Again, this idea is stinking stupid. Its not even funny to me, I dont know why other people claim its amusing.
People who die often are the ones who test out their characters limits. So why exactly would one put a penalty on that ? They will probably know a lot more about what they can and can not do. They will know more about what different mobs are able to do.
So yeah, put a reasonable death penalty into your game. Give a 5 minute debuff or something. Something people care about not dying. But not more.
This is probably the most idiotic thing anybody has ever suggested. It's completely stupid and there's no way a game using this could ever succeed, but it's hilarious to think about. I can just imagine some poor sap punching a hole in his monitor because he got pked, looted and charged $1.00 on top of that. It'd be great if players lost one level per death instead of being charged $1. The whole charging money thing assumes that everybody will be using a credit card, but a lot of people use prepaid credit cards or game cards these days.
Edit: Making players lose one level per death would actually be pretty cool. It'd prevent the idiots from messing up end game content and would add some actual meaning to obtaining maximum level with that sweet raid gear.
I think the OP may be onto something here. Especially in the context of a pay 2 win style title. It may not be something that everyone would want but for that genre I think it has enough merit to consider.
To everyone who thinks this is a good idea, how much money are you willing to spend each month to play an mmorpg...$20, $50, $100+? I think $15 is already too high, and yet what happens when you reach your limit for the month? Lets say you tell yourself that you won't spend more than 20 bucks on this mmo a month, then by Day 7 of the month, you've already died 20 times. Are you going to stop playing for the other 23 days of the month? That is absurd. Why would anyone support having to pay more for a subscription?
Let this thread be a perfect example of how players don't even know what they want and that posters on forums cannot be trusted to know the difference between a good idea and absolutely retarded ridiculousness.
The only winner in this payment model is the gaming company, and it would be a windfall for them if anyone was dumb enough to actually play a game with this pament method.
People would not play tanks or healers, and if the game required those roles it would die.
Current games when you play a tank or healer, you get raged at already if you make the smallest mistake, the level of abuse in a $1 death game would be more than most could handle.
Normal people wouldn't play, gankers would be everywhere, griefiers would be everywhere, everyone would be trying to kill you to make you pay a dollar, if you get corpse camped and pay 3 dollars and you are still dying, chances are you would log off and never log back in again.
I'm all for a harsher death penalty but this is just stupid. There would never be new players beyond the first couple of weeks of the game because the fast levellers would gank them into financial ruin.
People would not play tanks or healers, and if the game required those roles it would die.
Current games when you play a tank or healer, you get raged at already if you make the smallest mistake, the level of abuse in a $1 death game would be more than most could handle.
Normal people wouldn't play, gankers would be everywhere, griefiers would be everywhere, everyone would be trying to kill you to make you pay a dollar, if you get corpse camped and pay 3 dollars and you are still dying, chances are you would log off and never log back in again.
I'm all for a harsher death penalty but this is just stupid. There would never be new players beyond the first couple of weeks of the game because the fast levellers would gank them into financial ruin.
would definately need to be a skill based/sandbox game it would never fly in a theme park. Give me darkfall with this and im so down. Create a small safe area for people to craft and do shit without getting destroyed and leave the rest of the area a paycheck zone.
I honestly would buy this game in a heartbeat its the ultimate risk vrs reward other then blowing your brains out when u die in the game.
You'd better hope and pray that their servers are completely stable 100% of the time, that you never fall through the world, and that your internet connection never, ever wavers, otherwise that game will get really expensive really quickly.
Oh, and just wait for all the griefers and PKs to train mobs over you or otherwise get you killed just because they can.
I'm sure you'll love a game like this then. Really.
Hmmmm...so if a game is developed with this system, it means that the developers get paid whenever someone dies.
The developers also design the game world and can basically determine how frequently people are going to die on average based on how they design it.
I wonder what this system is going to encourage developers to do...
Paying when you die is essentially gambling, and the developer is the house.
Number one rule of any casino my friends. The house always wins .
It will encourage the GM's to go on PK-runs on OP toons!
Would you really want to play a game where you could have to pay $15 for a few hours of gaming? LOL people, F2P grinders FTW! Go play one and your love of this system will melt like snow to the desert sun, unless you're not the one picking up the tab.
Waiting for Guild Wars 2, and maybe SWTOR until that time...
If you play the game very cautiously and hardly ever die, you will likely keep playing because the game is cheap for you, but you will not be profitable to the company.
On the other hand, if you play the game poorly and die a lot, you are profitable to the company, but will likely quit as the game is frustrating you, costing you too much, and you realize you could get a better deal from a regular sub game.
It essentially comes down to:
You are either not dying and thus paying less than a subscription
OR
You are dying a lot and will quit to pay a subscription game that is cheaper to you
Either way, the company loses.
You are forgetting that not everybody has as much time to play as hardcore players. To somebody who can only play 5 hours a week max, or let's say 10 hours a month, paying a sub is pretty expensive.
It's F2P filosophy really, you play more, you die more, you pay more. You play less, you hopefully die less too, if not you suck! Lolz...:P
You just can't measure everything with a subscription stick. Different people you know...
Waiting for Guild Wars 2, and maybe SWTOR until that time...
If you play the game very cautiously and hardly ever die, you will likely keep playing because the game is cheap for you, but you will not be profitable to the company.
On the other hand, if you play the game poorly and die a lot, you are profitable to the company, but will likely quit as the game is frustrating you, costing you too much, and you realize you could get a better deal from a regular sub game.
It essentially comes down to:
You are either not dying and thus paying less than a subscription
OR
You are dying a lot and will quit to pay a subscription game that is cheaper to you
Either way, the company loses.
You are forgetting that not everybody has as much time to play as hardcore players. To somebody who can only play 5 hours a week max, or let's say 10 hours a month, paying a sub is pretty expensive.
It's F2P filosophy really, you play more, you die more, you pay more. You play less, you hopefully die less too, if not you suck! Lolz...:P
You just can't measure everything with a subscription stick. Different people you know...
Point taken, but why not just charge people hourly then? I think it would be a more fair system and it doesn't incentivize developers to do anything other than to get people to play their game .
I would be in favor of a system where you could either get "unlimited" game time for $15.00 a month, or pay $0.50 an hour or something.
If you play the game very cautiously and hardly ever die, you will likely keep playing because the game is cheap for you, but you will not be profitable to the company.
On the other hand, if you play the game poorly and die a lot, you are profitable to the company, but will likely quit as the game is frustrating you, costing you too much, and you realize you could get a better deal from a regular sub game.
It essentially comes down to:
You are either not dying and thus paying less than a subscription
OR
You are dying a lot and will quit to pay a subscription game that is cheaper to you
Either way, the company loses.
You are forgetting that not everybody has as much time to play as hardcore players. To somebody who can only play 5 hours a week max, or let's say 10 hours a month, paying a sub is pretty expensive.
It's F2P filosophy really, you play more, you die more, you pay more. You play less, you hopefully die less too, if not you suck! Lolz...:P
You just can't measure everything with a subscription stick. Different people you know...
Point taken, but why not just charge people hourly then? I think it would be a more fair system and it doesn't incentivize developers to do anything other than to get people to play their game .
I would be in favor of a system where you could either get "unlimited" game time for $15.00 a month, or pay $0.50 an hour or something.
Hourly Rate to play is an amazingly bad idea for 3 reasons:
1) it would be cost prohibitive to pay monthly. if your playing more than 30 hours, which you should be if your enjoying the game, then why pay hourly? reason
2) Competition. MMORPG down the street is FREE TO PLAY, why pay hourly?
3) I've payed hourly rates to play games, and dumped them when it went to subscription based. No one wants to pay hourly. I certainly won't go back to that. I'm sure most people don't.
========================== The game is dead not, this game is good we make it and Romania Tv give it 5 goat heads, this is good rating for game.
Hourly Rate to play is an amazingly bad idea for 3 reasons:
1) it would be cost prohibitive to pay monthly. if your playing more than 30 hours, which you should be if your enjoying the game, then why pay hourly? reason
2) Competition. MMORPG down the street is FREE TO PLAY, why pay hourly?
3) I've payed hourly rates to play games, and dumped them when it went to subscription based. No one wants to pay hourly. I certainly won't go back to that. I'm sure most people don't.
We pay hourly rates when we play bowling, snooker. We pay hourly for tennis courts.
It is not unimaginable. The only reason valid is competition. Right now, no online game is so superior as to maintain an hourly fee. If the game comes a holy ultimate game is published and it beats all other games hands down, god forbids they start levying an hourly fee? Who is to tell this won't happen.
Bless us, we have competition. We enjoy competition.
If you play the game very cautiously and hardly ever die, you will likely keep playing because the game is cheap for you, but you will not be profitable to the company.
On the other hand, if you play the game poorly and die a lot, you are profitable to the company, but will likely quit as the game is frustrating you, costing you too much, and you realize you could get a better deal from a regular sub game.
It essentially comes down to:
You are either not dying and thus paying less than a subscription
OR
You are dying a lot and will quit to pay a subscription game that is cheaper to you
Either way, the company loses.
You are forgetting that not everybody has as much time to play as hardcore players. To somebody who can only play 5 hours a week max, or let's say 10 hours a month, paying a sub is pretty expensive.
It's F2P filosophy really, you play more, you die more, you pay more. You play less, you hopefully die less too, if not you suck! Lolz...:P
You just can't measure everything with a subscription stick. Different people you know...
Point taken, but why not just charge people hourly then? I think it would be a more fair system and it doesn't incentivize developers to do anything other than to get people to play their game .
I would be in favor of a system where you could either get "unlimited" game time for $15.00 a month, or pay $0.50 an hour or something.
Hourly Rate to play is an amazingly bad idea for 3 reasons:
1) it would be cost prohibitive to pay monthly. if your playing more than 30 hours, which you should be if your enjoying the game, then why pay hourly? reason
That's why you have the option to pay monthly as well. You could even make it so that if a player's hourly rate exceeds the cost of a month's subscription, that their bill just "caps" at $15.00 or whatever a month's subscription is. There is literally no downside for the player here.
2) Competition. MMORPG down the street is FREE TO PLAY, why pay hourly?
Hahaha "Free to play." That's funny. No MMORPG is TRULY free to play, they just have deceptive business models. Also, you could make this same argument with subscriptions. If MMORPGs are free to play, then why does anyone pay a subscription.
3) I've payed hourly rates to play games, and dumped them when it went to subscription based. No one wants to pay hourly. I certainly won't go back to that. I'm sure most people don't.
I don't get this argument. You said that you PLAYED hourly rate games, but then dumped them when they turned into subscription games. Wouldn't your argument be against subscription games not hourly rate games?
I've had an idea about cash shops that I've never seen.
After spending $15 in a month on the shop, everything changes so that it can be purchased with in game gold.
Sort of like a spending cap. The respawn after death potions could be any price. When you hit the cap, buy them for gold rather than cash.
It would need to be debugged for exploits, but given the crazy prices, I'd have less trouble spending the $15 if it were capped and treated like a subscription.
Advantage is if I play and have money, I spend to my cap and then get cheap stuff as if it were vendor. If I don't play or don't have money, I just have to play more carefully.
EDIT: in reviewing this, it sort of sounds like LOTRO's optional subscription.
Ken Fisher - Semi retired old fart Network Administrator, now working in Network Security. I don't Forum PVP. If you feel I've attacked you, it was probably by accident. When I don't understand, I ask. Such is not intended as criticism.
Originally posted by Creslin321 Here's another argument against this system: If you play the game very cautiously and hardly ever die, you will likely keep playing because the game is cheap for you, but you will not be profitable to the company. On the other hand, if you play the game poorly and die a lot, you are profitable to the company, but will likely quit as the game is frustrating you, costing you too much, and you realize you could get a better deal from a regular sub game. It essentially comes down to: You are either not dying and thus paying less than a subscription OR You are dying a lot and will quit to pay a subscription game that is cheaper to you Either way, the company loses.
You are forgetting that not everybody has as much time to play as hardcore players. To somebody who can only play 5 hours a week max, or let's say 10 hours a month, paying a sub is pretty expensive. It's F2P filosophy really, you play more, you die more, you pay more. You play less, you hopefully die less too, if not you suck! Lolz...:P You just can't measure everything with a subscription stick. Different people you know...
Point taken, but why not just charge people hourly then? I think it would be a more fair system and it doesn't incentivize developers to do anything other than to get people to play their game . I would be in favor of a system where you could either get "unlimited" game time for $15.00 a month, or pay $0.50 an hour or something.
Hourly Rate to play is an amazingly bad idea for 3 reasons: 1) it would be cost prohibitive to pay monthly. if your playing more than 30 hours, which you should be if your enjoying the game, then why pay hourly? reason That's why you have the option to pay monthly as well. You could even make it so that if a player's hourly rate exceeds the cost of a month's subscription, that their bill just "caps" at $15.00 or whatever a month's subscription is. There is literally no downside for the player here. 2) Competition. MMORPG down the street is FREE TO PLAY, why pay hourly? Hahaha "Free to play." That's funny. No MMORPG is TRULY free to play, they just have deceptive business models. Also, you could make this same argument with subscriptions. If MMORPGs are free to play, then why does anyone pay a subscription. 3) I've payed hourly rates to play games, and dumped them when it went to subscription based. No one wants to pay hourly. I certainly won't go back to that. I'm sure most people don't. I don't get this argument. You said that you PLAYED hourly rate games, but then dumped them when they turned into subscription games. Wouldn't your argument be against subscription games not hourly rate games?
Pretty sure they mean they dumped the hourly games when subscription games came out. Why would you pay $6 or $8 an hour when you could pay $19.99 a month for unlimited play? Especially when you were paying for Compuserve or Aol?
I could see an hourly option working, if it were capped. If you played less than X hours a month, it would be well worth it to play hourly, but once you got to the $15 mark (however many hours that was) you could just keep playing.
** edit ** I glommed off of Action's idea. Their idea was first.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Point taken, but why not just charge people hourly then?
The model disappeared because of the difficulty of collecting fees on a post-use basis. It's all too easy to chargeback a credit card.
Prices dropped significantly moving to subscription (pre-use) basis, because the problem of collection went away. No more collection agencies, court cases, etc.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Right now, no online game is so superior as to maintain an hourly fee. If the game comes a holy ultimate game is published and it beats all other games hands down, god forbids they start levying an hourly fee? Who is to tell this won't happen.
There is a reason that hourly rates died over a decade ago, and they're not coming back. Ever. In fact, one of the innovations in the early MMOs like EverQuest was a set subscription fee. All you had to pay was $15 a month. No hourly fees, no outrageous bills for time spent online, etc. EQ was considered a bargain over previous games, especially the games on CompuServe and GEnie. You got months, if not years, of content and game time for one set price.
Unless you do all your gaming at an internet cafe, most people will not pay an hourly rate, or a fee for each death in an MMO. I don't give a damn if it's a class-based theme park, a skill-based sandbox, PvP, PvE, or whatever. Not going to happen. As long as there are games out there that are free or close to free, or which have set subscription fee, very very few people are going to be stupid enough to pay by the hour or by the death. They'll just go to a cheaper game that they like instead.
Love how you guys went from pay per death to hourly rate. The idea behind Pay per death is not to die try very hard not to die. Id love pvp it would be great. If the game was amazing i could easly spend 100 bucks a month Id just hope whatever company did it rewarded the pvp with a portion of the cash.
I think it's interesting, but people would be quiting right and left out of frusteration and therefore a bad ploy for the game. It just wouldn't fly, but it is definately getting closer to how it should be.
Love how you guys went from pay per death to hourly rate. The idea behind Pay per death is not to die try very hard not to die. Id love pvp it would be great. If the game was amazing i could easly spend 100 bucks a month Id just hope whatever company did it rewarded the pvp with a portion of the cash.
The point is that paying per death is just as stupid of an idea as hourly rates used to be, and for the same exact reason.
Back in the early days of online gaming, hourly rates died when straight subs came along. These days, anyone who tried to charge players per death would see their CSR and Billing departments quit en masse and their players leave in droves. Why would anyone pay $1 every time they died when there are plenty of games out there which don't charge them at all?
Also, you're dreaming if you think the devs would share the money with you. ROFL. Not gonna happen. They'd need the money to make up for all the revenue they're going to lose when people leave their game in droves.
Right now, no online game is so superior as to maintain an hourly fee. If the game comes a holy ultimate game is published and it beats all other games hands down, god forbids they start levying an hourly fee? Who is to tell this won't happen.
There is a reason that hourly rates died over a decade ago, and they're not coming back. Ever. In fact, one of the innovations in the early MMOs like EverQuest was a set subscription fee. All you had to pay was $15 a month. No hourly fees, no outrageous bills for time spent online, etc. EQ was considered a bargain over previous games, especially the games on CompuServe and GEnie. You got months, if not years, of content and game time for one set price.
Unless you do all your gaming at an internet cafe, most people will not pay an hourly rate, or a fee for each death in an MMO. I don't give a damn if it's a class-based theme park, a skill-based sandbox, PvP, PvE, or whatever. Not going to happen. As long as there are games out there that are free or close to free, or which have set subscription fee, very very few people are going to be stupid enough to pay by the hour or by the death. They'll just go to a cheaper game that they like instead.
Imagine this, in the market today with competition from monthly sub games and all these F2P games, there exist one superb game so good to enough gamers that they can maintain an hourly rate option, what does it mean?
Either that the hourly rate is very low, like those game cards, and hence cater to the very occasional casual gamer, using stored value cards
Or the hourly rate is high, but more than offset by a superb superb godly game.
Either way, it is ok for me. Too bad we have yet to see a game fitting criterion 2.
Imagine this, in the market today with competition from monthly sub games and all these F2P games, there exist one superb game so good to enough gamers that they can maintain an hourly rate option, what does it mean?
Either that the hourly rate is very low, like those game cards, and hence cater to the very occasional casual gamer, using stored value cards
Or the hourly rate is high, but more than offset by a superb superb godly game.
Either way, it is ok for me. Too bad we have yet to see a game fitting criterion 2.
You're not getting it. The hourly rate isn't going to happen. Ever. I don't give a damn what kind of game you're talking about or how good this mythical, imaginary game would be. NOT. GOING. TO. HAPPEN.
The biggest games in the world right now are either subscription based, or F2P with a cash shop. Hourly rates for an MMO died back when EverQuest launched. NO ONE is going to be stupid enough to pay by the hour anymore. They haven't done it since 1999, and they're not going to start doing it again now.
An MMO charging players real money for each death will never happen either, and for two reasons: 1) it's a f--king stupid idea on its face that would only be done if a developer deliberately wants their business to fail, and 2) because of all the F2P + cash shop games, and a B2P game like Guild Wars. Why in the hell would ANYONE be stupid enough to pay an extra fee for each death when they can just buy a copy of Guild Wars at their local game shop and never pay an extra dime no matter how many times they died?
So they charge you a buck for every time you die? So no one would ever run challenging content because fear of death. PvP would be non existant and completely unrewarding. People would rage quit by the hundreds. Or thousands.
After a year the game would enjoy a wonderfully healthy population of 12 people. Awesome.
This is different from the way FFA PVP sandboxes currently work?
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
X Free Death every 24 hours, (Lets say you can revive 3 times for free every 24 hours, and the 24 hours countdown starts on your 4th death)
Able to select respawn points (to avoid corpse campers, or to escape from powerful monsters that you encountered by accident)
Discount Death for raid content (lets say you pay $0.25 per death in raids)
PVP arena that gives you $0.50 per win, and if you won the whole thing, you win the pot amount. (You still pay $1.00 if you die. The pot amount is $1.50 x Number of Players fighting)
And a auto-cap that gives you unlimited revive if you've spent X amount. (Say the cap is $15.00, and if you've spent that much, you get free revives until the end of the month)
Then yeah, it could work. The good thing about this is if you are used to spending $15.00 a month, it won't make a difference to you. If you don't play as much, you pay less for it. If you are extremely good at playing the game, you are rewarded for it. Its a no-lose situation for players who are used to the subscription model, and its a win-win situation for casual and pro players.
Comments
Again, this idea is stinking stupid. Its not even funny to me, I dont know why other people claim its amusing.
People who die often are the ones who test out their characters limits. So why exactly would one put a penalty on that ? They will probably know a lot more about what they can and can not do. They will know more about what different mobs are able to do.
So yeah, put a reasonable death penalty into your game. Give a 5 minute debuff or something. Something people care about not dying. But not more.
This is probably the most idiotic thing anybody has ever suggested. It's completely stupid and there's no way a game using this could ever succeed, but it's hilarious to think about. I can just imagine some poor sap punching a hole in his monitor because he got pked, looted and charged $1.00 on top of that. It'd be great if players lost one level per death instead of being charged $1. The whole charging money thing assumes that everybody will be using a credit card, but a lot of people use prepaid credit cards or game cards these days.
Edit: Making players lose one level per death would actually be pretty cool. It'd prevent the idiots from messing up end game content and would add some actual meaning to obtaining maximum level with that sweet raid gear.
I think the OP may be onto something here. Especially in the context of a pay 2 win style title. It may not be something that everyone would want but for that genre I think it has enough merit to consider.
----ITS A TRAP!!!----
To everyone who thinks this is a good idea, how much money are you willing to spend each month to play an mmorpg...$20, $50, $100+? I think $15 is already too high, and yet what happens when you reach your limit for the month? Lets say you tell yourself that you won't spend more than 20 bucks on this mmo a month, then by Day 7 of the month, you've already died 20 times. Are you going to stop playing for the other 23 days of the month? That is absurd. Why would anyone support having to pay more for a subscription?
Let this thread be a perfect example of how players don't even know what they want and that posters on forums cannot be trusted to know the difference between a good idea and absolutely retarded ridiculousness.
The only winner in this payment model is the gaming company, and it would be a windfall for them if anyone was dumb enough to actually play a game with this pament method.
People would not play tanks or healers, and if the game required those roles it would die.
Current games when you play a tank or healer, you get raged at already if you make the smallest mistake, the level of abuse in a $1 death game would be more than most could handle.
Normal people wouldn't play, gankers would be everywhere, griefiers would be everywhere, everyone would be trying to kill you to make you pay a dollar, if you get corpse camped and pay 3 dollars and you are still dying, chances are you would log off and never log back in again.
I'm all for a harsher death penalty but this is just stupid. There would never be new players beyond the first couple of weeks of the game because the fast levellers would gank them into financial ruin.
would definately need to be a skill based/sandbox game it would never fly in a theme park. Give me darkfall with this and im so down. Create a small safe area for people to craft and do shit without getting destroyed and leave the rest of the area a paycheck zone.
You'd better hope and pray that their servers are completely stable 100% of the time, that you never fall through the world, and that your internet connection never, ever wavers, otherwise that game will get really expensive really quickly.
Oh, and just wait for all the griefers and PKs to train mobs over you or otherwise get you killed just because they can.
I'm sure you'll love a game like this then. Really.
Sound's the a concept those online casino's would come up with to make money out of people. They would do odds on each battle aswell.
It will encourage the GM's to go on PK-runs on OP toons!
Would you really want to play a game where you could have to pay $15 for a few hours of gaming? LOL people, F2P grinders FTW! Go play one and your love of this system will melt like snow to the desert sun, unless you're not the one picking up the tab.
Waiting for Guild Wars 2, and maybe SWTOR until that time...
You are forgetting that not everybody has as much time to play as hardcore players. To somebody who can only play 5 hours a week max, or let's say 10 hours a month, paying a sub is pretty expensive.
It's F2P filosophy really, you play more, you die more, you pay more. You play less, you hopefully die less too, if not you suck! Lolz...:P
You just can't measure everything with a subscription stick. Different people you know...
Waiting for Guild Wars 2, and maybe SWTOR until that time...
Point taken, but why not just charge people hourly then? I think it would be a more fair system and it doesn't incentivize developers to do anything other than to get people to play their game
.
I would be in favor of a system where you could either get "unlimited" game time for $15.00 a month, or pay $0.50 an hour or something.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Hourly Rate to play is an amazingly bad idea for 3 reasons:
1) it would be cost prohibitive to pay monthly. if your playing more than 30 hours, which you should be if your enjoying the game, then why pay hourly? reason
2) Competition. MMORPG down the street is FREE TO PLAY, why pay hourly?
3) I've payed hourly rates to play games, and dumped them when it went to subscription based. No one wants to pay hourly. I certainly won't go back to that. I'm sure most people don't.
==========================
The game is dead not, this game is good we make it and Romania Tv give it 5 goat heads, this is good rating for game.
We pay hourly rates when we play bowling, snooker. We pay hourly for tennis courts.
It is not unimaginable. The only reason valid is competition. Right now, no online game is so superior as to maintain an hourly fee. If the game comes a holy ultimate game is published and it beats all other games hands down, god forbids they start levying an hourly fee? Who is to tell this won't happen.
Bless us, we have competition. We enjoy competition.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
I've had an idea about cash shops that I've never seen.
After spending $15 in a month on the shop, everything changes so that it can be purchased with in game gold.
Sort of like a spending cap. The respawn after death potions could be any price. When you hit the cap, buy them for gold rather than cash.
It would need to be debugged for exploits, but given the crazy prices, I'd have less trouble spending the $15 if it were capped and treated like a subscription.
Advantage is if I play and have money, I spend to my cap and then get cheap stuff as if it were vendor. If I don't play or don't have money, I just have to play more carefully.
EDIT: in reviewing this, it sort of sounds like LOTRO's optional subscription.
Pretty sure they mean they dumped the hourly games when subscription games came out. Why would you pay $6 or $8 an hour when you could pay $19.99 a month for unlimited play? Especially when you were paying for Compuserve or Aol?
I could see an hourly option working, if it were capped. If you played less than X hours a month, it would be well worth it to play hourly, but once you got to the $15 mark (however many hours that was) you could just keep playing.
** edit **
I glommed off of Action's idea. Their idea was first.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
The model disappeared because of the difficulty of collecting fees on a post-use basis. It's all too easy to chargeback a credit card.
Prices dropped significantly moving to subscription (pre-use) basis, because the problem of collection went away. No more collection agencies, court cases, etc.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
There is a reason that hourly rates died over a decade ago, and they're not coming back. Ever. In fact, one of the innovations in the early MMOs like EverQuest was a set subscription fee. All you had to pay was $15 a month. No hourly fees, no outrageous bills for time spent online, etc. EQ was considered a bargain over previous games, especially the games on CompuServe and GEnie. You got months, if not years, of content and game time for one set price.
Unless you do all your gaming at an internet cafe, most people will not pay an hourly rate, or a fee for each death in an MMO. I don't give a damn if it's a class-based theme park, a skill-based sandbox, PvP, PvE, or whatever. Not going to happen. As long as there are games out there that are free or close to free, or which have set subscription fee, very very few people are going to be stupid enough to pay by the hour or by the death. They'll just go to a cheaper game that they like instead.
Love how you guys went from pay per death to hourly rate. The idea behind Pay per death is not to die try very hard not to die. Id love pvp it would be great. If the game was amazing i could easly spend 100 bucks a month Id just hope whatever company did it rewarded the pvp with a portion of the cash.
I think it's interesting, but people would be quiting right and left out of frusteration and therefore a bad ploy for the game. It just wouldn't fly, but it is definately getting closer to how it should be.
The point is that paying per death is just as stupid of an idea as hourly rates used to be, and for the same exact reason.
Back in the early days of online gaming, hourly rates died when straight subs came along. These days, anyone who tried to charge players per death would see their CSR and Billing departments quit en masse and their players leave in droves. Why would anyone pay $1 every time they died when there are plenty of games out there which don't charge them at all?
Also, you're dreaming if you think the devs would share the money with you. ROFL. Not gonna happen. They'd need the money to make up for all the revenue they're going to lose when people leave their game in droves.
Imagine this, in the market today with competition from monthly sub games and all these F2P games, there exist one superb game so good to enough gamers that they can maintain an hourly rate option, what does it mean?
Either that the hourly rate is very low, like those game cards, and hence cater to the very occasional casual gamer, using stored value cards
Or the hourly rate is high, but more than offset by a superb superb godly game.
Either way, it is ok for me. Too bad we have yet to see a game fitting criterion 2.
You're not getting it. The hourly rate isn't going to happen. Ever. I don't give a damn what kind of game you're talking about or how good this mythical, imaginary game would be. NOT. GOING. TO. HAPPEN.
The biggest games in the world right now are either subscription based, or F2P with a cash shop. Hourly rates for an MMO died back when EverQuest launched. NO ONE is going to be stupid enough to pay by the hour anymore. They haven't done it since 1999, and they're not going to start doing it again now.
An MMO charging players real money for each death will never happen either, and for two reasons: 1) it's a f--king stupid idea on its face that would only be done if a developer deliberately wants their business to fail, and 2) because of all the F2P + cash shop games, and a B2P game like Guild Wars. Why in the hell would ANYONE be stupid enough to pay an extra fee for each death when they can just buy a copy of Guild Wars at their local game shop and never pay an extra dime no matter how many times they died?
This is different from the way FFA PVP sandboxes currently work?
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
As many posters before have said, if you include:
Free to Play
X Free Death every 24 hours, (Lets say you can revive 3 times for free every 24 hours, and the 24 hours countdown starts on your 4th death)
Able to select respawn points (to avoid corpse campers, or to escape from powerful monsters that you encountered by accident)
Discount Death for raid content (lets say you pay $0.25 per death in raids)
PVP arena that gives you $0.50 per win, and if you won the whole thing, you win the pot amount. (You still pay $1.00 if you die. The pot amount is $1.50 x Number of Players fighting)
And a auto-cap that gives you unlimited revive if you've spent X amount. (Say the cap is $15.00, and if you've spent that much, you get free revives until the end of the month)
Then yeah, it could work. The good thing about this is if you are used to spending $15.00 a month, it won't make a difference to you. If you don't play as much, you pay less for it. If you are extremely good at playing the game, you are rewarded for it. Its a no-lose situation for players who are used to the subscription model, and its a win-win situation for casual and pro players.