Pay to skip the play

[Cayle]

I've always hated the grind in MMORPGs. I mean, I really, really REALLY hate it. Thereore, I always found leveling services and "chinese cold farmers" amusing. People would get up in arms about it, but I always regarded it as a symptom of the prevalence of poor game design. I mean, people were paying to skip something that was supposed to be fun? Wasn't that an epic fail of game design?

When F2P and micro transactions started gaining traction, I smelled a rat. I knew that it would take an already prevalent bad habit and provide incentives to make it worse.

Enter the brave new world.

[hallsofvallhalla]

I mean, people were paying to skip something that was supposed to be fun? Wasn't that an epic fail of game design?

Ha soo true. A games true nature comes to the surface quick. I mean every games nature is to make money but when you take a game like Skyrim that had so much content and playtime and options all for $60 you see they really cared about the game. Games like WOW care about that dollar and will be quick to give you what you want for the right price even if it means demeaning the game.

[Jackolantern]

WoW is actually the second major MMO to do this.

The thing about the grind is that grinding is a symptom of the problem of how to make a game playable indefinitely when you can't make infinite content. There are smaller games that have much deeper gameplay, like Achaea where players can pretty much never enter the leveling grind and instead get involved in complex political systems, run a player-owned shop, become a clothing or jewelry designer, etc. But there are still a lot of questions about whether gameplay elements like that can scale to 10k players, much less 500k. These types of games tend to do the best with 500 players or less. In most games the populations are not all on one server of course, but with the subscription model, one thousand concurrent users per server was the norm (about 3k total users including those not logged-in), and you may even have to squeeze more in there in a F2P game to keep the hardware costs down. EVE is probably about as close as any high-population game has come to having more dynamic, less grind-based mechanics, but even it is filled with various grind mechanics.

I guess the point is that we need mechanics that can keep 500k or even a million or more players playing for years on end without a grind. That requires dynamic game mechanics, and how do you keep that from breaking up the weight of so many players?

[a_bertrand]

I think it's a bit more complex than that. From my own game I saw many players which want just to be the best without actually doing any effort. For this they will cheat or try any possible road. So I'm pretty sure some people will just pay to get level X or whatever.