Concerns About Cash Shop Pricing

dagny

poison wrote: »

Looks like I know where I'll be sending my money to since PWEnt doesn't want it. If prices aren't fixed by then I won't give this company here a second thought as I move on to a better ran one.

Sadly, I'm with you. I don't really want to relevel my cleric, but it gets faster each time since I know where to go and what to do now.

If you all don't want my money and someone else is offering the same product at considerably cheaper prices... I love you guys, but I'm not an idiot.

dagny

PS... I just registered for the PW-MS version.

You guys are making me do it. I want to stay here, I can't be any more honest than that. So make me want to stay... please. They're both free games, so I would have no issues if I wasn't going to spend money. I have never begged someone to let me give them my money before and I don't like the feeling.

If you don't want it, just say so. This really cannot be that difficult a decision.

poison

dagny wrote: »

PS... I just registered for the PW-MS version.

Same here. This will be the 4th time I've leveled my veno, I'm quite used to it by now. lol

I'd really love to stay here and the GM's seem nice so far from what little I've seen, but if I can't get full satisfaction of the game here and can somewhere else... I'll go where I can.

vigor

I already registered on PW-MS but I'll still be playing here till their version is out. They're gonna have Pay by SMS options which is really great for me since I don't have a credit card

azudo

Whoever is in charge of pricing of PWI is incompetent and when the majority of population of PWI leaves for PW-MS (which it will if a decision is not made, like, right now) should be fired for running a perfectly good mmorpg into the ground.

Seriously, anyone with even a passing knowledge of economics knows that you deal in volume to maximize profits when faced with unlimited supply. I can only conclude that the PWI company has no economic or business sense and it will be a sad day when PWI is forced to close from pricing themselves right out of the market.

fr8train

I played on the My-EN Server and spent money there. But the prices to buy shop gold are just crazy. I may go back to the other Server in My than pay these prices. Or I may just play not spend anything. 3x the price is just to much. I will not bored you with my status, but most MMOs that are Pay-to-Play have alot more for less money compaired to this game. It is called Mirco-Transactions for a reason... PWI wants to be an ATM-Game. Sorry I like the game, but not to pay that much.

khaai

I already left PWI some time ago, and still I see people asking for prices to drop. If PWI management is not willing to do so, they won't do it no matter how hard people try and what statements they provide. By far you all should have realized this. The wise people have left this place long time ago. I don't believe that they will drop prices even if this topic reached 100+ pages. Because if PWI was listening to the community (as they say), actions should have been taken so far. The only thing that will happen is that they will try to convince all players how the pricing of PWI is absolutely reasonable because of the life standard and what not. (Maybe they also believe that Malaysia is a third-world country like a racist person stated before, somewhere in this forum.)

Probably Europe is compiled of third-world countries too, since their version is equal to PW Malaysia in terms of pricing?

PWI can save their "uncorrupted" GMs for themselves.

enricoe

dagny wrote: »

PS... I just registered for the PW-MS version.

You guys are making me do it. I want to stay here, I can't be any more honest than that. So make me want to stay... please. They're both free games, so I would have no issues if I wasn't going to spend money. I have never begged someone to let me give them my money before and I don't like the feeling.

If you don't want it, just say so. This really cannot be that difficult a decision.

Seriously. We are begging them to take our money but for what we believe is a reasonable trade. It is like no one buys a $0.99 burger for $3. Lowering the prices will encourage more spontaneous purchases. Quantity will eventually lead to more profit. *sigh*

thatsme

I've been watching this thread for around a week now, and watching to see if any action would be taken. Nothing yet and so I'm Outta Here. Bye. Uninstalling as we speak. Good Luck to anyone who sticks around.

l0ki

xauss wrote: »

making a mockery of PWEs pricing PWMS (multilanguage service - official European Hosts) have said

Kru (Admin)
"We will adjust our prices based on the MY-Version. The reason is simple. A lot of you played the MY-Version before. So said it is not a new product for you.

From a view of a customer: Why paying more for a product when you can have it cheaper somewhere else?

Especially when you are playing an Internet game country boundaries mean nothing. So said for players it is out of interesting what the average income is in Asian or in western countries. It is also out of interesting for them if a company use this as an argument to raise their prices. Players simple looking for a good place to play with reasonable prices to pay. It doesn't matter for them in which country the game is hosted (besides of some bad pings).

Maybe our prices are not exactly the same like on MY version. Possible that something is cheaper others things are a little bit higher. Also we will run special weekly offers like we are doing..." (on other games)

Ouch~ seems like PWI IS GOING DOWN! ~~~~ I hope not but it will.

Short Suggestion:

We just want the prices to go down

High Prices = Few buyers = LOW INCOME

Low Prices = *imagine 1 million people playing in PWI and 80% of it buys zen* =HIGH INCOME

Is that so hard to do?

*If your afraid that you can't pay your bills *whatever stuff you put on your first post,* there's always trial and error.

Try if this price suits the expectation of your customers, if the customers doesn't like it, change it. If your budget declines, change it. until it becomes stable. Damn isn't that so Easy?

*Somebody's whisper: Of course it's not easy, were running a big company and doing sh*t like thit isn't worth it; besides, we can always do IP-block to keep our customers away from other server * <--- If you think like this.. Sayonara~ ^_^

We just wanna play PW for our satisfaction, and also make new threads like your idea *bang for you buck* so we players can discuss about it.

fr8train

Guess I will look for another game to play... After all the anticipation. tsk,tsk,tsk....
This will be either a very thin community or a game that ends up with nothing but freeloaders.
And for those that depend on this game for a Job, ha, better get that resume ready.

soukyuu

ultimusmagus wrote: »

If Jelsoft (PW-MS) does indeed have a non-discriminatory license, and will present gold and item prices similar to PW-MY, I don't see how PWE expects PWI to stay afloat.

Small correction; Jelsoft is the maker of the vBulletin forums software (the one PW-US uses too, btw), the host of the PW-MS is Game-Masters.com

zanril

xauss wrote: »

making a mockery of PWEs pricing PWMS (multilanguage service - official European Hosts) have said

Kru (Admin)
"We will adjust our prices based on the MY-Version. The reason is simple. A lot of you played the MY-Version before. So said it is not a new product for you.

From a view of a customer: Why paying more for a product when you can have it cheaper somewhere else?

Especially when you are playing an Internet game country boundaries mean nothing. So said for players it is out of interesting what the average income is in Asian or in western countries. It is also out of interesting for them if a company use this as an argument to raise their prices. Players simple looking for a good place to play with reasonable prices to pay. It doesn't matter for them in which country the game is hosted (besides of some bad pings).

Maybe our prices are not exactly the same like on MY version. Possible that something is cheaper others things are a little bit higher. Also we will run special weekly offers like we are doing..." (on other games)

That's pretty funny. Really, the European version isn't doing anything special with their prices, just keeping them reasonable and competitive. And yet by comparison, PWE is making them look great.

PWE really needs to pay attention to Kru's logic, or their customers will.

andyboi

To be honest, I did not read through all the comments/suggestions. But the jist of it was, the price of cash shop items are too high. From the perspective of your company, you guys want to maximize profit. But most importantly, you guys are a business. Hence, if not enough money is being made and there is no profit, then there is no point in continuing to host this game. Instead of trying to make more money from the cash shop, try to optimize your company elsewhere. You can lower the number of gms, you can downsize your staff, you can lower your bandwidth. And there are more ways to do this.

The most obvious wrong way is to try to make up for the profits in the cash shop. As this is the longest thread in this forums, it shows that players really do care and you have touched a soft spot. I understand that quality service requires high costs to maintain. Try maintaining those costs elsewhere in the game.

ultimusmagus

soukyuu wrote: »

Small correction; Jelsoft is the maker of the vBulletin forums software (the one PW-US uses too, btw), the host of the PW-MS is Game-Masters.com

Thanks, did not notice that. Post has been edited.

cutlass

(forgive me for not reading all 38 pages, but this is my opinion)
These US statistics that you keep bringing up will not defend you.
This is PW-International. Maybe Americans have more leisure money(though it seems most of them are disagreeing with that) but I live in Canada.
The Canadian GDP is roughly a thirteenth of the american GDP! I DO NOT have the equivalent amount of leisure money as Americans allegedly have, and I'm sure thousands of others players can relate. I CAN NOT afford to pay these prices for something like this. I'd much rather turn to another version of PWI with more reasonable pricing.

If you want to base your pricing on American income, then you should be running PW-USA.
PWI is supposed to be open to EVERYBODY. The entire world does NOT run on the American economy.
You should be considering ALL other PW versions as being competition, and that includes ones like Malaysia with significantly lower prices. Take Wal-Mart's example: if you can be cheaper than all your competetors, your sales will increase drastically and thusly produce much more profit.

More profit = higher wages = food & shelter for your staff.

To be honest, not having those extra perks in PWI won't affect us much, because the game is still playable and there are always other games. Your prices will hit YOU the hardest.

karmelia

Funny thing is that they don't realize this is an urgent matter, and that with every day that pass they are loosing customers.

This should have been fixed one way or the other in a few days, not in more than a week.

Putting up a pool not covering the main concerns of the players only show that they have absolutely no idea what is going on in this community.

poison

karmelia wrote: »

Funny thing is that they don't realize this is an urgent matter, and that with every day that pass they are loosing customers.

This should have been fixed one way or the other in a few days, not in more than a week.

Putting up a pool not covering the main concerns of the players only show that they have absolutely no idea what is going on in this community.

I'm sure they know. And from the last option of the poll it looks like they are reading this thread as that was one of my suggestions. Of course my suggestion was for many things, not just heiros. At least we know what the only thing that was important to them when they were playing on PW-MY was.

They just don't seem to care that they have already lost a lot of customers who wanted to give them money, and will lose more when PW Europe opens if prices aren't changed to be close to theirs.

mystic

Please hurry up and correct this. We're losing more and more people to euro PW every day...

matanglawin

I think they made a mistake. It does not take a genius to understand that the situation is bad and yet they do not do anything. They do not do anything because they cannot do anything.

They made a calculation that for PWI to remain viable,that many players who responded in those two stickied forums will need to buy the items in current cash shop prices with the same frequency as in MY-EN. Anything less than this, PWI bottomline turns red. If less people buy, or less frequency of buying or cash shop items prices reduced, they do not turn a profit. We do not know what expenses or deals or credit they need to cover each month.

Evidence is the poll buy $150 you get $100 dollars extra zen bonus. $150 is almost a year's worth of subscription to P2P.

I applaud them to take the risk but they failed. Probably that was the reason why it took a long time to get a U.S. PW going in the first place. Investors see it as too risky and the return is probably not worth the risk.

That is why I like the market. It self correcting. I too want a flying abram tank that can be mini-submarine at 50mpg (ground) to take to work only if I could buy it for $25,000. Hence it is not viable. PWI is not viable.

Edit: If PWI last six months, then it was viable after all. I am simply cheap. Win win though I will be a freeloader

poison

So the staff won't be able to make their above GDP salaries? I care as much about that as they care about us. The more they care about us, the more I care about them getting their paycheck. The less they care about us... do the math.

dagny

Be careful before passing out failing grades.

GDP + Gross Domestic Product

This is the amount of total money generated by the entire country.

You are thinking of Per Capita Income which is the average income per person.

Canada's GDP is substantially less than the United States, but so is almost every country. This does not translate into average income.

He wasn't wrong, you just misunderstood what he was saying.

The failure here was in misunderstanding and handing out a failing grade without cause.

bael

You think this Cash shop is bad wake up Go to Rohan now thats a bad Cash shop this is peanuts compared to that your just Stingy as...

ragingwind

dagny wrote: »

Be careful before passing out failing grades.

GDP + Gross Domestic Product

This is the amount of total money generated by the entire country.

You are thinking of Per Capita Income which is the average income per person.

Canada's GDP is substantially less than the United States, but so is almost every country. This does not translate into average income.

He wasn't wrong, you just misunderstood what he was saying.

The failure here was in misunderstanding and handing out a failing grade without cause.

You may have hit on the most important point in this whole thread. Where is the logic in basing the game's prices on the Gross Domestic Product of the whole freakin' country? Instead, they probably should have based it on Per Capita Income. Even this, however, would have lead to miscalculations and prices that are too high. I think the only comparison they can use is the cost of other, similar products in the USA (if they're basing their prices on the USA). Here are some examples:

Cost of a new DVD movie: $18 - $21
Cost of the special edition of a DVD movie: $22 - $30
Old cost for new console games: $40 - $50
New cost for new console games: $40 -$60

If PWE had based their prices all along on these^ prices, there is no way that things could be over-priced. How hard is it to figure that out?

syndicatearts

I think the thing here is they ether overpriced because they got greedy, or they went overkill on cost of the servers and connections. The servers in MY run well and are probably bottom line machines and connections. This game looks great but you would not need a high priced server or amazingly large bandwidth to run a server. The fact that MY can run a cheap server as well as they are proves that, and with the US server in our back yard, they would still get much better game play with the same low end servers and connections.
If they have bought high priced servers and large bandwidth connections, then the game is doomed. They will never be able to produce enough revenue if only a hand full of people buy items, and they wont make enough lowering the price ether.

So basically...
ether they bought and appropriate server and connection for a low price and overcharging us
or....
they bought a server and connection that was overkill and now have to charge higher prices.

Ether way, they messed up big time. They should have taken a look at the perfect world community that was already established and realized that we would not stand for such prices, then they could have chosen a low cost server and connection to do what needed to get done and they wouldn't have to raise there prices.

That could be why they have little response, they don't want us to know they screwed up and are now stuck with a contract for a server and connection that's running the game into the ground.

tofu

well im not a fan of cash shop relaly
but these prices
are miniscule (hehe i didn't no i knew that word)
compared to that of maplestory (GMS)
u wanna get a single top?
good luck prices range from 2-5$ for a 2D PIXEL top.. u wanna get a pet dragon?
oh boy
its about 20 bucks to raise. but unlike PW.. these pets
DO NOTHING!!!
thats right
NOTHING!!! (except picking up ur items dropped from monsters)
THEY DONT MOUNT!!!
THEY DONT ATTACK!!!
20 bucks of waste!! yet
maplestory' cash shop income
is huge!
every other person will have some form of cash shop...

but im not a fan of cash shop
just stating a point
hehe^^ off to lost city!!! i get lost in archosaur

raxcal

I still find it very hilarious that a shirt in the game's cash shop costs more than a shirt in real life.


So lets say I want to buy that cool shirt worth $10 from the cash shop; Now what, only a shirt won't help, I need the trousers, the gloves, and the boots too (can't go around half naked now, can I?). So will I drop some cash for the trousers $3.00, gloves $2.00 and the boots $2.00 too.

Hmm, for some odd reason I got some non matching funky colors I don't like, so I'll buy some dyes to fix this... Oh wait I can buy random dye(1) for $0.50, or I can buy random dyes(10) for $2.00.

My shirt needs 5 pigments to change color RANDOMLY once, my trousers 3 and my boots 1, so I chose to buy random dyes(20) for $4.00.

I go to the NPC and process my shirt, you guessed it I got hot pink for my male toon's shirt (wasted 5 random pigments there), I give it another try, and what do you say, it turned purple! I'm like hell no, I don't want my buff barbarian to walk around in a purple shirt, so I try once again, and then once more, luckily it turned blue on my last attempt. So now I need to color the other parts of my new outfit.

But wait all my 20 random dyes are gone, and I've just spend $21.00!!! ZOMG!!!
Oh well I'll buy more random dye...


WRONG!!!

I say **** this, for $21.00 I can't even have the look I want? If I were able to chose my colors I would be able to consider it, but as it is a question of pure DUMB luck, I totally refuse to even buy the vanity items at such high prices.

raxcal

tofu wrote: »

well im not a fan of cash shop relaly
but these prices
are miniscule (hehe i didn't no i knew that word)
compared to that of maplestory (GMS)
u wanna get a single top?
good luck prices range from 2-5$ for a 2D PIXEL top.. u wanna get a pet dragon?
oh boy
its about 20 bucks to raise. but unlike PW.. these pets
DO NOTHING!!!
thats right
NOTHING!!! (except picking up ur items dropped from monsters)
THEY DONT MOUNT!!!
THEY DONT ATTACK!!!
20 bucks of waste!! yet
maplestory' cash shop income
is huge!
every other person will have some form of cash shop...

but im not a fan of cash shop
just stating a point
hehe^^ off to lost city!!! i get lost in archosaur

Do all of that games servers cash shops sell at the same price? If the answer is yes, then it's not good to use it as a measure for PWI, as the items here are TRIPLE, the price of the items in PW-MY.

P.S. No pet here in PW will pick up your loot.

ragingwind

Tofu, you can't base one company's bad choices on another company's bad choices. You're just encouraging the idiots who gave us this **** to believe that they've done a good job.

Raxcal has made a great point about cash shop problems. For the money they expect us to spend, they could at least do away with the scam that is fashion colors. If you want people to spend ridiculous amounts of money for this ****, then you must give us products that are worth it. I don't even like the fashion clothing in this game and you want me to fork over a ton of money for it. LMAO!

syndicatearts

raxcal wrote: »

Do all of that games servers cash shops sell at the same price? If the answer is yes, then it's not good to use it as a measure for PWI, as the items here are TRIPLE, the price of the items in PW-MY.

P.S. No pet here in PW will pick up your loot.

He is right, you can't come in here saying "well, the items here are cheaper then other MMOs." Perfect World isn't other MMOs. They don't even have to compete with other MMOs! Who they have to compete with is themselves, and right now they are 3x higher.