Goblin Squad Member
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Another interesting perspective on mmorpg economies. I think given the recent Cash Shop discusssions it's worth linking this in it's own thread.
In particular:
Similarly, if you are the only one that owns a horse in a virtual world, that horse has tremendous value due to its scarcity. If you log in the next day and due to a bug or exploit now 500 people have horses, the value of your horse has now dropped to almost nothing.
[...]
What if I spent three months earning the first horse in a game, and then a few days later I found out that 500 other players now had horses. But this was not due to a bug per se, this was because the game host decided that horses were cool and that players would pay real money for them. Again I describe this in Mona Lisa. Now horses are not cool anymore, and my equity has been destroyed. I'm upset! More importantly, I have now lost confidence in the game world and it's hosts because I know they will not protect my efforts.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I don't see how a real world definition of equity can be applied to a game. He is making up a new definition of the word.
eq·ui·ty
1. The state, quality, or ideal of being just, impartial, and fair.
2. Something that is just, impartial, and fair.
3. Law
a. Justice applied in circumstances covered by law yet influenced by principles of ethics and fairness.
b. A system of jurisprudence supplementing and serving to modify the rigor of common law.
c. An equitable right or claim.
d. Equity of redemption.
4. The residual value of a business or property beyond any mortgage thereon and liability therein.
5.
a. The market value of securities less any debt incurred.
b. Common stock and preferred stock.
6. Funds provided to a business by the sale of stock.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If there are more people willing to buy the horse, than there are people who worked for the horse, the producer of the game will not hesitate to introduce the horse into the cash shop. They will not even give it a second thought.
Same holds true when it comes to gold farmers. Many of us yell and say the developers have to do this or that to fight back at the gold farmers. In the end, the gold farmers remain because there are just as many or at least enough, that will buy from them anyway.
Same can be said about griefers. The Devs can do all that they can to discourage and even punish griefers, and they always find a way to grief. It takes the community as a while to slow griefing down, usually by griefing the griefers.
In a Sandbox MMO you have to think in terms of years of play. Over many years you can expect to be out matched by some one who has been in the game longer. Or to have your gear or transportation surpassed, instantly by some new item or perk added in. Or worse of all, you may find your whole character concept altered by changes in the game mechanics that then make your character obsolete.
What is the advantage is, you will have years to get over it and it is likely you will also get some of those perks as well.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I don't see how a real world definition of equity can be applied to a game. He is making up a new definition of the word.
I did learn some Cost Accounting too long ago, and realise these financial definitions can be slippery devils but I'm pretty sure even if I don't understand the definitions perfect use, the author does, as that's his job?
Isn't it just your in-game (asset value minus liabilities value) return for the time/money/fun etc you invested into those things? Assets should increase the longer you play and liabilities should be minimised atst is what he's advising, right?
Here's a defintion I dug up on google from "investopedia":
Definition of 'Equity Financing'
The act of raising money for company activities by selling common or preferred "stock" to individual or institutional investors. In return for the money paid, "shareholders" receive ownership interests in the "corporation".
I'm guessing exhange the meaning for meanings referring to mmorpg, player, avatar etc?
Edit: I vaguely recall a player in EVE cashed in some of his corporation's assets so he could use the earnings on a real-life mortgage for a house in Australia. I think it may have caused an in-game banking crisis. This may be the story - not sure: EVE Online player run bank 1.2 trillion ISK in the red, freezes all accounts
Conflict is not needed. Consumption is preferred.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The key here is in the expectations of the players... First off, in the horse story...
If the item is going to go in the shop, while being obtainable in game as well, it should either have both methods released simultaniously, or start in the shop then be introduced to the game via other means. People who buy from the cash shop, just want the horse because it is cool, they have no expectation of it being a status symbol or scarce at all, because they know anyone can buy it, thus there is no resentment if it is introduced into the game via other means. While things earned in game, do carry with them the status symbol value, expected scarcity etc...
Where this particular quote I find off, there's 2 values of items, Status symbol value, and practical value. Status symbol value goes down when scarcity goes down, both status and practical value go down, when a superior item that does the same thing better is added to the game. One thing to note.
IF for some reason something is added to the game first, but then it is decided that it should have been added to the cash shop after the fact... the diminishment of status symbol value could still be greatly reduced, via a simple minor change to the appearance. IE a brown horse earned, a grey horse in the shop, etc...
Without consumption existence fails.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If horses* were available as a MTX from day 1, I would have no problems with that. People would know they could either hand over some cash, or work for 3 months in game to get the exact same item. This comes back to the 'time rich vs cash rich' player. Give both the same playing experience, just gained via different means.
*Horses are a convenience item, which I am fine with. A +5 Holy Avenger is not and could be seen as pay to win. I am not fine with these types of items.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I am just going to add this and go to bed, cash shops are needed for gaming companies to survive, especially on a tight budget. However, I would HIGHLY advise GW and every other gaming company to use the cash shop to get early access to simple and plain items. Using the horse example, a simple brown or black horse is fine for cash shop, getting a nightmare or unicorn or other "unique" mount, while functioning the same and only looking different, would be for those who go through whatever in game process is decided upon and therefor earned. An example would be in Wow, where you could buy the simple mounts from the mount trainer, but really special and rarer mounts where achievements or rare drops off rare mobs. Granted that isn't cash shop but the concept is the same.
This applies to nearly everything in a cash shop. Unless it will be cash only, it needs to be a basic and simple version of the earned in-game item.
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Goblin Squad Member
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I agree Milo, but would go a step further. The brown horse you buy is just a plain old riding horse (at most). It's not trained to do anything fancy and is certainly not a warhorse by any stretch of the imagination. You have IC crafters (horse trainers) that do those fancy things.
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Goblin Squad Member
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AvenaOats, I seem to've missed something: how did the horse ever have value in the first place? You make reference to "cool", but that's not a quantifiable value; to me, at least, that's only in the eye of the beholder.
If you like your horse enough on Day 1 to buy or earn it, why wouldn't you like it on Day 2 as well? It seems analogous to liking a dish at a restaurant until you're told what's in it...if you like it, don't you just like it?
Perhaps it's that others' subjective opinions don't often alter mine, but I thought I'd ask in case I missed something vital to the discussion.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The author refers to "cool" and I did quote those egs a little out of context, but I think what he's talking about is 2 different things:
a) The value of scarcity as a motivator for players
b) prestige goods (earnt in game not bought)
It's the motivation for a lot of players to increase the value of their character/in-game efforts/decisions (equity) either via investing or earning or both. Tbh, I'm not very materialist myself (explorer?), so a horse is only a function of fun to me. But obviously for achievers horses are serious business.
But as Ryan mentioned before, I think socialisers can really rev a game up and I imagine if the economy has serious players, some of that motivations rubs off into the rest of the game fuelling it even more into a deeply interesting entertainment experience, so long as gold farmers and hackers don't get too big a piece of the pie that is.
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Goblin Squad Member
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| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
If you like your horse enough on Day 1 to buy or earn it, why wouldn't you like it on Day 2 as well?
Do a thought experiment:
Your boss gives you a $1,000 bonus check. You're happy and you feel good about yourself and the job you're doing. Then you find out your boss gave everyone else a $10,000 bonus check. How do you feel? How has the "value" of your $1,000 bonus check changed? It's still the same amount. Shouldn't you feel the same about it? If you're like most people, you'll go from feeling like you were being rewarded for a job well done to feeling like you are being chastised for a poor job. This is a very rational response.
Nothing has intrinsic value. Value only ever exists in "the eye of the beholder". And all value is relative to all other value.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Look, Blizzard did this and it was nothing but hugely popular. They have lots of mounts that you have to grind faction rep until you're ready to set your computer on fire. Those are "achiever" rewards.
Then they SOLD a mount (Spectral Steed) and made $40 million in two weeks. Nobody meaningfully objected. The world did not end. The faction mounts remained "cool".
You just have to avoid doing the dumb thing - selling the faction grind rewards in the cash shop - to keep everyone happy.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If you like your horse enough on Day 1 to buy or earn it, why wouldn't you like it on Day 2 as well?Do a thought experiment:
Your boss gives you a $1,000 bonus check. You're happy and you feel good about yourself and the job you're doing. Then you find out your boss gave everyone else a $10,000 bonus check. How do you feel? How has the "value" of your $1,000 bonus check changed? It's still the same amount. Shouldn't you feel the same about it? If you're like most people, you'll go from feeling like you were being rewarded for a job well done to feeling like you are being chastised for a poor job. This is a very rational response.
Nothing has intrinsic value. Value only ever exists in "the eye of the beholder". And all value is relative to all other value.
Unless we're talking about selling something wildly mechanically better, a more analogous example might be that you put in your years with the company, and got a gold watch, and then as an end of year bonus, everyone in the company got the same watch in silver. It stings, but it's hardly you being given objectively less.
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Goblin Squad Member
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To be clear:
AvenaOats was talking about a situation where the exact same horse were suddenly available.
Similarly, if you are the only one that owns a horse in a virtual world, that horse has tremendous value due to its scarcity. If you log in the next day and due to a bug or exploit now 500 people have horses, the value of your horse has now dropped to almost nothing.
[...]
What if I spent three months earning the first horse in a game, and then a few days later I found out that 500 other players now had horses. But this was not due to a bug per se, this was because the game host decided that horses were cool and that players would pay real money for them. Again I describe this in Mona Lisa. More importantly, I have now lost confidence in the game world and it's hosts because I know they will not protect my efforts.
Jazzlvraz seemed to be referring to this particular quote, and asking why the "value" of the horse would change. I highlighted above the part that I believe Jazzlvraz was directly referring to.
My thought experiment was not meant to be analogous to this or any other particular case. Rather, it was meant to demonstrate the fact that value is relative.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Jazzlvraz seemed to be referring to this particular quote...
Exactly right, and I'm thinking, seeing the discussion, that my issue comes from the fact that I've never seen, in any game I can think of, anything another player has, wears, or is that makes me say "ooh!".
Outside of gaming, I don't get the whole "cool" thing either, so at least I have consistency going for me :).
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Goblin Squad Member
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Jazzlvraz seemed to be referring to this particular quote...Exactly right, and I'm thinking, seeing the discussion, that my issue comes from the fact that I've never seen, in any game I can think of, anything another player has, wears, or is that makes me say "ooh!".
Outside of gaming, I don't get the whole "cool" thing either, so at least I have consistency going for me :).
Thanks for saying that. I'm glad to know my reading comprehension was up to the task. :)
Also, I'm cut from the same cloth when it comes to not being impressed by other players' gear. Some of the guys in my Vanguard guild try to impress me by linking their gear, or gear they see drop. I usually don't even bother clicking the links - I just don't care. I'm all about the experience, not the shineys.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Just to play the devil's advocate here, I will add this:
Some people get a great deal of personal satisfaction from obtaining things through difficult/involved in-game means. Part of that satisfaction can be derived, for some, through the admiration/envy received from fellow players.
-Understanding that player's "satisfaction" is not necessary. Acknowledging that they have it, is just common sense. They have/want it, therefore, to them, it is important and has value.
-When the exact same item/accomplishment becomes obtainable though out of game means, and other's do so, it becomes irrelevant. Impossible to tell if the "thing" was achieved in or out of game and so, again to the achiever, it loses the value that the achiever had placed on it.
Not necessarily how I view the world either, but a valid feeling for some players anyway.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Here's a little article on a new wow mount in the cash shop. Some of the comments are funny: But there's clear discussion on whether or not such a mount should be charged or not. I can see both sides:
1. It's a vanity item - for them that want such an option
2. If you pay a sub per month and on top eg $25 isn't that a bit money-grubbing?
World of Warcraft introduces the flesh-eating Armored Bloodwing mount for $25.00
=
My personal opinion is that it's fine to sell aesthetic things in the cash shop. Though if this fearsome sounding mount were in Pathfinder Online, I'd be disappointed. Why? Because of form and function: this MONSTER clearly tells me that it eat 50 children just for breakfast each day but makes up for it by being an absolute beast in combat and performing wonderful acrobatics in the sky - an experience that should be rare and privileged and proportional ie there can only ever be 10 of these truly epic beings at any one time or some such rule.
/my 2 cents into the cash shop
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Goblin Squad Member
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There are occasionally things that go 'ooh' in game, and those are some of the major aesthetic items (e.g. primary armor, primary weapon, mount). Sometimes its annoying not to be able to get a particularly cool piece of gear. But honestly, whether it came from the cash shop, a grind, an achievement or a raid boss, there are always going to be some elements that Im just not going to be able to get, for one reason or another. Therefore, as long as the availability is impartial, it doesnt break my immersion or start madly raging.
When I talk about impartiality, I mean being consistent in how it is available. If achieving a specific mount took an average of 100 game hours to achieve, that has real value to players. Some of it is epeen, some of it is just wanting to be different than the rest. Should that mount suddenly require less effort to achieve, it has destroyed its value. It doesnt matter if the change was requiring 10 game hours to achieve or 10$ to buy, the value has been significantly reduced.
To illustrate, imagine you bought a house next to a beautiful natural vista such as open fields with copses of trees. Without much warning, that natural vista was removed and turned into a landfill. Whether you bought that house for bragging rights or just because you wanted a nice view, the value of the house is no longer the same. If you doubt that, just ask yourself this: Would I pay the original price (with fields) in the current situation (with landfill)?
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CEO, Goblinworks
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| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
That is not the comparison you are making.
This is the correct comparison:
You hike far up a mountain, clear the ground, and build a house. You have a great view and wonderful clean fresh air. It takes you 10 years to do this. No one else has such a house.
I pay a guy to go make me a comparable house on the other side of the mountain. A few weeks later, I move in. I'm just the first of many, soon "mountain living" will be commonplace.
Has your house lost value?
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Goblin Squad Member
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Look, Blizzard did this and it was nothing but hugely popular. They have lots of mounts that you have to grind faction rep until you're ready to set your computer on fire. Those are "achiever" rewards.
Then they SOLD a mount (Spectral Steed) and made $40 million in two weeks. Nobody meaningfully objected. The world did not end. The faction mounts remained "cool".
Ryan,
I understand the appeal for GW in being able to sell items that are that popular (and lucrative) in the cash shop. My question is this - items that will be purchased in-game with coin earned by the purchase of Goblin Balls have a value that can be quantified whether we speak of gold or cash. That is, such items will have a going exchange rate and market value for both cash and gold. If you offer the highly desirable item only in the cash shop and at a fixed price, meaning it is not subject to the rise and fall of the in-game market price, are you not then unfairly competing with people who sell the less "cool" alternative in-game?
For instance, if Animal Handling exists in-game and I can "raise" horses, but doing so costs me time and money (feed, settlement support costs for the farm, etc.), then I'll need to make those expenses up on the sale price. I'll be competing with other horse sellers and all the usual player driven economy rules apply to our pricing. But if you offer a horse, cooler than any horse we can offer, and at a price that is not subject to the influences of the in-game market, then aren't you unfairly competing with players? I might have to drastically drop the price of my horses to compete with your price-fixed, cooler product.
Selling something like skins doesn't seem to cause the same problem since players will still need to buy, for example, the sword from the craftsman to then apply the skin. It seems to me that if the category of item exists nowhere else, is not in competition with player-made equivalents and causes no disruption (except to players who believe their subscription fee should make everything available to them). However, if it does exist, such that it is the item everybody desires, and subsequently causes the items we make in game to be less desired and less purchased, then its sale would seem profitable for the game company but less so for the game player.
I will be the first to admit that you know far more about game economics than I do. If there is a problem with my reasoning, I welcome the education.
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Goblin Squad Member
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...unfairly competing with people who sell the less "cool" alternative in-game?
...if you offer a horse, cooler than any horse we can offer...
I've lost track of where we learned that the cash shop would offer items "cooler" than what in-game crafters will make. Could you please point me?
If it was something along the lines of "the cash shop's item will be purple, and that's the only colour crafters can't make", I'm guessing that's not that okay? Should we "allow" for cash shop items to be obviously so, which will appeal to a certain portion of the population, those who want others to see them waving their wallets around?
That does provide an opportunity for cash shop sales to be skins, applied to player-crafted items, as you and others have put forth. I hope the crowdforging will be able to settle at least a few of these points somewhat soon, because these arguments become tiring quickly; no one comes out ahead in the continuing absence of certainty, and it all ends with ill-will.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In the portion I quoted from Ryan, he seems to be suggesting that selling a mount that exists nowhere else in-game is a just way for game designers to generate cash. To my knowledge, he has not stated this will be the case for PFO, but his post seems to provide his thinking that doing so is a viable option for generating revenue for a game (he referenced WoW).
Now, if the cash shop provided cooler horsey skins to lay over your in-game acquired horse, I see no problem, and likely it would generate the same kind of revenue. Those who want the sparkly horse can buy a regular horse (the in-game horse merchant gets a sale), buy the rainbow-bright skin (GW gets a sale), and apply it to their mundane mount.
People who only care about having a horse for it's obvious benefits (faster travel) won't care in the slightest. Those who want to play My Little Pony mix and match can do so, if they want to spend the cash. If these "horse skins" can also be sold on the in-game market, then mores the better...now time-rich but cash-poor players can get one too.
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Goblin Squad Member
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That is not the comparison you are making.
This is the correct comparison:
You hike far up a mountain, clear the ground, and build a house. You have a great view and wonderful clean fresh air. It takes you 10 years to do this. No one else has such a house.
I pay a guy to go make me a comparable house on the other side of the mountain. A few weeks later, I move in. I'm just the first of many, soon "mountain living" will be commonplace.
Has your house lost value?
Technically no, but I think the issue comes down to feeling cheated or that you took the "hard way" to achieve something that other people were willing and/or able to "pay for" and that is what makes the difference on a personal level. Some people are not bothered by this, but others are. I know myself, I like to show-off and "brag" about achievements I have done and gear/items I have achieved. earning something in game allows you to do that, buying it doesn't. Anyone with a gaming budget or some extra cash can buy something, but those who don't want to, or can't afford to, put more money into a game than the sub cost, feels like they are working extra hard for nothing. I think a simple and "fair" way to address this is to make the items that are available both through in-game work and cash, function exactly the same, though look/named differently. This will distinguish those who bought vs those who worked for the item, and allow everyone to see who got what how. that way you can tell, using the horse example, the guy on the plain brown horse paid for it, where the guy on the pretty silver-manned black horse had earned it through time and work. (I am not color coordinated or any sort of fashion expert in any realm so excuse the reference, but I hope the point gets across.) Obviously, whatever the great Games Organizational Directors (GODs aka GW) decide will be what we will see in game, but I have pleaded my views and desires on this topic.
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Goblin Squad Member
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That is not the comparison you are making.
This is the correct comparison:
You hike far up a mountain, clear the ground, and build a house. You have a great view and wonderful clean fresh air. It takes you 10 years to do this. No one else has such a house.
I pay a guy to go make me a comparable house on the other side of the mountain. A few weeks later, I move in. I'm just the first of many, soon "mountain living" will be commonplace.
Has your house lost value?
No, but it has declined in price on the real estate market. If either of us wants to sell our home, what we have to sell is no longer as scarce as it was, and the market price will reflect this.
That's not a problem though, because there's equity here (in the traditional economic sense of the world). It doesn't matter how we got our house--at some level it's production based. I put my production directly into building a house over ten years. Your smarter than me--you traded your future production in making awesome games to a builder, through a banking intermediary. Even after finance costs, because of division of labor, you only had to put 8 or 9 years of production into the house.
But we still had comparable--equitable--experiences. But if say a large part of mountain living is some sort of regulatory barrier--taxes, offsets and and other wedges that make up a significant part of the cost, well, what if that suddenly that goes away? A new entrant into mountain living only has to put 4 years into their mountain home (just the labor, material and transport costs). Now both our homes plunge in price on the secondary market, but it's not equitable, because one class of members in the political economy was treated differently than others.
What I think the author the OP cited is fumbling after, not quite saying explicitly, is that game designers can make wholesale changes at the click of a spreadsheet cell. You can introduce very inequitable changes without any of the political pre-work we might have in a polity in the real world, and so you can shoot yourself easily--all the feedback will be post hoc.
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Goblin Squad Member
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AvenaOats, I seem to've missed something: how did the horse ever have value in the first place? You make reference to "cool", but that's not a quantifiable value; to me, at least, that's only in the eye of the beholder.
The value isn't quantifiable, but the price is. As long as their is any kind of activity in the market you'll have a very accurate quantification of the premium (price, not value) people are willing to pay for scarcity.
If you had tried to go up to Harry Winston and trade him 40+ single carat diamonds, of even the highest quality, for the Hope diamond, you'd have been laughed at. It's precisely the scarcity of very large, high quality diamonds that makes their pricing distinct from diamonds as a commodity.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Let's use the 'Horse' example again.
Let's say, to 'make' horses, you have several options:
1) go out into the wild and find a wild herd and deal nonlethal damage/charm/befriend some of them and somehow take them back to your farm, which has hopefully been upgraded to a Horse Stable in the meantime, and then begin the long and slow process of rearing and training them yourself.
While slow, this method also allows you to pick your breeding material and focus upon Heavy Warhorses, Light but fast Scouting Horses or Slow but with incredible endurance draft horses.
2) go back to the starter zones and pay an expensive amount of in-game currency to buy a faction mount, which requires a rep-grind with said faction.
Crusaders might only be able to provide slow, reliable Draft horses. The Hellknights might have nothing but Heavy Warhorses. The Bandits might only supply fast horses, able to get the bandits in and out of striking range quickly for hit-and-run tactics.
I could fully see players allied with the Bandits selling strings of these 'Scouting' Horses to other players, or trading them in exchange for Warhorses or Draft horses, which can in turn be bred to each other, or to their own kind.
3) purchase your chosen mount from the Cash Shop, and it is fundamentally no different from any other horse found in the wild or purchased from a vendor ... but it's a gelding. It's a mount for people who just want to get from A to B fast, but for people looking to breed/have the faster/toughest/most durable Horse in the game ... it's a waste of money.
I'd like to see the Cash Shop offering ways to make the game more convenient in the short term, but the 'best' in the game has to be the result of Players' actions.
Using the above method, I know most of us will 'buy' geldings for our everyday running around, because A) they can get killed, most likely, like most of our other possession, and B) how many of us really have that much free time these days?
That said, if there was a niche market for it, I'd certainly still buy the Geldings for myself, maybe my friends, but I'd be working to either purchase or capture wild horses and try to breed up a solid bloodline for one of those niche markets.
Need steady, reliable Draft horses that can pull a loaded cart all day long, see me. Want a Warhorse that can cave in an Ogre's skull with a single kick, you'll need to head on thirty miles to the next Horse Stable and negotiate with them, etc etc.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
This is our current plan (not literally, but by example):
There are 5 horses you can acquire in the game. Red, green, blue, indigo and violet.
All the horse types are different from each other in some material way. You get them via in-game activities.
We sell a Red horse with a non-functional, purely cosmetic unicorn horn you can only get from MTX or trade with someone who used MTX.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If it's not account bound so that people who are time rich but cash poor can also get the snappy horned horse by buying it on the in-game market with gold, then I see not as much of a problem.
Questions:
1. Does the horned horse have any of the "different in some material way" extras? If not, why not make the horned horse a skin that you can apply to a regular horse to then make it look like a horned horse? This way, you're still providing the snappy look without stealing business from the in-game horse merchant.
2. How does one take possession of this horned horse? Immediately from the cash shop? As I believe Pagan pointed out earlier, immediate acquisition of material goods can unbalance something like a siege, where starving your opponent of material goods helps weaken them. Of course, this is only the case in this particular situation if mounts are killable. If they are, being able to buy a new mount out of thin air defeats the sieging army's attempt to kill off the enemy's means of speedy movement (i.e. their horses).
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Goblin Squad Member
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If it's not account bound so that people who are time rich but cash poor can also get the snappy horned horse by buying it on the in-game market with gold, then I see not as much of a problem...
Whereas I see no problem with it whatsoever. If I didn't want Goblinworks to have a way to be successful I wouldn't have contributed what I did. There is no in-game functional advantage to the purely ornamental unicorn horn other than providing opportunity to tweak your role play. GW gets to make some money. Win-Win all the way around.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If one can either buy something himself from the cash shop, or buy that something from someone else who used the cash shop, does that pretty much settle many of the disagreements we're having here? It sounds as if everyone will thus have access to everything, no matter in what resources you're rich or poor.
I won't even be buying the frickin' horses, and I really don't mind them having an item shop, because it makes them money that can then be applied to making the game better. So what if your red horse has a unicorn horn, or you house is over on the other side of the mountain, if you wanted the house for a view, you have it, and probably didn't intend to sell it, so regardless of the size of the neighborhood, it won't take away from the value that you placed on the house, by building it there. the only part about the other people being on the mountain that I would even care about is that I might have to interact with them. I hope this hypothetical mountain is big.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If GW is selling a mount that has a visible appeal that no game tamed/bred horse has, is this not competing with the players who might be taming/breeding horses as part of their in-game income? Competing with someone who does not have to spend time learning/training skills, finding the wild horses or breeding the tame ones, and who's price is not controlled by in-game market prices seems like unfair competition in a game that boasts a player-driven economy as one of its hallmarks.
Now, if the fancy horse looks are a skin, and players can't make skins, then there is no competition. Rather, there is now an incentive for players to buy the tamer/breeder's horses so they can then apply the skin they want to show off. That sounds more like a win-win.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If GW is selling a mount that has a visible appeal that no game tamed/bred horse has, is this not competing with the players who might be taming/breeding horses as part of their in-game income?
Not if they are selling the horn itself in a re-skin of your owned horse, and it is only an issue if someone actually has the horse-training skill, which I have yet to see GW own as in The Plan.
Competing with someone who does not have to spend time learning/training skills, finding the wild horses or breeding the tame ones, and who's price is not controlled by in-game market prices seems like unfair competition in a game that boasts a player-driven economy as one of its hallmarks.
If animal husbandry includes horse breeding/training as a player craft then you might have an issue.
Now, if the fancy horse looks are a skin, and players can't make skins, then there is no competition. Rather, there is now an incentive for players to buy the tamer/breeder's horses so they can then apply the skin they want to show off. That sounds more like a win-win.
Right, so when Ryan was talking about GW selling a red horse with a decorative horn you thought he could not have meant that already? Seems to me what he said could as easily be interpreted either way, or even both ways.
There is a mount. Its functionality is a wireframe that will relate spatially in the Golarion of PFO online and traverse same at given speed (150% human running speed). I can place a dark horse skin on it and call it a dark horse, or a giant spider skin on it and call it a mountain spider, or I can put a panther skin on it and call it a panther. It is still a mount. If I then make a red horse skin with a horn <beep beep> I can apply that to a mount as well and call it a red unicorn. But what it is, is a skin.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Being,
Everything in my comments and yours are speculations. Thus, I don't see either of our positions being any better than the other's, nor any less worthy of being posted.
1. We don't know if animal handling will be in-game, if you can tame/breed a mount, or if you can't. I posed a possible repercussion upon someone with those skills if the horse Ryan mentioned was a horse, not a skin. He did not state which it was, so it seems my speculation is as likely and valid as your speculation that it will not be in-game. Both of us know that if a game feature has not yet been mentioned, that it does not mean it will not be present come EE or OE, especially when so little about specific skills has been provided thus far.
2. "Right, so when Ryan was talking about GW selling a red horse with a decorative horn you thought he could not have meant that already?"
Again, I can only respond to what is said. Ryan did not make it clear whether he was talking about an actual mount or a skin, so neither you nor I know which he meant. He did mention an actual mount in his previous post about WoW, but I am still not assuming that his red horse was an actual mount. Rather, like everything on the forums that we do not know for certain, I am left to speculate, and if he did mean an actual mount, then my outlined concerns are again valid.
3. Your last comment seems to (seems...not does) assume that I am not familiar with skins. Though a relatively new concept for me, I think I grasped the idea well enough before I made my initial post. Thank you for your effort in explaining skins, had I been unaware of their function.
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Here's what I think would help you understand my position. First, after listening to the Devs in Gobbocast 9, I am a firm believer that we cannot take what they say for granted at this early stage in development...and I don't believe they wish us to. They have made changes to several major game systems since the first provided outline of the game, some with our help via forum suggestions. I also do not expect them to tell us everything they have planned, for again, if they do, it may change before EE or OE and then people will likely complain one way or the other. I do not fault Ryan for not being more specific about his cash shop horse example (whether it would be a mount or a skin of a mount), for I don't wish him to feel pressured into revealing more than he or GW are comfortable doing at this point, and thereby potentially painting themselves into a corner.
So at this point, all that we can do at this point is discuss what is known, speculate about what is not, and provide arguments for possible scenarios in either case. I try not to assume anything from the speculative posts you make, nor would I hope that you would do the same with mine. I think we both have a right to speculate when not provided with all the facts, and hope that our cumulative speculations offer some measure of community feedback and potentially useful ideas to the Devs.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Okay, pointing out what the stated plan currently is:
This is our current plan (not literally, but by example):
There are 5 horses you can acquire in the game. Red, green, blue, indigo and violet.
All the horse types are different from each other in some material way. You get them via in-game activities.
We sell a Red horse with a non-functional, purely cosmetic unicorn horn you can only get from MTX or trade with someone who used MTX.
1: All the "horse" types are functionally different, and presumably balanced against each other (the green "horse" might be faster over short distances, but the blue horse has a longer endurance and the red horse has more carry capacity... the actual differences are not relevant to the current discussion, since we aren't actually talking about horses)
2: The red "horse" is available from horse breeding, but the red "unicorn" (with game stats equal to the red "horse") is available from MTX.
My conclusion: The red "unicorn" MTX, strictly speaking, competes with the red "horse breeders", because the red "unicorn" is a replacement good for the red "horse". The coin price of red "unicorns" should stabilize somewhere near the coin price of that much cash worth of goblin balls, if the market exists in sufficient volume to do so. If that price is above the normal market price of red "horses", and red "horses" are almost all of the volume of red "mounts", then the coin market for red "horses" is not significantly affected by the supply of red "unicorns".
If red "unicorns" DO make up a significant portion of the red "mount" market, then the price of the MTX is too low.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I wasn't trying to still your input, Hobs. That would be contrary to my overall objectives here.
Ryan sketched out what he felt would suggest for us the pattern of his thinking on what the PFO store could offer.
You posted there might be a problem.
I disagreed with the idea that a possible problem should preclude sales potential from the store.
No matter what they come up with as a marketable product for the store I think somebody, somewhere will think of a problem for that thing. It was healing potions. Then it was star metal swords. Now it is unicorns. Almost anything is going to be objectionable to someone.
Shouldn't we manage our expectations just a little?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Decius Brutus,
The only part I have questions about is how Ryan's statement of, "You get them via in-game activities," became your "...the red horse is available from horse breeding." In-game activities could mean breeders, tamers, or bought from an NPC mount vendor. Do you know something we don't? :)
Being,
Certainly we should manage our expectations. Actually, in Gobbocast 10, I was the one to make the point that we should not let expectations rise too high - that on the forums we have all kinds of "wouldn't that be cool" suggestions we banter about, but EE will likely be a far sparser experience than many might anticipate, especially when contrasted with our forum wish lists. We shouldn't let our "what ifs" cloud realistic expectations for what the game will be able to deliver.
That being said, I think the discussion is a good one to have, so that GW can potentially gauge the community's reception to the sale of various items in a cash shop - perhaps even make it a crowdforging topic. Somewhere between selling everything (pleasing time-poor players and boosting GW income) and selling nothing (pleasing cash poor players and keeping the market totally player-driven) is the happy spot.
In a similar balancing act, as much as I agree that possible problems should not preclude sales, neither should they be dismissed to seemingly validate more sales. If the cash shop sells items a large number of players deem inappropriate for the style of game PFO was promised to be, then ignoring the problems we discuss on the forums may cost GW revenue (in lost players) rather than boost it. Again, it's a balancing act - one that I don't envy GW - but one that I hope our discussions will aid rather than hinder.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well it would be disheartening to find vampirism in the cash store.
I think it would be better to sell many relatively inexpensive things than fewer more expensive things. Not just because of the envy and pouting faces that would engender, but also the temptation to simply take what I want over the well-funded man's dead body.
I wonder whether steeds, even unicorns, will be lootable?