Allods Online Cash Shop Woes
I played a little Allods Online during the closed beta and was impressed with what I saw. It felt polished for a free to play game, and there was just the right balance of WoW clone and original features to give it a broad appeal. This week the cash shop opened, and boy are the Allods players not impressed.
While this poll question might as well have been “Does the Pope where a funny hat?”, it’s clear that a lot of players are not happy with the cash shop pricing. The Allods team have responded to these concerns with some customer service speak, but not much beyond that.
One item in particular which has attracted a lot of controversy is “perfume” which can be used to remove the debuff affecting characters after they are defeated. This debuff lowers character stats by up to 25% and can last up to 45 minutes. A perfume provides immunity to this debuff for 30 minutes. Perfumes are particularly important for players who wish to engage in PvP as they are likely to suffer frequent defeats and the debuff makes it very difficult to compete.
It seems like a good idea though, right? Let’s introduce a very harsh death penalty and then give players a way to mitigate it by paying? Wrong.
One of the key advantages to a microtransaction system (from the developer point of view) is that it enables the minority of players with the means and the desire to spend very large amounts of money on your game to do so. The trade-off you accept for this is that the majority of your players will spend little or nothing. Of course you want to provide people with an incentive to purchase, but it’s important to do this without making people feel that they have to purchase because the vast majority of them never will. In the case of perfumes it’s hard to see how anyone can take part in PvP without access to them so for a lot of players that’s a very strong pressure to purchase.
Selling temporary buffs has the additional effect that people feel this pressure to purchase on a regular basis. When faced with this many players will, quite reasonably, draw a comparison with a subscription game and find that the free to play game can be significantly more expensive.
I believe it’s a mistake in a microtransaction system to try to encourage the majority of players to spend regularly, which seems to me to be the design of the death debuff/perfume system in Allods Online. If that’s your goal you would be better off with a subscription model and all the advantages that offers. Instead, accept that most players will spend little or nothing and concentrate on providing lots of extra goodies for those who do wish to pay.
