Producer's Letter: Coming Right Up!

Holly, don't listen to the scrubs. All they do is whine and complain, tell you to hurry up, then whine and complain some more when things aren't perfect because it got rushed. Thanks for posting what little is ironed out, we adults are patiently looking forward to more info and a nice fat expansion.

Yeah an adult calling others scrubs. 16 year old "adult" eh?

Actual expansions definitely should require actual money. They put a lot of quality effort into those, even if they're not perfect.

In the case of AoD, the "feature pack" concept just didn't sell, so allowing people to eventually buy it with "triple station cash" probably saved a lot of customers from leaving. I would not have paid $40 for an AA cap increase. And in fact, nobody could buy it for station cash until well after its release, so only those who literally refused to buy it got any benefit from holding out.

Now that they say the next expansion is itemized with reforging in mind, that has to be treated like a core mechanic, which it is -- in multiple games, including eq2. Make reforging free, and sell unlockers for the other features, but include them for gold subscribers. Separate charges is what we pay the subscription to avoid.

This is why we can't have nice things around here.

It's a nice principle, but the micro transactions (if you can call $40 micro) are the reason that the sub can stay at $15/month. If it weren't for the SC market, the markup on Kronos, expac charges, etc. they'd probably be trying to hit us all for $40/month to keep the servers up. I personally don't mind a ding to the wallet for new content a couple of times a year as long as the servers stay up and SoE payroll gets made - for the three or four people they've kept at this point LOL.

If a lack of StationTrash items would collapse this game or cause 40 dollar subs, please explain how Eve-Online manages to keep on going at 15 bucks a month for 10 years now, has half a million subs, gives away expansions for free, and until approximately 2 years ago, did not have a cash shop?

You answered your own question. Eve has 500k+ subs. EQ2 has nowhere near that amount of subs. Which is why it's no longer a sub game, it's a f2p game with remnants of the sub model still left intact for the few who still want that option. For now.

I would just point out that EvE-Online has always been F2P and, like I pointed out, did not have a cash shop until very recently.

Somehow, they made it on just subs from the very beginning, giving away the expacs for free and not requiring RMT to keep the game afloat.

Imagine that.

EVEOnline has sold PLEX (equal to the Kronos) for MANY years, and that was what started their incredibly limited 'Cash Shop'. CCP also doesn't have the development load that other MMO's like EQ/WoW/etc.... have, they change ships every now and then and repeat the same system appearances MANY times, so they can afford to offer their expansions for free. I'd also like to point out that CCP has been increasing their costs across the board as have other games and have NEVER been F2P unless a player uses PLEX(which really isn't free). Going to a F2P format is what is keeping these games alive, case in point Blizzard is introducing a cash shop and still only really offering sub based accounts and look what that lack of evolvement has done for their business. Players have become too bored in general and often times too fickle to want to commit for long periods of time without having an opportunity to come back for nostalgia's sake. F2P offers gaming companies the opportunity to make the money they require to keep games going and to be attractive to those gamers who want to try games out and/or get back into their favourite games. F2P offers a lure, so to speak, and it's keeping 20yr old games like EQ alive, whereas games like WoW and Warhammer Online (yes, much more issues on that one) are literally dying off because they refuse to evolve as the gaming community demands.

Bleah. I dunno where I got F2P from, but that was a mistake on my part.

Non-RMT was what I was trying to convey. My bad.

Comes from spending a lot of time fighting the F2P forces, I'd imagine.

EvE has been RMT since YEARS before they even introduced the cash shop. Isk for cash, cash for Isk.

EVE Online is unique in that it is a SciFi Economic PvP game. It has no competitors and so cannot be used as a comparison for the glutted FRP MMO market.