Dungeoneering: Sign of RS Going Cash Shop?

[PhelimReagh]

I'm not sure how familiar the rest of you are with other "F2P" games that operate with an item/cash shop. The basic idea is that there is no monthly subscription, but players instead purchase "credits" of some sort, which are then used to purchase items that are used in-game.

To me, Dungeoneering is the second major indication that the folks at Jagex could be at least preparing the way to make a transition to a F2P cash shop for Runescape.

The first big signal was that "Bonus XP" weekend, wherein players were granted something like 10 hours of in-game time of higher-than-usual XP gain. Bonus XP is a standard cash shop offering in most F2P games. One can easily envision, now that they've tested the concept, that this could be in a future RS cash shop.

Now Dungeoneering comes along, and it screams out to me: Cash Shop Framework! We now have the cash shop currency in place: Dungeoneering Tokens. Just looking at it I'm envisioning Dungeoneering token prices being something akin to $1/10,000 tokens.

The Dungeoneering rewards mimic the kinds of things you'd find in a F2P cash shop:

• additional inventory slots (gem bags, etc.)
• degradable top-tier-items that require "recharging" (i.e., recurring purchases);
• one-time purchases that give you an in-game advantage (scrolls)

What's more, most F2P cash shops like to give you the pretend option of being able to get all of these items in-game WITHOUT having to spend real money. That's why these items cost such a ridiculous amount of tokens. You can TECHNICALLY get all these items simply by Dungeoneering for thousands of hours. But lets face it, it'll be easier to spend some real life cash to get the item long before you'd have spent Dungeoneering to get them.

The kicker: Dungeoneering XP can be purchased at 1XP per token. If you want to speed your way to using these new items ASAP, then get ready to pay $1 per 10K XP. You can't buy the other skills, mind you, but you can buy Dungeoneering XP which goes up to 104 million XP to reach level 120. Leaves plenty of purchasing room, and explains why this one skill goes up to 120 instead of 99.

So in conclusion, I suspect that the "skill" Dungeoneering is far worse than being nothing more than a minigame. It's the infrastructure for moving Runescape in the direction of a F2P cash shop. Our best hope is that they're just testing the infrastructure here in RS, but will only be implementing the cash shop in Mechscape.

EDIT: And the more I think about it, I could definitely see some future in-game content inaccessible to those without a Dugeoneering level of, say, 110, 115, etc. A level that would take an inexplicable amount of in-game time to achieve, so it would essentially amount to content that you'd be required to pay for (since you'd have to buy the XP).

[onezerobin]

If runescape becomes cash for xp shop, I can think of better stuff to do while in a game. Example in second life, you can buy virtual land, and do virtual real estate development and earn real cash by selling the linden dollars. If Jagex allows real world trading like selling your dungeon tokens for cash, it might not be such a bad thing. Especially for serious gamers.

[BlackJoker]

This may be just speculation lol

I don't think Jagex will go down to this. They said it themselves, that they'll never sell in-game items for IRL currency...

[capitalg]

If runescape becomes cash for xp shop, I can think of better stuff to do while in a game. Example in second life, you can buy virtual land, and do virtual real estate development and earn real cash by selling the linden dollars. If Jagex allows real world trading like selling your dungeon tokens for cash, it might not be such a bad thing. Especially for serious gamers.

my last 3 games where eaither p2p and got turn into f2p with cashshop or the game is f2p and has cash build into the game

i dont really see this game doint the whole cash shop it will just kill the game

now if the game got turn into a second life wanna be dont really see them buying virtue cash back from the play. i used to play second life made about 500 dollars a month not to bad

[Darth Kaz2]

Phelim,
Very interesting analysis! I certainly hope you are wrong. Imagine Runescape doing all it has done to ban RWT, and then to go into the business themselves. Hypocrisy! We'll see. Personally, knowing that someone can buy the skills or items I have played so long for would ruin RS for me. :/

[Hid]

This doesn't sounds so crazy if you knew Jagex latest game, War of Legends. You can play War of Legends for free, but every advantage you want to have costs Jcredits, which can be bought for real life money. 1 Jcred is about 0.10 $. Jagex is using every possibility to make money out of that game. For example you can get reward boxes in the game as drops or as reward for an achievement. The problem is, that to open the reward you have to buy the key from the shop for jcreds. For a standard reward you have to pay like $ 2 to open it, a good key costs $ 5.Those are just the cheap items btw.

If you want to really compete with others you have to spend a lot more money. For example if you want to have a good alliance/clan (which give huge advantages), you have to pay over a $ 1000. If you want to have a good legend (which is your main fighter) you have to pay about $ 500. Some single items cost up to $ 200, and so on.

Without spending real life money on the game you don't really stand a chance. So, either pay or get owned.

[Pa7uL]

a cash shop will kill rs for me and probably a lot of other mature players. i hope they don't ruin the game this way, turning it into a way to make a buck out of kids who know there parents credit card numbers. if they do this than how far away are they from making it posable to buy gp directly or indirectly? if that where to ever happen say good bye to any sense of accomplishment you have for months and years of game play when something like lvl 70 prayer can be obtained in a day or two by anyone with 50$

[PhelimReagh]

Remember, this is all speculation on my part, but I haven't been able to ignore the changes they've been making to the game lately.

Think of the advantages: There would be no F2P/P2P servers. Their would only be the F2P members world, enabling RS to shut down probably 20-30% of their servers, saving them money.

No more maintaining the F2P world content, reducing costs even more.

I don't know how successful War of Legends is/has been since it's release, but if it has been raking in some cash, I can definitely see Jagex trying to figure out how to transition the million or two RS players into a cash shop. Successful cash shop games make a ridiculous amount of money as players "pay to win", the most extreme cases spending of hundreds of dollars per month.

If War of Legends has been successful, Jagex is probably going to be unable to ignore the writing on the wall.

[Deep_Pain]

quite a while ago when the first few official quotes came out about mechscape and some of the quotes regarding rwt before the 10 dec updates, the question was asked a few times why didn't they just sell items cash etc, like a lot of other games, they said quite clearly this would never happen on runescape and was one of the ideas behind mechscape that it would be able to use this function. But they reiterated a few times this would not happen on runescape as it went against the ideals of the game.

But as mechscape has been dumped and never was at least 3 years ago now, u never know, I guess.

[Pa7uL]

i really hope they stick to their promises but if you think about how much other companies have gone from caring for the customer to caring to the profit, its not a good sign.

i wonder how many people would put money into a cash shop system. $6 a month is extremely cheep compared to almost everything else we buy (1 meal typicaly costs at least that much). with the prepay cards it makes it so anyone with a created card can get a membership for only a few dollars more. it makes me think the people who are going to put any money in this game already are, so they can't expect to much more revenue.

[Driftdog2k9]

I don't think Jagex will sell in-game items or exp to its players to buy for in real cash because that way it will ruin the purpose of this game. However i do agree that Jagex is trying to make dungeoneering the new skill release with a bit of thought and intentions towards cash shopping.

[RedFalling]

I think you may be on the right track with this, just not runescape in its current state. Now, if RS were to go to consoles like they have discussed, then I could easily see this feature. Imagine a version of runescape on either the xbox or playstation, and then using the marketplace features on each one, sell additional content like levels and items to players for there own game.

[cwadark0ne]

I would quit if it did