Another mmorpg subscription model

Tying in with Tesh's Ratcheted Subscription, I have just one suggestion in terms of subscriptions. Simply one of paying a set amount. Say for imagine, five hundred dollars. You pay your fifteen dollars a month as usual, but once your monthy fee has gotten to five hundred, you don't pay any more.


The idea is the company puts aside some of the money into bank accounts and accrues interest, which pays for costs and makes profits. So in this subscription type, your kind of investing into the game.


Of course, why do that if you can keep bleeding people each month AND all the people your bleeding can't imagine it any other way? No logical reason at all, really.

FFXIV: How to make money (as a company) without (the player) really trying

I should start logging some of my ideas earlier so I can do more 'told you so'. I've said in some places before that leveling time in mmorpg is primarily for the sake of subscription money. It's how the company makes their money. But someone who plays an unhealthy amount gets much farther ahead than someone who plays short, enjoyable bursts.

FFXIV tactics has a spin on this to simply slow down and stop you leveling after a certain time, so your not ahead of a predetermined leveling shedule.

To me its always starkly appeared to be the competing interests of making money and players wanting fun now.

Years ago when I played wow I thought of the idea of being able to wander out of the tavern, slay just a single monster, then waddle back inside and RP or log off, and for that first monster every day you'd get say 100 times the XP, but trickled out slowly to you (online or off). So if you didn't want to grind, you didn't - slaying a single monster would be an achievement. But if you killed more you'd get both.

That's another way, probably more towards player fun now. There are lots of ways to implement it, all with their own nuances.

Anyway, here's the video on it, where they are more honest about the behind the scenes than I would have expected. Though the bit at 4:53 is a bit rediculous 'If you really think about it, it works!'. How a game works is that it's fun. So it's like saying 'if you really think about it, it's fun!'. No, things don't become fun if you think about them real hard! However, thinking can dispell knee jerk assumptions of unpleasantness. However, the human brain is predisposed to work in extremes, either majorly pro or majorly dismissive. It has a hard time sliding the gear shift back to nuetral.

Oh, did I mention a video?...

Using psychic design powa's...

Heh, just the other day I was saying this

Any new model has to forfil both the player and the subscription companies needs (or become like guild wars, a one off purchase).

Personally I think something like this “Kill three orcs. In two days of real time after compleating it, you will become level 20. Or after the first three you can grind orcs to get to level 20 faster if you want (it’ll take roughly three hours – weve padded it out to that time)” works out better.

And just today I find out age of conan now gives you a level up for every four days of real life subscription.

I'm gunna have to start formally logging some of my predictions, just to see.

Hammering on!

Sorry for the pause, I've been playing alot of the warhammer endless trial and it is still quite engaging!

I will say though, and I don't blame the designers for this, when I tried out the other side - I lost perhaps all sense of importance of the game world? I guess it's because I was fighting for the cause of order first and then...destruction really is destruction. I just cancelled the meaning out so it ended up just the gamism, like playing quake live - not gamism and a sense of a cause your following. BUT as I said I don't blame the game designers - what are they going to do, lock you off from playing a side? Nah. There might be ways around it, but it's not something they have to do. Also it might just be something I experience, and I might be part of a minute demographic in that. But it made me think, all the same.

To be (subscribing) or not to be, that is the question

Actually that titles a little hyperbolic. It's not a huge question.

But I've been thinking about subscribing to warhammer online for awhile, but the first thing is they had a massive accounts stuff up recently, where people were charged up to thirty times their normal sub in one month. They are correcting it and appoligising, though they aren't offering any free time for the inconvenience, either.

Man still shouting at Evony advert

That's not even the biggest thing - the thing is people who were no longer subscribers also got affected! I mean, while playing I can imagine dealing with a stuff up, but I can just imagine finishing with the sub, then a year latter a bunch of financial pressures start to kick in and pow, they stuff up again just when it's vital my finances remain as is.

On the other hand I'm thinking that once I finish subscribing I could change the billing info to bogus numbers.

The other thing are some issues that Tesh has raised about subscriptions. I mean, what am I buying? It's rather like buying a newspaper, but if you don't read it all today the paper is gone tomorrow unless you buy it again.

I mean, given that, is subscription really an inappropriate word? When you subscribe to a magazine, you keep the copies. Granted with a gym, once you stop paying you can't go in. But it's called a gym membership, not a subscription.

The other thing with a gym is that it's not about content. You go there, you see if you can buff yourself, tone yourself - your not there to look at something pretty someone made (though perhaps you check out other members...hehe).

So while warhammer has PVP that involves self improvement, it also has a lot of 'your almost about to see this new thing' content tease, if you get what I mean?

What am I buying? If I buy even for the 'gym membership' factor, I'll be setting myself up for a big content tease. Content I can only see if I shell out money - and I mean, we have girlfriends for that! ;)

Subscription Model Idea

I thought of this when I first head of games selling lifetime subscriptions for over a hundred.

I'm assuming they take most of the lifetime sub money and bank it, drawing on interest from it to pay for the player.

So what if you took that to the traditional subscription model?

You pay a subscription as usual per month, but part of it is taken and banked. Once you have paid for a certain amount of time, the game becomes free to you!

'Cept for expansions and stupid mini pets/the usual gouges.

The ironic thing is I think anyone reading this might start comparing that they'd be paying several hundred dollars for a game when other single player games come out at around a hundred or less. So it might not seem like good value if someone presented to you that you can buy the mmorpg lifetime by subscribing for several hundred dollars. But yeah, your already doing that with wow or whatever, anyway.

That's another post I was gunna write - With people who play wow, if you take how much they've paid in subscription then go back in time to just before they started playing, and told them they have to pay all those subs upfront in order to play, would they pay it? Like say they've been playing for two years - before they started playing, if the game asked for them to pay $360 upfront or they can't play, would they have paid it?

I bet the honest answer is no.