Smedley is the new playerauctions

[Murgos]

You're 18 and just out of high-school, no real skills or talents but you do have an EQ X account.  Sure, before you might of stuck some of your loot, that just would have gotten sold to vendors anyway, up for auction to net you a few extra bucks for the weekend, enough for a pizza maybe, but now your parents want you to get your own place and move out and they are harping on you to 'get a job'.

Well looking for a job when you have no skills and probably no car sucks, getting turned down for the decent $9 and hour and up retail positions has got to hurt so you spend more and more time catassing away the pain.  You start putting everything up for auction and eyeing the dollar per hour value of farming certain areas, sure other areas may net you a big sale but the odds are against you and you will need help for those encounters, depressingly the areas you can solo efficiently probably only offer up 3 or 4 bucks an hour but hell, after a few days/week of that you got a hundred bucks!  Woot, now you can go see a movie with your friends again.

Now the serious farming begins.   15, 16 or even more hours a day of whacking the same mob that consistantly drops a piece of auctionable loot, day in and day out, 'punching the clock' you joke to the friends in your guild (some of whom are doing the same thing) when you log in.  You tell yourself you have to go on the raids with your guild, you gotta earn those attendance points and a chance at uber loot even though you are losing income during that period, the shot at one decent item a month would almost double your income or at the very least if nodrop will make your farming more efficient, besides, thats your 'free' time.  Time you can relax and don't gotta stick so close to your spawn schedule.  Sure, some of the guildies grumble about how you just put everything you get up for auction and don't use it to 'help the guild' but mostly they understand that you need the cash.  You probably haven't seen a real girl in a while but "Lady Che'male" chats you up often and maybe some day you two will meet.  Life sucks but it's tolerable, hell all you are doing is playing a game, am i rite?

Time passes and here you are a year later, you haven't hardly been out of your room in months but your paying your parents rent and helping with the bills, sure your lucky to make $600 a month even putting in 95 or a 100 hours a week, but it's easy money right?  You still have no marketable skills and the time that you could have spent learning the retail ropes at minimum wage so you could look for a job with a big chain with benifits and a small chance at maybe even being assistant manager someday has been flushed into EQ hell.

Crap job, no life, no prospects, no incentive to change.

----

How much you want to bet the scenario above plays out with rather disturbing frequency once this goes live?  I'm sure it's happened a few times already but if the stigma of buying and selling your 'phat lewts' goes away I am positive that this sort of thing will become all too common.

[Krakrok]

Crap job, no life, no prospects, no incentive to change.

How exactly is "assistant manager of a retail store" a better alternative? At some point in the future the only export the US is going to have is intellectual "property" which "virtual items" are slowly starting to become.

[MaceVanHoffen]

One more point to add on the silliness of Mark Jacob's article...

I think that not only supporting the sale of in-game characters, items and currency, but also taking a 'cut' of those sales, is not only a mistake but one of the worst decisions in the history of the MMORPG industry

Will there be a service fee charge if I wish to transfer a character to a new account?

Yes, the credit card that is on file from your source account will be charged a $40.00 transfer fee. Once you have verified the appropriate information with a support representative, your credit card will be billed and the transfer will be queued for processing.

Wow, good job on completely missing the point.

The difference between what Mythic and SOE are doing is intent.  SOE is intending to facilitate sale of in-game items for cash, something that Mark Jacobs is justifiably on about.  Mythic provided the character transfer system to enable characters on the same account to play together ... you know, what they said their intent was.

The fact that you can use Mythic's system to do what SOE's system can do is a tangent, and is stretching the facts to fit your viewpoint. Do you honestly think Mythic's system allows the easy transfer of items between characters in the same manner as SOE's, which is as simple as eBay?  The fact that you have to transfer an entire character doesn't seem to be a factor?  That you have to have a paid account with no characters on it to receive the transfer?  That with SOE you get a web interface (which is thus scriptable), yet with Mythic you have to do the transfer in-game?  You can already sell in-game items in any MMO that allows two characters to trade, which last I checked, both DAoC and EQ allow you to do.  In one case, that's now being officially sanctioned.  In another case, it isn't.  Two completely different things.

Look, you're obviously of the opinion that selling in-game items for real-world cash won't affect you.  Great, that's a valid opinion.  But it's silly to construct specious arguments to say that a character transfer system is the same as brokering item deals.

[Merusk]

For those who said, "It's only EQ2, what's the BFD"

 They're already thinking of the other games in their catalog.

Whee!

[Strazos]

But no one cares about Galaxies anyway. This fact was already found in the other SWg thread.

[Murgos]

Crap job, no life, no prospects, no incentive to change.

How exactly is "assistant manager of a retail store" a better alternative?

Than what I described?  Yeah, I think assistant manager would be about an order of magnitude better.  YMMV.

[Tale]

But no one cares about Galaxies anyway. This fact was already found in the other SWg thread.

You should care about Galaxies. Because on May 5, that game as you know it will end. The guts of the game is being replaced with a level-based forced-grouping traditional MMOG model. Soon after that it will be rebranded and relaunched as a "new" game: Episode III Rage of the Wookiees, to co-incide with the Star Wars Episode III movie. If that works, it could bring in a helluva lot of players and therefore potential Station Exchange users.

[Der Helm]

The guts of the game is being replaced with a level-based forced-grouping traditional MMOG model.

About time.

Edit: /sarcasm

[Soln]

But no one cares about Galaxies anyway. This fact was already found in the other SWg thread.

You should care about Galaxies. Because on May 5, that game as you know it will end. The guts of the game is being replaced with a level-based forced-grouping traditional MMOG model. Soon after that it will be rebranded and relaunched as a "new" game: Episode III Rage of the Wookiees, to co-incide with the Star Wars Episode III movie. If that works, it could bring in a helluva lot of players and therefore potential Station Exchange users.

it is off topic, but SWG right now is pretty much like watching a car wreck in slow motion, except of course when you're simultaneously inside it as well

[HaemishM]

I love Smed's response to Jacobs.

Unsanctioned virtual property auctions are now rampant, and will continue to grow whether or not publishers implement their own auction sites. Every MMO company has to assess the needs of its own player base. It is clear to us that we have many loyal and honest players who simply don't have the time to take multiple characters through the game's higher levels of play and want a sanctioned, secure means to broaden their play experience. Increasingly, our customer service department has had to bear the brunt of futily attempting to assist these players when they are cheated by unsecure transactions. Station Exchange will enable these honest players to use an auction service without concern that they will be scammed.

Let me translate:

Instead of actually, you know, altering the game so that it doesn't take goboodles of useless hours grinding and camping in order to get anywhere, and thus helping all the casual players, including the ones who don't want to spend cash on virtual nothings, we'd rather keep the game as lazy and lackluster as it is now. Only, we'll make MORE money because you retards will continue to play boring, grinding ass gameplay to get the sword of whoopty, AND you'll pay us transaction fees to BUY the sword of whoopty from some other useless catass. WE R TEH WIN! MY C0rVeTt3 needs new wheels, little man!

Fucker. You admit to a flaw in your game play, but instead of making a better game, you make a better cash register.

I still am in favor of doing this, because it means companies can make more money at the games they create, as well as shortcut the little cocksuckers like IGE who want to leech off of others work.

[tazelbain]

I still am in favor of doing this, because it means companies can make more money at the games they create, as well as shortcut the little cocksuckers like IGE who want to leech off of others work.

Maybe this could advance to the point where the game is FREE (not like Project Pyramid Scheme, real free) and the company makes money on transfer fees.  Maybe in 5 years when MMOGs pricing starts getting cutthroat.

I have been playing a bit on Puzzle Pirate's Doubloon server.  I am beginning to see the merits alternative payment schemes.  If I am paying a monthly fee, I don't want people to be able to grease the wheels with cash. I also don't want to deal with people who are operating under a profit motive.  It just drags the game down.  But if I am not paying a monthly fee, I am open to other possibilities.

I need to stop using the word "I" so much.

Edit: grammar

[MaceVanHoffen]

I am beginning to see the merits alternative payment schemes.  If I am paying a monthly fee, I don't want people to be able to grease the wheels with cash. I also don't want to deal with people who are operating under a profit motive.  It just drags the game down.  But if I am not paying a monthly fee, I am open to other possibilities.

You hit the nail on the head, phrasing my own objection much better than I did.

[HaemishM]

I still am in favor of doing this, because it means companies can make more money at the games they create, as well as shortcut the little cocksuckers like IGE who want to leech off of others work.

Maybe this could advance to the point where the game is FREE (not like Project Pyramid Scheme, real free) and the company makes money on transfer fees.  Maybe in 5 years when MMOGs pricing starts getting cutthroat.

It's going to take less time than that. Should Guild Wars be successful, all hell will break loose on pricing schemes. We're already starting to see some of it, with AO's free for a year thing. The generation of cash cow recurring revenue is a finite market, and eventually, some one will actually return with a "per-use" pricing scheme, as well as others like "time-limited" pricing.

[Stephen Zepp]

I still am in favor of doing this, because it means companies can make more money at the games they create, as well as shortcut the little cocksuckers like IGE who want to leech off of others work.

Maybe this could advance to the point where the game is FREE (not like Project Pyramid Scheme, real free) and the company makes money on transfer fees.  Maybe in 5 years when MMOGs pricing starts getting cutthroat.

It's going to take less time than that. Should Guild Wars be successful, all hell will break loose on pricing schemes. We're already starting to see some of it, with AO's free for a year thing. The generation of cash cow recurring revenue is a finite market, and eventually, some one will actually return with a "per-use" pricing scheme, as well as others like "time-limited" pricing.

What's interesting (and I do believe you, don't get me wrong), is that the subscription fee is actually one of the "best" pricing models for the consumer around. Think about it: 1 year at 15 a month is $174. Add in the base price of the game, say $50, and you're under $225 for an entire year of being able to play whenever you want, for as long as you want.

Now, take a look at how many single player games with < 1 day's worth of "content" that people buy over the course of a year...that's a huge chunk of change for many people.

Obviously there are other factors, but it still is a very nice consumer model for pricing, assuming you enjoy the game itself.

[AOFanboi]

Maybe this could advance to the point where the game is FREE (not like Project Pyramid Scheme, real free) and the company makes money on transfer fees.  Maybe in 5 years when MMOGs pricing starts getting cutthroat.

So, is "increase revenue" then "adjust droprates on items based on market prices"? Should rare/expensive items drop more often for players who sell a lot?

The problem with that model is that no longer is every player equal (with their monthly fee), they are "employees" of the game company, contributing to its bottom line actively not passively.

[Yegolev]

Obviously there are other factors, but it still is a very nice consumer model for pricing, assuming you enjoy the game itself.

The main other factor is how much time I have to put into it.  If I cannot get a complete gaming experience out of, let's say, the 40 hours I might get from a single-player within one month, which is ~$65, it costs me more when compared to $50 on something like HL2.  If you get my math, that is.  You have to assume that the player is going to dedicate a larger-than-normal amount of time to this game, which of course is pretty likely.  I'm not arguing with you, but it's somewhat more than just enjoying the game, IMO.

[HaemishM]

The subscription model is not the most consumer-friendly, IMO. First, most consumers are completely resistant to that pricing scheme. The reason for that is the second thing, subscriptions force players to play the game. If you are paying a monthly fee to be able to play the game, you are going to feel an obligation to "get your money's worth," and as such, you'll tend to play it with more fervor than you would a one-shot game. This leads to catassing, quick burnout, and playing not to have fun, but because you feel you have to. Thirdly, it gives the consumer a feeling of entitlement (I can play as long as I want, I can do whatever I want) about their playtime. Add on that hardcore users are much less profitable on a per account basis than casual users, and you have a mixed-up paradoxical business scheme. You have to keep people playing for long periods of time, but the longer they are on, the more they cost you in bandwidth.

Throw on top of the sub fee that it's not nearly high enough to adequately service an MMOG, which is also not consumer-friendly, and the subscription model is a REALLY BAD ONE. However, the market is used to it by now, and tends to not know what's best for itself. It needs a killer app with a reasonable pricing scheme (or different pricing scenarios) to shock it out of its complacence.

If you could pay one of 3 tiered prices for WoW based purely on your weekly play time, would you? Say for the first 20 hours, you paid only $6.95, up to 40 hours a week, you paid $10.95 and then if you played over 40 hours, you'd pay the full $14.95; you'd also have the option of paying the full price all the time, no matter how much time you averaged that month. Would you bite on that one, knowing that if you got an extra day off and played that extra hour or two, you'd have to pay more (but not more than you currently are)?

[Yegolev]

If you could pay one of 3 tiered prices for WoW based purely on your weekly play time, would you? Say for the first 20 hours, you paid only $6.95, up to 40 hours a week, you paid $10.95 and then if you played over 40 hours, you'd pay the full $14.95; you'd also have the option of paying the full price all the time, no matter how much time you averaged that month. Would you bite on that one, knowing that if you got an extra day off and played that extra hour or two, you'd have to pay more (but not more than you currently are)?

Considering that I can count on one hand the number of times I have run out of rest bonus in WOW since release, yes.  I'd be all over a pay-per-play sort of scheme, even one like what you describe.  What would work best for me would be a per-minute scheme like a long-distance phone call.  I can see being in a dungeon when someone says "Dude, I gotta log or else I'm paying another four dollars".  Or just logs out, you know how these MMORPG fuckers are.  If it was per-hour or per-minute you won't see dickwads dodging the breakpoints and sending me to a graveyard.

For catass motherfuckers, the per-month is great.  The big mystery to me is exactly why MMORPG suits desire to pad their ranks with botting catasses in the first place.  Seems like the thing to do is collect your sub and somehow keep your players from logging in.  Either you create a steady flow of broken patches or you design your game to attract the casual player.  Really, if I can figure this shit out, why can't greedy turds like the Smed understand this?

[Stephen Zepp]

Haemish--not going to argue one the points you made, except for one:

Your "prices per hour" are amazingly wrong. Someone else mentioned "HL2" for 40-ish hours total, that's a dollar an hour let's say?

But you want to offer 20 hours of gameplay per week (80 hours a month) for $6.95? Not gonna happen--especially since as you've already said, $15 a month doesn't do shit for paying for infrastructure + Customer Support in any case.

And compared to how games (and some still do) get billed in the past, $15 a month beats the hell out of $3 an hour.

Turn it back around again: At $15 a month, you are basically only able to buy 1 game a quarter, or 4 in an entire year.

[HaemishM]

I was working off the thinking that you can't increase the maximum sub price beyond what is already being paid. Thus, the highest you'd have to pay would be $14.95 a month, no more than you already do. It would be offered as an incentive to draw in more customers who wouldn't fit in the unprofitable catass realm. It was also a set of numbers pulled completely out of my ass.

I think we're more likely to see more offerings like SOE's Station Pass than we are offerings that cost less based on time-spent. Also, $3 an hour is no longer being used in things like MMOG's because it's insane. It was then, it's just there wasn't anything else like it. If you are going to move towards a per-time based scheme, you have to think micro-amounts per hour, i.e. 18 cents an hour or something. I get that from thinking the "average player" plays 20 hours a week, and you want a 4-week period to total up to the same price as a regular subscription, so $14.95/80 hours a month = around 18 cents.

It could be a billing nightmare. But once that type of billing is in place, the type of per-item transaction fees we're talking about could be added in easily enough.

[El Gallo]

If you could pay one of 3 tiered prices for WoW based purely on your weekly play time, would you? Say for the first 20 hours, you paid only $6.95, up to 40 hours a week, you paid $10.95 and then if you played over 40 hours, you'd pay the full $14.95; you'd also have the option of paying the full price all the time, no matter how much time you averaged that month. Would you bite on that one, knowing that if you got an extra day off and played that extra hour or two, you'd have to pay more (but not more than you currently are)?

Isn't 20 hours per week the median playtime from EQ?  Something tells me I read that somewhere before.  Tiered pricing would be more like: 6.95 for 0-5 hours per week; 10.95 for 5-15 hpw; 15.95 for 15-25 hpw; 20.95 for 25-35 hpw and 25.95 for 25+ hpw.

Really, someone needs to make a game that is good enough that they can charge whatever it takes to get enough content out there to make me happy.  I am sick of paying 15.95 to not have enough to do.  I'd spend 100 a month if they actually had high quality new content every week so I wouldn't have to recycle shit.  It would also keep (some of) the 13 year olds away.  Then again, content creation should be based on the company's overall income from the game, not the per user income, so Blizzard should be giving me something close to that already.

[tazelbain]

I think the big flaw with the subscription model is it forces all, but the most hardcore, to choose one game or another.
A good pricing scheme would not punish people for being inactive.

I am probably going to cancel my COH account, because for time being my interest has waned.  I would like to play the game again in the future, but I can't see myself paying 15 bucks a months to hold my characters so I can play again in 8 months.  Nor do I see myself re-penning my account, if I have to re-do all my Heroes.

My solution is to charge a monthly "keep the lights on fee" + an hourly charge that's capped. So you are being charged 2 to 20 depending depending your usage.

What I like about the Doubloon server is the game is playable without spending money, but there are plenty of reasons to spend money and I can take a break from it for a while I am not spending any money.  But who knows if its profitable.  Kudos to Three Rings for trying something new without betraying the spirit of game.

[Stephen Zepp]

I was working off the thinking that you can't increase the maximum sub price beyond what is already being paid. Thus, the highest you'd have to pay would be $14.95 a month, no more than you already do. It would be offered as an incentive to draw in more customers who wouldn't fit in the unprofitable catass realm. It was also a set of numbers pulled completely out of my ass.

I think we're more likely to see more offerings like SOE's Station Pass than we are offerings that cost less based on time-spent. Also, $3 an hour is no longer being used in things like MMOG's because it's insane. It was then, it's just there wasn't anything else like it. If you are going to move towards a per-time based scheme, you have to think micro-amounts per hour, i.e. 18 cents an hour or something. I get that from thinking the "average player" plays 20 hours a week, and you want a 4-week period to total up to the same price as a regular subscription, so $14.95/80 hours a month = around 18 cents.

It could be a billing nightmare. But once that type of billing is in place, the type of per-item transaction fees we're talking about could be added in easily enough.

Making some "straight out of my ass" guestimates:

--approx 50% of the players play less than 20 hours a week.
--roughly 20% of the players are "catasses" that would return the same amount of revenue as the current model
--you have 10,000 current subscribers

That gives you $150,000 a month revenue (NOT profit) with the fixed subscription fee, and $98,000 a month with a tiered structure (and only $70,000 a month guaranteed revenue if all players play the minimum amount that month).

That's a loss of $52,000 a month simply to move to this new revenue model, assuming that the numbers above are close approximations.

For every additional customer, you'll be only adding $9.80 additional revenue average, round that off to $10. You'd need to add another 5,200 customers (or more than half of your current subscriber base) just to break even.

Personally, I don't think a new subscriber model is going to increase your subscriber share by 52%.

NOTE: My numbers may be wrong, it's been easily 20 years since I've done a problem like this!



Complicated math here (for me anyway!), but I think that implies that you'd have to increase your subscription numbers by what, 500% to break even?

Note: it took me forever to run the numbers, and Haemish posted some possible better numbers afterwards--those might work a bit better!

[HaemishM]

You couldn't be charged less than the base ($6.95), even if you play 0 hours, because it's still a subscription service.

Probably the best way to implement this thing to an existing MMOG is by bundling it with a price increase. Since the price would be going up anyway, keep the lowest tier at only a few dollars off of the old price, make the median price what is was before, and make the catasses pay more.

But, of course, this type of pricing scheme would really need to be built into the plan from the ground up, like PVP, in order to get accurate numbers for what you need to be profitable.

[Stephen Zepp]

You couldn't be charged less than the base ($6.95), even if you play 0 hours, because it's still a subscription service.

Probably the best way to implement this thing to an existing MMOG is by bundling it with a price increase. Since the price would be going up anyway, keep the lowest tier at only a few dollars off of the old price, make the median price what is was before, and make the catasses pay more.

But, of course, this type of pricing scheme would really need to be built into the plan from the ground up, like PVP, in order to get accurate numbers for what you need to be profitable.

Given taz's concept of a "keep me alive" fee, and/or your min subscriber fee for zero hours per month, I could actually see this working, given the proper pricing structure. At a minimum you'd have those folks that never play at all but keep their accounts alive because "maybe I will later", which is a nice cost-less revenue stream to be sure.

[schmoo]

I think the big flaw with the subscription model is it forces all, but the most hardcore, to choose one game or another.
A good pricing scheme would not punish people for being inactive.

I am probably going to cancel my COH account, because for time being my interest has waned.  I would like to play the game again in the future, but I can't see myself paying 15 bucks a months to hold my characters so I can play again in 8 months.  Nor do I see myself re-penning my account, if I have to re-do all my Heroes.

You don't need to be subscribed to CoH to retain your characters, they aren't going to delete them.

The monthly subscription fee model has a big advantage over other pricing schemes - it's familiar and comfortable. You know exactly how much you will be paying every month.  People are inherently conservative in the aggregate; they like comfortable certainty.  Which is not to say that alternate price models can't work, just that the monthly fee will always be around.

[Yegolev]

As long as we don't confuse a model that is supposedly good for the game and one that is good for the customer, we can keep this conversation logical.  Seems to me that we agree the current monthly fee system generates money hats.  This is only good for the [non-catass] customer if the money is put to good use in making the game better.

Pricing?  I pay about $68 per month for my DirecTV subscription and I don't even get HBO/Skinemax/Blowtime.  My water bill is more than my WoW sub.  You don't want to know what my power bill is.  I'm completely behind paying $29.95 per month for a PWG if it cuts down on the retards, bugs and lack of content/service.  Chicken and egg, though.

[Hoax]

Not to mention cell phones the fucking things cost $40/mo if you dont want a re-re plan.  Seriously give me unlimited nights/weekends and 100min anytime and I'll be a-ok.  Because I'm not some shit-fuck assclown who has to have the goddamn thing plugged into my ear 24/7 just so I can recap my every waking moment to anyone who will fucking listen.

Considering how few people pay for multiple mmog's as it is, they could get away with $25/mo but think about the BITCHING if anybody encountered a bad bug, or a server crashed or heaven fucking forbid their was a rollback.  There's a guarenteed way to make the WoW boards look downright civil/sane.

[tazelbain]

Surely if companies are raking in cash hand over fist, there is no need to change.  But that model kinda relies on your game being a hit.  Maybe AC2 will stay on life-support forever, but its not making any real money.  More and more games are going find themselves in that position and maybe people will begin to look for a revenue model that is more part-time player friendly.

Look at SWG, the game had a ton of subscriptions but the price point was high.  It was very easy to hit the cancel button, especially when the new shiny game comes out.  They had a massive drop in subscriptions.  With a flexible payment system, the cancel button is more difficult hit.

Schmoo, still if I wanted to play CoH just one day a month, the monthly sub pretty much forces me to quit because I sure ain't paying 5 dollars an hour to play CoH. About predictability, thats why all of us suggest some sort of cap.  Are you really going to be pissed when the bill you are expecting to be 15 dollars is really only 3 because you only in a hand full of hours last month?

If you had a flexable payment system, you'd never need to have a win-back program because EVERY patch would be one.  No one would ever really need to "quit".

[MaceVanHoffen]

If you had a flexable payment system, you'd never need to have a win-back program because EVERY patch would be one.  No one would ever really need to "quit".

I think the pull for most gamers isn't the subscription plan.  It's the social aspect.  Players make friends in a game like EQ where you're forced to work together, and they're loathe to give up those friends.  That's the driving force in most MMOs, and is the real reason behind such inane mechanics as enforced grouping.

Make players a part of a tight-knit community, even if they're bound together by hatred of the game, and they won't leave no matter what your pricing plan is.  The games players leave fall into one of two categories:  (1) they are so craptastic that a community doesn't get a chance to form (hi there, AO), or (2) the game doesn't force you to group and thus you have no need to form a community (I'm looking at you, CoH).  Players will eventually leave, certainly.  To quote Fight Club, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate of everyone drops to zero."  But that's a very, very long timeline.  Long enough to recoup initial development costs and plunge headlong into the next game that uses addiction mechanics.

A pay-per-use only hurts the developers, since players can be relied upon to keep those subscriptions active to log in and chat once a month.  That's why you won't see anything but subscription plans for a long time to come.  I don't think there's any trend to the contrary.  It's just that crappy games are desparate for subscribers at the moment.  We're seeing a local minima, if you will.

[Stephen Zepp]

I've said this in other threads, but at least in the business to business sphere, transaction based revenue just wasn't what it was cracked up to be. Some businesses do well at it, but in general it died a quick death.

What's ironic is that somehow this mentality flips substantially in certain situations. I'm an Independent Contractor, but no matter what cost savings I offer for a particular project, most organizations want to pay me hourly instead of a fixed bid for the project. It's not always the case, but for the most part it works that way, even though it winds up costing most organizations a hell of a lot more money in the long run.

I personally have not witnessed anyone that did a double take at the subscription model for online games, so I can't really say what the majority opinion really is. 5 years ago sure, it was a huge surprise to people ("you mean I have to keep paying???"), but the market is aware of the concept now, and I think that it will be resistant to other mechanisms for quite a while...but hell, who knows until someone does it and gives us some data to see how it works!

[schmoo]

Schmoo, still if I wanted to play CoH just one day a month, the monthly sub pretty much forces me to quit because I sure ain't paying 5 dollars an hour to play CoH.

Sure, but that's not what you said.

About predictability, thats why all of us suggest some sort of cap.  Are you really going to be pissed when the bill you are expecting to be 15 dollars is really only 3 because you only in a hand full of hours last month?

If I've gotten used to paying $5/month and then I suddenly get a $15 (or $25 or whatever) bill because I played a lot more one month, I would tend to be annoyed, yes, even though I have no logical right to be annoyed, and I would likely blame SOE or whoever rather than my own catassery.  People do not always behave in logical ways (that's a generic "I" representing the average player, not me personally).

[MaceVanHoffen]

Probably the best way to implement this thing to an existing MMOG is by bundling it with a price increase. Since the price would be going up anyway, keep the lowest tier at only a few dollars off of the old price, make the median price what is was before, and make the catasses pay more.

That paragraph got me to thinking:  What if developers began to charge players based on how much trouble they cause for the game developer(s)?  Not that you would say that out loud, just that time-tiered pricing structures are effectively doing that.

A catass knows every damn thing about a game, even things the devs don't know (or refuse to believe, but that's another story).  So, a catass costs a dev house more because:  (1) he exposes what are not exactly bugs, but rather deeper flaws in the game that most players don't find and that the devs are forced to fix because they become common knowledge, (2) he is logged in to the game more hours per month than the average player, that being the definition of a catass, and (3) he is often in the vocal minority on messageboards and the like, giving your game bad press, and (4) he consumes content voraciously, often days or weeks after it's been launched.

In contrast, a truly casual gamer (1) doesn't know deeper game flaws, at least not from personal experience, (2) occupies fewer server resources due to less time online, (3) lurks and rarely posts on public messageboards (nevermind guild or personal ones) about game problems, preferring to discuss them IRL, and (4) may not ever experience all the game's content, but continues to play as if he would eventually.

The catass is just a more expensive player.  So why not use a time-tiered pricing structure to make a catass pay more?  It sounds like social engineering, and it probably is.  But this might be an alternate pricing structure that game devs would go for, and one that would have most of us pay less.

[tazelbain]

Sure, but that's not what you said.

Sure, I just didn't want my general point to be ignored because there was a flaw in my specific example, so I cited another example.

If I've gotten used to paying $5/month and then I suddenly get a $15 (or $25 or whatever) bill because I played a lot more one month, I would tend to be annoyed, yes, even though I have no logical right to be annoyed, and I would likely blame SOE or whoever rather than my own catassery.  People do not always behave in logical ways (that's a generic "I" representing the average player, not me personally).

Welll, shoot.  MMOGs wouldn't get any where if completely understood by the playerbase was a requirement.  Any plan, discussed in this thread so far, would less complex than the average wireless phone bill.

[Zane0]

This is a silly distinction I know, since no one really cares about AO, but whatever:

(1) they are so craptastic that a community doesn't get a chance to form (hi there, AO)

[/i] Well, although a lot were scared off by AO's terrible bugs in the beginning, the game was kept afloat by the small, 30-40k permanent base of subscribers who stayed because of the community that had formed.  It's not exactly true to say that its failure was due to the lack of a community, because a really good one was eventually established; it's a bit more complicated, I guess I'm trying to say.

In regards to the payment discussion, I'm very happy with monthly fees.  It's constant, cheaper if you buy larger chunks of time, and very unobtrusive once you sign up.  It would hurt immersion to know that the time I spent in-game was directly attached to cash out of my wallet.  That's just me though.