Curse

Diplo · Jun 13, 2005, 01:07 PM // 13:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by RTSFirebat

But I do know for a fact (Having worked in IT for a few years), its not as cheap as one would make it out to be.

Diskspace is dirt cheap. I work as a programmer and there is no way on earth people as smart as ANet would not be able to store an item in a few bytes. All you need to is store an items ID in their database which points to the item and the ID of it's owner and the quantity. Your basically storing a pointer to an item, not the item itself. I work as a programmer myself and this would be trivial. Disk space is not an issue.

Quote:

And again A.net has its reasons (Private ones) for not giving people more space...

I totally understand the reasoning for not allowing some people to have more storage space than others - people should not be encouraged to hoard items. I agree. However, let that be the stated reason for why it shouldn't happen, not fallacious arguments about bandwidth or disk-space that have no technical basis.

RTSFirebat · Jun 13, 2005, 01:13 PM // 13:13

You know.. your right, it costs only £1 to run a multi-user database/ storage solution for a mass number of users.

[/Sarcasm]

Ba Ne · Jun 13, 2005, 01:23 PM // 13:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jigs

... My storage vault is not even enough for my items. i have about 8 runes in there and armor materials and dyes crowding my vault. i am saving my runes and dyes for my final armor so i cant use them now. ...

Same here. A bunch of crafting materials, a couple of slots for dye and a few more for the runes and upgrade components I've found so far (and am saving for later) and my storage was full. I ended up taking a bunch of the materials I may have used for another character to the material trader to free up space.

I'd pay the Xunlei (sp?) Agents for a larger storage vault. I might even pay $5 or whatever to ANet for a large storage vault access key or something.

Schorny · Jun 13, 2005, 01:38 PM // 13:38

If I just want more storage I can easily buy a new account. It will take me maybe a weekend to bring all four chars to lions arch - there is no need to bring them further.

I can pack all 4 chars full of stuff and trade with them by using my old and new account at the same time. No problem for me.

But more chars per account would be a very little benefit over 2 accounts, because only the trading will get a little easier.

For normal people like me, more slots would mean a lot, for people who just want more storage it hardly doesn't matter if they need to use 2 accounts or one.

I'd be happy to pay even 10 bucks per new char. Just 2 more would be great for.

Diplo · Jun 13, 2005, 02:01 PM // 14:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by RTSFirebat

You know.. your right, it costs only £1 to run a multi-user database/ storage solution for a mass number of users.[/Sarcasm]

The original poster was suggesting paying $5 for what amounts to a few extra bytes of disk-space. That kind of price-per-byte ratio would buy you a lot of mirrored SCSI raid arrays with UPS backup. When Google can give way over 2GB of storage with a mail account then I think a few bytes for $5 is a rather good markup, don't you?

cc.pyro · Jun 13, 2005, 02:17 PM // 14:17

Not to say that Anet is out only to make money and nothing else, but you must realize that there is a reason you only have 4 spaces for characters. Simply put they want you to pay for more. Why would they let you pay 5$ for four more when they know that there are people out there that are willing to pay or already have paid 50$ for 4 more? So if one guy does it, that would be the same as 10 people doing it at 5$. There is no logical reason for them to sell you extra stoarge space for anything less than a new copy. Also the next expansion will probably be giving you 4 slots, and of course they know that everyone wants new content and slots and are willing to pay 50$ for it. So to conclude, in order to make money, Anet will not sell you anything for less than 50$, unless of course the expansions are less than that or the game is on sale.

Epinephrine · Jun 13, 2005, 02:45 PM // 14:45

I have no problem buying an expansion for character slots if reasonably priced - I just want them to be in on my unlocked skills, so that PvPers I make with them have access to my stuff. That's the problem with getting a second account, I don't want to unlock my runes AGAIN on another account.

Xinaya · Jun 13, 2005, 03:20 PM // 15:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by cc.pyro

Not to say that Anet is out only to make money and nothing else, but you must realize that there is a reason you only have 4 spaces for characters. Simply put they want you to pay for more. Why would they let you pay 5$ for four more when they know that there are people out there that are willing to pay or already have paid 50$ for 4 more? So if one guy does it, that would be the same as 10 people doing it at 5$. There is no logical reason for them to sell you extra stoarge space for anything less than a new copy. Also the next expansion will probably be giving you 4 slots, and of course they know that everyone wants new content and slots and are willing to pay 50$ for it. So to conclude, in order to make money, Anet will not sell you anything for less than 50$, unless of course the expansions are less than that or the game is on sale.

THANK YOU! I was just about to post the very same thing before I turned the page and discovered someone else was intelligent enough to figure it out themselves. Bravo.

ArenaNet is a BUSINESS. It's an amazing and wonderful thing that they don't charge us a monthly fee, but business is business, and no one provides ANYTHING at cost. So what's all this nonsense about how much bandwidth and diskspace costs? That's not the point. The point is, no one is providing us cutting-edge gaming as a charity. It's a luxury, and someone has to make money for it.

They also have to keep in mind balance for all the gamers.. as someone else with high functioning gray matter has mentioned... ArenaNet knows better than we do. There's a reason for it. Really. We just might not always know exactly what it is.

Games aren't free. Content isn't free. Companies want your money. It's not evil or unfair... That's their absolute right. Cheers.

Epinephrine · Jun 13, 2005, 03:37 PM // 15:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xinaya

Games aren't free. Content isn't free. Companies want your money. It's not evil or unfair... That's their absolute right. Cheers.

People are offering that they will pay for more slots. Those slots do not require additional art, world design, nor do they tax the system, as the same number of players will likely be on at any time, it just means I don't need to delete characters as often. Some money would be spent by ANet in setting up the system to add characters into an account, and some money for storage costs associated. Once that figure is known, triple it and charge for the spots - that's the way a business works - find something people will pay for, produce it at a low cost, charge them more to make a profit. I am pretty sure that they will come out with more slots, as you said, they are a business. I won't buy a second copy, as that involved unlocking all the skills again. I would pay a fraction of the costs, yet to be determined, to gain some more PvE characters on my account. Thus since there are probably many like myself out there, there is probably enough interest/money to justify doing this and earning a nice bit of extra cash for some probably simple work.

They are a business after all.

Dreamsmith · Jun 13, 2005, 04:02 PM // 16:02

Right now, you can get four more characters for $40-50, just by buying a new copy of the game and starting a new account. The problem is, your new characters won't be in your guild, won't be able to access the shared vault, etc.

If nothing else, I'd like to see the option of being able to add a second retail key to my existing account (just like I was able to add two pre-order keys), and get four more slots on the same account, rather than having to open a second account for the additional slots.

Quote:

Originally Posted by RTSFirebat

You know.. your right, it costs only £1 to run a multi-user database/ storage solution for a mass number of users.

[/Sarcasm]

No, but if you already have such a system in place, if you charged even that much for an additional character slot, most of it would be pure profit. Time on the CPU, network bandwidth, and salaries of the support staff are all several orders of magnitude more expensive than storage space.

Deathlord · Jun 13, 2005, 06:20 PM // 18:20

Five bucks is HARDLY something they'd sell for you for that much stuff. Let's put it this way, FOUR character slots and ONE storage is uh $50!. Let's assume each storage and character slot is $10. How about you pay them $30 for the character slots and another $30 for the storage. Don't be so cheap, if you're desperately in need to hold stuff then you either need to sell or get a mule. I stuck my ranger with all 45 spaces with mule junk, I either sold them to merchant or rune trader. Face it, half the runes are useless, that should help your storage out.

Phaedrus · Jun 13, 2005, 08:15 PM // 20:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diplo

Diskspace is dirt cheap. I work as a programmer and there is no way on earth people as smart as ANet would not be able to store an item in a few bytes. All you need to is store an items ID in their database which points to the item and the ID of it's owner and the quantity. Your basically storing a pointer to an item, not the item itself. I work as a programmer myself and this would be trivial. Disk space is not an issue.

Diskspace is dirt cheap. Re-scaling an infrastructure after having already estimated and projected playerbase growth through trending and having to do this all over is not. Having to put in redundancy to protect the data is not cheap. Having to regression test new hardware and software against the current infrastructure is not. Having to take down servers while these things get implemented (however quickly or efficiently, given they will have had many not-cheap test runs to ensure success) is not.

I've been a programmer too, but I've also had to implement my work. The time and money investments are very considerable, even for adding something as simple as a single disk drive, let alone farms of disk arrays.

[ ]

Zoolooman · Jun 13, 2005, 08:30 PM // 20:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by Deathlord

Five bucks is HARDLY something they'd sell for you for that much stuff. Let's put it this way, FOUR character slots and ONE storage is uh $50!.

Why do people continue to assert that I paid fifty dollars for the character slots?

That fifty dollars was paid to cover their initial multimillion-dollar investment in art, coding, hardware, and design. It was paid to give me a license and access to that content. Only a fraction of that cost paid for storage--only a fraction was paid for the slots and vault--and that is the ONLY thing I want to buy from them. They won't ever get a second account out of me because I would only get a small amount of use from it.

I won't redundantly pay for design costs. But I will pay, even at a reasonable profit, for a little more of their diskspace.

Also, for those claiming that A.net will have difficulties adding space: their system is surely scalable, considering that they'd otherwise have a terrible disaster on their hands when users begin to push their current storage limits.

Zoolooman · Jun 13, 2005, 08:42 PM // 20:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by cc.pyro

Not to say that Anet is out only to make money and nothing else, but you must realize that there is a reason you only have 4 spaces for characters. Simply put they want you to pay for more. Why would they let you pay 5$ for four more when they know that there are people out there that are willing to pay or already have paid 50$ for 4 more? So if one guy does it, that would be the same as 10 people doing it at 5$. There is no logical reason for them to sell you extra stoarge space for anything less than a new copy. Also the next expansion will probably be giving you 4 slots, and of course they know that everyone wants new content and slots and are willing to pay 50$ for it. So to conclude, in order to make money, Anet will not sell you anything for less than 50$, unless of course the expansions are less than that or the game is on sale.

While the market supports a small number of double or triple account purchases, the costs scare away a large portion of the user base. The benefits are too small and the prices are too high. On the other hand, many people would happily purchase a low-cost solution with good benefits. Demand exists for extra character slots at a reasonable price; comparitively very little demand exists for buying second accounts.

In order to make money, they want to find the highest price at which the product will sell the most. The optimal solution is not the full-game price, but the highest profit determined by price times purchases.

For example, you can purchase extra characters in FFXI for one dollar a slot. This is an optimal design; lots of people will pay a dollar but almost none will buy a second copy of the game. Of course FFXI is a pay-to-play game, and paying one dollar would be insufficient for a game like Guild Wars; but to imagine that the increase in cost would be fifty-fold makes me think that you're finding excuses to cling to the game's current design, and not seriously considering what I and others want to buy and how much we're willing to pay for it.

Dreamsmith · Jun 13, 2005, 09:04 PM // 21:04

Phaedrus: "Cheap" is a relative term. Compared to the other costs involved in running an MMORPG, everything you mentioned is relatively cheap.

Creston · Jun 13, 2005, 09:21 PM // 21:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by RTSFirebat

If A.net each all users who paid $5 for additional character and vault space it would require more storage space being used up on the servers. Simply put a on off payment of $5 most likely would not cut it.

Not to be rude, but adding a number of characters wouldn't cost drek.
The database that controls all the characters works on a number of concurrent connections. Extra characters would be tied into your account, and it's your ACCOUNT that's connected to the database, so there would be no expanded capacity needed there.

The only thing that would be needed is extra disk space to store all the data. How much space does a character take up, say 100K (which is a HUGE amount of data for characters, believe me. Look at, for example, Baldur's Gate 2 or NWN and the size of their characters, and it's all around 30K or so). So every 3 characters takes up 300K of space.
Say all the 1 million players want this, they need 1 million times 300K of storage space extra, which is 300 gigs of storage space. The total cost of that storage space is about 300 dollars, say times 5 if they have it in a RAID 5, is 1500 dollars.
Oh no, that five dollars per customer really isn't going to cut it.

Seriously, if they do this because they want to stop hording etc, I can understand that, although I REALLY want more characters. I've already deleted two whom I had played for about 30+ hours, because I'm out of space.

But the cost behind it is miniscule, really. 5 dollars per account would be a 4.98 dollar profit for them.

Creston

JoDiamonds · Jun 14, 2005, 12:08 AM // 00:08

$5 isn't worth the trouble of processing the order. I'm serious. Someone has to set up the system for players to purchase this, and weigh the various options they should offer (because there are obviously many ways they could go with this), etc. Also, comparing to Google isn't reasonable. Not only is GuildWars not even remotely on the scale of Google (which affects costs in about a billion ways), do you want advertisements in Guild Wars?

Also, you CAN currently buy another account. And the going rate is about $50 for four characters. You can argue that they have overhead, or the pricing is $30 of server access and $20 per character or whatever you want, but $50/four characters *is* the definitive pricing.

Offering $10/char might be smart. They could probably get away with $15 if it came with anything else (i.e. storage slots or whatever).

For what it's worth, though, you can't currently run Guild Wars twice on one machine, to be logged in with two different accounts. I know.

Vangor · Jun 14, 2005, 12:43 AM // 00:43

Purchasing a second account is not actually a viable solution, as unlockables are not shared between these accounts, nor is guilding nearly as simple, nor is storage space shared, and communication with a single person for messages does not extend to this second account (like noting a person is online as someone else in the guild), not to mention $50 for currently accessible content is a joke, that is where the bulk of this pricing comes in.

Fact is, additioanl item slots, such as a doubled Storage Vault, will not require much storage space or bandwidth for the slight, very slight, data transfer necessary, as well, the Characters themselves require a very small amount of data for accessing and keeping, ever transfered a saved character in say Dungeon Siege or Diablo? These spaces are small, very small, and while you can believe that the Guild Wars ones are slightly larger, this is not much, I could spend $20 on a harddrive to save thousands upon thousands of these.

Spending say $10 would certainly net a profit, designing a system to process these billing options and merely expand both will not cost this much unless ArenaNet uses some of the most convoluted programming for these systems, and even then, if you're paying $50 for the entire systems of the game, $10 is like purchasing another 1/5 of this, only in a much smaller context of the overall game size.

JoDiamonds · Jun 14, 2005, 02:37 AM // 02:37

The cost of a feature

Quote:

Not to be rude, but adding a number of characters wouldn't cost drek.

This is naive. If the quote was: "This is a trivial feature to add.", it would be true for some definition of trivial. Some seem to honestly believe that the only work involved is someone spending five minutes going to a computer store, buying a hard disk, and then sticking it in a computer somewhere. That image is just wrong.

Disk Space has nothing to do with the real cost

Quote:

The only thing that would be needed is extra disk space to store all the data.

Not remotely true. This statement shows unawareness all of the work required, which is far from the none seemingly claimed. It's a small feature in the grand scheme of things, compared to adding new areas with quests, or adding a new race. Yet trivial for Massive Online games is still not so cheap.

Someone spends manpower figuring out what options to offer. It's not as simple as saying, "Yes, let's sell characters for $5 per account" or "No, don't like that idea." ArenaNet and PlayNC must jointly decide what offerings to put forth to us, the Glorious Consumer. Offer just +1 character for a straight $$ cost? How much? What about more inventory space? Should it be a package deal? What's the hard limit on number of characters per account?

Then there's more technical issues.

Four characters fit nicely onto the character selection screen. Fix that, for whatever new limit of characters you want to have. Oh, you have to decide that too. Fixing the character selection screen is maybe 2-6 man weeks of work. It's not less than two manweeks, and that's pretty optimistic. If the average pay is $25/hour (not so unlikely), two (non-overtime) weeks of work costs 80 * $25 = $200 dollars. Will they definitely make that money back?

Let's say the CEO of ArenaNet (no idea who this is) decides she wants to offer increased #s of characters for an account.

1. CEO decides she wants the feature. Holds half hour meeting with just three other people (optomistic) to discuss how to do it.

Aside: That's two man hours, but highly paid ones. Let's say the average salary at that meeting is $75/hour. That's $150 for the first short meeting. No, I'm not going to keep computing the cost to the manufacturer, but the thought interested me.

2. Research by PlayNC marketing is done to see who wants it, and how much each user would pay for it, and decides on all the (sub)features they'd like to see as part of this and how much they want to charge.

3. Game programmers / designers / artists / network engineers / database programmers implement the feature. Easily a week of work (combined, anyway). Designers have to make sure this doesn't break the game in any way, including the economy, PvP, PvE, vendors, etc. Virtually no "work" from a design standpoint, but a lot to consider for a "little feature". May require art; at least artist input. Includes reprogramming the character selection screen, probably. Update the website and store, and the ability to add the code to your account. Might require restructuring the database. Marketing has to prepare press release kinds of information.

4. QA testing, probably first internally by ArenaNet (on their test servers, which require their own cost to maintain), then probably by the publisher's testers, and probably at least casually by producers at both the dev studio and the publishers along the way for approval. This testing includes the purchasing system, the system itself, making sure all "normal" aspects of another character are still taken into account (i.e. that there's nothing left from any programmer anywhere that assumed it would be four characters or less), adding fifty new ones at once, etc.

5. Oh, someone has to make sure there's enough hard disk space. Just kidding. (Hah!) Probably, no one is worrying about that for this feature at all. Instead, the system administrator is just generally watching to see how full the disks are getting, and talking to someone in Budgeting to make sure they can buy more disks when necessary. And talking to the developers in general to get a feel for what new features are going to consume a lot of space, and advertisers to know when there will be a flood of new customers. (Hah!)

Then it can finally be sold to someone.

I'm not trying to say this will break the bank. It's just not as simple as someone waving their hand and saying, "Oh, it's just some hard disk space." There's a real cost involved.

Seriously, about Hard Disk Space: We're not that smart anyway

Quote:

How much space does a character take up, say 100K (which is a HUGE amount of data for characters, believe me. Look at, for example, Baldur's Gate 2 or NWN and the size of their characters, and it's all around 30K or so). So every 3 characters takes up 300K of space.
Say all the 1 million players want this, they need 1 million times 300K of storage space extra, which is 300 gigs of storage space. The total cost of that storage space is about 300 dollars, say times 5 if they have it in a RAID 5, is 1500 dollars.
Oh no, that five dollars per customer really isn't going to cut it.

The cost of storage is probably more than five times as much, for full RAID with constant backup and monitoring hosted in a major ISP, etc.

Also, the amount of space for a massively online character probably can't be reasonably compared with a seemingly similar character for a regular PC game. The two formats are just wildly different. Baldur's Gate and NWN make a compact little file for your character. Massive Online characters are in some ginormous database with a million tables, where the character is spread out across a big pile of data structures. I don't know how much it is. Maybe it's smaller, because databases are efficient. But unless someone here has actual ly worked with Massive Online databases, I doubt we're qualified to really hazard a guess.

Number of Players
Also, I understand you are being pessimistic in one way (for estimating their costs), but for what it's worth, GuildWars has nothing like a million accounts. Only three Massive Online games have ever broken a million accounts. Very few have more than a few hundred thousand. What % of players would expand their account? 1%? I dunno. That's what the marketing department is for. But I assume most players would not bother.

Guildwars isn't old enough to be on here, but since I'm fairly certain it's not in World of Warcraft range, this at least gives some idea: http://www.mmogchart.com/

Even World of Warcraft took a while to get to half a million subscribers. If Guild Wars has even 100,000 subscribers before two months have passed, it's pretty successful. (Brief list to give an idea: World of Warcraft has 1.5 million accounts. The Sims Online currently has about 40,000. Everquest has about 450,000.)

$4.98 out of $5.00 isn't true, and it doesn't matter

Quote:

Seriously, if they do this because they want to stop hording etc, I can understand that, although I REALLY want more characters. I've already deleted two whom I had played for about 30+ hours, because I'm out of space.

But the cost behind it is miniscule, really. 5 dollars per account would be a 4.98 dollar profit for them.

I don't think it would be anything that good. Even then, it's a misleading figure: Even if that were true, that doesn't automatically mean it would be profitable. If they only sold 1,000 of them, that would only be $5,000. It wouldn't even be profitable at that rate.

It will come someday. $8-$10
They'll get around to it someday. The longer they wait the more in demand this feature will be. I estimate it will cost $8-$10 per character, if it's as simple as that.

Nearly everyone who would buy one or a few more characters for $5 would do it for $8, and most for $10, but $10 sounds a lot higher than $8. I'm not in marketing, so that's mostly Making Stuff Up. I *hope* that marketing figures out that $5 is the right price!

But I'm willing to make a public claim, if only to see if I'm right someday. =)

This was too long to be really useful.

Ollj · Jun 14, 2005, 06:47 AM // 06:47

I vote for purchsing more character slots.
Hope it will be in a buyable expansion annyways (new classes require new slots).