Have TLPs made enough revenue yet to bring back old Freeport, Commonlands, North/South Ro, and Oasis?
Don't let the minority of the forum population fool you. There's not enough care from the playerbase to do this. Really has nothing to do with resources.
They make a couple changes each TLP bringing them closer to classic. I think the zone geometry is one of the more difficult changes for them to achieve and might be impossible for them to do with how terribly this ancient game code is setup.
Prathun has said its possible to do, but would take a ton of Dev time he didn't have. I wish they would because I think alot of people would really like it. Especially Freeport...commons isnt too bad cause its pretty close still...but Freeport would be really awesome.
Only way I'd support spending the dev time needed to bring back old Freeport is if the new TLP also made the choice to go with EFP instead of the tunnel for their "bazaar", just like Drinal did back in the day.
I think overwhelmingly in the handful of posts about this over the last 14 years, this is the sentiment. If they could just do Freeport that would be awesome. What I found most interesting is the reasoning why they havent. He said they have the files and architecture but it was having to recode all the zone lines for every zone that touches Freeport that would take so long to do. Interesting tidbit I thought.
It's possible to do but hard for them, because the TLP's run on the same architecture as the Live servers and you can't have that happen and have them be different. That's what I read from a Dev I believe, but I guess my memory could be flawed. Either way Prathun said it could happen, just they don't have the time/resources to devote to it. Which I think is a shame, because these TLP's rake in big cash injections for them. I know there was a Dev stating that they're not allowed to count the revenue from a Krono sale until that Krono is actually used, but that doesn't make sense to me. They've been paid for it, and it now resides in the hand of a player. It's a sale, with a receipt.
It's a bit of semantics for accounting. To be sure, they can use that money however they see fit, they are just using creative accounting to not count it as a "profit" until its redeemed, as its technically a liability until then (similar to gift cards). One interesting thought is that while those krono represent a technical liability, a large percentage of them will in fact lead to other purchases (In store, bags, race changes etc), so I'd actually think its a good thing for them to have a large balance of outstanding krono, even if an inevitable purchaser would take over that liability. New revenue recognition standard: accounting for gift cards. ... When a gift card is purchased, your company should not record revenue; instead, the purchase of the gift card is recorded as a liability because you have an obligation to provide services or goods at a later point in time.
That helps me understand it, thanks! Though I think it'd be a lot easier for a company that deals exclusively in digital assets to provide those services than say, a brick and mortar store selling physical items.
Difference is that there is no obligation to provide service for a Krono. If EQ shut down tomorrow, I doubt there'd be any claim by holders of Kronos on any assets left over from bankruptcy. And a Krono being used while they are still operating doesn't increase either their labor cost or their overhead at the time, nor does it reduce inventory like a gift card. So really Krono is pure profit once sold with no real liability to account for.
The liability is the opportunity cost, if someone uses a krono to pay a month’s sub, which is the only way they get consumed, then that person is not spending new cash on the sub for that month, they are basically redeeming a gift card that says ‘someone paid you already so give me my month of game time please’. Let’s say as a hypothetical that 50% of the player base uses krono each month to pay their sub and that nobody ever bought another krono. DPG would be getting 50% of the income monthly that they would have, while still providing services to 100% of the players. This leads to an interesting question which is when does the krono liability become so large and the current monthly income drop so much that it makes sense to let it die and not put out any more games under all access, but rather start a new game with a new krono?
Hearing that and also seeing first hand that multiple players on FV are literally sitting on thousands of krono….
Subscription based revenue isn’t as significant as you think it might be. It has to get split between the different studios. They generate multiples of subscription based revenue from all their marketplace items and bag sales.
That's not a liability though. It doesn't cost DB any more to provide service to 10K people a month than it does to provide service for 2K people per month. So the amount of people or characters they are staying open for each month is irrelevant. In fact, if you remove all cost for new development and only consider the cost of maintaining existing content and servers, the overhead would be quite low. But that overhead isn't reduced or increased in any meaningful way by drops or increases in the amount of current players. No inventory is lost which must be replaced. Its like saying someone who owns a new refrigerator is a liability for refrigerator sellers and manufacturers because they won't buy another one until the current one dies. Same thing with Krono. Except with Krono that isn't totally the same because unlike a refrigerator, a krono can also be used as a currency in a limited manner. So even if there were enough Kronos out there to cover everyone's sub costs for the next five years, people will still be buying them to trade for plat and gear.
I know nothing of how business works, but this to me just seems bass ackwards in terms of online digital goods. DPG's gets the revenue from the krono when it's bought. It makes no sense that they wouldn't have immediate access to the funds. I mean, if they wiped all the krono from all accounts, they still have the money and I'm fairly sure there is no legal recourse anybody can do about it because those digital items are already paid for. At least in my way of thinking, gift cards and the like are far different. They seem to operate more like a check, in that, it's a prescribed amount that the issuing company sells/or gives out for a set amount of service or product and they have the absolute right to set a redeemable expiration date for said gift card.
Unpopular opinion, but I hated the old Freeport. This probably due to the fact that I started on Faydwer for my first two characters and only ran through Freeport when I had to. Also, no maps back then. It sucked.
Isn't the only real nostalgia from old Freeport being the runs to bank for PP to seal a EC tunnel deal due to money weight, which isn't a game mechanic anymore? A lot used to grind guards there for exp too with n00bs fishing their helmets off the corpses, but I think that's a thing of the past too with how TLP's are set up now as well.
