People who read this website know that I am a free market capitalist, so my response to changes in the business model is simply that consumers should, and will, vote with their wallets and their mouths. If a developer does something you don’t like, don’t give them your money, and let them know exactly why in a civilized manner. Marketers are people just like you and me, we need a decent amount of feedback in order to know what players are dissatisfied over.
I think we understand by now that the phrase “at this time” is a back door to allowing a company to do a complete one hundred eighty degree turn on their policy at some point in the future. The safe route for navigating the “at this time” phrase is to remind yourself not to translate the phrase into “we don’t want to do this,” but as its more accurate “we would like to do this, but we feel that the market/demographic may not be receptive to it at this point, or we feel a reminder that we are not doing said action at this exact moment in time will satisfy some of our uneasy customers who we plan on convincing over the next few months.” After all, how many times have you heard “we have no intention at this time of (adding free to play/shutting down/merging servers/cash shop/etc)” only to have that same event occur within a year or two?
“At this time” is still an interesting phrase. After all, for all of us who see it as a verbal form of twirling one’s mustache nefariously while slyly directing the movie’s hero toward the entirely not poisoned glass of wine, there are plenty more who buy into the false promise that it usually accompanies, and it appears to still be a viable marketing tactic. Turbine recently released non-cosmetic gear on their cash shop for Lord of the Rings Online, breaking their previous commitment but justifying it over the virtue that the armor is relatively low-tier. Oh and,
“Furthermore, we have no intention at this time of selling any raid gear in the store.”
At least not until metrics come back on the recently added gear to let us know if enough people are willing to throw money into the system. Again, as a capitalist I am personally unopposed to the idea of Turbine selling gear for stats. I think Turbine has proven itself responsive enough that if the community backlash is strong enough, they will indeed take the offending items down. For others, however, the message isn’t heard until the servers are a ghost town, and usually by then it’s too late.
But then again, I’m a capitalist, and if an MMO bankrupts due to poor design decisions, it is entirely on the heads of the developer.
MMO Fallout 