The Rebate
 |
| Turbine Points up for Grabs - 5 TP each for exploring 10 subzones and a 10 TP bonus for finishing all of them |
What the Turbine Points do reliably get you is a bit of a "rebate" on your purchase price. In Enedwaith, I snagged 75 Turbine Points (around 15% of what I paid in Turbine Points for the zone). The Isengard expansion was more costly, but there are probably around 200 TP in easily-obtained deeds (quests, exploration, reputation).
I've never run an alt high enough to matter, but theoretically such a character would be earning the same rebate for content that I don't need to pay for a second time. The catch is that there are some things that I do consider reasonably useful (especially the second millstone and the decrease on map cooldown) that you pay for per character, but at a minimum I suppose said character could be run on a Turbine-Point neutral basis.
The Downside of Selling Services
The virtue of doing business with someone who sells content is that they make money when they make content, which is generally a win/win for players. However, Turbine also sells "services" - I'll expand on this shortly - and people who are in the business of selling services make money when they create or maintain demand for the purchase of services.
 |
| Marginally related - the "terms and conditions apply" asterick under "access to ALL quests"? Quests from three and soon to be four paid expansions are an additional fee. Minor terms and conditions, really. |
In fact, quite the opposite, Turbine has worked harder to monetize more of the longstanding design shortcomings in the game.
 |
| My current supply of rep tokens - a few are unbound but most are bound to character |
- Inventory? During 2012, Turbine will be rolling out two major features - a recently-released "premium barter wallet" and the first expansion to player base inventory in the game's history - for a total cost of 2000 Turbine Points (roughly $20 - and NOT included for people who still subscribe). Bear in mind that these things are only necessary because the game generates excessive numbers of tokens, crafting items, etc - of all my MMO's, the two Turbine games are the only ones where inventory is a consistent struggle.
- Travel? For several hundred Turbine Points here and there you can unlock the previously mentioned teleportation options, and this week's patch opens the system up for players to purchase as many as eleven destinations for instant teleportation. This solution is definitely excessive compared to the problem, but it also allows Turbine to collect roughly $40 in points PER CHARACTER from interested buyers.
- Finally, we have the Legendary Item system. The Sypster said he was "0% sure why Turbine felt it necessary to complicate an already complicated system" with yet another way of enhancing items that are designed to be disposable, rather than "legendary". And yet, Turbine added yet another mechanic in Starlight Crystals, which immediately went to the cash shop.
Finally, there's the issue of bundling. From the earliest days of the Turbine system, many of the best-selling unlocks were one-time purchases. Unfortunately, this may have created a situation in which many customers are not worth a lot of recurring revenue once they have their basic stuff unlocked. In response, we've seen a steady trend of increasing prices on unlocks, moving stuff that would typically be included in patches into the cash store (see the two inventory features), and now a trend towards ever-more expensive expansion bundles. You can theoretically pay for your expansions a la carte with Turbine Points, but these options are priced to make them as unattractive as possible when compared to the price of points.
The Isengard expansion offered all of the new stuff for $30. After this was a success, DDO followed suit with the just-released Underdark expansion, in which the cheapest bundle that contains everything other than the cosmetics cost $50. (As an aside, DDO also made an odd decision to offer "epic levels" that do relatively little to everyone so they can claim that the level cap is still free, while splitting off a huge portion of the increase in character power from levels 20-25 into a separate "Epic Destiny" system that is included in the bundles, but costs prohibitively extra a la carte. I don't get why they didn't just say that the cap increase required the expansion, as a level 25 without Epic Destinies won't be getting far.)
A year later, LOTRO's Rohan expansion was announced with a base price tag of $40. These bundles were received poorly for coming in at a higher price than the previous year's editions, while offering less than the comparably upgraded packages. Turbine eventually added more Turbine Points and a promise to throw in the forthcoming instance cluster (which they most likely hoped to sell for an extra fee, since Turbine's marketing department has basically never failed to mention something that is included), but the place they would not budge on was the price tag. If they're only going to get paid once per year by some (many?) players, they're going to do everything the can to increase the minimum size of that one sale.
 |
| To add additional flavor to the world, Turbine just added "dummies" which will display model outfits available for sale in the store. Nothing says "town occupied against its will by Saruman" like department store display models - wonder when we'll start seeing these for expansion bundle perks. |
I ultimately decided to put some money into my account during this weekend's point sale, so that I will have the balance on hand to pick up the barter token wallet the next time it goes on sale. It irks me to pay for something that is free in most other games, especially when Turbine willfully exacerbates the problem with multiple new tokens in each zone, but it's no longer worth my time to work around the two dozen stacks of bound tokens wasting over a third of the space in my vault. As to the bundles, well, I guess I'll do what I always do, which is wait for a sale and pay substantially less so that I'm not out-of-pocket for the fluff they crammed in to justify the higher price tag.
At the end of the day, the problem I run into with LOTRO is the same one I had prior to the game's revamp - I will gladly pay for as much content as Turbine can produce, but they just can't make new content all that quickly. With the new model, I'm able to get much more flexibility in terms of when I can play the content (i.e. anytime after I purchase it, rather than shackled to a monthly subscription) but I'm occasionally forced to pay for stuff I don't want as Turbine tries to keep the books roughly balanced. That said, if your biggest complaint about an MMO is the pricing, you're usually in a salvageable situation, because eventually the price will come down in some fashion - if the game's not worth playing, that problem is unlikely to get better.