Yeah. Paying for cool, well-coded items would be the way to go; just don’t make an obvious competitive bias for paying customers.

If ep2 is like ep1, I’d be unwilling to pay a cent for it. Kingdom of Loathing has far more content and players, yet they maintain fine through a donation system. Oh, and they have no ads.

The site would be dead in weeks if any/all new content required pay. Perhaps you’d get fifty people to pay, a very liberal estimate, but this would instantly kill forumwarz domination, and you’d basically never get a new member. At this point, the people who are devoted enough to pay would quit and throw their money at something else.

That, and I donated $15 to keep this game running and I’d be pretty ****ed if I had to keep paying more and more to keep playing/stay competitive.

Evil Trout Posted:

It’s good to hear your thoughts, truly, but I really think you guys are getting a little out of hand about a pricing scheme that hasn’t even been decided on.

The simple truth is that we don’t know enough about the economics of Forumwarz yet to make clear calls about the future. The fact is the game costs money to develop and run, and if we can’t clear those costs we can’t sustain it. So far you guys have been very generous and we love you for it, but it’s only been up for a matter of weeks! We don’t know how much money we can expect to take in from brownie point purchases and ads, as we have only a few days’ worth of data to go on. The most important thing to us is to keep the game running and keep improving that. To do so, a certain amount of income is required.

Now, in our internal discussions where we’ve talked about Episode 2 having a cost, we’ve constantly been saying “it will be free for existing donors.” The idea being, if you’ve given us ANYTHING, we plan to give you the new episode for free. I didn’t want to make any promises but if you have already supported us, episode 2 will be free, period.

We are not making all new content pay only. Trust me when I say we are planning new features that are absolutely free to play like Forumwarz is now. The existing free content is not going anywhere either.

I understand that in other RPG games allow you to buy items and stuff, but I’ve always been against the idea of someone buying a better ability than someone else. You’ll notice that so far none of our options give you a leg up in competitions.

yeah well please just don’t go with the Game Forge “HURRR IM LEVAL 2 BUT I KILLS U LEVAL 17 PLAYER CUZ I SPENDS 9.99” pricing/game balance model that they use in Space Pirates and Ogayme.

Evil Trout Posted:

I didn’t want to make any promises but if you have already supported us, episode 2 will be free, period.

You, my friend, = awesome. I havent payed anything yet, but i plan too as soon as Jala figure out something.

And btw. Crash coredump, you. are. a fabulous person. Seriously, you suck man.

Log in to see images!

ITT: Truth =)

But for serials, everyone needs to take a chilly pill, since this is all rampant speculation. Hate to be the tiresome voice of reason, but wait for the final decision before frothing at the mouth.