Oracle said:
selling anything desirable at all in an MMORPG game is taboo. Anything in a game that you can get by grinding or purchase is power, and power in my viewshould not be sold. Valuable or desirable items, like a special horse or costume, are also under the umbrella of "power. Players always quaote that since microtransactions are everywhere they are OK.
Yes ''Wakfu sells powerful weapons. EVE Online sells facilitates the purchase of entire fleets and pilots by selling PLEX players can trade to each other for powerful in-game items. Too many MMORTS titles to name sell powerful units, items, and even resources, the lifeblood of most RTS games. EverQuest II, EverQuest, Lord of the Rings Online and many, many others sell mounts and special items that were once considered unique or were available through gameplay only. All of Spacetime Studios' Legends titles, Wizard101 and Pirate101, All Points Bulletin, Mabinogi, Die2Nite... they all sell powerful access, items, or weapons.'' But that doesn't make any of it OK. Its wrong, it't brings class to the game, they destroy the game.
The switch from subscription to free-to-play is bad for achievers. It doesn’t matter how much you try to persuade them otherwise, any payment for any gameplay-affecting item or service is pay-to-win. Anything that improves your chances of getting something gameplay-affecting is pay-to-win. Only purely cosmetic items are not seen as pay-to-win (and even some of those are unacceptable if they give the impression you’ve achieved something you haven’t). Pay-to-win attracts socialisers but puts off achievers (except cheating achievers). Achievers are the core audience for MMOs.
a MMO need a business model to stay open. Cosmetics, fluff and boosters is a lesser or evils if you not running a subscription model. Funny thing is, people moan about sub models so expensive, and then they might sink 100 bucks into the game buying crap during a month still.
As for EVE, I played since 2003. I got enough assets and ISK so I can plex 5 accounts for the next 10 years without raise an eyebrow. You can buy ships and fleets, but doesn't matter if you dont have able bodies to put into them. PLEX is exchange of time and effort. but not the skills that go with it. although you can buy skill injectors these days, but that is trade of skills too, they not created out of thin air. Someone need to sheed their skills for others to buy them.
Now I was talking about the ones that made it right, not the ones that delve in the same cest pool as Plarium. Btw, as for some things like mounts and gear you can get in some theme park mmo's, just to take wow as an example, because, everyone know what that is right? There is stuff you could get from old legacy content, that is hardly done or run anylonger so, newer players just wont get access to it. If such get sold on the market etc. I wouldn't mind that so much.
As for SWTOR you can buy like cool gear, weapons and such on the IGN, but they not as powerfull or good as the good stuff you can get from play the game. And its modular gear you can re-slot from grinded gear.
I'm not really a great achiever in games. Although I want to try consume all content, missions, quests etc, just to experience it. For my sake, playing with friends and shoot he crap on teamspeak etc is what make online gaming fun.
I prefer sub models in online game, but hey people is silly and then you get to places where have a full level 5 wall cost you the same as 6 "full price" copies of GTA 5, because we know the dev cost of Stormfall justify that right Plarium?