Quote from Aubog007;1169025:
Problematic my ass, it costs more to make an account endgame than to buy one from someone. Anyone who would shell out 2-3k in a week to get an endgame character WITH putting in hours of work is just dumb, go ask someone who quit to sell you their account for 1-2 grand.
Even though 1-2 grand is pittance compared to the effort people put in.
And no fashion whore is going to splurge on 3k when they have to put their own effort in it as well.
The only people willing to do this though are the insanely rich, and i mean rich.
You're looking at this too directly, you have to consider the actual consequences of it. Just because it's expensive pay2win doesn't mean it isn't pay2win. In fact, it's probably worse that way. If a small number of people manage to make a large number of people quit, then you have a very significant business problem. It's not a good model at all, kind of like hitting the self-destruct button for the following reasons:
1) Coerces players to quit - This is an undeniable truth: the stronger you cash shop is, the less people you will have playing your game. Picture how many people would be playing mabi if everything was free compared to how many people would be playing it if rebirths cost $10 each. Of course Nexon needs money, so the cash shop has to exist in a way that allows players to join. Making rebirths free every three weeks was one of the smartest business decisions Nexon has made because of the following points.
2) Practically no one starts the game as a paying player - In order to get players to pay, you need to get players to play. Getting invested in the game is the first step to paying for it. Most weekly rebirthers started out as free to players, and a significant portion of them were freebirthers. To get paying players, the game essentially needs free players. The chances of someone buying a rebirth card to get AP when you have other players paying much more to get AP at tenfold the rate is much more slim. Players are very competitive and are often motivated to pay to get a leg up, but if the gap is too large it hardly works. This brings me to the next point.
3) People Play games for the community - This is one of the main reasons why players keep playing games; people play games that their friends play. This applies to every type of game, not just f2p games. The best examples I can think of are WoW and CoD. A lot of people continue to subscribe to Wow every month because they don't want to lose their friends, and a lot of people continue to buy each CoD over and over because their friends are doing it as well. Would you play Mabi if it turned into a single player game? I would have quit a long time ago. Now would you play it if everyone in the world was playing it? Pretty much everyone would.
Now this is more looking at it from a business perspective, but the same ideas tend to apply to the users. The worse off the business is, more often the worse off it is for the end user. I can't imagine this having a positive effect unless they were planning to shut down very soon.