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After Storm Legion they just started making increasingly bizarre decisions regarding monetization. A while back they decided to change how Patron for Rift worked because they weren't making enough money with it. The change was that instead of letting F2P players save up their charges (stuff that let you do things like get loot in dungeons) as was the system for years, non-subbed members would be able to get rewards for those content once a day, period, and you would need to sub to get otherwise The title of the thread announcing this was "Now patron rewards are even better!" After the inevitable backlash from people that thought that taking away incentive to run content from f2p players was, in fact, bad, the company tried to explain the change: quote:In addition to enhancing Patron status, these changes are designed to enhance the development revenues of the game as a whole, supporting the game we all love. We are fully committed to the long-term health of RIFT, and exploring options such as these that will keep Telara evolving over time. How, in an industry where almost all of your competitors are running f2p systems and staying alive, do you screw up this badly?
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Oct 27, 2018 23:51
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 03:54 |
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Rift used to be one of my favorite MMO's until the AH change debacle. See, Rift (like other MSW-approved-MMO EQ2) had these random collectibles that you could find on the ground in every zone that players referred to as "Shinies." A complete set of shinies (common, rare, etc) could be turned in for cosmetic rewards and XP. People would use these to powerlevel alts, so they were always in demand. Rare shinies, even from the low level zones, could go for hundreds of plat. That was enough to buy a $15 PLEX equivalent on the auction house. This covered a lot of the Rift F2P store's sins. Sure, maybe the costs seemed bad - but if you didn't want to pay, it really was enough to collect enough shinies to get a REX in a week. Maybe they put raid equipment in the store - but that's just a week of literally picking up stuff off the ground, anyone can do it! They even used this as a selling point for unpopular changes. In a seemingly unrelated problem, the Rift servers could not handle holidays. There would be constant disconnects, server crashes, lag problems, etc. It didn't matter what the holiday was. Being unable to complete holiday events because of server issues annoyed people, so Trion promised to investigate. They eventually found the problem. Holiday events were usually tied to seasonal shiny collections. The thing that was killing the servers was the number of players buying and selling shinies. The server crashes were happening because the shiny trade was too popular. In order to combat that, Trion decided to make a few changes. First, they made the deposit for shinies scale based on list price. Most MMOs do that, but Rift did it punitively to stop people from selling the shinies. This didn't effect the people who already made a lot of plat, but the people who didn't have a lot of plat already couldn't eat the 2-3 weeks worth of deposit losses while waiting for a sell. So the REX trade ended up becoming restricted to high level raiding guilds who could run raids they didn't need for plat every week. Second, they added the ability to directly buy collection items from the collection tab. If there was a rare shiny you needed to finish a set, you could just click the button and buy it, no auctions involved. This is when they actually started seeing their player base revolt, because decisions that were just annoying before suddenly became real. "We're going to charge for an earring slot, but don't worry, you can buy it with REX" is something you can deal with when you actually can get REX and buy it. If it becomes impossible for you to earn enough plat to buy a REX, that excuse starts looking pretty dire. Edit: My last post about the Patron changes is kinda illustrative of this. In the full post, one of their justifications for removing features from F2P players and putting it behind Patron was "you can buy Patron for in-game currency." By that point, buying Patron with in-game currency was out of reach for everyone but like 30 people per server. Mormon Star Wars fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Nov 1, 2018 06:13
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