Tag: cash shop

Planetside 2 Will Have A Cash Shop

Planetside 2 will have a cash shop, but without offering exclusive weapons/armor.


I’ve downplayed cash shops quite a bit here on MMO Fallout, but I understand the people who do not like them, and why, and the factions of supporters and opposers continues to widen as new ideas are implemented. On the extreme sides you have players who won’t play a game now unless it has a cash shop, and players who will not play any game with a cash shop. There are issues over items in the cash shop being attainable through natural gameplay, or only selling vanity items or variations of existing weapons (for instance a different color/design but with the same stats).

So for some, the SyndCon experience of Planetside 2 was less about destructible buildings, space gameplay, and skill-based system, and more about the inevitable presence of a cash shop.

If a weapon can be bought in the cash store, he was quick to assure us that it would be attainable in the game as well. Definitely though, one of the things that will be sold would be customization.

In a game like Planetside 2, the cash shop ultimately comes down to a matter of skill over stats. Unlike a traditional MMORPG, will it matter that your store-bought rifle does 20% more damage if you can’t aim it properly? Or how a tuned sniper rifle won’t change the fact that the player still has to draw a bead on your head from across the valley. Watching the impact of the cash shop will be interesting, to say the least.

More on Planetside 2 as it appears.

Eve: We're Fine With RMT, Just Don't Affect The Economy


CCP and the Eve Online community support pay to win. There I said it. For many of you this will hardly be a tantalizing discovery but it is something that needs to be said to the somewhat-in-denial Eve community: Eve Online is already pay to win, what the community is against are implementations that unbalance the game’s economy.

In Eve Online, for the unfamiliar, players are able to buy Pilot License Extensions as an in-game representation of a 30-day game code. The PLEX can then be sold to other players on the open market for ISK. This system makes it possible to play Eve Online without paying a dime out of your own pocket (CCP still gains the subscription fee), and likewise it allows someone with extra cash to buy ISK. A sanctioned form of real money trading.

In a grand majority of arguments I’ve seen where the idea of Eve having pay to win elements appears, players disassociate the PLEX from RMT by saying that the ships and ISK are still being generated in-game through farming and crafting by legitimate players rather than CCP simply waving their magic wand and shouting “allakhazazzle” and making the ISK appear. Sure a player can spend $90 on PLEX, sell it for whatever the market value is worth (380 million per PLEX as of this writing, approximately), and use it to buy ships/enhancements, but the Eve player’s response is that the ships and the ISK were generated by other players, and thus you don’t have the inflation effect that would occur had CCP just created it. This is a perfectly valid explanation.

Not having an effect on the economy, however, doesn’t do much to throw off the fact that a player is still paying real money to get an advantage over someone who would have had to actually play the game for that ISK. The fundamentals are still there: I have $100, I use it to spend on characters, SP, ships, standing, etc, I get an advantage over someone simply paying $15 a month in subscription costs.

Where the argument tunes in is in this: someone argued to me that it doesn’t matter if someone used real money to buy a ship, because the game is skill based. As they worded it, some random moron with an overloaded bank account can buy all the ships, enhancements, and ammunition he wants. Won’t make a bit of difference when he doesn’t have the skill to pilot or fight with it and ends up losing it in 0.0 space, or AKF-mining. In a way it’s like buying a very expensive gun to go to war with. Yes, your rifle is made of the finest material known to man but it will do you no good when you’re lying dead on the ground because you failed to check that room you passed.

And this brings us right around to the economy issue: Players are against CCP selling non-vanity items because doing so would affect the economy and not for the better. It would set static prices in a game that has built itself on the balance of supply and demand, lower the price of those items and flood the market. This is the same reason CCP is against gold farmers, because they flood the market with ISK, causing inflation and inversely raising the prices of everything, making the game harder for legitimate players.

I’ve said this plenty of times here at MMO Fallout: PLEX is one of the best responses to combat gold farming, because it indulges those who are going to buy currency regardless of what the developers do, but it doesn’t affect the economy as greatly as a cash shop or allowing gold farmers to flourish, it offers a safer avenue than trusting some shady company in China with your credit card, and it also gives the developers a little something-something on the side to line their pockets with. It is a rather unique system, and more importantly a system that works. CCP may not have eradicated gold farming on Eve, but they’ve offered a legitimate alternative.

Eve players (and CCP) are against the destabilization of the economy (in this case, mass inflation), a perfectly reasonable argument considering the health of Eve’s economy is vital to the game itself. Just don’t hide it behind the thin arguments of pay to win, because by the logic of the opposition such a system either already exists or cannot exist due to the nature of the game.

Eve: We’re Fine With RMT, Just Don’t Affect The Economy


CCP and the Eve Online community support pay to win. There I said it. For many of you this will hardly be a tantalizing discovery but it is something that needs to be said to the somewhat-in-denial Eve community: Eve Online is already pay to win, what the community is against are implementations that unbalance the game’s economy.

In Eve Online, for the unfamiliar, players are able to buy Pilot License Extensions as an in-game representation of a 30-day game code. The PLEX can then be sold to other players on the open market for ISK. This system makes it possible to play Eve Online without paying a dime out of your own pocket (CCP still gains the subscription fee), and likewise it allows someone with extra cash to buy ISK. A sanctioned form of real money trading.

In a grand majority of arguments I’ve seen where the idea of Eve having pay to win elements appears, players disassociate the PLEX from RMT by saying that the ships and ISK are still being generated in-game through farming and crafting by legitimate players rather than CCP simply waving their magic wand and shouting “allakhazazzle” and making the ISK appear. Sure a player can spend $90 on PLEX, sell it for whatever the market value is worth (380 million per PLEX as of this writing, approximately), and use it to buy ships/enhancements, but the Eve player’s response is that the ships and the ISK were generated by other players, and thus you don’t have the inflation effect that would occur had CCP just created it. This is a perfectly valid explanation.

Not having an effect on the economy, however, doesn’t do much to throw off the fact that a player is still paying real money to get an advantage over someone who would have had to actually play the game for that ISK. The fundamentals are still there: I have $100, I use it to spend on characters, SP, ships, standing, etc, I get an advantage over someone simply paying $15 a month in subscription costs.

Where the argument tunes in is in this: someone argued to me that it doesn’t matter if someone used real money to buy a ship, because the game is skill based. As they worded it, some random moron with an overloaded bank account can buy all the ships, enhancements, and ammunition he wants. Won’t make a bit of difference when he doesn’t have the skill to pilot or fight with it and ends up losing it in 0.0 space, or AKF-mining. In a way it’s like buying a very expensive gun to go to war with. Yes, your rifle is made of the finest material known to man but it will do you no good when you’re lying dead on the ground because you failed to check that room you passed.

And this brings us right around to the economy issue: Players are against CCP selling non-vanity items because doing so would affect the economy and not for the better. It would set static prices in a game that has built itself on the balance of supply and demand, lower the price of those items and flood the market. This is the same reason CCP is against gold farmers, because they flood the market with ISK, causing inflation and inversely raising the prices of everything, making the game harder for legitimate players.

I’ve said this plenty of times here at MMO Fallout: PLEX is one of the best responses to combat gold farming, because it indulges those who are going to buy currency regardless of what the developers do, but it doesn’t affect the economy as greatly as a cash shop or allowing gold farmers to flourish, it offers a safer avenue than trusting some shady company in China with your credit card, and it also gives the developers a little something-something on the side to line their pockets with. It is a rather unique system, and more importantly a system that works. CCP may not have eradicated gold farming on Eve, but they’ve offered a legitimate alternative.

Eve players (and CCP) are against the destabilization of the economy (in this case, mass inflation), a perfectly reasonable argument considering the health of Eve’s economy is vital to the game itself. Just don’t hide it behind the thin arguments of pay to win, because by the logic of the opposition such a system either already exists or cannot exist due to the nature of the game.

$70 Monocle? We're Not Even Halfway To The Top


First off, Eurogamer owes me the sum of $4 for a now ruined blueberry bagel with peanut butter and jelly on it (the organic kind). The more I consider publishing this article, the more I’ve been refreshing the page, staring at the calendar hoping that today is April 1st, or someone hacked Eurogamer’s website to post a fake article. In an article just published, Eurogamer talked to CCP about future inclusions to the Eve Online Noble Exchange, including the possibility of a $10,000 gold-colored Scorpion (ship).

I guess the signs are out there. Take this, for example, from Eve’s Dev blog about the cash shop:

Deluxe tier outfits are aimed at flamboyantly rich capsuleers regardless of whether they measure their wealth in ISK, Aurum, PLEX, or currencies from Earth. While price is of little concern for these players, they could find themselves spending two or three times the price of an affordable outfit on a single piece for their ensemble. An exceptional tier is rumored to exist that represents a very special and rare investment for the wealthiest members of the EVE community.

So a special tier is planned for those who are above what is considered “flamboyantly rich” in “Earth currency.” Chariman of the Council of Stellar Management (CSM) Alex Gianturco believes that there is no reason for backlash against vanity cash shop items, regardless of how expensive they are.

“My perspective and the CSM’s perspective is that if they come out with something like – just as a hypothetical [example] – unique ship models with limited runs that they want to charge $1 billion for: as long as it doesn’t impact the competitive gameplay of Eve Online – If some crazy rich person wants to buy that, I don’t care and, by and large, the CSM doesn’t care, and that money helps go to develop Eve.”

Eve Online players are understandably standing once again on rocky ground after CCP’s own Arnar Gylfason refused to declare that non-vanity items were off the table forever:

“Saying never …” Gylfasson paused. “That puts me in an awkward position.”

It will certainly be interesting to see exactly how high CCP is looking to go in terms of cash shop costs, and what exactly will fill that spot of crazy rich. Like I’ve said before, going for an insanely rich item that is visual (other players can see on you in space) will likely wind up being a massive target painted on your ship for every player in the galaxy to target.

$70 Monocle? We’re Not Even Halfway To The Top


First off, Eurogamer owes me the sum of $4 for a now ruined blueberry bagel with peanut butter and jelly on it (the organic kind). The more I consider publishing this article, the more I’ve been refreshing the page, staring at the calendar hoping that today is April 1st, or someone hacked Eurogamer’s website to post a fake article. In an article just published, Eurogamer talked to CCP about future inclusions to the Eve Online Noble Exchange, including the possibility of a $10,000 gold-colored Scorpion (ship).

I guess the signs are out there. Take this, for example, from Eve’s Dev blog about the cash shop:

Deluxe tier outfits are aimed at flamboyantly rich capsuleers regardless of whether they measure their wealth in ISK, Aurum, PLEX, or currencies from Earth. While price is of little concern for these players, they could find themselves spending two or three times the price of an affordable outfit on a single piece for their ensemble. An exceptional tier is rumored to exist that represents a very special and rare investment for the wealthiest members of the EVE community.

So a special tier is planned for those who are above what is considered “flamboyantly rich” in “Earth currency.” Chariman of the Council of Stellar Management (CSM) Alex Gianturco believes that there is no reason for backlash against vanity cash shop items, regardless of how expensive they are.

“My perspective and the CSM’s perspective is that if they come out with something like – just as a hypothetical [example] – unique ship models with limited runs that they want to charge $1 billion for: as long as it doesn’t impact the competitive gameplay of Eve Online – If some crazy rich person wants to buy that, I don’t care and, by and large, the CSM doesn’t care, and that money helps go to develop Eve.”

Eve Online players are understandably standing once again on rocky ground after CCP’s own Arnar Gylfason refused to declare that non-vanity items were off the table forever:

“Saying never …” Gylfasson paused. “That puts me in an awkward position.”

It will certainly be interesting to see exactly how high CCP is looking to go in terms of cash shop costs, and what exactly will fill that spot of crazy rich. Like I’ve said before, going for an insanely rich item that is visual (other players can see on you in space) will likely wind up being a massive target painted on your ship for every player in the galaxy to target.

CCP: For The Love Of God, Stop Digging!


One of the biggest elephants in the room these days, not just for EVE but for the gaming industry as a whole, is virtual goods sales and microtransactions.

You could call it that, but let’s start at the beginning of this fiasco. Eve Online recently launched Incarna, an expansion pack that both CCP and the community have been waiting for, many for years. Countless times has CCP referred to it as a technological and artistic achievement, and boy did it go down with a whimper rather than a bang. You see, when Incarna launched, the attention was not on the technology nor the artistic value. Instead, players had a bone to pick with CCP’s pricing for the cash shop.

Utilizing a new currency, the cash shop items were priced far above player expectations, up to nearly $70 for the ocular implant. To make matters even more interesting, these are all avatar clothing pieces, so not only will you be the only person who will see your $70 implant, but you’ll only see it at certain points in the game.

Not interested in just leaving a turd on the carpet, almost no time had passed before an internal memo was leaked, and then confirmed to be real. The memo, bearing a distinctly memorable “Greed is Good?” catch phrase, discussed the possibility of adding in more cash shop items, including ships and bullets and guns and more, in direct opposite to CCP’s previous promise of only selling vanity items on the cash shop. It’s worth noting that the memo was asking for employee’s opinions, and not stating a determined corporate policy. Regardless, the forums exploded.

Then CCP put out this press release, and stated the following:

People have been shocked by the price range in the NeX store, but you should remember that we are talking about clothes. Look at the clothes you are currently wearing in real life. Do you have any specific brands? Did you choose it because it was better quality than a no-name brand? Assume for a short while that you are wearing a pair of $1,000 jeans from some exclusive Japanese boutique shop. Why would you want to wear a pair of $1,000 jeans when you can get perfectly similar jeans for under $50? What do other people think about you when they see you wearing them? For some you will look like the sad culmination of vainness while others will admire you and think you are the coolest thing since sliced bread. Whichever it is, it is clear that by wearing clothes you are expressing yourself and that the price is one of the many dimensions that clothes possess to do that in addition to style and fit. You don’t need to buy expensive clothes. In fact you don’t need to buy any clothes. Whatever you choose to do reflects what you are and what you want others to think you are.

Did CCP just relate a $70 ocular implant, which likely took a whole two or three hours to develop, to a $1,000 pair of jeans that are likely individually hand crafted? You bet they did. Personally, I think the better analogy would be to compare it to $1,000 pajamas. If you spend $1,000 on pajamas, you are indeed a sad culmination of vainness (I don’t think that is a word) and no one is going to look at you like the coolest thing since sliced bread, given no one will see you wearing them.

This is a super shovel we’re dealing with, and it wasn’t long before yet another CCP email was leaked. Now, Eve News 24 states that this is not completely confirmed true, but their sources close to CCP say that it is. Aside from noting that 52 monocles had sold in 40 hours, this was also dropped:

 I can tell you that this is one of the moments where we look at what our players do and less of what they say.

I 100% agree with the above statement. I love a good fight, and if the Eve Community is truly firing out of all cylinders (and not just aesthetically on the forums), the missiles will be directed right at CCP’s pockets. I’m sure my fellow writers (the ones getting paid with actual careers) will slash my tires for saying this, but the only effective way of cancelling is cutting your subscription. Not buying the items won’t work because so little work goes into them that CCP could stick at the 52 monocles and still come out making an enormous profit off of them.

Otherwise I think it’s fairly clear that the “we’re not selling non-vanity items” is about as genuine as John Smedley promising that Everquest II would not go free to play, fulfilling said promise by simply calling it something else.

But ultimately, I find myself asking a question a few others have asked me. Why am I covering this? Like I’ve said before, Eve Online’s community ranks pretty high on the loyalty scale. Where CCP will eventually throw themselves into the pit they just dug is when the community no longer trusts them, and departs for a new horizon, and if the scale is tipping against CCP’s favor, this is likely where it starts.

Derek Smart Talks: Alganon, Free To Play


I know what you’re thinking: “Omali, you clearly don’t have a punchline ready for this segment,” and you would be one hundred percent correct, but I have good news. In my continuing efforts to branch MMO Fallout from the normalcy of sarcastic comments, random videos, rants, sales, and “I told you so” moments, I’ve decided to start trying to get interviews with various developers, starting with my first phase: “How Free Can You Be?” I’ll be trying to get interviews with various free to play developers, about their outlook and particular take on the business model.

So with fresh taser burns from my daily trash looting at the Bioware offices, I chatted with Derek Smart about Quest Online and Alganon.

First off, I want to thank you for taking time out of your busy day to talk about Alganon and Quest Online. For those reading this who might not play Alganon, tell us a bit about Alganon and Quest Online and yourself.

I have been a game developer for over twenty years mostly focusing on hardcore space games developed at a company which I founded and own, 3000AD, Inc.

Quest Online was founded and seed funded in 2006 by Greg Wexler and some other dude who used to work for him at one of his other companies, Mortgage Coach. The company developed the Alganon MMO game which was released back in 2009 prematurely by that very dude (later terminated) and to well publicized disastrous results. So I was brought in by the majority investors to head the company, rescue and finish Alganon etc. I’ve been heading the company and leading the team since then.

The holy grail of free to play developers is to strike a center where the player is not so encumbered by the cash shop that he feels forced to spend, but at the same time has an incentive to throw money down on items/equipment. What is Quest Online’s aim for the cash shop’s presence in-game?

To be perfectly honest, we were lucky in some regard. You see, the game was not developed to be a F2P game supported by a cash shop. So when we literally cobbled that in, the game’s original design gave players all this content for free because there was only so far that we could go in order to monetize the game without doing a major amount of work. So the end result is that when we made the switch from a subscription model, we didn’t get much push back from the gamers because they could play the game without having to buy a single thing.

In the past year we have added numerous items to the cash shop, some essential and some vanity and we’re continuing to do that periodically. For example when we started implementing PvP we took the opportunity to added more cash shop items without making it so that the player with the most money wins. Though that can in fact happen at some point; but that’s the nature of the beast. 🙂

The level boost (about $10 total for the last twenty levels) is really the only “essential” buy to experience all the content available in Alganon. Can you give us an idea about what the big nonessential sellers are? Vanity pets, dyes, potions, boons, gear, temporary/permanent mounts?

That is correct. I don’t have the metrics on hand, so I really don’t know what the big sellers are.

Do you believe in the 85-10-5 rule for cash shop games (85% pay nothing, 10% pay a small amount, 5% pay substantially)?

Absolutely because that is pretty much the sort of metrics that I am seeing in our weekly reports. For Alganon, since you can play for such a long time without having to spend a single dime, our metrics – while improving in leaps and bounds – tend to be all over the map. That comes with the territory.

Alganon offers scaling PvP armor (the armor stats level with the player) on the tribute market. How is the tribute armor balanced so Alganon doesn’t become a buy to win game?

I don’t really have the answer to that because I don’t know. What I do know is that the guys try to make sure that the game doesn’t end up being “pay to win” like so many other F2P games out there.

The manner in which Quest Online has set up the tribute market is rather non-intrusive (barring perhaps the last twenty levels). How do you go about attracting a player’s attention to the tribute market’s existence, or is that a secondary function of the level cap?

We try to be as discreet as possible because as I mentioned earlier we don’t want to give gamers the wrong impression. While we do want to make money, we want to ensure that gamers stick around long enough to like the game and thus spend money on it so that we can continue to improve on it. We periodically have promos and such but we don’t go out of our way to make them intrusive.

How did Alganon’s advertising campaign in PC Gamer perform? From my personal experience playing, there seems to be a small but noticeable increase in concurrent users on Alganon compared to just six months ago.

It quite well actually. But it wasn’t just PC Gamer; we had campaigns on various online sites as well as other print media such as Beckett’s MMOG and others. All that in addition to our on-going Google and Facebook promos. I tend to spend money wisely, so I don’t believe in just throwing money at a marketing wall. For me, timing is everything and it has to make sense.The game’s population is growing, which is precisely why I am expanding the game as well as branching the IP out to other games.

What do you think the largest barrier is to more people picking up Alganon? Quite a few free to play games have noted a significant (30% in Dungeon Runners) percentage of players never fully download the client after they register an account.

I think it boils down to the MMO version of a perfect storm. We had the disastrous 2009 launch by my predecessor followed by the well publicized drama of his inevitable exit. And to make things worse, the game wasn’t even finished, it was buggy, had missing features etc. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it was a game you had to buy and pay a monthly subscription to play. Yeah, crazy stuff indeed. So there’s all that.

With so many choices out there, getting gamers to come back and take a second look, takes a tremendous amount of work, resources and marketing. So we have been taking it one step at a time. So our biggest barrier is getting gamers to come back; in addition to those who didn’t even bother to even check it out.

Launching off of the previous question, are there any plans for similar promotions in the future? Would Quest Online consider bringing back referral bonuses?

Yes we are considering that and several other promotions which will be announced in the coming weeks. In fact we have a promotion going on this weekend.

Alganon’s saving grace from its launch has been Quest Online’s dedication to fixing up the title, whereas a lot of other companies might have cut their losses, given the figurative finger to the early adopters, and moved on to another project. I think this is why the active Alganon community, although relatively small, are very adamant defenders of the game. Since your arrival, you seemed to have really rallied the development team, improving the game a lot since its relaunch back in 2010. Your thoughts?

Well my first course of action was to see the game completed. Then we had to address the bugs, performance issues, touted but either missing or incomplete features etc. We had to get all that out of the way first in order to assess whether or not Alganon was worth saving in the long term. Of course the business model was rubbish to begin with and simply could not be sustained, so I got rid of that as well and took the game F2P. In the end, it came down to my deciding whether or not there was anything worth saving. So once all those obstacles were out of the way, I made that determination and so I rallied the troops who then hunkered down and just got on with it. It really boils down to focus. We came up with a plan and executed that plan in various steps and phases leading to where we are now: the expansion of Alganon.

On a completely unrelated note, I heard through a very reliable source that you will be present at E3. Will there be any news on Line of Defense?

Yes, we are unveiling the first Alganon expansion, along with a bunch of other good stuff. The PR which should be out on June 7th, contains all the information.

There really isn’t anything new on the Line Of Defense front, other than it is coming along nicely and is looking awesome. We are going to be releasing some new shots once the E3 noise dies down next week. In the mean time, this is the art for the posters and postcards available at the show. http://www.3000ad.com/lod/media/shots/lod_poster.jpg

I want to thank Derek Smart again for taking time away before heading off to E3 to talk to me.

Of Course NCsoft Believes Subscriptions More Profitable…


I push this idea as much as I can here at MMO Fallout, but the old adage that free to play was a last ditch effort by subscription titles that were tanking died when Dungeons and Dragons Online pulled off the transition, and proved to the industry that throwing in a cash shop wasn’t just a way to stave off death for another few months, but rather a way to revitalize a game, boost the community, and (in the case of Lord of the Rings Online) cause a successful game to become even more successful. That being said, I find myself in a lot of arguments with hardcore loyalists to the Guild Wars games who claim that the business model (buy to play) is “wildly successful,” and is something the entire industry should adopt. What they don’t pay attention to is that Guild Wars brings in a whole 2% income for NCsoft. If NCsoft were to switch all of their games to buy to play, their profits would plummet to around 10% of what they are making now, assuming similar sales to Guild Wars.

So Massively had an article where NCsoft’s Jeremy Gaffney states that subscriptions are “probably” more profitable than microtransactions.

“There’s still a lot of money being made in subscriptions right now. Worldwide there’s a lot of money being made in [micro]transactions, but there’s probably a bit more money really being made in subscriptions worldwide,”

I’m sure the boots are quaking at Turbine (with their paltry double income from LotRO, and 500% increase in DDO), Cryptic (with their laughably small 1,000% increase in revenue), and Nexon (who posted over 50% increase in revenue over last year), not to mention Sony Online Entertainment, Gala-Net, T3fun, GamersFirst, Perfect World Entertainment, and the host of other companies who have found solace in the cash shop model.

Gaffney is correct in one sense, there is still a lot of money to be made in subscriptions, and both business models are equally viable. As for subscriptions bringing in more revenue than cash shops, I’m going to have to request Gaffney show me the money.

Holy Charm! Charms Are Free in Allods Online


Why So battered?

Previously on MMO Fallout:

In the July 7th patch, Fear of Death is going to be removed and replaced with item curses. When a player dies now, there is the chance that a curse will land on a slot in their inventory. If the item is rare (Rare, epic, or legendary only) the curse will invert the stats of the item. More importantly, bosses now have a chance of dropping rare items in an already cursed form. So, as one Allod Online’er put it, Astrum Nival essentially took a temporary grievance that can be waited out, and turned it into a permanent grievance that must, without exception, be fixed with a cash shop item or heavy gold in the auction house.

It’s been eight months since I talked about Allods Online, and the update that added in item curses. After my post, gPotato implemented a cash shop item called the Holy Charm, which is the cash shop item described above. Also in that eight months, I believe that the holy charm has far outweighed its presence, because gPotato appears to be gearing up to remove the item, and possibly the curse mechanic altogether.

In a news post on the Allods Online website, PioPico has announced that Holy Charms are now completely free! There are no limits to how many you can buy (aside from how many you can hold), and the post does not specify if this sale is permanent or only temporary. If you do play Allods Online, there isn’t much of a reason not to stockpile these. Otherwise, if gPotato does keep the mechanic in and the sale ends, at least the prices should come down heavily in the game’s auction house (albeit, doing that they may as well rename Allods Online to Zimbabwe Online, with how high inflation would be).

More on Allods Online as it appears.

Nexon Botches Maplestory Sale: 2x Exp Cards


Forget legalities, goodbye player trust!

As you can see from the top notice, on the 5th of this month, Nexon began a cash shop sale on their game Maplestory in Europe. The details are sketchy, and seem to change slightly depending on who you ask, but it appears that a 90-day double experience card found its way into the same area as the 24-hour double experience cards. Of course, in a world where we are brought up to understand that if a deal feels too good to be true, it probably is, the pricing was a mistake. Nexon fixed the price, and all was alright in the world, right?

Of course not, that would be too easy. After a week, Nexon fixed the cash shop item, and replaced the already purchased cards with 24-hour cards, which sent the forums into an uproar. The opinion appears to be split over whether or not players should be compensated or if they should have been aware that the sale was an “obvious bug” (their words, not mine) in the first place. According to a few members on the forums, this is not the first time Nexon has had such a cash-shop fluke, but apparently this is the first time they had responded by removing the items post-purchase from a user’s account.

Granted, we could yell until our faces are blue about the legality of this change in product, given the many loopholes and issues that would be raised from commerce laws between European countries, to exemptions in place because the product was purchased with Nexon Cash instead of real currency. I see a lot of people using examples of tangible purchases, but the two have separate laws that govern each form of commerce.

Of course, for those of you who did purchase the bugged card, there is still the option of reversing the charges on your credit card, if you are unconcerned with your Nexon account being banned.

The question now, as always, rests in the hands of the Nexon European community. I think it’s safe to say that, despite what the trolls say, players won’t be reeling in fear that their items are going to suddenly start being replaced en masse. You can buy that pack of regularly priced potions without worrying about them being turned into weak potions. I would, however, take great caution when buying something during any sales on the cash shop, as this is not the first time such an error has occurred. Nexon does not appear to be taking as much leniency with those who purchased the bugged item, maliciously or not.

I believe Nexon should have at least refunded the cash shop points back to players, and perhaps next time not take a week to implement a fix that should only take a few minutes.

http://forum.nexoneu.com/NXEU.aspx?g=posts&t=302702