If everyone else playing this game is like me and has both wondered and been appalled at the insane depot prices , I'd like to share with you all a potential sound reason that it is the way it is.
If anyone has tried any other mmos, you've probably noticed they follow the same design trends. For one, they are intentionally made to be incredibly easy. This makes the game more accessible to a larger amount of players. For two, the game appeals to as large and wide an audience that it can. MMOs now-a-days are targeted to a non-niche audience. Basically, they're for everyone. Why? More players-playing means more money-making. However, it wasn't always like this. Before the days of WoW, MMOs were designed for a certain type of player. A small targeted audience. And they catered to these player's needs wants and wishes. Ultima, Everquest, iRO, and so on. Not only that, these old mmos were successful. Before WoW launched, Ultima was in the Guinness Book of Records as the most successful online game. So successful they exist still to this day and some only recent started dying after the implementation of 'f2p'. Go figure.
I'm assuming you all probably have played Vindictus. It might be a shaky claim to make but Vindictus is one of those niche audience mmos. It was launched 6 years ago and in development for years before it even launched. Its very likely one of the last niche mmos to come out. It doesn't target a wide audience. It is not easy. It doesn't hold your hand at every possible moment. Vindictus was made for a very specific type of gamer.... us. It probably goes without saying that we are a small community compared to other f2p mmos because Vindi doesn't appeal to a broad audience.
So how does this tie back to the depot prices? Simple, few players means higher cost. The amount of spending Vindictus players is way less than say the number of players in Tera spending money. Reasonable prices are a risk were as whaling prices are a sure thing. Thus the high cost. Thus the gamble boxes. Thus the rng in favor of Nexon. To make comparable revenue that these other wide-audience f2p mmos do, this is what they have to do. Their hands may as well have been tied from the start. A low population can't sustain the game on a sub as 'The Secret World' shows. That mmo receives government funding. That's why it is still a sub game and not shutdown yet.
"But, why not have more reasonable prices? More people would actually spend money then!" Is probably what you're thinking. Setting the prices high has the desired effect of preventing players from getting everything they need for say $30 and then never spending any more. Essentially, they hope that you will continue to spend next month and the month after that before you finally reach that point where you have what you need, and that 'point' can be increased. It ensures a continued steady revenue stream. Whether this is actually better for business? I couldn't say. This method is probably just the most risk free for them as a company not to mention proven effective across the whole f2p mmo industry.
Many of us... myself included, look at these crazy costs and compare the value we could get with that same money on say Steam. What you may not know is that developing a full featured 3D MMO is THE hardest possible thing to do when it comes to game development. Not to mention that these games will all fail without continued support for who know how many years. This means having programmers and artists constantly working on bugs and new content. People to manage forums. Localization. Community Manager. Forum administrator. You name it. Employees on the pay-roll. The devs that made "Shadows of Mordor" for example launch the game, maybe patched it a few times after release to fix game breaking issues, and moved on to new projects. MMOs don't do that. They're kinda cursed by their very nature. If left un-cared for, they wither away and eventually die. In the end, you can't go, "For this amount I could buy 5 indie titles so this is stupid I quit!". There isn't a small army of people keeping those indie games alive for 5+ years. Even if you don't like a particular MMO, you probably should view its 'value' as slightly higher than that of a triple A. Try to view MMOs as quadruple A's or even quintuple A titles.
Lastly, here is the secret to not hating Vindictus... like niche mmos of the past, they were made to be long term time investments. Progression was slow and purposely drawn out over long periods of time. Progression in Vindictus IS slow unless you are willing to whale heavily to skip some of that time. It is a good thing that this is an option even if you don't agree with it. Your odds of successfully enchanting your armor in 6 months is far higher than doing it in 1. Wearing down a player's patience to wait is yet another f2p tactic to strong arm players to spend. People want immediate improvement for their investment and everyone has a breaking point were they say f-it and either spend $ or quit the game.
BUT! If you can resist the temptation and show some willpower, you can reach your goals in time and only spend money on cosmetic (or not at all I suppose). If Nexon didn't hold events were players could get runes for simply playing, this game would have died years ago and this reason could be why it is alive today. To their credit, they do give players a chance to snag c-shop runes for free. I Got 5 armor fusion runes, 9 months of hair tickets, 3 weeks inner armor coupons, 3 months VIP, 3 enhance runes, and 2 enchant runes from the G.O.L.D raid boxes in October and I didn't actively farm for them. Talking to the veterans in my guild, these guys have a surplus of these premium items from playing the game for years. Treat this game like a long term time investment and try not to get too upset when your scrolls fail. Keep grinding and keep playing. Join a guild and talk to your fellow players. Try not to pass judgement on the game in a month. The whole game is designed to be played longer than that. Even the c-shop. Have fun and make some friends.
I know I bash Nexon possibly too much in my posts here on the forums. I don't like the things they do, but I get why they do it. I suppose I only do it to encourage them to explore other avenues of revenues. They own the IP for this game. They could open an online shop for physical items like shirts, mugs, hoodies, figurines (they have the models for it already), and so on and fully control and limit the amount produced. Plenty of artists playing to create free artwork all over the world. They could also increase awareness of the game by setting up a booth at conventions to bring in new players and further sell item. Even if it only slightly lowered ingame costs, I feel a lot of us playing this game would appreciate the effort.
Thanks for taking the time to read all this! I do hope it helps someone to think of the game and the company in a less negative light and not be so quick to leave.
and 1 other.
Comments
Great post btw I really enjoyed it, kind of motivating imo.
I dont think they're licensed by nexon or anything, but they're out there. The chinese don't believe in copyright laws.
As for overpriced depot items, they are just that. Myself and many players feel that 5$ gacha boxes was a bit high, but seeing that the increased drop rate for outfitters was more than just lip service, we forgave them. Those who only got merc pots and dyes, did not forgive as much.
Nexon's cash shop prices are high because they don't take into account how their audiences differ, or at least historically haven't. It seems like the current GMs have caught on with things like the scroll shop and seal shop implementation. Things like that show that they're listening. Nexon global might simply refuse to adjust the prices of cash shop items, but as they are they just aren't reflective of what most here are willing to pay. Guess we'll see if that ever changes.
It doesnt take any type of skill or vpn, or ip spoof to set up an account on CN, or KR servers. There is no ip block. And there are plenty of sites that cant tell you how step-by-step. The lag tho is incredible. The point is, myself and many others know precisely how little we get in comparison to other regions. And there are many asian players connecting to and playing on our servers, and they will gladly tell you the same thing. It's shameful how little we get. I was recently told that they are no longer laughing at us, they feel sorry for us.
-Devcat/Nexon has made many attempts to make the game more casual. The easiest example of this was how difficult gnoll chief was in the NA beta, compared to now. Early content was seriously nerfed, partly because they kept adding more and more episodes and quickly reached the ceiling of how difficult they could make the new endgame content be without nerfing early game content to be easier in comparison. They were probably prompted to do so because they kept losing players to newer and better games.
-Many design decisions are not due to any coherent plan but simply occured due to bad decision making, especially prevalent when you have multiple directors, some of whom are well known for making bad decisions. Things like early characters (Lann, Fiona, Evie) having to spend way more AP to max out their skills compared to later characters are a great example of multiple directors making different decisions (and not giving a about consistency), rather than any secret plan to make the game harder.
Another example of unintentional difficulty is how the power infusion update added tons of junk drops to low level bosses, which actually made crafting low level equip a LOT harder. Before that update, new players had a much easier finding mats to craft episode-appropriate gear and the leveling process was much more straight forward. The update turned off a lot of new players to the game, which was unintentional.
-Many MMOs, even newer ones, actually require far more grinding than Vindictus currently does. Compare the amount of time it takes you to go from, say, level 30 to 40 in Vindi. That's basically one episode (ruins of sanctity). It's less than 10 battles, each of which can be done in 8 minutes or less on average. Now compare how many hours of grinding shitty "kill X monsters" quests in a WOW style game it would take for a roughly similar level of progression. Not to mention that games like WOW have a reputation for being casual still have insanely hardcore content to cater to hardcore gamers, such as forcing people to raid a certain amount of times a week or achieve certain PVP scores if they want to get the end game stuff.
Vindi's end game has been largely problematic ever since drags came out, because there was a sudden massive spike in how rare drops were. Even roch equip was relatively fine to make barring a few items (glas pants, etc), but the drag rares were so rare that most people were stuck fighting 9.6k def dragons with +10 roch weapons and low attack characters (twin swords, longsword, etc) averaged 12-13k attack. This is the point where many people started quitting because they hit a massive wall as they could not get level 70 weapons, let alone level 70 armor. I'm pretty sure a director change occured around this point because there was a massive shift in direction from the earlier episodes. MMO developers often resort to making things super rare to try and prolong content, but this is just a lazy bandaid fix and actually hurts the game in the long run because once you hit a certain threshold, people just give up and quit.
We are now in a pretty good spot, since orange weapon feathers are 150 seals and new players can actualyl make level 90 orange sets if they work at it. Before that happened, vindi kept going from a cycle of "i can't make equip for my level, i'm just going to quit" to "oh the seal shop got updated, i guess i will come back since i can actually get new gear now" to "the seal shop doesn't have mats for the new content, i'm going to quit again". I have seen countless players quit in this cycle, except that most don't bother coming back at all after the first time. Right now, I'm pretty sure that getting to 90 and crafting your first orange weapon with seals is easier than getting to max level with appropriate gear in many MMOs.
-3D MMOs are, strictly speaking, not hard to make. There are countless terrible WOW clones out there (and before WOW, there were countless RO or whatever clones). They are never very popular, but they clearly make enough to pay the bills, because their costs are low (just make generic quests and a brainless tab targetting combat system). Of course your costs are high if you are actually trying to make something good, since that requires a whole lot of things to be done such as marketing research into what players actually want (most companies cut costs here, because developers have a tedency to believe they know what is best without needing to do any research at all). Vindi obviously does not fall into this category when you consider the amount of effort, or lack thereof, put into basic testing of new content like the S2 13k DEF fiasco, which happened when level 70 mats weren't in the seal shop and people were stuck with +10 level 60s. Devcat is not trying to make a good game anymore, they may have been in Vindi's early stages, but they are cutting costs EVERYWHERE and even the story is an incoherent mess compared to the very well written original S1 story (the re-written s1 story is also a terrible mess, but at least understandable). What they want is a minimally viable product, rather than a blockbuster.
-The idea that the high prices in NA are somehow the result of a business strategy of making a hardcore niche game is hilarious when you consider that prices massively differ by region and it is a fact that the regions with lower prices have far more players and profit than NA does. Im pretty sure EU alone was way more profitable than NA. The high prices are the result of a bad business strategy that is failing to find the perfect price point where the business makes the most profit while losing the least customers.
To put it into simple terms, you can sell a loaf of bread for $10 to 10 customers, and let's say you make $5 profit per loaf for a total of $50. Or you can sell the same loaf of bread for $8 to 100 customers for a profit of $3 per loaf, for a total of $300. Nexon NA is doing the former, rather than the latter.
The high prices are a direct result of killing their own profitability because new players hit end game, realise they need to spend money on runes for a +10 double enchanted weapon, look at the price, and simply quit. That is a loss of money for Nexon NA because those players have taken up bandwidth while buying nothing. There is a sweet spot where you will get the most players to drop money to make their end game gear, and that's the one Nexon NA should be trying to reach, but they are not trying. Whether that is because they believe their pricing is perfect or they are locked into some kind of licence agreement with Devcat is unknown. It is quite common for retailers to adjust their prices constantly to find the perfect price point, but Nexon NA hasn't adjusted the prices....pretty much ever (sales do not count as permanent adjustments).
Most players are not going to wait several months for events to snag free runes, they are just going to quit and move to other games, and as anyone who has ever studied business will tell you, getting customers back is extremely hard. Just this year alone, I have seen many players quit permanently in favor of games like BDO where they don't feel like they are being ripped off. Those players are not going to come back regardless of whatever events or sales Nexon NA holds.
tl;dr : The high prices are the result of a bad business strategy, rather than any strategy to cater to a niche, hardcore audience, when you consider that Devcat has been making the game more casual over the years to try and appeal to a larger audience, simply because they were losing tons of players to competitors. Pre-roch Vindi wasn't even hardcore by any stretch of the imagination, and things became more "hardcore" only because Devcat got lazy and thought that making people grind for months to make a new weapon would allow them to push out new content slower.
I'd pay 250 USD for one.
And I'd buy several.
My Vella with chainblades and twinswords in various poses and various outfits.
Arisha as well.
http://66.media.tumblr.com/85fb777eaacc9cafdac062d022110455/tumblr_naa8h9eN931shztqfo10_r1_1280.jpg
The GMs have been working to make changes, but Nexon's execs and strategists aren't worth the paper their degrees are printed on if they think this is how you maximize value for your shareholders and ensure the longevity of your products. Their strategy isn't even good for massive short-term returns. The problems here are the same ones that plague BDO, BnS, and every other eastern grinder that comes here: failure to take the added audiences into consideration. There's no reason for our prices to be as high as they are, and there's no reason that Nexon should continue policies that have turned it into a company that many gamers want zero to do with anymore.
If anything, the scroll event is the result of some executive looking at sales figures for runes and wanting to boost sales figures for Q4 2016, and the seal shop update is the result of devcat trying to attract more players since they are releasing level 95 content now.
As to the seal shop update with the essences, it exists only in NA/EU/AUS currently, so it certainly didn't trickle down to us as you're alleging. Nice chatting with you, though, you've been pleasantly contrarian and irrational as always.