The future of PL ... long term recommendations; my most important post for this year

[Kalielle]

Thank you for the excellent post! It's rare to see people thinking so in-depth about the game. I agree with most of what you said, with the exception of the idea of separating platinum and non-platinum users in dungeons. I think this would widen the divide and the tension between people using different kinds of elixirs, rather than mitigate it. Unless the non-elixir dungeons would have some sort of bonus to them, the non-elixir users would feel excluded. On the other hand adding a bonus for non-plat users would alienate those who spend the most on the game, so it wouldn't be feasible either.

There is the perception that STS has been milking people of platinum too hard while players do not feel as if they are getting their money's worth. I have asked some players in my guild. Apparently I am cheap by comparison. To date, I have purchased "only" 4,800 platinum. Others have spent $500 - $1,000 USD on the game.

If that's true - and I certainly also heard guildmates express similar thoughts about how they can't believe how much money they spent on plat - then we really can't blame STS for what the game became. I think they didn't want the game to be this way but they had to bend to what the market demanded. We made this happen as consumers. Think of how PL used to be in the early days - a very fair game that did not sell power for real money. And what was the result? People would complain when a dungeon like AO3 with tons of new content cost 20 platinum. It was a very fair well-designed game, and I bet it was making a lot less money than it should have been. So then the game turned around and did what it said it would not do, and sold power - and it worked.

A lot of my friends who spent a lot of money on elixirs are now complaining (months later!) that the game has become all about platinum and no longer satisfies them. Take a minute to think about the irony of that. I am grateful to them for supporting the game, and for making my leveling life easier when I was running with them. But I think it shows that as consumers we have no idea what we want. How can we expect STS to know what makes us happy until we figure it out ourselves?