The Daily Grind: How do you feel about microtransactions?

I have no problem with microtransactions in games, especially when this means that the game is free, or offered at a significantly decreased cost to the player. I have a great love for all sorts of games, and there are many, many more games out there than I can possibly play that I would like to try.

More and more often I'm going for the free games that offer a microtransaction based economy, because I can try them out, play them if I like but not feel bad if I don't play them regularly, as I do with subscription based games.

Games that I have to pay up front and then monthy to play I feel a pressure to keep on playing.. and given the limited time I have to play, more often or not I will either not pick it up unless it seems really special, or I'll wind up playing for a while, then cancelling my subscription after a month or two if I feel I'm not playing the game enough.

As far as the content offered on a pay basis, I don't feel that the best gear should be restricted to those that pay real money. This is doubly true in games with a PvP component to them. Microtransactions are great for cosmetic upgrades, small gear or extra content, but should not be more powerful than you can obtain in game.

Otherwise it just become trying to soak the player for the best gear in as short a time as possible, because they will probably leave quickly. The draw to a game should be because people want to keep playing the game, not the latest uberpowerful widget of destruction that keeps getting added.

I think micro transactions are ok for novelty or "flavor" items like pets, armor dyes, mount accessories, or trinkets with silly abilities. But items (gear) that increases your stats (character performance) should probably be earned in-game.

Especially in a game with PvP.

The ability to "skip to the front of the line" in terms of gear by substituting money for time (and, to a large extent, skill) is the strongest argument to be made against micropayments. There will always be people who, either through laziness, a sense of entitlement, or honest lack of time, will buy their way ahead.

Real life already has too much of this sort of behavior; virtual life can be free of it.

This isn't to say that there isn't a place for micropayments in the MMORPG field; as a matter of fact, they're already there in a slightly different form - the World of Warcraft CCG contains some vanity items, such as the Frostsaber mount, tabards, the fishing chair - which don't offer any gameplay advantages. They're fun for the owner but don't put them in a position where they are creating an unfair gameplay situation for other users.

I played Maple Story on and off for nearly 2 years. Here's the thing about micro transactions, they're great for casual players, or people who don't want to commit a lot of money to an online game, but for the more hardcore players, you inevidibly end up spending WAY more than the typical $15 a month.
I would sometimes spend $5 a day on charms that prevented me from losing hours and hours of grinding-worth of exp every time I died (which was a lot obviously). Every death costs money, pets cost (a lot) of money, but they're worthless by themselves, you need to buy them accessories so they'll pick up your items, eve more if you want them to run and pick up your items, even MORE if you want them to be able to figure out which items are yours, moreoh, you wanted them to pick up money, pay more.
They try to play these items off as vanity/luxury items, but try telling a hardcore player who spends hours and hours a day grinding for a few percentages of their level, they don't need a safety charm, or that they have to manually pick up all their loot (picking up loot always lags alot, slowing down grinding significantly).

I played before they had Exp cards, which are... obscenely expensive, but not nearly as obscene as the US maple story exp rate.

Need to sell something? Gotta buy a bazaar stand. Wanna search the bazaars? Pay up. Need to send a shout to the server? Gotta pay first.

And of course, there are the vanity items. Just dressing up your toon can cost up to 30 bucks or more. When I started playing, the cash shop was tiny, very few people had cash shop items. Now, almost everyone does, some have multiple outfits for their toons.

The amount of real money some people spend is flat out scary. I was paying $30-60 bucks a month at LEAST. Everything expires in 30-90 days. So every 3 months, your pet, its accessories, your bazaar, your clothes, it all disappears and you have to shell out another 60$ to buy it all again.

All that said, I love the idea of being able to try or play games with no commitment. But the reality is, microtransactions ultimately require a (much) bigger commitment from the players who commit themselves to the game. For a typically "hardcore" MMO player like myself, that's not a good thing. Not at all.

I'm not a big fan of microtransactions as anything more than side items (cosmetic outfits, healing pots, pets etc.).

I'm also not a fan of only giving players one subscription option of $15 a month etc. That is fine for players with only one game they want to play and have plenty of time to play, but i feel like that business model is choking the mmo industry on the whole.

As there are different types of gamer, there should be different payment options to fit the play and lifestyle of PAYING customers. What's wrong with per hour plans for those that want it? Or how about paying for a block of levels, as in "Hey I just paid for levels 20-25 so I can play however I want and at level 25 I can still keep playing but if I'm enjoying the games progress I can pay to level up again." Or how about instead of after purchasing a game and giving a player 30 days play time or whatever, give players the first few levels free forever and for player with high level characters they can still log in to socialize, check inventory etc. but all leveling/quests/pvp/instances etc. are off limits till the subscription is renewed.

Maybe all those ideas don't work, I don't know as I've never tried to run an mmo but basically I think gamers need to be given more payment options and I don't think microtransactions and 1 standard monthly subscription are the only options.

When you put it as simply as "allow customers different payment options" then who would argue? I wouldn't.

But the idea of paying rather than playing your way through a game really annoys me. Infact, where exactly is the game in that? I wonder, as breezer outlined, whether f2p games with micropayment models really do serve the time-poor cash-rich player, or infact whether they are infact most used by hardcore players who want more from their game.

Paying for exclusive gear? Yuck, hate it.

I find there to be a big problem with the free-to-play but microtransaction model.

Typically the base game play suffers from it. The developer spends so much time 'encouraging' you to buy the micro transaction items that the game isn't as fun as subscription based ones. This could just be the current iteration but its all we have to go on for now.

What ends up happening is games like Maple Story make it painfully slow to level, a huge grind for items/cash, and big penalties for dieing. They then offer cash out options to avoid or help with a lot of this (if I remember correctly). This makes the game less fun for those not paying to play and those that do (as said before) tend to spend a lot more.

What I think is a lot better is a combination of opt-in subscription and micro-transactions.

For example opting to subscribe can open up new areas, character advancement, guild functions, housing, pvp tournaments etc.

Then there can be micro-transactions for some stuff like dyes, 'useless' pets, novelty items, furniture etc. (basically anything not affecting gameplay) and some services like character transfers, character renames, etc.

I'd think/hope that the combination of people subscribing for some of the advanced parts of the game and people buying the micro-transaction items and services would be enough to fund the game.

One thing about microtransactions though is they break immersion. You're going along in the wonderful fantasy world you come up to a barber shop and what do you do? pull your your credit card or confirm to pay $3 for something. It just kind of breaks the game play experience to an extent to suddenly go from the in game world and rules to something very external to the game (real money).

The idea of paying for end-game items that have a huge effect on game-play does not seem like a good idea to me. I've never played a game that allowed microtransactions, but it doesn't seem like it would be of much benefit to the game.

Take WoW for example. If people could buy the best gear without doing SOMETHING in-game to get it, then you have the same issues as you do when people buy a character off Ebay. You run across a level 70 decked-out rogue who doesn't know how to sap a mob. LOL

It's an extreme example/analogy, but yeah, I don't think microtransactions would be good for ALL games. Some, they work fine. Probably. Like I said, I don't play those games.

I DO, however, support microtransactions in the cases of things like cosmetic items. (I'd pay a decent amount to get extra customization options for my character and mounts in WoW, for example.) Or to access other fun items. Perhaps different vanity pets or something.

I also like the idea of paying for items that grant you additional % of experience gain. I'd pay well for an item that would help me level my Shaman faster! (He's my fifth level 70 character! I've seen the content already. XD)

I didn't try to reason with Nightbane. I just took that Chestguard from him. :O

I don't mind it for cosmetic and customisation options, or in worlds where you are actually dealing with other users (like, well, Second Life) where that is not going to be covered by any monthly fee. If whatever service you are purchasing has a significant extra cost for the provider, too, then fine, why not?

To increase actual in-world/in-game capabilities though I'm completely opposed to the idea - they work out to just be a hidden fee, which anybody "serious" has to pay if they want to compete. And people want to compete. Unless there it is really obvious when somebody has paid, and there is social pressure not to, it's merely a way of bumping the charges up.

In SL of course there is a charge for land ownership, but then, those are actually dedicated resources being set aside for you, and there is no charge for interacting and creating. (Asset upload has a nominal charge, true, but it's only, what, a couple of cents per item which can then be used as many times as you like, and I think that's necessary to stop people hammering the asset server with dozens of automated uploads per second.)

I'm increasingly becoming a fan of the hybrid payment model - a reduced sub fee and an internal RMT system that puts everything up for sale straight from the devs.

There's a huge market for RMT and currently the external RMT providers (your IGEs and such) are cleaning up off it. There are plenty of people who want extra in-game currency or powerleveling or certain items and are forking over RL cash to get it. This is money the MMOs who don't have internal RMT are leaving on the table.

Here's a question: who cares if a player buys his way into the end game if everyone else can too? If they can't play, then they lose and / or they learn. Why do MMOs have to rely on a system that rewards only the time-rich who can afford to grind and grind until they get the drops they want?

There are design decisions that go around a hybrid payment model - everything has to be available cheaply through RMT and also through drops, there can be no exclusive items available through either channel, you shouldn't be able to somehow get RL cash out of the game (eg auction houses that provide RL cash), the studio can't dump new sets of better gear every month, etc - but it's certainly feasible.

External RMT is the MMO industry's dirty not-so-secret. Internal RMT provides a way to fight that as well as providing players a choice - are they willing to spend 40 hours to get to the 'fun' bit, or are they willing to spend $20 to get to the same place?