Housing. A great strength, pricing causing more problems than benefits?

That's always the issue. With every designe decision you are doing. And I am sorry to point it out but the SotA playerbase is extremly easy to alienate.
Just take a look at the crafting changes shitstorm that came up before the change was even online.
After the change a lot of people had to reconsider their initial reaction.

I get your point though. It's just that stuff like that doesn't disturb me. Time, money, it's all the same in the end in my opinion.

 

Isn’t the current sub already usable for this purpose?
It is not promoted as that but with the currently available $9 sub you get 900 Cotos each month. With the current pricing of cotos (circa 150 gold per Coto) that’s 135.000 gold. Divided by 30 that mean you have 4500 each day you could use as rent and I think the rent for a city lot is still 4000 a day.
I think the direct conversion Cotos -> rent is below the player marked value but even this way you should be able to pay with the sub the rent for at least one town lot.
But of course you would still need a deed to claim the lot and that way I made a suggestion that might be a good solution.

 

Yea, I meant a sub with a deed, sorry I was very unclear. But your suggestion in your linked thread makes a lot of sense rather than messing around with deeds associated with Subs given deeds are tradable commodities, or else a new class of non tradable deed awarded with a subscription may be needed.. and then life perhaps gets complicated..

 

Pay to Win is to have the possibility to buy power to become stronger than others. Buying straight up experience from Portalarium = P2W without hesitation. In the meantime the housing market is a decorative one, and let me be honest, I've seen some Row lots and some village lots with better decorating than city lots, so bigger lot does not result in better deco, thus you are not winning at anything.

As for gold sellers, this would have happened one way or an other, as black markets for any game involving trading has one, but instead Portalarium declared it ok to do, gave us an official platform, and that was it. Cotos, or Shroud of the Avatars "Premium Currency" is tradeable, like many games, Aarframe, a very successful game comes to mind, players can buy currency to trade it for items from other players. The players make their own market.

What Geaux is suggesting, is to have Portalarium sell experience, meaning The company would intervene in a player market, to sell power at an accelerated rate to a player, just imagine Port selling Exp at a rate of 10$/1m exp, someone could spend 10000$ (many have in this game, and whales do exist), and get 1B exp, in a matter of seconds, that is straight up paying your way to the top 10% of the player population (if it isnt less even, 1B exp is huge). Now Geaux, you could argue that by letting this be a trade between player a's exp pool to player b's exp pool, but why not take the existing route of paying Mac to grind a zone while you pick your nose? It already exists, without resulting in the P2W tag getting even bigger on this game.

 

The fundamental difference (for me, anyway) is that in player to player "powerlevelling services" - someone has to earn the XP, someone has to grind the monsters. It is fundamentally different to allow powerlevelling as a service between players, or to sell XP outright for cash, which nobody has to earn, that is just changing a value in a database. My main issue with "P2W" has always been that if you can just buy something for $$, then playing the game has no value. And hey, no judgement here - I get it that some people have money, and some people have time, and I have no issue with them working out a fair exchange of time-to-money between them. I just feel like if we go down the "buy a level 100 character out of the box" route it sets a strong P2W precedent that will certainly have a knock-on effect to prospective players. Likewise, it may attract players who can just buy their character and jump into the action. How many people fall into these categories? What are their demographic characteristics? Who is likely to stick with the game longer, and spend more over time? Who is likely to be a more active community member? What does this do to the game's image/perception? Will existing players feel like their efforts are cheapened if XP is made a purchaseable commodity? Market analysis above my pay grade but all things to consider.

 

Perhaps I should re-explain this again...with more detail, by listing some of what my thoughts were...and this is just my concept, feel free to take it and run with it, or to run away from it...

This is not selling gear, this is not selling a performance edge or advantage, this is grind avoidance, for those who can afford it, and a way to compensate senior players...

Players earn the experience, and they decide to spend/sell their experience.

They could go to the Oracle and offer to share their soul, allowing them to convert their experience into an offering of favor.

It can be crafting experience or adventuring experience.

The "Favor" can be used towards discounted COTOs, but players always always have to pay some percent of the cost. There would be a bonus discount allowing the COTOs to be purchased in the "no-drop" version vs a tradable version. So let's say for arguments sake, you get 75% off for a non-tradable COTO and 50% off for a the tradable version, until your credit of "Favor" is consumed.

This experience is sold in 2 formats by Port, a % upgrade set at various levels and Soul Potions.

Nobody can ever use this sold experience to promote themselves beyond the 90% mark or 90th percentile in game.

This is about player retention and longevity of the game, keeping Mojito fed, and so forth...

It allows senior players to still play their toons, and have a more meaningful use for their experience than one more point in Heavy Armor for 2 months of playing...

It allows players that are just starting out, to catch up...

It allows players to keep up that have more money than time...

As to the argument that it diminishes your sense of accomplishment, I wish you felt differently, but you are certainly entitled to feel this way, and I think this actually helps to plot and document a value for what you have achieved.

 

THIS is exactly why we have a very low population. This is exactly it. Reality. There it is.

Do any of you know what the actual demographic is for gamers? For MMORPG gamers? Most of them are younger, 25 years old is the median, to be exact. Most do not have a whole lot of disposable income. On average they make $31,000 a year which is not a whole lot.

When I first brought this up here, about two years ago, someone actually old me, "Well, they can go play a cheap game, then." And you know what? That's exactly what players did.

People play these games for a sense of achievement in a virtual space. This game does not answer that very, very basic gaming tenet because you can just BUY it. It renders all of it meaningless. It takes away the entire concept of "fairness." It also removes a very large part of our demographic and creates haves and have-nots. No bueno.

 

What if they made all taxable deeds available in-game for gold coin and only charged crowns in order to upgrade to a tax-free deed?

 

It's worse than just haves and have-nots. With the best intentions of rewarding their backers, Port handed them not only wealth (there will always be haves and have-nots to some degree) but more importantly, the means to create more wealth -- multiple lots, large lots, tax-free lots, and commission-free vendors. Their decisions since (selling things on the crown store) have tried to ameliorate the problem, but the economy here is still a little too much like the real world -- where the gap in wealth and wealth-building assets between the haves and have-nots is now wider than it's been for most of history (and far wider than most "normal" people realize the magnitude of).

Yes, it's possible to achieve your dreams here, just as it's possible for people in real life who are born in poverty to make their way out of it. But those people are the exceptions to the rule, and their success usually depends on having access to other social resources (people willing and able to help you). Hard work and long hours isn't enough when the resources needed to build wealth are concentrated in the hands of people who already have wealth. You only have to listen to some of the high-level players, look at the inventories of the accounts for sale... how can a new player hope to sell enough to achieve anything when they're gathering in 1s and 5s and maybe 10s on a public vendor, and high-level players are selling in thousands at cut-rate prices on CF vendors?

Even Vladamir's "race to home" thread that is continually cited as "proof" of how easy it is.... he was able to do that BECAUSE he already knew the market here, knew how to work it, knew what was likely to sell and what wouldn't be worth trying. A new player isn't going to have that knowledge base.

I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm trying to do it myself and nowhere close to giving up. But for the game to appeal to more people, new players have to have more hope for their achievements to matter than the economy here is currently offering them.

 

Exactly. People play MMORPGs as a form of escapism. Games have rules. Games have an even playing field. Games are not real life.

 

To keep a form of monetization for Port, have "skins" as the only thing buyable, or, better known in this game as patterns :
Weapons, armor, vendors, pets (add a kobold crafted armor with tech on my Polar Destroyer, man will I buy that pattern!)
Basically, anything that you can reskin somehow, make money off of that, and not any other asset in the game.

That will make the game have a bigger playerbase AND will generate insane amounts of money, because people want to look different/cool, and will pay for that, the will GLADLY pay for that, just like Fortnite, League of Legends, Dota, Rocket League, CS:GO and probably a bunch of other successful games do.

 

I agree, but i deleted my post as it wont get much traction here in the forums and likely just cause a flamefest. Might be best if u unquote me

 

I suggest playing a game like Archeage for a while, so you can truly have the P2W experience. I would note they had many more players than SOTA ever has, and was largely populated by <25 than > 40s like SOTA.

 

With pleasure! I left my bit in but removed the quote!

 

No, the reason we have a low population is we have a 1990s UI.

Drops mic.

 

Please don't attempt to derail the topic.

 

SotAs UI is not the deal breaker, it's an irritant, what can be a deal breaker is the feeling of having to climb an insurmountable mountain, with a lack of accomplishment during the process. It's the fact that even the best rigs fall victim of 80%+ of CPU and GPU usage, it's the fact that the game does not feel like it has a goal. I mean even minecraft has a technical goal, killing the ender dragon, meanwhile Shroud of the Avatar has : Acquire the shroud, after spending countless hours trying to navigate this quest system that keeps on telling me I should have an easy time with the next step, while I get beaten to death nonstop without even seeing the finish line, or after spending hours trying to solve this 1 puzzle that my log tells me to do, but since I accidentally triggered the next flag, nothing happens. Those are real deal breakers, at least for the younger audience, which is the one who will actually make your game get populated.

 

I think it's already derailed. It went from the price of property deeds back to the rubberband topic of how easy it is for new players to kill things for money, and then on from there...

 

Not derailing, responding.

You can give away the whole game and you'll still have the same small population. Sorry, we're already giving away 2 deeds, it's a solid fact at this point.

The population will never get much of a bump as long as people are confronted with a 90's era UI when the start the game. Go ahead, give away castle lots, prove me wrong.

 

And my above post does include the quest system. They go hand in hand.