Also, I’m with mbp, in that I’m very happy to pay for content (Guild Wars style or Wizard 101 Access Passes for other examples). I’ve purchased games for a long time now, and that model fits my purchasing patterns (and play patterns) most effectively.

As for the XP potions, there are 2 ways to look at it:
- First, the VIP players are offered 500 turbine points a month and pay 15$ a month. Some may want to go to the “end game” (I hate that term) quickly for their buck. Others might want to level alts
- Second, it might be free, but there are always people that want to level quicker and quicker still. I have such a friend.

Personally, the rate at which I’m leveling is fast enough. Even too fast: I outlevel a good portion of the content :/.
But I tell myself I can have alts go through this content.

On the introduction of micro-tranasactions in other games I do think there is a question of value to be considered. At the moment we have no ready yardstick for comparing micro-transaction prices but I think that €10 for a pet is just terribly bad value.

Put it this way, did you ever grind Timbermaw rep in vanilla WoW? I’m sure you mentioned at one stage that you did.

If that had been skippable on payment of $100 a lot of people would have paid that.

But you can’t say it was designed to make people pay because it was designed as a horrible grind without any pay option. Sometimes games are just like that.

DDO feels like they’re designing the game they think will be fun for subscribers first. That they also make chunks of game available to people who want to buy it in pieces. And that’s it even viable to play completely free if you’re time rich money poor and devise some serious grinding strategies (like the Turbo Favour Barb I wrote about on Stabbed Up).

WoW is different. They’re saying “here’s something cool and you can’t have it” to everyone who won’t open their wallet for these microtransactions. That’s different from here’s something cool and you can grind like a nutter or be sensible and fork over some cash.

One thought is that if you’ve levelled through the content once and want to get an alt up to snuff so you can play that with friends, then XP boosts and such are a bonus, but also a privilege. Look at WoW and the number of people who are using Refer A Friend bonuses to whip alts through the low levels, it’s not an uncommon issue. In a mature game, and we have to remember that DDO is such a game, I think these sort of items have their uses.

And from Turbine’s point of view it’s still a partial win I’d imagine, people pay them money to get through their game quickly, rather than spending time and playing through it for free. However, their main incentive is to make the game interesting and enjoyable enough to keep the people playing for free, because the more they do, the more likely they are to be tempted buy something in the store.

I totally agree: if a game were designed to make avoiding the content the preferred route, I think it would be a Bad Thing. I also think it would be a failure. Where DDO succeeds is that the game is enjoyable on its own merits, and the items in the store give the player the freedom to enjoy that game at their own pace and in their own way.

I believe I see where you’re coming from though, for example if Blizzard offered iLevel X gear on the store to allow players to skip a raid dungeon and move onto the next one in the progression, they would essentially break their end game because the incentives to perform those raids on their own merit is not high enough to encourage players to play the game rather than buy their way to the next level. The danger for most MMOs at the moment is that much of their content requires nothing more than a basic grind to achieve the goal, and this isn’t something that presents a suitable balance to the option of ‘purchase or play’.

These things have to be balanced with your game’s content, your game’s subscription model and the general tone and attitude of your player base. Blizzard were at least sensible enough to start with items that don’t affect the game in any way, but I still think they are foolish not to offer a way to earn the items in the game through playing the game (rather than the current option of buying them with ground-out gold).

To me, if you have a choice between getting an item in game or paying for it, I feel like I’m being told that I can pay to avoid playing the game. I don’t want a game that’s designed to make that an attractive proposition. I don’t ever want to say, ‘Oh yes, I’d rather pay hard cash to avoid spending another minute in that cruddy game!’

Somewhere’s there is probably a sweet point. But buying stuff that you can’t get any other way, as long as it’s purely cosmetic, doesn’t push my buttons in the same way as buying to sidestep a game element would do.

So, if nothing else, Blizzard have introduced an RMT link similar to CCPs game time trading for ISK, but Blizzard’s is time limited, because eventually the market will be saturated enough with these mini-pets that their in-game price will plummet, whereas EVE’s game time is a constantly in-demand entity.

I feel that, if nothing else, Turbine’s way has more of a feeling of honesty to it, and thus encourages people to pay more freely.