Options for cash shop instead of P2P

Thoughts on the further development of Haven & Hearth? Feel free to opine!

Options for cash shop instead of P2P

Postby Grable » Mon Aug 31, 2015 8:16 am

As many others, I also believe that Pay2Play is the wrong model to go with this game. It's an alpha of a very niche game that has a small playerbase in a time and age where subscription models fail left and right.

Anyway, I just want to give out a few ideas on what could potentionally be in the cash shop. I don't think anyone would mind a cash shop with cosmetics with some early game conveniences sold. And if you think that people wouldn't pay for cosmetics, you couldn't be more wrong - people are prepared to waste tons of money on them. This is the amount of cash I have spent on skins with zero impact on gameplay:

Dota 2
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CS:GO
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This is without Steam market purchases. And I don't count myself amongst the big spenders (I've seen people that have wasted over 30k$ on skins).

Here are my ideas for items sold in cash shop. Mind you that the game time should not be limited for free players.

Cosmetic Items
- Straight up purchases of cosmetic items. Cool looking skins for hats, clothes and weapons/tools that make a player stand out.
- RNG boxes/chests with cosmetic items. This thing pulls people with money like fuck, since they like to gamble. Have a box that contains certain cosmetics and when you open the box, you get one of the cosmetics that the box contains. The thing that makes this special is that some should be more rare, with a possible (but very low chance) drop of a super special/rare item. For an extra trick have these chests be found in-game and sell the keys in store. Not unlike CS:GO.
- If or when this game is on Steam, integrate this with Steam market. People like to earn money (but mostly lose) with their gambling.
- There's no need to sell just skins for equippable items! You could sell for example different skins for houses, horse armor, ...
- Custom village banners
- Special items that don't influence gameplay, but provide a cosmetic value - for example instruments to play music with (different types that make different sounds)

Convenience items
- Starter packs that contain starter tools (shovels, saws, axes), gear (backpacks) and scrolls that for example raise Exploration or Survival to 5~10. It's just so that the early game is a bit eased.
- HS spawn scroll! Basically the old 'spawn at hearthsecret' sold in cash shop. You can only use it on a new character and it would cost like 10-15$, so that it wouldn't be spammed. Or rather, if someone wanted to use it to spam alts, they would have to dish out some serious cash.
- Special tools that speed up (non-pvp) actions like plowing, chopping down trees (~10% speed up)

Subscription (again, mind that there is no time limit for free players)
- Faster curiosity study - max ~10% (I believe it's enough to not make things between free players and subs unbalanced, and enough to keep tryhards/minmaxers paying)
- Fancy forum title + special font color / icon
- Cosmetic set
- Perhaps a special font for name and title ingame?


I will be adding more to this list as I think of new ideas.
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Grable
 
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