So what kind of cash shop would work?

[Don]

It seems to me most western cash shop and by extension F2P are doomed for failure. You usually never hear about a game that went to F2P release anything solid other than "number of players went way up when it became free' and 'X months after F2P there's still a lot of freeloaders on our servers'. Certainly it's not like say Nexonsoft where they release revenue numbers that can almost rival WoW. I guess the Russians/Chinese/Koreans got the F2P stuff figured out, but for whatever reason the western developers sure haven't. So what kind of stuff would it work or not work in F2P? Preferably it'd be something you'd actually consider buying, not 'I think someone out there could spend a million dollars on a pony so they should sell that, it just won't be me'.

1. Gear unlock. I don't really like this but I think this is necessary for a sustained revenue. I'd say the 'unlock per piece' deal for EQ2 is better than 'pay lots of money at once to unlock everything'. First of all the unlock per piece stuff probably gets you more $ overall anyway, and the fact that you're not being hammered by a $15 to bill to do what amounts to just equip gear makes it easier. I think EQ2's gear was like 75 cents per piece though given the constant SC discounts it's probably more like 50 cents. If I didn't get bore with the game itself, it doesn't seem unreasonable to spend 50 cents to equip a piece of awesome gear especially if I have reasons to believe this gear isn't going to be obselete in 2 weeks. Over the very long run you probably pay more unlock per piece, but assuming gear didn't just fall out of sky or you found that the latest epic gear becomes obselete every 2 weeks, I think I'd rather spend say $5 to be able to equip some stuff that'd last for an year and then do it again next year, then shell out $15 at once even if I plan to play the game for a while.

2. Mounts. I think mounts are a BAD idea. I have the Saryrn Deathcharger from EQ2 and while it actually looks pretty cool, the primary reason I got it was because it was really fast compared to the normal mounts you can get and you get a 15% XP bonus while having one. As far as I'm concerned I could be hopping on a pogo stick and I'd use that if it gave me 15% XP bonus. I'll point out that every guy I know in EQ1 who swore cash shop were evil bought the $5 ultra ugly lizard mount from their cash shop because that's as cheap as you can go to get an ultra fast mount, and mounts actually give you an advantage in EQ1 compared to no mounts (you regain mana faster while mounted when not moving), and the speed actually matters because it takes time to accelerate your mount so it basically works out only the ultra fast mount is the one that accelerates fast enough that you can move around with anything that resembles normal precision during a raid environment (if you use a slower mount you'd be moving way too slowly due to the fact mounts need time to acclerate). Sure I know the guys who spent $100 on the Chimaera mount too but for every guy like that you can find 100 guys who bought the $5 utility cheapo mount, not to mention the guy who bought the Chimaera is already a cash shop addict while the guys with the cheapo mounts are previously guys who swear cash shops are the devil. Here I don't agree with how some games have a 'rent a mount' option. The way I figure if you can get even $5 off something as relatively basic as 'moving around' per player you should be thankful. The mount should also be really fast. In WoW the flying mounts are something like 300% speed. The EQ1/2 mounts are about 150% speed and you can pretty much just run in a straight line through everything with almost no risk of dying as long as the mobs don't have a ranged stun. The mounts should be so fast to render traveling basically a nonissue, because that's the only way you can reliably get $5 from everyone. Otherwise people will just walk, so no stupid mounts that dismount you the moment anything looked at you in a funny way. Maybe they don't have to be EQ1 level of crazy where you can be running through 200 mobs where each of them can kill you in one hit and still comfortably know that you'll make it through alive, but it should be pretty darn close.

3. Race/class unlocks. I think these are actually a good idea, but there should be some way to actually test this stuff. I don't really mind having to pay $5 to play class XYZ but I'd like to at least have some idea of how the class plays like. Yeah you can look it up online but it's just not quite the same. Every game should offer the ability to play any class/race to a reasonable level where you can actually see how the class is going to work (20 works out reasonable well for most games) and beyond that you got to pay. I'd say that race unlocks in general appears to be a bit too expensive and can use a price adjustment down. It's not like your game's elves are really that much cooler than any other game's elves. Unless there's a good reason to believe your game's elves are really that awesome, race unlock should be more like in the $2 range (they seem to be more like the $5 range currently on most F2Ps). Class unlocks can be higher since it's content, and I think $5 per class is reasonable provided you've a way to actually test the class instead of just blindly choose one and hope it's good.

4. Tradeskill stuff. I don't necessarily buy them but I think it's a good way to balance the economy. If you do tradeskill a lot in a MMORPG you'll often notice people try to buy up all the raw materials to hike the price way up. Usually such efforts are foiled by supply and demand but occasionally it succeeds. If you can buy all the raw materials from the cash shop this limits the damage done that can be done by predatory tactics because if the prices get too out of whack people will just realize in game currency can almost always be converted to real currency and if it's cheaper to buy stuff with real currency, they'll do that.

5. In game currency. They should just flat out sell currency for money. I don't know why all the F2Ps try to beat around the bush by selling you some valuable item (say, 30 day game time) as for real $ and yet it's also tradeable in game so you can convert it to game currency. Of course this means your game actually has to have some reasonable uses for in game currency (this appears to be harder than it looks) but that's not my problem. There's really no reason to make people jump through the loop of using real $ to buy some meta currency item that gets sold in game for the game currency. As a corollary, this means you should NEVER sell in game currency cap increase, because what's the point of trying to encourage people to buy your currency if they can't even carry a lot of it? For example SWTOR has a currency cap of 200K for the preferred players, which is a very small amount (I have 5 million when I stopped playing, and I don't sell anything on market nor do I even try to get credits). Let's say you offer $1 = 100K credit, but if you can only carry 200K credits you might just say forget it, why should I pay another $5 to just be able to carry the credit I spent real $ on?

6. Utility stuff. It always strike me stuff like XP potions are significantly overpriced and I really have a hard time seeing people spend $10 for a 5 pack 3 hour 25% XP increaser. It's not even a matter of principle or morality. It just seems like that's way too much money to be spent on such relatively little effect. At any rate, if the point of selling utility stuff is make the game shorter why not sell limited power? Virtually every game has group level designation stuff, and as far as I can tell the group level areas, especially the lower ones, almost never get used. Why not just sell quadruple damage to group instance mobs as a potion for the same price? The ability to kill these mobs quickly would allow you to actually solo them and you'd get more XP as a function of your increased power, and you even make use of an area that otherwise nobody uses (I tried using LFG stuff for random low level dungeons in MMORPGs and almost always no one is going to do them).

7. Content passes. I'm not opposed to content but if I pay you $2 or $5 or whatever for this content, it should be stuff that I can absolutely bulldoze through. You can readjust the loot if needed to resemble some kind of balance but I don't expect to pay $5 for a raiding pass and then still have to find a large number of other guys and then wipe over and over, because if that's what I'm interested in doing I should already be subbed to the game where I can do this an unlimited number of times. For the most part I think content passes should work kind of like WoW's vehicle combat where you should be playing as a character significantly more powerful than your normal self in such contents to allow you to complete them with minimal and possibly no help. Let's say I pay $5 for some pass to the same raids other people are doing. I'd expect to be able to complete it (if not, I'm just never going to buy the said content again) and get the same loot (the quantity of loot should be less, but that's easy to tune given it'd probably a different instance of the raid to begin with). Let's face it, it's not like raids are that hard to begin with in most cases unless you're running ultra hardcore whatevers, and at any rate in the end money wins anyway. If it turns out that people like to play artificially pumped up characters to destroy raids at $5 a pop and this is more profitable than the standard $15/month deal, there's no reason why the developer won't go that path. I'm not saying this is necessarily the case but I see no reason to oppose this on principle. I think in general devs way overestimate how good their dungeons/raids/whatever are. I see the same guys looking to form a raid/group that never happened and it's probably because nobody's actually interested in doing them. In some games like SWTOR you can actually go to the raid/group instance and it'll tell you how many people on the server is in the same instance and you can often see it's exactly 1 (you) so you know nobody else is actually doing this stuff. If you want me to pay $ for the privilege to playing content that possibly no one else is even using, I don't mind that in itself but I expect to be given considerable advantages given I'm paying real money to do that content that none of the subscribers are even playing at this moment because it sucks.

Actually they should do some kind of dynamic pricing like how in certain places the cost of going on the carpool lane (if you don't meet carpool requirements) changes depending on how congested the other lanes are. It should be easy to collect data on whether anyone's actually interested in doing dungeon/raid XYZ. If nobody is doing a given dungeon/raid it should be dirt cheap to buy an 'uber pack' where you just go in and destroy everything in the said content solo, and conversely any actively done content should be more expensive or possibly not available at all. You can even do something like every week put up a drawing for 100 free uber pass on some content nobody is ever going to do.

[kali o.]

As usual, you write far more than I will ever read - at least until you start tossing in random insults or something. However, my experience of cash shops suggest the following:

Content:
Quests, Raids, Classes, Races, Expansions, etc -- alone or in packs. These are fine to sell, above the free "basic content". However, they should be provided as permanent unlocks and priced accordingly. Temporary passes are never popular and, if anything, discourage people from participating in an 'al a carte' system.

Convenience Items:
This does NOT include things like UI, Fast Travel, "Experience Boosts" or any items that infact otherwise hinder the ability of enjoyment of the actual game. If you try to monetize that, you are effectively making your product crippleware. Things that can be included are EXTRA: bank space, backpack space, respec options, etc.

Social / Cosmetic Items:
The bread and butter of a GOOD al a carte system. Outfits, Mounts, Titles, etc.

You can't monetize things that effect others or things that simply are not good:
I'll use some examples here. In LotRO, they tried to 100% monetize PvM...that is, no non-sub player had access. Not only has PvM been largely ignored for years (and thus not very good), when they locked out free players from participating at even a basic level, they only hurt the population of PvM and thus the experience of those who were already playing PvM. Another LotRO example is Traits...when you retard the functionality of characters in the game, you simply hurt other players that happen to group with them. As a final example, lets look at SWTOR...they are trying to monetize a bad system -- crafting. Things you craft in SWTOR are largely useless but even that aside, when you restrict new players from participating at a functional level, you just hurt the rest of the players and the economy.

Pay to Win:
Never, ever add P2W items. If it can be bought from a BASIC vendor, fine add it. But everything else is off limits. Players will have varying opinions on this and the arguement is usually "Hey, if one player can get something with time and one player uses their wallet, who cares...they both invested". The problem is players are too stupid to realize the devestating effect this has on the game. Content is run less, because you can simply buy what you want. Economy is ruined, because tiers of initial gear can often be skipped. Players disappear, because some are sickened by P2W and others are bored...because the P2W'd.

Keep it 100% FREE:
Make it hard, long and boring...but always offer an ingame system to earn store currency. People that are going to attempt to never spend a cent never would have paid anyway and you can still get them invested enough to buy expansions. At the very least, they bolster the population.

As you can see, EA has basically violated each of my points for SWTOR. Perhaps not P2W...but given the obvious greed already there (and the examples set in other EAsy free games) it'll happen and happen hard. SWTOR will NEVER be a good MMO. It may however appeal to a rotating casual group and perhaps enjoy success in that way. Regardless, I recommend people check it out when its free and at least play the Agent storyline.

[Don]

While nobody release stuff on cash shop sales I simply do not go to a F2P and see a large amount of visible cosmetic stuff so I'm not convinced you can survive just on sales of virtual ponies or whatever. It probably doesn't hurt you to have it but if it was that easy to make a living by selling virtual ponies you would hear more about how successful F2Ps other than the exact moment a game got converted to F2P.

On the P2W, ignoring the fact that the successful Russian/Korean/Asian F2P tend to be P2W, what is the reason to not sell content that almost nobody is doing? SWTOR lets you know exactly who else is in the same instanced zone as you and it's easy to verify that usually no one else except you (or your group) is doing it. Maybe you can say the current content stuff that people are constantly doing has to have some relevance but nobody was ever impressed that EQ1 or WoW had 15 tiers of raid content that nobody would ever be doing due to the gear being totally obselete. If you sell $5 for the ability to demolish Onyxia or Eternity Vault or some otherwise content that nobody would possibly be doing how exactly does this upset the balance of power? Of course you can ask 'why would someone buy such a thing' but then people go back and try to solo Onyxia long after the gear has become irrelevent, and at any rate this costs you very little to implement once you've a unified system. Maybe paying $5 to go through Eternity Vault and loot everything is more enjoyable than doing Dailys for 3 weeks in a row even though that yields higher tier gear. Entire tiers of gear are constantly made irrelevent by the 'gear reset' patches. Whatever PvP gear you may have had in SWTOR sure isn't worth anything now due to the constant inflation and this is pretty much true for any MMORPG, sub-based or not.

You can simply do something like multiply a person's stat by 25 (or 20, 16, whatever the raiding size is) and it'll probably work for any raids that doesn't involve a headcount mechanism. It should be easy to keep track of what content people are doing and simply keep current relevent content outside of the cash shop. Do you really care if someone can solo Darth Malgus with some cash shop uber grenades that knocks him off the bridge instantly? I can't even get anyone to do The False Emperor after about the first month SWTOR is released and that's supposed to be the end of the overall story quest so who exactly is shortchanged if you're selling a P2W item to what is supposed to be the ending of your main story that nobody is actually using?

I get that you don't necessarily want to kill the goose for the egg, like say you find out everyone really likes raid XYZ and then say 'if we sell free kills for raid XYZ that's even more $$$!' but I really don't see why people are attached to the bizillion tiers of obselete content that absolutely no one is doing.

For the ability to earn stuff as a F2P, that can be solved easily by just acknowledging that people are going to convert currency from game to real and support it, and then you can obviously get any cash shop stuff if you have enough virtual currency.

[kali o.]

You haven't actually said anything except to excuse the fundamental flaws in game design (obsolete gear / content and lack of motivation). So due to those flaws, you /shrug and say "who really cares?". You've exacerbated the underlying issue. You've also highlighted a fundamental flaw in not only MMO design (themeparks), but especially free-to-play models. Rather than adjust old content to newer standards, developers leave old content to stagnate. All that does is hurt the game (the journey to end game). Even if they replace old content with new level appropriate content, then they are just developing solely for the cash grab (pack sales / expansions). Content already existed, all they had to do was make it viable again.

The way you look at MMO's is precisely what is wrong with the industry. You are no Raph Koster, you are EA.

[Don]

The reason you don't adjust old content to new standards is because even if you did everyone would just complain that there's no new content. Naxxamas in WoW might be the best well received example of what you're talking about and even that was just a placeholder until newer stuff comes out. Certainly if that was the only content you're getting people will point out that it's really not that different from the raid from 4 years ago except with updated boss stats plus loot. It's probably a relatively cheap investement to bring back some old favorites updated but WoW is not going to get very far if the only thing to look forward to in the next expansion is Onyxia 15.0 and Molten Core 7.0.

At any rate the constant gear obseletence is a problem inherent in Western MMORPGs but nobody has yet to figure out something better so saying that it's a problem is like saying the problem with MMORPG is that they require a lot of time (that's a problem too). Maybe eventually someone will figure out something better but nobody sure knows a better solution right now so you can't just say, 'well the game shouldn't have this problem' because they all do.

[kali o.]

The reason you don't adjust old content to new standards is because even if you did everyone would just complain that there's no new content. Naxxamas in WoW might be the best well received example of what you're talking about and even that was just a placeholder until newer stuff comes out. Certainly if that was the only content you're getting people will point out that it's really not that different from the raid from 4 years ago except with updated boss stats plus loot. It's probably a relatively cheap investement to bring back some old favorites updated but WoW is not going to get very far if the only thing to look forward to in the next expansion is Onyxia 15.0 and Molten Core 7.0.

At any rate the constant gear obseletence is a problem inherent in Western MMORPGs but nobody has yet to figure out something better so saying that it's a problem is like saying the problem with MMORPG is that they require a lot of time (that's a problem too). Maybe eventually someone will figure out something better but nobody sure knows a better solution right now so you can't just say, 'well the game shouldn't have this problem' because they all do.

You are wrong and you are just talking nonsense now. You can make old content viable by simply tweaking the rewards. You can make old content level appropriate by simply tweaking the difficulty. Just because some devs DO NOT do it does not make it any less simple or needed -- they are simply either being lazy or maximizing profit instead. If you want to see a game that DOES do that, look no further than Turbine's DDO. They made ALL content constantly appropriate (reincarnation) and they've even made old content viable at end game (Epic). With their recent expansion, they have effectively killed off these systems (Epic) and added more P2W, and what you are now seeing is the effects of those decisions (burn out, boredom, players leaving).

What people "complain" about is nonsense 99% of the time. Devs should never listen to their playerbase, they should use their complaints only as indications to underlying problems. Players don't know what they need and they'd burn down the house simply to have it cleaned. If they complained "waaah, this is only old content revamped for end game!", they'd still be the ones on raid timer for that content for next 3 months.

Bottomline is, we already have a solution to obsolete gear and content...make it relevant. The problem is devs usually only think short term, especially in a free to play system. Selling P2W gear/etc from old content just plays into their hand and when you advocate that, YOU are part of the problem.

All of this highlights why themepark MMOs are not for me. Give me sandbox, where players make their own "content" from the tools provided. I'll pay a subscription for that - fuck these linear treadmill games.