Guild Wars 2 is one of those games that I've known is coming for what seems like a decade. Now that it seems like it is just around the corner, and game play details are becoming clearer and clearer, I keep getting more excited.
Yesterday Mike O'Brien revealed details about microtransactions and currency systems in a blog post over and ArenaNet. There will be gold, karma, and gems. Gold is regular in-game currency, karma is untradable, earned currency for special items, and gems and purchased with real money. Here is the beautiful thing. You can trade gold for gems and gems for gold with other players.
This doesn't seem like the kind of announcement that is going to get the fans hyped about the game. But it does have that effect on me. You see, I played Runes of Magic for quite a long time and they have a nearly identical system that I love. RoM allows you to list diamonds on the auction house for gold, or gold for diamonds where diamonds are purchasable for real money and gold is the in-game currency that you receive from completing quests and selling your junk to vendors.
For me this allowed me to farm a bunch of random stuff from mobs, sell it on the auction house for gold, use that gold to buy diamonds from other players, and then get access to cash shop items for "free". I had a great time doing for several months is RoM, and I can't wait to see how fun that is going to be in Guild Wars.
Showing posts with label Microtransactions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microtransactions. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Thursday, August 13, 2009
What Does Runes of Magic Cost?
This is a post I hadn't planned on making so soon, but after reading this post over at MMOCrunch.com it has been moved up my priority list. iTZKooPA attempts to calcuate the cost of playing and fully equiping a single character in Runes of Magic. He arrives at about the right answer, but for the wrong reasons when it comes to how much Runes of Magic will cost in the end-game.
The bulk of the cost as calculated by him comes from purchasing rune slot drillers. While it would be nice have have each piece of gear maxed out on runes, that definitely isn't going to be the priority upgrade for high level Runes of Magic players. Fitting your armor with runes is nice, but only after you have maximized your armor's stats in every other way you would find yourself turning to runes slots.
What iTZKooPA doesn't know about is that armor (and jewelry and weapons) can be fitted with up to six stats per piece of gear. There are several methods for doing this which I will go into in a later post, but for now it will have to suffice to say that creating the most powerful piece of gear possible is going to basically cost you six Pure Fusion Stones. These can be purchased for 55 diamonds a piece. At $0.033 per diamond that comes to $10.89 per piece of gear. Let's assume you eventually do this to all five jewelry slots, 8 armor slots, and for one weapon. That comes out to $152.46 to fully deck out your character.
How much have I payed for Runes of Magic? Soon after the game first launched I purchased a small amount of diamonds for $25 just to get my feet wet. I immediately wasted these diamonds on foolishly renting bag space and renting mounts. I even think I bought some experience potions and daily quest reset tickets. Any player will now know that these are extravagances that just aren't necessary. I then went four or five months without purchasing anything for diamonds.
I almost felt bad for the developers since I was getting away with playing their game and enjoying it so much, and all it had cost me up to that point was a measly $25. So recently I decided to load up on 3,000 diamonds for $100. About 1000 of those diamonds are now gone. In six months I have paid Frogster $125 which comes out to about $21 a month. But, like I said I still have 2000 diamonds left. So actually I have only "spent" around $60 in six months.
I know there are players who have spent several times this amount and I know there are players with level 50 characters who have not given Frogster a dime. So in the end, the beauty of Runes of Magic is that you can spend however much you want. You can be perfectly competitive by spending as little as $10 a month or you can be that incredible Mage walking around with 11,000 hit points.
The bulk of the cost as calculated by him comes from purchasing rune slot drillers. While it would be nice have have each piece of gear maxed out on runes, that definitely isn't going to be the priority upgrade for high level Runes of Magic players. Fitting your armor with runes is nice, but only after you have maximized your armor's stats in every other way you would find yourself turning to runes slots.
What iTZKooPA doesn't know about is that armor (and jewelry and weapons) can be fitted with up to six stats per piece of gear. There are several methods for doing this which I will go into in a later post, but for now it will have to suffice to say that creating the most powerful piece of gear possible is going to basically cost you six Pure Fusion Stones. These can be purchased for 55 diamonds a piece. At $0.033 per diamond that comes to $10.89 per piece of gear. Let's assume you eventually do this to all five jewelry slots, 8 armor slots, and for one weapon. That comes out to $152.46 to fully deck out your character.
How much have I payed for Runes of Magic? Soon after the game first launched I purchased a small amount of diamonds for $25 just to get my feet wet. I immediately wasted these diamonds on foolishly renting bag space and renting mounts. I even think I bought some experience potions and daily quest reset tickets. Any player will now know that these are extravagances that just aren't necessary. I then went four or five months without purchasing anything for diamonds.
I almost felt bad for the developers since I was getting away with playing their game and enjoying it so much, and all it had cost me up to that point was a measly $25. So recently I decided to load up on 3,000 diamonds for $100. About 1000 of those diamonds are now gone. In six months I have paid Frogster $125 which comes out to about $21 a month. But, like I said I still have 2000 diamonds left. So actually I have only "spent" around $60 in six months.
I know there are players who have spent several times this amount and I know there are players with level 50 characters who have not given Frogster a dime. So in the end, the beauty of Runes of Magic is that you can spend however much you want. You can be perfectly competitive by spending as little as $10 a month or you can be that incredible Mage walking around with 11,000 hit points.
Microtransactions vs. Subscription
"I would never pay a subscription fee for a computer game."
This is a statement that a friend of mine recently made. In my little bubble it seems like he is living in the stone age, but this is an attitude that definitely still exists. It is strange to think about, but for most gamers, even in the era of WoW, paying a subscription fee is still a foreign and strange idea.
A recent Massively Speaking podcast (I'm sorry, I can't find the exact show) reminded me that every gamer at some point has made a statement like my friend recently did. I know about 10 years ago I probably thought the same thing as my friend.
Now business models are changing again and people in the MMO community are saying stuff like, "I would never pay $10 for a horse."
Five years ago, I might have said the same thing.
Never-the-less, even though RoM is free to download, free to play, and even purchasing a permanent mount is far from a necessity (you can rent mounts that last an entire play session for an extremely small amount of in-game gold) some people are going to resist the business model. This is a hurdle developers will have get over. I feel that F2P games have an advantage over subscription games in this area because they generally allow the play to play for free for as long as they want. Players can try the game, see if they like it, and slowly ease into spending money if they decide they want to invest in this game.
Most subscription games offer a 10 to 14 day free trial, but getting that player to actually commit to a subscription after two weeks is much harder that getting a player of a F2P game to say, "You know, I've been playing for a couple of weeks, and I'm going to be around for a while...it would be nice to have that really cool mount."
This is a statement that a friend of mine recently made. In my little bubble it seems like he is living in the stone age, but this is an attitude that definitely still exists. It is strange to think about, but for most gamers, even in the era of WoW, paying a subscription fee is still a foreign and strange idea.
A recent Massively Speaking podcast (I'm sorry, I can't find the exact show) reminded me that every gamer at some point has made a statement like my friend recently did. I know about 10 years ago I probably thought the same thing as my friend.
Now business models are changing again and people in the MMO community are saying stuff like, "I would never pay $10 for a horse."
Five years ago, I might have said the same thing.
Never-the-less, even though RoM is free to download, free to play, and even purchasing a permanent mount is far from a necessity (you can rent mounts that last an entire play session for an extremely small amount of in-game gold) some people are going to resist the business model. This is a hurdle developers will have get over. I feel that F2P games have an advantage over subscription games in this area because they generally allow the play to play for free for as long as they want. Players can try the game, see if they like it, and slowly ease into spending money if they decide they want to invest in this game.
Most subscription games offer a 10 to 14 day free trial, but getting that player to actually commit to a subscription after two weeks is much harder that getting a player of a F2P game to say, "You know, I've been playing for a couple of weeks, and I'm going to be around for a while...it would be nice to have that really cool mount."
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