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snider uppercut :D

No, item malls do not suddenly make everyone pay tons of money. The common fact in the FTP industry is that 10 percent or so (if you're lucky) actually pay. The rest play for free. If FTP forced the pocketbooks of every player, then Blizzard would not be the most profitable MMO company in the world...(although some FTP companies that publish several titles are coming in a close second.)

FTP is brilliant, in the way it allows free basic access. That free access often turns into more profit than not, thanks again to sub options or the people who pay extra amounts. Look at DDO< LotRo and other examples of Ryzom's "velvet rope" model (not true FTP.)
FTP does not equal trolls, or bad players. If it does, it's the same as any other pay game. Again, if you do not think so, look at WoW and their stellar community -- all who pay 15 bucks a month.

Beau

item mall == p2w, not p2p (pay to win).
If indeed 10% pay, but they pay more than 10 times (on average) what customers for a p2p game pay, it's a higher income business model.
Combine that with typically less overhead (no real accounts department, fewer paid GMs (typically it's all volunteer work in f2p games, at least part employees in p2p games)) and your margins are higher too.

Blizzard is profitable in large part because of bulk (volume of paying accounts), their overhead must be massive.
What I'd like to see some day is a comparison in the average (pay active account) revenue and profit per account between f2p and p2p games taken over many games and a long period. That'd be an interesting comparison to see which business model is the most potentially profitable.

An item mall for the free accounts where everything on sale can also be acquired through normal gameplay but only for paying accounts seems the perfect compromise to me, really.

that might work. And might persuade people to get a paying account instead (especially if they can buy the option to gain higher skill levels than 125 for say a month using the item mall and fall back to 125 after that period expires, with the resulting loss of the ability to use the higher q gear they may have got in the meantime).

What exactly could be for sale?

Just storage options or level caps? I don't see how renting storage or level caps would work out well. Think of the whining when Johnny rents some storage with birthday money and then has to give it up later.

Keep in mind that cats, gear, etc are already f2p (via handouts) unless you drastically restrict trading options. And restricting/changing the trading system would have major consequences. One example, think about guild recruiting f2p ppl (basically everyone new) when you cannot give them anything.

Finally if you sell advancements (skill levels or any advancement "bought" with time investments now), you debase the value of the accomplishments for all existing players. Why level when you can buy your way to the top? This is p2w as Iala observed.

If this game gets an item shop added I'd declare it officially dead.

Ryzoms unique gameplay and experience set it apart from the flood of korean free2play games. With every patch we got more and more mainstream, the wrong direction imho.

I see the trial as a good chance to show people all aspects of the game, if they are convinced they will sub. If not they wouldn't play it anyway.

I completely agree with Arc in this matter. For me item shop would be a reason to unsub and never come back.

Yep IF we would get item shop then i'm i'll be gone for sure

In Ryzom, I admittedly can't think of much. We'd need a major restructuring before it could work here.

My remark that it was the perfect compromise was about MMOs in general. Ryzom was designed for P2P and would thus need major restructuring before that model could work, but when designing an MMO from scratch it can be designed around it from the beginning.

atleast we can dual client forage with an unlimited careplanner :)

The suggesions so far seem reasonably balanced... while I may have been opposed to this sort of thing in the past, would you rather see the Arispotle population dwindle to nothing?

Tico, I'm not thinking about skill boosters that permanently give bonusses, but rather of something that allows a free account to temporarilly unlock higher skill levels.

E.G. for say $5 you can buy an item that will remove the level cap for one month.
$5 more gets you an item that lets you access packer storage for a month.
Another $15 one time fee allows you to buy an apartment, the storage of which is limited to half that of an apartment for a paid account but for $5 a month you can unlock the other half.

Such paid storage options are best sellers in many mmos that don't provide (or severely limit) free storage. $5 a month would be a low amount in fact compared to many (I've seen mmos sell such storage for $25 a month for less slots than you get on a packer). While there might be complaints from people who don't understand the system, it's well enough established in the industry that the majority would understand it.

Such items also wouldn't upset the gameplay balance, as they won't allow free accounts to do anything a paid account can't do, they'd just unlock options of paid accounts temporarilly at a price.

I'd (like most I guess) be dead against nerfing paid accounts in relation to items to be sold in an item mall. That'd be backstabbing loyal old customers in favour of newcomers.
And that'd include selling generic exc and sup mats in the item mall (among other things), or anything else that gives someone a potential advantage over someone who doesn't buy it, whether they have a paid account or not.

Seems to me that the existing trolls of Aris are alive and well. Does Aris really need more? :P

yey aera :D
muahaha super trolled