Pierced Brosmen
Priory Of The Lemon
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Posted - 2011.06.10 08:21:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Adunh Slavy
Originally by: MotherMoon
the dev blog was quite clear. Aurum will be used to be NON vanity items in dust514. However the only different between the Aurm item and the normal item is, as you said, visual.
Have the refrence on that?
This makes perfect sense really, as it's in the nature of the business model.
EVE Online: Pay-to-play style game with eighter recurring subscription, game time codes or PLEX. Payment for game time is CCP's main source of income and until recently have been only usable to extend game time (or donate to charity, but that is not part of the business model). With the additional ability to convert it to Aurum, CCP has a small additional income stream that will allow you to buy vanity items that give you no advantage in-game (although a lot of pressure from the CSM had to be applied for CCP to commit to it only being vanity items. Something a lot of people apparently seems to miss, but CCP's initial plans for microtransactions in EVE was not limited to that). Regardless of how many and how awesome looking vanity items CCP will put in the game, the income for game time will always be the main income. Though ofcourse, the more money we spend on the virtual goods store, the more interested CCP will be to develop more vanity items.... if the consept doesn't attract buyers, there is no point in allocating development time on expanding the store.
Dust514: Play4Free style game that you never have to pay anything to play the game, but can get upgrades through virtual goods sales. Though you can manage with the standard items, you can get a bit better gear from the Aurum store, or from buying Aurum-items in the secondary market. So if you work hard to make in-game isk, you could in theory never have to pull out your wallet... However. Aurum being the ONLY income stream for CCP, it's only logical that items from microtransactions would be slightly (or vastly, we'll have to wait another year to find out) better, since there has to be some incentive to make players want to pull out their wallets.
I don't have any reference, but I do remember (my memory is not perfect though) from what I've read/heard after the E3 announcement, CCP saying that the virtual goods store in DUST is a place to buy "better" equipment. But, they have also made sure it's gonna be balanced in a way that buying stuff for Aurum ain't gonna be the "pay to win" option.
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