CCP RyanD
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Posted - 2008.05.23 23:32:00 -
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 Originally by: Val Vympel
A professional and "sober" company spokesperson and PR expert(preferably at least 35 years of age) would IMO be a splendid addition to the CCP payroll.
Hi, I'll be 40 in October. Wrangler works for me. (And he doesn't write many of the news items that get posted, he just posts them. He didn't write this one, for example. You're taking shots at the wrong guy in this case.)
Normally I would not post on a thread like this but we're going into the weekend and I thought a little clarity might be useful.
Let me start at the beginning. Our billing system overall is way more complex than it may appear. It seems that every day we find a new wrinkle, a new issue we have to overcome, a new requirement placed on us by our payment processors, a new government regulation we have to abide by, a new fraud technique we have to fight. It has become necessary to try to make that process simpler, to help us reduce errors and improve service. Simplifying the ETC system is a part of that overall process.
We are constantly working on improving our basic, direct payment services as well. Recently we have integrated options which allow, or will soon allow, people without credit cards to use those systems.
We prefer that our customers use our direct-bill services for a number of reasons. The most important is that using that system allows us to collect the full price of the subscriptions. Our Time Code systems use a reseller network, and they receive a discount from the suggested price of the Time Codes when they purchase them in bulk This discount is how they make a profit selling the codes to the public, but it means that Time Codes are a less profitable way for us to do business with our customers.
Because we are enabling this expanded payment system, we do not feel the need to continue to support the complexity (and the overhead as a result of that complexity) of having many different denominations of Time Codes. If you wish to pay 30 days at a time, you'll be able to do that (and if you cannot do it now you will likely be able to do it soon) even if you do not have a credit card. This simplification has a number of internal benefits, and we decided that those benefits outweighed the unfortunate impact that the change might have to some of our customers who wish to use a payment method we don't yet support.
So to reiterate: If you wish to buy 30 days of play for EVE, you can do it with us directly for the listed price of $14.95/E14.95, and you don't need to buy a Time Code to do that. The same applies for people who want a 90 day period of play as well. We expect the number of people who are unable to use this method of payment to be negligible, and to become smaller regularly as we enable more and more payment options.
The creation of a new, 60 day Time Code, and the pricing of that Time Code is not related to the transition away from 30 and 90 day codes, but was done to fulfill a 2nd strategic goal which was influenced by a number of factors.
We think that the market, lead by Blizzard, is moving towards a standard of 60 days for Time Codes and we're moving there at the same time. As Blizzard's policies (due to volume) often become de facto standards, we think that many other games will follow in this path as well.
Our pricing for our 60 day Time Code is higher than Blizzards (today) and that reflects a number of assumptions about who buys the time codes, who will be acting as our reselling partners for those time codes, the impact of various taxation regimes, and the foreign exchange rates between currencies. Although our pricing does not mirror the marketshare leader at this time, it does reflect the internal assumptions we are basing our business plan on, and our price is something we are comfortable with at this time.
Thanks for listening.
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