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Comments
I'm not the richest lass in the world, not by a very long shot. I recall an old comment someone else made that they believed they made less money than anyone else in Achaea. I thought then, that they were mistaken. I still think that's me, or it's a tie. Possibly with more than just her.
I live in the same country as she does, and I'm on disability - which I'm sure surprises few here.
In my real life, I've very little to do, and apparently due to stuff that I choose to describe here as the reasons I am on disability, make me a very difficult person to employ, no matter how much I want to do something more meaningful than Achaea. No matter that I get real-world pieces of paper to 'prove' I've done the training, no matter that I refuse to be as useless as my lack of employment appears to claim I am. At least I can help people who I can only assume live lives in which they're made to feel just as useless, forget for however long I can manage.
Even seeking a nonpaying job, didn't work.
Ye gods, what sort of lives do you think you're running from, all you high-rolling folks who put thousands of dollars into credits more than once every few years?
Results of disembowel testing | Knight limb counter | GMCP AB files
Breaking even in this case would only apply to profit margins in a "do this vs that" situation. IRE is clearly not a non-profit organization. I believe I read somewhere that f2p games make the bulk of their money on "whales" or the big spenders. As I mentioned previously if that is true then giving further discounts to the whales would just be the company undercutting itself. Free players are still gonna play free regardless of memberships or promos. Casual spenders are still gonna spend casually and are more likely to sit on a membership and only whip out their wallets during the especially sweet promos. Big spenders are just gonna keep on making it rain every month, they just need enough interesting stuff to keep the money train rolling.
tl;dr I speculated on alot of stuff.
What Elite does is encourage purchases from the minnows, the small spenders, who are lured in by how great of a package it is, thereby generating some revenue from a demographic that was previously giving you nothing or very little. The downside, of course, is that the whales will get it, too, thereby decreasing the number of credits they purchase at normal price, which means you lose some revenue from that demographic, but that's okay as long as it's balanced by the minnow:whale ratio, and the Elite package isn't so good that whales stop buying at normal price altogether. If you offer a higher tier of Elite, though, that's exactly what can happen. The small spenders aren't going to jump for it, only the whales will, and then you have your whales getting the bulk of what they want (or everything they want) for a 40% discount, and like Shadizar points out, that's undercutting yourself, and will hit your bottom line.
Speaking as an infrequent credit buyer before Elite, Achaea probably makes more off of me now than they did then, but as far as regular credit sales go? I would very much bet that the arrival of Elite saw a drop in regular credit purchases, and was only balanced out by volume/consistency, which is not an infinite well. You can be certain that Elite was very carefully balanced as to how it would impact IRE's bottom line, and I think the fact that our subscription price is a higher $25/mo instead of the more usual $10-15/mo subscriptions of other games (which did take some flak from our community, initially) is proof of that.
But if your resources are short, you are on a budget, you simply CANNOT buy credit packages, but are willing to be patient, Elite is for that. In my opinion it's the "equalizer," because if you use it long enough, and manage it well enough, you end up with tons of great arties, good experience from the boost, and a bunch of lessons, though I don't think those lessons at this point keep up with the demand of multiclass; I am, however, pretty sure you can get a 2nd class with it provided you buy no-brainer lessons.
You cap at 150 cr, multiply that by 12 and that's 1800 bound cr a year, and 9000 cr in 5 years. Past that, and it's over 9000. I'd say many of us could gear up pretty well for 9000 cr and many people play this game for over 5 years, so provided you save towards set goals and don't splurge, you should eventually be well-geared at 25 dollars a month. It's not what I personally have done, but I can see people doing it, and it does mean people can play this game and enjoy it and still have credits without buying giant packages.
I don't have this sort of patience, but some do.
Sorry for being long-winded.
There of course is always the argument that spending countless hours grinding out bashing gold is more cost effective than going to work 40 hours a week and using the extra you have to buy those bulk packages. The discount is great, the promotions each month are generally very generous. The time however, spent bashing and hunting in comparison to the amount of credits that could be bought should the person be working a fair paying job, are leagues below beneficial.
The real card that IRE has to play here, the hole card so-to-speak, is the fact that humanity is inherently lazy. The vast majority of people do not want to sit around for hours grinding out 50-60k in gold per month (rl day) to buy house/cheap market credits. Nor do they want to wait a month for their membership to 1up. Therefore in my opinion, while I myself wouldn't be wealthy enough to spring for the 50-100 dollar per month subscription. I don't believe the amount of bulk credits purchased at a time would be affected much if at all by higher membership brackets.
NOTE: I do however think that the Achaean economy could possibly take a hit in the rubles with the cheaper credits are to gain OOC as opposed to the market rate IC. This is the part where we have to balance, gaining future players that value the game as a well-balanced and equally opportunistic platform and those that just want to powerhouse their way to dragon/combat/riches.
Long live the roleplay junkies that didn't care for credits as much as the role their character played in the game.
I can see your point, as the base monthly pay rate for someone at 7.25 (nearly if not minimum wage), providing IRE is one of those that doesn't really pay their staff as well as they should, that is about what? Part time=800-1000 per month per person and full time wages=1200-1500 per month. 1500xhowever many employees Achaea has on payroll and take that from what the elite membership generates in revenue....yeah...there's no -way- that Achaea would survive off of Elite memberships alone. they'd -have- to keep credit packages as their priority over membership packages.
I concur Miss.
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
then again, maybe Anarchaea -was- the anti anxiety med
Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh."
Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."
I won't paste the image here, since it's so long, but link: http://xkcd.com/1227/
Site: https://github.com/trevize-achaea/scripts/releases
Thread: http://forums.achaea.com/discussion/4064/trevizes-scripts
Latest update: 9/26/2015 better character name handling in GoldTracker, separation of script and settings, addition of gold report and gold distribute aliases.
- Increased crit rate (Like the rate given by wheel) - $12/m
- Increased willpower/endur regen - $8/m
- Increased xp gain (5%) - $5/m
- Increased xp gain (10%) - $12/m
- One more major trait slow - $10/m
- Increased talisman drop rate - $10/m
- and other benefits on subscriptions...
I know I'd take up a few of those to make the game more enjoyable at the same time increasing predictable revenues for IRE.
The fact that all five games have different secondary factors to their elite says you're wrong on that end, too. If that was the case, then Achaea's would give out mayan crowns or globes.
PS. It's the ideas thread. His thread, at that. You can tell someone you disagree, without saying well... What you said.
PPS. Why create another thread for the exact same topic he's discussing? Think it through.
Saying other IRE games do it, therefore Achaea should is disingenuous. They are from the same company, but they're different and unique beasts with their own commercial pressures.