LotRO’s Cash Shop affects gameplay directly and indirectly

Im not so sure why so many people consider the monthly subscription such a bad model. I don’t see any problems with it as is, unless the MMO in question doesn’t have enough LASTING appeal to keep people playing.

With that said, there is a HUGE difference between free to play, and pay to win. Im not particularly against microtransactions that are purely cosmetic. But paying to win – to give a gameplay boost to some doesn’t sit right with me.

And Free to Play models don’t always have to be that way. Im sure there can be an MMO that is free to play, NOT pay to win.

The funny thing is LOTRO is so non-competitive compared to other MMOs. Pay to win what?

Don’t be a smug git. The stat boosts are pretty trivial, convenience items are not mandatory, and allowing people to sidestep grind hurts nothing but your e-peen.

Is it really so bad that people who would otherwise have been frustrated with, say, virtue grinding, will be able to enjoy the game? None of this forces you to change the way you play the game; it merely adds choice for those who don’t want to play it the way you’re used to.

So what ARE they thinking in that board room?

What is the motivation for a company to take a sub-based MMO and switch to FTP/microtransactions?

My guess is:

1. By switching to FTP, they will make more money. If the playerbase stays the same size, that means that they are making more on average per person than with the current subscription model.
2. By switching to FTP they intend to INCREASE the playerbase, which would have the same effect, even if the average intake per player drops.

That’s really all I can think of at the moment.

And I can think of better ways of increasing playerbase than by changing the payment system.

1: The Stats tome are also available as rare drops in the new classic instance….

2: Players will be able to craft those potions

3:I have to agree with reputation mounts though, not a good idea here and I’d rather if Turbine had made a new type of mounts for the cash shop.

4: teleport scrolls have been well-received as far as I know.

I’ll leave it at that.

@Jezebeau: Except all the people who still want to play and put in the 20, 30, 60 hours to actually GAIN those bonuses and benefits are being kicked in the teeth. What’s the point in actually playing a game if you can make a new character, buy everything you need right out the gate, and then… what? An MMO is largely about character development, and if your character is really, really well developed at 1st level because you dumped tons of money in to the cash shop then what the heck is there to look forward to? Why even bother playing? … And if you’re not going to play, then why fork out the cash to begin with? That is one of the cornerstone issues.

“So here’s this mechanic, we’ll make people perform all these tasks that are scaling from easiest to hardest to earn points, the harder the task the better the reward. When they gather up ‘x’ amount of points, we’ll give them something awesome. That will keep people busy for at least three weeks per group we do this with!”
“Can’t I just buy that stuff?”
“Uh… yeah, I guess.”
, now what?

Furthermore, if you spend a month grinding out all this gear, and levelling your character – working on fine tuning them to their most efficient, you ought to be pretty well familiar with the game by that point, you should be comfortable in the world and know what’s-what, how to play, how to perform in a group. If someone buys their way to power, they won’t be skilled players because they didn’t earn anything they have, thus they don’t know how to use what they SHOULD have, let alone what they actually do have. This will degrade community’s overall skill level and, in games that are heavily reliant on grouping, the community will be severely crippled or collapse.

Let’s face it, there haven’t been many good F2P games (I challenge you to name 3), and even fewer microtrans games (DDO is probably an exception to the rule, though even I didn’t play it for more than a dozen levels before getting bored) and LotRO is just the most recent casualty. The “Ignore it and it won’t affect you,” approach is bollocks. Try ignoring a dog biting at your ankles and see how it affects you.

Sorry for the rant, but given the morsels of info released about the cash shop for LotRO, I can’t see how anyone could say, “Oh yeah, ignore it and all will be well. Kudos.”

@Wren: MMOs are largely about character development for some people. Personally, I’ve played enough MMOs that what I’m generally looking for is content. I want to explore the art and landscape, see the work of the writers, plumb the game mechanics, and understand the distinguishing features of the game. None of that is improved by a sixty hour grind (or a three-hundred hour grind, if poor luck strikes your quest for radiance).

The shop isn’t letting you buy a max level character. If someone runs a new character, fully equipped, through the game, they’ll learn to play as well as they would have if they’d done the grinds. Killing 250 orcs teaches me no more about how to play than killing 10 does.

If character development is what you’re after, then focus on your experience. It shouldn’t matter to you whether JoeBob LuteSmasher is pre-med and can’t spare the time to grind factions. I can’t stop you, though, if rather than attempt to let it go you want to foster an obsession.

Lastly, I’m just gonna lump F2P and microtrans because they’re basically the same thing in this context and say DDO, Free Realms, Wizard 101.

@Thomas: I think that could be because it’s Fry’s, and not a lot of people go there to buy games.

I was in Fry’s the other day and they had 57, I counted, fifty-seven copies of the StarCraft II Collector’s Edition left on the shelf.

At the same time a place like GameStop only shelves a few copies of a computer game at a time – so it’s hard to see their actual stock. BestBuy would probably be a decent alternative.

@Keen: Changing the gameplay itself would be better. Given the avenue they took, that’s not likely to happen. This is still an improvement over the old state of affairs, at least for people who can pay and are willing to.

Keen, from your own twitter page:

“Turbine sells power in their cash shop and renders character development meaningless yet some people defend it as a good idea. Derp.”

that’s just hyperbole. if Turbine were selling level 65 characters decked out in purple gear, you’d have a point. but none of the things on sale are ultimately more than small assistance.

We defend Turbine because they’ve shown, with DDO, that they can create a very successful microtransation-OR-subscription based game. one where buying these XP boosts or Virtues isn’t necessary. by contrast, take a look at SOE’s plan – currently it shows that even current subscribers will have to purchase races, and it stinks of money-grabbing in the way it’s laid out.

You’re vilifying a company that, overall, has been a pretty good company in the MMO genre, in comparison to many others.

I like how grinding is the only thing associated with levelling – because there aren’t level-appropriate dungeons with bosses or enemies that have specific game mechanics that reappear throughout an MMO that are helpful to know and learn that you would end up skipping entirely if you level too fast and don’t need to explore the dungeons.

Also, If you can level up very quickly on your own then the incentive or need to party up (ie – for dungeons) is no longer necessary or a viable way to spend your time. Thus, as a potentially new player (not everyone who ‘tries’ or plays a F2P MMO has played 6 or 7 of them before), you won’t learn the grouping etiquette of the game until you near whatever the game’s cap happens to be. At which point people expect you to not be an idiot and/or jerk. If you don’t know what’s going on you may be less likely to get groups – esp. in games with smaller communities.

Furthermore, I would argue that the more things you kill (regardless of what they are) the more opportunities you have to learn something new and try different things to figure out what works. You also get more practice with controlling your character in a very general sense which can make the difference between a precise player that manages his resources well (not just HP and MP/SP/Mana, but pots and buffs), knows instinctively the size of their hitbox and can avoid damage with minimal time wasted on movement, knows the limits of their character’s power (Can I take 3 of these guys at once, or just 2? Only 1?) and one who does not. If you level up 3 times faster than the average player because you’ve got better equipment and better stats, you’re losing out on 2/3rds of the opportunities to really feel and master your character, which will then have to be made up in the endgame (assuming you even play that long).

As someone who spent a long time playing various MMOs, playing with veterans and then having to deal with / teach newer players, watch them become seasoned, and then deal with more new players again, I am of the opinion that those who travel through the breadth of an MMO faster are less likely to be as familiar with what’s going on as those who didn’t have any shortcuts to aid them, resulting in more selfish, sloppier players overall that refine their play way later than it ought to have been.

Maybe this is inapplicable and off topic, but I feel like the Theme Park MMO’s player is hurt by the fact that they can only work with a limited slice of the community at any given time, and for me and my experience that has had a much bigger impact on my long term commitment to and enjoyment of games than the effects of a Subscription vs. Free to Play model.

Mind, all the games that have done this have forgone the traditional Experience per kill/quest setup that the typical theme park game has, the one exception being Guild Wars, and that has a very fast leveling process and a single shared server for all the players, so even with all the instancing you had access to any player who played the game (Points go to EVE for persistent open world and Single Server). One of the most frustrating things for me with regards to WoW is that I know plenty of people who play, but they’re all scattered across a half dozen servers, again, this effects the ability to interact with the whole community and limits your partying options.

The Persistent world games that have kept my attention best are the ones where advancement is a fluid experience that can just as easily expand outwards as upwards, and even while expanding upwards the 1st tier still serves a vital roll in the game. Eve provides a great example of this because even a 4 day old character can have skills trained that make him or her an asset to someone who has played the game for months or years. Certainly, the older character can do more damage in their battleship of choice than the new guy can in the frigate. However the frigate has faster speeds of targeting and maneuvering, so is much better suited to keeping the enemy from moving via use of modules to slow down the opponent’s speed and prevent their escape.

It’s like how even an “unskilled worker” can still stock shelves or work the produce isle at the supermarket. It’s not a super rewarding job in a lot of cases, but nevertheless it’s an important part of running any operation. More MMO’s need to create oppurtunities for low level and high level characters to work together for mutual benefit.

Closer to topic: I must say I am disappointed with a number of the aspects of the cash shop that you’ve listed here. Of course cash shops will have an effect on gameplay, however these are effects that are… Well, DDO does have the reincarnation system which allows similar gains in power for cash, but that’s only after max level and you have to level up all over again upon paying… I’ll give LotRO a trial anyways when it goes F2P, the only reason I’m really interested in it anyways is because I want to check out a European friend’s RP guild, and apparently Europe’s LotR is in a much better state than the US one.

I think what Keen means is that it will affect HIS gameplay. It will affect my gameplay in LotRO only to the degree that currently I am not playing it, and never would have played it again had it not gone F2P. Once it does, however, it will join my MMO rotation and get layed as often as I feel like playing it.

In a decade of playing MMOs, what other people are doing in them has been only of amusement value. The great majority of other players in any form the backdrop against which I play. They’re scenery. They’re NPCs with unpredictable AI. I never meet them, get to know them, do anything in game with them. The people I do end up spending time with are by definition enjoying playing the game in the same way I am. We all gravitate into cliques in which we fit and a change to the ruleset won’t do more than cause a few new cliques to form and some people to move from one to another.

Changes like the ones coming in LotRO may affect some people’s gameplay negatively, but to assume it will have a negative effect on everyone just shows a lack of empathy, imagination or both. Obviously Turbine are gambling that a lot more people will like the changes than the other way about and I would expect that to be proved correct.

Your post is full of how you “earned” things and how hard you “worked” to get them. That doesn’t sound much like fun to me.

If you can’t enjoy your game because other players may not have “worked” as hard as you to “earn” the same level/skills/loot/whatever then that’s a problem with your attitude or with your choice of game.

A cash shop is just like viagra for your epeen, I wonder why that makes so many other people feel inadequate?

The fact that you can get everything you mentioned in-game undermines your point. Now excuse me while I go have fun in my new, shiny, more convenient LOTRO.

Grinds are commonly accepted as a means of extending subscriptions. It’s ugly but it works for them. Getting rid of the grinds entirely isn’t good business for them. Letting people buy their way out of them means they aren’t losing money on people who will be playing for shorter periods of time.

1. It’s Turbine
2. They did the same sort of thing with DDO – though admittedly, they had some content options.
3. See #1

As others have asked, how exactly do you “pay to win” in LOTRO? It’s a PvE game. As for “affecting gameplay” none of this does. What it does affect is certain players’ attitudes, nothing more. Buying stats? Who cares? There’s a stat cap and you’ll cap it naturally just playing the game. Buying virtues? Again, who cares? They are minor buffs at best and the virtue cap per level bracket still applies. I’ll admit I’m not overly fond of selling the existing reputation mounts without requiring the actual reputation to ride them but guess what? LOTRO is a traditional Diku-based MMO, and like all DikuMMO’s before and after it, content gets obsoleted. In the end it doesn’t matter if I spent 50 hours grinding reputation for a certain mount or gear or if it’s taking me well over 100 hours to get Radiance gear because the next time they release an expansion that increases the level cap all that “effort” is immediately removed and on we go to the next treadmill.

As for a “sense of accomplishment” again, that is purely the individual player’s attitude. Personally I would view it as MORE of a “sense of accomplishment” knowing I “worked” for my reward. But then again, no one would ever know if anyone paid for a reward or “worked” for it unless they actually tell you. What other people do in a PvE game has no affect on your own game.

Myself? I will more than likely continue my own personal habits of “working” through stuff the original way on my main. But if I decide to bring up an alt? No way am I going through all those grinds again; I will happily pony up a few dollars for the virtues or whatever. Time is money, and that is true in both the real world and the virtual.

Regardless of opinion on LotR or most F2P cash shops (I can understand why a lot of people are upset, and while it’s good for me what LotR is doing, I’m a bit annoyed that they’re doing things that are hurting their long time crowd in the process). There is one subscriptionless MMO-style game that doesn’t require players to use a cash shop in order to succeed, in fact its cash shop is essentially just the kind of microtransactions that we see in WoW. Character customization, name changes, that sort of thing. Guild Wars had the initial purchase for the game and each expansion, but there was no monthly fee or stat boosting enhancements or xp buff potions or anything like that in the cash shop.

The most that the cash shop has that directly effects gameplay is a couple of max level weapons that are unique that initially were part of the Game of the Year edition (but their uniqueness mostly extends as far as their names and stops there), Character Slots, which you have 8 of in total if you’ve gotten the first 3 Guild Wars Titles, so even before forking out the 10$ per slot there’s plenty of room for alts, and lastly you get Xunlai Bank upgrades, meaning that you can buy extra tabs to increase the carrying capacity of your bank.

The difference is that there is an initial out of box purchase, and this is largely what they seem to be intending to do for Guild Wars 2. I’m just throwing it out there, but this appears to be the online subscriptionless game where the cash shop has no effect on gameplay. But instead the game still has an out of box fee. This may not work out for failing MMO’s that have already existed for years, however for MMO’s that are being designed to not include subscriptions, why not use this model?

It proves there is a form of subscriptionless MMO that can work, in my opinion.

I just want to add that I don’t care about trivializing accomplishments or the monetary side of things. I would probably never use the micro transactions in the first place, so I’m in the “it would ruin my experience” camp, not the “it hurts my wallet” group.

But for me, good design is the highest possible accomplishment in a game. I appreciate well designed games like I do a well made wine or beer, on some level. And I’m not trying to claim I’m some great Connoisseur, just that I appreciate craftsmanship more than value, or whether something fits my taste perfectly.

So my problem here is not that this sort of design cheapens my accomplishments or costs me more money, but just that it creates perverse incentives that damage the designer’s ability to find a well crafted, or at best sublime solution to their gameplay problems.

To me, that’s what makes some games more than just entertainment or a stimulating mental challenge. In a game like Shadow of the Colossus, or Braid, or Portal, I believe the design solutions are truly sublime and illuminating. In the way they perfectly blend concept, subject matter, form, and gameplay, these games allow us to think, act, and feel in truly visionary ways.

I’d argue that DaoC, UO, EQ, and even WoW achieve many of these same things to one degree or another, even though they all had their issues. On the other hand, while I still think it’s *possible* to achieve such visionary solutions in a F2P game, once you’re designing with these perverse incentives in mind, it becomes much more difficult and much less likely that you can achieve such brilliance.

And don’t think I’m saying so because I believe trying to make money taints the process. I’m not the kind who thinks art and creativity is poisoned by commercial needs. It is the design goal itself that spoils things: “Design a game that makes you want to buy your way around playing it”. That is blatantly wrong on its face.

@Parenon: You forgot to mention the lack of contents and overall depths of GW. Not to mention many missing basic MMO features that got left behind because the dev can’t afford to have them.

With all those combined, the business model that GW uses CANNOT replace the Pay-2-play model.

I’m not trying to say “just ignore it” but I do wonder why this is ending up beind such a big deal for people. I browsed through the cash shop on Bullroarer and after purchasing some things that were completely incidental to my gameplay (a couple of outfits, some emotes, extra bank space), I was pretty much done with the shop.

I know that on my server and in my kin alliance, the potions and deed grinds are just not going to be that big of a deal. We play to enjoy the game, not to get everything maxed out and better than everyone else. I’m sure I don’t mix with any large part of the server population but I don’t see people in SH or SG berating me because I don’t have all my virtues maxed out. People just seem more laid back then that.

The way I see it, I can either GET Turbine points for completing deeds (and you do. 5-10 points per deed, from what I’ve seen so far) or if I really want to, though I probably won’t, I could spend some of my alloted points-per-month on something that does the same thing. Does it trivialize it? I don’t know. I think virtues are pretty trivial anyway. I still have to do the work to get all my class traits. How much of the player base in LOTRO feels the way I do? I don’t know. But at the end of the day, I just don’t see myself caring whether or not someone managed to buy a virtue from the store instead of killing 400 spiders.

Who exactly is being disadvantaged here? The pure free player?

Under the old model, in order to stay competitive and not lose your raid slot and win at pvp and generally rub all your sweet grindhorses in people’s faces, you had to go to the evil Turbine store and BUY A SUBSCRIPTION. Every month. The people who didn’t buy a subscription at the cash shop were hugely disadvantaged in things that directly and indirectly effected gameplay, such as LOGGING IN or PLAYING.

Under the new model, the subscriber does just as before, except buying her sub also gives a pile of points in addition to access, points she can use to select new stuff, like stat boosts, or radically repriced stuff, like previously super-hard-to-get mounts. If for some reason she is a masochist, then she can refuse to spend the points on the stat buffs or the virtues or the horse, and insist on earning them the “old fashioned” way, refusing out of principle to acknowledge that the price of these items has changed over time in their MMO. Because that never happens right?

However, that same subscriber can now choose NOT to plunk down the sub money, and instead buy only those things that she is truly interested in. If she buys the stats only, is she “buying power” relative to a current subscriber, who is free to buy the same “power” with his large allotment of points? No.

The only person disadvantaged in this equation is the pure free player, who is permitted to play some portion of the game without paying anything. While that is his or her right, in reality, they are accessing large swaths of what was previously paid AAA content for nothing. Plus, they are hugely advantaged, from a pure price perspective, relative to both the subscriber and the cash-shop browser. It all more-or-less balances out.

Your arguments are all ill-fitting here because they really apply to standard free-to-play games, not to a AAA subscription game offering a free-to-play option. In those instances, you don’t have a standard subscription model running alongside a free-to-play model. It’s (1) shop in the shop, or (2) suck. In LotRO it’ll be (1) subscribe like you always have, (2) shop selectively in the shop, or (3) suck. Furthermore, the standard free-to-play game’s gameplay was designed around funneling players to the shop. LotRO was designed around funneling players to the subscription page. So any argument that it is built from the ground-up to punish players for not hitting the shop just doesn’t apply.

Lastly, are people seriously defending the noble sanctity of the grind — one of the most cynical crappy keep-you-paying design philosophies out there? Anything that burns grind to the ground is more than fine with me.

I’m happy with Turbine. They’ve shaken up the business thinking behind MMOs a little and found something that works for them. In a market littered with still-steaming AAA corpses, that’s a good thing. For them and us as lovers of the genre.

Exactly. Grind is a far bigger game-killer than the option to buy out of the grind will ever be. You want to complain about business models suffocating the fun out of MMOs, I’d take a long look at the cynical grind as the main culprit. AoC’s Godslayer xpac, to take just one example, was an awful, cynical set of endless, crawling rep grinds wrapped in a kimono. Sorry. I just don’t have that kind of time or patience in 2010.

Don’t defend the grind. Making horsies cheaper and allowing people to opt out of a rather pointless grind ain’t that big of a deal.

The one concern I have is that the F2P crutch allows developers to wriggle out of fixing boring stuff in their games. Don’t kid yourselves: those horses were rare because it was BOOORING to try and get them. Same with virtues. They’re a pain. The F2P’s flaw is that it allows the P2P developer to leave in these broken unfun grinds rather than requiring them to revisit and tweak them to make them more entertaining.

So… then I take it you won’t be playing it anymore? I see that you’re claiming victory before the “battle” has been decided in Beta. “Mission Accomplished”?

But really, don’t you do anything for your own personal satisfaction? So someone else bought a horse, and I fought hard for it. It doesn’t lessen my own accomplishment. You went ahead and bought a virtue, I fought hard for it. You went ahead and bought the tomes, I waited for them to drop. Again, it doesn’t lessen my accomplishment. Its not a PvP-heavy game, so I truly don’t care if someone buys them or not.

The only point I agree with are the potions, but only on the cooldown part… make them be on the same CD’s as other potions and make the cooldown a lot longer than 10 seconds, and not just the store ones, but the craftable ones as well, otherwise the game itself will be a joke at high level as everything becomes soloable with those pots.

But if they keep the $ high, and craftable in game, then people will PREFER to buy them from crafters instead and those crafters will make a VERY nice profit. So whether you buy them from the store or you buy them off another character? Meh.

But again… its still beta and they could change. Heck, they could change outside of beta, too.

If you don’t like it, though, especially this much, then show Turbine you mean business: don’t play.

@Keen – Definitely not working on _any_ games here, just commenting. 🙂

The grind part is only one part of the argument, but it stood out as the weakest link to me based on the whole sub vs. F2P conversation going on here.

Personally, F2P games aren’t to my taste, but if they’re going to be viable at all of course they need to charge for convenience/power items. It’s the only real way they can make money because their ship will sink if their only revenue stream is coming from vanity items.

Obviously, this creates a bit of an interesting dynamic when your game’s audiences is a hybrid of time-rich and cash-rich players. Each have their own set of ideas on how gameplay should be rewarded. The former thinks time and effort should pay off while the latter thinks they should be able to pay to compete.

Interestingly, I feel that time-rich gamers treat their games like more of a job than cash-rich gamers, while the latter focus on making more money at their jobs so they can afford to make their games LESS joblike.

Weird, innit?

“Regardless if it’s a grind or not, that item allows players to circumvent PLAYING the game.”

You have to admit, it’s marketing genius. Imagine McDonald’s started selling the McNot: for $3, they’ll sell you the privilege of not eating a cheeseburger.

The monthly subscription is a bad model for a number of reasons:

1) You basically can only play one MMO at a time.

2) If you have any sort of busy life, your choice is to get ripped off most months, or just unsubscribe altogether.

Cash shops aren’t “bad for games” any more than money is “bad for life.” In life, people use money as a shortcut. Why should it matter if they do the same in games?

The whole attitude that someone who buys something you earned through time “trivializes” your accomplishment is stupid. Focus on your own fun more and what other people are doing less.

The fact that it takes 100 hours to get a certain piece of gear trivializes my life and my family by virtue of the fact that I have to farm a boss 200 times to get a single item.

Wow some people just don’t get it.Free to play(or pay to win) is fundementally different from the Monthly subs in that it is designed to make money for the publisher, at the expense of World Balance.END OF STORY!

Just stop talking shit and think for yourself for second, its stairing you right in the face.

Joy, YOU don’t get it. How is “pay to win” any different than “no-life to win.” Is the direction we want games to go that only no life, no job, no family cat-assers who play 14 hours a day should experience the majority of the content? Really?

F2P removes barriers to entry and re-entry, removes the stress of having to make sure you are justifying your monthly sub with how much you play, and lets you choose which areas of the game you’d like to enhance with either more content, more customization, or some boosts.

Its that simple.

Also as I will start with 4500 Turbine Points, plus a ridiculous amount if they give us TP for deeds we already did, I’ll be able to spend them on rare emotes haha.

“If you have bought into the crap about free to play offering you a greater choice in your gaming life, well then I feel sorry for you.”

lol. I probably wouldn’t be playing ANY games right now if it weren’t for “F2P”. The $ itself isn’t the problem. It’s the feeling of getting ripped off if I don’t play much that month. …which then makes me “want to get my money’s worth,” so then I’d probably opt not to play At All to avoid playing too much. …so does “F2P” give me more gaming choice? Absolutely. It’s ala carte`. Of Course it’s giving me more choice.

The “pay2win” argument is flawed on a PVE game because it has little bearing on other people’s gameplay. You can’t buy uber stuff in LOTRO anyway, but let’s say you could. …so what? You’d have to try pretty hard to come up with a situation that it even matters much to someone else. The only way you’d know if I EZ-moded to level 100 and my purples is if I told you anyway.

Do you guys despise God mode in single-player games too? Do you want me to waste 10 hours or simply quit in frustration trying to get past some bs part of a game? Does it make you all upset knowing I finished Doom faster than you did because I “cheated”? Well, hey, too bad.

I’ve considered going back to WoW because I heard the bs attuning to get into various raids is easier now. Making the game easier so casual players will play and have some fun… oh noes! At least they didn’t make it F2P, right?