[MUD-Dev] Buying benefits

[Mathue Moyer]

Corey Crawford wrote:

> Honestly, I think one of these days one of the "big guys" is going
> to do this, and once players get use to the idea of paying extra
> for extra features, everyone will be doing it. I think it's all a
> matter of acceptance; once players are use to it, it won't be a
> big deal. I'm use to paying the high prices for the gas I put in
> the car now, though I sure b*tched when it first went up ;)

> Thoughts on that?

I'm not sure that would actually fly.  I suspect there's an
important tradeoff that would have to be considered.  Allowing
people to purchase benefits for RL money will bring in more revenue
from those people, but it might also decrease revenue in other ways,
such as:

    1) Less people playing because of game imbalance resulting
       from the players who can afford to shell out huge amounts
       of money to create super-characters
    2) Increased development/design costs to maintain balance in
       spite of people's ability to create super-characters
    3) Increased support/overhead to implement more complicated
       billing, provide manual (or design automatic) character
       modifications tied into the payment system

I'm not saying that these necessarily _would_ offset the benefit, or
that they would even exist, but the potential for drawbacks that
would also impact the bottom line seems real to me.

-mathue

--
Mathue Moyer                                    Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Software Engineer                               Enterprise Systems Products
Mathue.Moyer at West.Sun.COM                       9560 Towne Centre Drive
858-626-3226  (internal: x43226)                San Diego, CA 92121
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