[TERA PC & Console] En Masse is closing, but TERA lives on! We will continue to support TERA PC (NA) and TERA Console until service is transferred. Stay tuned for more information.
[TERA Console] The Grotto of Lost Souls update (v85) is now live! Read the patch notes here: https://bit.ly/TERACon_v85
[TERA PC] The 64-bit update (v97) is now live. Check out all the changes delivered on August 11 here: https://bit.ly/tera64_patchnotes
[TERA PC & CONSOLE] Summerfest Part 2: The Beach Bash is on from August 11 until September 1! Participate in event activities to earn tokens redeemable for costumes, consumables, mounts, and more! Details: https://bit.ly/tera_sf20
RNG = RMT .. will I spend on Tera's shop?
My typical gaming is one MMO at a time and then typically only the subscription fee with a few minor cash shop buys, likely $100~$200 over the life of the game for me above the subscription. There was, however, one time where I literally spent over $2000 in the cash shop .. and over a relatively short period. I played a ton of different MMOs, but only one motivated me to spend in their shop. Which one?
SWTOR. Why? Insanely good costume system. It's so good, that I want to see it in every MMO I play. Why aren't I still playing it? Rollbacks. The one unforgivable MMO sin. Steal my effort and I'll not only punt the game, but the publisher and parent company for all time -- never again buying another EA or Bioware game for any reason because of what they did there. That's a different topic, though. Here are the things that kept me buying from their shop:
1. perfect preview; walk around in game with some or all of ANY costume to view it in different settings. Tera's dressing room is almost this good.
2. mix & match; could use part of a set or all for interesting and unique looks -- Tera's is quite poor in this area.
3. most sets were direct buy, but those that were not could be picked up on broker -- Tera has far too much RNG.
4. anything could be used as a costume -- two paper dolls, one stat and one skin -- Tera's is too limited, can only put costumes in the appearance doll
5. and the BIG one; all sets were account-bound and infite-copy; want another one or one for an alt? click & voila!
Because of the account-bound thing, building up a large collection of armor sets became incredibly desirable. I made and played almost 4x as many alts as typical for me simply because I could make a new interesting look for them using the armor collection. I made multiple skin sets for many characters -- something I've never done in any other game.
Of course, they couldn't resist the "screw people with RNG" thing that a lot of cash shops do with boxes, but RMT was an easy answer for that. Buy credits via RMT at a ridiculously low price and then use it to get what you want on the broker. Did I want to use RMT? No. Did I feel even remotely bad about it? Not at all. If they wanted my cash all they needed to do was sell things direct at fixed prices rather than implementing RNG boxes + broker trading for those things. Money exists to buy time; if you're going to save me time with $20 via direct cash shop than $10 RMT, I'm REALLY happy to use the shop. Make me work for it via RNG with an unknown success rate? Hell no. Not even going to test it with a single RNG buy. Time for RMT.
I really don't get the RNG box thing. The devs know a box costs X and has a Y% drop rate for each item. So they know EXACTLY how much they'll get (X*Y) for everything. So, just why not just charge that price? Direct pricing gives me zero incentive to do anything but use the cash shop.
Do I think I might spend a lot in Tera? No. Why? No point in building up a costume collection when it's only usable on a single character and you can't mix & match. So, I'll very carefully craft a look for characters I like playing, buy just exactly what I need via the quickest fixed-cost method and use that one look forever on that character. Besides, I'm still in the newbie phase. I won't spend much at all until I know I'm hooked and honestly, Tera looks like it's slowly dying. Too bad really, it's got a lot of great things going for it. Some of the best combat in any MMO I've played along with great art.
SWTOR. Why? Insanely good costume system. It's so good, that I want to see it in every MMO I play. Why aren't I still playing it? Rollbacks. The one unforgivable MMO sin. Steal my effort and I'll not only punt the game, but the publisher and parent company for all time -- never again buying another EA or Bioware game for any reason because of what they did there. That's a different topic, though. Here are the things that kept me buying from their shop:
1. perfect preview; walk around in game with some or all of ANY costume to view it in different settings. Tera's dressing room is almost this good.
2. mix & match; could use part of a set or all for interesting and unique looks -- Tera's is quite poor in this area.
3. most sets were direct buy, but those that were not could be picked up on broker -- Tera has far too much RNG.
4. anything could be used as a costume -- two paper dolls, one stat and one skin -- Tera's is too limited, can only put costumes in the appearance doll
5. and the BIG one; all sets were account-bound and infite-copy; want another one or one for an alt? click & voila!
Because of the account-bound thing, building up a large collection of armor sets became incredibly desirable. I made and played almost 4x as many alts as typical for me simply because I could make a new interesting look for them using the armor collection. I made multiple skin sets for many characters -- something I've never done in any other game.
Of course, they couldn't resist the "screw people with RNG" thing that a lot of cash shops do with boxes, but RMT was an easy answer for that. Buy credits via RMT at a ridiculously low price and then use it to get what you want on the broker. Did I want to use RMT? No. Did I feel even remotely bad about it? Not at all. If they wanted my cash all they needed to do was sell things direct at fixed prices rather than implementing RNG boxes + broker trading for those things. Money exists to buy time; if you're going to save me time with $20 via direct cash shop than $10 RMT, I'm REALLY happy to use the shop. Make me work for it via RNG with an unknown success rate? Hell no. Not even going to test it with a single RNG buy. Time for RMT.
I really don't get the RNG box thing. The devs know a box costs X and has a Y% drop rate for each item. So they know EXACTLY how much they'll get (X*Y) for everything. So, just why not just charge that price? Direct pricing gives me zero incentive to do anything but use the cash shop.
Do I think I might spend a lot in Tera? No. Why? No point in building up a costume collection when it's only usable on a single character and you can't mix & match. So, I'll very carefully craft a look for characters I like playing, buy just exactly what I need via the quickest fixed-cost method and use that one look forever on that character. Besides, I'm still in the newbie phase. I won't spend much at all until I know I'm hooked and honestly, Tera looks like it's slowly dying. Too bad really, it's got a lot of great things going for it. Some of the best combat in any MMO I've played along with great art.
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Comments
I will say that if you play long enough that you most likely will not be content with one costume combination for your character. Pretty much everyone who actively plays a single character has multiple costumes for it because they get bored of their look from time to time.
I agree that character-bound costumes is a dumb idea though. Even maplestory, run by the greediest game company I'd seen in a while, allowed costumes to be traded account-wide until they went crazy with all the new classes and realized how much money they could make doing it character-bound for the new classes only.
In all fairness the armor looks in this game arent good (apart from agnitor, regent, nightforge, visionmaker) the rest look ugly anyway. And you can get those from fashion coupons so basically they are free,
I do not see the point here....if you want it you spend money on it, if you dont then dont. You arent forced by any means,
To the dying part:
Tera is dying for so many years now and look its still around, and i see a lot of old players coming back.
People usually play tera for a while, then stop, then return again, but like every other game population comes and goes. Especially since for a long time there was no other game that could really compete with what tera offered. Then came B&S, Revelation, BDO....(given those at certain aspects are sooo much crappier than what tera offers) they are a good competition.
I am very curious about what inspires YOU to spend money on a cash shop and if the reasons are similar to mine or not. For instance, if things were account-wide with as many copies as I liked, I'd absolutely would have made multiple buys already. I'm still in the newbie phase for a game, making a lot of different chars, trying them out, seeing what I like. With RNG + locked to a single char, it makes no sense to buy for a char I could punt tomorrow.
BTW, sorry about the "dying" comment. I've not been around long enough to know if the population was higher and more active in the past. I sort-of assumed it was due to the multiple sever mergers I read about and the calls for more on the forums. And, based on the LFGs I see, IMS is literally the only way to get a group pre-65.
Because of perception and psychology. If you have a cash shop full of $40-50 costumes, people start thinking "that's the same as the price of a full game!" -- it's sticker shock. A game like that would be widely decried as a massively over-priced ripoff. And yet the people can spend $50+ on lootboxes with a "chance to win" each time, and our brains just don't generally measure it in the same way. Plus, opening lootboxes is more addictive. To be clear, I'm not entirely thrilled with lootboxes (and there are some specific changes I think EME needs to make to them), but it's hard to argue with the overwhelming market evidence that it works on the whole.
Obviously, the perfect solution is for the costumes to stay at the same price or at most twice their price, still tradeable, and account bound. But the company wanting to do this is a bit far fetched. Of course we can dream right? And with some hope it may become true.
If the intention of account bound costumes were for them to be untradeable, this could not affect the EMP buyers, or would only be positive for them, but the free player base will not benefit from this, and if changed to this model entirely, will be screwed a lot, this in turn screwing up the whole free player market. I think this falls right into the same deal a while ago about the account mounts, and my opinion is the exact same about it: I'm in as long as the tradeable choice remains, and if pricing is OK. Also I think having a single character version cheaper still makes sense, there's people with countless alts like me, and people that just don't want to play with so many alts, and will stick to one character, or say one male and one female, or characters that one looks good on a costume and the other ridiculous, and so on. It would be a waste to pay for all in this case.
The RNG wall tho is another topic, like Counterpoint said above, the psychological factor of being able to win or not, that gamble, is something people do get addicted to, and pay for. Sadly that's a reality, both in game or life, and hence it gets exploited. End of the day people still only pay for what they agree to.
What has been proposed to the RNG wall was a fail cap, which I think is a nice solution. Having a maximum amount of boxes needed for the success, and telling the actual odds of the boxes, is something I think is fair. Even tho in any actual gambling you don't have this fail cap, but this is not a casino anyway so why not. I feel like the RNG boxes would even sell more that way.
A game I once played did just that with a very desirable RNG item. The reaction when people saw the $100 price tag was, well, priceless.
As for mixing and matching costume parts... We used to have that with the template system. Then they introduced the "new and improved" system and here we are, years later, stuck with the same old unoriginal costumes. When they first announces it, I'd honestly(and stupidly) thought they'd sell "costume builders" in the cash shop, designs that allowed you to combine different armour pieces into 1 costume and create your own look. But, hey, that'd require work and stuff.........
You gotta wait weeks for a new mount release and you get flying wolf, upcoming costumes and weapon skins, are revamped and crap too, Frozen crap.
Community is at fault too, we give feedback, not many forumers get in their and support it, but make a thread and say more dungeon reward, then LesbianVi says something, pages of you don't run dungeons appear, moral of story, people don't give feedback for things that could make a different.
The way it worked in SWTOR was that you could trade it BEFORE you locked it to your account. Afterwards, you could clickout as many untradable copies as you wanted from any char account-wide. Ultimate cost of each wasn't much ... $10~20 is my memory, with some few rare ones going for a lot more. It definitely would not make sense for those copies to be tradable!
The main differences between an exclusive per-char system and the more permissive account-wide is one of sales volume. I'll buy a LOT more if I don't have to worry about loosing things if I delete a char or just get tired of one and play a different one. If I have skins on tap, I'll play more, create more characters. IIRC, I had an absurd 40~50 chars in SWTOR, but I had fun creating 'em and playing 'em. It's the only game where I ever made more than the classic "one of each class." Account skins were the reason.
The per-char model seems to think "if it's on two chars, I want to be paid twice!" What I'm saying is that if I can't put it on multiple chars, you aren't even going to be paid once. The per-char model is so unfriendly to playing more that I'll wait until cap and am fairly certain I want to play it in end-game before buying. There's a serious risk there for EME; during the level up phase I could simply get used to how it looks and decide I don't need a cash shop costume. In other games with per char systems, only about 1/3 of my chars got cash skins and then only a single skin. Fashion is fickle. Gotta milk the now of it before the next now hits -- it's a now eat now world out there.
BTW, another big turn off for loot boxes is that you get a TON of stuff you don't want and thus need to sell. Figuring out the gross cost for a cash shop item is easy, but the net cost is a lot more work. Selling is more work. This is a game. I don't want work. I want play. My suspicion on the current costs for cash shop items is that the net cost is considerably lower than what you see them being sold for on the broker -- likely more in the $10~30 range than the $70~100 -- but, omg, the metric shitonne of work you have to sell to realize that cost.
In fact, things are a tad worse than what they used to be: I've felt that costumes got progressively more expensive EMP wise, and a handful of new lootbox only options popped up. This last bit tho I cannot be sure, as there was previously already such system on the kitty-cat and black cat costumes for Elin.
It was unknown of a costume or an entire set to be on the 2K EMP range, but that's what they did on some if I'm not wrong (picnic set, wasn't it it like 2.4K?). New maid sets force you into the bonnet that I never liked and can't sell cause no one buys it separate, and costs more than the previous maid costume without the head frill costed, if I recall, IF you wanted the frill too it would sum up to about the same if not a tad less when bought both together.
It would somehow make sense if they add an option for account bound costumes as well indeed, but considering their history with account bound vs character bound mounts, what they would do (tho I hope not) is: say the costume you want costs 1.5K EMP for character set. Account bound set will cost 4.5K and will be untradeable. Unless you want it on more than 3 characters, you'll be losing money.
All in all it looks more like they need to revise the entire store, SPECIALLY lootboxes.
Yep, it's a marketing trick to make it look cheaper than it actually is.