Monetization

[tokamak]

http://forums.warchest.com/showthread.php/34925-A-Theory-of-F2P

[BAMFana]

I think you make some good points in that thread, but I don’t agree with everything you say.

Content that can only be obtained through paying with real money, and that has an appreciable effect on player performance, is essentially pay to win. “Sidegrades” can be acceptable in practice depending on how the rest of the game is designed, but it has the potential to create big problems. While two different mercs may technically be equally powerful, just have different strengths, the player who has access to both will typically have an advantage over the player who only has access to one, because the first player has the option of picking either, and can thus choose the merc that is the most powerful in a given situation. That is why I can’t agree with you that it is acceptable to have certain player performance enhancing content only be accessible through real money payments, tokamak.

Then, and this is really something stolen from Valve. ALL content should be tradeable. Players that can spent a lot of time should be able to trade their items with players that spent money on the game or with players that have gotten lucky.

This is strictly speaking not true. Both TF2 and Dota 2 have limitations on item trading. That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of trading, because there is, but it makes sense that not everything is freely tradeable – an achievement medal should not be tradeable, for example.