PETITION/POLL: Please Portalarium put a hard cap on sales of Player Owned Towns

If you owned a business, and needed funding to develop it, would you limit sales for the sake of the current members?

Further, if you didn't buy into the game until it is launched, and couldn't buy a POT (because the cap had been reached), what do you think the appeal to playing the game would be? On the hope you might be able to buy in Ep2 and later? And if those are also capped?

So, if the game is catering to the high end players to retain their property/town values, is it a wise business decision to limit your sales at all?

I mean, limited housing, limited POTs. What else will people want limited in order to retain their own non-diminishing empire? At the cost of Portalarium developing a better game for a broader player base, or narrowing the player base, and not making more money because sales have been capped?

 

You may be more satisfied then with being isntantly killed by a pair of guard upon entering a scene you have been banned from. Less "immersion breaking" and still keeps the known griefers out

 

Reeferring to the op, this has been a concern of mine as well. also, i dunno what "op" stands for in a forum.

 

OP = Original Poster

 

opulent playboy (original poster)

 

I guess I'm the odd one out, but I agree that looks like an acceptable POT density. As for POTs that don't have overworld map access, I'll reserve judgement until I see how it is implemented.

 

That depends on the promises and premises my business was built upon in the first place.

 

Very tough but killable guards that a POT can earn and place in their town and manage on KOS/Outlaw list would be far more satisfying.

 

I have a book recommendation for you. Marketing and Sales 101, by people that understand marketing and sales.

I love that we have a forum where people can voice their opinions. But I dislike it when people state opinions as fact. (i.e. everything quoted above) The idea that somehow not having limited housing or POTs is some kind of "magic formula" that would ensure the success of this game is either ignorant or foolish, in MY opinion.

 

Where did I state anything at all in my post as fact? The entire post is nothing but questions.

I love it when people make assumptions and call someone else foolish, making themselves look the way they accuse another to look.

 

Lets lock this thread too please.

 

Also I just had a thought, now if you think about it we are only seeing Novia and Hidden Vale more land mass is coming so I can't imagine that all POTs would be just on the two maps we see now. So when we see the whole picture (meaning all the maps are in that is) then it should have a better feel to it.

 

Muhahahaaa! She said the magic word and I am released! (Istaria is very like Betelgeuse, but you don't have to say it 3 times)

Istaria used to be called Horizons. It is a MMORPG that came out about a half year before WoW did. Like UO, EQ, WoW, Second Life, and EVE it is still in business. Besides the usual player races of human, elf, dwarf, & gnome there is also: Saris (cat people); Sslik (lizard folk); Half-giants; Fiends (blue demons); a couple that the community had to win campaigns to open - Satyrs & Dryads (fairies); and last but definately not least! Dragons. If you pick a biped race for a character, you start out as an adult called the Gifted (one of the few that has resurrected after death). If you pick a dragon, you start out as a hatchling that later can grow up to an adult (you then can fly) and then an ancient.

Almost the whole game is non-instanted, although some places you have to be an adult dragon to get to. It is PvE, but there is a PvP (both one on one & group to group; no death count, no looting) arena & isles that a Dev spent his own time to develop that has been added. After you reach 10th level you do have death counts, which most folk either craft or RP while waiting for it to count down or eat food to reduce. It is mainly a sandbox game (it does have some quests) and it is mainly a player driven economy (there is some gear & gold on some monsters, but it usually is worst than what the crafters can build), although some of the quests do reward items and/or gold.

The original housing areas were opened via large building projects (bridges, tunnels, artifacts) that the player community had to complete often while being attacked. After several months where the demand severely outstripped the supply (guilds quit over this and some ended up with bitter hatred of others over trying to get one small plot) a lot more housing areas (including guild communities) were added. Underground dragon lairs were added later and plot sizes have been increased several times. If you own a plot or lair and don't keep up your subscription your account will be emailed to warn you and then after a couple of weeks (if you don't renew your subscription) the land will be reclaimed & put up for sale. Your buildings will be reduced to building supplies and you can find them in the character that owned the plot vault with the base cost of the plot and the items that were stored in the buildings. Players can sell their plot/lair to other players for in-game currency.

To purchase an available plot/lair, go to a community that has such and either go from plot to plot checking the markers or pull up the community map that lists all the plots/lairs and if they are for sale & for how much. After you purchase a plot or lair, then you need to design what is going to be on or in it. After that, the decorations and structures need to be built, so you need particular crafting skills or the in-game money to pay crafters for that (you can set up on your plot marker payment for parts built). No NPC realtor instant gratification. Guild communities a little different in that you need to buy the main plot and then build the guildhouse to open up the rest of the plots/lairs. Also only folk in the guild that owns the main plot can purchase plots/lairs in such a community. (Several islands are only guild communities.) You can set permissions both on the plot/lair and on individual structures. Some of the structures have bindstones for recall use and there are a few gates, but if you are looking for a plot/lair to buy you'll probably do a lot of running/flying since this is a non-instanced world.

https://picasaweb.google.com/UnicornsLady/UnicornSLadyDallianceIstariaMix




For gentle Majoria a wikia link for some of the story lore: http://istaria.wikia.com/wiki/Lore
(UO didn't have a lot of the story lore in-game either)



Long and the short of it, both Shroud's and Istaria's housing plans are good & bad. In Istaria you can see the communities you are near, but you also get all the problems with item load (unless it is an empty or very small community. With Shroud you only get community markers on the overland map until you actually enter the community, but you also don't get the item load problems until you enter the community. (*cough* *cough* Ardoris)
With Istaria it takes a lot of work to make or change housing areas because it is non-instanced. With Shroud's system it is adding a point of access on the overland map or main community (for those without overland map access) and adding the community program to the correct server. (sorry if I'm not totally correct on how Shroud works, I'm not a programmer)

For those of you that purchased POTs for resale may I suggest you look into linking your POTs with big NPC cities such as Brittany, Ardoris, and whatever the main elf city will be. Those are the places new players will look first for housing. The main places that they will get dumped into after they are introduced. Think of what gets filled up first now with the new players... Soltown. Also the big cities tend to be a gathering place, think about how land around Britain was alway in demand in UO in the old days.

 

Not alone I'm with you

 

I believe there will be guards that serve a function, but it doesnt take much for a griefer to sneak around next to soemones lo and start spammign obscenities. If the owner doesnt want them there at all, shoudl be an opion to keep them out compeltely

 

It doesn't look too bad... for a well developed agrarian kingdom with sensibly spaced towns and villages I guess (not that there is even a single acre of farmland in Novia yet but... =P). It was noted though that it doesn't leave much room for wilderness or isolated areas. It seems even weirder when there are supposed to be undead armies on the march cutting a swathe of devastation across the countryside that would generally leave whole areas depopulated. Etc etc. But that is world building stuff.

But there is another thing that was pointed out earlier in this thread which I think has slipped by people. I didn't plot any non-player player towns such as Holtrot or Valemark on that map. And the developers have guaranteed there will be enough lots for everyone who bought one via pledge/add on store to be able to place them at launch plus an addition X% beyond that for post launch.

And this part is the BIG thing - you can't count on POTs to meet those figures because we have no idea what every town owner has planned for their town. Not without taking away some control over lot allocation from the town owners anyway. Some might want a scene to themselves. Some might want to reserve half or two thirds of their lots for later episodes. And so on. That means there needs to be a healthy number of non-player player towns which will further add to the settlement density. And the primary purpose of all those 230 POTs + X NPTs is housing really.

I get the feeling that towns (of all kinds) are going to significantly outnumber points of interest, dungeons, and story zones. I also suspect it will eventually lead to criticisms of "most of this game looks the same!" from people who play it at launch which would not be an unfair criticism.

 

That is actually the very first point I made in this thread:

"One of the big keys there is Player Towns that are there specifically to meet the needs of sold player lots through pledges on the addon store plus 20% for newer players. Portlarium can not necessarily factor in POTs player lots to meet the needs of the sold player lots are a POT owner could simply just place 1 lot and have the rest of the scene is their front yard. In order words, as it stands today there is already a horrible urban sprawl. It is not like this problem somehow crept up on Port as this concern was brought up at the very least the day it was announced and in person at the roundtable discussions in Austin when there was only 50 POTs sold."

There is also a whole other factor in that players were also supposed to be able to buy POTs with in game gold that they earned. Since Portlarium never capped POT sales to a low number, is that now still a possibility? Or is the answer to that in the form of even more instanced POT scenes.

 

@Caliya
I thought you didn't want a further pile on, so I've stayed away this far. You know that if I get started I kinda get wordy, then others will pick up on some things of our dialog and it will get a bit messy as usual.

I really think that we should meet up in the game and just have some adventuring fun, you and I and your hubby, because here in the forums we have way different PoV and the tone usually deteriorate when others more confrontational get involved.

Yes, definately yes. If it means a more viable business model long term and less work to achieve that.

How Portalarium got its kickstarter funding was partly through a perceived value for high pledgers. Lots of that perceived value comes from land deeds and housing.
That is still a key factor in fundraising today, and will continue to be so when we look on the value of objects in the addon store.

Also the data you are missing is that the devs are saying that POTs are at best zero sum game for them and more probably a loss. They have said so repeatedly and as late as the last couple of weeks. They probably hope to make up for that loss with the communities built around POTs staying in the game for longer due to investment.

Spoiler

Now had it been my business I would have done it way differently than Port, but that is because I'm a different entity with a different history, and I would have set up a diminishing return so that for each 10 units sold the price would increase by 10%, then let the market decide how far they want to take the concept. (Yes that is a doubling after 70 units sold, tripling at 120 and so on). Its a great model that lets the early adopters get a bonus while still aiming at the middle market and then reaping great margins from late adopters.
That however is because I think more capitalisticly than Portalarium.

??? I don't follow your reasoning here. You are painting a scenario that assumes I know stuff that I couldn't know if I was a new arrival.
For your scenario to work, its like you are saying that people/players wouldn't buy benefactor pledges after kickstarter since the kickstarter cap had been reached. That is not how it works though.

When you are late you go 'bummer' and look at what is available right then and there and what is worth it. If some who was here earlier got some really cool stuff, then I'd be oh 'cool' look at what they got, how can I achieve that?
Then we know that there will be some way, hopefully epic, to get a POT through game play, that is what I'd aim for.

You are missing that my petition is about stopping *sales* of POTs, but not about stopping the creation of game controlled POTs that one can earn through game play or maybe 'rent' for cash later on.
This because sales gives limits and expectations on how Portalarium handles them, while if the game owns them then the devs are much more free to handle them correctly and not to a detriment to the game long term.

Yes. For all the reasons above and more.
If you can get your product to feel/bee exclusive or rare then you can set a higher margin on it.

Check out the OP wording. I want them to stop sales now until launch. At that point not only will they have more time, but they will also know their market better. At that point, not now, can they create/add more POTs and put up for sale, and if the market is there they could easily triple the prize for them. Right now they are selling too fast becuase they are prized too cheap and saturating the market needlessly.


After launch Portalarium can look at the map, and say hey we can put something here and here without any pain, we could do this and that and they can price it accordingly to market demand.

Again, this is not how it works though. In order to create a better game for a broader player base, they need the few to pay for perks so that the many can pay less for more features. This is not a AAA big corporate production funding development for years before exposing it to the market. They are crowdfunding this one.
To be able sell perks at a premium those perks must have a perceived value.

Check out the "expired" items in the addon store. Those have a higher perceived value precisely because they are expired.
That means that the next time Portalarium puts up something for a limited time, or only a fixed number or anything like that. Then people can look at their history and say, they really mean it when they say exclusive or rare, that adds a very high perceived value to those new items for the long term gain.

Now soon you will see a change in the business model where they will move away from the pledges and high end backers, and focus more on a broader player base paying a little here and there for smaller perks. That transition is hard though since they cannot lose/alienate the players they got now.
My opinion is for that transition to go more smoothly they need to cap the sales of POTs until launch so they get a feel for how the map, game and market develops.

 

And I have a book recommendation for YOU, Understanding and Using English Grammar 101. It explains the difference between a statement, which is a sentence ending in a period, and a question, which is a sentence ending in a question mark.

 

I'll stand by my post. I'm not interested in arguing the semantics of someones "factual" arguments because they technically posed them as questions. If that's someone's only defense of their point of view, I think that speaks for itself.