Curse

cataphract · Apr 15, 2009, 12:21 PM // 12:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by Longasc

Yeah, 10$ for a tab is no longer micro, rather macro?

There is a Wikipedia article on that if we really want to split beans.

Not only that, there is a youtube video too.

Fril Estelin · Apr 15, 2009, 12:33 PM // 12:33

Quote:

Originally Posted by kokuou

Well, considering they have over 100 employees, I'm sure that each get paid more than $10,000 per year.

If only people realised the unprecedented feat that Anet pulled by sustaining this game for 4years without asking the amount of money that other companies have asked of their players, they'd see the problem very differently. (the average salary in the UK in the MMO business is £30,000/$45000).

If people see and don't like a "trend", distrust Anet or regret that the game is not as they wish it to be, they should go play the other f2p games. If you find a better deal, I'm sincerely happy for you. Because I know I won't find a better deal. And to go back to the original question, I'm still waiting for the full detail of the April 28th offer, despite still having a good feeling about the update.

Stockholm · Apr 15, 2009, 12:41 PM // 12:41

I love this thread, all the hoarders are $hitting their pant over having to "BUY" more storage. LOLOLOLOL

GJ A-Net.

Vilaptca · Apr 15, 2009, 12:42 PM // 12:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yawgmoth

Advantage from selling Unlocks later became even more apparent since addition of Zaishen Keys -> a player who spends a lot of $$$ on the skill/stuff unlocks instead of unlocking by spending faction can start spending his first faction on ZKeys and if he then plays as much as a player who earns his UAX, the lame RMT player will get OVER 2 MILLION GOLD ADVANTAGE.

LOL

I demand my over 2 million gold advantage that I apparently got when I bought unlock packs.

Seriously, its been a few years. Where is my 2 mil?

Don't tell other people to stop making stuff up and then bull this kind of garbage out of nowhere.

Red Sonya · Apr 15, 2009, 12:43 PM // 12:43

Let's see how many updates did we get for Diablo 2 and how many times did Blizzard say ok now if you want this you'll have to pay us $10 per item? They gave us more storage, more items, harder ai opponents, more content, more fun even a cow level and how much did they charge us for all those updates? Nada! Nothing! It was thank you for buying Diablo 2 origional and here are your reward(s).

NCsoft/Anet have become greedy and forgotten how they got to where they are in the first place(or perhaps they haven't perhaps all along it was meant to be a squeezing program). Now it's just squeezing time for them, a time to drain every penny they can out of the die hard fanboi customers who never look past the carrot in front of them.

This "They Need Money Bull Crap" they sold nearly 6 million copies at $40 a pop is $240 MILLLION dollars fools. Don't go telling me they've spent all that money and need more. Then again they might just be like the car dealerships and have gone on these extravagant vacations and thrown money to the wind for hookers and pizza.

Last thing I ever want to hear about any company is "They Need Money". I could care less. They could make money by making more chapters (as they said they would every 6 months) and selling those instead of barnstorming off to make a new game cause they fudged up on this one and still are fudging up on it.

Ahhh I feel much better now that they know my stance.

Targren · Apr 15, 2009, 12:43 PM // 12:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fril Estelin

Because I know I won't find a better deal. And to go back to the original question, I'm still waiting for the full detail of the April 28th offer, despite still having a good feeling about the update.

I just hope it's not the same as that stupid imp. I already have all 3+1 games from boxes. :P

isamu kurosawa · Apr 15, 2009, 12:46 PM // 12:46

I'll say what i have seid since character slots where buyable.

They should have added the ability to access the bags of other characters via xunlai, That way we could 'buy' storage slots and get more for our £.

Rocky Raccoon · Apr 15, 2009, 12:49 PM // 12:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yawgmoth

I myself wanted an option to buy more xunlai panes as a last resort if there's no free storage update, and I WOULD buy those if they were fairly priced.
$5 per pane would be expensive but bearable, and if they went with selling them 2 for $10 I WOULD buy a pair as I could really use them. And they would make more money this way (2 for $10).

But after seeing where they're going I immediately changed my mind - I won't support them changing the business model and giving us less and less and less for the same price. This has to stop now. Bring back fair pricing, deliver better value for the prices you charge.

I need the storage but I will boycott absurd prices - I will have to struggle with a full chest but I did that for years... now while money is no problem for me, I'm boycotting it only for a principle of better future.

The choice is up to you, think of it as an intelligence TEST - if you get ripped-off you fail it, if the community fails and shows support to blatantly horrible deals - we will surely get more of them in the future... and even worse ones... and GW2 may be entirely based on rip-off deals from the base design... and it will be too late then.

The time is now. Open your eyes. Don't get owned.

If the cost of the panels are $5.00 each, standard markup in retail can be anywhere from 25% and up. The wholesale business I work for uses a standard of 35% which our customers then markup again for their customers. ANET is a business with costs to be covered and they feel that they need $9.99 to cover those costs

Lourens · Apr 15, 2009, 12:57 PM // 12:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fril Estelin

So you know better than the Anet team and Regina?

Do you even read the posts in this thread?

Anet Monday briefing, 13/04/2009, 8:00:
Mike O'brien: ok guys, big news, I decided we're going to give away the additional extra storage for FREE, as our reasonable customers expect.
James (from the finance department): Wait, but, but...
Mike O'brien: yes James, it means we'll make a loss on it so this means...
James: we're not getting paid this month?
Linsey, Regina, Martin: WHAT??!!??
James: ok ok let's calm down, what about $5 a pane?
Mike: well you'd all get half your salary but I'm afraid we'd break the trust of our customers who expect us to deliver everything completely free
Regina: I can already see the thread on Guru...
Linsey: I <3 this game but, hmmm...
Martin: I just moved to Seattle!
Mike: well I'm sorry guys, we can't afford to loose our customer's trust, read the threads on Guru and you'll understand what I mean
Linsey, Regina, Martin: GURU??!!??

You should have made it 8am 12 april

Thread Started : Apr 12, 2009, 04:30 PM

Red Sonya · Apr 15, 2009, 12:59 PM // 12:59

No what they should have done is like every other mmorpg out there has done and that's given the same amount of storage to EVERY character not just one storage center for every character. They keep saying they aren't like WOW or EQ's or any of the rest, but, they sure don't mind accepting the AWARDS for those CLASSED MMORPG's so if they are going to take the awards they should offer the SAME BENEFITS.

When I played Everquest you had a storage of 22 slots and in those slots you could put 22 (10) slot containers for a total of 220 slots PER CHARACTER. Do we even get that much for our ENTIRE ACCOUNT with GW? And that was just the storage container. Your CHARACTER could carry about the same as well (needed weightless bags but oh well). Even so I still had to use mules in EQ to hold all the stuff I had collected. Now you can see my frustration in GW as I barely get an inkling of that kind of storage. I have 7 mules with full compliments of HEROES all full of stuff. There's a weapon in every hand and an offhand in every other hand. There's a rune or two on everyone and they are complaining about storage space as well.

Targren · Apr 15, 2009, 01:04 PM // 13:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by Risky Ranger

If the cost of the panels are $5.00 each, standard markup in retail can be anywhere from 25% and up. The wholesale business I work for uses a standard of 35% which our customers then markup again for their customers. ANET is a business with costs to be covered and they feel that they need $9.99 to cover those costs

Except you cannot apply the formulae of merchandising to software. The first panel (rather, the implementation) has a cost equal to the time of development + the storage space needed for the data structure(and unless Anet employs only 14 year old Visual Basic programmers, that can't be more than a few Kb). Each panel after that costs only the storage space, which would be a microtransaction in the truest sense of the word (even using consumer pricing for flash drives, $5 gets 512MB or more. Even the aforementioned VB programmers couldn't use that much space for one panel)

So what they are doing is amortizing the development cost over all of the panels sold. Every one sold reduces the cost per panel. As we've seen with Character slots, I expect that price will never go down.

Pay attention to the words used. She mentioned doing the math, but didn't get into what the math was, so that you can bet that part of that math was that they had the "New Accounts for Storage" business model factored in there. While they make less money on the cheap accounts, they get something valuable in the mid-to-long term (which is good. Most companies don't bother worrying about that anymore, thus the economic crisis): Every account sold to an extant player for storage is one more hash mark on their claims of "X gazillion accounts active" for advertising. They probably priced the panels to make sure they didn't shoot that market in the foot (and even to give it a boost. At $10 for 20 slots, $15 for 200 becomes a damn nice-looking deal).

rohara · Apr 15, 2009, 01:26 PM // 13:26

Quote:

In determining the price point for the storage panes, we discussed what people in various departments thought would be a balance between making enough to cover our costs, keeping the price low enough that it doesn't alienate a large number of players, and setting a price that was commensurate with the amount of work and resources we put into developing this feature. We have to charge a minimum of $5 USD in order to recoup the base costs of a transaction. We understand that not everyone will be happy with the $9.99 price tag, and we're aware that people are advocating for simply purchasing additional accounts to achieve similar results as an alternative to purchasing storage panes. There was a consensus on the $9.99 figure as balancing out all of the considerations I mentioned above, so this is why it was chosen. Again, I know that knowing why we chose the figure may not necessarily make anyone happier about it. --Regina Buenaobra

lots of speculation here, but...

i don't think "$5 for base transaction" means what people here think it means. $5 cannot be the cost of a transaction (with their payment processor), because the Game of the Year upgrade and 2008 upgrade only cost $4.99 each. if that were true, anet/ncsoft would be stuffing the pockets of the processor and gaining $0 from these two upgrades. that is highly unlikely.

that said, i think it is clear that "$5 base cost" refers to the minimum cost required to recoup service and development costs - which i have a real hard time believing. i could picture $5 base cost per unit for something like a campaign, but not even close for a storage upgrade. $5 per unit to recoup for a storage upgrade would mean that anet spent (theoretically, if expecting 500,000 units to sell) 2.5 million dollars on development (and future support) of this feature alone. and, with the price tag of $9.99 each, they make 2.5 million in pure profit. perhaps 500k units is optimistic, but you get the point - big numbers.

i call shenanigans. there is nothing "base" about that $5 - it is probably their way of recouping for the development of the rest of the update and for continued service. which is fine, really - they are in the business of game software for profit using a free-to-play model, so microtransactions were inevitable and, generally, most welcome. however, and regardless of the theoretical numbers, this storage thing isn't sitting right with a lot of people and i believe it needs to be addressed without a classic anet "yes, we know, and no, we don't care" cop-out.

in summary...i don't really give a crap about number fudging, but hyping up this update without mentioning we'd have to pay for things was lame. they've already milked us for storage solutions via new character slots and new accounts. the storage upgrade prices do not make sense and cannot compete when compared to the price of a new character slot or new account. i don't think anet has properly weighed the impact of these facts by a longshot.

Puddingbroodje · Apr 15, 2009, 01:45 PM // 13:45

I bought the game because it has no monthly fee and you don't have to buy armor or such with real money.

So i'm not going to buy extra storage.

Fril Estelin · Apr 15, 2009, 01:48 PM // 13:48

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ctb

It does not cost $5 per pane. That's probably the most ridiculous thing I've heard here yet. I was quoted $12,000 for 4 more terabytes of usable space on our enterprise storage server with a dual fibre channel connection and dual mirrored and striped arrays plus the required software purchase for the two new SCSI cards.

I didn't know your company was into online games, or maybe you're providing this service for MMO companies?

Sarcasms apart, your post is as ridiculous as the one in the first pages comparing that storage offer to the prize of their 500Go portable drives...

P.S. to OP: very neatly biaised modified OP.

Shasgaliel · Apr 15, 2009, 01:49 PM // 13:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bryant Again

I want incentives to give them my money that don't give advantages. I want to be able to purchase add-ons that don't change the mechanic of my gameplay or make things easier on me .

Can you give some examples just to make it more clear? I agree with the imp and partially with skill packs but storage update for me would fit in this cathegory same as BMP for which items almost nobody uses...

Also having 10000 more money does not give any advantage as can be noticed by fow armor wammos with chaos gloves trying their luck in RA....

BenjZee · Apr 15, 2009, 01:53 PM // 13:53

not only do we not have to buy these, who said you need to buy the max amoutn and all at once, this is ridiculous. Theres no point.......

Targren · Apr 15, 2009, 01:57 PM // 13:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fril Estelin

I didn't know your company was into online games, or maybe you're providing this service for MMO companies?

Sarcasms apart, your post is as ridiculous as the one in the first pages comparing that storage offer to the prize of their 500Go portable drives...

Do you think that MMO servers require different hard drives than "Enterprise quality data storage?" (Which means, essentially, high reliability, high speed, large size).

Seriously, what is your point here? What's the relevance of what his company does? Enterprise-level hard drives are pricy, but less so than a lot of consumer technologies (some MP3/media players have a higher price/gb than a full enterprise raid-rack).

If Anet has to pay $5-transaction fee(typically in the $.75-$1 for such small transactions) to store 1 pane's worth of data, then they are getting screwed either by their suppliers or their programmers.

Orange Milk · Apr 15, 2009, 02:03 PM // 14:03

Quote:

Originally Posted by rohara
i don't think "$5 for base transaction" means what people here think it means. $5 cannot be the cost of a transaction (with their payment processor),

Quote:

i call shenanigans. there is nothing "base" about that $5 - it is probably their way of recouping for the development of the rest of the update and for continued service.

It's not just type in your credit card and it's all done. The credit card company charges a fee, the people at ANet doing the paper work on the transaction need to get paid (billing and collections people plus accounting), Electric bill needs paid, as does the bill for the modem lines that receive their transactions. There are ALOT of hidden costs involved with an electronic Credit Card transaction that you don't see. It's called Overhead and Indirect Labor those cost MUST be accounted for to avoid taking a loss.

Learn how the real world works, kthxbye.

I'd REALLY prefer panes at $5 but I see why and know why they are $10. I also feel that initially they will miss their sales goal but over time, a longer time line that they expected, they will reap their sales goal. Much like with the Character slots.

Reguardless ANet is about to hit a sales influx, I expect Storage slots to be sell weel, not great, but well. I also expect to see an influx in Character slots being purchased as well as copies of individul campains spiking. Though the sales of individual game copies won't show as high on the ANet sales charts since I expect them to be purchased from retailers online as well as at game stores and not via the online store, and all copies sold by retailers were already sold by ANet to those people and have since already hit the ANet sales charts.

To sum up, buy some NCSoft stock today and sell it in a month and you will get a profit as ANet and NCsoft report profit estimates for the second quarter based off this sales "spike" mid quarter. OF course this spike will make the funding for GW2 much easier to come by down the road when ANet can report a high sales number at teh 4 year mark of game existance. OF course at $10 a pane adding in the above costs as well as the Direct labor (Devs, Live Team, Other salaries) i don't think they will post a high profit margin, mearly just high sales dollars.

Shasgaliel · Apr 15, 2009, 02:10 PM // 14:10

Quote:

Originally Posted by Targren

Do you think that MMO servers require different hard drives than "Enterprise quality data storage?" (Which means, essentially, high reliability, high speed, large size).

Seriously, what is your point here? What's the relevance of what his company does? Enterprise-level hard drives are pricy, but less so than a lot of consumer technologies (some MP3/media players have a higher price/gb than a full enterprise raid-rack).

If Anet has to pay $5-transaction fee(typically in the $.75-$1 for such small transactions) to store 1 pane's worth of data, then they are getting screwed either by their suppliers or their programmers.

In the company I work increase in the capacity of the database costed 2,5 million euro. Pure 300k for the software to manage it. I wonder why you all technicians and database administrators did not wrote a word that increasing a capacity and MAINTAINING the performance of the database costs as hell. I am quite sure by looking at what we store in our DBA that Anets one is more powerful and thus more costly.

In this case I support Fril. We do not know what kind of DBA they use. How many people maintain it, what kind of software they use and whether they had to upgrade thier DBA for the storage update. So guessing their costs as I or CTB did is just as accurate as predicting weather using /roll emote.

Quote:

Originally Posted by immortius

I'm also curious what affect the 3-data centre model has on their database infrastructure. Worst case each data centre has a replica of the database, which means they need 3x as much storage.

This article may be of interest, Shasgaliel: http://www.dbms2.com/2007/06/09/the-...of-guild-wars/

Thank you very much for this link. That sheds some light. In this case their costs might be much much lower than the ones I pointed for my company.

immortius · Apr 15, 2009, 02:26 PM // 14:26

I'm also curious what affect the 3-data centre model has on their database infrastructure. Worst case each data centre has a replica of the database, which means they need 3x as much storage.

This article may be of interest, Shasgaliel: http://www.dbms2.com/2007/06/09/the-...of-guild-wars/