A couple suggestions for the devs regarding the payment model

I know that the developers are unlikely to even read this, much less implement anything, but I feel like I need to write this.

My first suggestion is: Just like you did with the Oversky, I feel you have no choice but to make content updates purchasable with gold, as well as real money. You have already decided to charge for the base game, and it will be hard to get rid of the store, as it is the most practical way to sell cosmetic items and content. But if, on top of those two, you will also make content updates a compulsory cash purchase, you will be accused of “triple dipping” and players will start leaving like water through a sieve!
If on the other hand, you will give players a choice to pay with cash or gold, you will please everybody - those who want to have the content fast, wouldn’t mind paying for it, while those who can’t afford that will put in the playtime, pushing the game up on Steam Charts
And no, you can’t make “major” updates paid and give the “minor” ones away for free. This will lead to “waves” of players coming in whenever the free update hits, only to leave again after a week, leaving the rest of us to argue on the forums about whether the latest paid update was worth the money.

My second suggestion takes a bit of explaining: before I started playing Faeria, I played an MMO called Guild Wars 2. It started off as a buy-to-play title. However, when the first expansion got released, they made it free to play up to level cap, which is 80. It seemed so generous it was crazy, but it was a very clever move.
Reaching the level cap in GW2 takes at least a month. Therefore, people who managed to reach it were bound to like the game. As a result, Ninety Percent of players who reached the cap ended up buying the expansion! They could buy it earlier if they wished, of course…
So what I’m suggesting is: implement a free trial up to a certain level. My suggestion is: Free players limited to level 50, rank 16 and 50 Pandora points per month. No recruitment rewards, login rewards and limited to cards released before Oversky.
This way, it will still be possible to try the game out before buying it, enticing more people in.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions, positive or negative, feel free to join in! :slight_smile:

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I totally agree with the second part, a limited experience for F2P seems totally worth it!

Now for the gold purchasable dlcs, my guess is that they are not going back on that decision, they certainly put a lot of though into it, and it would be quite shameful to decide do drop it now, I guess ^^

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Excellent suggestions, Nettlesoup. Especially the second one. I feel like that could be a really smart model. As for the first one, I really hope that that will be the case as I’m one of those people who doesn’t mind the grind, and would rather grind up the gold for the dlc than pay cash. Sometimes I will, but if I need to in order to be competitive, than I almost definitely won’t. This is because I know that if I start paying for the dlc just to get cards I need to be able to climb the ladder, than their going to know that that system worked and do it again. I’d much rather pay for something I want than something I absolutely have to get. That’s why I applaud F2P games that focus entirely on purchasable cosmetics. If I could buy the entire bom-r set including emotes, I would have done that a long time ago.

The second suggestion sounds great. Definitely win-win for both new players and Abrakam. May be even free Oversky, but obviously they can’t play on after level 50 or so.

The first suggestion is good for players definitely, but I guess the question is whether it’s financially viable for Abrakam too. Cosmetics is optional so I don’t feel bad if they charge for it. Maybe give some cosmetics along with new expansion/content to sweeten up the deal.

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I do hope it is financially viable. The main reason I suggested it is because I have seen at least a couple negative Steam reviews and at least 3 people complaining “I love this game, but I’m leaving”, based purely on the assumption that all updates will require a cash payment. Even though Abrakam have said absolutely nothing on the subject so far!

An easy solution to the problem would be to vary the price of the content updates depending on their size, with the smaller ones being cheaper and the bigger ones more expensive. This way, some people can decide to pay for the smaller ones and “play” for the bigger ones, while others will do the opposite.

Oversky definitely counts as “big”, but we’ve been promised updates every month and doing ones of similar size with that sort of frequency just wouldn’t be feasible.

Guild Wars 2 does have a cosmetic cash shop, and it is very popular. Most players use it just to support the devs. So maybe rather than give free stuff away, Faeria should take another leaf out of GW2 book and have a bigger cash shop with regular rotating price reductions on some items, as well as free exclusive cosmetic skins for veteran players for their important Faeria “anniversaries”. For example: “Your account is a year old - here’s a cool orb!”