Elder Scrolls Online's First Microtransaction Is a Horse

[RandV80]

Honestly they should just make horses reasonable to acquire in game and add in the stupid horse armour. I'm under the impression that it was so bad that it looped around and became funny, a joke they can toss in as a form of self depreciating humour. And a lot of it came from a PC vs console angle, where on PC you can acquire a near unlimited amount of mods & additions to your game for free, while on console you have to pay actual money and all you get is some stupid horse armour.

 

[SecondPrize]

You can buy a horse with in-game currency. You can't buy the Palmino horse in game though. Speaking of in game, the term cash shop in mmos has always referred to an in game item store which accepts real money. That's why people raised a fuss about WoW adding a cash shop when they had already sold services and skins through account management for years. With ESO you have to go to account management to buy the imperial upgrade, cheap spotty horse and name change. It's not a cash shop.

Okay, fine, cash shop, account service, however it differs in the fine details, the results are the same; demanding more money on top of a regular payment. A rose by any other name..or in this case, a stink weed.

Yes, they're demanding extra money, if you want the skin and ease of early horse on your first character. Still doesn't mean you can't earn it in game, still doesn't mean there's a cash shop.

 

[Parnage]

WoW did it is not an excuse. WoW started selling stuff because players wanted to. After the panda monk pet for charity folks wanted more so blizzard gave them more stuff to buy. Having said that I still don't personally like it but they did what was wanted of them. And do try to remember this stuff was started in like 2009 the game being five years old at that point.

Unlike these ESO crumbums who managed to go from "shop" to.. "no no shop at all" to "surprise shop!" in the span of a few months. These guys are obviously trying to force as much currency out of the player as possible as soon as possible and it's not okay. This isn't some company realizing that the playerbase wanted to spend money on cosmetic items it's a bunch of take the money and run ish decisions that should make anyone with a sense of caution nervous.

If you love and I mean really love elder scrolls you may enjoy this(I mean I've got a weak spot for Kotor) but otherwise you are throwing your money away on this forgettable title.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

Queue the gamer misanthropy!
Honestly, I can't think of the last multiplayer game I played that didn't have pay shop of some kind.

WoW, Tera, Neverwinter, Borderlands 2 etc etc.. It is a common theme of games these days.

It doesn't make it right. Especially when they are charging you 14.99 a month just to have access to their game.

You really wanna see gouging? Look at the Blizzard store right now. You can BUY MAX LEVEL for WoW. Not to mention its a decade old game which has held it's 14.99$ a month model since its inception. I have yet to see thread complaining about that though. Oh right thats because the majority of threads are just people parroting the popular opinion, which right now is just how dissa-fucking-pointed they are with ESO.

Well this certainly isn't my thread. I can't stand Blizzard. It is just as bullshit for them to be doing it. I do agree about everyone just being a parrot on forums though.

 

[The White Hunter]

Really? I have to buy a Horse after I buy the game? That's ridiculous!

I was thinking about buying it, but I certainly won't now.

And then you have to subscribe also!

I'm guessing I'm too late to this party to say something about horse armour.

 

[StormDragonZ]

I, for one, look forward to seeing the next microtransaction to be either armor for the horse, or a booster to let your horse gallop 10% faster for an hour... or both, but the armor lasts only for a week.

 

[AlwaysPractical]

This stinks of publisher and executive interests :/ I doubt any of the developers of ESO went: yeah, we'd love our game to shoot itself in the foot several more times.

 

[Ian Mantell]

From there it's just a tiny step to pay2win, just do the hop, little Zenimax as better things await your customers elsewhere. They just need the last push over the edge, do them the favour, will you. /SCNR
EDIT: I'd do the full loop and write it that way: the devs would not have wanted their game to take an arrow to the knee that early.

 

[Hagi]

Oh for God's sake. You want to have a subscription fee? Fine, it's a legit business model, if not the most popular one. You want to have a cash shop? Fine, just so long as what it offers is cosmetic and/or convenience items and not demanding a person pay to get the basic features of the game after it was advertised as F2P. But having BOTH? No. No, no, nonononononono. $15 a month is too much to ask from a customer to THEN demand MORE real money from them. Make those items available for in-game currency; don't get greedy when you're already getting regular payments from customers.

You can buy a horse with in-game currency. You can't buy the Palmino horse in game though. Speaking of in game, the term cash shop in mmos has always referred to an in game item store which accepts real money. That's why people raised a fuss about WoW adding a cash shop when they had already sold services and skins through account management for years. With ESO you have to go to account management to buy the imperial upgrade, cheap spotty horse and name change. It's not a cash shop.

I'm genuinely curious,

If some developer were to take their cash shop game, remove the in-game button for the shop's interface and instead put all the exact same items for the exact same prices under account management, you'd say it didn't have a cash shop?

I mean because that's all the in-game screen is, an interface. In almost every single MMO it's quite literally a screen loading HTML directly from their web-shop.

 

[SecondPrize]

Oh for God's sake. You want to have a subscription fee? Fine, it's a legit business model, if not the most popular one. You want to have a cash shop? Fine, just so long as what it offers is cosmetic and/or convenience items and not demanding a person pay to get the basic features of the game after it was advertised as F2P. But having BOTH? No. No, no, nonononononono. $15 a month is too much to ask from a customer to THEN demand MORE real money from them. Make those items available for in-game currency; don't get greedy when you're already getting regular payments from customers.

You can buy a horse with in-game currency. You can't buy the Palmino horse in game though. Speaking of in game, the term cash shop in mmos has always referred to an in game item store which accepts real money. That's why people raised a fuss about WoW adding a cash shop when they had already sold services and skins through account management for years. With ESO you have to go to account management to buy the imperial upgrade, cheap spotty horse and name change. It's not a cash shop.

I'm genuinely curious,

If some developer were to take their cash shop game, remove the in-game button for the shop's interface and instead put all the exact same items for the exact same prices under account management, you'd say it didn't have a cash shop?

I mean because that's all the in-game screen is, an interface. In almost every single MMO it's quite literally a screen loading HTML directly from their web-shop.

Were someone to do that, then it'd be a cash shop, wherever it is. What ESO has isn't, it draws close to the line, but it isn't. Yet you have people calling it such. You have other people thinking it has an in game cash shop because people keep saying cash shop. Until someone carries out your hypothetical, cash shop still means what it does and straight up lying about what ESO does isn't going to help whatever game the people using the term are championing, it just gives others a false impression about ESO. I don't like the horse for sale, but spreading disinformation isn't the answer.

 

[Mike Fang]

*snip*

*Just rolls his eyes and shakes his head.*

 

[SecondPrize]

*snip*

*Just rolls his eyes and shakes his head.*

If you don't like the answer, perhaps you shouldn't have asked the question. There are people in this thread who think the game has an in game cash shop, is that fair to ZOS? Why not allow them to fail on their own rather than helping them along by muddying the waters?

 

[Mike Fang]

If you don't like the answer, perhaps you shouldn't have asked the question. There are people in this thread who think the game has an in game cash shop, is that fair to ZOS? Why not allow them to fail on their own rather than helping them along by muddying the waters?

Good God man, stop getting so worked up over some piddly-ass, nit picky detail and DROP IT.

 

[Hagi]

Were someone to do that, then it'd be a cash shop, wherever it is. What ESO has isn't, it draws close to the line, but it isn't. Yet you have people calling it such. You have other people thinking it has an in game cash shop because people keep saying cash shop. Until someone carries out your hypothetical, cash shop still means what it does and straight up lying about what ESO does isn't going to help whatever game the people using the term are championing, it just gives others a false impression about ESO. I don't like the horse for sale, but spreading disinformation isn't the answer.

So seeing as it's not the in-game part that makes it a cash shop where's the line then?

I'm just confused as to your definition of a cash shop, especially since you say ESO draws close to the line. I don't see how it's something you can draw close to. You either have a cash-shop or you don't. Just like you either have a subscription or you don't. You can't draw close to the line of having a subscription, you're either on one side or the other.

 

[SecondPrize]

Were someone to do that, then it'd be a cash shop, wherever it is. What ESO has isn't, it draws close to the line, but it isn't. Yet you have people calling it such. You have other people thinking it has an in game cash shop because people keep saying cash shop. Until someone carries out your hypothetical, cash shop still means what it does and straight up lying about what ESO does isn't going to help whatever game the people using the term are championing, it just gives others a false impression about ESO. I don't like the horse for sale, but spreading disinformation isn't the answer.

So seeing as it's not the in-game part that makes it a cash shop where's the line then?

I'm just confused as to your definition of a cash shop, especially since you say ESO draws close to the line. I don't see how it's something you can draw close to. You either have a cash-shop or you don't. Just like you either have a subscription or you don't. You can't draw close to the line of having a subscription, you're either on one side or the other.

you couldn't figure out where the line is between his hypothetical f2p cash shop removed from in game and what EOS is selling in account management? You see no difference there? No space at all between them? If that's the case, then I don't know what to say.
Right now, the term cash shop, as it is used to relate to MMOs, always means in game. So when people say ESO has a cash shop, others without any experience in the game are led to believe that there is an in game cash shop in addition to the sub and box price. Were his hypothetical scenario to take place, it'd be different, but that's how it is right now.

 

[Hagi]

Were someone to do that, then it'd be a cash shop, wherever it is. What ESO has isn't, it draws close to the line, but it isn't. Yet you have people calling it such. You have other people thinking it has an in game cash shop because people keep saying cash shop. Until someone carries out your hypothetical, cash shop still means what it does and straight up lying about what ESO does isn't going to help whatever game the people using the term are championing, it just gives others a false impression about ESO. I don't like the horse for sale, but spreading disinformation isn't the answer.

So seeing as it's not the in-game part that makes it a cash shop where's the line then?

I'm just confused as to your definition of a cash shop, especially since you say ESO draws close to the line. I don't see how it's something you can draw close to. You either have a cash-shop or you don't. Just like you either have a subscription or you don't. You can't draw close to the line of having a subscription, you're either on one side or the other.

you couldn't figure out where the line is between his hypothetical f2p cash shop removed from in game and what EOS is selling in account management? You see no difference there? No space at all between them? If that's the case, then I don't know what to say.
Right now, the term cash shop, as it is used to relate to MMOs, always means in game. So when people say ESO has a cash shop, others without any experience in the game are led to believe that there is an in game cash shop in addition to the sub and box price. Were his hypothetical scenario to take place, it'd be different, but that's how it is right now.

Yup, I don't see any real qualitative difference. A quantitative difference, sure. But both ESO and our hypothetical cash shop would be selling in-game items for real money.

I don't really see how a small selection of items (singular horse plus a pack with a race, horse and a few other goodies) makes any qualitative difference compared to a large selection of likewise items.

What's the exact characteristic of our hypothetical cash shop that makes it a cash shop where ESO isn't?

 

[SecondPrize]

Were someone to do that, then it'd be a cash shop, wherever it is. What ESO has isn't, it draws close to the line, but it isn't. Yet you have people calling it such. You have other people thinking it has an in game cash shop because people keep saying cash shop. Until someone carries out your hypothetical, cash shop still means what it does and straight up lying about what ESO does isn't going to help whatever game the people using the term are championing, it just gives others a false impression about ESO. I don't like the horse for sale, but spreading disinformation isn't the answer.

So seeing as it's not the in-game part that makes it a cash shop where's the line then?

I'm just confused as to your definition of a cash shop, especially since you say ESO draws close to the line. I don't see how it's something you can draw close to. You either have a cash-shop or you don't. Just like you either have a subscription or you don't. You can't draw close to the line of having a subscription, you're either on one side or the other.

you couldn't figure out where the line is between his hypothetical f2p cash shop removed from in game and what EOS is selling in account management? You see no difference there? No space at all between them? If that's the case, then I don't know what to say.
Right now, the term cash shop, as it is used to relate to MMOs, always means in game. So when people say ESO has a cash shop, others without any experience in the game are led to believe that there is an in game cash shop in addition to the sub and box price. Were his hypothetical scenario to take place, it'd be different, but that's how it is right now.

Yup, I don't see any real qualitative difference. A quantitative difference, sure. But both ESO and our hypothetical cash shop would be selling in-game items for real money.

I don't really see how a small selection of items (singular horse plus a pack with a race, horse and a few other goodies) makes any qualitative difference compared to a large selection of likewise items.

What's the exact characteristic of our hypothetical cash shop that makes it a cash shop where ESO isn't?

Because it was an in game store selling in game store type stuff before it was removed from game in the example. ESOs sells name changes, a CE upgrade and a portion of that upgrade with a palamino skin attached all through account services. Does that compare to any cash shop you've ever seen? When you call it a cash shop, do you think those who haven't played are going to see that term and think ESO has a traditional cash shop or that they sell those things through their website?

 

[Hagi]

Because it was an in game store selling in game store type stuff before it was removed from game in the example. ESOs sells name changes, a CE upgrade and a portion of that upgrade with a palamino skin attached all through account services. Does that compare to any cash shop you've ever seen? When you call it a cash shop, do you think those who haven't played are going to see that term and think ESO has a traditional cash shop or that they sell those things through their website?

Seems pretty much the same to me. In-game mount, kinda standard for your normal shop. In-game race, actually more than your average shop has. In-game ring with XP boost when grouping with a specific person, unusual implementation of fairly standard functionality.

As I said, it's a very small selection of items but I don't really see any qualitative difference with what's usually sold in cash shops. Doesn't seem to be any pay to win type of stuff, which is nice but luckily becoming more common for cash shops these days. There is stuff which does give a temporary in-game advantage, rather standard for shops though.

And when I personally hear the term cash shop, in relation to a game, I think of them selling in-game stuff for real money.

 

[SecondPrize]

They're not selling a race, and they're not selling a ring. They're selling a collectors edition upgrade that contains those things. It's not uncommon to find small advantages in CEs, though a separate race is a new one. That you've mentioned the ring while neglecting to mention that you can't just buy it alone without getting the CE or upgrading to it is pretty telling though.