Play by hour time card for western/oceanic aion?

[NuSix3]

Originally Posted by Elaith

A big reason why pay by the hour is so popular in the East and not in the West is because a lot of people in China and Korea don't own their own personal computers, or don't have personal internet access and can only play by going to lan centers (which they have to pay by the hour THERE and than pay by the hour to NC soft, so they really aren't getting a deal), whereas in the West almost all of their customers have personal computers and personal internet connections.

Like this guy said, it's just not the practical way to do things here.

[Cresnik]

Having both options can't hurt anybody and i don't understand why all the subscription fans are so nyerked off by ppl who wish to have a fair deal and pay for what they are getting, paying 15 $ a month and playing 10 hours does not advantage the players so why are you speaking as if ur ncsoft and loosing ur money; ppl should be able to choose how what payment options is better suited for them and to the smartass vepo about he's electric bill and phone and w/e i dunno where u are living my friend but where i live we pay for how much electricity we use and how much we speak on the phone and it dose not charge ppl for services that are not used so pls stop trying to be smart cuz ur obviously not.

[goldensun441]

theres plenty of ways that it could be beneficial.

me for instance,

i would only get to play aion online for a few hours every few days due to the fact that i would be playing it on someone elses computer which they seldom relinquish control of.

now, if i payed 15$, and got to play it maybe 10 hr a month, im seriously getting ripped off.
this would be a huge deterrent to me paying for the game and im sure im not entirely alone in this situation (or similiar situations)

however. i would not mind paying calculated hourly prices which would actually be overly expensive if i played too often.
in other words expensive hourly rates which playing more than maybe 8-12 hr a week would actually make it more expensive to play for a month than a regular subscription. i think this would help people who maybe work or take long breaks and such. and especially when video games are supposed to be something you do in your free time, why should we feel obligated to get our moneys worth out of something when we may have something else worth doing pop up. not saying video games are bad but i think the account setup should at least try to cater to the fact that people need breaks

another thing. I know for a fact there are players in WOW that play aion as well, with dual subscriptions, i think paying hourly could benefit them as well since they will quickly feel that theyre paying for too much and not playing one or the other enough

I know that monthly fees are a big deterrent to playing for people who feel they dont have the time (or computer) but want to play. even pricy hourly fees would be more fair and less costly to people who want to hop on casually, and if too many people players dabble with it when they should be doing monthly hey that just makes the ncsoft team more money.

i think the bottom line is making this option would be beneficial to the income of the game as it would attract more casual players who do not want to commit a chunk of money or time when they are unsure as to how much they will use it.
and many of the players who get hooked may start playing more and paying monthly.

I'm only seeing benefits here. as long as the hourly price is higher than how much the average player pays for their usage.
it could even have an expiration date on their hours of 3 months, so that someone cant pay for time and take huge breaks.

it would be a rip off for the average player but a great deal for the casual dabbler,

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i believe i supported my points with at least some sligght degree of backup.
many of you negative people however *cough* NuSix3, simple say "it wont work" without any information,
please stop posting without providing any new information or bases for what you had to say. no offense but it needlessly crowds the forumn and makes it hard to find the real information.

what i WOULD like to read would be some reasons why ncsoft cant implement this. cause id really like to know why, from a business standpoint, that including hourly subscripts would be harmful to the company even if it is implemented carefully.

we're talking cost/benefit analysis for a company, not "koreans and chinese dont have computers so they need it to be cheaper because of the cost of internet cafes"
i dont have a computer that runs aion so I need the game cheaper too. lol and get a job? im taking full time classes in university. id like to spend some of my freetime playin a game without feeling like im getting ripped off since i cant play that much. thats all.

am i cheap? well maybe, i dont know. i might be a penny pincher lol. but i think its fair to say that a reasonable amount of people care where their money goes and if they feel that paying for a month of server time will be a waste since they only logon periodically, then that will be a group of customers that ncsoft fails to attract.

perhaps this minority is not as large as i think it is, but i think in the grand scale of an mmo, that even a minority customer group can make a nice increase in sales.


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sorry if this post got extensive and maybe nerd-rager-ish lol
but i was just tired of forum posts being so baseless and opinionated
id be nice if we had some moderators post in here every now and then to add some facts to the discussion
-ben

[Sapper]

Everyone wanting to pay by the hour realize that in china where it was cheap wasn't ran by NCSoft, right? NCSoft's pay by the hour is extremely expensive. I played Japan Aion until the NA release, and it was about $20 for 100 hours or 30 days, which comes out to about 3 hours a day. The unlimited was around $28 a month. Stop complaining about $15 a month.

[Zaine6]

With the original private stores a pay by time scheme would suck, and in general you would never want to afk or be in the game without playing, and what happens if one week you play heaps. It will add up.

[Vaper]

i prefer the guild wars system

[goldensun441]

the guild wars system wasn't necessarily bad... i mean. paying for expansions was okay but in my opinion guild wars was more like a single player game that you could play with others. it had its good points but yeah it lacked the longevity an mmo hopes to achieve, its not a bad game its just on a smaller scale, and now that they are focusing on guild wars 2 i wouldnt expect to see any other content in gw 1. just seems like a beat it and leave it type of game.

i even half suspect that all the instancing they did in guild wars somehow cut down on server usage. cant prove it but it makes me wonder. it certainly made the areas easier to design

not to say it goes out of use. people play starcraft online still and thats service is free (unless they changed it, highly doubt it),

but this method just doesnt seem to fit a larger scale mmo like aion is becoming, theres alot more support for it and updates and crap than for gw where they sortof made a half empty world and let it run itself.
(i like guildwars im just saying it feels like a different type of online game)