Discussion: Featured Items at the Paragon Market - 2/7/12

Indeed! Thanks.

I haven't been paying attention to how long the packs are on sale but have the devs been putting packs on sale for less then a month?

We can sit around and argue that limited time offers are bad but atleast with a month long sale window every ViP will have a chance to buy it. That ViP is going to get 400 pts at some time during the month. If these packs are being offered for less then a month that hurts ViPs who are awarded their stipend outside of the dates the pack is on sale.

Well, I got my stipend on Dec 8th and Jan 8th, but I didn't get my stipend today. Additionally, there were not one but TWO concurrent limited sales for 400 points. Also we're about to get hit with one or two MORE before the end of the month. The Imperial Dynasty set is likely to land in the next two weeks, and it will likely be 400 points. Additionally I suspect that there will be another Valentine's offer before the end of the month.

That is 1,200 to 1,600 points of LIMITED costume bundles in a single month.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

Yet according to the annoucement post its a saving of 600 points, which is pretty clearly showing that the bundle is including the value of the repeated stuff.

I think right now, they're like kids with a new toy, OCD kids with a very complex toy that came with a big book of instructions. If I were that kid, I'd try out every step in the instructions to make I didn't miss any awesome stuff the toy could do.

The gang almost certainly has access to NCSoft's body of market data and best practices from other games, especially from the Asian MMO market where microtransactioning is a much more mature practice, well accepted by the player population. I don't blame them a bit for trying everything out per the book before twiddling the bits to dial in a good body of best practices for our specific community of players.

Maybe in the long run they'll decide to abandon limited availability items, or choose to limit the practice to seasonally-specific bundles, or not.

Myself, I'm pretty happy either way. I loaded up my account with 9600 PP back in September, so I just buy whatever I want pretty much as soon as I see it. Still have 7K-odd PP left, and when it's gone, I'll just do it again. I recognize that not every can throw $100 at CoH whenever they like.

The Pilgrim Hat was available for only six days, but the costume packs vary between full availability and one-month ones.

On one hand, we've had the Barbarian Pack, the "Gunslinger" Pack, and the Carnival of Light Bundle, which are on offer year round.

On the other, there's the Halloween Costume Bundle (available from 10/18 to 11/18), the Winter Holiday Pack (12/20–1/31), the Roman Costume Bundle (1/31–2/29), and now the Pocket D Valentines Pack (2/7–3/6).

If the Chinese Dynasty Bundle similarly has only limited availability, then it would seem that Paragon Studios has decided that causing artificial scarcity is the best way to prod the CoH playerbase to burn through their points.

Well, we have to work with different assumptions here on how people come, try out the game, and leave. The devs would have the actual metrics.

- If you get a regular "churn" of players- people coming and going and coming back, then this number of potential 'lost customers' is going to be larger, so it may benefit them to have the costume pieces be available year-round.

- If you get a larger bit of "veterans" that at least visit at the holidays during events, then perhaps the time-gated nature of the pack will prod more of them into buying the set when they have the chance.



I expect that these kinds of metrics are being heavily-monitored by Paragon studios. I'm betting that we'll see a mixed bag here- special limited-time holiday sets taking advantage of the surge in players that show up for those events and more permanent general-purpose sets that are release during lower-traffic times.

Indeed They certainly haven't repeated the experiment of offering an unique holiday-themed item for a week after the Pilgrim Hat.

Nonetheless, it would be nice if the holiday-themed costume packs were more appropriate (the Roman and Pocket D packs certainly don't need to be time-gated) or more timely (the Chinese Dynasty, which may or may not have limited availability, is being released well after the Chinese New Year).

In fairness, from what i can tell that was intended for release in a more timely manner, but... it's a complicated set, and like so many things in software, the release date had to be pushed back. It goes back to the same reason we don't get hard release dates for new issues.

I actually wonder if this was part of the reason we got the Roman pack when we did, given how flimsy its attachment to Valentine's Day is -- a while back when the store was new, people were clamoring for the Roman armor to be available too and the general consensus there was that it was probably being held back for just such an occasion, so that unforeseen delays wouldn't cause any "missed" weeks with no new content on the market.

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

Ehhh, I don't really know how effective limited time offer is for something that is totally digital.

with that said i don't have any issues with this pack, anything in it or anything else. Then again costumes don't get my ire up as things which actually affect game play.

That could also be that I'm used to the Paragon Market sucking PANCAKE. I have nearly 2700 points sitting there unused and not expecting anything done with the market to got towards its use.

/shrug.

EDIT: Also agreeing that I don't see how anything in there counts as Valentine's day pack.