DUST Search - Aurum, Microtransactions, and Us.

Iceyburnz wrote:

Iron Wolf Saber wrote:

Iceyburnz wrote:

I think they got the vanity drop-suits about right. I love my 3 aur Kindred scout suit. It makes me feel like a badass. I don;t even consider that Im spending money on it as far as Im concerned any aurum I buy is like a tank you for paying fpr a subscription.

Yes I know its not a subscription game, but that how Im choosing to frame it. Every month CCP get -ú13.99 or whatever and I get my 500 aur to play with. Simples.

Additionally: You can spent 3.99 a month (1100 Aur.) and that enough to get a 30 active skill booster. Thats probably the cheapest premium subscription on the market right now. the 30 days also keeps you repayment time right as well as giving you a little extra to play with.

Yup supscription as I outlined in section 6 would include packages like that.
"Supscribe just for this month for some cool gear." Is a definite option they can go espeically if they rotate the gear issue.

Hower Merc Pack will be seemingly stop begin sold on launch day and replaced with another one (the Dragonfly scout suit is a 'beta bling' item.)

Hehe sorry Iron I missed that.

Good idea, I think I'd just prefer psn to take the money once a month and give me my aurum. Hmmm do I want that? Maybe Id prefer to have the control myself, I could end up with a surplus of Aurum.

Good news about the dragon fly, gonna sell my spare one :D


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Iron Wolf Saber BetaMax. 2867	Posted - 2012.08.14 05:22:00 - [1] - Quote Its a touchy subject as it is now but since we're in beta we have some opertunity to adjust plans & ideas for selling items to players. So this discussion is to help CCP stay in business and keep the servers open and 'free.' 1. CCPs promises to Dust 514 players Not to make MT mandatory to enjoy all the major/minor features. This includes the expansions which they have stated are free, in a universe that is not linear it makes little sense to red rope players off in certain zones like Wow, Eve online practices this now no reason any other game in New Eden shouldnt as well. Not make MT buy 'unique' items that cannot obtain similar ones with sweat blood tears and isk. Interating on earlier that no MT will be used to preform a certain gameplay tasks such as buy 'energy' booster to play another match. Finally not to make MT able to buy ISK direclty which is better valued by players reselling Aurum items for isk. So now that we got what CCP doesnt want to accomplish with thier MT model we can hopefully focus on the things that CCP or Players could want in a MT system 2. The shortcuts The idea of the shortcut is to allow paying players to quickly access items that would otherwise take them a long time to reach. This is a good business pursuit, when done right non-payers will view it as a convience but not a nessecity to remain competitve as time, effort, specialization and patience allows them to catch up in one way or another. Downside is the more the shotcut is taken the shorter the path to needing it becomes. Eventually the player's own natural progression skills will override the shorcut, normally this is okay in a game with drop ins and outs, but this may mean lesser revenues from CCP as players age like a fine wine that was not stored properly. The there is the possible burnout. With too many shortcuts where players think they reached thier preceived endgame for example a player only wants to be the best sniper ever, he has trained every skill and clustered his way to max and got there. Now what? Unlike Eve players most console players may quit at this point instead of choosing a second profession, however its a risk I and hopefully everyone else is willing to agree. Hopefully the skill list will be long enough to possible create new game play styles that interest Mr sniper into changing carreers as expansions roll in. Types of shortcuts on the table. Active SP Booster Implant - This implant mutates the amount of active skill point gains at the end of every match. Great for the weekend warrior Passive SP Booster Implant - This implant mutates the amount of passive skill point gains over time, perfect for alts and not so actives Skill 'Spikes' - These spikes temporarly raise certain levels of of various skills to a level for a short time, when they expire they revert to previous levels. Great for the guy who wants to get to the point he thinks is the hump for his role from breaking ot making Skill 'Clusters' - Supposivly a group of skilsl to raise skills to a certrain level, for example a dropship cluster gives you enough temporary levels of SP to pilot a dropship. New packs have to be made regularly as game updates Early access gear - These peices of equipment are easier to equip at earlier skill levels, they should offer one level lower of what is required of a weapon of similar perofrmance. Should be applicable to all types of equipment including suits weapons and vehicles. 3. The Cosmetics Cosmetics are a perfect 'gold mine' of microtranactions almost acceptable anywhere provided its not the 'overpriced' the 20$ battlehorse can **** somone off as its no better than the worked 20 hours to get war horse and despite such still gets sold in large numbers... Now when a player buys a cosmetic they want to show it off most of the time, the 'look what I bought ma!" sort of feeling. Something you are that proud of and don't want to lose that feeling. Which brings me to my next feeling about cosmetic aurum suits The disposable ones are a bad idea. Humans are by default risk averse at some level. Its been so far from discussion with others that players are willing to risk 'slightly' bettter weapons than a gun of normal performance painted in their favorite color. Why would you bring such 'valued' item to the field for what I like to call battle value? Cosmetic suits atm have no battle value gain (and in some cases negative value cosmetic suits are bullet magnets) and the constant loss rate for some players in some battles is WAY too high or so unpredictable its easy to lose several dollars worth of pretty for a fight that even didnt matter. This I honestly think is a very bad component missing a special gear to make it work, a pernament option A match of recolors could easily waste 10$ a match. Now what is bad about a pernament option is that they will eventually dry up in sales as more and more players obtain the items. Almost requiring constant effort of new skins to keep the starving artist employed (bad exageration), so to offset the starvation a bit we make the price much more expensive than the disposbale ones, 100x-250x more of the value of the disposables for a paint can BPO (and not the suit) would be a fair soultion and will not upset the anti-god of pay to win Also the options of some cosmetics is albit lacking when there can be so much more. So here are a few more options Expanded Merc Quaters to the size of an eve online captains quaters Deeds (pernament or rental options) Personal items/pets in the quaters Dropsuit Paint Cans BPO/BPCs (pernament paints) Vehicle Paint Cans BPO/BPCs. Custom War rooms Resonable Vehicle and Dropsuit effects [/list]
Iron Wolf Saber BetaMax. 2867	Posted - 2012.08.14 05:22:00 - [2] - Quote Part 4 The Sidegrades Now this is where things get subjective. What is a sidegrade? How do you make a side grade of a weapon with plenty of sidegrades on it already with isk variants? Current set of sidegrades are about to be competed against with Specalist types of weapons nullifying thier CPU/PG fitting advantage. Then the risk of making a sidegrade is the potential too powerful, too difficult to use, or the just simple 'it sucks and not worth it complaints. This is a current conumdrum that I really don't see good solutions for yet as most suggestions would anger the anti-god of Pay to Win. While others will not pay the bills So my best solution so far that would encourage its purchases while not tipping the hand of the angry god who is against all pay to win would be the suffix system. If you have something better please suggest something because where dealing with straws on how to approach this Prefix system is basically a modifier that can be applied after the name of any weapon, base, or module variant. These suffix changes non-critical performance slightly should have penalties for the benfiits it brings. These can be tweaked to allow for the 'customized' gun experince that is still fair and not overpowering items like Frictionless Assault Frictionless - Effects reload at the cost of RoF/Charge Time, mostly found on the hard to reload weapons. This makes the gap of reloading seemingly less vunerlable but would lose to its isk cousin on who can empty out thier magazine faster or get the first shot off Bountiful - Effects only the magazine size of the weapon variant at the cost of reserve ammo. Thus overall less reloads and even lesser total gunlife damage potential vs is isk variant, while the aurum variant may not have to reload as much the isk variant has the endurance to play dogding bullets much longer Reserved - Effects how much reserve ammo the variant has at the cost of increase powergrid for holding the extra ammo in containment and storage. While the reserved types have more ammo the Powergrid eats into thier tanking ability a bit making the user more vunerable to non reserved soldiers These are just basic examples they're bonsues not normally wanted desired solely for a certain variant and they have just enough disadvantage that they lose thier thier parent (the isk item they are based off of) while at least offering a slight altenrative in gun play with players favorite weapons that need that extra 'feel' of thier gun in a certain direction and are willing to accept the drawbacks. It also possible to restrict prefixes on gun types that may make them to OP if done so suchas frictionless assualt scrambler pistols I can see being bad The worst part about these guns however is when the nerf bat hits, crying for refunds will ensue then again its likely still going to happen even if we dont use this system and the gun class as a whole gets nerfed such as swarm launcher did Part 5 Bonus Buy Bonus buy is a player made suggestion after discussing it to some length on the IRC channel. This basically takes the idea the mercenary pack brings and then going going a step further giving you more goodies for 'buying' more, however isntead of cash, the ingame aurum as well Bonus buy for all intents and purposes is to reward payers, while non payers would get sour over the idea, as long as we adhere to ccp's promise to avoid 'pay to win' there should be little issue with this. It also allows economizing of certain buy ins making it a savings to buy the bonus package over non-bonus package So far the few bonus buy types have been suggested in the discussion Crates - Crates contain mass quantities of aurum buyable items with bonus items for spending on it. for example crate of 100 grants 25 additional free copies, while a crate of 200 grants100 more. The scale and pricing should be fine tuned to make even buying smaller packs more appealing over individual copies. While the largest of purchases grants the most Discount Time - As in section 2 the shortcuts the boosters there are time based consumables. So to encourage larger ones being bought would be to discount the total pricing. So lets say a 1 day active booster is for sale for 100 ar 30 day one would be for sale at 2000 arinstead of the expected 3000. This would encourage purchases of larger units provided that all of them get a scaled discount Soldier Kits - Soldier Kits comes with various items that allows a dust 514 mercenary to temporarly enjoy or explore another role. They come with all the spikes clusters and items they can need to get started. For example a Shocktrooper Kit will come with AV skill cluster, Heavy Suits and Swarm Launchers Mystery Box - Instead of making it a 'gamble' box where the players 'always lose'. An more acceptable pay for what you get with a chance of additional award being the 'bonus' aspect of this buy. The Mystery Box will contain various random items of aurum value with a chance of being total worth much more than the box's own price while at most of the time will be matching or near matching. All items are of course sellable for isk. Potential for isk based items as well. These boxes can come in various pay packages the higher cost aurum ones would yeild better bonuses Part 6 Optional Subscription Finally another MT Option suggested by players. The optional subscription. With Dust 514 is very straight foward to what we can expect form a monthly subscription we can call Tour of Duty(TOD) Tours come in various grades, higher the monthly pay the better the perks are. The tours will pay out aurum on a weekly/daily basis based on the subscription amount. Such as 5$ 10$ 15% and 20$ packages per month youll accumulate that much aurum over the entire month. The perks rewarding 'loyalty' give the subscribers additional aurum purhcase bonus along with a free mystery box of matching grade monthly.
Iron Wolf Saber BetaMax. 2867	Posted - 2012.08.14 05:22:00 - [3] - Quote Final Thoughts Either way these plans will hopefully help CCP keep the servers up, developing dust 514 more, get better resources for improving the game while 'hopefully' not nickel and dime us every chance they get. Let us willingly spend the money let us not think we need to spend the money. Make us spend money because we love the game the developers and really do want to continue the experince. Not as an obligation but out of voulenteer. Interation on why Aurum shouldnt buy Isk The ultimate reason why is to not over monetize the idea of isk in this point but rather dual monetizie the value of aurum items buy letting players resell them. That way those non payers can still get thier hands on aurum gear, and buyer can get a small boost in isk so both parties win. Interation on Bonus Buys As for the Bonus Buys one more suggestion as made but ran out of character places Multi-character purchases. Buy a pack that distributes it to all your alts. While some player may not use this as often its more of a convience factor and antoher chance to sell the items. and of course I am willing and open to discussion and new suggestions the such as the crate idea came from the first replier. Also I think that ccp should also have 'rotational' sales of various packages to encourage buying as well when these items are raw discounted off by 5% - 10% rotating on a weekly basis as this will spike that items sale temproraily.
Iron Wolf Saber BetaMax. 2867	Posted - 2012.08.14 07:37:00 - [4] - Quote Mmkk333 wrote: You say don't make us pay for things like "expansions". By expansions, do you mean like Dawnguard was an expansion for Skyrim? Because, if so, then I disagree completely, that is practically the ONLY thing I think they should make us pay for. I have to disagree for various reasons. CCP may give out free expansions twice a year but sometimes those expansions don't feel... expansion sized. One example all they did for it was bug fixes. It was regarded one of the best expansions ever as no new feature where added, no new garphics, just 1000s of bugs getting fixed and that was it. Dust 514 may get to that point one day and you really have to ask yourself as a game publisher can I really sell a bug fix expansion? the answer is no. community will demand it be a free patch. Dust 514 will have its slow expansions and raptor jesus upgrades that makes you go 'How in the heck could I have been playing dust 514 last week without this expansion? This should have been a launch feature!' and when you start trying to red rope people off from zones content and stuff you make 2x a year and charge even 20$ an expansion the Eve Online would require over 360$ USD to catch up to the current content.
Iron Wolf Saber BetaMax. 2867	Posted - 2012.08.14 14:00:00 - [5] - Quote John Surratt wrote: Iron Wolf Saber wrote: Dust 514 will have its slow expansions and raptor jesus upgrades that makes you go 'How in the heck could I have been playing dust 514 last week without this expansion? +1 internets, Raptor Jesus approves. thak you
Iron Wolf Saber BetaMax. 2867	Posted - 2012.08.14 14:27:00 - [6] - Quote Khaa Thu'um wrote: I feel like everything that can be purchased with AUR should be able to be purchased with ISK no matter how much time that could take... Because from what I've been reading some people are willing to pay $40-$60, which could go all towards bonus experience and superior weaponry, making all the people playing for free become discouraged from playing again. Or, potentially a better solution, being able to buy blueprints with AUR and not with ISK. That way everybody will be on the same level in terms of weaponry. I just don't feel like it's a good idea to allow people willing to pay larger amounts of money to be allowed to become better through increased XP bonuses or better weapons that are off limits to non-paying users. I agree however it shouldnt be sold from npcs infinite source, I think all AUR items should be 'resellable' by the player who originally payed aurum for them (and or stolen from other less suspecting players) This is also why ccp doesnt do direct aurum to isk transfers it allows players to put real price tags on these items and makes them acceptable unacceptable and the second best indicator of a good sold item or a bad one as secondary markets are much more honest than primary aur based ones.
Iron Wolf Saber BetaMax. 2867	Posted - 2012.08.14 14:29:00 - [7] - Quote Iceyburnz wrote: I think they got the vanity drop-suits about right. I love my 3 aur Kindred scout suit. It makes me feel like a badass. I don;t even consider that Im spending money on it as far as Im concerned any aurum I buy is like a tank you for paying fpr a subscription. Yes I know its not a subscription game, but that how Im choosing to frame it. Every month CCP get -ú13.99 or whatever and I get my 500 aur to play with. Simples. Additionally: You can spent 3.99 a month (1100 Aur.) and that enough to get a 30 active skill booster. Thats probably the cheapest premium subscription on the market right now. the 30 days also keeps you repayment time right as well as giving you a little extra to play with. Yup supscription as I outlined in section 6 would include packages like that. "Supscribe just for this month for some cool gear." Is a definite option they can go espeically if they rotate the gear issue. Hower Merc Pack will be seemingly stop begin sold on launch day and replaced with another one (the Dragonfly scout suit is a 'beta bling' item.)
Iron Wolf Saber BetaMax. 2867	Posted - 2012.08.14 14:36:00 - [8] - Quote Iceyburnz wrote: Iron Wolf Saber wrote: Iceyburnz wrote: I think they got the vanity drop-suits about right. I love my 3 aur Kindred scout suit. It makes me feel like a badass. I don;t even consider that Im spending money on it as far as Im concerned any aurum I buy is like a tank you for paying fpr a subscription. Yes I know its not a subscription game, but that how Im choosing to frame it. Every month CCP get -ú13.99 or whatever and I get my 500 aur to play with. Simples. Additionally: You can spent 3.99 a month (1100 Aur.) and that enough to get a 30 active skill booster. Thats probably the cheapest premium subscription on the market right now. the 30 days also keeps you repayment time right as well as giving you a little extra to play with. Yup supscription as I outlined in section 6 would include packages like that. "Supscribe just for this month for some cool gear." Is a definite option they can go espeically if they rotate the gear issue. Hower Merc Pack will be seemingly stop begin sold on launch day and replaced with another one (the Dragonfly scout suit is a 'beta bling' item.) Hehe sorry Iron I missed that. Good idea, I think I'd just prefer psn to take the money once a month and give me my aurum. Hmmm do I want that? Maybe Id prefer to have the control myself, I could end up with a surplus of Aurum. Good news about the dragon fly, gonna sell my spare one :D Sorry ran out of room didnt get enough time to squeeze it in and I am all for player control of subscriptions to the point it can be an ingame tradeable item for isk. TODs would come in various metal grades so to say and when you apply them to the account you start getting the weekely injection and the free items associated for that month. Have the free value items rotation monthly (so like one month it would be a mystery box the next month it would be the demolition warload) and of course make the subscription either montly or pay it once deal. What I dont want to see is long time perks since the TODs are already those a thank you for spending money. Maybe if they do give out awards for subscribing annouce well ahead of time and only require any one TOD consumption over the previous year.
Iron Wolf Saber BetaMax. 2867	Posted - 2012.08.14 15:31:00 - [9] - Quote Sees-Too-Much wrote: I think an argument could be made that aurum-only items being "better" than isk variants in some limited way isn't all that bad a thing. As long as payers still need isk one way they'll get it is by using aurum on items and seeding those items back on the market for isk. As a result you don't have to pay to win, you can get the top-end aurum-only gear without ever dropping a penny of real money into the game. It's a delicate line to walk, though, and it could go wrong pretty bad. If I stick with the game through release I'll probably drop a few bucks now and again to show CCP some support. Skill boosters to get my SP up faster are probably what I'd go for, and I think they're the best combination of not pay-to-win and still bringing in money for CCP. I like the idea of vanity items too, especially if they can be seeded to the market like aurum-only mods. I'm all about tricking out my Eryx with the words "Enola Gay" next to the cockpit. You dont want the weapons good enough that players want to keep it for themselves though.
Iron Wolf Saber BetaMax. 2867	Posted - 2012.08.14 15:31:00 - [10] - Quote Seran Jinkar wrote: Why not make vanity items wear off over time. Just like the boosters, skill spikes etc. ? Thats a possibility as well 30 day paint can bpo not as expensive as the pernmaent bpo but an option none the less.