Cryptic's Roper Explains Microtransactions For Champions Online 82
Karen Hertzberg writes "Many MMO gamers have expressed concern over the recent announcement that micro-transactions would play a role in the upcoming release of Champions Online. Knowing that MTs can be a touchy subject for fans, Ten Ton Hammer sat down with Bill Roper for an interview. He reveals more about Cryptic's take on the business model, what type of items you can expect to find through MTs, and how the system will be integrated into Champions Online come launch day. Roper said, 'The idea is wanting to be able to have things there that players can get if they want to, but they don't negatively impact the balance of the game. It's not like we're expecting players to go and purchase things through micro-transactions that then give them some huge leg up. All those things I think people get worried about, but really the focus is on having things that are fun, cosmetic or are things that are more account-wide and maintenance based.'"
Re:He doesn't even know what microtransactions are (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a site with microtransactions:
http://pacer.psc.uscourts.gov/pacerdesc.html [uscourts.gov]
Yes, the US government runs the site. PACER is intended to give access to court documents, however, to protect the business models of Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis there is an $0.08 charge per page, for both legal filings and for varying definitions of a page for many HTML rendered pages.
In the last quarterly billing cycle I managed to generate $38 in fees, so yes microtransactions do suck and are an extremely bad idea.