New User Experience Improvement [Game Design Perspective]

As a fellow game designer, I feel the intuitive new-user experience could be slightly improved. The 3-day premium addition is absolutely amazing and VERY useful for new players, though it could be improved by a few additions/changes listed below.

As standard with most MMOs lately, the inclusion of several quest items fills up the limited starting inventory slots VERY quickly. For the new user that you want to ease into paying money for the game, such a mechanic quickly sours the experience if not handled properly.

Certain items could easily be handled as currency instead
--'Spirit Guards' and 'Crystals of Truth' come to mind
--Emote and mount items could also fit this paradigm and encourage hoarding/collecting and showing them off ANYTIME; this in turn would encourage further sales of such items by other players (just ask Blizzard!)

Quest items need their own 'quest bag'
--There are enough drops and other items to fill up inventory very quickly and still necessitate the need for additional andermant payments for more spaces.
--Such a similar mechanism is already in place via the 'Premium' Bag and a bit of UI tweaking could easily accommodate an extra 'Quest' Bag where such items automatically reside therein.

Event items need to be handled as currency or placed in the 'Quest items' bag
--You want players to participate rather than immediately toss such items out the window. You work hard for the events so let them enjoy it without hassle!

Customized discounts for the player, let them feel special by allowing them to CHOOSE their own discount (perhaps once per day, rotating) on whichever item they like. Encourage both retention and loyalty while mitigating churn.

I am also available for some paid in-depth consultation if BigPoint is interested. Do please let me know

 

I can only wonder on break-even date on the implementation costs and overhead of your ideas. What do you think they are?

 

Going to respond to ya specifically while quoting parts of what I said above.

Certain items could easily be handled as currency instead
-Implementation is trivial. They already have mechanisms in place (Drakens) that used to be items but are now currency. A similar mechanism could easily be done for other items. A simple implementation can be done in under a week (being very generous with timeframes) but can be done in a day by a competent coder; this is especially true since THEY HAVE ALREADY DONE IT (Drakens) so if they're smart and used object-oriented compartmentalized programming, they could reuse the code for 'currencizing' other items as well.

Quest items need their own 'quest bag'
-Again, very trivial implementation. The 'Premium Bag' already exists, so does the 'Overflow Bag'. Copy/paste and limit to quest items only. They had some foresight in marking items with 'This item is used for a quest' for just about every quest-specific item. They can tweak it from there.

Event items need to be handled as currency or placed in the 'Quest items' bag
-See above, but trivial implementation. Mark the Event items with the 'Quest items' flag and all set!

Customized discounts for the player.
-This one would be a bit more difficult and take a bit more time/implementation to do properly. The mechanisms are there, but the presentation and UI parts might take a bit of work.

As far as costs? Most of what I proposed is copy/pasting existing functionality and slightly modifying it for a specific purpose. Games tend to have few ongoing costs once the intial investment in people/hardware/software has already been made. This game is several years old, and all of this stuff could be done in under a week (tops) even accounting for testing time if they have competent staff/coders/testers.

Based on personal experience and what I can tell of my OWN capability? If I was contracted to do this, I'd have everything except the customized discounts and have it done in a week for under $10k (since I don't contract myself out at bottom-feeder rates). Any half-decent coder from Russia or India would likely be able to do it for a fraction of that price but with a big ? on the code quality.

As far as break-even point, this game has already far-exceeded the break-even point years ago. Games like this tend to be very cheap to develop and maintain if the foundational codebase is created and maintained properly. If the costs would be (at most) about $10K for a competent person to do this, then the break-even point would be less than a day (based on the most recent BigPoint financial statement). I don't doubt for a minute this game makes a KILLING in sales and income.

Will they do it? That's the big question.

 

I believe some "quest only items" should be handled in a quest bag. However, I do not believe crystals of truths should be handled as a "currency", same goes for event items like Essence of Light and stuff like that. Customizing discounts? Totally unwanted. Spirit guards only for newbies, never again find them in bag after using.

 

I don't know what you are talking about. Drakens were never an items. Since day 1 they were currency.

As for your thread and your other threads ... I think you are posting them in wrong section.
This would be the best section for posting them.