Please avoid Monetization at all costs and watch dup bugs/money bugs.
So, yes, I searched and saw the other posts about monetization. I don't think this was covered as well as it should have been from the feedback side of things.
I understand that MMORPGs, especially live service ones are very expensive to make and maintain. Got it. However, it is my personal opinion that any form of monetization really ruins the experience for me personally. If you give me a few minutes, I'll explain it in thorough detail. I know many others in the community feel the same way. Don't worry, I have viable alternatives.
For me I enjoy the immersion of the game, its story line, I like to check out into an alternate reality. If every time I turn a corner in said game/world there is something, some mechanic or design trying to get at my real-life money, it immediately breaks the immersion for me. I don't know about everyone else, but I enjoy video games because they give me a break from reality. Don't get me wrong, I am not poor, I am a college educated professional in a career, I have the money to engage in things like this, but it kills the experience for me. Now some games do a good job of not putting it in your face all the time, and that is good. It does help with this issue, but it doesn't prevent it. If you never open the shop, it doesn't affect you right? Wrong! If someone goes to the shop and buys a cosmetic and they, have it at a much lower level than me, but I haven't put in all the hours to grind to get it, it immediately kills that items value to me, and takes all my desire for that item away, you know if it can just be bought, why waste the effort. Visual progression based off of level and achieved milestones is huge to this genre. Making it so that someone can just buy it, yes helps the developers monetarily, but hurts the community as a whole. It breaks immersion and fosters an environment with less player-to-player group, mutual objectives, etc. This will kill a game and it's community very rapidly and has a history of doing just that.
It is even worse if you give players the ability to buy things that increase their power or make achieving things, especially levels easier (Or currency). That is just straight up pay to win and will kill the community much faster than just buy cosmetics.
I think you should do a box sell price for initial access but make it reasonable. You'll make a killing if it is reasonable as millions upon millions will buy the game. Make that box come with a month or two of "free" subscription (built into the box price) so players can try the game, and then make it strictly subscription based from that point on. I see people mentioning 15$ USD per month is where it is currently set. I believe if you brought that up to 20$ (Which when factoring in inflation is about what WoW launched at) that plus the box fee will more than pay for the games initial development and will provide a steady stream of income. Almost like this is a proven model that has worked before. And leave all the extra things that monetization can bring alone. Your community is more likely to enjoy it and more importantly more likely to stay.
Lastly a great deal of us had high hopes for New World, and there absolutely are great things about that game still. However, it was just a few months after launch that bugs broke the games economy and it still hasn't recovered, and that is the backbone of that game, the economy. Please during Alpha encourage your testers to "Break" the game and find and flesh out all these flaws before beta, but of course still continue the same mantra into the Beta. Duplication bugs absolutely destroyed New World and I don't think the Amazon staff saw it coming. I think it blind-sided them.
This is earnest feedback from just myself, and I do intend to purchase and play the game.
