Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Would paying for offline farming constitute pay to win?
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,499
I had an odd idea for a business model yesterday: no subscription, but a very sparse item mall that really only has one huge item. Let players buy farming time from the item mall, so that if they don't have time to play the game, they can get the experience, loot, and so forth that they would have gotten if they did.
As you probably know, some people have a lot of time to play games, and some people don't. Some people have a lot of spare money, and use that to buy stuff from "pay to win" item malls. But what if all that they could buy is basically the ability to keep pace with those who do have a lot of free time?
The way that it would work is that you could buy farming time for up to four hours per day of playing time. Any time that you actually play the game counts against this four hours, so you can't double-dip by playing all day and also buying farming time. If you actually play the game, you could play as much as you had time for. For your offline farming time, you could specify a level-appropriate area that you want your character to farm while offline, and when you come back, you'd have the extra experience and loot that is roughly equivalent to if you had actually played the game and spent that time farming.
The only loot that you gain in this way would be loot that can be obtained through normal gameplay. You could chose the area that your character supposedly farmed while offline to bias the loot toward what you would have gone after if farming. This would include any content in the game, including gathering from crafting nodes and doing dungeon runs. So this doesn't make it so that anyone is forced to pay to compete with people buying stuff from the item mall.
The price tag could increase as you bought more farming time per day. For example, the first hour for a day could be $0.25, the second hour $0.50, the third $1, and the fourth $2. Someone who exclusively bought farming time could end up spending over $100 per month; if you're going free to play, you do need to get something from the whales. But someone willing to buy less farming time wouldn't have to pay outlandish rates to do so.
This is also markedly different from the experience boost potions and such that item malls commonly sell. Those merely provide a multiplier to what you get, and don't help with endgame loot. This would allow someone who makes a lot of money but only has time to play on weekends to keep up with people who have vastly more free time. And it would also let people who don't have time to go raiding or whatever the endgame is to still get endgame loot, all the way up to the best items in the game. But it wouldn't let them get such loot any faster than people who play the game for free, due to the cap of four hours per day.
Much of the goal here is cutting out the external gold farmers and power-leveling sites. Anything they could provide, you could get legally by buying offline farming time.
So what do you think? Is this pay to win? Is this something that no one would pay for, so the business model would collapse?
Comments
Thats the definition of pay to win. You're just adding an extra step into the process to try to hide that its pay to win.
Thats like someone buying gold to use to buy better items saying that its not pay to win because they're not buying the items directly.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Interesting. First take is it feels pay to win, but not in the usual way.
After reading it twice, this is definitely a convenience item that many folks would buy. I'm not entirely clear how the hours limitation works, but presume I could apply 4 hours of farming time while I'm at work in addition to spending 4 hours of time in game. Possibly on a daily basis.
So in that case, right off the bat it would have a huge impact on game economy. Crafting goods would be increasingly available and prices might drop radically. If loot drops are not bound to the player, the value/price of loot will also drop because it will flood the market.
I spend 30+ hours a week in game but if something like this was available, I'd probably indulge in it for the xp, faction rep, crafting goods, extra cash and loot drops. You would have to create a bunch of gold sinks to strike any kind of balance.
I think there's definitely a place for it. Personally though I tend to avoid games where paying to avoid content is a extremely viable option like in your description. That said I understand why it's a viable option. I think it was Voyage Century that had something like you propose (without the loot or coin) but characters had to be online when the skill book was activated and then idle? It's been years don't remember exactly how it worked. Just know it was the same concept to get a character experience without having to play it. No loot though. Time is money and when people get home from work get their family stuff sorted what little time they have left before it's time to get off do they really want to spend it doing what often is a choir in mmo's or just enjoy the game with what little time that they have.
The only problem with what you describe is that a developer could go to far with it. Build the game completely around this model essentially making it nothing but a cash grab or "pay to win". Adding in nothing but content that essentially forces one to either use this system or to leave the game because they can't keep up. That said definitely a market for this sort of thing I think. There's a market for anything as long as the game can pull people in. Options in the type of services as long as they don't completely break the game are a good thing.
Much of the point of the idea is that you couldn't do that.
The idea is that you could buy farming time ahead of time and say, the next day that I don't log in, apply four hours of offline farming for me instead. Or you could buy stuff a week ahead of time or whatever. If you log in and play for four hours, then the offline farming time gets pushed back and doesn't get used that day. If you play for two hours, then you only use up two hours of offline farming that night.
This way, people who can play 4+ hours per day would never be at any disadvantage as compared to people who buy offline farming time. That makes it decidedly unlike the usual "pay to win" item malls in which you absolutely have to have stuff from the item mall in order to be competitive.
That's actually part of the point. If you make $20/hour in your real-life job, even $1/hour for offline farming might seem cheap by comparison.
The idea was more to let players pay to keep up when they don't have time to play.
Actually, the real idea was that I thought it might make for an interesting discussion thread.
Depends on the game. It doesn't appear to break any rules, but it doesn't sound like a worldly game, so I don't know.
100 dollars a month to farm? How much xp and loot could you need? Is it a very high cap on stats? very slow progression? Why do they continue to spend? Im assuming its more of a game than a world.
"If the Damned gave you a roadmap, then you'd know just where to go"
How is this any different from just buying it on the AH/Market/whatever?
Really. Seems just like PLEX in Eve but you remove a step.
Spend money to buy a Timecode.
Sell Timecode for Credits
Use Credits to buy stuff that you didn't farm yourself
Result -> You paid real money for stuff you didn't spend the time or effort to farm yourself.
Same thing would apply to something like Neverwinter or any other game with multiple currencies that are tradable between characters, where one of which is a cash-shop currency.
Yeah, I think it is genius. Avoid the grind all together. IF you don't want to, don't have to, if you want to, you can no issue. May want to incorporate stop gaps for things like "I want a max level toon, going to just farm till max" Maybe as you play you can get a form of "rested xp" that you can farm with.
My Thoughts on Content Locust
Fair enough ... I just try to see it from the point of view of the CEO who's bonus target is to increase revenue by 10% next quarter and what that means for the next patch.
Eve works because CCP walks the fine line of breaking the rules of the game and lore. Does neverwinter bother with such things?
"If the Damned gave you a roadmap, then you'd know just where to go"
Why even bother installing the game for 12 months or so. Just pay and forget till you (assume) you have enough to play end game content!
Regardless, this pay to play type crap game is not for me!
1) This makes everything available from offline farming, including items that are bind on pickup. So it won't become "keep up until you need raid epics that you can't buy".
2) This only benefits people with limited time to play the game. A PLEX system lets people play all day, and still pay for additional advantage on top of it. So someone who plays a lot already has all of the advantage that they could have gained by paying, without actually having to pay anything.
If it's really going to get people to spend hundreds of dollars via offline farming before they even play the game to find out if they like it, then the idea will be such a massive commercial success that most games will adopt it immediately. I don't think that will happen.
It would depend entirely on what kind of resource you are "farming" and how it compares to online farming speed. If buying it is more efficient or just faster than playing the game for the resource, then it could easily fall into "pay to win" where people setup multiple free accounts and have one farm and send over mats or whatever to their real account.
But again, without knowing what kind of resource we're talking about, and it's impact on the game, I couldn't say.
You make me like charity
LOL that it does.
It sounds like Age of Wushu's VIP system
http://www.ageofwushu.com/static/jianghuvip_event/
Offline Stalls and Cultivation - Allows you to open a professions stall and cultivate your skills offline. Your character never truly goes 'offline'.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre