Digo Market Is Overpriced!, How can anyone afford this stuff?! Options

[PhotonKitsune]

Yes I think Furcadia's prices on Digo Market are outrageously overpriced. There aren't alot of people in this day and age who can afford (or would have top priority) to buy items that are 100+ from the marketplace. And where exacty does that money go?

Don't mistake me for someone who just hates the game; I love this game, it's the only game where you can create and observe things without the use of grossly overpriced Adobe products or extreme knowledge of codes to make models move. It's also very simple and favors the artist with little knowledge or interest in codes and the script is very simple. In fact, this whole game is simple! Their graphics (though improving) are pixelated, they never use models, their script is kept simple and the commands like sitting and laying are very basic. So why exactly DOES this game cost so much?

A friend of mine recently questioned a Beekin about the game's ridiculous prices and posted the response to me that they got from the beekin: "Because it takes alot of money to maintain a game"

This is true; it DOES cost money to maintain a game but I've also seen more complex games with way cheaper items. Example:A game called Mabinogi, which is not a famous game but the game featured 3-D graphics, a load of skills, quests, customizable items, character age changing and the ability to compose music, had premium items for sale. They had a fox avatar that acted as your pet that followed you and that you could control. It also fought with you and had it's own level system (if I remember properly). Know how much it was? $7.00 for a fox. Compared to Furc's foxen, which is much less detailed and doesn't have the script, is a 43 dollar difference! (in US dollars) I dunno about you but that's alot to alot of people. Another example would be RuneScape, probably a more famous name to people, who only had one premium subscription available: Membership. It was 4.00 back when I played and the price might've changed but the game was still more advanced with various skills to raise a player amount that likely toppled over Furc's. More players means more space required for the servers, and there were alot of servers! Also note that there were a good amount of members on this game and that membership DID offer ALOT more to the player but it wasn't expensive and the free players weren't totally left out of just about everything that came to the game. Need other examples still? What about FlyFF or Perfect World? All of which had premium items but buying them only enhanced your playing ability and you were almost never barred from something like special color choices or the ability to turn off certain things on your menu (in Furc's case: Turning off flood prevention or running fast for a long time blockers) just because you didn't have the money or bank access to pay for it.

Which leads me to my second topic: Silver Sponsorship. What exactly DO we like about SS? How about the fact that without it you're overloaded with ridiculous restrictions like not being able to make your dream bigger or unable to preform certain actions? I will admit that getting free DS after a time is a nice feature and totally appropriate for a membership but some of these features that really should be allowed to the free players are just stupid. I heard at the Town Meeting SS would be able to have special customization for their characters. Well where does that leave the free players? So they get to use something that rightfully should be available to every player in a game based on character appearance and story? And then there's the matter of Silver Sponsors being able to turn off the 'your throat is tired' message in their dreams or turning off the control disable if a player is moving (running) really fast for a prolonged amount of time. What about free players who own a racing dream? Is DEP basically telling them their imaginations are restricted to their wallets? Because that's what alot of this sounds like to me.

I brought up DS in the last topic. Now I'd like to address it fully. What are DragonScales? Their Furc's equivalent to in-game currency. Wat makes them different from other games' in-game currency? Well, let me break it down for you. Most games have their currency for sale in their premium store, such as Digo Market is. Most games even compare it to real-life money, usually depending on where the game was made but it's usually USD (United States Dollars) but what makes other games different is that for 1 USD, you cold get somewhere between 10 and 1,000 in-game dollars. The fact that Furc places 1 DS to 1 USD is pretty outrageous, especially since the point of doing it is so you can pay less for digos. Paying with DS is the same as paying with real money but the means can be different for getting both so in reality, it doesn't save you anything but the fact that you can get DS through other means actually makes it worse.
For example. Say you're an artist, much like I am, and you go to Artist's Alley to sell your art and be commissioned from someone who might want a portrait or patch. That's how you get your DS but what about the people who have nothing to sell or offer? The only way for them to get DS is to buy it. Which is basically the same as buying the item. In reality, all DEP has done is add a middle-man specifically for legalizing buying/selling on Furc, which is all fine and good but what about the people who, again, have nothing to offer?

On that note, I'd like to go into my fourth topic, Avatars. Avatars are divided into 4 groups (currently) on Furc. There are Mythics (Dragon, Phoenix, gryffe, ect), there are ferians (Wolven, foxen, owlen, ect), there are Furlings (currently one) and there are Nobles. All of which, though very well-drawn and fun to play with in the PatchEd, have prices reaching to over 100 dollars! That's alot to pay for pixels. And as I said earlier, there are other, more complex games out there that don't sell items for half as much. The most expensive I've ever seen a premium item is 25 real USD, counting that one USD might buy you somewhere around 100 in-game dollars. As pointed out in the last topic, Furc's in-game dollars are worth the same as our US dollars and therefore do little to lessen the impact of the ridiculous costs. Even when a sale is advertised, the prices still barely come down. Something might be 200 or 150 USD and might be on sale for 100. Well all that does is cut $50 off! To me, the point of a sale is to cut the bulk off a grossly expensive item but this, though it is a significant difference, barely does anything for the less fortunate players. Does this seem fair? Even when sales are advertised, players can't gain expensive things?

While we're on the subject, I'd like to lead into my fifth and final topic: Advertisements. Perhaps the worst one of all. Yes, those annoying announcements in red that tell you what you *have* to get on Digo Market. First of all, there's nothing wrong with advertising to let people know something is there. The way Furc does it though, it makes it sound like people *need* to buy their stuff and usually they neglect to mention the price and sometimes even neglect to mention it's a premium item! It's like they think when you click it you'll be enticed to buy it. Still worse is that they make it sound like you're nobody if you don't. Like they're pushing you to buy their stuff. And it can really make you feel like crap just because you can't afford it. Like I said, advertising is ok but when it makes it sound like having the items is a necessity then it's a little over the top.

Again, I love this game and think there will never be one to compare to it's creative aspect even though there are more complicated ones out there but at what cost do we have to play it? Is Furc really a free game?

[Xxysthstris]

MMOPRGs such as Mabinogi are hosted in South Korea, and have the Korean government's support; during late 2008, the Korean government invested US$200 million to support its gaming development industry.
That's one of the many reasons why Korean MMORPGs are either free to play or offer premium accounts for a phenomenally small fee (not including any corporate backing).

[Kain Ragnorok]

:facepalm: Not this again.

Honestly, you're just coming off as extremely spoiled, petty, and ungrateful--and normally I don't say anything like that! >=\ You say that you should "rightfully" have this or that option... well no, actually, you're not entitled to ANYTHING. Last I heard this was a private game that has 95% of it's content GIVEN TO YOU FOR FREE. If I draw a picture and you come to my website, are you suddenly entitled to use that picture? No, you're not, and that's exactly what this is.

In Furc you can create your own world, fill it with your own art and ideas, and bring it to life with Dragonspeak. You can even take all those overpriced Digos and patch them into your dream! You can create beautiful animations and take commissions for money. (Furc is where I started taking commissions.) New things are always being added FOR EVERYONE TO USE: buddy lists, 32-bit art, attachments. Eventually there will be live-edit for everyone, including live DS and patch editing as well.

Is Furc really a free game?

Yes. Yes it is. The reason for Digos and sponsorship is NOT for pixels and a couple extra commands that are just for fun. You do it to support the game.

Talz says it better than I do.. can anyone find that giant post she made about the costs of running this business? It's $1000+ A MONTH for servers alone. Add in the cost of food, electricity, mortgage, health insurance/medical bills, gas/water bills, etc... for the whole company... when the only source of income are Digo Market sales...

You're totally free to complain, as many before you have, but Digos are never going to come down in price.

[Kamose]

Most complaints about Digo prices really boil down to, "I can't afford them. Therefore, it's not fair, or it's a rip-off." Few people would attempt to use such an argument in a store or restaurant, but somehow, it's supposed to carry more weight in Furcadia, even though digital items are not a necessity.

Here are some good discussions of Digo prices and how the money is used:

1. Bandwidth. When people log in to Furcadia, they are making use of the Internet. Although the Internet was a free service largely covered by government funding, that isn't true today anymore. Every big game has to pay a lot of moolah for "bandwidth". The more players we get, the bigger our bills grow. The same business that provides us with bandwidth also does our co-location.

2. Co-location. That just means, a business that houses and maintains the servers. We used to keep a machine right in Felorin's apartment, but we outgrew that a long time ago. The Furcadia hard drives run so fast, they're always 130F degrees. Servers need to be kept in a DFE (dust free environment) CC (climate-controlled) chamber, that is, extra-good air conditioning and an auxilliary power supply in case of power outage. Our IP co-location service keeps the computers running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They charge *us* money because it means staffing the office even during the night there.

3. Non-Furcadia-Client-or-Server Coding. Much more time than I ever anticipated is devoted to making things that most furres never even see. There's a lot of database and web interfacing stuff. The design, engineering, and changeover to the email-verification Accounts system took a while to accomplish.

Whenever a furre takes a Beekin course, it's recorded, so a Teacher can check who's taken which class. We're required to keep detailed records of Digos, and that goes into a database too. If DEP provides personal web pages (and we're seriously hoping we can), that will require a UCCI (User Content Creation Interface). While those look simple (for example, GeoCities), they're notoriously difficult to create. Before we go into that, there's going to be web pages for Groups.

4. Art. That new graphics system means I am going to re-do the interface. YOU don't; everything you have will still work JUST FINE. Furcadia also needs new things from time to time, such as new species and new Digos.

5. Design. This probably doesn't sound like real work, and we do our very best to make it not feel like real work, but it is. We spend significant time debating with each other. We spend time researching so that we have something accurate upon which to base our cases, and we spend time considering the conclusions. Design includes amiable debate. Anytime you've seen me cite some logical fallacy or other in the Forums, you've seen me utilize the tools of the design trade.

"Should we charge a fee for being able to upload Dreams?" "Should we employ a marketing director and sell advertising space on the Furcadia screen?" These are a few examples of stuff we went over early on. We also re-visit old decisions. "Should we have a 'Follow' command?" "Should we have a separate avatar for each gender?" "Should we sell coded weapons that would only work in combat-enabled Dreams?"

Buddy list, anybody...? In-game messaging? How about something that lets you opt-in to listing what other online games you're playing, which Servers, which Sides, what your alt's names are? In order to better understand the latest games, we need to play games such as World of Warcraft and City of Heroes. One of the things I've seen that maybe Furcadia should have is CoH's option for "global" aliases. If you're playing Alt X, you can tell somebody your Global Alias (if you want to). Then, if they message the Global Alias when you're playing Alt Y, you still see the message but you don't have to reveal your alt. "Should we have global aliases?"


6. Client/Server Coding. We spend a lot of time on design because, unlike companies with big budget, we know coder time is at a premium. We don't have the flexibility to redo something later. Design is real work and Client/Server coding is the Even More Real work. It's normal for a computer game company to have 4-6 full time coders on staff, plus 4-5 contractors. We have 2, plus up to 2 contractors (it varies).

The next client has more HTML, and a new graphics system that will allow 256 colors per Object, instead of forcing everyone to use the same palette for the whole Dream. This is probably going to eventually necessitate a rewrite of the FSHeditor. We, the staff, all still love the game; we all sort of "live" in it, and we want new features at least as much, if not more, than you might.

7. Customer Service. This can't be done by volunteers. Some matters can be addressed with a form letter but others require a unique letter that typically takes half an hour to an hour to write. Sometimes there's a question of a rule being broken and someone needs to research who plays which alt via the database. Sometimes someone has to investigate something on a web site.

8. Insurance. In-office DEP employees receive pay and they also receive full health insurance coverage. That runs about $600/month ($7200 a year) per person. One of us was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid; it was frightening but we at least had some peace of mind knowing our insurance covered it. (and, in case you were wondering, the cancer was successfully treated and she's on the slow but assured trail to recovery.)

9. Advertisement. Furcadia pays for ads, notably, on Google.

10. Contractors. Some things done for Dragon's Eye, such as some bits of the art, and work on the web site, are done for-pay.

11. Conventions. We haven't been able to send any official representatives recently, but we've managed to get the team out to Further Confusion, Mephit Fur Meet, and Anthrocon. To save money, we may travel by rented trailer and drive in shifts, but that still adds up to expense in the thousands. We don't have infinite time, and travel by plane is preferable. Plane tickets have become more expensive over the years. Despite special convention rates, so have hotel rooms.

They're not just entertainment to us, though. Conventions bring together ideas and creative energy that inspire us to do more. For me, as an artist, seeing the things Furry artists create is an overwhelming and wonderful experience.

As a bonus, conventions also spread a lot of "buzz" about Furcadia. When we do manage to get to one, we're assured of hundreds of new furres joining us. So conventions do ultimately give alot back in the way of publicity, too.

12. Order Fulfilment. We have more Digo stuff than we can handle, so we work with Infire. Oy!

13. Legal Fees. This is kinda obscure and we seldom actually need it. When Dragon's Eye Productions was first set up, it cost over $500 to pay for "Incorporation". We're considering selling something that might be like gift certificates and might be like in-game currency, and we'll need legal advice.

14. Movies. Sometimes "we have movie sign!" and the Austin/Pflugerville/Round Rock DEP furres get taken to the movies on the company tab. That happens a few times a year maybe.

15. Products. The T-shirts aren't cheap, they're five-color printing and cost us approximately $8 each. We eventually make alot of that back, but in order to do a "run" of printing, we have to commit to making at least 100 shirts, which means, we're handing over at least $800, plus silk screen set-up ("burn") fees. Although they may appear simple or cheap, the Pawtograph books that the Silver Sponsors receive the first time they sign up are not. Because they're miniature sketch books, they're made of heavier archival-quality paper stock. They're designed to take quite a bit of punishment and to last for many convention visits, and they do. It cost several thousand dollars to get a batch made up. We print the color prints and certificates ourselves, on pretty nice paper. Again, it's simple but high quality.

Whether or not a Digo is "expensive" to somebody varies a LOT! For some furres, $10 is far more than they can afford. For some furres, $10 is next to nothing. Either way, I hope that when you see somebody with wings or a dragon or some other special item walk by, that you'll keep this in mind: Furcadia is actually expensive to run, and, by buying those special items, they're helping to keep it free for everybody else, plus, they're making it possible for Furcadia to improve.

Computer Mouse, I notice that in one post you complain about the price of Digo items and in the next you insist that Furcadia needs all these new features. I'm sure you are not aware of the realities of running a business, so I'll inform you a bit. I think this is pretty common among our players.

Dragon's Eye Productions is the company that makes Furcadia. We are what they call in the game industry an Indipendant. This means that we are privately owned and we have no investors or bigger company backing us. We chose to stay that way because investors like to tell you how to run your game and they'd have never agreed to "Forever Free" or volunteers or many of the other thigns we like to do. By choosing to stay that way though, we make sacrafices too. Most big online games that you see out there like WoW and Everquest and even smaller ones, had investment money to produce their games. We are talking about 10s of millions of dollars to produce their games. They have teams between 40 and 200 to just make the game and add new features and a whole other group of that many called the "live team" that actually runs the game day to day.

At DEP, we have Felorin, Talzhemir, Myself, Sanctimonious, Cironir, Gar and Leah, full time and we have a couple of part timers. That's to both make new features and to run a community of 60,000 people. This is really not possible, but we do it anyway and none of us are paid anywhere near what we'd get doing the job for another company. The DEP "offices" are in my spare room. We do this for the love of Furcadia and the belief in producing a non-violent, imaginative, free online game where people from all over the world can meet. Suggestions are nice and we like to hear them, but honestly, we have a good ten years of things already planned for the game.

We do all this work totally off the sales of Digo Market items. How many wings and portrait spaces does it take to do something like, say, pay the lease on our house, pay doctor bills or even go grocery shopping? How about the cost of bandwidth or server machines? You should be very grateful to all those players out there who do buy Digo items, because they are what keeps Furcadia alive. A year ago, we almost lost the company because our players, mainly kids, would buy Digo items without their parents' permission and the parents would charge them back. Paypal only allows for 1% chargebacks and they froze our account right before Christmas, our most important season. The two things that saved us was going with IBV to process orders and the fact that Felorin's parents had pssed away recently and left him some money that he could use to make payrole and pay for the servers for a few months. Our sales have still not fully recovered from that and with the new servers, our expenses go up. Think of going to dinner with your parents for one evening, that usually costs at least 60 dollars or a computer game that you only play a few weeks costs 40. Furcadia Digos are not so expensive.

You might see here why when one thing is going on, say, new forums or a new server, development on the update stops. There is only one set of people to do all of these things, each person is vital to making it all run, and when something major happens, like my getting cancer this year, development slows considerably. You might also think the solution is volunteers. As much as we appreciate our wonderful volunteers and all the help they are, any actual development has to be done or at least supervised by DEP. The programming has to meet quality standards and all work together; the art all has to look good and go together. New dreams have a very complex system they must go through to fit into our vision of the Furcadia world. You can ask an employee to make 20 changes but volunteers are not professionals and they don't take it as well.

So next time you get the urge to complain about things not happening fast enough, or how much Digos cost, or you make a suggestion for yet another feature, think about some of this.

I just want to make a comment about the notion mentioned in the topic title that Digo Market item prices are "high". Most of the items we sell cost you less to get for a year than it would cost you to go to McDonalds once a month and get a burger, fries and a drink. I don't think most people would consider one trip a month to a fast food joint to be "expensive". And we're certainly a LOT less expensive than games that charge $120 to $180 a year for a subscription that's required in order to play. $19.95 a year for wings doesn't seem like much to me by comparison. You could go see 3 movies at a movie theater for that price, and entertain yourself for 5 or 6 hours. How many hours of entertainment can you get out of Furcadia in a year? I don't think our prices are high, I think they're reasonably low. For anybody that does think they're high, or is just short on money at the moment, we let people play for free, too. Hard to beat THAT price!

I've never understood the complaints about Digo prices. Here's why--

1. People ocassionally complain about DEP without having much or any experience running a company, large or small, and tend to vastly overestimate sales while underestimating costs. So, with no real knowledge of how DEP works or what it takes to keep it running (let alone growing), they use unrealistic estimates to try to show that it really must not cost *that* much money and coupled with their guesses at sales numbers, it is implied that the players are not "getting enough for their money", which brings us to...

2. Furcadia is privately owned and there is no subscription fee to obtain the player-side client, to register an account, or to log onto the server. It is a *free* game and virtual community. Anything you pay for is strictly optional and your purchase is limited to the features for which you are paying (having an avatar with wings, getting access to certain channels, etc). That is, since there is no subscription to playing the game itself, people can't really talk about "getting their money's worth" out of DEP except for those optional items purchased at Digo Market. If you paid for a dragon, you are entitled to a dragon, that's it. If you don't feel that you would be getting your money's worth for a Digo item, no one is forcing you to buy one. If you want to have a Digo and can afford it, or if you just want to support DEP, you can choose to do so. One might argue, for example, that $60 is an outrageous price for a steak dinner, but who is making you go to that restaurant? There must be something people who pay for such a meal feel is worth that price, and it is their money to spend how they see fit, wisely or otherwise. Just because someone else can afford something you cannot does not make the seller of the item(s) in quesion unfair. And compared to the price of Playstation games, movie tickets, etc, as has been pointed out ad nauseum, the price for year-long Digo items are not out of synch with what people pay for entertainment.

[Kain Ragnorok]

Thanks Kamose! I was looking for that post.

[PhotonKitsune]

I will agree with you, games are expensive to run, but every reason I've gotten for digos being expensive doesn't explain why alot of other games have more advanced script, way better graphics, more servers and premium items that do more. And their stuff is pretty cheap, even if people work for them as a full-time job. My entire point is that other games are much cheaper, even P2P games like WoW (though it might not be worth it) would be cheaper. So why is it that Furc, which is run like every other game with the exception they have way less servers, 2-D graphics and alot less t actually do despite the dreamweaving charge so much more? Because everything listed above, other games have to put up with also.

Yeah well I can see where I'd come across as spoiled for the 'rightfully' comment but all I meant was that there's just too much given to paying players that would normally go to the general public on other games. Not that they're owed to us in some way. I'm aware that the company owns the game and they do a decent job for the most part but I still don't understand why everything's so expensive if others get by just fine.

[Felorin]

Actually, I think our server costs are more like $2000+ these days - our Fox Department would know for sure. And we're about to add another server machine so we can handle more dreams at once.

As an excercise, I just went through every page on Digo Market, and counted up the total number of inexpensive items there. As of today, there were 25 things that cost between 0 and 5 dollars. And 23 more items that cost between 6 and 10 dollars.

I don't think anybody could realistically claim that people who don't have much money to spare are unable to buy anything in Furcadia. Whether they're someone with a job that barely covers the bills, a college student working their way through school, a kid spending allowance money, or a kid who has to mow lawns or babysit to earn spending money, anybody could get a little something if they want.

And of course, somebody who can't even spare five bucks - or could, but doesn't want to... They can do most of what there is to do in Furcadia without paying one penny. This is far more generous than you get from most big online games in the USA. World of Warcraft charges you $15 a month - that's $180 a year - to be able to log in and play ANY of it. By my estimates, something like 5% of players on Furcadia buy stuff, and 95% of them enjoy the game for free. They don't seem to feel like they can't have fun without the stuff you have to pay for. Which is how we tried to design things.

We do have some items that cost $15, $20, and on upwards. Though just about everything at the $100 and up range is just a longer lasting version of something you can get in the $20 to $40 range. Don't have the money for a Phoenix for Life? Get a Phoenix for a Year, most people could afford that if they really want a Phoenix. Hopefully by a year later, if you feel like you still really enjoy being a Phoenix in Furcadia, you'll have earned some more money by then.

We have more expensive items because I figured out a long time ago that the amount people want to spend on their hobbies varies HUGELY from one person to the next. Some people like to spend $50-100 a year on their favorite hobby. Or if they'd like to spend more, they don't, because that's what they can afford. Some people have high paying jobs and likel to spend thousands of dollars a year on their favorite hobby. Whether it's on expensive golf clubs, season tickets to their favorite football or basketball team, travelling to conventions, covering their walls with rare posters and limited edition art prints, or an online game.

One of the reasons we offer some higher-end items is so people who'd enjoy having more exclusive items they can get in Furcadia can do that. In the end, it isn't just them and Dragon's Eye who benefit - it's all of you. If we made it so there were only $50 worth of stuff you could buy on Furcadia a year, and then you had everything, people willing to spend more on the game wouldn't do so. In that case, we'd either have make a lot less money, have less people working on the game, and be able to add less new free features for you each year... Or to make up for the lost income, we'd have to try to get a lot more people paying, by requiring a subscription to get to a lot of parts of the game or something. Which might not even work, it might just drive away most of our players.

Allowing people with more spending money to actually spend it here, that subsidizes the cost of developing, providing, and supporting all the free stuff for the 95% of people who are playing for free. You should be glad there's a few people out there buying Dragons For Life and such. It shouldn't hurt your gameplay that a few people have those things. We don't have player vs. player battles like some games, and say that being a Dragon For Life means you get to attack for more damage. We don't have anyplace in the game that only a Dragon For Life can get to and nobody else can. Mostly they just get to look cool, and maybe some other people are a bit impressed that they have that. That's all.

Charging a wide range of prices for the same sorts of things is very common in the real world, too. If I go out driving around and I'm hungry, I could get a burger, fries, and a drink for just a few bucks. Or I could stop in a fancy restaurant and spend $30, or even $50 or more on a fancy dinner.

Should the fancy restaurants stop existing, so that all food options are in the $4-$10 range? I don't think so. It's perfectly reasonable to provide more expensive alternatives for the people that want them. Anybody that doesn't want them certainly doesn't have to buy them, and can lead a perfectly fine and happy life without them.

If you don't want $30 or $50 or $100 items from Digo Market... Buy a $20 item, or a $15 item, or a $5 item. Or buy nothing and play for free, like 95% of our players do. You're perfectly welcome to do so, and we're glad to have you in our community whether you buy anything or not.

I think it's ironic that you cite a $4 a month game as an example of something you think is fine, then you complain about our $5 a month Silver Sponsorship. Even though that other game restricts a large percentage of the abilities and content from the non-paying players, and we restrict only a tiny, tiny amount of our game from non-Silver-Sponsors.

As for DragonScales, you point out that other games give you 10 to 1000 units of currency for a US dollar. That's why we started out from day one with Silver and Copper DragonScales, as well as Golden DragonScales. We know that players might want to be able to give and receive a bunch of game coins to each other, and giving you just one DragonScales per dollar wouldn't be good for that. But with 100 Copper DragonScales, that's right in the 10 to 1000 range you mention. Whether you're roleplaying and you want to toss the barkeep 3 Coppers to pay for an ale in a tavern, or you want to give someone in your Guild 5 Silver DragonScales (50 coppers, or 50 cents) for helping you work on a dream you were making, I think you get enough coins for a dollar to have some flexibility there.

As for people who don't have skills like drawing artwork to offer - that's one of the reasons we're working towards a 3 currency system in Furcadia. DragonScales are one, we're trying to make Cookies into the second (obviously a less serious one and a less valuable one, but hopefully fun), and magical "mana" will be the third one, somewhere between the other two in value and significance. Though there'll be things you will be able to do with mana you can't do with the other two. You'll be able to get both Cookies and Mana for free, on a daily basis. You already get Cookies for free. I'm hoping that by making Cookies very low in value, people will find a lot of things to do for each other to give and get cookies for, and not have to do something really major like draw someone a picture or make a big complicated dream or whatever.

Even when a sale is advertised, the prices still barely come down. Something might be 200 or 150 USD and might be on sale for 100. Well all that does is cut $50 off!

I think if you go into real world stores, you'll find that 25% off is considered fairly decent for a sale, and 50% off is a rare good bargain and about as big a discount as you're ever likely to see! We've actually occasionally discounted items as much as 60%, but usually 50% is about our limit and that's pretty good.

To me, the point of a sale is to cut the bulk off a grossly expensive item but this, though it is a significant difference, barely does anything for the less fortunate players. Does this seem fair? Even when sales are advertised, players can't gain expensive things?

I'm afraid that's how the world works. If you went to a fancy jewelry store that sells diamond rings for $3000, and they've discounted one to $2500, you're not going to get anywhere telling them "Unless you discount that to $50 once in a while, I'll never be able to afford one." The reality of the matter is, if they had one week out of the year when they sold their rings for $50, nobody would buy them the other 51 weeks. They'd just wait for that week, the store would never get more than $50 for a ring, and they'd probably go out of business.

If Dragon's Eye were selling food you need to live, gas you need to drive your car to work, or medicine you need to stay alive, I think there'd be a different level of importance on keeping prices affordable. But it's a luxury item, not something you need to live. If we were charging for ALL of the fun in the game, and we wanted you to pay hundreds of dollars to get it, I'd say gee, you could enjoy a movie or a book for ten bucks and it seems like we're charging way more than that. But we're giving away most of the fun for free - possibly a bad business decision on our part and maybe we could be making a lot more money if we didn't, but there you have it.

We're saying you can have 98% or 99% of the fun for free - but if you like the other stuff we offer enough to pay $10 or $20 or $100 for some of it, and think you'd get that much enjoyment out of it, feel free to buy some of our stuff.

If the amount of extra fun you'd get out of it isn't worth that much money, or if you don't have the money to spare right now - don't buy it. Simple as that.

As for advertisement - while television keeps struggling against technologies that let you fast forward through or "zap out" ads, we have made sure that our ads are all in a format that's highly compatible with our ignore command. Again, we're being generous to our players even when it hurts out income to do so. Where an hour of free television will typically contain 18-22 minutes of advertisements, we only interrupt you with 1-3 sentences of text every THREE HOURS. We're ridiculously light on advertising, and if it bothers you in any way whatsoever, you're totally free to filter it out and it's quite easy to do so. I don't think we could get much nicer about it if we tried. We even try to put a little humor and fun into the messages and the little cartoony pictures on Digo Market to entertain people sometimes.

I'm sorry that it makes some people feel bad when other players can get some stuff in the game that they can't have. But that's what life is like, really. I think we've made Furcadia life far, far less like that than real life is. We could make it even LESS like that. We could give away all avatars and never charge for anything. But then we'd have to do Furcadia as a hobby, and all get jobs, and put a lot less time and work into adding new features for you all.

And you know what? If we gave all the avatars away for free, people would be a lot less excited about having the "special, rarer ones", too. I think the game would be a little less fun if nothing were "rare and special", and everybody had everything.

[Felorin]

I will agree with you, games are expensive to run, but every reason I've gotten for digos being expensive doesn't explain why alot of other games have more advanced script, way better graphics, more servers and premium items that do more. And their stuff is pretty cheap, even if people work for them as a full-time job. My entire point is that other games are much cheaper, even P2P games like WoW (though it might not be worth it) would be cheaper. So why is it that Furc, which is run like every other game with the exception they have way less servers, 2-D graphics and alot less t actually do despite the dreamweaving charge so much more? Because everything listed above, other games have to put up with also.

I really don't see how you can say WoW is cheaper, at $180 a year. Furcadia is free for most people, it's $60 a year to someone who wants to add on a Dragon and Triwings - it's very few people that pay over $180 a year. (Bless those few for helping to keep us going, by the way!)

In general though, it's certainly true to observe some games are better and worse than other games. And you can't make a simple prediction about how good a game is by how much it charges. Sometimes more a cheaper game will be better than a more expensive one, sometimes it's the other way around. Why is that? Well, there can be a lot of reasons involved. One of the simplest is, some game developers are just better at making good games than others. But let me give you some "behind the curtain" observations about what makes Furcadia in particular different from some of the other games you could compare it to.

The first thing to observe here is a basic, harsh statistic of what the computer game business evolved into in the 1990s. In the single player game market (I don't have stats on this for multiplayer games, I'm afraid), the last statistic I heard was that 92% of the computer game titles published lost money. Almost every game published would lose money for its publisher. 8% of them manage to break even or make a profit. Of those, the vast majority of the profit comes from the top 20-30 hit titles. Those have to make enough money for their publishers to make up for the flops they also published. (Unless you're Blizzard and don't every publish flops!) If you're one of the publishers who goes a few years without having a hit, you can just eventually go bankrupt or something.

This is in an industry that, at it's peak, was putting out over 3000 new games a year. Seems pretty crazy. But it's hard to predict hits. The book publishing industry is the same way, most books published lose money, and a few best-sellers make enough to keep the book publishers profitable overall, hopefully. Movies are very hit and miss (with a lot of miss) also.

Most big, well distributed titles are publisher-funded. They decide what they think is worth the risk (more often a sequel or clone or highly derivative title, only occasionally something unusual or risky), and they put millions, or in some cases tens of millions of dollars into developing it.

So in some cases, if you compare one game to another and say "Why can't this game do what Super Boffo Land did, they have a ton of amazing cool features and it only cost $15 bucks at the computer game store" - sometimes the reason is that Super Boffo Land lost its publisher twelve million dollars, and nobody's able to actually throw that much stuff into a game AND sell it that cheap AND still make a profit.

Of course the publisher's hope on Super Boffo Land was, even though they spent $30 million dollars making it & sold it for $15 instead of $40 or $50 a copy, was that it would be so amazingly popular that everyone would buy it, and they'd make a huge profit because they were selling so many copies. Sometimes that works out - World of Warcraft cost tens of millions of dollars to make, but they have millions of subscribers worldwide, and take in over a billion dollars a year in subscription fees. They are making a profit. (Not hard to do when you charge $180 a year to play to 100% of your subscribers - even if they spend about $90 per person on server costs and customer service salaries, they're $90 a year ahead to pay off that initial investment and then turn a profit).

Part of the way Blizzard gets there is having hundreds of people to work on the game, and tens of millions of dollars to spend up front.

We made Furcadia with me and Talzhemir, and $50,000 I had saved up. Which basically paid for us to live on for a year without working a paying job, plus we each got a new computer to work on - blazingly fast 133 Megahertz Pentium 3s!

Part of the way Blizzard gets there is being so well known that every time they make a new game, millions of people will check it out because it's from Blizzard.

Talzhemir and I were well enough known from our past computer games that hundreds, or even a few thousand people checked it out just because of our reputation in our first year. Or course if we had money to advertise, our reputation might have been worth more, which brings me to:

Part of the way Blizzard gets there is, like every other big company, they spend millions of dollars on advertising each new game they put out.

Me and Talzhemir told some people on IRC and Usenet we had this new game out. Then they told friends and it spread by word of mouth the first five years. More recently we hired a part-time marketing guy for $500 a month who never was able to get us significant amounts of new users. Now we have our Fox Department spend about that much on buying ads on Google, icanhascheezburger.com, some furry art and discussions sites, online gaming websites, etc. it gets us around 2000 new downloads each month if I remember right. Some of those people stay, others decide Furcadia isn't to their tastes & don't stick around. If we could afford $50,000 a month in advertising I'm sure we could get a lot more new players, but we don't have that kind of money, $500 a month is about all we can spare right now.

At the end of the day, Furcadia has around 60,000 regular players. Runescape peaked at around 4 MILLION players, nowadays I hear they have about 2 million. That means if they were to put the same type of thing out there for sale, and the same percentage of their players bought it, they'd bring in about 33 times as much money to use towards costs of developing neat new stuff, paying server expenses, etc.

If Furcadia had 600,000 players, we could probably afford to do about 10 times as much good stuff to improve the game. If we get to 6,000,000 players, which I would certainly like to within my lifetime, we would presumably have about 100 times as much money coming in, with the same items at the same prices as we have now with 60,000 players. That's really the main reason some games can afford to do more stuff than others.

Some games invest so much money, they need 200,000 to 300,000 players or more to even break even. Some of them make it there, some get 50,000 to 100,000 and crash and burn. We started the game on a modest, tiny budget, and we always kept expenses under control enough that we could keep running the game forever no matter how many (or how few) players we might get. But growing a game without millions to spend on PR and advertising is much slower and much harder.

You want to see the game work out better? Go tell a LOT of people to try it out. Encourage them to tell their friends of they like it, too.

We might get a lot of growth this year when we put out an iPhone client. Or it might be a very small amount of growth. Keep your fingers crossed though - if you want to see a quality-to-cost ratio comparable to the games that have millions of players, you'd need to see millions of players in Furcadia also. It'd strain out small staff to the limits trying to expand server capacity and keep up with that number of people coming in at that pace - but we're willing to try, if we're ever so lucky as to start seeing that kind of growth. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

In the meantime - and forever if we never get that big - I think we provide better quality, service, pricing, features, etc. than most games in the 10,000 to 100,000 subscriber range, certainly the ones that are stable and profitable & not just a money-losing investment that's gonna be around a couple years and flame out. We've kept this running for 12 years already, longer than anybody else on the net, and we'll keep it running forever & try to turn it over to someone else competent to keep it running after we die.

I know not all the way things are seems to make sense from outside our company sometimes. But after 33 years of playing games online, and 27 years of developing games for a living professionally, believe me, I think we've made most of our decisions reasonably well and done a pretty decent job of providing a quality service to our players and our community. It's certainly always possible for anyone to do better. But I think we could have done a lot worse, and a lot of what we offer is available in few or no other games - and it's available for FREE on ours.

ah well I can see where I'd come across as spoiled for the 'rightfully' comment but all I meant was that there's just too much given to paying players that would normally go to the general public on other games. Not that they're owed to us in some way. I'm aware that the company owns the game and they do a decent job for the most part but I still don't understand why everything's so expensive if others get by just fine.

Subscription based games offer you a bunch of stuff for "free" because you already paid just to get in the 'front door". Furcadia pioneered the "the game is free but there's some optional extras so we can make a buck" business model in 1999. Korea, which is generally 2-3 years ahead of most of the world in online gaming trends and developments, started moving in that direction a few years later. Today it's the primary business model in Korea, and all the top money-making games are that way.

Switching to that model means charging for some things that might be part of the "built in basics" in a game that charges $5 to $15 a month subscription fees. You have to charge for SOMETHING.

I have to say, too, if I went back in a time machine, and made Dragons and Phoenixes and Wings and Portrait Spaces free, but took five game features that are free now and made Furcadia charge for those instead... We'd have had the same complaints and arguments pop up about why THOSE things cost so much, and almost nobody would be saying "Wow it's so great that dragon avatars are free". But ya gotta charge for something if you want to have a game that has a full-time paid staff working on it. We picked stuff you don't NEED, but might enjoy, and I think that's pretty much the best way to go. Again, if you want to see us selling it all for $5 instead of some of it being $20-$50, give me a couple million more users and I'll think about it.

Though frankly, given that well-off lawyers, doctors, and rich people play online games too, I think you're missing out if you don't offer SOMETHING they could spend a few hundred bucks on if you want to. As long as it doesn't give them some unfair advantage in a competition over people that can't spend that. Since Furcadia isn't a game with competition or dueling, I think that's not so big a problem for us.

The top designers and business people in the MMORPG industry feel the same way about supporting wildly different spending habits of different customers, by the way. You can see it in blogs like Raph Koster's (he designed Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and is a really nice guy by the way). It's just sound business. I really don't think it hurts the light spenders or the non-spenders in Furcadia. In fact, because we encourage a 'gift economy" type of community, a lot of the spending from the well off people ends up going into $20-$40 gift digos for their friends and loved ones. Also prizes in contests held in various dreams, etc. That benefits the non-spending players who get some of those gifts and prizes, so I think it's really good all around.

Again, at 60,000 players, if I dropped ALL our prices, I think we'd just all have to go get other jobs & work on Furcadia in our spare time, and get a lot less done. We DO have lots of cheap items for the people who want to get a little something - so I really don't see what all the fuss is about.

[PhotonKitsune]

As for DragonScales, you point out that other games give you 10 to 1000 units of currency for a US dollar. That's why we started out from day one with Silver and Copper DragonScales, as well as Golden DragonScales. We know that players might want to be able to give and receive a bunch of game coins to each other, and giving you just one DragonScales per dollar wouldn't be good for that. But with 100 Copper DragonScales, that's right in the 10 to 1000 range you mention. Whether you're roleplaying and you want to toss the barkeep 3 Coppers to pay for an ale in a tavern, or you want to give someone in your Guild 5 Silver DragonScales (50 coppers, or 50 cents) for helping you work on a dream you were making, I think you get enough coins for a dollar to have some flexibility there.

100 copper DS is still the equivalent of 1 dollar. It's like having 100 pennies, the same as a dollar. It doesn't really make a difference. Now, if for example, one dollar was worth 2 DS that'd actually be a significant difference because having 2 DS would be like having 1 dollar and, instead of paying 30$ for something you could only pay 15 for the DS. That's what I meant when I said it takes alot of in-game money to get a dollar. But these games also work differently in premium shops, such as you could buy something for 30 iin-game dollars or 15 real dollars, this is how the value is achieved.

I have to say, too, if I went back in a time machine, and made Dragons and Phoenixes and Wings and Portrait Spaces free, but took five game features that are free now and made Furcadia charge for those instead... We'd have had the same complaints and arguments pop up about why THOSE things cost so much, and almost nobody would be saying "Wow it's so great that dragon avatars are free". But ya gotta charge for something if you want to have a game that has a full-time paid staff working on it. We picked stuff you don't NEED, but might enjoy, and I think that's pretty much the best way to go. Again, if you want to see us selling it all for $5 instead of some of it being $20-$50, give me a couple million more users and I'll think about it.

Yes we would. I don't see why any of it is so expensive. Yeah yeah I get you *live* off this stuff but there really are other games that are cheaper and again, take more of everything.

If you don't want $30 or $50 or $100 items from Digo Market... Buy a $20 item, or a $15 item, or a $5 item. Or buy nothing and play for free, like 95% of our players do. You're perfectly welcome to do so, and we're glad to have you in our community whether you buy anything or not.

That's true, except for SS, who get perfectly understandable incentives like the test dream and money every month and random color changing but then they get things like 'special colors' and features in their dreams to turn off the really annoying filters of Furc that'd really help the rest of us out. Then there's Group Packages, which offer bigger dreams. It's hard to fit so much into such a little space. I dunno why they aren't listed on Digo Market, or why only a few dreams have them but that seems a little messed up.

I think it's ironic that you cite a $4 a month game as an example of something you think is fine, then you complain about our $5 a month Silver Sponsorship. Even though that other game restricts a large percentage of the abilities and content from the non-paying players, and we restrict only a tiny, tiny amount of our game from non-Silver-Sponsors.

The game I cite does little to hinder gameplay to non-members other than save special items and abilities for them. And I was compariing it to items here that are really expensive.

I don't think anybody could realistically claim that people who don't have much money to spare are unable to buy anything in Furcadia. Whether they're someone with a job that barely covers the bills, a college student working their way through school, a kid spending allowance money, or a kid who has to mow lawns or babysit to earn spending money, anybody could get a little something if they want.

You mentioned kids. It isn't just the money in this case, what about the access to their parents' bank account? Or PayPal? I almost had an SS when I was 15 but my mom denied it to me because she had no PayPal account and didn't trust her security number to a bank in Finland. What about the kids like that? Who DO enjoy those items? And might even have the money to buy one but their parents say no? Another reason ads bother me...

We do have some items that cost $15, $20, and on upwards. Though just about everything at the $100 and up range is just a longer lasting version of something you can get in the $20 to $40 range. Don't have the money for a Phoenix for Life? Get a Phoenix for a Year, most people could afford that if they really want a Phoenix. Hopefully by a year later, if you feel like you still really enjoy being a Phoenix in Furcadia, you'll have earned some more money by then.

That's also true but even year items can be expensive, though they are much cheaper. I'm inclined to agree at that.

As an excercise, I just went through every page on Digo Market, and counted up the total number of inexpensive items there. As of today, there were 25 things that cost between 0 and 5 dollars. And 23 more items that cost between 6 and 10 dollars.

Yeah for like a month. What's in a month?

We have more expensive items because I figured out a long time ago that the amount people want to spend on their hobbies varies HUGELY from one person to the next. Some people like to spend $50-100 a year on their favorite hobby. Or if they'd like to spend more, they don't, because that's what they can afford. Some people have high paying jobs and likel to spend thousands of dollars a year on their favorite hobby. Whether it's on expensive golf clubs, season tickets to their favorite football or basketball team, travelling to conventions, covering their walls with rare posters and limited edition art prints, or an online game.

I translated that as "we found out we could get away with it." Seems a little messed up...

We're saying you can have 98% or 99% of the fun for free - but if you like the other stuff we offer enough to pay $10 or $20 or $100 for some of it, and think you'd get that much enjoyment out of it, feel free to buy some of our stuff.

Again, I agree that you can have alot of fun but there are some restrictions put on dreamweavers, as I've said and in all honesty, I can live without mythics and have fun on Furc but some of these features only available to SS owners seems a little over-the-top to me personally. I addressed the heavy costs as the public.

And you know what? If we gave all the avatars away for free, people would be a lot less excited about having the "special, rarer ones", too. I think the game would be a little less fun if nothing were "rare and special", and everybody had everything.

That would be human nature, I'm not saying give it awa for free though. I'm just saying I don't see where it'd do any harm to lower prices since other games that are more complex cost alot less for premium items, not just the ones I listed, either.

So in some cases, if you compare one game to another and say "Why can't this game do what Super Boffo Land did, they have a ton of amazing cool features and it only cost $15 bucks at the computer game store" - sometimes the reason is that Super Boffo Land lost its publisher twelve million dollars, and nobody's able to actually throw that much stuff into a game AND sell it that cheap AND still make a profit.

It's not like I'm saying the game should drastically improve, all I'm pointing out here is that there are games with far more than Furc that cost much less. And they have the same problems mostly.

If Furcadia had 600,000 players, we could probably afford to do about 10 times as much good stuff to improve the game. If we get to 6,000,000 players, which I would certainly like to within my lifetime, we would presumably have about 100 times as much money coming in, with the same items at the same prices as we have now with 60,000 players. That's really the main reason some games can afford to do more stuff than others.

So basically the reason some games can do more than others is because of how many players play? And how many buy?

[Matter]

You... didn't really get anything he just said, did you?

[Talzhemir]

So basically the reason some games can do more than others is because of how many players play? And how many buy?

Yeah.

Felorin says it's $160 a year to play World of Warcraft. Not quite; here's how that breaks down.

10 day trial....................(FREE)
WoW 2004.........................$35 (comes with 30 days play)
60 day WoW timecard..........$30
60 day WoW timecard..........$30
60 day WoW timecard..........$30
60 day WoW timecard..........$30
60 day WoW timecard..........$30
_____________________________
$185 Cha-CHING!

Annnnnnnnd... If you want to keep hanging out with your old friends after they hit a certain level, you'll need:

Burning Crusade 2007..........$28 (requires WoW to run)
Wrath of the Lich King 2008.$36 (requires both WoW & BC)

Cha-CHING!! Cha-CHING!!!

WoW accounts for 62% of all the MMO players out there.

So, I know that well over half of us (and it's about 10 million people, give or take a million) pay 50 cents a day for their "habit". That's a MANDATORY $15/month.

...Blizzard employs 2700 people.

----------

With a "market share" of only .8% compared to WoW's 62%, you might think City of Heroes is a "small fish", but, there are only about a dozen games accounting for 99.5% of the world's MMO players
http://mmogchart.com/Chart7.html

City of Heroes was created by Cryptic Studios, whose developers each went into deep debt in order to produce their game. By the time they had something playable, they couldn't afford to go on. So, they sold CoH at a "firesale" price to NCSoft. NCSoft did not need to charge nearly as much for CoH because the original developers were out of the picture.

14 day trial...........(FREE)
City of Heroes .......$20
60 day Time card....$30
60 day Time card....$30
60 day Time card....$30
60 day Time card....$30
60 day Time card....$30

Cost per year is roughly $170, or, 46 cents per day.

As an option, you can purchase add-ons:

Super Booser I: Cyborg...$10
Super Booster II: Magic...$10
Wedding Pack................$10
Mini-booser Jetpack.........$5

Where does most of CoH's money go? Updates. To date, they have released 14 major updates, and, to keep their customers, they must continue to produce new material.

Their most recent update (Architect) is remarkable because it allows players to create their own missions. So, if you are tired of the "standard" missions and the missions the engine randomly generates, you can try out things by your fellow players.

NCSoft recently organized its City of Heroes staff into one new group of smaller companies, called Paragon Studios. At the moment, I believe City of Heroes is run by approximately 55 production staff and 100 other employees.

----------

Cost to play Furcadia? Free.
People working for DEP on Furcadia? 16.

[Sookan]

photon. why don't you grow up, leave home, get a job and attempt to feed yourself...
before you criticize DEP's attempt to do so?

felorin himself came and gave you over 10 perfectly valid reasons WHY digo market items "are so expensive", and you're basically calling him a liar.

Yeah for like a month. What's in a month?

on average, 30 days. which is more than 0 days.

It's not like I'm saying the game should drastically improve, all I'm pointing out here is that there are games with far more than Furc that cost much less. And they have the same problems mostly.

you obviously TLDR'd felorin's explanation of ~how businesses work~, didn't you? well, i'm not going to paraphrase. go and read it, it's not hard to understand.

Again, I agree that you can have alot of fun but there are some restrictions put on dreamweavers

name one. there are no restrictions whatsoever. only new features recently released that were never there before. do you think you're owed them, or something?

It isn't just the money in this case, what about the access to their parents' bank account?

..what about it? someone who doesn't understand businesses probably doesn't deserve said access.

Yes we would. I don't see why any of it is so expensive. Yeah yeah I get you *live* off this stuff but there really are other games that are cheaper and again, take more of everything.

i just want you to think about that bolded part. you have no idea how much it costs to live nowadays, especially in america's economy... do you?

[Xxysthstris]

Felorin says it's $160 a year to play World of Warcraft. Not quite; here's how that breaks down.

Just for a touch of foreign perspective:

A 60 day time card for World of Warcraft costs roughly $50USD (AUD$69.95).
While it still rounds down to the same denominator after the exchange, you're looking at paying more for a timecard here than in the US. By standards anyway.

That makes Furcadia appear even cheaper in comparison; for $50 I can buy several things that last several months to one year (and in market specials: for life).

[Mollie]

Hey.
They already LOWERED some prices.
As I recall Gryffe for Life was lowered and is now the same price as a Phoe for life.
Wings for life: Batwings, and Butterfly wings, now lowered.
Wings (butters and bats) in yearly format: Now lowered. 19.95 instead of 24.95.
Ferians are also a Generously priced item.
Foxens, one of the most popular avatars, is only 10$. That;s NOT expensive. Not even for me, and I'm canadian, and it'd cost me 12.14 for one.
Furcadia IS a great game. Furcadia OFFERS fairness, and equality. It is very different from the other games. Be happy with it, or don't, But I agree with what felorin says.

[Mollie]

i just want you to think about that bolded part. you have no idea how much it costs to live nowadays, especially in america's economy... do you?

Not just america's, almost everywhere is suffering from a recession.

[Deedlit79]

PhotonKitsune about FLYFF... ever buy a "Dragonstick" in their cash shop? We have. It costs roughly around $75 each! It's one of the most expensive items (other than a bike perhaps) Furcadia's items are fairly priced in my opinion. Don't just look at the item you're getting. Think about what your money is doing for the game. The item is just a thank you gitft.

[Vlin]

Alright, I went and did some reading into Mabinogi's Cash Shop, to attempt to compare them as best as possible.

Lets start with the cost of NX Cash (Here on called NX 'cause I was lazy. )

$1 = 1000 NX

Which means:

$.001 = 1 NX

That's right, 1 NX is not even a penny. 10 NX = $.01 and 100 NX = $.10, obviously.

Lets start with the "Premium Services", the things you can buy that are very Silver Sponsor like:
[NOTE: These Services are all FREE until a character hits a total level 30.]

Advanced Play Service = 9,500 NX, or $9.50 for 30 days
The Advanced Play Service gives you a lot of one use items per day, some of which you could sell in game for some gold, if you so chose. They're all items that really don't mean all that much to me, just potions and things you could likely inferior versions of in game.

Extra Storage Service = 9,500 NX, or $9.50 for 30 days
This one is a lot of Storage features:
-Can buy and use bags (1 per character)
-2x bank inventory
-Character tabs in bank [Shared Bank]
-Can create/manage guilds
-Personal shop
Again, it's not that game breaking, but once you use it, it would probably be a pain to go back to being without it. The personal shop is the one that gets me, though, as that's normally a free feature...

Nao's Support Service = 9,500 NX, or $9.50 for 30 days
Here's something that wouldn't be worth being without. Death penalty lowered, free item every week plus a stat-boost item at level/age 20.
-Less penalty when KO'd
-Free item a week
-Special item at level(age?) 20?
-3x kill enemies on screen / day

Fantasy Life Club = 14,900 NX, or $14.90 for 30 days
-All three Premium Services in one

Character Cards (Alts)
Yes, Mabinogi charges for any extra characters after your first. If I read everything right, you also need one if you want to "Rebirth" your character, but I'm not sure on that part.
Basic x Card = 7,900 NX, or $7.90
Premium x Card = 9,500 NX, or $9.50
(These give you an extra player or "rebirth" a character [ie: New Game+]. You only get one character per account unless you pay.)

Animal Cards (Mythics/Ferians/Etc)
[Note: It seems like you only get x minutes per day with a pet, however the pets do not expire.]
Coral Cobra = 5,200 NX, or $5.20
Brown Fox = 4,200 NX, or $4.20
Silver Fox = 5,700 NX, or $5.70
Mini Bear = 7,500 NX, or $7.50
Red Panda = 7,400 NX, or $7.40 [Special]
Black Cotton Ostrich = 10,300 NX, or $10.30 [Mount]
Shire = 9,900 NX, or $9.90 [Mount]

Again, I agree that you can have alot of fun but there are some restrictions put on dreamweavers, as I've said and in all honesty, I can live without mythics and have fun on Furc but some of these features only available to SS owners seems a little over-the-top to me personally. I addressed the heavy costs as the public.

Most Silver Sponsor features become free to the public. Live-edit will become free when it's working properly (We're paying to test!). PhoenixSpeak is already free (We tested that, too!) The only things Silver Sponsors get is a changeable portrait space and the ability to change our colors/species live. One is a perk for spending $5 a month, the other only saves us the trouble of logging out and back in.

As for these special colors Sponsors are going to get, we don't know anything about them, and even then, it's not going to be any sort of game-breaking feature, here.

Sponsors do not get larger dream sizes (although we do get more local species and a bit more PS space) or any real feature that makes the game unplayable otherwise. Yes, sponsors get features first, but they always go public after they know they work right!

Cost wise, it's what, $5 a month? Price of going to a theater and seeing a movie during the day. Cheap, plus I get 5 silver scales each month ($.50 right back to me, meaning in a year I get $6 back.)

It's all a matter of value to you. Is Silver Sponsorship worth $5? Is a dragon worth it's cost? If yes, pay for it. If not, don't. None of the premiums hinder your game experience if you don't have them. Heck, you can put the Digos into your dream as a local species if you feel so inclined! Take that, Digo Market!

Really, all I want you to take away from this is that they're not as bad a deal as you're making them out to be. None of it is necessary and you can do AMAZING things with dreams even if you don't shell out for a dream package. Seriously.

[Rat The Unloved]

Yes I think Furcadia's prices on Digo Market are outrageously overpriced. There aren't alot of people in this day and age who can afford (or would have top priority) to buy items that are 100+ from the marketplace. And where exacty does that money go? (SNIP) So why exactly DOES this game cost so much?

First sentance of the post and you're already using Weasle Words... this just doesn't bode well.
The bulk of Furc's money probably goes toward the payroll of a number of full-time employees, benefits (medical, mayhap dental/vision) for those employees, and toward server costs. In my estimate MOST of the Digo Market money is, after these finanical obligations, consumed.

The remainder goes toward, I would think, contractors, legal fees (legal retainers most likely), overhead (the cost of keeping the Offices running) and the other incidentals/consumables.

Why does it cost so much? For the same reason that buying a set of dishware at Walmart costs less than buying them from me. Walmart has an army of manufacturers who, through automation and bulk, have reduced the cost of a single plate to pennies on the dollar. I am a small businessperson, who has only myself and occasionally two other workers. Everything must be done by hand, without automation, and in smaller runs, and thusly costs more. Does it start to make more sense?

If DEP had more players to provide more revenue they could have an army of programmers and artists creating content on a more industrial scale, thus lowering the indivdual cost, while raising net costs. I.e. the game will cost more to run, but the cost-per-thing would lower.

BULK lowers the cost of production considerably, but people who are not set up to produce in bulk cannot benefit from that perk. I must buy paints at $2.50-$50 a bottle ($50 is a rare purchase of paint that is made of actual gold), rather than buying a 25 gallon BARREL, or even a 1 gallon jug, which would work out to pennies "per bottle". I cannot affort or support the bulk that would lower my costs. If more people purchased things from me, I could. Just like DEP!

A friend of mine recently questioned a Beekin about the game's ridiculous prices and posted the response to me that they got from the beekin: "Because it takes alot of money to maintain a game" (SNIP) I've also seen more complex games with way cheaper items.

The beekins do not set the price of Digo Market items, so I certainly hope you/your friend did not take your anger about digo prices out on someone who voulenteers their time (no pay, at all) to help furres out. Also, the Beekin was right.

On the second bit: Because those games have corporate backing to create in bulk. They have lowered individual costs and time-use by being able to have 20 people doing one thing, which gets it done faster than it ought to (it often takes -less- than the fraction works out to).

Another example would be RuneScape, probably a more famous name to people, who only had one premium subscription available: Membership. It was 4.00 (snip) More players means more space required for the servers, and there were alot of servers! Also note that there were a good amount of members on this game and that membership DID offer ALOT more to the player but it wasn't expensive and the free players weren't totally left out of just about everything that came to the game.

You're awfully fond of using Weasle Words to flavor your arguement. It makes your post look very overt and less sincere than it ought to be. Consider that $4 per month, is not that far from $5 per month for a premium sponsorship. Mind you, without the sponsorship you're missing a few things, but let's break this down. There are, at my last count, three things SS get that free players don't have at all (yet). These would be on-the-fly color change, free port art, and Live-Edit. Live-Edit is in testing, one of the ways SS actually do something -useful-. We sponsor the game we love by paying a bit, and testing features so that everyone else gets to use them when they're done. We help to provide live-world testing, bringing in non-SS friends to introduce far more variables into the situation than you'd see in closed testing. More people on different computers means more bugs pop up, and those get fixed faster to bring what -was- a touchy, risky, but cool feature to you whole, safe, and functional.

We don't get any "advantage", because there's nothing to win. We get some extra perks that are -all- (last I heard) slated for other furres to get FOR FREE, as soon as DEP knows exactly how FurC handles them. The only things SS get to "keep" are Color changing, Rotating port and Developer channels.

Well where does that leave the free players? So they get to use something that rightfully should be available to every player in a game based on character appearance and story?

It leaves the free players exactly where -everyone- was before SS tested out and passed on new features for all. Our perks, that some of us say we're "paying for" eventually pass to players who didn't support the game at all. Imagine how -we- feel after spending hard-earned money-... Oh wait, we're sponsoring the game we love, some of us without ever using the perks beyond testing. We aknowledge that our $5 a month is specifically to help DEP, and that for helping out we get the chance to help out in other ways.

What are DragonScales? (SNIP) Wat makes them different from other games' in-game currency?

DragonScales are gift-vouchers, each Gold Scale is worth one USD. Paying with DS is the same as paying with a gift card or certificate. Once the voucher/certificate is purchased it no longer has the same real-cash value, except second-hand. I have a wad of GD setting on my alts, just like I have a Walmart Gift Card in my wallet. Those dollars are now useful only to the companies that issued the voucher.

what about the people who have nothing to sell or offer?

Why should Furcadia, as a community, lose sleep over people wanting something for nothing? We have furres begging for scales constantly, and in addition we have The Giving Tree. Just as there are ways in the real world to get people who have more to give to those who don't... there are ways on Furc. And honestly, I find them annoying. Would you tell Walmart it has to give you 3,000 Walmart Fun Bucks for $1 USD that would be worth $3,000 USD in Merch? No. So why do it here?

Avatars are divided into 4 groups (currently) on Furc. There are Mythics (Dragon, Phoenix, gryffe, ect), there are ferians (Wolven, foxen, owlen, ect), there are Furlings (currently one) and there are Nobles.

That's semi-incorrect. The avatars are devided into two groups: "Default" and "Digo". Within the "Digo" group there are sub-groups, introduced when more species were introduced. There are the Mythicals, Wings, Ferians, Seasonals and Avatars. Nobles and Furlings are in the "Avatars" group.

As pointed out in the last topic, Furc's in-game dollars are worth the same as our US dollars and therefore do little to lessen the impact of the ridiculous costs. Even when a sale is advertised, the prices still barely come down.

However, your likening of GD to Gaia Gold/Perfect World currency was incorrect, therefore invalidating a lot of your arguement. Gaia Gold is NOT a Gift Certificate, a GD is.

Something might be 200 or 150 USD and might be on sale for 100. Well all that does is cut $50 off! To me, the point of a sale is to cut the bulk off a grossly expensive item but this, though it is a significant difference, barely does anything for the less fortunate players. Does this seem fair?

25-50% off is ALWAYS fair, especially when some of us are more than willing to buy these things at full price. "ALL" it does is cut $50 off? $50 means a lot to a lot of people, to paraphrase from your fox-pet comments earlier.
It seems perfectly fair to pay for a service or item, yep.

Advertisements. Perhaps the worst one of all. Yes, those annoying announcements in red that tell you what you *have* to get on Digo Market. First of all, there's nothing wrong with advertising to let people know something is there. The way Furc does it though, it makes it sound like people *need* to buy their stuff and usually they neglect to mention the price and sometimes even neglect to mention it's a premium item! It's like they think when you click it you'll be enticed to buy it. Still worse is that they make it sound like you're nobody if you don't. Like they're pushing you to buy their stuff. And it can really make you feel like crap just because you can't afford it. Like I said, advertising is ok but when it makes it sound like having the items is a necessity then it's a little over the top.

If advertising effects you so severely I'd suggest that the problem is not actually the advertising. Again, here, you're throwing a lot of Weasle Words into the arguement for no reason. If the advertisements bother you you could've disabled them a LONG time ago. If digos bother you do not buy them. If GD insult you do not use them. It's pretty simple. You do not need these things to get 99% of the functionality out of the game, period.

Again, I love this game and think there will never be one to compare to it's creative aspect even though there are more complicated ones out there but at what cost do we have to play it? Is Furc really a free game?

As you just said, no other game comes close in the creative aspect. None probably ever will. You get ALL of that, yes, for free. You get DS, Dreams, Patching, Phoenix Speak, and everything you need to create a huge, dynamic, world of your own FOR FREE. I worked for a Harry Potter Roleplay for a while that used an SS alt to upload a tiny, relitavely useless, "entry" map. Within that was a nested array of upwards of TEN other maps, not a single one using a single paid feature. If he could fit Hogwarts into a normal map, there is NO reason for ANYONE to say they cannot do "anything" without a 300x300 behemoth.

every reason I've gotten for digos being expensive doesn't explain why alot of other games have more advanced script, way better graphics, more servers and premium items that do more. (SNIP)
all I meant was that there's just too much given to paying players that would normally go to the general public on other games.

Hopefully the information I provided above, in terms of Bulk vs. Artisan is somewhat helpful in solving this pressing issue. One MOST people don't take the time to consider. In the ONLY other MMOG I play in order to reach whole areas of the game I must pay. In order to use specific objects (numbering in the hundereds) I must pay. In order to -keep- using these things, even though once I get them they are "for life", I must KEEP paying. It may only be $30 a year or some such, but I hear the same arguements there that I hear -here-. I get people begging and berating me there for the same things people berate digo-holders for on Furc. The grass is NOT greener, and stating it is is patently false.

The game in question, AQ worlds, offers a way to get "paid" stuff for free... Trialpay! After completing a few offers you can get "adventure coins" to buy and use "paid" items. "But furcadia doesn't have that!" you might say... you're right, we have better. You cannot BUY a membership with "Adventure coins" on AQ... you CAN buy a membership with GD on Furcadia. You can complete Trialpay offers, get scales, and buy an SS. All for free, problem solved for "unfortunate" furres.

Now, if for example, one dollar was worth 2 DS that'd actually be a significant difference because having 2 DS would be like having 1 dollar and, instead of paying 30$ for something you could only pay 15 for the DS.

At which point Furc would be losing HALF of it's revenue. Why on earth would they do that? Otherwise, they'd have to move to a full digital economy, where a Dragon for life might cost 1,000,000 Vinca (kinda like a Darigan Neopet costing a million np) Now, that might seem like a lot, or nothing. It depends on the rate of exchange. Buying 1,000,000 NP (aganst neopets TOS), costs about $200 (about the cost of a life dragon! COOL!)... Buying 1,000,000 NC (neocash) exchanges at about a .01:1 ratio would cost you about $10,000 if my math is right. Well, I think we can agree ten grand is a bit much for a Dragon For Life... so it's all in the exchange.

but then they get things like 'special colors' and features in their dreams to turn off the really annoying filters of Furc that'd really help the rest of us out. (SNIP) Then there's Group Packages, which offer bigger dreams. It's hard to fit so much into such a little space. I dunno why they aren't listed on Digo Market, or why only a few dreams have them but that seems a little messed up.

I'm sorry, but where do we get special colors? We don't. We -might-. And if we do it would likely a: be special testing to eventually broaden the free pallette, b: a slightly different shade of a color y'all already get as a perk for helping out the game. On map size? See my comments about HOGWARTS on a regular map. It's NOT hard to fit things into that space. THe space is -huge-. It's about knowing how to weave smartly, really. Furthermore, they are clearly listed on the Digo Market under "Dream Packages". Only a few of us have them because only a few of us want them and/or are willing to pay for them. We're paying $15 a month for those perks, it's not "messed up" that we pay more to get more. That's kind of how things work.

What about the kids like that? Who DO enjoy those items? And might even have the money to buy one but their parents say no? Another reason ads bother me...

How the hell is it DEP's fault that someone's parent tells them no? I hate to break it to you, but until you're making your own money your parents have a right to deny you whatever non-essential thing they feel like. Point of fact, until youre 18 they have the right to tell you that you can't play Furcadia at all. That's how the world works.

We have more expensive items because I figured out a long time ago that the amount people want to spend on their hobbies varies HUGELY from one person to the next. Some people like to spend $50-100 a year on their favorite hobby. Or if they'd like to spend more, they don't, because that's what they can afford. Some people have high paying jobs and likel to spend thousands of dollars a year on their favorite hobby. Whether it's on expensive golf clubs, season tickets to their favorite football or basketball team, travelling to conventions, covering their walls with rare posters and limited edition art prints, or an online game.

I translated that as "we found out we could get away with it." Seems a little messed up...

Your translation seems to be incorrect and biased, as he clearly spoke in English. Some people, such as myself, have expensive hobbies. Mine is aquarium-keeping. Not betta bowls on a desk with a half-dead fish in it. No, very finely tuned marine and planted freshwater aquaria with exotic species living in them. I do my best to spend no more than $20 per month on that particular hobby, and no more than $10 per week. However, I know doctors who are willing to spend over $5,000 on a single fish, and they may purchase $20,000 worth of livestock in one go. Because I do not have that much money, should the stores be obligated to either STOP selling the more expensive things, or lower their prices, therefore losing money, on things I can't afford? No. You wouldn't, I hope, tell them to do that either.

It's not "because they can get away with it", it's because "this thing has more value in it, and therefore costs more". I can chose to set up a little betta tank for $20, or a big German Ram tank for $100. Maybe I want something a bit more bulky and go for a Malawi Cichlid biotope for $500. There's a price range that can get everyone something, but not everythng for everyone. The fish tank is useless, the fish will die (expire), and do nothing but look cool. Same thing as a digo. There is no intrinsic value in those objects or items, only that they look cool. However, it cost someone money to breed those fish, build those aquariums and stock them in the store... just as it costs furcadia money to design a digo, have it drawn, and program it into the game.

I hope I've answered some questions and cleared up some misconceptions! A few of us have practically written a book, both official and non-official people, so I think it gives a pretty good overview of all the reasons from -many- angles.

[Kamose]

Now, if for example, one dollar was worth 2 DS that'd actually be a significant difference because having 2 DS would be like having 1 dollar and, instead of paying 30$ for something you could only pay 15 for the DS. . . . you could buy something for 30 iin-game dollars or 15 real dollars, this is how the value is achieved.

It doesn't matter what the nominal value of the in-game currency is so long as the in-game currency is primarily purchased with real money. People are always going to convert the in-game currency into its real-money value.

In your example, both prices are still $15. You're still spending $15, whether you take the cash directly to the Digo Market, or whether you go through the intermediate step of converting the $15 into 30 DS first. Your argument is akin to saying that the price is cheaper if you pay with two $5 bills than with one $10 bill.

[PhotonKitsune]

Most Silver Sponsor features become free to the public. Live-edit will become free when it's working properly (We're paying to test!). PhoenixSpeak is already free (We tested that, too!) The only things Silver Sponsors get is a changeable portrait space and the ability to change our colors/species live. One is a perk for spending $5 a month, the other only saves us the trouble of logging out and back in.

As for these special colors Sponsors are going to get, we don't know anything about them, and even then, it's not going to be any sort of game-breaking feature, here.

Sponsors do not get larger dream sizes (although we do get more local species and a bit more PS space) or any real feature that makes the game unplayable otherwise. Yes, sponsors get features first, but they always go public after they know they work right!

Cost wise, it's what, $5 a month? Price of going to a theater and seeing a movie during the day. Cheap, plus I get 5 silver scales each month ($.50 right back to me, meaning in a year I get $6 back.)

It's all a matter of value to you. Is Silver Sponsorship worth $5? Is a dragon worth it's cost? If yes, pay for it. If not, don't. None of the premiums hinder your game experience if you don't have them. Heck, you can put the Digos into your dream as a local species if you feel so inclined! Take that, Digo Market!

Really, all I want you to take away from this is that they're not as bad a deal as you're making them out to be. None of it is necessary and you can do AMAZING things with dreams even if you don't shell out for a dream package. Seriously.

Probably.

If DEP had more players to provide more revenue they could have an army of programmers and artists creating content on a more industrial scale, thus lowering the indivdual cost, while raising net costs. I.e. the game will cost more to run, but the cost-per-thing would lower.

BULK lowers the cost of production considerably, but people who are not set up to produce in bulk cannot benefit from that perk. I must buy paints at $2.50-$50 a bottle ($50 is a rare purchase of paint that is made of actual gold), rather than buying a 25 gallon BARREL, or even a 1 gallon jug, which would work out to pennies "per bottle". I cannot affort or support the bulk that would lower my costs. If more people purchased things from me, I could. Just like DEP!

So if more players joined, prices would drop?

The beekins do not set the price of Digo Market items, so I certainly hope you/your friend did not take your anger about digo prices out on someone who voulenteers their time (no pay, at all) to help furres out. Also, the Beekin was right.

Of course she didn't, I even told her when she asked the beekins are volunteers and usually tell what they are told to/ what they know like us about it. When she did, I didn't think she'd get very far but she did add some valid points and received mostly the same answers I do from volunteers/long-time players about why everything is expensive. Mostly why I started this post: because everyone was giving us the same answers. And, on a positive note, I DID get different answers by posting on these forums.

You're awfully fond of using Weasle Words to flavor your arguement. It makes your post look very overt and less sincere than it ought to be. Consider that $4 per month, is not that far from $5 per month for a premium sponsorship. Mind you, without the sponsorship you're missing a few things, but let's break this down. There are, at my last count, three things SS get that free players don't have at all (yet). These would be on-the-fly color change, free port art, and Live-Edit. Live-Edit is in testing, one of the ways SS actually do something -useful-. We sponsor the game we love by paying a bit, and testing features so that everyone else gets to use them when they're done. We help to provide live-world testing, bringing in non-SS friends to introduce far more variables into the situation than you'd see in closed testing. More people on different computers means more bugs pop up, and those get fixed faster to bring what -was- a touchy, risky, but cool feature to you whole, safe, and functional.

Seems logical.

DragonScales are gift-vouchers, each Gold Scale is worth one USD. Paying with DS is the same as paying with a gift card or certificate. Once the voucher/certificate is purchased it no longer has the same real-cash value, except second-hand. I have a wad of GD setting on my alts, just like I have a Walmart Gift Card in my wallet. Those dollars are now useful only to the companies that issued the voucher.

So basically the entire point if DS is not to take the burden off spending at all? And act like a gift card? Basically it's like store credit meant for someone else?

Why should Furcadia, as a community, lose sleep over people wanting something for nothing? We have furres begging for scales constantly, and in addition we have The Giving Tree. Just as there are ways in the real world to get people who have more to give to those who don't... there are ways on Furc. And honestly, I find them annoying. Would you tell Walmart it has to give you 3,000 Walmart Fun Bucks for $1 USD that would be worth $3,000 USD in Merch? No. So why do it here?

A: What's The Giving Tree? B: No I don't think so. I don't think anything should be given away, just as no one should give for nothing, and I noticed just about everyone's comparring this to life. I compared it to other games. There's a bit of a different economy for gamess. Typically things work differently. I only meannt to bring that up. C: What are weasel words?

That's semi-incorrect. The avatars are devided into two groups: "Default" and "Digo". Within the "Digo" group there are sub-groups, introduced when more species were introduced. There are the Mythicals, Wings, Ferians, Seasonals and Avatars. Nobles and Furlings are in the "Avatars" group.

Yeah ok I'll go with that. o.o;

As you just said, no other game comes close in the creative aspect. None probably ever will. You get ALL of that, yes, for free. You get DS, Dreams, Patching, Phoenix Speak, and everything you need to create a huge, dynamic, world of your own FOR FREE. I worked for a Harry Potter Roleplay for a while that used an SS alt to upload a tiny, relitavely useless, "entry" map. Within that was a nested array of upwards of TEN other maps, not a single one using a single paid feature. If he could fit Hogwarts into a normal map, there is NO reason for ANYONE to say they cannot do "anything" without a 300x300 behemoth.

Again, seems logical.

Hopefully the information I provided above, in terms of Bulk vs. Artisan is somewhat helpful in solving this pressing issue. One MOST people don't take the time to consider. In the ONLY other MMOG I play in order to reach whole areas of the game I must pay. In order to use specific objects (numbering in the hundereds) I must pay. In order to -keep- using these things, even though once I get them they are "for life", I must KEEP paying. It may only be $30 a year or some such, but I hear the same arguements there that I hear -here-. I get people begging and berating me there for the same things people berate digo-holders for on Furc. The grass is NOT greener, and stating it is is patently false.

It does.

The game in question, AQ worlds, offers a way to get "paid" stuff for free... Trialpay! After completing a few offers you can get "adventure coins" to buy and use "paid" items. "But furcadia doesn't have that!" you might say... you're right, we have better. You cannot BUY a membership with "Adventure coins" on AQ... you CAN buy a membership with GD on Furcadia. You can complete Trialpay offers, get scales, and buy an SS. All for free, problem solved for "unfortunate" furres.

That sounds good but I also heard TrialPay was unsafe and can result in alot of problems for people trying to use it for this reason, most of them involve loopholes in contracts (Go figure) so how could people possibly use it in a safe way if this is true?

At which point Furc would be losing HALF of it's revenue. Why on earth would they do that? Otherwise, they'd have to move to a full digital economy, where a Dragon for life might cost 1,000,000 Vinca (kinda like a Darigan Neopet costing a million np) Now, that might seem like a lot, or nothing. It depends on the rate of exchange. Buying 1,000,000 NP (aganst neopets TOS), costs about $200 (about the cost of a life dragon! COOL!)... Buying 1,000,000 NC (neocash) exchanges at about a .01:1 ratio would cost you about $10,000 if my math is right. Well, I think we can agree ten grand is a bit much for a Dragon For Life... so it's all in the exchange.

This was mostly answered above, I think. I always thought DS would be the equal of making things cheaper for people. Never once crossed my mind they were meant to be given to other people.

How the hell is it DEP's fault that someone's parent tells them no? I hate to break it to you, but until you're making your own money your parents have a right to deny you whatever non-essential thing they feel like. Point of fact, until youre 18 they have the right to tell you that you can't play Furcadia at all. That's how the world works.

This is a totally different subject all together but I hhave never saw the fairness in kids been seen as property of their parents and assumed to have no opinion on what should be. Yes, there are sone things kids can't speak for like issues with cursing or things best kept to adults (I hope everyone knows what I mean) but I think a 14 or 15 year old teenager should be given /some/ freedom. Regarless of what snobby adults think, and again, I'm not talking about Furc mainly, it's EVERYTHING. By the time someone is 16 they can drive a car but they still can't be out late? That's extremely messed up! And there's not much of a gap between 17 and 18 yet they are treated completely different by the law, which is also wrong.

Your translation seems to be incorrect and biased, as he clearly spoke in English. Some people, such as myself, have expensive hobbies. Mine is aquarium-keeping. Not betta bowls on a desk with a half-dead fish in it. No, very finely tuned marine and planted freshwater aquaria with exotic species living in them. I do my best to spend no more than $20 per month on that particular hobby, and no more than $10 per week. However, I know doctors who are willing to spend over $5,000 on a single fish, and they may purchase $20,000 worth of livestock in one go. Because I do not have that much money, should the stores be obligated to either STOP selling the more expensive things, or lower their prices, therefore losing money, on things I can't afford? No. You wouldn't, I hope, tell them to do that either.

A: No I wouldn't tell a store to sell less expensive items. I would save up, like I've been doing for over 10 years if I wanted something, and I would also feel bad for anyone who couldn't afford certain thiings they would try to save up for.

It's not "because they can get away with it", it's because "this thing has more value in it, and therefore costs more". I can chose to set up a little betta tank for $20, or a big German Ram tank for $100. Maybe I want something a bit more bulky and go for a Malawi Cichlid biotope for $500. There's a price range that can get everyone something, but not everythng for everyone. The fish tank is useless, the fish will die (expire), and do nothing but look cool. Same thing as a digo. There is no intrinsic value in those objects or items, only that they look cool. However, it cost someone money to breed those fish, build those aquariums and stock them in the store... just as it costs furcadia money to design a digo, have it drawn, and program it into the game.

You've just made the mosr compelling point I've heard all day. Or at least, stated it in the most logical way. But still, to me, that does seem like alot to pay for something o.o;

I hope I've answered some questions and cleared up some misconceptions! A few of us have practically written a book, both official and non-official people, so I think it gives a pretty good overview of all the reasons from -many- angles.

Yes, it does. Hopefully there will be some reference in here people can use.

Alright, I went and did some reading into Mabinogi's Cash Shop, to attempt to compare them as best as possible.

Lets start with the cost of NX Cash (Here on called NX 'cause I was lazy. )

$1 = 1000 NX

Which means:

$.001 = 1 NX

That's right, 1 NX is not even a penny. 10 NX = $.01 and 100 NX = $.10, obviously.

Lets start with the "Premium Services", the things you can buy that are very Silver Sponsor like:
[NOTE: These Services are all FREE until a character hits a total level 30.]

Advanced Play Service = 9,500 NX, or $9.50 for 30 days
The Advanced Play Service gives you a lot of one use items per day, some of which you could sell in game for some gold, if you so chose. They're all items that really don't mean all that much to me, just potions and things you could likely inferior versions of in game.

Extra Storage Service = 9,500 NX, or $9.50 for 30 days
This one is a lot of Storage features:
-Can buy and use bags (1 per character)
-2x bank inventory
-Character tabs in bank [Shared Bank]
-Can create/manage guilds
-Personal shop
Again, it's not that game breaking, but once you use it, it would probably be a pain to go back to being without it. The personal shop is the one that gets me, though, as that's normally a free feature...

Nao's Support Service = 9,500 NX, or $9.50 for 30 days
Here's something that wouldn't be worth being without. Death penalty lowered, free item every week plus a stat-boost item at level/age 20.
-Less penalty when KO'd
-Free item a week
-Special item at level(age?) 20?
-3x kill enemies on screen / day

Fantasy Life Club = 14,900 NX, or $14.90 for 30 days
-All three Premium Services in one

Character Cards (Alts)
Yes, Mabinogi charges for any extra characters after your first. If I read everything right, you also need one if you want to "Rebirth" your character, but I'm not sure on that part.
Basic x Card = 7,900 NX, or $7.90
Premium x Card = 9,500 NX, or $9.50
(These give you an extra player or "rebirth" a character [ie: New Game+]. You only get one character per account unless you pay.)

Animal Cards (Mythics/Ferians/Etc)
[Note: It seems like you only get x minutes per day with a pet, however the pets do not expire.]
Coral Cobra = 5,200 NX, or $5.20
Brown Fox = 4,200 NX, or $4.20
Silver Fox = 5,700 NX, or $5.70
Mini Bear = 7,500 NX, or $7.50
Red Panda = 7,400 NX, or $7.40 [Special]
Black Cotton Ostrich = 10,300 NX, or $10.30 [Mount]
Shire = 9,900 NX, or $9.90 [Mount]

This is what gets me: Why is most of that stuff individually less money? They have more people to take care of, more game issues, more maintenance, more code, more maps ect. My point isn't how much a game costs in general but how much it costs to only have a couple things. I'm looking at this from a normal person's point of view when they go through a list, not from the point of view of someone who does alot of math and knows alot about business.

..what about it? someone who doesn't understand businesses probably doesn't deserve said access.

OH you don't think? You don't think people who just use a bank account to make their lives comfortable DON'T deserve a bank account? People get paychecks through those! People make subscriptions through those! And no! I DON'T understand business! I DON'T understand why the government does little about the gas prices! I DON'T understand why the laws don't apply to big business! I think the whole business industry wreaks of foul play!

BUT there are some decent businesses out there, usually over-run by the big-time idiots that just want more money when they have enough to last them a good long while. I don't doubt everything people tell me about DEP using the money to support themselves. I was just asking why it's so much. Otherwise, I like the job they do. It's the only game out there I see them actually interact wih the player base and I think that's very honorable and there's been alot of fog cleared here about why things are so expensive, yet it still seems like alot to fuel the game and feed 16 people. Perhaps, alot of it might have to do with the player base...