spenders WANT to buy.

A statue seemed like that kind of item.

I deliberately avoided the feasability question, other than to make it server specific. It's a feature that would almost certainly never be added, anyway. In any case, the devs here have a bit of a track record at this point of saying "X is not and never will be feasible" and then coming back in a couple of years and saying "Guess what? We made X feasible!"

A base only thing would kind of defeat the purpose, IMO, but I find the retired hero comment interesting. I'd find an Architect accessory more interesting than a base accessory but, again, the specifics aren't so interesting as the concept.

I might pay $10, myself. I'm not sure I'd go higher than that unless it was REALLY prominent in some fashion. That probably says that I'm not one of the big spenders that the item would be aimed at.

I always think this has potential as an inf sink.

One way to implement it and also get round the problem of Paragon City being wall-to-wall statues would be to create a few locations with a full-size 'mutable' statue. The player would log in with the character they want to be immortalized, and pay the inf -- as someone suggested, maybe a sliding scale depending on how cool the location is. From then on, the player will see the statue as their chosen character, in the costume it was wearing when the inf was paid. Additionally, if a team leader has a statue, then everyone on the team will see the leader's statue.

If a player has no statue themselves, then...maybe a random one from the pool is chosen when they zone in? Or they see the last statue paid for? If a player wants to change their statue (different character, new costume), then they have to pay again.

A simpler way to run statues as an inf sink would be to have a single statue spot per server (or even per zone per server), and a daily auction to see who gets the spot. For players without much inf, a spot in the Shadow Shards would probably remain pretty affordable. :-)

It all seems like a lot of effort, really, but the suggestion is perennially popular.

Since this is a Poll I will respond to the question as such.

1) I would be willing to pay money to place a statue of myself for my base.

2) I would be willing to pay money to place a figurine (Statue) of my character on my desk as I play Cityof Heroes/Villians.

3) I would not be willing to pay money to have a statue of my characters in a public zone.

I'll side with the Base Item option. Having a "Hall of Heroes" with Statues of exemplary members would be a nice addition to many SG Bases.

Having public statues? No.

Just to throw a monkey wrench into the feasibility side of this...

In DAOC, one of the most requested items was player housing. The solution was to implement housing only zones where the players could pick a house and decorate/customize it to their specification ( both inside and out ).

Suppose they were to create similar player customizable zones in this game where you buy a plot and you can place buildings/statues/whatever. A lot of work, yes. But it HAS been done in at least one other game.

If they were to do this, wouldnt it be cool if you could add an npc on your plot that would let players run your AE missions?

Guild Wars has a "Hall of Monuments", which is an instanced shrine devoted to a player character, with a monument and plaques inside. I think that addresses that specific need appropriately.

So, a statue in your SG base, yes; in public, no.