SlickRiptide

Believe it or not, I know a game that actually has that power... at least if smashing the coins in your face can be considered mauling...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHGYf_IEh28

If one of the signature arc missions involves dressing in your underwear and investigating a dark basement with a broken light switch,then we'll know.

I don't think the current list of products in the store actually contains any "whale" items. I'm no whale, but I'd spend $10 on a powerset if I liked it well enough. In the case of Street Justice, for instance, I have been waiting for, oh, close to eight years for a real fisticuffs-themed power set. There's no real question of my buying it, regardless of any monthly stipend. OTOH, $10 is right at the edge of what I'd find acceptable. In fact, weird as it might sound, I'd find $11 to be too much. I guess that's the $9.99 principle at work.

As far as the OP goes, I find the exercise of attempting to establish some objective price for a powerset and then insisting that anything more than that is gouging to be both futile and to be missing the point.

Pricing isn't set to some objective value based on past performance. You can't determine some value that is an objective "powerset value" any more than you can set some objective value for a barrel of oil and then insist that all barrels of oil should sell for that price. There are factors that influence the price - demand, supply, the source, the quality, the type, the season of the year.

It's no different with powersets or costumes or emotes or what-have-you. Until you can quantify the costs involved with developing a powerset and then quantify the demand for that powerset in order to do a revenue projection, you can't say much of anything about its value.

Thinking that you can somehow chop out the powersets of Going Rogue as being X% of the retail price, and then assigning that as a generic value of all powersets ever made or that will ever be made is the height of silliness. You might as well take every booster pack and chop out the emotes and come up with a "value" for emotes. I'm sure that such a value would show that Boombox emotes make the base client of the game a huge value...

*EDIT*

I'll just point out that one reason that you can't assign an objective value is that value is not uniform. The "premium" powersets are not premium simply because Paragon/NCSoft decided to call them that. The developers clearly feel that these powersets offer more bang for the buck than previous powersets. The game mechanics behind them are more complex than the basic powersets and the graphics have a higher degree of "flash", if you will. An objective evaluation, if such a thing is possible, can't be truly objective unless it takes those factors into account.

The number of games that let you earn in game currency by playing the game is still pretty small. I think that someone needs to prove the business case for doing it,using proof that it really boosted revenue.

One internetz to you, BTW, for the Illuminatus reference.

If you're going to continually diss the people you propose to discuss the problem with then it's not going to be much of a discussion.

As for the free points, they are relevant because they affect the "monetary value" of the powersets or anything else in the store.

As an example:

A well-known game publisher uses a virtual currency (I'll call it "Bux" to avoid naming them). Bux sell for 1000 for $10. You would think, then, that a piece of clothing in one of their games that costs 500 Bux would translate into $5, wouldn't you?

The things is, that the conversion between dollars and Bux is neither flat nor fixed.

When you buy Bux in quantity, you receive bonus Bux, effectively creating a discount of between 5% to 20% depending on the quantity.

Moreover, as pointed out upstream, Bux semi-regularly go on sale at a deep discount for limited periods of time. A typical discount is 35%, but at certain times it goes as high as 50% In the case of this particular publisher, there was an Event that prevented access to their games for a period of time and one way they made it up to their users was by offering a 66% discount for a short time.

Clearly, such a deep discount is an unusual event. Regardless, it has a dramatic effect on the "value" of Bux for anyone who snapped up a large quantity during that sale. I personally spent $60 on Bux at that time and I received $180 worth of purchasing power.

This is the important thing to consider - You can't look at the powersets, for instance, as being "worth $10". They are "worth" 800 Paragon Points. That is all. The value is going to be determined by the exchange rate of points to dollars.

If I was spending my Bux on these powersets, then the "monetary value" to me would be $3.33, which I would find quite reasonable. (Too bad I CAN'T spend my Bux on them. *laugh*)

Another player buying points at retail price might feel differently. Then again, she might not.

I participated in a beta test of a Facebook social game, and in discussing the format of the game, the devs spoke of a "feature" that the Facebook people had told them they would need. It seems that there is a class of people who LIKE to spend large sums of money. Maybe it's because it makes them feel good. Maybe they simply have a lot to spend and thus their own cash has little value (another topic entirely). Whatever it is, this class of users exists and Facebook has even nicknamed them "whales". Facebook advised that the developers of this game should deliberately include some big-ticket items purely to appeal to the "whales", and encourage them to spend their money. In a freemium game, the value of courting such players should be intuitively obvious.

When you see $20 for a shark mount, that's the "whale principle" at work.

Are powersets "whale items"? I don't really think so, but it's worth acknowledging that pricing isn't always about setting low prices on things. It may seem counter-intuitive but sometimes value comes from setting high prices on things. Wine is a real-world example of a luxury item that can be viewed by conneiseurs as being worth more simply because it COSTS more. If we were discussing celebrities, we'd call it "famous for being famous".

On a final note, sales often go the other way. That is, items in the store will have their point costs reduced. That also affects the "monetary value" of an item. This is compounded when you happen to own a lot of discounted points. When I use my 66% discounted Bux and buy an item that is discounted 50% in points, then my actual dollar cost is hardly anything at all. Yes, these are real example of real life, not made-up examples.

So, the "worth" of the powersets isn't really that easy to peg. Is a retail prices of 800 points a little steep? I dunno. I'd probably pay it so I guess my answer is "it is worth 800 points". The "value", after all, is whatever people are willing to pay for it, not what they are happy to pay for it.

Actually... You just hit the "free" nail squarely on the head. See, if I could spend $50 one-time and have HBO forever, I'd be a happy camper because I don't want a monthly cable bill and I don't give a hang about 90% of the available subscription channels.

This is exactly WHY the freemium model works. There is a whole market of people out there who avoid subscriptions on principle but who are not at all averse to buying individual "things" periodically. Especially when buying it means you "own" it instead of "rent" it monthly.

The Paragon Rewards program caters to those people.

"Let me get this straight - I buy that costume pack I like, and I buy Praetoria because I like the idea of switching sides. I get these tokens that give me extra stuff and if I just spend $5 more, I'll have enough tokens to fill that tier and I'll be able to use the mission architect too? I better find another costume pack to buy."

In the cable example, it would be that I buy a bunch of those premium channels and by virtue of spending $100, I start getting HD for free in addition. Meanwhile, you are spending $20 a month to get all of the channels, but you lose those channels if you stop paying.

The free membership DOES look pretty good from that standpoint. It all depends on where you think the value lies and what your feelings are in regards to renting versus owning.

Don't be too sure. All I heard Matt say in yesterday's Ustream was "signature character". He didn't say anything about "Surviving Eight" or "Freedom Phalanx". "Signature Character" could mean Azuria or Fusionette or Lord Nemesis if Matt and Company felt they could create a dramatic story out of their death.

All that said, my inf is still on Manticore, though this business of Positron being sweet on Numina might be a way of signing her death warrant... er, her undeath warrant... or something.

A character needs a signature power. The traits of cancer are that it spreads indiscriminately and that it wrecks the parts of the body that it contaminates.

I'd make a case for a necro or demon summoning mastermind with a poison secondary.

I'm also on Facebook and I AM a misanthropic curmudgeon. It's okay, though, because I don't like it. Facebook, I mean.

Note that this is speculation, but I suspect booster packs will no longer be offered. It will be more of an ala carte thing, though there might be discounted bundles to encourage some big-ticket spending (where $20 would be considered "big ticket" by most people).

Well then I don't see what "losing" low-res Atlas Park to a high-res makeover has to do with Galaxy City being deleted and relegated to being a "museum" as you put it.

It's my opinion, which I've alluded to earlier, that Atlas and Galaxy TOGETHER are the heart and soul of the game. They reflect opposing principles while simultaneously embracing the seed of the other. The real loss here is that the "heart and soul" is being diminished to something monolithic.

That's philosophy, though, and I don't expect everyone to agree with me even if I AM right.

That was particularly effective with the Jim Carrie avatar on display when I read it.

As for Statesman being the face of the game, that hasn't prevented him from dying twice already. Superman is the "face" of DC in many ways and they managed to create a whole saga about killing him, and he's still around in the end.

I'd say that nobody is immune, but I'll also say that, given how many supporting characters die the True Death in the story of Paragon City, that I'll be very disappointed if a signature character of any sort dies a "comic book death" instead of a True Death.

Heh. I'm sure that this is probably very funny, but you know - when you have to explain the joke, etc..., etc...

So, you're suggesting that instead of revamping Atlas Park that they should delete it instead?