18FEB20 - PRESTIGE PRICING CHANGES
Printed From: Illyriad
Category: News & Announcements
Forum Name: News & Announcements
Forum Description: Changes, patch release dates, server launch dates, downtime notifications etc.
URL: http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/forum_posts.asp?TID=10762
Printed Date: 17 Apr 2022 at 00:38
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.03 - http://www.webwizforums.com
Topic: 18FEB20 - PRESTIGE PRICING CHANGES
Posted By: GM ThunderCat
Subject: 18FEB20 - PRESTIGE PRICING CHANGES
Date Posted: 18 Feb 2020 at 16:18
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Hi all, PRESTIGE CHANGES We're generally raising the price of purchasing prestige from the company via PayPal across the board, starting just after midnight (server time) on Wednesday the 4th of March. We'll also be creating a new smaller package of 50 prestige available to purchase - although we will not be releasing a tradable 50 Prestige scroll. WHY ARE YOU RAISING THE PRESTIGE PRICES? Average annual global inflation is 3.22% per annum, and so a compound inflation over 10 years would mean that our prestige prices should be 37% higher than they currently are, simply to keep up with inflation. Our costs from suppliers have certainly risen with inflation, and so this is a necessary adjustment. However, we've decided NOT to apply 37% price rises across the board, as we fully recognise playing Illy is a luxury rather than a necessity for most of you good people - so we've chosen 25% as our general price increase. The introduction of the new 50 Prestige package means that there is still the minimal price point (GBP1.99 USD2.99 EUR2.49) package available for purchase. We hope you all understand that this is an adjustment of our prestige pricing at substantially below the actual rate of inflation. We're implementing this price change at just a couple of minutes into the early morning on Wednesday 04MAR20; so this announcement gives you a couple of weeks' notice in case you want to stock up on prestige at their current prices or stock up from the ingame player-run markets etc. Of course, the discounts for purchasing larger packages will remain, and have in fact increased! By buying a 3250 Prestige Package rather than a 50 Prestige Package, you're getting your prestige at more than half-price... in all currencies! WHAT ARE THE NEW PRICES FOR PRESTIGE GOING TO BE? POUNDS STERLING (GBP) PAYPAL PRESTIGE PRICING
US DOLLAR (USD) PAYPAL PRESTIGE PRICING
EURO (EUR) PAYPAL PRESTIGE PRICING
Remember, these price changes don't come into effect until a few minutes into Wednesday the 4th of March, so please do feel free to take maximum advantage of the current pricing structure before then! Thanks very much for your understanding. Regards, SC |
Replies:
Posted By: Kimmyeo
Date Posted: 19 Feb 2020 at 04:47
That's a shame. I already thought it was a lot, now $95.00.... Why are you making it so expensive? That might be too rich for my blood.
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Posted By: Grom
Date Posted: 19 Feb 2020 at 08:27
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While I'm sure a lot of us won't be happy about it, the "why" question was pretty well adressed. As a business the game needs to either raise prices to cover inflation (which they are only partially doing) , or attract new customers. Since the player base keeps declining, that means those potential new customers come from an ever smaller pool.
Sadly, raising prices will probably result in a decline in sales, leading to necessary new price increases in the future. Meaning Illy will slowly walk the path of most mmos, increasing prices and reducing the amount of customers until the entire revenue comes from a handful of whales. The solution would be to attract more players, thus increasing the pool of potential prestige buyers, but that would require both in-game changes to appeal to the current market (face it, browser mmos are getting closed down one by one because they often become outdated), and a sizeable marketing budget. Both of which would cost the Devs money, and have the inherent risk of not seeing a return on their investment. So, yeah, I'll leave it at that. My three cents if you'd like, adjusted for inflation. |
Posted By: OssianII
Date Posted: 19 Feb 2020 at 11:16
 I want Moar! MOAR!  Seems excessive to me. I think many players will agree. ------------- “If anyone was to ask for my opinion, which I note they’re not, I’d say we were taking the long way around.” Gimli son of Gloin. |
Posted By: BayNights
Date Posted: 20 Feb 2020 at 07:42
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Not a good time to be raising prices. Poor enforcement of a positive community and a rash of long term players abandoning the game isn't a good time to double down. Cheers to a better environment and more transparency in a project many of us have invested years in, I'll be saving my coins til then. In the meantime, we'll continue smashing the chosen few
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Posted By: Dungshoveleux
Date Posted: 20 Feb 2020 at 21:10
| A minor increase for inflation every year would have been preferable and bearable. One can still lock in the old prices for the foreseeable future by buying in advance, so I do not think people have much to complain about the prices which were far too cheap. |
Posted By: OssianII
Date Posted: 21 Feb 2020 at 10:39
Sir. What you are saying is that players can avoid the increases by buying in advance now on current prices ie spending money now, which they did not intend to, in order to avoid an excessive increase that will be introduced on the 4th March, irregardless. Hornswoggle  Spin, they say, is a form of propaganda, achieved through knowingly providing a biased interpretation of an event or campaigning to influence public opinion about some organisation or public figure. Hmm... The Hornswoggleux at work  DUNGSHOVELEUX AT WORK  A pitching shovel heaves cow dung up and over the backyard fence, Spread it thin and even over the earth A digging spade with long reach handle gets to them hard to reach corners His sweetie strides on by wearing red wellies "Don't go getting fancy fella" she says " "We gotta rake it out laters anyways". ------------- “If anyone was to ask for my opinion, which I note they’re not, I’d say we were taking the long way around.” Gimli son of Gloin. |
Dungshoveleux wrote:Posted By: Thirion
Date Posted: 21 Feb 2020 at 17:13
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In my opinion as a builder and trader the Prestige price changes are bad for the game and the "pay-to-win" component is getting bigger and bigger as it is going to get more and more expensive to buy Prestige for gold at the market. Detailed explanation: The game is balanced around using Prestige to finish buildings. Just the last two levels of a TradeOffice take almost 3 weeks to finish - and to push 30 cities and more you need a lot of them. Thus as a builder you need a lot of Prestige. A selling point of Illyriad is that you can buy Prestige with gold - you can play the game without using real money to buy Prestige. This requires a healthy Prestige market though - Prestige should be available for affordable prices and at a good quantity. Thus for a healthy Prestige market we need players to sell Prestige at the market. Thats usually military players that finance their big army with Prestige sales to cover their gold burn. If there is a lot more demand then supply to price is going up and it gets harder and harder for players to buy and use Prestige. And now we are getting to the problem. As people might have noticed the Prestige price went up by quite a bit in the last year. The main reason for that is that there was a lot more demand then supply. Quite a few of the military players that supplied Prestige stopped playing or stopped selling Prestige over the last years and a lot less players started selling. With the seasonal tournaments players have even less reason to sell Prestige as troups are used more often and thus huge armies should be less common (exception: PVP players). The changes to the Prestige prices is another reason why people are going to sell less Prestige. Thus the Prestige price should increase even faster then in the last year (as far as i remember it doubled in the last year). This means that for new players it gets harder and harder to get more cities, and because of that more and more new players are going to stop playing - which is unhealthy for the game. I do not have a better solution other then "we need more players". I do think though that increasing the Prestige price is not going to have the desired effect of getting more money with Prestige sales.
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Posted By: Dungshoveleux
Date Posted: 22 Feb 2020 at 00:03
| People cannot expect something for nothing. No price increases for 10 years - that was a mistake not marginally increasing the prices. But don't moan because they now want to charge for inflation, and not even that. You lot want to have your cake and eat it. Nothing is for free. |
Posted By: Thirion
Date Posted: 22 Feb 2020 at 17:17
I completely disagree with your post. I do not expect something from nothing or something free. I am happy to pay (and did pay my more then my fair share) for games i like and enjoy. In addition i am big enough as a player to not really care about the Prestige price - i can generate a lot of gold to buy whatever i want. Thus the Prestige price changes affect me a lot less compared to new or smaller players. The inflation argument might work well for conventional products - it is in my opinion quite different for digital producst. Thus you have to be a bit more careful with your argumentation. Conventional products (lets take an apple for an example) have a fixed production price and thus inflation matters a lot. In addition the maximal amount of sales to a person is limited (somebody that usually buys 10 apples a week isn't going to buy 10 million because of a sale). Digital products are a lot different as first the production price is a lot harder to calculate and second you can buy an almost infinite amount of the product and use it. This means that for digial products it is an option to e.g. half the price if you expect that a lot more people buy the products. In my experience as a trader bigger players tend to spend a specific amount of money to sell Prestige and not buying for a specific amount of gold. |
Posted By: Dungshoveleux
Date Posted: 22 Feb 2020 at 23:38
You are looking at the problem in terms of what you think the customers are willing to pay. You are entitled to your opinion. But, the costs experienced by the team that delivers illyriad are subject to inflation. Since we can deduce from the illyriad accounts and constant prestige prices that this is a labour of love as opposed to a real money spinner, the prices do need to increase or illyriad will eventually die. Its your choice and everyone elses. We support the devs or the game dies. Its that simple.
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Posted By: Ruarc
Date Posted: 23 Feb 2020 at 09:24
There are 40 prestige scraps available in Centrum now for 27 million each, and another 100 scraps available for around 29 million each. I don't recall a time when scraps were worth 15 million each, I'm pretty sure that they've always been 25-26 million. Right? I'm not just mis-remembering that? Wasn't the whole reason why a terra costs ~25 million because that was roughly the price of a prestige scrap? Also, I think you're right that the new tournament system fundamentally changes the paradigm in Illy shifting it away from hording massive armies with huge gold burn on a daily basis and towards being able to rapidly recruit large armies with significantly less gold burn. But, I don't see a connection between that shift and prestige. Sure, some players might finance large armies with prestige they're more likely to finance them with gold farms on a second account.
This is the key point I think. Increasing prestige prices might result in less prestige being bought with money. I imagine though that Illyriad Games have thought this through, and will monitor revenue streams going forward. If the price increase does result in less revenue then they'll (presumably) drop the price. If not then they won't and prestige will become slightly more expensive (scraps will probably rise to 30-35m?), but still available to all via gold purchase and the free daily prestige bonus.
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Posted By: DeliciousJosh
Date Posted: 23 Feb 2020 at 09:55
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I remember buying scraps at 14-18million not too long ago. Might've been late 2018, early 2019 - Then someone sweeped in and bought everything and set a new standard, raising the prices again. I believe it was Thirion or Ellania. It has gone up and down like that one or two times, where it drops down below 20mil and it goes up to 26-29mil again. In my opinion the prestige prices have been much too low for way too long, and I think it has been intentional for some of the time whilst it has also been "what shall we do, and when" for some of the time too. Finding the right moment in time to do a thing like raising prices on a currency in an mmo, be it browser or anything else, is quite hard. There was just a prestige sale in late December and there will probably be another sale within 3-6months from the release of new prices. Now was actually quite a good time to do it. The tryhards have already built up their 40town accounts, The PvPers are doing what they always do and this wont affect them much, New players will not notice the difference, Traders have so much gold anyway and they will just make more now, Ossian will keep trolling and being angry at people, Bill's posts will still get deleted by Cerb, Starry will keep farming, and Malek will never return for real again anyway. ------------- PublicRelations HumanResources |
Posted By: Wartow
Date Posted: 23 Feb 2020 at 17:00
All monopolies in the market are temporary. The goal is to have such a monopoly before your competition re-establishes itself. The mentioned decline in price was due to PvP as IRON was burning through gold and caused a glut in the market and scrap prices fell. The lull in PvP and shift in maintaining armies due to tournaments will cause another adjustment in the market. And, yes, the price to purchase prestige with real funds will also contribute. A player base that prefers building, trading, and tournaments will necessitate a market that is different than another base that may vary in preference of game play (or size). With increased prestige prices on the market we may see the incentive for the PvP to return. Good luck to all! ------------- 
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Posted By: Snagglepuss
Date Posted: 23 Feb 2020 at 17:14
| I see the price raise as inevitable and reasonable. Thank you for all your hard work, and I think the realistic among the citizenry, while maybe probably not being happy about it (who is ever happy when prices are raised?), understand and will deal with this. Those pushing the "Illy is no longer a happy place" agenda" , obviously don't see the new players and camaraderie in GC. |
Posted By: Snagglepuss
Date Posted: 23 Feb 2020 at 18:13
| The Devs aren't implying the price of digital items is the main cause of the price raise. The devs use the money made from selling digital items to but conventional items? If the price of conventional items they have to buy to survive goes up, they cant raise the price of their digital product accordingly? That seems a but unfair simply because the product they sell is digital. |
Posted By: Thirion
Date Posted: 23 Feb 2020 at 19:35
Ellania is my alt, thus Thirion and Ellania are the same players. I am the main Prestige trader for a few years now. I am doing it mostly for (easy) ranking points - thus its hard and not profitable for newer traders to compete. The Prestige price is COMPLETELY dependant on demand and supply. If the price is too low then i run out of Prestige, if the price is high enough usually some players are selling some Prestige. Best example is at the moment - i raised the price because i sold a lot (because of the announcement) and soon after that Count Rupert started selling Prestige too. The low price early 2019 you described was because players sold a lot more Prestige then people buying - thus the Prestige price crashed. As i already said, the goal of the game should be to increase player base and keep new players playing (more players -> more Prestige sales -> more money for the devs). In my opinion raising the Prestige price isn't going to help with that.
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Posted By: lsxrule
Date Posted: 25 Feb 2020 at 01:21
| I feel I was one of the biggest buyers of Prestige over the last 2-3 years at $350.00 per month american. It was absolutley necessary to keep my armies alive and Thirion was one of my main buyers. I recently lost most of my troops due to RL issues and almost abandoned because of this. I have strted rebuilding and getting back into the game but I can say at 90 something dollars american a Tome, my purchaces will likely stop completely. I did buy 2 or 3 tomes during the sale last month. I have always heard there used to be sales back in the day but I had never seen one. Lower prices will equal more sales. |