New stuff on the addon store!

I think you have it here, at least for me. It is the way this was done, not that they did it, that stings. Doing some of your examples would have made the optics of this much better to a fair number of people.

Edit - I should add, I have bundles with the (formerly) rares I used solely for prize giveaways at parties or just to keep. Even without an RMT persepective since I don’t sell this stuff, I feel pretty dumb having bought some of these now that they are $8.

In my line of work, we think very carefully about decisions that materially impact existing customers (hint - try not to make existing customers feel dumb while chasing new ones, and find a balance that makes them all/most happy).

 

I understand if people wonder about inconsistent decisions.

I am just wondering about the following (tell me, if my thoughts are wrong, please!):

1. Commission free Vendor

Commisson free Vendors are still available in bundles - so where is the problem, when they are sold separate now?


2. Crafting Stations
Where is told, they are the +5 Stations???
Means "Expert" Crafting Stations they are?

Beside that:
As told above: You can visit and USE those stations in a lot of towns for FREE. There is no reason to own one because of that.
So how can that offer do anything negative to owner who got them with an early pledge?
You still can sell them on your vendor cheaper as the shop offer ...

Expert Crafting Stations (Pick 5)

Pick 5 of any of the 10 Expert Crafting Stations, including: Milling, Tanning, Smelting, Butchering, Tailoring, Carpentry, Cooking, Textiles, Blacksmithing, and Alchemy Stations.
(NOTE: You will need a Property to place these items in-game.)


3. (No) Kickstarter for Episode 2
At last I am thinking: may be they should think about a "small" kickstarter for Episode 2 to give a possibility for new players to get some special stuff.
However, the offers could and SHOULD be different from the origin kickstarter, of course ...

 

You are not supposed to do anything. Just forget it. It seems like you are not willing to understand our point anyway. None of the things that can be said here won't change anything anyway, by the way.
It's just a bad timing from Portalarium (CF vendors and crafting stations should have been available for gold coins and not being exclusive from the very start, RMT should have not been allowed from the start) and an extremely bad way to handle thing (hey, look ! Go get that thing for hundreds of dollars, now close your eyes, wait, ok, now you just lost hundreds of dollars, magic !).

 

Why would they, after experiencing the hellfire that's been rained down on them over the last 5 years, EVER consider doing another Kickstarter?

 

Erm it's nothing to do with the gate of wealthy people am pretty well off myself thanks.

It's about the game surviving and being appealling to enough people to enable it to do so and flourish which it certainly isn't doing now !

 

Personally i say No to new rewards that segregate the community. Any players coming after Episode 2 are then new players and we keep the them v us mentality going onward.

Even though i pledged i have never been for the way the game has been funded from Kickstarter to now. It has made a divided community of have and have nots and does nothing to encourage new players who don't just have to deal with the big gap in skill points between old players and themselves, but the older players have all these rare rewards, best location's etc.

Any further funding should aim to equalize old and new players, as new players looking to get into an already established world really need to be thinking that with a bit of work ( extra xp now and 1 mill an hour helps) they can get to the levels of the older players in skill points and in material items....else they will look for a game that wont be putting shackles on them from the get go.

 

In fact, that's an important point.
I bought the prosperity tools just before they were included in bundles, because I was tired of expensive tool repairing - in the beginning there was not so much gold in loot, as most of us know
And sadly there was no deduction with bundles for people who bought stuff before it was included ...
But I am happy for all people who can get them within the bundles

 

Portalarium did not price it at 100$. Nothing for me to forget about I have no issue with the CF vendor when it was priced by backers at 100+ dollars or Portalarium who value it at 39$ and they made it. You seem to be hurt like a lot of other people for misunderstanding what they Implemented RMT sales into the Game for not for Creating Jobs or ways to make money for a community they want to play their game rather then take there work at make more money then them reselling them or even for you to sell your extra Items and get your Money back on Investing into a game you ended up not liking. They allowed RMT to not have to deal with it and allow the community to sell, resell, purchase the Items they create any way you choose too. Portalarium has given Gamers the GOLDEN CUP of games and still, people want more and feel entitled to whine and cry when things don't go there way. I'm not talking about bugs,fixes or broken promises here either. Only about the Value of what we have after 39$, YOUR INVESTMENT, COLLECTION RMT SALES anything you invest buy or do after that is up to you and you alone Portalarium owes you nothing after that.

 

I'm a Royal Founder Pledge holder.

WAY back then, I could only afford to spend a little over $200-something on this game.

EVEN if I had spent $15,000 on this game, the change in making the Commission Free Vendors and Crafting Stations available is pretty meaningless. I live in a town FILLED with vendors that I pay no commission to use. There's +5 Crafting Stations all over the place.

This is a meaningless shift.

Now... if they make my Royal Founder's Plate armor patterns available as a free for all? I might say, "Hey", but... if they make the pattern available WITHOUT the crests for new players AND feel obligated to toss Eternal Patterns to those of us who have the Royal Pledges... I would literally be fine with that.

I want the game to survive and grow. They need money for that. This is a good and acceptable change.

 

Actually, one thing I'd like to add about the crafting tables.

When I go to do my crafting I tend to do it in Open Mode. I gather my stuff and head to the crafting tables at the Gov's mansion. There I see other people using the tables as well and this provides me with some socializing, some small talk, a wave, and what have you. I don't like to socialize a great deal and when I do I'd like for it to be on my terms. Everyone having these tables means that one of the only times I like to socialize might diminish a good deal.

I'm sure that I'll find other ways to get some socialization in but I might hold off on the tables for now. If I wanted to be a hermit I'd get the Remote Access Bank, all of the tables, and just hold up in my home. As appealing as it seems I'd rather have a chance encounter with one of my neighbors now and then.

 

Time is changing.
Who knows what will happen after Episode 2 is online in 2019/20?

However, the way not to do a second kickstarter was chosen for Episode 2.

Whatever someone decides (like now selling commission free vendors or expert crafting stations):
there always will be people who don't like it as people who like it - for different reasons, of course.

From the view of a new player it is fine to have the possibility to participate in small steps.
I assume there are still people who can't afford it to buy a bundle or lot deeds at the current prices ...

From the view of old Pledge holder I assume the feeling of "special" seems to lose value ...
Well, I don't think so - but that's just me

I dislike more how my in game time is treaten so different with XP loss on death, as currently talked about here ...
And I am wondering how many people don't care about
And again: It's not about that we have a kind of death decay, it's just about the way it works - yet ...

 

You are right, Portalarium doesn't owe us anything. They are just competing with the marketplace to get the money instead of the players who just got sick with the GOLD CUP of games and who try to recoup their losses after realising that the game is far less colourful than in its Kickstarter/Steam/Seedinvest description. Some expect them to improve the game with this money ? Please wait for the future development to be a concrete thing before making any prediction. Being seedinvesters ourselves, we are still waiting to hear where the $600K went with the advertisement campaign.

Now if you don't mind, I'll try to get out of this discussion.

 

later

 

I understand that a good economy is built from the ground up. Keynesian economics works. I'm a Democratic Socialist. I get it. That is why I fully support the new quality of life changes.
Unfortunately, many of these changes are coming at the expense of those of us that paid in high and early. It's not just vendors and stations. Many of us paid extra to get ahead in the lot selection because centralized banking and faster travel times were not yet introduced. We paid extra under the understanding that having vendors and houses in sought after locations would give us a competitive advantage when building an in-game business empire.
Expedited travel, centralized banking, and cheap vendors are all good things for the game's economy and players. The fact still stands that these things are coming at the expense of people that paid in high and early. I think it would be totally fair and appropriate to throw a bone to Nobles and bundle holders.

 

@E n v y @HannahAlpenglow2 correct!! It’s not that they are selling these things in the Add-on store. It’s how it happened; the way it was done.

For the 4 months I have been playing this game the Add-on store, the in-game COTO merchants, and the RMT market was my “truth” for assessing what something was worth in the game.

While I am not naive to believe prices will never change, I don’t think anybody could have predicted the degree to which it did, and, the instantaneousness to which it took effect.

Things that were highly valued and sought after in one moment, were suddenly trivialized in an instant. Like flicking a light switch.

This, is the slap in the face issued by Portalarium to the RMT community.

Disturbingly, it would also be naive to believe Portalarium did not fully understand the ramifications of their action.

Enjoy the slap, Portalarium, for everyone’s sake i hope it was worth it.

 

I think overall this change will be positive in net effect, but at the same time that it's also not unreasonable for players to be upset about resulting damage that could have been mitigated better with a less haphazard implementation. Like first testing such a dramatic price change with a less impactful store segment first, like dropping the $100 houses to $40 to both see how the market responds to make more optimal pricing decisions with the higher impact stuff and give the heads up to players that such decisions are under consideration to rethink their valuations accordingly. Or alternatively, decoupling items from the bundles nearer their current market price with a notice that the price will be dropping further in something like six months or so.

I think CF Vendors were a particularly bad choice for the initial inauguration of this magnitude of change because they're not just an investment purchase at this point in the game. CF Vendors are the current entry point into the player economy due to the public vendor system not really being as effective as intended, which is definitely a huge reason to support greater accessibility to them for the general public -- it's probably more efficient to give broader reach to something that's working than trying to fix stuff that's not under current limitations -- but it should also be an equally huge point of consideration that this situation has caused players of lesser means to save up money to purchase entry level access to what many consider a critical gameplay component having to compete with prices that investors are willing to pay rather than having a more reasonable consumer-level purchase option, and I think this particular situation warrants some measure of sympathy and compensation. Like maybe give a 30-day period people can cash in their currently owned CFVs for 100 Cotos or something, so they can rebuy (or not) their vendor at the new market price plus a few extra things they might like to still be getting the value they paid for in good faith for access to a gameplay element that's had its costs artificially inflated for quite a while due to the original point-of-entry systems not panning out.

 

A man is as good as is his word. If financial troubles exist, one must ask why?

 

Knowing where everything is and how it works from having played for 2+ years is still a big competitive advantage. I know I take every advantage of it.

You should have seen it when FFXI lifted the level 75 cap after like six years. So many people who had become entrenched and smug with their high-end gear were furious, and much rage quit ensued. But the game needed to move up.

Except they didn't want to drop the house prices. They didn't drop any prices, except against artificial prices from the RMT market, they just created a new price that hadn't previously existed. If in fact they dropped prices on something that previously had an official price, please tell me so that I can do some window shopping.

It might be nice if they had a list of everyone who owned a CFV as of update post #296 (appears to be Friday morning a mere hour or so before the stream sale went live!) and sent them a little something. But 100 COTOs is simply excessive. As I have said before 3 of my 4 came with a TF lot deed, and the other was bought with (budgeted!) IGG, all a few months or more apart, so it's not like I got the short straw from a bundle buster. Prudence is a virtue (but not a Virtue apparently!) and all that.

FWIW, the extra CF vendor and TF deed were why I got two Edelmann pledges instead of a single larger pledge. I still think it was a good idea.

 

lol