Smedley on PS2 Monetization

If they have any PR sense they would not neglect their own official forum.

Adding to that, many vets are now buying new weapons and other content with stock piled certs. Weapons and cosmetics weren't enough, and no one bothered with implants either since they dropped so frequently. Currently, I am making ultra chargers from T2+T3 implants. Quite often I've gotten T3 implants drop too.

Apprently, some also confuse vertical progression with "grinding."

One of the main issues I see with Smed's talk about " monetization " is that it doesn't come with a talk about " direction " ...

What direction is the game going ?
What are the future short term and long term goals ?
What's planned for the next few months ?
etc
etc
etc

But we have nothing ... So Smed want's to " Monetize " on faith ..
Faith that the game is going to turn into what it should be ...

Well I'm sorry but " faith " isn't good enough ..

Give the players hard solid details and maybe just maybe they will see the worth in funding those details ...


( and tell us here not Reddit ya noob )

Heh, communication is definitely not a strong suit for SOE.

Did you notice the two 88ish MB patches in the last two days?

Did you wonder what they were for?

Did you look around for patch notes?

Don't worry.. you only have to look David Carey's twitter to find out that they were client crash hotfixes...

The directions is clear. It is regression.
From escaping from 3-death-for-a-quarter to purchasing video games you could play all you want, and the final fall back into pay-per-play arcade on your own computer disguised as a F2P.

The F2P are the fodder for the P2W players. SOE shears the sheep who P2W.
Yeah, the P2W aren't cool with their bling, they are just sleep to be fleeced.

Random Implant drops? Gotta catch them all?
Yeah, I know about random drops. I played a CCG or two.

How about USB scanners and you can purchase models of the vehicles and weapons you want to use and scan the code (of course, it can only be scanned on the internet and the code can only be used once) and you get a little, useless toy to look out 5 or 10 years from now when the game is shutdown or converted to a free-for-all like the original PlanetSide, or did they start selling things in original PlanetSide at this point?

You know PlanetSide is back out and, apparently, completely F2P with no Market Place - or, at least, so it was billed when they were getting ready to re-release it.

We will see.

PS2 isn't living up to its potential. The best things on the Roadmap, that people may well consider they already invested in, were consistently pushed back. Now it's all but abandoned while SOE funnel their resources into putting what we're already playing on the PS4, for little benefit to most of us. It's not really surprising people aren't confident in the on-going development they're paying for any longer. Or that players are leaving the game.

Asking what avenues of monetization would the players like should always be secondary to making a game that players want to spend money on. Hats and weapons don't really cost what people pay, yet they do so to support everything else.

That is, by all means have this discussion, but it feels almost insulting to do so without updating the Roadmap and making a start on delivering all those phase 2 and 3s.

I don't care what some guy says on reddit, it's not like it's on the official PS2 forum...

Furthermore, I've been saying for a while - the best way to motivate them to start making something good for the game is NOT to pay them money. As long as people pay, they have no reason to listen to community. It should hit them in the pocket before they listen.

I never played any of the Everquest games or DCUO, but I did play SWG and PS1 and can easily say that losing money never stopped SOE from making bad decisions.


On the flip side of that.. here I am more than a decade later still playing a Planetside game despite SOE's history...

I did pay for a bit because i thought they were actually improving it, but after a few months i realized that was a mistake and it wasn't worth supporting. it's OK for a free game, but not good enough for spending money on it.

All of their MMOS have sucked in my opinion. I have tried them. This was a first moderately entertaining game for me. However once you figure out the business model of sell x# of Overpowered gun units then nerf, rinse and repeat business model you have to start being a smart consumer. I'm definately not buying the implants. This game has become a "filler" game until something better comes along for my interests/tastes. They make a little bank off me therefore I feel the privledge is mine to vent/ give constructive criticism.

i agree. PS2 is not a game to play because it is good, it's a good time waste until one of the upcoming games is released. As such, spending money on PS2 in not even considered in principle.

I get that they have to make money. They wouldnt make PS2 if they didnt get something out of it ofcourse.
I just dont think they are very good at descision making when it comes to how they go about trying to get that money.

For the past 10+ years (that i have played their games) it seems like SOE sticks to one money making plan in their games, and that is to try and mend bad marketing mistakes and bad game design changes that people dont like (causing profits to drop because people leave) by resorting to shady grabs and milking and just ignoring the core problem completely.
So the whole thing spirals downwards where they get more and more agressive as more people leave, to try and make money.
Once the game has been milked dry, its shut down and they move on to the next.

Its happened before PS2, its happening now and will happen to the next game they release.
Unless someone over there goes "Maybe we should hire more people to try and figure out what we are doing wrong, and make a profit in the long run by spending more money now"
But i suspect the problem lies too high up the chain for any sort of "wake up call" to have any effect.

They also seem pretty bad at balancing. There is no "toning something down gently" and seeing how it performs for a few weeks.
Its either super OP, or so useless that nobody uses it.
Not only that, but they are so slow in recognizing bad balancing that people just get fed up and leave.
A little "We know X is broken and we are looking into ways to balance it", instead silence.
Im mainly looking at BFRs in PS1. Left alone and OP forever, 1 immortal mech to rule and dominate them all.
And finally balanced so that 1 guy with jammer grenades and a decimator can solo one head on.
And whats with these "phase 1" things that doesent leave phase 1. The resource phase hasent gone anywhere forever.
Whenever people say something about balance related to resources the usual answer is "its just phase 1, it will be balanced".
But you cant leave things "broken" in phase 1, expecting people to just deal with a half-way system for so long without getting fed up.
Then they try to balance things around phase 1 so that its not totally broken, instead of releasing phase 2, digging themselves deeper into what is quickly becoming a web of balance nightmare.
Then they scratch their heads wondering why their game doesent have players and dont make a profit.
Sometimes it seems like they dont even know why things needs balancing and just does something random.
Like the godsaw/butcher velocity/equip time "buff" they are going with. Because reasons, and higby thought it was cool.
And the Vulcan that desperatly needed some range (the only problem with it) but got the good 'ol soe godbuff.
Meanwhile in ZOE town. Not even acknowledgement

Also sometimes seems like you get conflicting information. It doesent help that information is spread out all over the internet.
Like some freakin scavange hunt for PS2 information buried in reddit posts, several twitters, facebooks, secret homepages and who know what else.
The fact that they boast about "great communication with the playerbase" is worrying, in that on their end everything seems fine.

There are tons more. I got 10 pages worth of stuff. But i cant be bothered really.
I probably come off as a ranting deuche, but this has been going on for over 10 years and i really want to see SOE games make it.
They usually start off cool and unique at release, until they do whatever it is they do wrong with their games.

That is my honest opinion on SOE money making practices and why they dont make more money and their games die off.

If they are actually interested in ways of making $$$'s and reducing "cert pools" this post is full of both.


Almost every idea in it is better at making $$$'s, reducing "cert pool" and not honking off customers than rentable implants.

EQ1 was a genuinely great game, certainly up to SoV and maybe SoL, and WoW basically owes everything to it.
EQ2 was a bit fuzzy to begin with (I don't think they knew what it should be or what EQ1 was by that point) and although it included a lot of great stuff with time, but.... well.....WoW..... it was never going to beat that Behemoth when it was released at pretty much the same time. In a world without WoW it probably would have been deemed a big success.

So I wouldn't say they really did badly there, but PS1 was like SWG in many ways, they seemed to flounder about a bit without direction. I'm convinced to this day that just halving the subscription cost of PS1 would have helped it massively (even if they had to put in a weekly playtime limit or something).

Really speaking they already are, I guess their issue with that is that it would be a one off buy (or at least a finite buy) where as what they want is an endless income stream (it seem to me rather like wanted the goose that lays golden eggs - you can have subscription or F2P, but wanting your cakes and trying to eat it is doomed to failure).

Yeah if cert storage is the "problem" genuinely then this is a very self-harming way of addressing it, let people "rent" titles, desireable/unique camo or other visuals, party packs, even (Vanu help us) gambling boxes.




But even then none of that is going to stop the full membership, full boost, full farmer cert gain!

Everybody calm down nothing to see here!

First of Planetside 2 is an uniqe experince you don´t get in any other game. None out there. They pulled of a new game concept more or less. It has its flaws and the endgame is not existing at all. But really look at other titels and the grind you have to do like WoT. Planetside 2 is in that case REALLY harmless.

Lets talk about the Implants which are nice to have but does it REALLY give you an advantage over the enemy. Tier 1 or 2 is normaly enough to give you an advantage and the things you want. Tier 3 and 4 are nice to have but no where pay to win since you can actually run them if you turn them of if not needed. Its not like Gold ammo like in WoT.

Most of our Outfitmembers sitting on a ******** of certs and have no clue what to do with them. The cert gain is insane in this game once you understand the gamemechanics.

I do understand that they need something that the certs are burning away otherwise it has no use for them to do new content. Everybody is buying new guns with certs and not with money and thats a problem for them. In other games you hit a certain barrier and you can´t break this without money. We don´t want that but I do see a need for them to bring the cert economy in line.

Other games you pay 50 bugs for and then 20 for each DLC to proceed in game or even be able to keep up with the online game (Battlefield 3-4) (Call of Duty aso).

i would go even so far that you can fill up the nanites with certs and make that economy based. Like the prices are higher when everybody needs them in alerts and lower in small fights depending how many are buying atm. The "extra nanite pool" is filled by the bases you do have.

Nanites and certs are to seperate atm they need to be combined. In the long run i would give the outfits a cert pool which every member could transfer its certs in and giving them the ability to outfit logistic tools like the gal and so on that platoonleaders can pull. And its customised by the outfit. Or buying camos for each member for an x period of time.

In any case the economy is totaly out of balance and it needs to be sorted and we do need to understand that.

This is what happens when they don't have a business plan/strategy to begin with. They're trying to double/triple/quadruple dip into the same things for revenue, where a smart business that knows what you're they're doing will have a single main means of getting revenue.

Membership, boosters and even now cosmetic items (event hats) all serve the same purpose - shortcut the cert grind.

If you want to make your in-game currency (certs) be the big money draw, then you can't sell the same things they unlock as your virtual games currency (SC) unlocks and expect people to spend money on the same thing twice. They're either going to pay for shortcuts, or buy the item outright... that's a given.

If I have some change sitting in my pocket - I'm likely going to put it into the vending machine, instead of swiping my credit card. Its something so fundamental and simple that SOE doesn't even get. They want to double charge people instead, by making it so the vending machine only takes a prepaid topped up credit card they issue you, and not allow you to use coins you've already gotten from them.

You actually see this being used in some of the event items... you either pay for it outright (with SC) or grind for it (but there's no shortcuts, they are tied to directive do X things).

With implants, they clearly want to use this to slowly reduce the supply of in-game currency that some players have, thus the tweaked rates, higher level implants, etc. The key to their implant strategy is not necessarily getting immediate monetary gains, but to take away/back/reduce the value of something they already sold to people previously.

Its just greed now, because they didn't have a proper defined business plan to monetize the game correctly from the get go. Had they gone with cosmetic items with SC, and sold only a single form of boosting/grind reduction, they'd be in much better shape than having some of the top players with thousands of certs while everyone else below is struggling.

That's the thing, I'm unconvinced F2P is a sustainable business model (it certainly gets a glut of cash to begin with, but that of course isn't the same thing - subscription did the same thing), but most certainly a F2P model where you try to sell everything, then panic and try to regain control of it by double or triple dipping is never likely to work long-term.