On the 1st paragraph, I honestly don't know what in the world am I reading, but you must be saying something related to profit, so I'll just say that limiting content is a bad idea for profit, and selling cosmetics is a good one. Because that way f2players don't get whacked with limitations asides from not having as much swag as p2pers.
At 2nd paragraph, I suppose you are right. I knew this idea was a bit too extreme to start with, but i was just wondering how people would react. I'm not really surprised with the results though. Still, starting to small steps is a good idea. And we can start with crown crafting. And here's why:
- Crafting cost is completely independent of the CE price, or in short, the prices are fixed. Which means that the CE price can skyrocket all the way to the next dimension, but you are still capable of crafting with relative ease, which prevents the game from breaking.
- It has the potential of decreasing the price of CE, giving that it's cheaper to craft by crowns than by CE equivalent. This is good because f2pers won't cluster the market with crown offers, so supply can actually overwhelm it.
-Less begging and CE price complaining threads. That, if the prices are fair to the amount of effort it should take. If it stays as a grindfest, people will still complain.
Either that, or cut the CE cost on crafting in half. Both are good because it can make obtaining stuff less of a chore.
If you're going to state that ripping out the majority of the money making parts of the game is not only going to be good for player retention but will definitely translate into higher sales in other areas that will equal or surpass the current profits then shouldn't you have a fully detailed business plan that covers various expenses and sources of income with solid figures and projections behind them?
Mohandar made a reference to this already, but the sales strategy behind the energy model wasn't decided upon by throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what stuck. So I think we'd have much better luck convincing a change in sales strategy if we suggested more mild alterations rather than going straight for the jugular. With the suggestion as it is right now, I feel that the likelyhood of staff support is zero. You can debate the effect of grinding all you want but I don't think it's going to make much of a difference unless you scale back to ideas that appear more reasonable from the company's perspective. At the very least as a "let's start off small and see the effect".
Or produce that detailed business plan, I guess.
One thing I don't get though is why you seem to be so put off by the idea of buying energy with crowns for crafting and would instead prefer to use crowns directly for crafting. From a F2P perspective, what does it personally matter to you? Whether you exchange crowns for energy or use crowns directly, the end result for you is the same. You used up crowns and got an item at the end. You can debate the numbers involved, fair enough, but I'm not sure why you seem to have taken issue against the very system itself. In the current scenario someone paid Three Rings for the energy you used, but that person wasn't you.