The Escapist on Micro-Transactions

And the day enough people ask for orc costumes is the day the devs are going to get over the prejudice that this game is a superhero game.

The devs don't have a "prejudice" over subscribers. Its a decision, not a prejudice, to declare their model to be focused on the subscribers.

Maybe if enough people are willing to pay for it Paragon Studios will become a pizza delivery company. Then again, maybe that's completely ludicrous, and there are limits to how far anyone will pursue revenue streams relative to their corporate objectives.

I seem to recall you yourself saying that global chat is another one of those big hooks of an MMO, and that social interaction doesn't specifically have to mean teaming. So if we decide to add initiating teaming with the free accounts because its a big MMO hook for new players, regardless of consequences, why not also allow free players access to global chat channels, also regardless of consequences? Isn't the ability to participate in the social networks of this game at least as important, and at least as much of a hook to continued play, as direct teaming?

Put it another way: without access to chat channels, how are you even going to know your friends are logged on to team with them? This game is so heavily dependent on chat channels to network players, isn't the ability to team without the ability to coordinate and contact your friends limiting the ability to team to the point where much of its potential benefit is defused anyway?

That's sig-worthy material right there, and I'd use it if my tribute to the mod who mod me weren't so dear to my heart

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

You're assigning an invariability to corporate objectives that I don't happen to believe exists; especially when you're talking about a shift in revenue streams like this one. The primary objective is to make money. If they believed that 90% of the player base wanted Orc costumes, they might not convert to a fantasy game, but you can bet they'd make a fantasy costume pack and not worry overly about all of the fantasy characters populating their super hero game. (It's not as if there's a shortage of such characters as things currently stand.)

It doesn't really matter at the moment. At the present time, the strategy is exactly what you say it is, Arcana. Time will tell how well that strategy works.

People can always change their minds. Also, the people themselves can change. But that's presumed, and separate from the general principle that it is not true that companies, run by people, will pursue revenue where ever it exists. They will pursue to the best extent possible within the limits of their corporate objectives and those things are not trivially mutable.


I'm also not making any guarantees that it will. I only know what the intended objectives of the devs are. Whether they succeed will depend partially on their execution, partially on what the customer base decides they want, and partially on their definition of success.

If they double the total playerbase and increase total revenues by 50%, that's good but not great. It would keep the game going for years to come, so that might be success, just low grade success. If they quadruple the playerbase and double revenues, I think that will be the minimum level of success that a normal F2P conversion would consider success, and would be a pretty good deal for a seven year old game pursuing more of a hybrid model. Anything above that would have to be considered a completely unqualified success.

I would DEFINITELY buy some permanent temp powers.

Well, even without Global friends, you still have Local friends to work with, and while those aren't idea, we made due with them for, what? A year? Two years after Launch? It's cumbersome but doable.

I'm also not sure that Global channels are the best way to engage Free players into the community. For the most part, they're player-made, player-run and player-recruited, more akin to large amorphous SGs, in fact. That said, I would still like to give Free players at least one server-wide channel that they can chat with that isn't Help. Or Arena... Good god, not Arena, though now that PvP is dead, that might not be a bad idea.

I'm not really adamant about giving Free accounts access to THE friends, chat and teaming systems, so long as we give them access to A VERSION of these systems. I'm also not that serious about allowing Free players to approach and proposition Premium and VIP players (though giving Premiums and VIPs the option to permit this would be cool) so much as I want to allow them to better communicate and team with each other. I don't really want a Free player to be able to send me tells or invite me to teams (without my explicit consent), but I would kind of like to allow said player to sent tells and team invites to other Free players.

Basically, cutting Free players off from Premiums and VIPs I get. Cutting them off FROM EACH OTHER? Not so much.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Couldnt they have just made the game cost $5, come with 400 PP, unlimited game time and the current Basic Premium, then said; 'Sub for even more!'?.

That's precisely where I stumble in trying to figure out the reasoning behind the faux-F2P change. They're handling the game such that Free players aren't really supported, they're just left to fend for themselves and you're actually really expected to make a token purchase pretty early on... But if that's the case, then indeed, why not just ask for a token purchase as a prerequisite for opening an account? And if the intent is to attract Free players and only later convert them to Premium players, why not go father and facilitate at least the basic "MMO stuff" for Free players - stuff like teaming?

It just seems like Freedom is being designed as a "purchase" type game, but it's being managed like a F2P game. Do want Free players running around for any length of time or don't we, anyway?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I'm not even sure free players can use local friends and I'm pretty sure they can't use the friends channel. So even if you could figure out a friend was on, without chat your only option would be to blind invite them out of the blue: without chat you can't even send them tells. So again, to make free to play teaming work, it would seem the actual act of invitation is not enough to make this practical: it would only open the door to even more requests for even more features to make the feature palatable.


Since the logic behind barring free players from generating unsolicited tells is that they can indulge in bannable conduct without any penalty (losing a free account is theoretically no loss at all: you can just make them specifically for the purpose of performing bannable conduct) allowing free players to send tells to each other will mean someone could perform that kind of conduct, but it would be limited to just the free players. Is that wise?

They could have, but that would eliminate the use of the free play option as a form of advertising for the game. Just because that option is not exactly all that Sam wants it to be, doesn't mean its logical to give it up when there's no benefit to Paragon Studios to giving it up.

To put it more bluntly, yes they could have done that, but they could also have done it the way they did, and that's the option they chose because it gave them the options they wanted.

When you put it like that, I'm not sure. I mean, they don't have access to Customer Support. I suppose we'll have to decide whether we want to pamper them or give them the cold shoulder. Do we want to take care of Free players and nurture them into the game, or do we want to treat them as "not customers" and let them fend for themselves? I don't really have a good answer to this, but it kind of feels odd that we'd want to protect them from griefing for free, but not let them team for free. It seems like picking and choosing when to pamper them and when not, and I can't really understand how that's decided, other than "That's what they went with, so there!"

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I think not being able to start teams is less of a deficit than being subject to chat abuse that cannot be controlled.

Plus, the implementation of this keeps getting more complicated. If you allow free players to chat and invite to teams, but only with each other, that means that if any member of your circle of friends buys anything one day, they'll suddenly find themselves outside your circle: you won't be able to talk to them or invite them to teams. That's possibly worse than not having the ability to do it in the first place.

I'm not totally oppose to possible solutions to this problem. I suggested in the past a couple of potential solutions to different aspects of the problem. I suggested the possibility that anyone could send a tell to a free player, say to ask them if they wanted to team, and if you did they automatically had the right to respond to you for a fixed amount of time, say one hour. If you stopped talking to them that right eventually expired. So you could ignore someone that started getting abusive, and eventually they would be unable to send tells to you anyway, and couldn't create another account to get around the block.

I also suggested that free players be allowed to invite someone as a friend if they were in visible range of each other and once friended, they could then send tells to each other. I think these two ideas, both of which probably require some tech, open the door to chatting in a way that is least abusable. From there, its possible that some limited form of teaming could be allowed centered around these chatting abilities.

But I still think that the current limitations, given the current lack of technology to implement limited access contact like this, are still prudent. That doesn't mean I'm opposed to advanced solutions that provide some of those features but eliminate the problems I currently see plaguing any attempt to add them without those safeguards.

I tend to agree with Arcanaville on her last point. One idea I've been messing with in my head is to allow Free players to reply to a tell, say, within 5 minutes of the last tell from a given person. Extra work and coding but would make the free guys a little less isolated.

Other ideas: allow /friends and /supergroup. That'll help with new folks who get invited to try the game out by someone already in. With out at least that then there's going to be difficulties getting some new folks in.