TAGN beat me to posting about the WildStar PLEX plan. /agree
It works in EVE because EVE has a balanced economy. WildStar being a themepark, it won’t (feel free to bookmark this and come back 6 months into release and tell me otherwise).
What I do find interesting is that WildStar, being an NCSoft title, is going to charge a sub, while GW2, also under NCSoft, does not. Now sure, GW2 is a sequel to GW1, which was also sub-free, but Anet never set out to create an MMO with GW1, while they most certainly tried with GW2. Pretty clear message NCSoft is sending with this announcement; WildStar is not a 3 week vacation.
Whether it succeeds or not I can’t tell yet, mostly because I’ve not been following the game closely and I’ve yet to read anything convincing about it one way or the other.
Now that I think about it, that’s a huge compliment to the game actually. Past MMOs have been easy; be it SW:TOR (4th pillar of fail), GW2 (living world of static zones), TESO (“we reskinned WoW with the ES IP, yo”), or EQN (SOE, parkour, boss red boxes, countless design fails in a single presentation) those games and many others were/are/will be DOA. I can’t say that about WildStar yet. Congrats?
Hardcore Casual 
You’re not going to like this game. I promise you. Unless you’re regretting that you no longer play Rift or GW2, which I doubt you are, you will not like this game. Asking for a sub pretty much guarantees it.
And you’re blowing my mind lately — emergent AI is an automatic fail but a themepark asking for a sub might be worth it because they’re asking for it? smh
Oh no no, don’t misunderstand the post. I don’t doubt I won’t like WildStar (hence no interest in it), this was just more a reference to them not burying themselves already. It’s a low bar we are working with here.
And SOE’s version of what they want to call emergent AI is fail, because SOE. Considering I invented it (yo), I’m a pretty big fan of the concept.
This is a most reasonable response. Well the “because SOE” part might not be reasonable but is certainly understandable.
I’m not willing to dismiss EQN’s AI, if only because the Storybricks folks are involved, and long before anyone knew they were working with SOE, I was a fan of what they wanted to do and what they had to say. At least, they don’t seem like complete idiots.
I guess we’ll see.
I do miss the “Nintendo Power” era of hype. When we got previews for a game a month, maybe two at the most, before release, then got the game and reviews. And that was it. And we walked up hill in the snow, there and back, to get to the video game rental place. And we liked it goddamnit.
I don’t see an a priori reason to conclude that a plex-type scheme won’t work with a somewhat unbalanced or incomplete economy. The PLEX economy worked in EVE during periods of higher botting, massively multiboxed farming, etc. The economy in WoW, as a whole, was pretty lacking, but I think a PLEX plan would have worked there, potentially very well. Obviously at some point an economy is too limited to support a PLEX-type plan, but I think you’re setting the bar too high here.
To me the problem would be that everyone would want a PLEX, and no one would want to sell one because the gold you would get for it would be worthless, in that you could not do anything interesting with it.
In EVE you always need more ISK, but do you always need more gold in WoW?
“In EVE you always need more ISK, but do you always need more gold in WoW?”
I don’t always need more ISK in EVE, and I also didn’t always need more gold in WoW. It’s true that it’s much easier to get more gold than one can easily spend in WoW than ISK in EVE , but it’s also true that there are many many people willing to buy gold for dollars to then buy mounts for gold in WoW. The fundamental question is “what constitutes success for a PLEX program?”…so far you’re saying it wouldn’t be successful in WoW, I’m saying it would (at least it would have 3 years ago when I played), but we don’t have a clear definition for success. In my mind, it wouldn’t take much of the dual benefits of reducing illicit RWT and increasing profits to be ‘worth doing’–are you saying that you don’t think it would have any positive effects whatsoever, or that you think it would have positive effects but below some unstated threshold for success? To me it’s more useful to look at how many people bought mounts in WoW, than to compare WoW’s economy to EVE’s.
I guess if Blizzard kept releasing stuff to buy with gold, it would work. When I stopped playing WoW there was literally nothing to spend the gold on, as all the best gear was raid stuff, they removed the importance of consumables, and there were no gold sinks. At that point it would have failed, because I’d have paid the gold limit for a free month. A lot of my guild mates would have as well. It’s why I laughed at all the people and blogs giving tips for making gold on the AH. It was as easy as ‘run ad-on macro, profit’, and even then it was still pointless.
When I last played, early in Cata, it’s true that all the best gear became raid stuff (although some of that raid stuff was BOE and went for ~50k gold on the AH), the only consumable being used were flasks, generally, and there weren’t many gold sinks. On the other hand, Blizzard released BOE pets right before I quit which cost 10 dollars and which some people purchased and sold on the AH for around 10-15k gold. So, you’re saying you’d be willing to buy free months for 999,999 gold. Obviously, some people existed at that time who were willing to trade 10 dollars for 10,000 gold. That gap there is massive, and screams that a PLEX system at that time would benefit both of you. You get your free month for 200,000 gold, which is much lower than you are willing to pay, and he gets 200,000 gold for 15-20 dollars, which is much superior to the deal he actually did make. If you’re right, and the group you’re in is much larger, then the price will stabilize somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands of golds range (adjusted for inflation to whatever gold amounts are like now in MoP, which I know nothing about). If I’m right, and there are more total casuals playing WoW these/those days willing to spend real cash to buy mounts and pets then there are/were serious players like you and your friends, then the free month would have stabilized at a price more like 30,000-50,000 gold (again, current gold price would depend on the current economy in MoP). The key is, that whether you’re right, or whether I’m right,I consider either scenario a success for the PLEX-like system. If, after hearing about the BOE cash pets, you still think that BPLEXes would have gone for the gold limit permanently, which I agree would have been a failure, then we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
Also, consider that Blizzard would likely have considered a high BPLEX transaction volume more of a success, and thus would be expected to make some minor changes to give gold more value, if they went ahead with a PLEX-like system. Bringing the conversation back to Wildstar or any other themepark considering a PLEX-like system: In one respect, PLEX is a means of providing a legal alternative to illicit RWT. Realistically, we can skip the entire discussion we just had and ask the simple question: is illicit RWT occurring at a significant level? If so, then obviously there is a desire for legal RWT, and implementing a PLEX-like system makes sense. We know that there was rampant gold-selling in WoW, despite it being a themepark, and thus your contention that PLEX-es won’t work in themeparks is a nonstarter. (and the price of RWT gold at the time I quit makes your contention that BPLEXES would have gone for the gold limit highly implausible) If Wildstar’s designers want to make PLEXes most viable in Wildstar, then they just have to design the game such that rampant RWT will plague it…i.e., they should actually design the game so that PLEX-es won’t be that viable, and then implement them anyway, if they’re aiming to reduce illicit RWT as a high priority.