Cost

straydog5930 · August 2015

I relize the game was free, however the amount of Zen things cost is a little high. As well as the Zen itself. Am I the cheapo.

armadeonx · August 2015

One problem with Zen is the price fluctuation. Sometimes it's (relatively) cheap to buy with AD and sometimes it's not worth it. Either way, you are looking at (at least) several hundred thousand AD to buy anything.

The majority of players probably average at about 10-20 hrs per week and will rely on dailies for their AD's - netting around 100k - 140k pw. That's a week's grinding to buy ONE GMOP from the vendor unless they spend $10 to buy a varying amount of Zen.

The alternative of buying Zen with real money is priced in such a way that (I'm guessing) +99% of the player base just won't do it - it's quite simply over-priced.

I know Cryptic use the same economy structure across their games so there's little/no chance of anything being said here actually having any influence but their pricing structure seems based around garnering large payments from the minority rather than small payments from the majority.

You absolutely cannot call anything over $2 a 'micro-payment' but I'm of the opinion that earning $2 per month from 50% of the player base would earn a lot more than the large amounts paid by the 'pay-to-play' minority.

If I bought a 110% mount with real money it would cost me the same as a new game! That's ridiculous and as such I won't do it. It's worth a 10th of that price but value for money doesn't currently appear to be a consideration.

Cryptic need to give some serious thought to the 'price per item/total earnings' ratio as I believe the current situation is a lose/lose.

bluedood · August 2015

The free to play model has been around for quite some time now and the pricing structure here does not surprise me at all. What does is how they have made it to where people can truly play for free and with some work save and get whatever they want. Yes, it takes grind and a bit of luck, but can be done.

Pricing may seem high to you and cheap to me, just depends on your perspective and what value you put on the item. I like the game, spend a little here and there, and buy things that make sense for me to buy. I would never buy fashion items, but someone likes them and will pay.

arex · August 2015

It's all a matter of perspective....if you look at subscription MMORPG's, you are looking at $9-$20/mo. How many months have you been playing this 'free' game? I suspect that the percentage of players that purchase Zen is a good bit higher than the ~1% that you posit, armadeonx. There is a reason that Cryptic uses this model across all of their games, it works.

willwheatley · August 2015

It's worth buying an epic mount with RL cash early on - then you have it all the way through levelling up. With that, it makes this "free" game a $30 game, which is quite reasonable compared to every other game being $70 these days. And having that mount does make the experience much more enjoyable. Everything else you can just grind out the AD for once you are max level.

Cost

Comments