Cryptic dipping into gold farmer business

Grummelig

While this isn't particulary hot or all that fresh news, it might be interesting having the information about it in a topic on here.

 

Cryptic has announced their plans to introduce a currency to unify all or most of their different badges, emblems and marks that are currently used to purchase special equipment and some of the ships from npc vendor. For now it is named Dilithium.

The interesting part comes in where Daniel Stahl (those who don't know, he is the current executive producer of STO) explains that they are designing a system that allows players to trade this new ingame currency to other players in exchange for their cryptic points, the currency used for their "micro" transaction item mall.

Here is the link to his statement: http://forums.startrekonline.com/showpost.php?p=3707832&postcount=94

There has been a lot of anti c-store sentiment on the official forums, despite cryptic's frantic moderation. And the above concept is what they are using in an attempt to appease people, saying that with it everything would be available ingame to everyone, without the need to pay real money, and there would not really be a pay-to-win / pay-double-to-play concept at work.

Now we have to keep in mind that with very few exceptions players get their end-game equipment with the current ingame currency. A lot can be crafted yes but for every single equipment slot there is an item of the highest level and quality available for purchase with ingame currency.

If we couple that with the announced mechanic of being able to exchange a currency bought with real life money with ingame currency, we really have a "perfect world" for Cryptic. People will spend real life cash for items in the c-store (aka, as some people call it, the c-junkyard), and keep spending money to get more tokens to sell to other players ingame to essentially buy their characters allround equipment, all for real money. From what I recall selling ingame currency/-purchasing power used to be the business of the rather despised gold farmer industry.

Cryptic has their excuse of everything being technically available through ingame means (keep in mind that based on what is known at this point, the exchange rate between the real life- and ingame currency will be absolutely flexible/based on what players want to charge the others). And they are still grabbing the money for every single item in their junkyard shop, since somebody will always have to pay for it, even if it is not the end-user of the item. As they are using the players as intermediaries they can even partially deny that they are directly selling ingame power for real money (with the quite notable exception of all the c-junkyard based ships of course).

Seeing how naiive and gullible a huge part of the remaining STO player base is, they will keep throwing money at cryptic... and keep defending the company for their business practices. The road is paved for possible the largest "pay double to play" model ever seen in the mmo industry.

In all honesty, from a business management point of view I do have to congratulate cryptic. They are making perfect use of the IP they acquired and the characteristics of the fanbase associated with it. If people are dumb enough to willingly accept a full blown subscription model in combination with a full (or even over-)blown item mall, effectively doubling the monthly costs if one wants all the content, everybody deserves what they get. The customers deserve to get milked for every penny, and the company sure as hell deserves to reap the profits of a genius business model associated with an otherwise at best mediocre game.

To conclude, a note for the potential defendants of the game and company that might venture to these forums here: yes we are all aware of your most favorite defence-speech: "you don't have to buy anything from the junkyard", "nothing on there is required to play the game". Absolutely right. People wouldn't call it the junkyard if it was just full of cool stuff. There is a ton of fluff that only appeals to those wanting to play dress-up-online and similar. There still are quite a few nice items though, and there are definitely a hell of a lot more niceones to come. But yes, nothing is "required". However, I have yet to see a defendant mention what they consider to actually be required.

Pretty much everything can be done in lower level ships, so the high end ships are not actually required either, so put those in the junkyard too. To play the game you are not required to play missions, you can just do deep space encounters (random skirmish battles, sort of) to level up, so put all the missions in the store too, they are not "required" after all. Certain areas of the galaxy sure as hell are not required for the game to be played either, let's have them on a must-pay-for basis as well. While we are at it, bank space is not required either, you can work just fine with your inventory only so let's put bank slots in the store too... oh wait, they already did that.

So a long story short: the gold farmers are out of luck (if they were still active in STO), cryptic is moving in on their market.

 

On an entirely different note, more indication of impending free to play: a friend of mine has been able to fully play the game with little to no restrictions (exceptions: can only send /tells to people who have him on their friend list) for several weeks, if not a month or more, just using the buddy trial invite that I sent him. One might think his account was somehow given/considered as a sort of unlimited free to play one that they are preparing behind the scenes.