It's gone too far about the mog station SE

[Iscah]

We have to pay for the Chinese and Korean items because those were made by partner companies and SE does not have the ability to give them away.

These items are made by SE not some partner company. Hopefully that wrong information will one day be gone. It was stated in one of Mr Happys interview that its all created by SE.

Just because Mr. Happy stated it wasn't created by SE doesn't necessarily mean he was right and they were wrong either. I'm not sure it's really smart to take the word of a Youtuber over what the actual company says unless you can provide proof that SE literally said otherwise.

(Link)

[I]A.) It may feel like the pace is being accelerated but the Mog Station releases are on a release schedule. More recently, we have been releasing items to the Chinese and Korean servers, which are separate from our global servers (NA/EU/JP). Since those games use a different payment model than the global version, those regions pay us to create these items and supplement the game itself.

Posting the whole discussion chain for context.

The Chinese and Korean servers are "separate from the global servers".

In another thread I have seen this explained (approximately from memory) as that another company actually manages the game in those areas, and designs these extra costumes which they then give to Square Enix to be modeled and implemented for their version of the game.

When Square Enix wants to put those designs into the original game, they have to pay some kind of licensing fee or royalties to the other company for using their designs.

It would make sense with the pricing system on Mog Station, I think? These "licensed" costumes are EUR 13.50, while character costumes (SE-owned) are EUR 9.00-10.50.

[Iscah]

Personally I think their prices are too high, even if what they're doing is trying to encourage lots of microtransactions. (Halve the prices and I might buy three things instead of hesitating over one for months!)

Evidently it's working for them with the prices as-is, but I'd like to see things a bit cheaper so more people can feel like it's within their price range to get some of those really pretty costumes.

Or perhaps it doesn't seem so bad for the relative price in other countries, but with the Australian exchange rate those 13.50 costumes end up over $20 each, and that seems far too much to spend on a virtual dress.

[Adrestia]

I'm not sure it's that suspicious for them to provide you with more storage space (=data allowance) if you pay them for it.

Their servers aren't an infinite amount of data storage. They will have allocated a certain amount per character, and then you have to pay them for extra inventory, whether it's hiring additional retainers or paying for the extended saddlebag via the app. It's an ongoing cost for them to maintain the servers that are storing that data.

Whether it's a fair amount to charge is a different debate, of course. But for the app at least, it's providing a few different services to those who find them useful, and the extra inventory is only part of it. (For those who don't want the other app features, an additional retainer is cheaper than an app subscription and gives 2.5 times as many extra inventory slots.)

The markup they’re charging is on the order of several thousand percent, though. When 100GB of cloud storage is ~$3/mo, and that’s with much better traits other than “SE holds the keys.” They’re not charging to recoup costs at all. They’re charging as an extra monetization strategy. I think that differs from “whether the price is fair” because we’re not talking about a significant markup over cost. It’s an entirely fictional price purely designed as a revenue stream.

[Hamada]

I suppose it is marginally better than a fake discounted santa suit marked down from $30 to $20 when it was never sold at $30. Or $12 Jpegs stickers. I'm not likely to buy much on the mogstation anyway.

Nice comparison , SE is doing a good job because they are not breaking the law! Love the logic. I hope you realize what fallout 76 did with that is technically breaking the law, it is just law enforces are not good with keeping up with technology yet

[Caitlinzulu]

The markup they’re charging is on the order of several thousand percent, though. When 100GB of cloud storage is ~$3/mo, and that’s with much better traits other than “SE holds the keys.” They’re not charging to recoup costs at all. They’re charging as an extra monetization strategy. I think that differs from “whether the price is fair” because we’re not talking about a significant markup over cost. It’s an entirely fictional price purely designed as a revenue stream.

The retainer data doesnt just exist on hardisk. We have been told that the game is backuped like every 10 seconds in case there is a catafstrofical failure and SE needs to do a rollback. That includes retainer data. So more retainers means more data to backup ergo more data throughput.
So calculating data storage cost isnt just as simple as guessing how much data it holds on a harddisk.

Second what would happen to the amount of data used if everybody got 10 retainers active instead of the 2 most people have?
Would be interesting to know how many paid retainers there are actually*

[Adrestia]

The retainer data doesnt just exist on hardisk. We have been told that the game is backuped like every 10 seconds in case there is a catafstrofical failure and SE needs to do a rollback. That includes retainer data. So more retainers means more data to backup ergo more data throughput.
So calculating data storage cost isnt just as simple as guessing how much data it holds on a harddisk.

Second what would happen to the amount of data used if everybody got 10 retainers active instead of the 2 most people have?
Would be interesting to know how many paid retainers there are actually*

That kind of backup isn’t meant literally in the way I think you’re implying. Nobody, and I mean nobody is dumping their tables (or collections or what have you in the noSQL world) to disk every 10 seconds. They may be writing the transaction log to disk every 10 seconds, but that doesn’t care how much total data at rest you have. 2 retainers or 200 doesn’t meaningfully affect it.

And when I said “much better traits” I was kind of summing up all the things you’re referring to: commercial cloud storage is going to have backup and availability policies guaranteeing you far better than SE is guaranteeing your retainer data (and rightfully so). It’s also going to offer gigabytes-terabytes of ingress and typically unlimited egress traffic.

The main difference really is just that the storage needed to provide additional data persistence in an MMO isn’t raw disk space in a file system but rather in a database. Now that we have features like the ability to search all our inventories (including retainer inventories) at once, you are dealing with a larger data set and potentially larger payloads. I don’t think anyone on this forum wants to be put to sleep with a lecture on database optimization, and I’m not a DBA myself so other people can do a lot better anyway, but the short answer is that the addition of more inventory data isn’t going to have a large impact on retrieval and insertion.

I guess all of that is a long winded way of saying I hear you that reducing the costs to just a number of bytes on a disk is an oversimplification, but I was taking that into account and rather than drone on about the technical details I was just going to let “100GB vs a few kB” kind of stand in for the sense of scale, since it’s only natural that if you’re storing data sets that much larger, you’re also incurring related additional costs in terms of traffic, backup and availability overhead, etc.

[Alleo]

Just because Mr. Happy stated it wasn't created by SE doesn't necessarily mean he was right and they were wrong either. I'm not sure it's really smart to take the word of a Youtuber over what the actual company says unless you can provide proof that SE literally said otherwise.

It was in an interview with SE, stated by SE. x) And we also have the video where we could see one of the asian mounts being made by SE.

Edit: seems that others have already posted the link to it. Thanks for that.

And it might be that they have the ideas to what they want but its still created by SE. If they have to pay fees to bring it over to us then they have made a contract that way but imo I still think they own it.

[Insertcoins]

It was in an interview with SE, stated by SE. x) And we also have the video where we could see one of the asian mounts being made by SE.

Edit: seems that others have already posted the link to it. Thanks for that.

And it might be that they have the ideas to what they want but its still created by SE. If they have to pay fees to bring it over to us then they have made a contract that way but imo I still think they own it.

Who knows how they made the contract. But the actual fact is they do pay fees to bring that stuff here. They may own the overall product but here's what they don't own. Whatever deal they made for those items to be china only items. Now because of the gimmie attitude the west have they have to break that china only rule. Which in business cost money. Money se has to cough up.

[Sigma-Astra]

It was in an interview with SE, stated by SE. x) And we also have the video where we could see one of the asian mounts being made by SE.

Edit: seems that others have already posted the link to it. Thanks for that.

And it might be that they have the ideas to what they want but its still created by SE. If they have to pay fees to bring it over to us then they have made a contract that way but imo I still think they own it.

Yea, the link is helpful. The only reason I asked for proof is because too many people praise and take the word of a Youtuber as absolution in this age, not to mention that Mr. Happy has been wrong before in the past.

[Ayer2015]

When people stop buying the you know store will have gone too far. From what I see, people are still buying.