Sparkle Pony vs the Sparkle Cat

I'm writing this post partly after listing to MMOVoices podcast #34, and partly because of some of the other things I have read during the last week regarding SOE introducing the sparkle cat in EQ2 (kinda weird for me to defend SOE on this). Lots has been said that this is just SOE copying Blizzard with a 25$ mount, but I think people are not looking at it from the right angle, it really comes down to Blizzard copying SOE.

Why do I say that, well lets look back at RMT in both games. SOE introduced its Marketplace back on December 9, 2008 when it started they had a few items with the most expensive being 10$ for a set of appearance armor, time goes by they slowly add things to the marketplace including change name and change gender potions witch they sell for 25$ (which the reveal at FanFaire 2009 is there biggest seller), more time passes they add race change potion 25$ and character transfer also 25$, on December 22, 2009 they started selling backpacks for 25$, these are 44 slot backpacks tha would actually have an appearance on your character. Also during this time they have been creating lots of house items for people to buy, to the annoyance of the carpenters in EQ2, and they sell complete sets for 50$, yep thats right 50$.

Now we have Blizzard, on November 4, 2009 Blizzard announced it was selling 2 pets for 10$ each. Granted until Dec 31, 2009 50% of the Pandaren monk pet was going to the Make a wish Foundation (SOE also had a similar thing with donations going to Child's Play for the 2nd year). Now April 16, 2010 they now offer a new pet for 10$ and gasp a sparkle pony for 25$. That's 4 items that are offered in to WOW store (yes some of you may say what about the 2 stuffed pets you can buy that give you digital pets in game, and I say if your getting something thats real, its not the same thing)

Now comes May 20, 2010 and SOE anounces its sparkle cat for gasp 25$, now I will say here I think the sparkle pony in WoW is a better deal, I believe that SOE just had the bad luck of releasing this after Blizzard.

As for the price point being the same, well looking at the stuff that SOE has released, I'm surprised it wasn't more, and maybe we should be glad for Blizzard for releasing their mount first so that it wasn't.

So who is really copying who, well I think that's just what MMO's do.

RGX

The Sparkle Cat and why I'm going to buy one

So SOE has followed in Blizzard's footsteps and have released the $25.00 mount, now yes this is a cat and it does have a few stats, but nothing that's really game breaking or that you cant get better in game, and I'm going to have to say the same thing I did when the WoW horse came out, if someone wants to spend $25 on a horse let them.

I do think the WoW horse is a better deal since you get it for all your alts, I think one thing that people are not looking at is the Station Cash itself. Now I've been playing the game for a long time and one thing I learned is to pay attention to things like twitter, facebook,ect, The reason I pay attention to these things is that you can find out when its advantageous to buy SC and when you can get SC for free.

When thy had the connecding promotion valid EQ2 subscribers got 1000SC, I also managed to pick up another 500SC when I attached my Pax Nora account to my Station account, also got another 500 from buying the expansion, I think i picked up some more SC thru some other promotions that I can't recall atm, but the most important thing I did was to redeem SC cards when they had double station cash promotions. So a 25$ card now gives you 5000SC, so its possible to get the mount for free or at the least $12.50.

So needless to say I have a little bit of SC and so far had nothing to spend in on, however one thing that nobody seems to have mentioned it the SC Store update is you can now buy LoN cards with Station, this could become a problem.

RGX

RPG - A controversial thought

This post is a result of MMO Voices podcast 33.  Where there was a discussion about a comment from Bioware saying that J-RPG are not RPG. I'm going to take a different tack at this discussion and what I really think people are not considering is why we consider games like FFXII and ME2, Dragon Age RPG's at all? Some people say its story, some say character development, some say choices, I'm going to say that none of that matters.

What I'm mean is the name RPG stand Role Playing Game, and it means you are playing a role, and this really describes any type of game. Every game you play you are playing a role no matter what, in a FPS you could be playing the role of a terrorist or counter-terrorist like in Counter-Strike, in an RTS you take the role of a commander of an army, I could go on but it would all lead back to the same you are still playing a role.

I believe what most people are forgetting is what the G stands for, and that's Game, at the end of the day if your having fun does it really matter the type of game it is?

RGX