Micro-transaction Management

I've been fuming over this for the past few days. Micro-transaction has been the route some MMO's have taken to increase their revenue. Now, it appears Turbine is flirting with the idea.

Turbine's Job Posting

If you are unsure of what micro-transaction is all about in the MMO world here's a piece from the Wiki site on Micropayment

In MMORPGs

Micropayments are used in some massively multiplayer online role-playing games^[3] These are typically free to play games with no monthly fee, which offer players the possibility of purchasing in-game currency redeemable for items. These items are often more powerful than those that can be obtained by "free" players, or offer an advantage or feature otherwise unavailable. An example would be a set of armor more effective than that obtained from generic in-game vendors or enemies, or a potion that allows a character to earn more experience points per quest completed or enemy slain, thereby progressing faster than usual. (MMORPGs).

Numerous MMORPGs use this system to some extent, though the details of what can be obtained and at what price will vary depending on the game. Some of these games are: SECOND LIFE, Starport: Galactic Empires, Cabal Online, Rappelz, Sword of the New World, Flyff, Silkroad Online, Atlantica Online, Maplestory and Daimonin.

What does this mean to us LOTRO gamers? We're going to end up paying for that uber sword of we're-stupid-consumers if we want to continue having a good time in LOTRO. You want the next horse that's going to be .5x faster than the one you have now? Twenty dollars please. Do you want an xp boost? $5 dollars please. Would you like to get a stack of uber crit pots? $1 please per stack. Think this kind of game-play won't add up? You should see the games both MMORPG and other types of games and how much money they are pulling in.

This is the new frontier for gaming. Soon, you'll see Call of Duty 7 asking if you want to aquire the RPG of Nubness for $9.99 or X Microsoft Points. When Fable 3 hits you'll be contemplating if spending $14.99 in MS points is worth 15k in in-game gold or a new fuzzy hat that talks.

This has me very upset. Turbine has been so high on my list of kick ass MMORPG developers but ever since Book 13's release they have fumbled the ball a few times and their overall performance has fallen off a good deal. Moria's look and feel was outstanding however they KILLED crafting and now I think we can see why. You want the best gear? Crafting isn't going to get it done for you. Or, perhaps, you'll have to BUY the sepcial components in the future to make any sort of in-game money through crafting which is NO DIFFERENT than those who pay the far-east for gold accept now it will be going to Turbine and you'll still have to bust your ass to make SuperDuper Master whatever.

The gaming industry didn't rise up against companies who announced they were going to create databases for gamer demographics based on Ip addresses to sell to advertizers. The gaming comunity stood by and did nothing when their ISP's decided to allow thirdparty companies to snif all HTTP traffic from your system to generate demographic data to be used for advertizing. And now I see clearly that the gaming world will not rise up against this one either. Micropayments will hurt. You shall see.

Turbine, turn this down. Please.