The great NC P2W divide

[Crumble-KT]

Thats right... a Pay to Win topic to which id like to bring to the attention of both NC and new/existing players.

What i mean by divide is how much NC charges for these so call events to what we can actually afford which has created this massive disadvantage to the average player who cant afford hundreds to even thousands of dollars every few weeks that NC have put out these P2W events. This is the last 6 months worth of P2W events...  First was the Ultimate Enchant stone (P2Winners maxed out here), Second was the Transform Contracts (P2Winners Capitalized here to get Ultimate Transform) Third was the Ultimate Manastone (P2Winners max out their sockets here) and lastly and to which i believe is by far the most expensive event to date is the Stigma "event" and my understanding it takes around 250 Stigma stones... give or take.. to get 1 Stigma to +15! now add this up and its Thousands of US dollars worth! See where im coming from?! Its either you pay your life savings to NC to not only try to be the best but minimum just to compete.

Now what id like ask NC is where is the game going from here? I for one gets rolled every time it comes to PVP even though im maxed out at +15 DT gear due to P2W players on top of a lagging Server that hasn't been figured out yet! i also play often and really enjoy the game but no way in hell can afford the extortionate prices NC charge and find it demoralizing and after almost 10 years of playing am looking a quitting! i do pay some money for this game like Prestige and the odd event and even Luna! I believe you have created a massive division in the game for your own financial gain! You are constantly after new players but yet allow players to spend massive amounts of money to out the people who cant afford... hense the division!!

SO looking forward to the big spender comments...

 

[BCS-KT]

Developer team salary?
3D Artist salary?
Sound artist salary?
QA team salary?
Tester salary?
server cost?
Server technical salary?
PR cost?
GM/ support team salary?
.....
How many player pay for this game now?

I agree with you stigma event is pay to win. the damage between +12 to advance stigma is to big they should make it like daevanion skill increase damage each plus. who have stigma +15 won't stay too far from normal ppl so it will be easier to be accept it ok game need money to operate.
All MMORPG have same problem. So if you can't find the way to enjoin the game you should quit it soon!
 

[Vantheria-DN]

I spend money on this game (not a crazy amount like some people, but a decent amount here and there), and even I agree that it's a bit out of hand these past few months.

But that's not going to change, sadly.

[Rapier-DN]

5 hours ago, Onggong-KT said:

Developer team salary?
3D Artist salary?
Sound artist salary?
QA team salary?
Tester salary?
server cost?
Server technical salary?
PR cost?
GM/ support team salary?
.....
How many player pay for this game now?

I agree with you stigma event is pay to win. the damage between +12 to advance stigma is to big they should make it like daevanion skill increase damage each plus. who have stigma +15 won't stay too far from normal ppl so it will be easier to be accept it ok game need money to operate.
All MMORPG have same problem. So if you can't find the way to enjoin the game you should quit it soon!
 

Just wanted to point out that our population won’t ever cover any significant percentage of ANY of the costs that you mention  It’s more realistic to think about NA operational costs such as support , Loki, our share of Hime, Gideon, server team.

Having too large of a discrepancy between the  heavy P2W and the F2P means that eventually the F2P leave -  if any of you recall some of the early patches this might sound familiar.

[Aly-DN]

4 hours ago, Vantheria-DN said:

*snip*

Damn you, Van! Poor little guy!

9 hours ago, Onggong-KT said:

Developer team salary?
3D Artist salary?
Sound artist salary?
QA team salary?
Tester salary?
server cost?
Server technical salary?
PR cost?
GM/ support team salary?
.....
How many player pay for this game now?

I agree with you stigma event is pay to win. the damage between +12 to advance stigma is to big they should make it like daevanion skill increase damage each plus. who have stigma +15 won't stay too far from normal ppl so it will be easier to be accept it ok game need money to operate.
All MMORPG have same problem. So if you can't find the way to enjoin the game you should quit it soon!
 

+

3 hours ago, Rapier-DN said:

Just wanted to point out that our population won’t ever cover any significant percentage of ANY of the costs that you mention  It’s more realistic to think about NA operational costs such as support , Loki, our share of Hime, Gideon, server team.

Having too large of a discrepancy between the  heavy P2W and the F2P means that eventually the F2P leave -  if any of you recall some of the early patches this might sound familiar.

Both good posts and not really counter to one another.

This (and all games) exist to make money. They are businesses, not charities. It's weird that that has to be pointed out so often. NCSoft exists to make money. As @Onggong-KT points out, developing and maintaining a game isn't cheap. And with a free-to-play model, the company has to entice the players to spend their money. Our model at Aion was one of the best ones I had seen.. up until Aion went f2p in Korea. Before that, we were playing a sub-game squeezed into a f2p model. Now we are playing what the Korean devs actually mean to be f2p. When that change happened, we suddenly started to see the boom in pay2win. And it's only gotten worse and worse.

It's not going to change. And it's not going to get better. Unlike a company like Blizzard, which is pretty much run by gamers, NCWest is run by bean-counters. All they see is dollars and cents. The higher ups at Blizzard realize that if they do things like.. ban hackers.. gamers are more likely to stay, play and spend money. The higher ups at NCWest look at a whale getting banned for hacks and can only see the loss of that one player's money. What they don't see is that we see that the pay2win crowd is treated far differently than the casual spender or the totally free players. And though they may keep the whales, who are those people going to fight? Each other? As @Rapier-DN points out, the f2p crowd will just leave and even the casual spender will get sick of being beat to death by whales.

[Arhangelos]

Aion NA is in terminal cancer, first the developers took wrong decisions which has nothing to do with our publisher. But our publisher took a cancerous body and instead of trying to remove the cancer, they injected it with more cancer by regional nerfs and changes.

Long story made short, in 6.0 NCWest decided that since Aion is dying, assisted suicide is the best and most humane way to go. They took EVERY possible wrong decision for our regional nerfs, there were hardly any regional benefits as much as there were nerfs, I am more than sure they had a special team that worked hard to find the way that will work the least so they took that route, bad events, nerfed stats and features, nerfed drops, lethargic update speeds, non existent forum replies, no real patch information at every patch, bugs that took months to fix, bans on badly implemented features etc.

...
Once this made the majority of f2p players leave, any possible micro transactions from f2p players (like prestige) were non existent, then they had to rely on p2w tactics, which is like injecting an ill body with deadly poison to kill it without pain.

We are definitely in the point of no return at least in NCWest.

Since 7.5 I cannot play the game anymore, the lag is constant and there is absolutely no way would they ever change it or fix it. This is a game feature now.

I even die from MAD-74C mob in luna because it seems to be far away and when I get out of lag, I am already dead.

[Shy-DN]

The game has always been p2w since f2p and it will never change. I am a free player and i can manage to get by and still compete by farming on my alt accounts and wait for good free events to feed my main. I was able to +15 4 of my stigmas with the stigma stones i got for free from the stormwing event. I am out of stones now so i'l just save kinah and hope that someone sell a +15 stigma my way. 

AND to the OP, I do not know if you are playing by yourself or with friends, but its definitely a lot easier to pvp with a group  (a decent one) than to go solo.

Sorry bad english, not my language.

[Aly-DN]

1 hour ago, Shy-DN said:

The game has always been p2w since f2p and it will never change. I am a free player and i can manage to get by and still compete by farming on my alt accounts and wait for good free events to feed my main. I was able to +15 4 of my stigmas with the stigma stones i got for free from the stormwing event. I am out of stones now so i'l just save kinah and hope that someone sell a +15 stigma my way. 

AND to the OP, I do not know if you are playing by yourself or with friends, but its definitely a lot easier to pvp with a group  (a decent one) than to go solo.

Sorry bad english, not my language.

It wasn't that pay2win when the game first went f2p in the US and EU. You have to understand, at that time and for several years after we went f2p, the game was still a sub game in Korea. That's why, for instance, a lot of skins we could buy at the shop were not sellable or tradeable. Those skins were actually rewards from events in Korea. They wanted players to actually play to get them since they were getting $$ the longer people played. That's why so many of the events were afk events. The Korean players were paying to stay online. It wasn't until the game went f2p in KOREA did we really kick our pay2win into high gear. That's when we finally saw what NCSoft would do with a game DESIGNED around a free to play model. And it stinks.