Gold Crowns of the Obsidians

@Godra, how would the Founders and Benefactors feel if their houses were offered up on the Add-On Store.

I would support Similar houses being offered on the Add-On Store, but those granted with the Packages need to be shown the same respect, and provided the same exclusivity as the Pledge houses and equipment.

 

Clearly the decision isn't that black and white. Gold Crowns aren't a guarantee of 5 wonderful episodes and a lack of Gold Crowns isn't guaranteed failure. There is a whole lot of middle ground and other options that can be explored. I'm not even opposed to the idea of Gold Crowns, but just the way they are being implemented with regard to item durability.

 

I was thinking they were still planning to charge money for the base game for each of the episodes and also maybe do some kickstarter?

 

They mentioned an Episode 2 Kickstarter before. I'm a little surprised they didn't see how well that went before going down this road.

 

Only Portalarium knows how much regular income they need for the game to survive. Nevertheless, because SotA is an MMO of sorts with years of development ahead of it, the funding they require must be substantial. If they say the add-on store alone won't cut it, I'm inclined to believe them. Frankly I'm overjoyed that they have finally revealed a funding model that looks sound and protects the large commitment that I have made to the game. I would hate to lose all that because an inadequate business model resulted in premature shut down of the servers and a permanent end to development.

I fully support the broad thrust of what Portalarium is doing, and have every confidence that with a bit of fine tuning it will work well.

 

<gone...>

 

@Womby,

Like I said earlier in the thread, I just hope the new funding model allows them to focus more on RP related items that fit into the game world. I don't think the way they were trying to fund it with some of the more ridiculous add-on stuff (which got attention) was helping the game in the long run. It was turning a lot of people off. We want to get more people actually buying the game, and we want people to continue to play the game, and I think its important to protect the integrity of what they're doing in order to do that.

Also hoping they continue to support a player-driven economy, which means providing players similar items to the ones they put up on add-on to craft.

 

I love that I can essentially pay for my taxes with real money now! Well done!

And the 45 crowns I get will help me with starting gold for sure.

 

Will there be a cap on how many crowns can be purchased per month (total or per player)?

 

How much would it cost a competitor game to buy all the POT lots and keep them dormant so the game environment is saturated with vacancy's?

 

? POT owners can kick out residents.

 

I think its important for everyone to know that items being sold on the add-on store as a currency of sorts was always part of the plan. It eliminates the majority of the issues encountered with gold farmers, so the fact that they are on the add-on store is actually a positive thing. Dont let this sway you to leave the game. The rub comes in when they are also a direct means of repairing maximum durability on our items, because it drastically effects the economy. Separate those two mechanics and most of the valid concerns in this thread are mitigated.

I have to admit I had a knee jerk reaction to this as well (I'm over it) because these have been in game for 2 releases already and not a single one had dropped for me. That coupled with the impact to crafting as a sustainable profession urks me to no end and I agree that if the concept had been posted in dev+, the impact would have become clearer and we could have dealt with it proactively rather than reactively.

@Baron Drocis Fondorlatos To expect an in-game drop to balance with an add-on store item specifically designed to generate revenue is folly. It will never balance out because its not intended to.

The need for balancing goes away with the following idea...

This is the fix we need to implement, but there must be an opportunity for failure to keep the demand for newly crafted goods moderately high and the market for repairs by high level crafters active. I thought we were on the right track with mastercraft because it falls in line with the exact concept that I'm describing here.

 

yes...I sliced the end of Womby's quote to suit ..

what I wonder about is why it took SO long to come clean (ok, so they really haven't come clean...rather another *new* definition to things) about the fact the $ was running short.

I'm not even gonna bother looking up past posts I made saying that very thing. Perhaps a bit more transparency and a real solicitation of ideas would have brought about a better solution.

*shrug* so now to see if I can get past the feeling of bile coming up and regain the feeling of fun

 

I'm curious to know if there will be caps on how many crowns a person can buy at any given time. If there's no cap there's no reason to rely on an in-game economy for mitigating deed sales.... if a person can buy crowns to buy gold to buy property deeds in-game, it'll introduce a very interesting dynamic to land ownership.

 

I think it gets really convoluted that there would be two different types of repairs, one standard repair that restores an item's current health and another COTO repair that restores an item's maximum durability. I don't really see how you can integrate a failure mechanic into the durability repairs. If someone fails, they would likely just attempt it again until they succeed.

What if instead there was a limit to the number of times (preferably only once) that maximum durability can be recovered on each item?

 

Probably not a cap on crowns, but likely a limit on in-game property deed availability. I'm fairly sure the lack of quantity on the Viking packages was just an oversight that will be corrected eventually but there's not a need right now because there is so much PoT space available.

 

You won't be able to buy lot deeds in game. Instead, you'll be able to buy a lottery ticket for a lot deed. Or better yet a lottery ticket for the right to purchase a lot deed. Hopefully they'll have a restriction of one ticket per account.

EDIT: The winning ticket should be non-transferable to prevent speculation.

 

The idea behind failure is that it would result in losing the item if the maximum durability was below 5 for example.

 

This.

There are only so many deeds available... That's why they're releasing POT Only deeds in Batches, so they can monitor lot availability against the number of deeds in-game.

 

I understand the competing interest here. But I believe as long as Starr, Dallas, RG, and Chris are running things, they will make every effort to balance this as closely as they can. I don't think they're trying to become millionaires here. I think they're trying to create a great game that can be funded for many many years to come.