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[PATV] Tuesday, August 30, 2011 - Extra Credits Season 2, Ep. 25: Microtransactions
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
This week, we talk about microtransactions, and how they COULD be a pretty great thing if we'd just start doing them right.
Dog on
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The fact both games do not punish a play for being free to play. I am Looking at you Star Wars: The Old Republic. Instead they reward players by being a sub by giving them Free DLC. While free to play mods still have to spend 15 dollars for the DLC. Which I am perfectly fine with that. They also limited you bank, inventory and money you can hold but does not delete your over the cap cash.
This is a great system. As I know I can spend cash to unlock my cash. Yet it does not discourage me to make sure I am not over cap. The fact that seeing the saving account that I can only touch through micro makes me feel better about a limited cap on in game cash then other free to play game. Where your money is just destroyed. This makes me feel little sad that I can not touch the 200k extra cash I have earned past cap. It how ever makes me happy that my time and energy was for nothing. MMO and other games that deletes your money when you hit cap makes you feel like that you did all that work for nothing.
It can go both ways, but I would generally argue against selling leveling speed in games like MMORPGs. I've had games that I have played for free and I would compete with another friend of mine, and we would end up in a competition, as I have seen many other friends of mine also engage in. Unfortunately, the friend I used to compete with would always either purchase experience boosters or find some really high level guy to jump him up quickly, which made me really not like playing the same game as him, and eventually quitting.
At the time when these competitions would normally start, I was entertained with the game, but not committed enough to it to pay money for it, at least not yet. So when my friend would just buy experience boosters and make it essentially impossible for me to keep up, I really lost incentive with the majority of those games.
That being said, when combined with the idea to always have it possible to get each type of currency as also mentioned, then I am okay with it. If I can keep up with someone who is just paying their butts away by being smart, then I wouldn't mind experience boosters, though that does end up with things like Maplestory who is all about selling experience boosters and getting people to zoom through their content, that they have to keep pooping out new classes to keep people playing.
This rewards players for playing consistently and improving (since you get more C-Bills the better you do) but still gives players the opportunity to throw money at them. There are a few other ways to spend MC (vanity paint patterns, premium time to level up slightly faster, converting different forms of XP) but it is definitely possible to play without spending, if you're good enough. They even grant special c-bill boosts for new players to help you buy your first custom chassis faster - getting you into the store and attached to "your stuff".
Extra Credit guys: did you work with the MWO folks on their microtransaction architecture at all?