Rift to go Free to Play on June 12 May 14, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Rift.Tags: Free-To-Play, PLEX, REX
8 comments
I was wrong.
Another subscription MMO caves in, unable to make a go of things on monthly fees alone. Or they feel that the grass must surely be greener on the free to play side of the fence.
Of course, my prediction was back when Scott Hartsman was still on board and before they put the cash shop interface into the game. And with WoW, the game Rift sought to out do by speed and emulation, dropping subscriptions in huge, game killing chunks (for any game except WoW), the subscription model takes has taken another blow.
Anyway, Trion has announced that Rift will go free to play come June. They have a video and such on the official site. And a producer’s letter. And a FAQ. And an interview over at Massively to reinforce all of this.
They will even have something called REX, which sounds remarkably like PLEX. You think?
The beginning matrix of who will get what has been announced.
Rift, Storm Legion, and free levels
People who subscribe will now be called “Patrons” and will get a set of benefits. Will they be worth $15 a month to people?
Call me “Patron”
That feels more like World of Tanks, what with the short term options available. They are certainly trying to mix in all they can.
But still, the cash shop will now rule the roost and new content will likely falter while Trion begins the endless race to figure out what will sell best. Those who buy from the cash shop will drive the game going forward.
Some people will be cheering, feeling that every game needs to be free, that there is only one right model.
Others, whom like me, have been unhappy with the rot that cash shops can bring, will be less enthusiastic.
Either way, it will change the game. Nobody can deny that. And it will likely bring in some new players to start. But eventually the cash shop chase will begin.
What do you think?
Addendum: Green Armadillo has some thoughts on Rift’s new plan.
Krono – Maybe It Will Work… Maybe It Won’t November 21, 2012
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online, EverQuest II, Sony Online Entertainment.Tags: Krono, PLEX
add a comment
I mentioned SOE’s new Krono item previously, though really only in reference to an oddity in its pricing. It is SOE’s version of EVE Online’s PLEX, an item that can be redeemed for 30 days of game time (or premium game time, in the case of SOE’s free to play model) and which exists in-game and can be sold to other players for the in-game currency.
All About Krono
(Krono screen stolen from The EQ2 Wire because we love them.)
I had wondered previously if WoW could support something like this, back when they were indulging in their half-hearted, and I would say ultimately failed, kitten economy experiment. But now that SOE is attempting to emulate the PLEX model directly, I am very interested to see how it works out.
Currently Krono is only in EverQuest II, though there are plans to bring it to EverQuest and Vanguard should things go well.
But will things go well?
I have been watching pricing of Krono on the broker on a couple of servers and it seems to be all over the map.
Now, there are a couple of problems that cause this.
To start with, unlike EVE, EQII has no buy order mechanism built into the broker. In EVE, the ability to set a buy order sets an effective floor on the price of anything. No matter what you have to sell in EVE, there is somebody somewhere who will think, “I’ll take n of those if it gets down to the right price.”
Sometime buy orders are really low. There is always somebody who will do a region-wide buy order for light missiles at half an ISK each. Reprocessing them or reselling them near a low level mission hub will allow the buyer to turn a profit.
But in trade hubs like Jita the buy orders and the sell orders begin to converge and you can determine the real market price of an item, minus the geographic convenience multipliers.
Since you cannot do that in EQ2, sellers are flying blind. Let’s say you buy a Krono and put it on the market for 700 plat and it sells. Is 700 plat the real market price? Did you simply price the Krono too low? Did you just find a fat cat in a hurry? Were you simply the lowest price at that moment on the broker?
None of that tells you what the real price should be. It is one of the flaws of the EQII broker. I certainly hope buy orders are on the list of features for the tentatively sandbox-like EverQuest Next.
The second issue is that there simply were not that many Krono for sale on the broker. People seem tentative, and rightly so, about diving into this latest SOE scheme.
So on one server I saw about a dozen Krono up for sale. They were priced between 700 and 2500 platinum, and except for the couple at the bottom of the price list, who were clearly in a price war, there were pretty wide gaps between the listings. Anything with a commonly accepted value should be clustered pretty closely for the most part, with a few outliers looking for suckers.
This says to me that most of the people selling Krono on the broker are trying to sell at what they feel should be the right price. This is how much plat they think $17.99 should bring in. This, again, goes back to the whole lack of a buy order mechanism thing, as there is nothing out there to help determine a real market value. Without that a seller cannot make an informed pricing decision, so we get stuff all over the map.
Meanwhile, I saw several people on the trade channel at various times trying to sell Krono for between 500 and 600 plat. This is an off-shoot of the fact that the broker in EQII, unlike the market in EVE, is a completely optional feature. You can go through years of playing and never buy anything off the broker and never feel the worse for it. After all, the best items in the game cannot be bought or sold. You have to go slay some beastie or another, or complete some epic quest to get that.
And unless you have a gold account, you cannot even use the broker to its fullest. That is how non-essential the broker is.
So the deck isn’t somewhat stacked against outright, unmitigated, obvious success.
And I am not even including the calculations from old hands like me who remember the days when selling something for a gold… 100 gold is 1 plat… seemed like a major economic victory. Something selling for hundreds of plat seems crazy insane, because I do not thing all my characters, if they pooled all their coins, could come up with 200 plat. But I am still playing in the mid-tiers of the game, in content from 2005, so have no real sense of how readily available plat is when you are in the 90-95 zone. The price of Krono might be quite reasonable to somebody at that level.
But there appears to be at least one wild card in favor of the whole Krono scheme, and that has to do with the RMT gold selling sites.
I went to check some of those sites just to see if I could get a sense of the street value, such that it is, of plat coins in EverQuest II.
The basic response from most of the sites I visited was, to mix a reference, “Screw you and the crappy SOE game you rode in on! We don’t serve their kind in here!”
Okay, maybe they were not quite so up front. It was more like “We do not currently serve this community” or “We are currently out of stock and cannot foresee a time when we will resume sales” when it came to EverQuest II.
I went through six sites I found via Google before I was directed by one to a seventh site that actually had EQII plat for sale. And they didn’t even have plat for all of the servers. But on those that they did, it looked like $16.99, the cheapest price for a Krono, could get you about 300 plat coins.
Krono Pricing
Which, in the world of RMT versus PLEX, is mondo bizarre. Go look at Nosy Gamer’s chart. In EVE, you are paying nearly a 50% premium to get clean ISK via PLEX when compared to RMT. In EQII at the moment, where I checked, you could be getting a 50% premium when buying clean plat via Krono. Being legit pays, for the moment.
Of course, the problems I mentioned about the EQII market apply. There is no saying if this will be the price range next week, or the week after, or the month after. There is no way to get a sense of the demand, absent the buy order mechanism, so we are still flying blind when it comes to pricing on any given day.
Which is kind of a shame, because I would really like this to work. And, I think in EverQuest, where inflation has led to people having huge stacks of plat coins around, it might be a viable way to spread out some of that wealth that is just sitting in banks doing nothing, to the betterment of the game.
Still, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
What do you think? Is Krono, a good thing or not, and will it succeed?
The Interesting Thing About Krono and the All Access Pass… November 16, 2012
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EverQuest II, Sony Online Entertainment.Tags: Krono, PLEX, SOE All Access, Station Access
2 comments
Krono is a new item from SOE, currently available in EverQuest II. The Krono page describes it as such:
When used, this magical krono adds 30 days membership time to the amount of the consuming character. This krono can be used only once.
- Adds 30 days of game time to the account of the consuming character
- Fully tradable and salable
- No expiration date
- Krono only redeemable in EverQuest II
So Krono is, essentially, the same thing as PLEX in EVE Online.
This is PLEX
I need to get a new stock PLEX screen shot. That one is out of date. PLEX is now just an object in game like any other and can be destroyed.
Anyway, Krono is an attempt by SOE to thwart RMT currency sales in EverQuest II by giving players a legitimate way to buy something that can be traded in-game for platinum.
And, on the flip side, if you are a player with lots of plat who wants to save some money on their subscription, you can fund your premium access with your game play.
As in EVE, generally a win-win, so long as the market can support such an item at a reasonable price. In EVE the price of PLEX has been rising over time, hovering around 600 million ISK per these days, double what it was two years ago.
We will see how the EverQuest II broker handles it. My own fear, if I were SOE, would be that of low demand and/or low or erratic price patterns. PLEX works in EVE because everybody has to use the marketplace. The same is not true in EQII. In fact, free players are somewhat restricted in what they can access at the broker. As I pointed out when I asked if WoW could support something like PLEX, market participation is a key factor.
I suppose we shall see how it works out. I applaud SOE for diving right in with this. According to the FAQ, if the response is favorable, Krono will be rolled out to EverQuest and Vanguard as well.
Also like PLEX, Krono are priced to be more expensive than a normal monthly subscription. A standard game pass… what SOE calls a subscription these days… is $14.99 a month, while Krono is $17.99 per 30 day unit of time.
Krono Pricing
Clearly, nobody is going to simply buy and consume Krono just to keep their subscription going.
Unless you happen to subscribe via the SOE All Access Pass.
There is a long history to the All Access Pass, once known as Station Access, which was introduced just about the time EverQuest II launched. In short though, it is a subscription plan where, for a few dollars more, you can have access to all SOE online games.
Pricing has varied over the years, peaking at $29.99 at one point. But once SOE went all-in on free to play (and shed a few games), the price was dropped significantly. Here is where the pricing stands today.
All Access Pricing
Nice, but what does that have to do with Krono?
Well, deep inside the Krono FAQ, there is a question about SOE All Access.
13. Do Krono work for game memberships as well as All Access memberships?
Yes. When a Krono is consumed, it will add 30 days of game membership time to the account associated with the character that consumed it. If that account has an existing All Access membership, the All Access membership will be extended by 30 days. If the account has a regular game membership, that membership will be extended by 30 days. If the account has no current membership, then 30 days of regular game membership time will be added to the account.
So using Krono will actually extended your All Access subscription.
And, in certain increments, it is cheaper than. Basically, if you subscribe in increments of less than 6 months, Krono is the cheaper route. At 6 months, they are essentially the same price. Only if you buy your All Access subscription in year long increments is Krono more expensive.
Which makes me wonder if this was a deliberate action to help boost the sale of Krono, or if we are seeing yet another case of SOE not quite thinking things through, as happened with the $1.25 worth of Station Cash buying a 30 day subscription situation.
What do you think about that, or about Krono in general?
Opting Out of the Economy? Is PLEX Cheating? May 3, 2012
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online, polls.Tags: NBI, New Blogger Initiative, PLEX
34 comments
I have written about PLEX before.
(And I have used that graphic before… look at the price of PLEX in the background!)
I have praised PLEX as a way to stem the illicit RMT market. I have wondered if a game like WoW could support something like PLEX. I have marveled at CCP allowing PLEX to be treated as an in-game object like any other, and how that lead to the inevitable giant loss event.
But I have never really bothered with the idea of it being cheating.
Primarily because, technically, PLEX is not and cannot be considered cheating because it is allowed, created, and administered by CCP. They say it is okay and they make the rules, so therefore it is not cheating, QED. And even before PLEX, CCP allowed the purchase of time codes with ISK, the in game currency. PLEX just removed some of the complexities. (You can still buy time codes and turn them into PLEX, which some web sites use as a way to get financial support.)
But that aside, there is the question of PLEX giving those with money an advantage over those without, and this is the aspect that Rohan appears to be wrestling with over at Blessing of Kings.
I have been reading Blessing of Kings for ages, it being a source for all things Paladin related in World of Warcraft.
But Rohan has recently ventured into New Eden, and I have been following his posts on the subject with interest. Jaded after more than five years of exposure to EVE, it is interesting to read about somebody entering the game afresh and discovering its myriad complexities, especially somebody with a critical eye like his.
He has recently hit upon PLEX as being something that allows a player to skip content, or to cheat. The focus seems, from my read, to be entirely on the economic aspect of the game.
He divides the economic sphere into “producers” and “consumers,” something I find to be a bit of a false dichotomy.
First, there is a lot of gray area in between the two from my point of view. There are lost of people who just like the industry side of the game. And there are, I am sure, people who just buy PLEX to turn pirate and hunt other players. But in between?
What of the mission runner who focuses only on the mission reward and thus optimizes his efforts to completing them as fast as possible? He never loots, he never salvages, and he certainly never stops to mine any tasty ore that might show up in a mission. He merely consumes the mission content, adding to the market place approximately the same as the person who buys PLEX.
And what about me? For the last four months I have been in null sec, I have ratted a little bit for bounties, but have pretty much steered clear of the economic sphere. I have been in coalition fleets for battles, and when I lose a ship my alliance reimburses me the cost of my ship and sells me a replacement at a very good price, thus subsidizing my play. How does that differ, in terms of economic impact, from the buyer of PLEX? My choice has essentially opted me out of the production aspect of the game as well.
Second, the consumption side of the does, in fact, add to the economic sphere of the game. Nothing keeps the production people going like some pirates out there blowing up ships. The so-called consumer is in fact a very important aspect of the producer’s life. Without him, the producer is done.
Third, there is the standard argument about how ISK does not translate into power in the game. You cannot jump ahead in skill points to allow you to fly a more powerful ship, you have to train them one point at a time like everybody else. Yes, you can buy implants, and those do help some, but the noob to titan training plan is still most of a year even with +5 modules.
More importantly, ISK does not impart skill. Ships in the game are all vulnerable. In WoW, a level 1 player in starter gear would be severely challenged to kill an AFK top tier raider in full gear. There is a vast discrepancy in power between the two, imparted by equipment and skills that come with levels. But in EVE, the wily frigate pilot can take down a strategic cruiser. (The first kill in that post, which made Dabigredboat quite smug.)
Finally, the consumer of content that uses PLEX does add something to the game. The person who buys PLEX for cash and sells it on the market for ISK gives the producer the option to pay for his game time via the fruit of his labors. CCP still gets paid, the guy selling the PLEX gets his ISK, and producer gets a real life reward for his work. For me, that is high on the list of “best features ever.”
Rohan then goes on to a horrible analogy, though in fairness, I should say that I think almost all analogies are horrible. People who agree with you already go, “Yeah!” while people who disagree pick apart the points where the analogy falls down (and the analogy ALWAYS falls down under close examination… if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be an analogy) and nobody’s opinion is altered one iota. (See Scott Adams.)
Anyway, this analogy involved a theoretical immortality pod that would let you opt out of PvP for 30 days as the opposing side of the PLEX issue. To my mind, this is absolutely not the case. Said pod would be game breaking… opting out of PvP in what is a PvP game… and would literally remove content, as opposed to PLEX, which merely changes one aspect of a players interaction with the game. Your PLEX buying gank pirate is still creating demand for production, still buying from the market, and giving the producer something special. The immortality pod is a literal opt-out of the nature of the game. It isn’t skipping the part of the game he doesn’t enjoy, it is skipping the game. Enough people do that and the end result is the death or production as an ongoing concern.
Anyway, this is all debating society level discussion. CCP is not going to take out PLEX and they certainly are not going to introduce an immortality pod. But it is always interesting to try and hash out what PLEX means to the game as a whole.
What do you think of PLEX?
[Addendum: If you are looking for other ways to make ISK, read this excellent article.]
New Blogger Initiative pointers of the day that can be gleaned from this post:
-Taking long comment responses to other people’s blog posts and turning them into posts on your own blog is an easy way to come up with a post idea, and fosters a sense of community between blogs by linking them together in some sort of web-like structure. (Link whoring)
-Link back to past posts you have made on the same subject. It keeps you from having to repeat yourself, it gets people to look something not on the front page of your blog, and when some site steals your content, at least you’ll get a bit of traffic back with those links. (Link whoring)
-Polls are an easy way to finish up a post when you aren’t clear where you are headed and you feel you need to distract your readers from the weakness in you argument. (Hiding your link whoring)
Deklein Will be Rid of Goons by February December 27, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Null Sec, PLEX, White Noise
18 comments
Although I spent Christmas in empire space, thanks to the magic of jump clones, packing up some stuff to be shipped out to null sec, I have been keeping an eye on communications and other bits of intel that find their way to me, usually via Gaff.
It seems that White Noise had a meeting of their own which, like the last State of the Goonion, shortly found its way to the web in audio form and is posted, along with a summary, over at EVE News 24.
Some of the key items from that:
- White Noise was “surprised” by the attack, despite The Mittani discussing everything short of a seating chart for the victory celebration to take place after the defeat of White Noise. Winter is Coming was more than a meme. Maybe White Noise only read the State of the Goonion summary over at EVE News 24, which was terse to the point of uselessness. (The subtitle for their post was “Too Long, Didn’t Listen.” I am told that EVE News 24 hates the Goons. But then the fill in the blank statement “_______ hates the Goons” has a lot of potential answers I suppose.)
- White Noise jumped straight to the Godwin’s Law moment and made the historical (hysterical?) comparison to Germany invading the Soviet Union in 1941. White Noise certainly fit the bill when it came to not being prepared despite obvious intel that the blow was coming. Can they trade systems for time until they get their act together is the real question.
- White Noise is getting their allies together and plans to start their counter offensive on January 1st. This includes borrowing forces from Red Alliance down in the south, which apparently has enough free time to ship pilots across the map just for a chance to kick the Goons in the nuts. (Because, of course, they hate the Goons.)
- White Noise says that the Deklein region will be cleared of Goon forces by February.
So, with that in mind, here is the sovereignty map for December 26th, borrowed from here:
Null Sec Sov. December 27
If things go as planned for White Noise, most of that big yellow splotch in the upper left corner should be gone. That little purple patch as well, which is where I live when I am in null sec.
We will have to see what the map looks like on February 1st.
Until then I have a bunch of mining equipment set to to be shipped out to Deklein. I need to start making some money somewhere along the line.
Though, I suppose if it came down to a desperate moment (it won’t), PLEX recently hit a new all-time peak price. According to the November EVE Price Index, PLEX was selling for nearly 500 million ISK per unit at one point before settling down a bit. Lots of ISK out there chasing PLEX I guess.
And the war, in which I played a very small part one night, goes on.
PLEX – Available in Bulk Lots December 3, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: PLEX
6 comments
I got a pop-up from CCP that they were having a sale on PLEX, the 30 Day Pilot License Extensions that are essentially 30 day units of game time you can buy or sell with the in-game currency ISK.
PLEX - On Sale Now!
I was interested to see what constituted a “sale” price. PLEX is generally prices at a point that you would never buy it for yourself to keep your subscription… unless you were paying in ISK. So I went to the account management page where these things are bought and sold.
The PLEX Store
As I suspected, the PLEX prices were not all that special. $17.49 for 30 days of a game that is $14.99 a month when you pay directly. Not a deal, even if you can get it down to $16.50 a month by buying a batch of six.
PLEX Special Pricing
The surprising bit for me was the ability to buy PLEX in lots of 28 (or 30 with the special offer).
That must be the empire builder’s package. 30 PLEX can be turned into more than 12 billion ISK, with patience, which seems like a lot of in game currency for me.
But then a titan runs a lot more than that.
Still, you don’t put that option on the “Buy Now” list unless somebody is using it, so somebody out there is buying a lot of PLEX.
Could WoW Support Something Like PLEX? October 17, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Blizzard, entertainment, EVE Online, World of Warcraft.Tags: PLEX, RMT
12 comments
And would they want to?
When Blizzard announce their Guardian Cub plans for the Blizzard store, the immediate comparison that came to mind was PLEX.
And while, as Massively notes, there are items in other games that have some of the qualities of PLEX, nothing quite matches it. CCP has something quite interesting on their hands.
PLEX is an in-game item you can buy in EVE Online for cash from their web site. PLEX stands for Pilot License EXtension, and it is essentially a consumable in-game item that extends your subscription by 30 days. You buy it and collect pick it up with your character in game.
Your character can then either use it to extend their account (which would be silly, since at a cost of two PLEX for $35, it is more expensive than a month-to-month subscription in most cases) or they can put it up for sale in the in-game marketplace and sell it to other people for in-game currency. The going rate currently is about 400 million ISK, the in-game currency.
This effectively gave players a legal way to “buy gold” as well as rewarding hard core players by allowing them to essentially play for free as long as they were able to part with 400 million ISK or so every month.
It didn’t seem to break the economy and has provided only a mild amount of spectator drama in the two years since it was introduced. There is a lot of PLEX for sale on the market in EVE and price has slowly risen over time, proving there is demand for it.
So could Blizzard pull off something similar in World of Warcraft?
My gut response is “no.”
I wouldn’t say it was impossible, but I cannot come up with a good answer on how or why Blizzard would go for it.
The 20,000 foot view seems to reveal this as an opportunity for Blizzard. WoW has something like ten times as many players outside of Asia as EVE Online. And they have a problem with gold sellers. A big market and a problem to solve!
But EVE is special. EVE may only have a tenth of the subscribers, but they all play on the same server and use the same market and contract system.
WoW players, on the other hand, are scattered over more than 400 servers in the Europe and North America. And there are two separate factions on each server, each with its own auction house. So there are at least twice as many economies in action as there are servers. (There is also the neutral auction house, which is active on some servers, but really isn’t anything like a full economy.)
So while it has 10 times the players, WoW is divided up into economies that are, on average, about one tenth the number of potential users as the EVE Online economy.
And potential users is another key. In EVE Online, the economy is the life blood of the game. You pretty much HAVE to use the marketplace. Everybody participates. When the Goons start doing things to impact the economy, everybody feels the ripples.
In WoW though, the auction house is a bit of a sideline. You do not have to participate. You can gear yourself up with quest rewards and instance drops for the leveling game, and if you move on to raiding, you aren’t going to find any of the tier rated gear you want for sale there. And while it is the place to go to make gold (Darraxus just finished a good series on the subject, though he needs to discover tags to I can link to the whole thing. The first post in the series is here.), I know people who hate the auction house and refuse to buy or sell on it.
And those people can not participate and get along just fine.
And so my first concern is if there is even enough economic activity on the dominant faction on a high population server that has a high percentage of auction house use to support something like PLEX being introduced into the economy.
Even in that optimum scenario, would there be enough players with enough gold to absorb all the… let’s call it WoWPLEX… that would enter the market so that it maintained a stable and viable price?
I cannot actually answer that question.
This is where my gut says “no,” but I cannot prove or disprove that feeling.
And “that” feeling is that the price of WoWPLEX would bottom out at a level too low to make it an attractive illicit gold sellers or that, at best, the price would fluctuate wildly.
And that is on the optimum server environment. The price would almost assuredly bottom out too low or be radically unstable on the short faction side of a low population server.
To which I can hear some of you replying, “So what?” Low priced WoWPLEX might be good for you, if not the seller.
And this is the second part of the problem, which is creating a set of circumstances under which Blizzard would see it to their advantage to adopt such a scheme.
Given that customer service is likely one of their larger expenses when it comes to the operation of the game, adding in anything that will generate phone calls that they might have to actually address is not going to fly at Blizzard. The thought of people upset about WoWPLEX, likely because the selling price on their server is too low for their tastes, flooding the forums or calling up customer service looking for a refund is probably enough for Blizzard to steer clear of the idea, all the more so when they start seeing what happens when the Guardian Cub market starts to fall flat.
I can think of a few things that Blizzard might do to mitigate the market problem.
- They could break down the wall between horde and alliance and create a unified auction house per server
- They could a special cross-server auction house for WoWPLEX alone
- They could put a floor on the price of WoWPLEX
- They could make the actual real world price attractive enough that people would not mind if they could not sell it immediately
But those all require some changes on the Blizzard end
What do you think? Could Blizzard be successful with their own version of PLEX? What changes to the game do you think they would have to make?
And, probably most important, do you think Blizzard should pursue this sort of idea for WoW?
Blizzard Endorses the Transfer of Capital to the Proletariat October 11, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Blizzard, entertainment, EverQuest II, World of Warcraft.Tags: Companion Pets, Guardian Cub, PLEX, RMT
14 comments
Blizzard announced yesterday that their newest and cutest companion pet will not be bound to your account when you buy it from the Blizzard Store for $10.
This means you can turn around and sell it at the auction house for GOLD!!!
I can make you rich! Maybe...
Ostensibly, the reason for this is that Blizzard wants to allow people without the real world fiscal means (or the stubbornness to refuse to play the cash shop game) to be able to purchase the pet in-game… and to stop people scamming with bogus pet codes.
Since the introduction of the Pet Store, many players have been asking for ways to get the companions we offer there without having to spend real-world cash. By making the Guardian Cub tradable (much like the BoE mounts from the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game), players interested in the new pet will have fun, alternative in-game ways to get one. In addition to trading the pet, players can give the Guardian Cub as a gift to another character for a special occasion; guild leaders can use them to reward members for a job well done; and so on. We also hope this change will help reduce the number of incidents of scamming via trading for invalid pet codes.
Of course, for some in the community, this was a huge, “AHA, GOTCHA!” moment! The RMT alarms have been sounded!
Unfortunately, if this is Blizzard breaking down the doors and letting RMT run rampant, they aren’t doing a very good job of it.
In the continuum of cash shop MMOs, with LOTRO at one end, where Turbine (last I checked) doesn’t let you buy anything that can be resold on the auction house, and Rune of Magic where, the last time I played, you could simply list RMT currency for sale at the auction house for people to buy with the in-game only currency, this is a lot closer to the LOTRO end of the spectrum.
The first blush comparison is with PLEX, CCP’s own cash shop item that is the root of many a quickly realized stellar fortune. Both can be purchased for cash, both can be sold in the marketplace for in-game currency.
However, PLEX is a consumable. The market for PLEX is insatiable it seems, and the market price has slowly risen since it was introduced about two years back.
Companion pets, on the other hand, are… well… forever. You buy one and there it is, you have one. Blizzard has made the guardian cub a per character pet, as opposed to previous pets, which were per account, which meant once you bought one ALL of your characters, including any made going forward, had one. This might increase demand some. There will always be somebody rich in gold who will want one on every character.
But Blizzard has made the cub less attractive for people to buy outright for themselves… which pet would you spend $10 on, the one all of your characters get, or the one that only a single character gets… so I would guess that most people who are going to buy a cub are going to do so with the intent of reselling it, thus increasing the supply in the market.
It almost makes me wish I was still subscribed to WoW, just so I could go in and watch the behavior of this new guardian cub economy. (Somebody please do this? Gevlon? Anybody? I want a “Cub Watch” economic report.)
As a method to reduce fraud and to allow people access to companion pets via in-game currency, this seems like a reasonable, if unambitious plan.
As a sword in the heart of gold sellers, this will probably be a non-event. The in-game economy is too small on most servers to absorb many guardian cubs, especially on the downtrodden half of some servers, like the Horde side of Eldre’Thalas.
Frankly, EverQuest II Extended has a more open path to go from cash shop to in-game currency, and barely anybody screams about that. You can buy rare crafting materials for Station Cash and turn around and sell them on the market if you need some platinum quickly. Common thread – consumable.
When Blizzard is really serious about putting gold sellers out of business, they will follow CCP’s lead and put sellable game time in the in-game economy. That will close the loop and cut the gold sellers out.
Addendum: Blizzard, surprised as usual that anybody is upset about something they did, had this to say when accused of endorsing RMT with the new guardian cub:
TCG Loot card mounts like the Spectral Tiger have been BoE for a long time now (since patch 3.2), and that was and continues to be well-received, and as far as we’ve been able to tell hasn’t had any adverse impact to the game or economy – despite them selling for sometimes astronomical amounts of gold.
It’s potentially worth noting that no new gold is being introduced into the game’s economy with those mounts or the new Guardian Cub pet.
Our goal with the Guardian Cub is to provide alternative ways for players who don’t want to spend real money to add these pets to their collection. Even though this has been available a while now with the TCG mounts, this is obviously a new kind of way to deliver Pet Store pets, and we’re definitely interested to hear your feedback and ultimately see how this will play out.
Which is pretty much what they said in their original message. So they either think you cannot read (a pretty safe bet in quite a few cases) or they are demonstrating how to stay on message.
EVE Introduces a New Currency – Aurum May 27, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Microtransactions, PLEX
7 comments
I wondered why the clothing selections seemed so sparse when I was creating my avatar with the new EVE Online character creator.
There will soon be a lot more clothing choices, and they will be for sale.
CCP will be introducing a new currency into the game, Aurum, which will be used to buy things from a new in-game store.
The current plan is for this store to sell vanity items only. From the dev blog post:
There will be a store, and it will have all kinds of stuff for sale: clothes and accessories for your character, custom paint jobs or logo placement on your ships or a fishtank/stripper pole for your Captain’s Quarters. You’ll browse through the list of items available and, when you’re ready to make a purchase, you’ll use a new currency called Aurum (AUR).
You will use PLEX to buy this new currency.
But in the grand EVE tradition, anything purchased from the new store can be re-sold again on the open market for ISK, so you may be able to get your customizations that way, if you want them. Or you can just buy PLEX on the market. Either way, if you have the ISK, you won’t need to spend extra cash on this sort of thing.
But somebody will. Somebody has to buy the PLEX first, though judging from the supply on the market last I checked, there seems to be ample volunteers.
The store will be showing up in a few months, and CCP promises to move slowly on adding items to judge what the impact on the economy will be.
What would you like to see in the EVE Online vanity store?
EVE Online Screen Shot Contest Winners October 17, 2010
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: contest, pictures, PLEX, Screen Shots
23 comments
The time has come to announce the winners of the EVE Online Screen Shot Contest.
The top two entrants will each win a PLEX, a 30 day Pilot License EXtension, which will give them 30 days of game time… or around 330 million ISK if they decide to sell the PLEX in-game.
Another group of entries will each earn 10 million ISK for submitting the best picture for a given list of categories.
About picking the winners
I had 112 pictures to choose from, entered by 26 individuals.
It was not easy to choose. And the choosing was complicated by letting people enter five pictures, but then only allowing a single prize to go to any given person. Some people sent me pictures that were contenders in five different categories. Heck, you will see a few pictures that won that could easily have covered a couple of categories. Conflicts in with people being in more than one category caused me to scrap the Rookie Ship category, as the people who were contending for that had winners in other categories.
In the end, once I picked a winner, all the other shots from that person had to be set aside. So, aside from the two overall prizes, you might view the rest as the best picture that was qualified to win.
That said, there are some pretty awesome pictures on the list from a game that can really make you feel like you’re looking through a window into space.
Now on to the winners.
