The Secret World Cash Shop

[WanderingFool]

I don't think I've ever heard of an MMO that launched with a box price, a sub fee and microtransactions. F2P incoming in 6 months...

Thats what Im waiting for. Interested in the game, but dont care to pay a monthly fee.

 

[Schadrach]

Not offhand, but there's not a terribly good reason to have more than one char (you can respec literally at will at no cost outside of combat, there's even a mechanic to store your favorite specs with their gear so you don't have to look through your bags to find it), and no reason to have more than three (which is default character slots), if you want to see the full assortment of storyline missions for each secret society.

I can think of a few marginal reasons. Family members sharing an account is one. I sometimes have characters that I level up only with other players. For instance in Diablo 3 I have a Demon Hunter that I only ever play once a week with my brother, and he has a Monk saved for the same purpose. I liked the character enough to make a separate Demon Hunter for solo play, but I keep that first character exclusively for coop so that we're always on the same level. Marginal reasons, sure, but there's even less reason to restrict players like that. There would be virtually no extra expense for Funcom to increase the limit. With how you say there being very little reason to have more than three slots, the additional slots in the cash shop aren't exactly going to be a hot sale. If there are any prospective players out there that see this as shady and are put off, then is it really a wise decision by Funcom?

Levels don't work like that in TSW though. As far as "levels" as they are thought of in other MMOs are concerned, it's more or less entirely equipment in TSW. In fact, the game uses the mean of the quality level of all your gear in order to determine how things con. It's 95% lateral advancement rather than vertical advancement in TSW.

 

[Rangarig]

Still, do you know how much the slots are in TSW?

3 slots with a regular game copy/account. More slots through additional packages or a one-time fee of US$ 9.99/? 9.99.

Since your character can eventually learn every ability and skill, 3 slots allows you to have one character in each of the three factions. To me, that seems plenty.

 

[WoW Killer]

Levels don't work like that in TSW though. As far as "levels" as they are thought of in other MMOs are concerned, it's more or less entirely equipment in TSW. In fact, the game uses the mean of the quality level of all your gear in order to determine how things con. It's 95% lateral advancement rather than vertical advancement in TSW.

That'd probably suffice for my and my brother admittedly. Still, I don't know for what reasons other people would want extra characters; I was just listing two examples that pertain to me in particular. What if someone was doing similar to my example above but wanted to keep a character separate for lore/rp reasons? Who is to say that their idea of playing the game is wrong? "You can use the same character for different roles and keep those roles at different levels", "oh but I want them to be separate characters because it makes it feel like a new game when I play that way". They're not wrong to play the game like that if that's what they prefer, so why limit them like that? I'm playing devils advocate of course. Point still stands, if additional character slots are worth so little to the vast majority of gamers then you're not going to sell a lot of them. If the existence of such a product was to put off a number of potential buyers, then what is the point?

I know why, by the way, that's a rhetorical question. It's the same reason why new technology like TVs and games consoles are priced so high on their initial release. FC know as soon as they announce free-to-play in some months time there will be a revival of interest that will forget any morally ambiguous practices of the past. Similarly when a new TV is released, you set the price sky high knowing that certain sections of society will buy that product for whatever price just to have the latest thing. You can then drop the price to get the real community interested and the extortionate prices of the past are forgotten. It's called "skimming [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pricing_strategies#Creaming_or_skimming]" in the marketing world.

 

[StriderShinryu]

I can think of a few marginal reasons.

While it doesn't apply to everyone of course, there's always the roleplaying aspect as well. With three different factions and a game world that is very lore and politics based, I would imagine TSW could be a very rich game in which to RP and that could certainly use up any number of character slots. I know that The Matrix Online was very much the same way (an easy to achieve level cap with a lot of horizontal growth into multiple skills specs, with a 3 political group faction system) and it was a RPers paradise with many players ending up having to routinely delete characters just to have more room for RP alts.