Forums » General Pantheon Discussion

Encouraging Pledge Upgrades

    • 2752 posts
    October 15, 2018 2:38 PM PDT

    Algrinon said:

    Aethor said:

    I bid $20 / month for a guaranteed pre-alpha (and alpha, beta and whatever) access, 24/7 (except when the server is being updated), also in between phases (so, even if alpha is finished and beta comes in 6 months, I get to continue in between).

    I think this is a little low.  Maybe $100 a month.  I say this for two reasons:

    At the same time this would be a large slap in the face to those who forked out the $1,000 or so for pre-alpha (among other things) already. 

    • 160 posts
    October 16, 2018 7:20 AM PDT

    Iksar said:At the same time this would be a large slap in the face to those who forked out the $1,000 or so for pre-alpha (among other things) already.

     

    Well, $20 might be a slap in the face, but $100 per month sure wouldn't, since it adds up to $1200/year, and those $1000 were one time only, several years ago.

    The question is how much money would it generate, that is, how many people would actually be willing to pay it, or in other words, if it's worth the hassle.
    I could pay $100/month; any more than that, if we start talking about thousands and tens of thousands of dollars, it's not really a donation to help a game in development, but something that, at least in my mind, would require a real IPO and owning the shares.

    A multi-millionaire might feel differently, but how many of such people do we have on these forums?

     

    • 432 posts
    October 16, 2018 2:54 PM PDT

    Aethor said:

     

    A multi-millionaire might feel differently, but how many of such people do we have on these forums?

     

    I know of 1 multi millionnaire on these boards and he doesn't feel differently  :) There might be a 1 or 2 more but it is surely not a crowd .


    This post was edited by Deadshade at October 16, 2018 2:55 PM PDT
    • 624 posts
    October 16, 2018 3:13 PM PDT

    I would support PRotF with massive additional funds to get a personalized ringtone snippet, like...

    1) Kilsin yelling “Traaaaaaaaaaain!”

    2) Kilsin saying “Bards are sexier than Rogues”

    3) Aradune commenting “Nerf warwizards, they are OP!”

    • 11 posts
    October 16, 2018 4:55 PM PDT

    I would 100% up my pledge if it guaranteed Pantheon never receives a real money shop, cosmetic or otherwise.  100$ a month is pretty pricey, though.

    • 1281 posts
    October 16, 2018 4:59 PM PDT

    jadaski said:

    I would 100% up my pledge if it guaranteed Pantheon never receives a real money shop, cosmetic or otherwise.  100$ a month is pretty pricey, though.

    Brad is vehemently opposed to cash shops, so I can virtually uarantee that they will not happen.

    • 3852 posts
    October 17, 2018 8:40 AM PDT

    ((Brad is vehemently opposed to cash shops,))

     

    This is very good - but still leaves open two possibilities.

    One - all Gods of Terminus forbid - it turns out the choice is between having cash shops or the game failing. Remember Elder Scrolls Online? Of course you do. They swore that cash shops were antithical to the game's design and philosophy and they would be pure subscription. They probably meant every word of it. Release was a disaster and it took months not years for them to switch to a free-to-play model. For which I blame them not at all - you do what you need to do for survival. But Pantheon is a different game with a different market and different objectives and is being built to be profitable with a smaller base number of subscriptions. ESO's failure does not predict a similar failure when Pantheon is released.

    Two - the eternal (well maybe not quite) issue of what cash shop *means*. Is a website-based market where you can pay for name changes, server transfers, gender changes, race changes, or similar things that do not give you any item whatever to use in the game a "cash shop"? Many who foam at the mouth at the words "cash shop" would say no. They might strongly object to this market (especially name changes or server transfers to let people escape the consequences of bad behavior) but this type of market was common in the days when pure subscription was the model.

    Now let us say that this market sells some combination of cosmetic items, mounts which are not any faster or better than mounts in the game (in other words they just look different and therefore are cosmetic only), housing decorations etc. Nothing that lets a character do better in the game. Nothing that could fairly be described as making Pantheon even partly pay-to-win. 

    Since it is *not* in-game and does not give anything that is actually *useful* in-game it would clearly be less objectionable than an in-game store. It would clearly be less objectionable than a website market that sells useful items. It would with great certainty bother most of us - not least because of the camel's nose in the tent concern. Is this a "cash shop" not in my opinion or yours but in Brad's? I don't know. Would this be a good idea if the choice was not being able to get enough revenue otherwise? Of course. Let us hope all goes well and VR is not forced to such decisions.

    • 646 posts
    October 17, 2018 8:44 AM PDT

    dorotea said:Now let us say that this market sells some combination of cosmetic items, mounts which are not any faster or better than mounts in the game (in other words they just look different and therefore are cosmetic only), housing decorations etc. Nothing that lets a character do better in the game. Nothing that could fairly be described as making Pantheon even partly pay-to-win. 

    Since it is *not* in-game and does not give anything that is actually *useful* in-game it would clearly be less objectionable than an in-game store. It would clearly be less objectionable than a website market that sells useful items. It would with great certainty bother most of us - not least because of the camel's nose in the tent concern. Is this a "cash shop" not in my opinion or yours but in Brad's? I don't know. Would this be a good idea if the choice was not being able to get enough revenue otherwise? Of course. Let us hope all goes well and VR is not forced to such decisions.

    Absolutely this counts as a cash shop, though it's one of the more socially acceptable forms. I'll admit, though, as someone who values cosmetics and fluff things like housing over the stats on my gear (I don't raid to get more powerful... just to see the content and unlock new armor appearances!), that I get rather tired of being treated as the cash cow for MMOs.

    I agree that w can all hope VR's hand isn't forced into that kind of decision.

    • 3016 posts
    October 17, 2018 8:55 AM PDT

    dorotea said:

    I was encouraged to see the October newsletter mention that recent funding objectives have been met - and even more encouraged to see recruting of new team members.

    The newsletter pointed out that the game is still partially crowdfunded and the support of people like us is still valuable.

    Looking through the pledge levels I noted (not for the first time) that there is often little benefit to the player for a significant increase in pledge level. Obviously this varies based on what level you are and what you are increasing to but things like pre-alpha testing are essentially unavailable since pre-alpha is almost done and alpha, beta, name reservation and the like are shared among many pledge levels.

    Is this a good time for people to suggest what new incentives might motivate us to increase pledge levels - personal rewards I mean we still have the good feeling of supporting the game? This has been discussed now and then but perhaps answers will be different now as we get  close to alpha testing.

    One thing that should not be done is giving away any reward for a previous pledge (at least unless the upgrade is to the pledge level that gave that reward). Many of us were not here for the original campaigns and might suggest something that was offered for an early pledge without having any idea that such was the case. Not should any reward for a previous pledge be reduced in value. Thus, taking early name reservation as an example, a second tier of name reservation with priority over the first tier should not be considered even though technically both tiers would be "early".

    Obvious possibilities include (but only if this could be done with the cost to VR being significantly below the revenue):

    An array of shirts or sweatshirts or other clothes with the name of the game on them and perhaps pictures of classes, Gods or monsters. I note that companies like The Mountain do exactly this by means of private labeling. I do not know what it would cost. 

    Mugs, plates or other dishes - same general concept.

    Small relatively inexpensive pictures that could be framed and hung. Yes I know - no need to frame them since they are obviously guilty. 

    A tastefully iced and decorated Pantheon cake.

    Each year it becomes more common and cheaper to get things delivered by UPS or FedEx or USPS so ideas that may not have been feasible a few years ago might work today.

     

    We had whole threads about that in the early days Dorotea.. mugs, bobble heads of raid bosses and Devs,  hoodies, bumper stickers, coffee cups etc etc.   Think that might have been archived its been that long.    Hoping for an online store me too...tee shirts and things can be made in bulk..cutting costs.   Meantime the game is still being built,  I would imagine this would happen after release , if at all.   Another item to keep fingers crossed for.      Please note for those that are thinking cash shops...nope not what I mean. :)

    Cana

    • 3016 posts
    October 17, 2018 8:57 AM PDT

    spacesnowman said:

    dorotea said:

    An array of shirts or sweatshirts or other clothes with the name of the game on them and perhaps pictures of classes, Gods or monsters. I note that companies like The Mountain do exactly this by means of private labeling. I do not know what it would cost. 

    Mugs, plates or other dishes - same general concept.

    Looks like pay-to-win to me. Shirts keep you warm so you can play longer. Mugs etc = drink/food to play longer! No thanks

     

    Not the same as pay to win cash shops lol.  Not at all, some people like memorabilia..actual physical items,  this wouldn't be to buff up your character ingame...nothing at all like it. :)

    Cana

    • 3016 posts
    October 17, 2018 9:00 AM PDT

    Aethor said:

    I would suggest a permanently-running alpha server, and then whoever upgrades, would get the ability to log in, into that server, and play right now and also in between testing phases.

    As in, uninterrupted until the real release. (of course, with any updates in between, and we accept that it might be buggy as hell)

     

    That would make me upgrade my pledge.

     

    Considering that my original pledge was $300 some years ago, any amount that would be a significant upgrade for it, is not an amount I would give for mugs, plates, cake or other fluff.

    Also, my idea does not stretch into the real release - no in-game gifts or anything that would give me anything (much less any advantage over players who did not pledge), except that I would know zones better.

     

     

     

    Test server would be cool,  I would participate. :)   

    • 3852 posts
    October 17, 2018 11:30 AM PDT

    Spacesnowman was just adding a bit of sarcasm - I liked that reply.

    As I recall Ashes of Creation offered alpha testers an alpha server that would be available until release. I considered that a very nice feature and if I get sufficiently bored of LOTRO as my means of killing time waiting for Pantheon I may take another look. 

    We would not want something that would reduce the value of any existing pledge reward, of course.

    But adding a new pledge reward "Permanent access to test servers up until shortly before release - note that test servers will be down periodically, will be incomplete and buggy, and after the alpha test ends we do not promise to update the alpha test server with any bug fixes or improvements" would take nothing away from the alpha testers who would get exactly the access they were promised until the alpha test was over - it would merely give a new level of reward *after* the alpha test was over. Needless to say the cost should be greater than the cost for participation in the alpha test.


    This post was edited by dorotea at October 17, 2018 11:32 AM PDT
    • 43 posts
    October 18, 2018 7:41 AM PDT

    At this point in development the only thing I see them doing with the pledges is the same thing they did with pre-alpha access. When they were ready to transistion into the start of pre-alpha they advertised all over the anti social network that our chances to get into the pre-alpha were coming to a end and to pay now to get your access to pre-alpha because once this window closes there will be no more access to pre-alpha.

    Then a couple of months later after showcasing the pre-alpha and getting everyone foaming at the mouth, they created a new pledge tier that reopened pre-alpha testing. So I feel that what is going to happen is as they get ready to transistion from pre-alpha to alpha they will advertise all over the anti social network that the window for getting in on alpha is coming to a close and once the window is gone it's gone. Then in 2 months after they get all the alpha testers settled and having showcased all the players having a grand old time in alpha. There will some type of annoucement along the lines of : Like what you have seen? Want to get in on the ground floor and help mold and test the game? Well you are in luck because we have been able to present to you another chance to get in on alpha, and a new pledge tier will be created for a limited time. Don't get me wrong I'm not against it, it's good inexpensive marketing.

     

    In regards to player housing, I personally would walk away from the game right now and never look back if they gate player housing behind a real money wall. Just because someone has more disposable real world cash then me doesn't give them the right to have access to more of the game then I do. Guild halls also should not be sold for real world cash, if anything guild halls should have to be built from the ground up with collected in game resources and having to hire with in game currency in game NPC builders that take "x" amount of real world time to build sections of the guild hall.

    • 801 posts
    October 19, 2018 12:45 AM PDT

    Well when you have something here that will sell, funding shouldnt be an issue with publishers, investors. When you dont have anything completed and its going to take a few more years id expect nobody credited to fund the project. So that means my investment is sound and it will be my last MMO since EQ first came out. I am happy to say that. Now the scope of which the length goes on is up to the community.

     

    I am happy with my Knights pledge, ill be keeping that.

    • 160 posts
    October 19, 2018 8:21 AM PDT

    dorotea said:

    One - all Gods of Terminus forbid - it turns out the choice is between having cash shops or the game failing. Remember Elder Scrolls Online? Of course you do. They swore that cash shops were antithical to the game's design and philosophy and they would be pure subscription. They probably meant every word of it. Release was a disaster and it took months not years for them to switch to a free-to-play model. For which I blame them not at all - you do what you need to do for survival.

    If a company doesn't want their game to fail, then create a game that people actually want to play. EQ did not fail, EQ 2 did not fail, WoW did not fail.

    I remember the Elder Scrolls Online. When I heard about it, I was rather enthusiastic... until I tried it. It was for the most part a solo game, with just a little bit of grouping. Worse than WoW.

    And it incorporated elements that show a basic misunderstanding of how a MMO game world should look like. I remember when me and my wife were grouped, sitting next to each other, in the same group in the same zone... and on slightly different stages of the same quest.
    The quest NPC was in one place for me and in another for her. One person sees that same NPC running around, the other person sees that same NPC standing and talking.

    Same with whole towns. On one phase of a quest, a player sees a town under attack, damaged buildings... and another player in the same group, in the same zone, sees it in normal state, because he isn't at that stage of the quest.

    It was... disgusting. It made it completely impossible to maintain any suspension of disbelief. It made the world totally unreal, worse than a drunken dream.

    And then I had to ask myself, if the devs / game designers who made such decision have that epic level of misunderstanding, what else did they mess up? And do I want to spend years on that game? The answer, of course, was "hell no".

    Most of the play time in TES online was solo solo solo solo, then a group dungeon to finish off some quests before moving on. In fact it was possible in some cases to just walk behind an existing group and finish the quests. I asked if there was any raid content whatsoever, and nothing was known about it.

    Design a game like that, and yeah, it will flop.

    Do you really see people who are willing to pay a subscription, spending their time on subpar games? Especially since most of the people here have seen everything good and bad since EQ days until now, and we can recognize both good and bad design very quickly. And we're (most of us) too old and too jaded to spend too much time on something that shows basic flaws.

    The reason why we're here is that we know the amount of experience Brad has in making MMOs and we count on that he already knows what works and what doesn't, and is not going to make any newbie MMO designer errors. Well, at least we hope so. We might be right, we might be wrong.

    As the result of that, the game will probably not flop. It might not become a wolrdwide success like WoW - that would require the average player world-wide to be a lot more mature than he/she is - but it will do ok, as long as the game has all the standard bases covered.

     

    • 3852 posts
    October 19, 2018 8:41 AM PDT

    Aethor - I had no idea that ESO was so bad at release. I had played the single-player games and wanted a game based on subscriptions. Thus ESO looked perfect and I *really* wanted to like it. But I couldn't force myself to get even as far as you did.

    We have a design team with a lot of experience. We have pre-alpha and alpha and beta testers who have a lot of experience and, more important, care a great deal about the game's success. We can expect quite a lot of quality testing not just people playing around to have fun and never reporting much - or just reporting trivia such as typos. We have a reasonable expectation that tester reports will actually be read and tester opinions considered. Whereas a common theme on MMO forums is "This blunder was reported over and over in-test but the reports were ignored". On outright bugs not simply legitimate differences in opinion on what design choice was best.

    We have (I hope and assume) a financial model not based on wildly unrealistic estimates of how many people will subscribe. ESO quite likely had a model that assumed a large number of players since it used a very well known intellectual property. If done perfectly or even very well this might have been realistic. It didn't happen.

    We have a higher percentage of dedicated players that understand that "crap happens" and will not leave the game because not everything is perfect. If ESO had a required break-even of 1 million players and 10,000 dedicated players, the 10,000 were a drop in the bucket and couldn't support the trainwreck. If we have a break-even of 100,000 and a dedicated base of 10,000, that is a far higher percentage and the chances of overcoming any problems is far greater. Numbers *totally* made up out of whole cloth and not to be taken seriously.

    Long winded way of agreeing with you - I too am optimistic.