Hi, I've bought Mercenary slots on other accounts, but I don't remember the price being so high before. I seem to recall ( as does my account history for the ones i bought them on) that the price used to be 5 slots for 2500 points. Right now the price is showing at 4000 points. Which would mean that if you subbed to buy, even with the all access discount, that it would still be 100 points more than previous. So my question is, Why DBG? Why did you see fit to do this? I mean, I would have paid the 2500 for 5 slots like I had done in the past, but now? Sorry, I'll keep my money. I'm glad I bought it on the 2 main accounts, but I won't be buying at this price for the 2 ftp / silver accounts I was looking at. You want to know about your customer base and our reactions. Here's one of them. if you increase your prices for no good reason, we'll decrease our spending "for that reason." Please be aware of this next time you are considering such actions. Especially with all the problems as of late, and just blatant increase of prices. We pay, in 1 fashion or another, to play this game. if you make it so the cost to play/enjoy ourselves weigh more than the actual enjoyment factor, you will see a decline in sales ( IE income).
Economics. This is a business, after all. There is a balance that is struck between number of customers and the price of an item or service. As the price increases, your customer base decreases. Ideally the increase in price covers the loss of a customer. The price will keep increasing as long as the revenue does as well.
Hmm my marketplace shows 3 slots for 2500 and 5 slots for 4000. There is a sale right now of 20% off so the 2500 ones are 2000 and the 4000 are 3200. So not sure where it would be 100 more than what you remember it being previously with discount which would have been 10% without sale. 10% of 4000 = 400 = 3600 which is 1600 more than what you remember. But right now if you paid 4000 (2 of the 3 slots on sale) you would get 6 slots for 4000 so you could double it. But that wouldn't help because you are limited to 5 extra merc slots when buying them thru marketplace. Perhaps you only bought 3 the first time? Dunno I get my extra slots thru the quests. That's free.
yeah, that was a typo on the 100 points, should have been 1100(4000 minus 400(10%) being 3600, 1100 more than 2500, the original amount)(however even at the current sale price of 20% off, that's still 3200, so 700 points more, it's like all those stores that place ads for a sale but increase prices to fool customers). Now I have 6 slots on all my toons on my 2 all access accounts, with some toons opened further with hero's barracks and the 1 slot that was through a promotion. which means 5 paid. I had paid 2500 points for it. at the time the only thing that was more expensive, point wise, was Heroic characters, at 3500( expansions and Landmark were in $$, not points). The price has definitely increased. As to the economics argument. The Merc slots have been around for about 9 years(SoD era, or close to). They have paid for themselves in that time ( development costs). The rule of Commerce is Cost to fit Demand. When demand is low, cost decreases. When Demand is high, cost increases.Again, these have been around close to 9 years.once bought they do not expire. So inevitably the demand is low due to the majority of accounts already having the feature purchased. Now, I can see your point. In this example they are trying to keep revenue up by increasing the cost for those that will want to still buy it, as an offset against all the accounts that already have it; which is your Lost customer example. Though I think most would agree with me this is not an intelligent move. All it's succeeded in doing, at least in my case, was making the purchase prohibitive for myself on my accounts that I was looking to purchase the feature for. (Only other thing I can think of in regards would be inflation to value of currency and the economy, however that's usually due to shipping costs or overhead. As for this game, they keep the overhead pretty low ( remember the people they let go? as well as other cutbacks) and there is no shipping costs as it's all online. Now for Hardware costs. Hardware continues to decrease in price all over the market, for example: Price of Ram per mb 20 years ago compared to today. Today's price is at a massively small fraction of the cost it was 20 years ago. That's the trend of hardware.And we all are well aware that DBG / SOE recycle(d) servers and hardware between servers many times over. They stated as such numberous times.)
