VIP to Premium IO question.

Customer: one that purchases a commodity or service

Just saying.

The whole point of the "free to play" model is that "free" players, as a whole, pay, and pay a lot. Some of them pay nothing, but others pay more than a subscription would cost.

I play my characters in the Ouroboros missions with out enhancements to get badges. It sucks but it's doable. You don't *have* to immediately respec. Odds are most returnees won't notice right away.



And if they won't at least shell out $2 per month, who cares? If they're not going to make any effort at all, then they probably aren't going to stick around regardless.

Players who want to play will find a way to make it work. Maybe they couldn't justify $15 per month but $2 is within their budget. Maybe they'll take the time to respec into SOs. Those are the people you want as customers because they'll stick around and because they want to be here. The entitlement oriented folks who expect everything they had for free, I doubt they'd ever be a customer.

Okay now I understand what the problem is. Thank you for taking the time to explain what I wasn't perceiving.

Agreed

Show me one of these folks, please. Nobody expects to get everything for free. It's just a turn of phrase some people (like you) use to make it sound as if giving free players a little more is a terrible thing which only the lowest scum would want.

Edit: Actually I seem to remember an "I want everything for Premium" guy. I think that went with "if you don't give me everything for free then I'll stop playing" (ooh, now they're shaking). Still these will be a tiny minority. Most people just want a little more and aren't adverse to paying. By ignoring them and talking only about the folks who want everything for free you're weakening your argument, because you're implicitly telling us that only by taking the issue to an extreme you can show a real problem with it.

At some point, giving free players "a little more" will kill this game, because it'll become impossible to make it profitable. Exactly what that point is, is quite debatable, and any debates over that point will be full of mostly just supposition, with little real numbers backing up said facts. The only ones really in a decent position to know where that line would be are going to be Paragon/NC- but only after Freedom launches and they can gather data.

Blindly saying it can't hurt is a much easier position to take than saying 'hold your horses', because it's easy to make an emotional appeal and ignore any potential long-term ramifications.


I really don't think no access to IOs is a huge deal. PvP is not a major draw of this game, so exactly how powerful your character is in comparison to another is much less of a big deal. Since SOs are generally more than enough to be able to solo anything in the game (sans team-only content), it's also not a big deal from that point of view... and for team content, no one is going to really notice the difference between someone using SOs and someone using IOs (I've been on high levels teams with no enhancements and no one had a clue... even as melee characters!).

Might giving free/purchasable perma access to IOs be a good idea? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. It's easier for them to make that an option later than to take it away in the future if it turns out it was a mistake.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

The goal is to keep VIP better than Premium so that people will feel compelled to subscribe. One of the mistakes done in some Hybrid models is to allow the nonsubscriber accounts to essentially buy access to everything you would get by subscribing. Where is the incentive to subscribe then? I know because the reason I've never resubscribed to one of them was there is no special benefit that I can see for subscribing to it. The other I have a lifetime membership to so don't have to subscribe but it is the same. Biggest difference is the ring one I get free points every month. ::shrug:: Well and I don't have to spend points to unlock things.

The other big Hybrid model made by a certain Cryptic company was clever and reserved full character creation for subscribers. Just playing free and spending points only unlocks so much.

The fight here is that some people don't want to subscribe but do want full access to things. Yes some want to pay a one time fee for access to this or that but they want full access without subscribing. And I don't think that ever should happen.

Sure thing. They aren't hard to find.

and

They won't "notice" that it is different because they won't have anything to compare to, but they will certainly notice that they are hitting less than makes for an enjoyable game. They will notice they run out of endurance running a single target attack chain and a toggle.

They will notice the game isn't fun, which (as I said) is the opposite of what the devs want.

That attitude would make this entire experiment a failure. Virtually no one stopped subscribing because $15 was too expensive, so dropping the price by $13 is meaningless. They stopped playing because they didn't like something about the game. The trick is to make them believe the game is better now. The way to do that isn't to give them a game that isn't better.

"Oh, I remember why I quit" is not the result they want to get from Freedom.

Another huge pile of not fun.

Those are the people who are already here. Changing the billing model and doing nothing but appealing to the people who are already subscribing is stupid.

I think you misunderstood what he was talking about when he mentioned the $2 dllars per month.

I'm pretty sure he was referring to the IO license which costs Premium players $2 dollars per month to use IO's, not suggesting they drop the monthly sub $2 dollars to entice people to remain subbed.

T Immortalus's post was particularly amusing.

As I recall, he didn't have much to say after it was pointed out that even though you bought a cell phone, you still have to pay your bill if you want to use it.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

This is correct.

It costs $2 per month to play with IOs under the current Freedom billing model. If that isn't the deal of the century, I don't know what is.

Except for possibly playing completely for free for 50 levels and getting all the legacy content too, just the way we all used to play up through Issue 8.

No, I understood that just fine. A $2 monthly license is functionally identical to a subscription.

He suggested that people who returned to only be hit in the face with a now useless character could simply pay the $2 and be ready to go.

My point is, if they were not willing to pay the $15, then they aren't going to be willing to pay the $2. That massive $13 was never the reason they stopped paying in the first place.

Because you already want to play the game. Let that sync in. It is only a deal if you already want to play the game.

If instead, you stopped giving them money because you were not enjoying it enough to pay them, then it's still $2 more than you need to pay.

Seriously, this is a business model that crack dealers can figure out. It's not difficult. For the first hit, you don't give them the stuff you cut with cat litter and ground up glass. You want the first taste to be the good stuff. For returning players, Freedom fails at that part.

Yup. You get what you pay for. There's plenty of options for returning customers listed up thread in addition to paying a minimal $2 monthly fee. I don't feel the need to reiterate them here.



Seriously, I don't think "crack dealers do it" is a good business model for anyone. The idea of getting players to return is to get them to pay something. If they won't, at all, or make any kind of compromise, then I really truly don't think they're going to be paying for anything in the future.

The goal is to NOT give away the store. Dot-bombs didn't get that. We've learned our lessons, so we're not doing that any more.

I agree, they didn't have to do that, and it makes the CoH model special amongst MMO's. I still think that disabled IO's suck for those of us who aren't at reward level 7 yet, and that this could have been tweaked, but that doesn't mean the idea as a whole isn't great and special.