122705-how-to-improve-the-game-in-a-few-ways

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Hey, that money's coming from somewhere. You think Trion and NCSoft aren't making money off their "F2P" and B2P games? They're making a lot, and they're making it essentially by enabling "rich" players (whatever that means, I kept up a WoW sub while working as a cart attendant at Target, 15 dollars was a pittance every month even in that dead-end job) to get access to a ton of content. And, if they aren't making it on things like mounts, the game goes P2W. Period. The money comes from somewhere; no game is actually free to play. And look at it from our perspective. You say this is an improvement, but right now, for 15 dollars, I can get anything in the game I play for. I may not pay less, but I don't pay more. To get more in a game like Tera, OF COURSE we'd have to pay more. That's the only way this system works. They aren't hiring more developers if they go that route, so our options as you present them are to either pay more to get the same amount of development time or to pay less and have those development hours essentially locked away from us. Right now, 15 dollars a month for the kinds of QOL improvements we've seen is a much better deal than more than 15 dollars for a bunch of cosmetic items or less than 15 dollars and less development in the kinds of improvements we really want. The flat monthly fee is a pretty good shake for a gamer, considering our alternatives. In this system, every single one of us is on equal footing financially, and none of us can get gouged. 15 dollars a month is all any of us have to pay (if we don't use CREDD) to get equal access to everything.


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There is no game in which you can't "buy" a carry (honestly, you don't want the solution to that problem), but if you'd like that solution, we can have that. I think that the problem with your argument is that, "People must buy carries for money, why not just let them buy buffs directly from the game company." These things are not the same, and even if they were, you're ensuring that people buying carries is the norm, not the exception. Nobody buys a carry in my guild, we run with everyone, letting them get better, teaching them. I haven't personally ever run, nor purchased, some kind of raiding bus tour that will take you to the end of a raid. I don't know anyone that's ever taken one. I'm sure it must have happened somewhere, but you seem to think this strange, underground market somehow makes it equivalent to players literally spending hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars purchasing things they have no other means to buy. And, as Dharnell pointed out, you're absolutely blowing the scale completely out of proportion. I made enough plat to buy a CREDD one week where I ran my dailies the whole week day-to-day. Fifteen plat from actually just playing the game and doing dailies. I'm not sure if the idea of scale isn't clear, but to be clear, making it available for people in a F2P game to burn months to get enough currency to buy a costume piece and me literally just running a week of content and being able to purchase an entire month's free access to all the content available in the entire game, with no pay walls anywhere are two very different concepts. There's no finger-bleeding needed, I just have the 15 dollars and thus I spend my plat on housing decor, CREDD's hardly out of my reach. Again, you're ignoring my argument. The idea isn't that the entire payment model is time vs money, in fact, there's very little you can actually buy with money that you can't farm easier in a few weeks if you're talking about progression, and most things in the game require reputation or other currencies to buy, not your wallet. You're equating this with several things which are, as you rightly surmise, finger-bleedingly difficult to gain in-game or paid only with real money. That dichotomy does not exist in Wildstar, CREDD's too cheap, the items aren't that useful, nothing's that hard to actually get. But the reason you have that idea is because you know this from other F2P games, where this is absolutely the dichotomy. Play endlessly and hope to scrape together enough that you can buy something (if the developer deigns to give you that option), or crack open your wallet and start shoveling money. Neither is the case in Wildstar because, as you've likely noticed, the entirety of what you're talking about happens on a player-to-player basis. There's nothing behind a pay wall for you to flay your fingertips or shed your money for. Someone has to actually get the thing you want to buy. That's not how it works in games like Tera or GW2, where if an item isn't exclusive behind a pay wall, the price is set by the company to force you to shell out. In Wildstar, if you want to get something, you can get it just as easily as the guy selling it did, and he couldn't get it any other way. Because Carbine doesn't stand in the middle of the work, the stuff isn't impossible to get (obviously, it was gotten by someone who didn't need it) nor is it bound to be prohibitively expensive (since there's a simple rate of exchange that means you can just go get it yourself if you don't like the price they set, thus unlike a cash shop, the price will come down to meet you as the supply grows). There's nothing that self-regulated about a real F2P system, everything is carefully calculated to make sure that the company makes enough money off the item. Wildstar's position at the beginning, not the middle or end, of that transaction makes the pitfalls of F2P, including designing to the richest and the sleight of hand they play with the players they swindle, completely useless. Wildstar can't make anything so prohibitive that you have to pay money to get it because someone has to get enough to sell and CREDD doesn't grant you enough money that it completely outclasses actually grinding it up. There's a massive difference between essentially permitting trades for in-game gold in exchange directly for game time and acting as a mall for your players, then tuning your game to provide as much extra revenue as possible. And that brings me to that last argument, it matters in design and it matters right there. A million people could play SW:TOR and, if no one spent an obscene amount of money, the game would still die. Disconnecting your monetary performance from your game quality doesn't help the game at all; no F2P game makes money because people play it, they all make it by hawking things. There is no other way it works, you don't add people that don't play and magically get more money unless a lot of people are paying a lot more for things that would have been developed for the cost of their subscription. I get that you really want that whole F2P bubble to come because you think it will help the game, but I've actually played F2P games. I don't talk about them because they aren't worth talking about. I played Aion, SW:TOR, and a few others for maybe a few weeks or days, but I'm not an idiot and I can see the hallmarks of what is coming almost immediately. I've gotten enough advertisements for "free vacations" to know better, and I know a setup for a sale when I see one. And, for the record, a lot of people mentioned CREDD. The OP said he plays on Luminae and CREDD is expensive there. He also said he doesn't particularly want to get plat for it. He said he had quit his job recently and simply didn't have the money to play without CREDD. Instead of fighting up enough plat for CREDD or ponying up a rather insignificant sum of money for his sub, he wanted to institute a cash shop to pick up his tab.


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You seem to think there are a lot of people throwing 600$ worth of CREDD into this game and then are carried through the content. Before moving on, do you actually know any examples of people doing this? I don't want to make this sound insulting, but it seems like you're assuming a very serpentine effort to do something that doesn't happen. Powerleveling services don't tend to get paid in plat or CREDD, they get paid directly in dollars. At the point where you have someone so well geared that they can literally walk someone through the content, in this case with their own personal 20 man raid, platinum is no longer an issue for them. There's a pretty marked disconnect between the people who have the ability to do what you're talking about and the people who actually need the currency. Those people are called powerlevelers, and they don't need CREDD or plat, they take cash directly. I don't know any 20 man raiding teams reserving a few slots of their roster for bus tours because they are desperately short on plat. I certainly don't know anyone dropping 600$ on the CREDD system (or anywhere) to do that. It's theoretically possible, but in practice not likely. And no, 15 plat isn't hard to get. It's not even cash v effort as you may know it from the F2P games you've played, it's literally the decision of whether to pay 20 dollars or do dailies. Then, once you have the plat, what will you buy? Archivos gear at best and runes? The crafted PVP set and runes? Maybe, in the hypothetical multiple-hundred-dollar CREDD buyer scenario you are buying a Pristine Genesis key to skip attunement and get AMP and ability points? And then you're also assuming someone's going to be able to drop plat to get walked through GA by a raiding guild, over and over in order to gear, that presumably has it on farm? And we'll assume for the sake of argument that said player, having never done a dungeon in his career, isn't going to get the raid killed when he can't make a mechanic work? I can say, without any shadow of a doubt, that I know a LOT of people who play this game in all kinds of different ways, but I've never even heard of that hypothetical person. Why? Because the grind in labor is cheaper than the theoretical cash alternative, always. In an F2P game, that is carefully engineered so that the game makes money because the shop is in the middle or end of the transaction, CREDD starts at the beginning, it's the bought item. It's too cheap to make it worth spending thousands of dollars instead of playing the game. Since Carbine doesn't regulate that cash vs time paradigm you think is equivalent, it literally takes as much cash to buy CREDD as a player thinks is worth the time it takes to purchase it. Right now, it's about the cost of a week's dailies if you stretch it. In PVP, it'd be even more worthless. You can't even buy the blue set now, you may be able to buy the blue set with gold and no rating in the future. People paying for carries don't tend to do it by going the long way around through CREDD and plat. They just pay in cash. It's against the TOS, but the whole business is. A high-end PVP player doesn't need hundreds of plat; almost all the good PVP rewards are locked behind ratings and gains. That's why few of us take this accusation very seriously and almost all of us don't equivocate CREDD with F2P. In F2P, the cash vs time ratio is predetermined and exploited in order to generate revenue for the company. In Wildstar, it's set by players and can only help you so much. Again, not to put too fine a point on it, but when people in the game talk about ratings boosters and powerlevelers, they're not talking about the people benefiting being the big issue. Nobody got carried through PVP by a tanker and became the problem, the tanker as the problem and he'd earned his gear (he was essentially dropping down to terrorize lower rated players). I don't hear a lot about DS geared people who completely bought their way in (in fact, I've never heard of one) and they'd be more of a liability than a help. A raiding guild generates money and currency enough through just doing content.


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This, the people that could spend the platinum to make it worthwhile for guilds to carry (considering that these guilds have benches that also need to be rotated/geared, and need to be farming gear for the next raid, and probably want a break) are an insignificant minority. We could see more widespread carry raids, or gold-dkp runs in the future, but that activity generally occurs late in the raid cycle and the newest tier is right around the corner, so any B2W advantage they have would be very short lived.


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Lol, you are funny guy , but that's not what p2w means. Getting that plat from other players wont give you any significant advantage in WS. The amount of plat you need to develop your char isnt much, the more expensive stuff is just fluff , excluding the Ability and AMP unlocks which you can get by other means.


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