It’s much like auto insurance. People who have bad driving records pay much more for their insurance than good drivers.

MMO developers need to start realizing the negative cost associated with allowing bad players to ruin the experience of other players.

About 3 years ago I wrote an article entitled: MMO Developers: Community Should Be Your Most Valued Commodity:

http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/?p=126

It seems I was ahead of the curve.

They can only be less of a millstone. XD Or a millstone that is worth toting around because eventually you get to carve it into a GIANT TASTY COOKIE OF DOOMY DOOM!

XD

Even when content isn’t gated by gear, it is gated by skill and knowledge. Skill is something newbies may have from day one – just look at FPSes where many of the skills are transferable. But knowledge is not transferable – at least not in the same way within games. And a lot of the time, that knowledge matters.

I guess what I’m (tangentially) again saying is that even if ‘obvious’ gating indicators are removed (gear, attunement quests, etc, all that sor of thing), skill and knowledge will still gate people, and that removing the obvious indicators isn’t always a good thing.

In WoW, if I wanted to nicely tell someone that I didn’t think we would group again (for whatever reason), or really – that we would group at all – I could give them the fig leaf of, ‘Sorreez, ur gear is not da leet enuff! Mebbe in da futurez!’

In Guild Wars, if someone is simply a very bad or very inexperienced player, and I don’t feel like carrying them… I can’t let them cushion their egos with gear.

And I miss that cushion.

I don’t mind not being good enough for content, will happily bash my head against it until I figure out better, practise till I play better. But not everyone is like that, nor should they be. But for those who don’t like to hear that, sorry, you’re currently just not good enough, not having gear to hide behind… has got to sting.

…probably enough to stop playing.

In short, I’m not sure the millstone problem is solveable, just that there are many kinds of millstones to pick from.

Generally speaking, being social is its own reward IRL, and anti-social its own non-reward. You can simulate that in-game like MMOs in ages past, when you had to group to get anywhere. That is not a model that works very well subscription-wise, however, as most people want a single-player option so as to not have to schedule their playtime.

What really eats through money, though, is anything that requires actual human beings. If you take up an hour of a GM’s time per month that’s going to wipe out the subscription you pay. Or to put it another way, if GMs spend just two minutes per day dealing with petitions that Leetkillr is sniping newbies from a rooftop again, then under the subscription model it’s not worth having Leetkillr as a subscriber.

You don’t want to bill per minute of connection and GM ticket – apart from anything else, that means you then have a complicated and expensive billing system to build and run. The trick is to come up with a simple pricing plan that takes all of those costs into account and as far as possible passes them on to the right people without getting too complicated.

That said, how exactly does one calculate the benefit they bring to the financials? And does this all go down the rabbit hole of charging per minute of connection, for every GM ticket and so on? I’m not sure that’s the right direction to go.