krahctMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited July 2013
Can you envision the day when AHs are cash based and items you grind for or win by luck in game can be placed on the AH for real cash and the game developer takes a real money cash cut? $$$ Chaching...paid for gaming.
Then all we'd have to worry about is paying taxes on income earned. And of course, the whole under age earner problem in America.
"I never make mistakes, I once thought I did but I was wrong"
Can you envision the day when AHs are cash based and items you grind for or win by luck in game can be placed on the AH for real cash and the game developer takes a real money cash cut? $$$ Chaching...paid for gaming.
Then all we'd have to worry about is paying taxes on income earned. And of course, the whole under age earner problem in America.
That day started a year ago with Diablo 3 and the Real money AH. Why every game hasn't cought on yet I don't know. I hope my items I listed sell on there my Paypal acct is thirsty. Its nice when you sell a item here and there for 50bucks the RMAH is the best thing diablo 3 did.
what exactly are u guys storing in ur bags that u need so much space that u feel like you HAVE to buy a bag? ? ? rank 1 and 2 enchantments? lol
edit: hope u know u can sell ur **** for gold!
I farm a lot and enjoy it. Like the old days in WoW mining, herbing for hours with a pot of coffee in the morning. I found some nice places to farm in this game and you need bag room if you are a serious farmer. This is how I roll.
Bag1 - Potions, items, some gear that I switch out
Bag2 - Runestones
Bag3 - Enchants
Bag4 - Proffesional stuff, scrolls odds and ends extra storage for over flow from farming.
I get full then I empty out. I keep all enchants rank 2 and above since that is all you find on your 60 and fuse up. So a bag for each is nice and like I said I love to farm and horde stuff so 4 bags is a must or I don't have enough room.
<i posted this in another similar thread but it seems more appropriate in this thread>
lets do some math to deck out a character
4,000 - bags (initial bag is 30 slots anyway so you don't need 5)
3,000 - 3,500 for a decent companion
3,000 - for the mount (and let's not try to fool ourselves here it does give a huge advantage in PvP)
300 - if its your first time playing that class (because lets face it hardly anybody gets their powers/feats/stats the way they want them on their first try)
This reminds me of going to those "build a computer" sites, picking all the most expensive options (even if they don't make sense), and then complaining that computers are too expensive.
For example.... no-one needs 4 of the bags.
1. you get an 18 slot bag at lv7 (and I can't see even the most crazy Mr. Moneybags spending $10 to gain 6 slots).
2. a single extra large bag (on top of your starting pack and the two quest reward bags) is plenty.
3. if you're trying to be a penny-pincher - just spend $5 on two extra character slots, level two mules to lv7 (for the first extra bag) and mail all your extra <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> to them. For extra bonus points, level them to lv11, so that you can craft and invoke on them (20k diamonds every 7 days on each of them, from selling the Celestial coin enchant pack. Or two more chances at enchants & wards
edit: I will admit, I wouldn't mind if the bags were a bit cheaper. If they were, say, $8 each; then they'd be in line with the bag prices I've seen in just about every other f2p MMO I've played. (well, except for the lousier ones, where the bags are a bit cheaper but are only rentals that you have to pay for every month. :mad:)
You should learn how to do basic, elementary school level research if you think WoW is free to play beyond a trial basis. If your knowledge about Rift is equally limited, then I feel very sorry for your guild.
I have known about the lvl20 free thing for ages but I foolishly asked a friend who still plays it if the whole thing was free. I stopped playing it years ago when raiding died. My bad.
My knowledge on Rift is perfectly fine, it's free to play.
In my opinion a fully stocked fashion shop would be a more profitable plan than enchants which must be upgraded with a 1% success chance without special zen items. That is where this game becomes "p2w". Sure you can buy them off the AH.. Someone else paid so you can win, you just paid with your time to acquire them from that person.
If there was a slew of different cool looking outfits on the zen shop.. Well customization is king in the land of online gaming.
when players are happy with a game they don't mind shelling out good cash for needless frills, when they aren't happy even buying the stuff that makes a character OP will feel like all you are being is ripped off
Can you envision the day when AHs are cash based and items you grind for or win by luck in game can be placed on the AH for real cash and the game developer takes a real money cash cut? $$$ Chaching...paid for gaming.
Then all we'd have to worry about is paying taxes on income earned. And of course, the whole under age earner problem in America.
Um, ever hear of a little game called Diablo 3? Lulz. The future is here, my friend. The future is now.
10 bucks for a single bag? 50 bucks for a mount? 30 bucks for a companion? This is just coding folks. You arent working hard for replicate a mount so why charge 50 bucks for one? To be exact you arent working at all after the initial coding is done. The game it self does the transaction. That said prices in the zen shop are outrageous.
How much do you think it costs to hire staff to create the entire game and keep servers running? I do agree the prices are high for such mundane things, i would prefer if they lowered the priced and added more desirable things, like cosmetics and cool stuff that people actually want... courtsan wear, wedding garbs and nobleman? That i kinda find rather appalling. If they made pirate outfit, assassin/ninja, or some "western cowboy style" garbs. im sure they will get enough money from doing one of those 3.
Add crappy armors that look good for transmutes too and im sure they will make alot of sales for that.
I agree with the OP. I suppose I would be more inclined to buy silly things, like mounts and stuff like that, if they were reasonably priced. But they are far too expensive real money wise. I am also mystified why someone would spend $200 on a Founders Pack so they could have a spider mount. The cost of respec is to me ridiculous... even tho they cut it in half. It should be a part of the game that you can respec a certain number of times and then, maybe, buy it with gold. But to charge real money to respec, that is just them catching you up by the short hairs.
The prices in the Zen shop are exorbitant and qualify as gouging.
Free game should be more free? IMO Zen market is already the place for players to show even some support for the game.
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werealchemistMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited July 2013
I agree that a cash shop i s a necessity for a free mmo to keep running and i would love to support his game through those means, however at the current prices i can not afford to give them any of my money. In my opinion these are not "micro transaction" as it is claimed as one mount is about my semi-monthly (per paycheck) food budget. It's just too expensive for me to see an item i like and just say "aww why the heck not? instead of "do i need to eat today?".
It's really boils down to this; other games are simply doing the f2p microtransaction better than NW now.
you can cry all you want about other games being mentioned such as rift etc, but the defense of the pricing in this game is hilariously bad. Since when is NW exempt as a company from being judged by how it meets standards and competition?
It's really boils down to this; other games are simply doing the f2p microtransaction better than NW now.
you can cry all you want about other games being mentioned such as rift etc, but the defense of the pricing in this game is hilariously bad. Since when is NW exempt as a company from being judged by how it meets standards and competition?
Other games may do F2P better, but even in those games 2 things happen:
1) People complain about the price,
and
2) the companies adjust the prices.
Every one of them.
I agree the prices are insane here....but then again, every F2P game I've seen had insane prices. Heck, doesn't WoW, which isn't even a F2P game, sell $25 unicorns?
The prices will be adjusted. The best way to make sure this happens is to NOT BUY the stuff off the CM. When the company realizes that stuff isn't selling, they will do what they can to get it selling.
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kaiserschmarrnMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 390
edited July 2013
Personally I put all my purchases on hold til we get new classes and better endgame content. I have at least one 60 of every class now, I have done CN several times and I don't find Gauntlgrym that interesting. So currently I only log in to do my prayers and set my crafting.
Give me the ranger+warlock and make Feywild not suck and I will gladly shell out some money again (Winter Wolf mount please).
I can conjure magic missiles and huge ice shards, but a regular plain old mundane bag is hard to come by eh?
The entire jealousy straw man argument is old and tired. No one is jealous that someone else has disposable income, they just think its <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> that a bag in a game costs as much as it does. Its not really too hard to understand, but first people have to ditch the wallet elitist argument that people are supposedly jealous that the blind defenders spend more on an unfinished product than anyone with sense sees fit to.
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ambisinisterrMember, Neverwinter ModeratorPosts: 10,462Community Moderator
edited July 2013
Guys, come on.
Telling the company what items you think it worth too much or why you wouldn't spend money is a very important thing to give feedback on. Obviously they want you to spend money so they are very concerned about why you would or wouldn't spend money on the game so please keep making threads discussing you opinions on such matters...
But do so while following the rules of conduct. The profanity and the insults on the last two pages are simply unacceptable. Lewstelamon01 has cleaned this thread while I was typing this comment but know that this thread, with much regret, will be locked if it boils down to the petty insults again.
Please review the Rules of Conduct again and particularly take note on the segment on respecting other posters.
A Note about Respect
We're here to have fun and to share information with each other. With so many different personalities gathered in one place, clashes are bound to happen now and then. But how one conducts oneself during these situations makes all the difference. While opinions are valued on the forums, please remember to respect each other and have discussions and not arguments. If you find yourself disagreeing with another member, think first and then calmly compose your words. Treat each other how you would like to be treated.
I think the prices are too high, too, when compared to other F2P MMO's. I am also iffy about spending a relatively large sum of money for a "micro transaction" -- such as $20 -- for a long-term benefit such as a mount, when I am still not sure about the game in general as it was just released. In the past year or so, I've played DDO for about 6 months, then gave that up to switch back to WoW with some friends. I actually did DDO's "subscription", and really, really liked that model. I actually spent more money on DDO than I do WoW, even though by most measures, WoW is a better game and DDO was F2P.
I will say, though, that DDO sold a lot of consumables as micro-transactions. You might pay 15 cents for a healing potion. But you bought points in batches and didn't think about how much the cost was. They'd have special bonus point periods, and also discounts on items from time to time. The best part was that, if you had the "subscription", you got an allotment of points each month "for free". It turned out to be a better value overall. There were times when I bought additional points to get things I really wanted. There were times I waited a week or two for the next month's points to come in.
This is a game still in its infancy. I really, REALLY like the Foundry, but there are so many limitations or "nerfs" on them now due to people abusing that system. No profession nodes, no random chests, etc., make them an unattractive way to spend game time. I'd much rather pay a recurring $10 for some sort of "premium membership" access to Foundry quests and other "premium" game content than on a bag. (Unless that bag is some kind of bonus space or bank space you get "for free" as long as you keep the monthly membership.)
I also think breaking things into smaller pieces might help. If I could spend, maybe, 250 Zen on a 10 slot bag, and then upgrade it 5 slots at a time for 200 each per upgrade, I'd be much more likely to get it. Same for the companions. If I could buy one for 500 points at Rank 1, but it's only common quality (max rank 15), but then I can upgrade it to a higher quality companion for 500 more Zen -- that would be much more attractive to me.
I guess the point is, I don't mind spending "a cup of coffee" (a few bucks, not more than five) if I'm having a good time with something. And I might be willing to do that a couple times a week. But $10 or more is a lot for me to justify on a single transaction in a game.
Of course I realize there are people out there with a lot of disposable income, and the game seems to cater to them buying way more Zen than an average person would, then using the exchange to get mountain of diamonds -- thus giving people with less disposable income a way to obtain Zen (or people without a lot of time to obtain diamonds), and I do appreciate that. So I guess you have to weigh people who are in my position, where we'd be willing to spend a little money here and there on a regular basis, against people who buy absurd amounts of Zen, then let it trickle down to true F2P players who never purchase Zen at all. I think there's something to be said for marketing to us folks in the middle.
Of course I realize there are people out there with a lot of disposable income, and the game seems to cater to them buying way more Zen than an average person would, then using the exchange to get mountain of diamonds -- thus giving people with less disposable income a way to obtain Zen (or people without a lot of time to obtain diamonds), and I do appreciate that. So I guess you have to weigh people who are in my position, where we'd be willing to spend a little money here and there on a regular basis, against people who buy absurd amounts of Zen, then let it trickle down to true F2P players who never purchase Zen at all. I think there's something to be said for marketing to us folks in the middle.
I think there's room for that on some low-hanging fruit items.
The typical freemium setup depends mostly on people who spend a lot of money, not generally on lots of people spending a little money each. And, of course, the pricing is going to be the most aggressive when the game is newly released (compare NW's prices to STO's prices and you will see a difference there, because STO is now three years old so the ability to price as aggressively is missing). Having said that, I think there is room for some of the lower hanging fruit items to be cheaper (say lower level bags), while having more QOL type items like larger bags and faster mounts be premium priced for bigger spenders.
So i started playing Neverwinter few months back. I must say it was pretty cool at first since it was something new. Then i started hearing the "pay to win" on zone chat. I figured theres some mounts etc that are purchased with zen, no big deal so i continued playing till level 30ish. That's when it became evident to me that i needed bag space. So i looked for bags. Definitely didnt have enough astral diamonds to purchase any bags from the AH so i looked at the prices of the items you purchase with zen. Obviously at first glance the prices didnt mean much to me until i found out the conversion rate of dollars to zen. 10 bucks for a single bag? 50 bucks for a mount? 30 bucks for a companion? This is just coding folks. You arent working hard for replicate a mount so why charge 50 bucks for one? To be exact you arent working at all after the initial coding is done. The game it self does the transaction. That said prices in the zen shop are outrageous.
Take a look at the competitors such as wow, guild wars, and tera. You can spend 50 bucks and buy out half the game while in here you get 1 piece of code. Of course wow doesnt have a zen store however it does sell mounts and companions for money... that cost 9 bucks and are available on every single one of your characters.
I know you guys are out to make money however dont take my arm and a leg in the process.
That said i'll keep my money in my pocket.
I am confident that Cryptic/PWE have done extensive research on the price of Zen items and if they could make more money by lowering the costs they would do it.
I am confident that Cryptic/PWE have done extensive research on the price of Zen items and if they could make more money by lowering the costs they would do it.
I am not sure where you get your confidence. That these prices are based in anything besides the option of "How can we get the most money in the shortest amount of time without having a subscription model". I have played many games that are now "free to play" and never have I seen such pricing for items that are necessary to game play.
I know that the AD market is overinflated because the influx of diamonds from the special packs that were sold, and those of us who play this game not having invested a couple hundred dollars have a steep mountain to climb to be able to afford things. The game is filled with players who insist that AD in the hundreds of thousands is easy to obtain and smugly state that anything in the game can be obtained thru ingame play... and they are the ones sitting on mountains of zen or AD. Pretty much reminds me of the 1% out there wagging their fingers at the masses for their poverty when they in fact perpetrated it.
Whistlingdixie has a very valid point. I won't sink a lot of real money into a game I am trying out and may not spend a lot of time playing. I have made that mistake in the past, buying premium editions of games for "special exclusive" items that, when the game began and you got past the first couple of weeks, ended up being really worthless. SWTOR ended up being so famous for that. Wasted money. Right now, though I thoroughly love this game's mechanics and skills and gameplay, I feel like I'm doing business with a snake oils man.
Just a small example as to why I am leery about spending money in NW: I spent money on Zen so I could respec one of my characters. Turns out, I had logged into the website when buying the zen on an account that was not the one that had the character on it that I wanted the respec. Didn't realize until it was too late that this was NOT a token that could be transferred but would be exclusive for the character on that account. I immediately placed a support ticket and I haven't received any response and it has been a week... not a single response, except for an auto-response when I first placed the ticket. My ignorance as to the item, not paying attention to the account. But really, how hard would it be for them to move that zen/respec to my appropriate account and sow some goodwill among their playerbase? Not really a company that I would trust that their products are worth spending my money on.
So i started playing Neverwinter few months back. I must say it was pretty cool at first since it was something new. Then i started hearing the "pay to win" on zone chat. I figured theres some mounts etc that are purchased with zen, no big deal so i continued playing till level 30ish. That's when it became evident to me that i needed bag space. So i looked for bags. Definitely didnt have enough astral diamonds to purchase any bags from the AH so i looked at the prices of the items you purchase with zen. Obviously at first glance the prices didnt mean much to me until i found out the conversion rate of dollars to zen. 10 bucks for a single bag? 50 bucks for a mount? 30 bucks for a companion? This is just coding folks. You arent working hard for replicate a mount so why charge 50 bucks for one? To be exact you arent working at all after the initial coding is done. The game it self does the transaction. That said prices in the zen shop are outrageous.
Take a look at the competitors such as wow, guild wars, and tera. You can spend 50 bucks and buy out half the game while in here you get 1 piece of code. Of course wow doesnt have a zen store however it does sell mounts and companions for money... that cost 9 bucks and are available on every single one of your characters.
I know you guys are out to make money however dont take my arm and a leg in the process.
That said i'll keep my money in my pocket.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, this is why software developers loathe "the customer"... right here.
How much do you think it costs to hire staff to create the entire game and keep servers running?
How is this anyone else's problem? In truth I would expect the company to know exactly how much all that costs and it is they who will have to formulate a method for covering all that not you or me. And what way have they devised to cover their expenses? So far its been con artistry. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Consider themed fashion sets for the various classes. Consider skins for companions. Consider weapon skins. Things that players (like me) in all their vanity would want, would pay for and would display for everyone else to see. Non combat breaking, non game breaking, pro immersion cash items the likes of which have sold in every other game in which they were offered.
But here we have 200$ spiders and 30$ ponies. I, very literally, don't buy it.
But here we have 200$ spiders and 30$ ponies. I, very literally, don't buy it.
And we also have plenty of people using hyperbole and biased comments to tweak the conversation. (like the people who keep going on about "$50" stuff in the cash shop, when the highest thing is 35. Or the aformentioned "200$ spider".... the spider is only 200 if you ignore all the other stuff that came in that $200 pack. That's like saying the car someone bought was $20k tires.)
disclaimer - I would never go near those big expensive collector-pack purchases (don't do it for physical games, either).
And yeah, I do have a 110 speed zen mount..... which I got by exchanging AD for zen. As a "low spender" type, I bought cheap utility items from the zen store with my initial actual-$ outlay - $5 mount, some character slots, a single bag. Relatively cheap stuff. And since then, I've earned 8-10k zen via the exchange, and grabbed some of the bigger items (like prof packs, fast mount, costumes). I've got another 900k+ AD sitting around, waiting for something to spend it on. So, while - yes - I wouldn't mind if some of the prices are lower? I really don't see the cash shop as the monumental abuse/cashgrab. All this frothing & foaming seems overwrought to me. But, hey... maybe that's because I've seen real "abusive" cash shops, like Aeria's. Eh, whatever. No matter what the prices are, there'll always be someone moaning that they're being taken to the cleaners.
Telling the company what items you think it worth too much or why you wouldn't spend money is a very important thing to give feedback on. Obviously they want you to spend money so they are very concerned about why you would or wouldn't spend money on the game so please keep making threads discussing you opinions on such matters...
But do so while following the rules of conduct. The profanity and the insults on the last two pages are simply unacceptable. Lewstelamon01 has cleaned this thread while I was typing this comment but know that this thread, with much regret, will be locked if it boils down to the petty insults again.
Please review the Rules of Conduct again and particularly take note on the segment on respecting other posters.
I am not sure where you get your confidence. That these prices are based in anything besides the option of "How can we get the most money in the shortest amount of time without having a subscription model". I have played many games that are now "free to play" and never have I seen such pricing for items that are necessary to game play.
I know that the AD market is overinflated because the influx of diamonds from the special packs that were sold, and those of us who play this game not having invested a couple hundred dollars have a steep mountain to climb to be able to afford things. The game is filled with players who insist that AD in the hundreds of thousands is easy to obtain and smugly state that anything in the game can be obtained thru ingame play... and they are the ones sitting on mountains of zen or AD. Pretty much reminds me of the 1% out there wagging their fingers at the masses for their poverty when they in fact perpetrated it.
(Emphasis mine.)
Ah, but anything in the game can be obtained through in-game play. Are some people on the forum (and in game) too smug about their riches? Probably. Is it easy to earn hundreds of thousands of AD through gameplay? No, not really -- depending on your definition of easy. It sure isn't fast for a newish player who hasn't bought any seed money or isn't in an uber guild.
But the prices on the Zen Market have to take into account that people can convert AD into Zen.
Personally, I can sympathize with the sticker-shock problem, but I'm not sure that we players aren't biased by years and years of a totally different business model. Even most of the so-called F2P games with which we MMO players have experience weren't really F2P, to the extent that Neverwinter is: in my case, both CoH (after its conversion) and SWTOR are/were still subscription games at their heart.
And over ~8 years, off and on, of playing CoH, I probably spent $2,500+ on that game between box prices, subscription fees and extras. A year's worth of SWTOR cost me somewhere around $250.
In any case, what made the prices in SWTOR so frustrating is that you basically needed the subscription too. Players are/were constantly reminded that EA/Bioware wanted more of their money. It's not a good feeling.
In NWO? Astral Diamond "convenience" costs, and to a lesser extent Zen items, are also thrust into the player's face fairly often. But the game itself is free -- really and truly free. I have to remind myself of that on occasion, because my subconscious frame of reference is from decades of pay-to-play games. I can occasionally be heard mumbling, "That thing should be included! Oh, wait, hum ... Maybe not."
Expect Zen market prices to go down as time passes. Or there will be promotions with increasing frequency as the game ages. As others have pointed out, and for good or ill, prices are bound to be at their highest point at launch, because there's a segment of every gamer population (the so-called "whales" segment) that will spend outlandishly for the sake of instant-gratification convenience or for the sake of giving themselves what they perceive to be a rare status within (or a rare advantage against the rest of) the community.
In the meantime, the main frustration for the rest of us, those of us who are willing to spend, in principle -- if only to support the developers' work -- but who also don't want to fall down a slippery slope of constant and exorbitant spending, our main frustration is that there isn't a one-size-fits-all-solution, like a subscription, to give us what we're used to regarding as "full access" (more or less) to the game. We have to think about what we spend, and on what we spend, to maximize our mileage.
That thought process will vary from person to person, but in general I'd say that alt-prone people should focus on account-bound things like the tier-3 horse (the cheapest tier-3 mount). The next investment is probably just to buy a healthy chunk of AD to give yourself some seed money, which, if invested wisely, should give you a steady and relatively generous income. (Either through crafting or through farming dungeons, or both.) For the price of a typical new-release title (~$60) you could conceivably buy a 110% speed mount for all of your characters ($25), two extra character slots ($5), and ~1 million Astral Diamonds. (Or you could buy the Guardian Pack for the same price, which gives you some extra, mostly fluff items, and somewhat fewer AD.)
That ain't bad, when you really think about it.
Most of all, have fun. It is a fun game, even if you never buy a thing.
Comments
Then all we'd have to worry about is paying taxes on income earned. And of course, the whole under age earner problem in America.
edit: hope u know u can sell ur **** for gold!
That day started a year ago with Diablo 3 and the Real money AH. Why every game hasn't cought on yet I don't know. I hope my items I listed sell on there my Paypal acct is thirsty. Its nice when you sell a item here and there for 50bucks the RMAH is the best thing diablo 3 did.
I farm a lot and enjoy it. Like the old days in WoW mining, herbing for hours with a pot of coffee in the morning. I found some nice places to farm in this game and you need bag room if you are a serious farmer. This is how I roll.
Bag1 - Potions, items, some gear that I switch out
Bag2 - Runestones
Bag3 - Enchants
Bag4 - Proffesional stuff, scrolls odds and ends extra storage for over flow from farming.
I get full then I empty out. I keep all enchants rank 2 and above since that is all you find on your 60 and fuse up. So a bag for each is nice and like I said I love to farm and horde stuff so 4 bags is a must or I don't have enough room.
This reminds me of going to those "build a computer" sites, picking all the most expensive options (even if they don't make sense), and then complaining that computers are too expensive.
For example.... no-one needs 4 of the bags.
1. you get an 18 slot bag at lv7 (and I can't see even the most crazy Mr. Moneybags spending $10 to gain 6 slots).
2. a single extra large bag (on top of your starting pack and the two quest reward bags) is plenty.
3. if you're trying to be a penny-pincher - just spend $5 on two extra character slots, level two mules to lv7 (for the first extra bag) and mail all your extra <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> to them. For extra bonus points, level them to lv11, so that you can craft and invoke on them (20k diamonds every 7 days on each of them, from selling the Celestial coin enchant pack. Or two more chances at enchants & wards
edit: I will admit, I wouldn't mind if the bags were a bit cheaper. If they were, say, $8 each; then they'd be in line with the bag prices I've seen in just about every other f2p MMO I've played. (well, except for the lousier ones, where the bags are a bit cheaper but are only rentals that you have to pay for every month. :mad:)
I have known about the lvl20 free thing for ages but I foolishly asked a friend who still plays it if the whole thing was free. I stopped playing it years ago when raiding died. My bad.
My knowledge on Rift is perfectly fine, it's free to play.
when players are happy with a game they don't mind shelling out good cash for needless frills, when they aren't happy even buying the stuff that makes a character OP will feel like all you are being is ripped off
Um, ever hear of a little game called Diablo 3? Lulz. The future is here, my friend. The future is now.
How much do you think it costs to hire staff to create the entire game and keep servers running? I do agree the prices are high for such mundane things, i would prefer if they lowered the priced and added more desirable things, like cosmetics and cool stuff that people actually want... courtsan wear, wedding garbs and nobleman? That i kinda find rather appalling. If they made pirate outfit, assassin/ninja, or some "western cowboy style" garbs. im sure they will get enough money from doing one of those 3.
Add crappy armors that look good for transmutes too and im sure they will make alot of sales for that.
and also the featured satirical comedic adventure "A Call for Heroes".
The prices in the Zen shop are exorbitant and qualify as gouging.
you can cry all you want about other games being mentioned such as rift etc, but the defense of the pricing in this game is hilariously bad. Since when is NW exempt as a company from being judged by how it meets standards and competition?
I put my card away for this game until things get fixed and customer service becomes priority number ONE.
Funny how easily my card came out to support another recently gone f2p game that isn't as greedy as NW and has superior Customer Service.
Like I said....just keeping my word.
Until then, no more new content, no more "Double ANYTHING" weekends....unless you figure a way to give double customer service or double bug fixes.
Other games may do F2P better, but even in those games 2 things happen:
1) People complain about the price,
and
2) the companies adjust the prices.
Every one of them.
I agree the prices are insane here....but then again, every F2P game I've seen had insane prices. Heck, doesn't WoW, which isn't even a F2P game, sell $25 unicorns?
The prices will be adjusted. The best way to make sure this happens is to NOT BUY the stuff off the CM. When the company realizes that stuff isn't selling, they will do what they can to get it selling.
Give me the ranger+warlock and make Feywild not suck and I will gladly shell out some money again (Winter Wolf mount please).
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The entire jealousy straw man argument is old and tired. No one is jealous that someone else has disposable income, they just think its <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> that a bag in a game costs as much as it does. Its not really too hard to understand, but first people have to ditch the wallet elitist argument that people are supposedly jealous that the blind defenders spend more on an unfinished product than anyone with sense sees fit to.
Telling the company what items you think it worth too much or why you wouldn't spend money is a very important thing to give feedback on. Obviously they want you to spend money so they are very concerned about why you would or wouldn't spend money on the game so please keep making threads discussing you opinions on such matters...
But do so while following the rules of conduct. The profanity and the insults on the last two pages are simply unacceptable. Lewstelamon01 has cleaned this thread while I was typing this comment but know that this thread, with much regret, will be locked if it boils down to the petty insults again.
Please review the Rules of Conduct again and particularly take note on the segment on respecting other posters.
I will say, though, that DDO sold a lot of consumables as micro-transactions. You might pay 15 cents for a healing potion. But you bought points in batches and didn't think about how much the cost was. They'd have special bonus point periods, and also discounts on items from time to time. The best part was that, if you had the "subscription", you got an allotment of points each month "for free". It turned out to be a better value overall. There were times when I bought additional points to get things I really wanted. There were times I waited a week or two for the next month's points to come in.
This is a game still in its infancy. I really, REALLY like the Foundry, but there are so many limitations or "nerfs" on them now due to people abusing that system. No profession nodes, no random chests, etc., make them an unattractive way to spend game time. I'd much rather pay a recurring $10 for some sort of "premium membership" access to Foundry quests and other "premium" game content than on a bag. (Unless that bag is some kind of bonus space or bank space you get "for free" as long as you keep the monthly membership.)
I also think breaking things into smaller pieces might help. If I could spend, maybe, 250 Zen on a 10 slot bag, and then upgrade it 5 slots at a time for 200 each per upgrade, I'd be much more likely to get it. Same for the companions. If I could buy one for 500 points at Rank 1, but it's only common quality (max rank 15), but then I can upgrade it to a higher quality companion for 500 more Zen -- that would be much more attractive to me.
I guess the point is, I don't mind spending "a cup of coffee" (a few bucks, not more than five) if I'm having a good time with something. And I might be willing to do that a couple times a week. But $10 or more is a lot for me to justify on a single transaction in a game.
Of course I realize there are people out there with a lot of disposable income, and the game seems to cater to them buying way more Zen than an average person would, then using the exchange to get mountain of diamonds -- thus giving people with less disposable income a way to obtain Zen (or people without a lot of time to obtain diamonds), and I do appreciate that. So I guess you have to weigh people who are in my position, where we'd be willing to spend a little money here and there on a regular basis, against people who buy absurd amounts of Zen, then let it trickle down to true F2P players who never purchase Zen at all. I think there's something to be said for marketing to us folks in the middle.
I think there's room for that on some low-hanging fruit items.
The typical freemium setup depends mostly on people who spend a lot of money, not generally on lots of people spending a little money each. And, of course, the pricing is going to be the most aggressive when the game is newly released (compare NW's prices to STO's prices and you will see a difference there, because STO is now three years old so the ability to price as aggressively is missing). Having said that, I think there is room for some of the lower hanging fruit items to be cheaper (say lower level bags), while having more QOL type items like larger bags and faster mounts be premium priced for bigger spenders.
I am confident that Cryptic/PWE have done extensive research on the price of Zen items and if they could make more money by lowering the costs they would do it.
I know that the AD market is overinflated because the influx of diamonds from the special packs that were sold, and those of us who play this game not having invested a couple hundred dollars have a steep mountain to climb to be able to afford things. The game is filled with players who insist that AD in the hundreds of thousands is easy to obtain and smugly state that anything in the game can be obtained thru ingame play... and they are the ones sitting on mountains of zen or AD. Pretty much reminds me of the 1% out there wagging their fingers at the masses for their poverty when they in fact perpetrated it.
Whistlingdixie has a very valid point. I won't sink a lot of real money into a game I am trying out and may not spend a lot of time playing. I have made that mistake in the past, buying premium editions of games for "special exclusive" items that, when the game began and you got past the first couple of weeks, ended up being really worthless. SWTOR ended up being so famous for that. Wasted money. Right now, though I thoroughly love this game's mechanics and skills and gameplay, I feel like I'm doing business with a snake oils man.
Just a small example as to why I am leery about spending money in NW: I spent money on Zen so I could respec one of my characters. Turns out, I had logged into the website when buying the zen on an account that was not the one that had the character on it that I wanted the respec. Didn't realize until it was too late that this was NOT a token that could be transferred but would be exclusive for the character on that account. I immediately placed a support ticket and I haven't received any response and it has been a week... not a single response, except for an auto-response when I first placed the ticket. My ignorance as to the item, not paying attention to the account. But really, how hard would it be for them to move that zen/respec to my appropriate account and sow some goodwill among their playerbase? Not really a company that I would trust that their products are worth spending my money on.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, this is why software developers loathe "the customer"... right here.
How is this anyone else's problem? In truth I would expect the company to know exactly how much all that costs and it is they who will have to formulate a method for covering all that not you or me. And what way have they devised to cover their expenses? So far its been con artistry. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Consider themed fashion sets for the various classes. Consider skins for companions. Consider weapon skins. Things that players (like me) in all their vanity would want, would pay for and would display for everyone else to see. Non combat breaking, non game breaking, pro immersion cash items the likes of which have sold in every other game in which they were offered.
But here we have 200$ spiders and 30$ ponies. I, very literally, don't buy it.
@the above poster -
Seriously? Did we not just get advised about that sort of ad hominem? C'mon.
And we also have plenty of people using hyperbole and biased comments to tweak the conversation. (like the people who keep going on about "$50" stuff in the cash shop, when the highest thing is 35. Or the aformentioned "200$ spider".... the spider is only 200 if you ignore all the other stuff that came in that $200 pack. That's like saying the car someone bought was $20k tires.)
disclaimer - I would never go near those big expensive collector-pack purchases (don't do it for physical games, either).
And yeah, I do have a 110 speed zen mount..... which I got by exchanging AD for zen. As a "low spender" type, I bought cheap utility items from the zen store with my initial actual-$ outlay - $5 mount, some character slots, a single bag. Relatively cheap stuff. And since then, I've earned 8-10k zen via the exchange, and grabbed some of the bigger items (like prof packs, fast mount, costumes). I've got another 900k+ AD sitting around, waiting for something to spend it on. So, while - yes - I wouldn't mind if some of the prices are lower? I really don't see the cash shop as the monumental abuse/cashgrab. All this frothing & foaming seems overwrought to me. But, hey... maybe that's because I've seen real "abusive" cash shops, like Aeria's. Eh, whatever. No matter what the prices are, there'll always be someone moaning that they're being taken to the cleaners.
This is what's known as a "Good moderator" :cool:
(Emphasis mine.)
Ah, but anything in the game can be obtained through in-game play. Are some people on the forum (and in game) too smug about their riches? Probably. Is it easy to earn hundreds of thousands of AD through gameplay? No, not really -- depending on your definition of easy. It sure isn't fast for a newish player who hasn't bought any seed money or isn't in an uber guild.
But the prices on the Zen Market have to take into account that people can convert AD into Zen.
Personally, I can sympathize with the sticker-shock problem, but I'm not sure that we players aren't biased by years and years of a totally different business model. Even most of the so-called F2P games with which we MMO players have experience weren't really F2P, to the extent that Neverwinter is: in my case, both CoH (after its conversion) and SWTOR are/were still subscription games at their heart.
And over ~8 years, off and on, of playing CoH, I probably spent $2,500+ on that game between box prices, subscription fees and extras. A year's worth of SWTOR cost me somewhere around $250.
In any case, what made the prices in SWTOR so frustrating is that you basically needed the subscription too. Players are/were constantly reminded that EA/Bioware wanted more of their money. It's not a good feeling.
In NWO? Astral Diamond "convenience" costs, and to a lesser extent Zen items, are also thrust into the player's face fairly often. But the game itself is free -- really and truly free. I have to remind myself of that on occasion, because my subconscious frame of reference is from decades of pay-to-play games. I can occasionally be heard mumbling, "That thing should be included! Oh, wait, hum ... Maybe not."
Expect Zen market prices to go down as time passes. Or there will be promotions with increasing frequency as the game ages. As others have pointed out, and for good or ill, prices are bound to be at their highest point at launch, because there's a segment of every gamer population (the so-called "whales" segment) that will spend outlandishly for the sake of instant-gratification convenience or for the sake of giving themselves what they perceive to be a rare status within (or a rare advantage against the rest of) the community.
In the meantime, the main frustration for the rest of us, those of us who are willing to spend, in principle -- if only to support the developers' work -- but who also don't want to fall down a slippery slope of constant and exorbitant spending, our main frustration is that there isn't a one-size-fits-all-solution, like a subscription, to give us what we're used to regarding as "full access" (more or less) to the game. We have to think about what we spend, and on what we spend, to maximize our mileage.
That thought process will vary from person to person, but in general I'd say that alt-prone people should focus on account-bound things like the tier-3 horse (the cheapest tier-3 mount). The next investment is probably just to buy a healthy chunk of AD to give yourself some seed money, which, if invested wisely, should give you a steady and relatively generous income. (Either through crafting or through farming dungeons, or both.) For the price of a typical new-release title (~$60) you could conceivably buy a 110% speed mount for all of your characters ($25), two extra character slots ($5), and ~1 million Astral Diamonds. (Or you could buy the Guardian Pack for the same price, which gives you some extra, mostly fluff items, and somewhat fewer AD.)
That ain't bad, when you really think about it.
Most of all, have fun. It is a fun game, even if you never buy a thing.