Wow. Awesome job with the necro post. Lol

Its alive!!!

It is still a very valid discussion about handling opening up a game and dealing with a community. As mentioned it doesn't take much to get a bunch of "elitist" players that treat the new players like dirt. You don't want to spoil them too much, but you do want to try to build a really good core set of players that will help you out more than hurt you with new players and give positive feedback as well as constructive criticism on how things are going. Also, just opening up the doors to every joe blow sometimes isn't very useful as more people you have to deal with is more time that could be spent doing something constructive (as dealing with people tends to be dealing with their issues and personal issues with someone else).

Ok so answer me this one. Repopulation is released but you only got enough money or time to have a limited amount of players. But way more want to get in. Did you just do first come first serve. All the while people are reselling accounts behind your back for large money or do you keep some accounts in reserve and charge people more for the last seats? What would you do? I am thinking I would hold back some accounts and sell them for an additional charge because I would explain I rather we had the money then 2 timing Joe the refresh macroing whore.

I don't have the answer, but I do think you could get in a lot of trouble for charging different rates for different people, at least with your community if not with the law. It just seems to dangerous in the global economy of the internet. You could try to explain it however you want, but I just think people could pull out any coincidental pattern they wanted to and claim you are gouging Europeans, Indians, people from Boston, etc. A price needs to be a price across the board under all circumstances.

Last I checked Equal protection laws do not effect video game sales. To be on the safe side I will remain the high price limited spots as "collectors edition" reserved spots.

That sounds like a good idea. I believe there is a law against selective price gouging. The Equal Protection laws are something else. But even if it is not written into the law, charging everyone the same price is just a good idea. Just because something is against the law doesn't mean it can't destroy your business.

Price discrimination is a perfectly legitimate business model, and is practiced all the time. It's not price gouging.

MMORPGs typically charge different prices for different regions. People in China don't pay a $14.99 subscription fee for WoW like people in the USA. Similarly, Microsoft doesn't charge the same for Windows in say Nigeria, that they do in Germany.

You can give a discount to "early adopters", charge more for people that purchase after that, etc.


What Does Price Discrimination Mean?
A pricing strategy that charges customers different prices for the same product or service. In pure price discrimination, the seller will charge each customer the maximum price that he or she is willing to pay. In more common forms of price discrimination, the seller places customers in groups based on certain attributes and charges each group a different price.
Investopedia explains Price Discrimination
Price discrimination allows a company to earn higher profits than standard pricing because it allows firms to capture every last dollar of revenue available from each of its customers. While perfect price discrimination is illegal, when the optimal price is set for every customer, imperfect price discrimination exists. For example, movie theaters usually charge three different prices for a show. The prices target various age groups, including youth, adults and seniors. The prices fluctuate with the expected income of each age bracket, with the highest charge going to the adult population.

So you can't just be totally blatant about it, it seems.

Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean charging different prices in different countries. I meant within the same country. I am pretty sure you can't just put a sign up in a hamburger shop in the US or most other industrialized nations saying "Icelanders pay double".

But anyway, I think you could get away with charging different rates if there are reasons behind it, such as special editions, early adopter discounts, etc. But people would be confused by price differences in the same region with no apparent reason for different people. And even if there is no legal problem, you probably don't want to have those people who payed the higher price trying to figure out why they did. That is basically all I meant by bringing up price discrimination.

How about the dell poweredge M610 blade server with quad core zenon processors with DDR3 96gb ram?

That would hold a lot of people provided you have a very good connection with high bandwidth both upstream and downstream. However, regardless of how fast of a single server you have, you won't be able to get 2,000 players on it. To get those kinds of numbers, you really have to have a server farm.