NewBlacksmurf wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

rotaugen454 wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

A moderator removed my reply from another thread as it "threatened to derail" the discussion because it focused on the cost of the mount (but, funnily enough, kept the positive post that I responded to that ALSO discusses the cost of the mount), so I'll respond here again.

kevlarto_ESO wrote: »

I think it is a pretty cool mount, I am not going to buy one myself, I enjoy seeing others ride by on them. It seems a little Lord of the Ringish, but oh well.

But if you can afford one and like it by all means buy one, it's your money your game and your fun, you are not a sucker for enhancing your game play, the haters are most likely the players that think everything should be free or mommy and daddy will not open up the credit card for them LOL

Anyone who purchases this mount is absolutely a sucker. CDN $50 is almost the price of an entire new game. Think about what you're buying, here: it's an object that gets you from point A to point B. Is that equivalent in value to an entire new video game?

I don't want the mount for free: I want to pay a reasonable amount for it (2500 crowns max).

Absolutely a sucker if you buy? Would you buy it for $1? That is what the $20 (in discounted crowns) is equivalent to for some people. You might as well say anyone is a sucker who buys a coffee at starbucks, which costs as much as several coffees elsewhere.

That's a poor analogy. This isn't about premium mounts being cheaper in other games; this is about inconsistent store pricing in this game. If Starbucks started randomly charging $5 for coffee after consistently charging $2, and people continued to buy their coffee, then yeah, they're suckers. I can buy two full freaking DLCs in this game for cheaper than this mount. Are you people HONESTLY suggesting that the Elk Mount is indeed worth more to you than Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild COMBINED?

Someone gets it.
Thanks for this context

Yep, this

I was really happy to see this mount priced so high. I bought Overwatch with the money I would have spent on it and still had enough to pick up another game on top of that. Cheers, ESO, between this, crown crates, and stahlrim motif with 5 mimic stones, you've converted me from a buy-all-the-things crown store fan to someone who's moving on to other games and scaling back on ESO to a more casual level. Well done.

Somewhere in an executive office or a boardroom lurk the money people who don't really care about or even play games, who don't think too highly of the idea people who create the games, the visual artists, the coders that make it all possible, the community relations staff... they don't like us much either except as sources of profit. Every large company has these people in their executive offices and boardrooms. Their products are just a means to an end and are gauged strictly on their profitability.

Once upon a time in gaming we were not as aware of them and their influence... back before the faux-free 2P gaming revolution came along with its intrusive cash shops, gambling boxes, multiple currencies, etc. They were always there but gaming profitability was simple: build a good game and the $$ will come.

These days though you can't help but see their greedy minds at work and if you look carefully enough you can get some insight about just what they think of us.

It really must be an uncomfortable and embarrassing situation for those game-creating workers caught in the middle and especially those whose job it is to interface with the community. I've had jobs like that and worked for people like that... it's not fun having to toe the line and pretend to promote the PR message.

Once ESO added a cash shop, it was inevitable that Slick Willie and his minions would get progressively more and more influence over what we're sold and at what price.

Some of us are better than others at tuning out their disrespectful message and carry on enjoying the parts of the actual game play that we enjoy. I suspect the less you remember about the pre-cash shop MMO playing days, the more likely you are to accept gambling boxes and price gouging as just the normal ways that games are.

I also suspect that the more you care about the game: what it was, what it is, what it could be, the more likely you are to be really put-off by some of this stuff. I bet it's not just us and there are people designing and coding parts of this game right now who also cringe when they see Slick Willie flex his corporate muscle and undermine the work they do with conspicuous displays of greed and disrespect.

rotaugen454 wrote: »

Phinix1 wrote: »

Price exclusivity encourages egocentric personality disorders and alienates the majority of customers.

You will always make more money selling 1000 items for $10 than 100 for $30.

If people crave exclusivity they should have to do something more than drop a credit card number, which is meaningless. They should do something in-game that requires actual skill, and represents an actual accomplishment.

ZOS should learn what most professional marketing teams already understand and stop dragging what has been an excellent B2P model through the absolute worst of the micro-grab muck.

But how do you know they will sell 10 times as many? What actual game sales data do you have to back it up? People keep using this arguement, but can't actually prove any of it. It may very well be they sell 10 times as much, but it could be they sell twice as much after cutting the price to less than a third. The only ones with that data are the analysts on their side. The rest of us are guessing repulsed.

ftfy

Phinix1 wrote: »

rotaugen454 wrote: »

But how do you know they will sell 10 times as many? What actual game sales data do you have to back it up? People keep using this arguement, but can't actually prove any of it.

The statistics hold true across billions of transactions from a vast sampling of global markets over many, many years. It is true for far more than ZOS sales. It is a well known and well established fact which is why people continue to use it.

The majority of customers will not buy over-priced items because the majority of people do not have large reservoirs of disposable income. This is true for customers at Walmart as much as the customers at ESO.

Sure there will always be mentally imbalanced people who think they are somehow cool for buying the Nordstrom gimmick rock-in-leather for $85 bucks just because they can, but they are the naked Emperor.

No one thinks their clothes are beautiful. Everyone secretly thinks they are tools and laughs at their desperation to prove their worth as people through overpriced purchasing.

Not true, otherwise companies would not sell "overpriced" items. The business of business is business, as Milton Friedman would say, and they will do what they can to maximize profits. They aren't out there to be your friend, they are out there to make money. If they make more selling a particular product at a low price, they will. If they will make more selling it at a high price, they will. The future prices of mounts in the game will be a good indicator of what their data is showing them, as opposed to blind guesses by us on the forums.

I'm not going to read this thread. I can just assume it's the same back and fourth as the scam crates. I just wanted to add my input...

*** this rip off. Every time I see another poor decision, it brings me one step closer to not caring enough about the craftbag to pay a sub anymore. It's disgraceful to support such sleeze and every poor decision made like this is another shovel of dirt digging the grave to put this game to rest.

Phinix1 wrote: »

rotaugen454 wrote: »

Not true, otherwise companies would not sell "overpriced" items. The business of business is business, as Milton Friedman would say, and they will do what they can to maximize profits. They aren't out there to be your friend, they are out there to make money. If they make more selling a particular product at a low price, they will. If they will make more selling it at a high price, they will. The future prices of mounts in the game will be a good indicator of what their data is showing them, as opposed to blind guesses by us on the forums.

I could never be friends with ZOS management (ZOS artists and community members sure), because I don't respect them. I think they are greedy and their skill at business is abysmal. At best they are chasing some fad of the moment formula and becoming increasingly desperate as they chase away customers doing it.

What lead people to believe that running an honest business and running a profitable business were mutually exclusive?

I have never heard a single one of the "greed is just good business" crowd explain this beyond "I like money though" or "it's just the way it is."

Obviously it isn't. WoW is obviously the MMO model you are all chasing. They made BILLIONS over a decade and never once stooped to cheap b-rate gambling shop micro transactions to do it.

Explain to me how you think it is just good business to obsessively pursue a model not embraced by the ACTUAL good business?

I'll wait.

If they thought they would make more otherwise, they would do it that way. It's that simple. If they thought they would make more using the WoW model, they would do it. If there isn't enough volume using their current model, they will change it. If it hits projections, they won't. Each consumer has to decide for themselves what value they place on any particular item, and the overall market will dictate what direction things go. That's just how reality works. It will be driven entirely by sales. Expecting anything else is idealistic and not grounded on reality. They may well drop prices, IF they don't get the expected sales. Same goes for the crates. Same goes for absolutely anything sold by any company. If the price would have to drop to a level they can't make a target profit, they shut down. Ask anyone with decades of experience working in corporate environments.

I dont care about the mount, but the price does suck. What this and clown crates tells me is that I can expect more of this type of money grab. More power to them, but I will find something else to spend my sub on in the future. I 'invest' my entertainment budget and ESO has become not worth it. I'll keep playing for free, of course, until something better comes along.

GrumpyMuffin wrote: »

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Phinix1 wrote: »

You will always make more money selling 1000 items for $10 than 100 for $30.

But you will ALWAYS make less money selling 1000 items for $10 than selling 800 for $30.
You don't know the elasticity/price factor of this particular product.

The stack them high, sell them cheap model has served Walmart very well for the last fifty years. There is a reason that tesco sell many more beans each week than waitrose in the uk. More people visit the cheaper retailer than the other shop which sells the same items for a higher price.

That's valid for beans. Not necessarily for an ESO mount.
Typically, food products have a very strong elasticity (prices rise => sales drop, and vice-versa), mostly due to a very high interchangeability of goods (buy it next shop or eat something else).
Typically, energy products such as oil have a very low elasticity (people will keep buying it no matter how high prices rise, because they NEED it and it has little to no replacement)
In some cases, the elasticity is negative (people will buy less if prices drop). That's valid in most luxury businesses such as perfumes, fashion, etc. where a cheap product is perceived as a low quality product.

You don't know the elasticity of a mount in ESO. Neither do I.

rotaugen454 wrote: »

GrumpyMuffin wrote: »

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Phinix1 wrote: »

You will always make more money selling 1000 items for $10 than 100 for $30.

But you will ALWAYS make less money selling 1000 items for $10 than selling 800 for $30.
You don't know the elasticity/price factor of this particular product.

The stack them high, sell them cheap model has served Walmart very well for the last fifty years. There is a reason that tesco sell many more beans each week than waitrose in the uk - even when applying a weighting for the differences in store numbers -More people visit the cheaper retailer than the other shop which sells the same items for a higher price.

While talking statistics, I'm also willing to bet the crown store follows the 80/20 model, with 80pc of the sales go to just 20pc of people. It is the 20pc that Zos base decisions on, not the masses.

Yes, if there were an exact duplicate of ESO selling the same crown store items at lower prices, they would outperform ESO. But we are talking about a purely luxury item, not a loaf of Wonderbread that is exactly the same regardless of what store you buy it at. I can see why the mount is not worth the price to a lot of people. But the righteous indignation is something else. Do these same people go into stores and start shouting at the employees about the prices? It's either buy or don't buy. The aggregate sales will determine what happens next. Getting upset about it won't.

You don't get it do you? We're not here because of the cash shop. We're here because of the game. The cash shop is something that's added to get at our wallets while we play a game. Something that takes development time and effort that could be re-directed toward making the game better.

Buy/don't buy doesn't even begin to cover it. It's just the simplest of simplistic rationalizations.

Iselin wrote: »

rotaugen454 wrote: »

GrumpyMuffin wrote: »

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Phinix1 wrote: »

You will always make more money selling 1000 items for $10 than 100 for $30.

But you will ALWAYS make less money selling 1000 items for $10 than selling 800 for $30.
You don't know the elasticity/price factor of this particular product.

The stack them high, sell them cheap model has served Walmart very well for the last fifty years. There is a reason that tesco sell many more beans each week than waitrose in the uk - even when applying a weighting for the differences in store numbers -More people visit the cheaper retailer than the other shop which sells the same items for a higher price.

While talking statistics, I'm also willing to bet the crown store follows the 80/20 model, with 80pc of the sales go to just 20pc of people. It is the 20pc that Zos base decisions on, not the masses.

Yes, if there were an exact duplicate of ESO selling the same crown store items at lower prices, they would outperform ESO. But we are talking about a purely luxury item, not a loaf of Wonderbread that is exactly the same regardless of what store you buy it at. I can see why the mount is not worth the price to a lot of people. But the righteous indignation is something else. Do these same people go into stores and start shouting at the employees about the prices? It's either buy or don't buy. The aggregate sales will determine what happens next. Getting upset about it won't.

You don't get it do you? We're not here because of the cash shop. We're here because of the game. The cash shop is something that's added to get at our wallets while we play a game. Something that takes development time and effort that could be re-directed toward making the game better.

Buy/don't buy doesn't even begin to cover it. It's just the simplest of simplistic rationalizations.

Oh, I get it. No one joined ESO because they heard that they added a cash shop. I also know there are a lot of people who want the mount, but it is priced beyond a level they want to spend, so they yell about it. The game can be played without spending a penny at the cash shop.

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Phinix1 wrote: »

You will always make more money selling 1000 items for $10 than 100 for $30.

But you will ALWAYS make less money selling 1000 items for $10 than selling 800 for $30.
You don't know the elasticity/price factor of this particular product.

And even more money if you sell 1000 items for $30

This is not just any random thrift shop Elk. This is a Great Elk! so its gonna be more expensive.

Aurielle wrote: »

That's a poor analogy. This isn't about premium mounts being cheaper in other games; this is about inconsistent store pricing in this game. If Starbucks started randomly charging $5 for coffee after consistently charging $2, and people continued to buy their coffee, then yeah, they're suckers. I can buy two full freaking DLCs in this game for cheaper than this mount. Are you people HONESTLY suggesting that the Elk Mount is indeed worth more to you than Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild COMBINED?

As can be seen in the game, yes, people do feel that the Great Elk mount is worth more than the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild combined.

I also want to point out that ZOS is not randomly charging 4500 Crowns for this mount. They are very deliberately charging 4500 Crowns for this mount.