Acceptable Cash Shop Items: Suggestions!

[Ikeda]

Those links seem to support what I've posted, everything crumbled when the community realized the game was headed away from a P2P model. The cash shop was added and people seemed to [more or less] accept it initially, but when they started removing content and/or gating it behind it (the cash shop) the community basically bailed.

I know Blizzard has successfully offered vanity items for WoW through it's store without destroying it's community; yes, it did ruffle a lot of feathers, but most that left because it challenged their ideals did return. I'm not too keen on what they're doing now with buying boosts to lv90 though, and don't personally agree with it.

They didn't start locking content behind the cash shop until AFTER it went F2P. While the game was P2P the cash shop had nothing more than useless weapon skins, they didn't even have costumes in the shop. Useless weapon skins were enough to get enough of the remaining players to quit to the point that it was forced to go F2P.

Blizzard is the ONLY company to successfully offer vanity items and the ONLY reason it survived long enough to continue doing that is the sheer amount of subscribers it had. WoW with it's 8 million+ subscribers had enough subscribers to withstand a few hundred thousand to 2 million+ lost subscriptions due to the cash shop. FFXIV and many other mmos that only have a few hundred thousand to 2 million+ subscribers DO NOT have enough subscribers to withstand the inevitable loss of subscriptions.

Also those players that left and returned only did so because the mmo market literally consists of a massive sea of clones of WoW that have less content than the original. When their only choices are either play the game that's ripping them off or play a copy of said game that has far less content of course a few of them are eventually just going to say screw it and go back to the game with the most content and ignore the cash shop. Other mmos DO NOT have that luxury because they are those clones with less content.

[Skull_Angel]

snip

First of all, there was no definitive timeline of events posted in any of those threads or anything I could find. Thank you for clearing it up, but I find it hard to believe that TERA lost mass subs only because a cash shop was added, more had to be going on and a lot of testimonies point to activity suggesting the game was headed to a F2P being the cause. I can believe a portion of the player base being unhappy with the inclusion if the cash shop and of them some leaving due to idealism, but to say it was the reason the majority left does sound out of place.

As for Blizzard, I don't agree that WoW's sub. numbers was the only reason that offering vanity items didn't make the player base tank. Only a small portion of the player base cared and out of those, only a smaller portion left. A lot of people did talk about it at first, but it quickly turned into a forgotten novelty by most. IIRC, this all happened around the time that F2P MMOs were high in popularity and P2P was scarce, most of the people that I knew who left clamored about F2P games and shortly returned not only because of the lack of content, but the lack of quality and support (and they missed their friends, haha).