Best Of

Wuff said:

I know I've spent more money on IRE stuff than I've spent on graphical games before, and I'm not as rich as half the people playing this appear to be.

I don't think people spending lots of money on this game are necessarily rich, any more than someone spending all their savings on drugs and alochol is likely to be rich. Being fiscally responsible is pretty important if you wanna be rich(er).

Don't get distracted by artifacts.

Work towards transing your class skills, and even there, it's worth taking a hard look and deciding if the trans skills are worth it. As I personally don't have an interest in PvP, I for example decided that shrapnel was the highest rank I needed in Improvisation, Conceal the highest rank I needed in Guile. I trans'd Gunslinging but since Unload got nerfed, I kind of wish I'd stuck to Eject. I will probably not increase my class skills any further until I reach max level, get bored of hacking/captaincy, and start taking an interest in PvP.

The skills are what will really make or break your experience in any IRE game. Think of artifacts as fancy bonuses you get for being an extremely generous donor. Not something for normal people like you and me. You don't need them to have fun, trust me. If there is one specific one that catches your eye, save up for it long term. For me that's Ship Illusions. And if I get that as a reward for having been a member for 6 months, that's cool.

(Consumerism, man. Always trying to get you to buy the latest, shiniest thing.)

We’ve had these conversations for 20 years now. Now that I think about it, I don’t remember IRE changing their prices in that time other than offering Elite and the no-brainer packages, and taking inflation into account, they’ve been getting cheaper over time.

Secondly, the artifacts here so far are pretty great compared to the others, if the math I’ve seen is right. The gap between having a level 5 stats arti and not is smaller than usual for a top tier boost, afaik.

Soooo...I'm sure this has been debated hundreds of times.  However, the gist of this post is the barrier of entry to be competitive in this game seems to be steep.  I'm currently an IRE member.  The $24.99 is a steep monthly fee.  On top of that you have the credit packages that you can spend literally thousands of dollars on.  The artifacts are very expensive.  Just to trans all your skills would take a lot of time for a FTP player.

In general I think the direction should be to attract more players.  With a larger player base you would get more revenue.  When trying to maximize the revenue earned per active player you tend to lean towards a smaller player base.  I think the cost ends up being a turnoff to a lot of potential players.

I'm having a lot of fun on the game itself.  However, I just typically don't throw this kind of money to one game.  There are so many ftp and cheaper options out there.  Even other MUDs that are less monetized.  

Is there a way that a small niche game can earn enough revenue to support the servers and development staff without bleeding the player base dry?  Or is this set-up the only real option?

You can come back in 5 decades when MUDs FINALLY decline (unless of course we have some sort of retro craze and someone comes around with a revolutionary MUD idea) and all the staff are wizened and this follows the same path that Imperian and Lusternia have?

I'm not sure things are going to change too much until then though. Not until the whales get beached, at least.

Edit: I consider the $20 you pay for lesson packages to be the real price of entry into the IRE games nowadays.

Minion said:

As an American, I didn't get to gripe over being forced to use British spelling in every other IRE. That said, I am not sure I remember how to design WITHOUT British spelling.

My main IRE game before Starmourn was MKO, so yeah, I get to gripe. American spelling was enforced there too for the arbitrary reason that Feist (who wrote the Midkemia books) is American.

I think style-policing is a generally pretty shit practice for any game to adopt. If what's being written is correct and legible enough to be read without confusion, then who f-ing cares whether you write 'armour' with a 'u' or not. Other games shouldn't do it either and I said exactly the same thing on the Aetolia forums. As @kamyr said, two lefts don't make a right.

As for the problem with categorising things via terminals, for one thing, it's ugly. Speaking from the perspective of someone who really wanted to take Cuisine (I had Big Plans for it that I raved about here) and could easily afford to but decided it's just not worth my money, the idea of trying to open up a restaurant and having to put up each menu category (starters, main dishes, sides, desserts?!) as a different shop is daft. And since it's digital, the best I can offer is a delivery service, which largely defeats the purpose of buying food: facilitating RP. It's not like we eat on this game for sustenance; we do it to be social. We have NPC bars and clothing stores; why not player ones? Give us the option to choose. I'm sure that Trade Terminals would have an easier time selling most goods by virtue of convenience and being able to reach a wider audience, but many of us would rather have a physical shop we can manage and facilitate RP from, even if it means having less reach and making less marks. There's something fundamentally different about being able to play a watchmaker in a cluttered trinket store, a fashion designer in a colourful boutique, a bartender serving up beer, compared to having everything accessible with 0 interaction between the trader and customer. Some people might prefer that, but for others, give us a choice.

@Tecton, @Aurelius and team: I will never, ever pay 1600 credits to boost my shop front by 16% (which I don't have, because problems with the existing system dissuaded me from taking a tradeskill). But I would gladly pay 2000 credits for an artifact shop with a custom, subject-to-approval location (like auction shops from other games). In my case that would no doubt be the Litharge, Omni Station or Kovalar. I would gather people to RP there and host regular events that energise the playerbase: this is good for player-retention.

@Minion  All of the above is fair except I am pretty sure that, at least for this point in the game, everyone (or almost everyone) bought the tradeskills and lessons with credits or membership credits that they bought with money. So y’know, we are paying for that staff’s time, because that is what they offered in exchange for the purchase of said tradeskill

I've been that kind of person on other IREs who has to have every tradeskill. I've always loved designing items and by the same token I've also done building work both on IREs and other MU*s.

Being a designer/crafter on Starmourn was one of the things I was most looking forward to. I baked it into my character concept and had grand plans for it.

I'm not short on cash or credits; my character's sitting on enough to buy and trans a tradeskill right now, I have an Iron Elite membership, and I'm expecting a heap of retirement credits to come in once those are released.

However the problems with the system that have been outlined by others in this thread and elsewhere have led me to decide that being a crafter/designer on Starmourn just isn't worth it.

I'm not willing to pay 300+ credits just to get a tradeskill that will cost me even more in the long run, with a 50 limit on designs (no doubt due in future to be unlocked with yet more credits/fees), each costing 5k to submit (250k for all 50!), and then having to own multiple shops on the trade terminals just to hold the full range of items I want to sell and make them available to a wider audience. The shop layouts are not attractive, with no categories, and no physical presence in the gameworld that I could use to generate RP.

I'm massively, massively disappointed in staff's decision to not include beverages in the cuisine tradeskill, which they indicated would be the case in their dev posts prior to launch. I'm not going to take it just to have to then take beverages on top as a separate tradeskill, thereby locking myself into a second tradeskill choice, without even knowing what other tradeskills may be released at the same time and what the cap on our allotted tradeskills will be in future.

The devs said they want to facilitate the player economy, yet all of these features are prohibitive to doing so. Crafting and designing is not profitable in Starmourn and by the looks of things it doesn't appear intended to be. It's a massive gold sink for the designer, and comparatively much cheaper for anyone else to buy what they need from others putting in the hard work/credits.

A 1600 credits artifact to boost your shop front by 16% is also an absolute joke, when you could spent 16% more marks to do the exact same. It will never be worth the money, and who would spend that money just to make comparatively much less? It defeats the entire purpose of even wanting to boost your shop front in the first place.

Final gripe: I speak British English and I should be allowed to submit designs in British English. No one is confused by my use of a 'u' in colour. It doesn't create inconsistency in the game world. You know perfectly well what it says. It is not a spelling error. No player is going to be shocked and appalled by the existence of both British and American spellings in a multiplayer game.

And all of these factors are reasons why I have not purchased a tradeskill and will not in the foreseeable future, despite being able to afford it, despite having done so gladly and eagerly on every other IRE game I've played. I'm sorry but the system feels exploitative. Crafters and designers provide a massive service to these games and they pay for the privilege of doing so. The squeeze, shakedown and arbitrary limitations placed on them for being gullible enough to allow it is, as someone said above, gross.