“The Price of Microtransactions” column attempts to discover the cost, if any, of free-to-play (F2P) titles. Most F2P titles are just that, free-to-play, but they offer objects for players to purchase. Often these items are purely cosmetic, such as extra costumes, character customization options or non-stat armor modifications. However, there are items that are more than cosmetic or “convenient” to own in today’s MMORPGs. Especially for those who want to be in the title’s upper echelon. The cost of those useful items are why we are here.
In a pre-launch Runewaker interview the founders of the company stated something along the lines of ‘you’ll never be able to purchase an uber sword’ in Runes of Magic (the interview was taken down when GetBuffed.com went into “database mode”). And that is entirely true. Runes of Magic’s Item Shop, called a Diamond Shop after the real-money transaction (RMT) currency, contains no weapons of mass destruction. True to the founders’ point, the Diamond Shop offers few must need items for the average user, except the pricey permanent mounts.
The case can be made that there are numerous other items that are required for endgame participation outside of a stead, which itself isn’t cheap by any means. Additional rune sockets (gear upgrades from Weapon, Armor and Accessory Drillers) are a must have to maximize a characters innate abilities for instancing. As are the various jewels (Star, Moon and Sun Jewels – Wishes) that raise an object’s level.
Nearly as important as maxing one’s statistics is being able to hold on to everything you need. Storage, and lots of it, is often an important “statistic.” Be it multiple sets of gear for different purposes, items needed for crafting or your collection of Auction House purchases for later resale, everything needs a place to reside or it’s lost income. In Runes of Magic new characters start off with a seemingly large supply of bag space, 120 slots. That’s only when you compare it to a pay-to-play title though. The less than intelligent quest design, item stacking and the parade of junk handed out fills one’s coffers quickly. And that’s just the early levels. It’ll become readily apparent to any player that bag and bank space are a premium, as it is for all other MMOGs. Unfortunately Frogster doesn’t offer any permanent solution for space. Sure, you can muster a additional slots by filling up your player house with small trunks, but on your person, or in your bank, the best you can do is rent additional space. For the collectible nature of the gamers, and MMORPGs in general, this equates to subscription fee. Albeit a petite one.
Here’s a breakdown on how much you can expect to pay if you want to be hardcore in Runes of Magic (1 Diamond ~ $.033). This is admittedly the extreme case, but only applies to a single character, mind you. Additional toons cost you extra:
Transportation:
- 199 Diamonds for a generic permanent mount or
- 395 Diamonds for a fancy permanent mount (ignored for total due to its aesthetic nature)
Item modification:
- 712 Diamonds on Expert Weapon Drillers for ranged and melee weapon (1068 for dual wielders of melee weapons)
- 1760 Diamonds on Expert Armor Drillers for all eight gear slots
- 1100 Diamonds on Expert Accessory Drillers for all five slots
- 95 Diamonds on Star Jewel – Wishes for weapon enhancements, with no guarantee to reach max stats of +6 (143 Diamonds for dual wielders of melee weapons)
- 188 Diamonds on Moon Jewel – Wishes for armor enhancements, with no guarantee to reach max stats of +6
- 117 Diamonds on Sun Jewel – Wishes for accessory enhancements, with no guarantee to reach max stats of +6
Storage space:
- 440 Diamonds for full bag space – 180 day lease
- 440 Diamonds for full bank space – 180 day lease
That’s 4171 Diamonds on upgrades alone! God forbid you replace your gear often, as each replacement will cost you additional Diamonds for new rune slots and enchantments, or the less costly route of transferring your old gears stats to a new item. When converted to real money, the upgrades alone will cost a tidy sum, $139.02. I would also include the 880 additional carbon chains that will creep up every 6 months. That creates a “subscription rate” of $4.88 per month for the hardcore player.
Then there are the numerous items that can enable one to reach the level caps faster. This collection of consumables, experience/mount/loot/skill potions and encyclopedias for crafts, to name a few, are truly matters of (time saving) convenience. Thus they are not required to be the best you can be.
It’s definitely worth noting that the major costs will only creep up on a player if they enjoy the game thoroughly. Till that point there’s almost no reason to spend obtuse amounts of money on Diamonds. Even if you do come to absolutely adore the title, there isn’t much reason to modify one’s equipment until you reach the level cap and begin collection level 50 gear. Therefore, even hardcore players won’t spend much real money on Runes until later in the game.
Runes of Magic costs $140+ for the hardcore, but that’s only a small subset of Taborea’s population. The vast majority of players will only purchase a mount (~$10), and perhaps a collection of potions and additional storage space to make leveling more efficient. Outside those minute purchases, which can easily stay under the price of a retail MMORPG, Runes of Magic can truly remain free-to-play.
I’ve been a bit skeptical about this pricing model. But it seems a lot more miz than I originally anticipated. I play to win. And I don’t want that to have to cost $140+.
Nice read
Please note that diamonds can be traded and a lot of people trade in-game items for diamonds, never having to spend a penny.
While that is true, the price varies by server, and can be incredibly expensive. It’s not a feasible endeavor to pay for all those materials with gold transferred to diamonds.
$4.88 for a hard core gamer… per month… that’s a pretty cheap deal really… If you were a veteran WoW player just grinding reps/honour/tokens/indignia you’d get more fresh entertainment out of RoM for that level of cash than for the monthly subscription to dowdy old WoW.
What about the dye system dyeing a suit of clothing alone can take up to 80+ diamonds then you will most likely have to trade it out for better gear in a few hours or days. In a gear and lvl based game it should cost ingame gold and the price should verry on item lvl not diamonds.
There are a ton misconceptions about what you need to spend money on in Runes of Magic.
I think iTZKooPA came to a pretty good estimate by purchasing all the wrong things. If you want to check out a similar estimate of the cost of RoM from a player who actually has a level 50/50 in game you can check out my blog.
@Tim it seems to me that you came to about the same conclusion, but used one of the various other methods possible. Perhaps that is part of the issue, you can arrive at the same setup in different ways, so the costs can vary for the same basic setup. Or am I being a bit naive – newish player.
At any rate those are the items I am looking to purchase with the Diamonds I just got, I am just trying to figure out what is more important. As you and iTZKooPA both noted, you only go all out on gear once you have a great set, and I think that is where the major cost would come in, as noted in this post. If you aren’t that hardcore, then the game should be far cheaper.
The hidden monthly fee for bag/bank space really annoys me though. I had no idea it actually would cost me that much per month, a true eye opener.
The nice thing is that you don’t pay a dime until you realize that you actually enjoy the game. I hate buying MMOs only to quit DURING my free 30days (SWG), let alone because they aren’t strong enough to suck me into a subscription (Tabula Rasa’s lack of endgame).
Makes me feel like I wasted $50 every time.
@Ryan M. – When you think about the overall cost of the game, $140 isn’t terrible, assuming there aren’t upgrades to be bought every other week. As a casual gamer, I don’t think that this pricing will directly affect me.
Factor in your time being worth an average of $15/hour and this price model makes a lot of sense!
While it may work out to be cheaper in the long run than a traditional pricing model, I think the fact that so much of the cost is loaded at once would be a turn off for a lot of people.
I still don’t think I would spend any money if I wasn’t paying anything per month. Paying monthly gives you unlimited upgrades per month at the same cost. FTP provides a ton of temptation items/upgrades which, if purchasing all of them, may cost you more than the average monthly fee. So in essence, they’re restricting content for those who wish to pay a higher monthly fee. Still not down with that.
First of all, you really, truly, do not need to spend money on the game if you don’t want to. I have a friend with a level 50 who is now leveling his Cooking abilities who enjoys the game a lot, but has absolutely no desire to spend money on it.
Even if you love the game and want to participate in most of the end-game content you still do not have to pay any diamonds at all. It is entirely possible to upgrade your gear enough by using in game gold and phirius tokens from daily quests.
In fact anything that can be done with diamonds can also be done without diamonds. However, it is just going to take you a lot longer.
@GeeSigh iTZKooPA and I arrived at similar numbers by spending diamonds on different things. It’s important to understand that you can do both. There is almost no limit to how much you can spend on your gear. But putting rune slots on your gear is not the most effective way of improving your gear. You would only want to do those as a slight bonsus after you do what I suggested.
Just to get an idea of how much gear matters…If you’re a newly minted level 50 and wear only non-modded gear from quests and random drops you find through soloing I would bet you would have around 1800-2200 hit points. Compare that to the Mages I see walking around the Abandoned Fortress that have over 10,000 hit points.
Some of the bosses in the high level areas of the game will have AoEs (with huge range) that will do 4-5 damage.
Edit. The last sentence above should read:
Some of the bosses in the high level areas of the game will have AoEs (with huge range) that will do 4,000-5,000 damage.
Hello, lot of time passed from when this was written but it got some major mistakes that haven’t changed through the time:
First of all plussing: you never needed your items plussed to +6 the old times. Plussed item true enough gave you extra 60 stats but this was only 1-1,5 times as much as one of additional stats (max 6 per item) could give you. 360 stats per item without spending anything to plusses with cheap green stats that were by the time what people usually started with, and 420 plussed. Meaning you were perfectly able to proceed to the best content without having to do whole plussing. Old times you needed to pay to get enough purified fusion stones
for six other stats but plussing armor was no way obligatory
If you can battle through whole game without it, why would you include it to costs?
Nowadays you do need your items +12 (+16 being the maximum) but very same time game has been altered way that lets you do that without diamonds. It just takes you longer because you’ll need to do daily quests for tokens. More characters you do this with, more often you can make new and diamond free gear. Also purified price got altered down so this is doable same method.
Exception to both is weapon, necklace and both rings that directly effect your performance so much you can’t do without having them maxed. But many players use somebodys old ones as they won’t be too bad for nearby year (unless original owner failed statting them, in which case they can still be used in midgame normal modes that majority of players farms). As you can still stat the other 11/15 gear pieces with brand new stats, those 4 are nothing that couldn’t be compensated for in total amount of stats.
Most common reason why somebody haven’t enough attack power is not those extra 200 stats per item that without them already has 2400 (400×6) + all the variating green stats that item has from the moment its created or drops. Neither it’s having to use somebodys old necklace and rings that score roughly 80×6=480 total stat loss for each 3 pieces instead of normal 200 that applies to rest of gear per piece out 15.
Nope, the most common reason why somebody havent enough attack is that instead of going for 5/6 attack stats, they choose to trade half of their should-be attack stats for stacking more hit points and defense than needed to survive because it’s faster – not cheaper – to find stats for that “determined to lead gear that doesn’t work” method. Or doing other weird choices because some people like to try things out on their own instead of sticking to common sense and knowledge how things work in game.
If you either choose to give up making working items for joy of getting new things more often, or if you experiment, you naturally do it on your own costs. But then don’t go and claim that the game made you pay or made you bad
Now you say you play to win, but what winning it is if everybody regardless of how long they have been in game or how well they statted, cooperated and traded with other players and farmed, or how ambitious choices or right priorizations they made, always wins right away? Even without winning yourself the very best ones out of available resources that everybody competites for (and that aren’ enough for everybody to reach absolute perfection) you can still do pretty good.
Second thing, permanent mount sure is a thing everybody would like to shop for, but it takes you around 30min per month to complete minigames that directly give you mount for whole month forward. With exactly same riding speed than permanent ones that were included to this calculation.
IDK where people got these numbers from but even when i played back in the day,it was FAR more costly than 4 something a month equivalent.
As of right now in 2015,it costs far more than 15 a month just to get a decent ,expected amount for inventory space,that does not include all the other needed stuff that you DO NEED.
It is $5=105 diamonds.
It costs 70 diamonds a month just for ONE BAG lmao.So if you rent 3 bags a month,that is 10 bucks.In comparison,i get around 5x that space in FFXI for my 12.95 a month subscription.Then you need BANK slots it soon adds up to more than a sub just for storage and because everything has multiple mats,you need TONS of storage space.I am already way out of space at level 15 lmao.
This does not include the massive amount of cost that goes into the gear statting.I know people that have spent 1500 bucks in one month.Then you have to do it all over again with new gear.
We have not even talked about a mount.
Bottom line is if you want to play the entire game’s content with a fair bit of fun,it will cost you about 10 years in subscription fees in only one year,which is around 1800 bucks.You can expect to spend a lot more than that if you get mildly serious.
I have been gaming over 30 years,this operation is the most expensive cash shop i have ever seen and by a LOT.Well sorry as of this date there is a whole new gimmick inside gaming ,called Pledge packages which i have seen 10-12 thousand dollar packages,lmao sad when we get idiots spending foolishly on games,it ruins it for common sense people.