The Crown Predicament. What would you like?

Solanum

As most of you are aware, in the near future this game is going to feature a lovely +subscription, granting extra benefits, amongst which a lovely 1500 crowns of spending money for vanity items, potions and shards, or actual downloadable content which won't require a subscription.

For us loyal fans whom have been here since the game launch, took up free days to hang out with the groundskeeper, clumsily stumbled trough content wearing the digital urn named heavy armor, suffered trough the incredibly low soft caps, and whom have witnessed this games admittedly amazing progress and improvement along the way there is a very special reward. 100 crowns per month.

Let that sink in, in the first month a new customer get's all the features, the improved balance we hope to experience with patch 1.6, and if they pay their subscription fee for a single month, 1500 points. (Which is equal to about 15 months of the old subscription point wise)

This makes me, and possibly others like me feel a little bit unappreciated. Certainly my time and money is worth as much as that of a new member of the community. Not just a mere 1/15th. The alternative of offering us the full amount of crowns leads to another predicament.

Imagine receiving the full value granted in crowns. That would be about 11 months worth, plus 500 for purchasing the game 17000 crowns. I don't know about the prices yet, but that seems like loads. What are we going to spend that all on?

The crown shop will be rather new, and limited in it's wares, DLC's will be released over the time of several months, and hopefully not cost more then a months worth of crowns. And even when granted half the normal amount we'll still have 8750. Which will keep us soothed for quite a couple of months.

So, let's talk solutions! How to repay those whom have been here from the start, supporting this game, without breaking the crown economy?

Several months of free membership? Or perhaps insanely awesome items for a very high price in the crown shop?

What would you consider a suitable reward or solution?

Jitterbug

if every month remaining on your current subscription results in 1500 crowns wouldn't our 11+ months result in something like 17000 crowns, or am I way off?

Lynx7386

I can see why they wont give 1500 for previous months, they dont want to flood the cash shop economy right away and devalue everything. 17k~ crowns is probably enough to buy the entire cash shop's worth of starting items and anything else they come up with for months.

Given the allotment of 1500 points per month for subscribers, I'm going to give a rough estimate that you'll see prices like 2000-3000 crowns for mounts, 1000-2000 crowns for vanity pets, and under 1000 crowns for costumes and the like. That's comparing it to other current cash shop f2p games like SWTOR and DCUO. Essentially, anyone without an abundance of extra months on their subscription is going to have a maximum of around 2600 crowns when TU goes live, which means we're going to have to dump additional cash into the shop on day 1 just to be able to afford that guar mount.

It's all about working the numbers to get as much money as they can per customer. There are dozens of 'tricks' used by f2p/b2p mmo devs to milk a little more money here and there. For example, with star trek online (at least months ago, havent played recently), most items would cost in multiples of 500 zen (their currency). You'd have a new starship on their cash shop that would cost 3000 zen, for instance. Their website, however, only allowed you to purchase zen in multiples of 400, so you ended up having to purchase 3200 zen to exchange for that starship, leaving you with a spare 200 that you couldnt really spend on anything.

We're going to start seeing these underhanded tactics used in ESO, no matter what we do to try and prevent it. Giving 100 crowns per month for previous subscribers is just the tip of the iceberg.