Greedy Goblin

Friday, June 19, 2015

Pay-to-lead?

"Pay-to-win" or more properly pay-to-hurt-another-player is here to stay, because game companies want to grab every penny. Unless enough victims leave, they won't change.

However I can suggest an equal or even bigger moneygrab that doesn't hurt another players: pay-to-lead. It spawned from the weird scam idea where the victim gave up 100B for the "privilege" of being in a failcorp. What if the game companies would pull the same? The idea is that you can play the game solo and in informal groups for free or for normal subscription, but to form and upkeep a guild (corp in EVE), you'd need to pay real money to the game company. For example to create an EVE corp, you'd need to pay a PLEX and another one every month. If the PLEX isn't paid, the corp is disbanded after a warning. For alliances, it would be 2 PLEX-es per month.

Why would this work? Because the original scam worked: socials want to belong to a "group of friends" and also want to be important figures in this group. That's why there are so many failcorps that invite random miners without any background, and give them horrible advices and tax them and then fail.

So why not make some money on the side? I'm sure that these "great leaders" would pay up for the opportunity to form a "strong corporation to help our members" in their glorious plan:
  1. Mine veldspar in ventures and dock if red appears
  2. ?
  3. Conquer nullsec
This method would have the positive side-effect of limiting the time these "leaders" can operate and harm players by "teaching them" and also it would help closing dead corporations and alliances.


Daily tear and a wonderful fit:
[22:04:56] TEL''C > fuck me
[22:05:17] TEL''C > help me!@
[22:06:16] VTyx Soul > sure
[22:06:21] VTyx Soul > batmobile enroute
[22:08:10] Hugo Stiglitz01 > hahahaha
[22:08:15] Hugo Stiglitz01 > lululululululul
[22:08:46] VTyx Soul > Kill: TEL''C (Thanatos) nooo
[22:08:48] VTyx Soul > it burns

6 comments:

maxim said...

I am not aware of any game that actually tried it.
The rationale so far is that game designers see people forming guilds as something they want to encourage in itself, not put behind paywall. Guilded players are more likely to stay in game and return to it and are more likely to encourage each other to buy other content.

daniel said...

did moa go inactive, or why are you presenting months old killmails?

Gevlon said...

@ Daniel: They sent me a big batch of tears and I publish them one by one.

Anonymous said...

Seems your idea would be easy enough to implement as a CONCORD tax on corporations based on corporations and alliances based on total and active member counts, resources owned, etc.

Anonymous said...

This idea of pay-to-lead is implemented conceptually in Path of Exile (which is a game similar to Diablo III). You can play PoE completely for free and even form a guild for free, but the guild is limited to a certain number of player slots. To increase the number of players allowed in the guild, you have to pay a nominal fee per X players.

Similarly, there's a shared guild stash which costs money to progressively unlock.

It's definitely a different style of game (guilds are purely social constructs) and its monetization scheme is very different from Eve, but the concept is definitely there.

Anonymous said...

That seems like a pretty great idea and will actually fix quite a few problems. It would give purpose to wardecs because corps will have intrinsic value. It will ensure that groups are dedicated so will actually participate. It will enable a minimum requirement for the members. Lots of good things.