Thank you all for such varied and thought-out responses. Some good points made too. A lot of them fall into a few categories, so I'll try to deal with them in groups. I hope people don't mind me snipping their posts - I've battled to keep this post short! In fact, it may just be the longest post of all time.
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Hangars
personally i dont mind paying a reasonable fee to pilots who have expenses and earn their eu living from it... but 80 ped for a tp trip is too much imo
well IMHO it gives PED to those who own a hangar and takes them from those who don`t. I think this is not fair[snip]
I was hoping not to dwell on the hangar issue, which has been quite controversial, but I did based my argument on the assumption that at some point the TP is replaced with an interplanetary travel industry.
I think it's very silly for someone to buy a hangar and not be allowed to use it. It also looks silly to get paid for doing nothing. There's argument because both things are silly and so it's hard to reconcile. All in all, given they had to nerf hangars, it seems to me a reasonable (maybe not ideal) solution. It's just that the longer it goes on, the sillier it looks. It'll remain silly until people get their spaceships back.
Anyway, I was talking not about the pre-existing hangar issue. I was talking about one day the 40ped fee being replaced by an interplanetary travel industry. If that never happens, then I definitely hear you guys. Bring back the spaceships!
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Changing the amount of the fee
if the price would be like cp i may have gone there a few time a month
I do think the tp fee is too high, I also believe that the new planets will still have to make it worthwhile going there wether it costs ped or not, no player is going to go to a planet that is not worthwhile no matter if it is free or not...
I have been to Rocktropia twice.
the first time was exciting[snip]
The second time was a disaster[snip]
Would i go back? mmmm maybe if i hit a big HOF or an ATH,[snip]
Good and bad experiences is not the only factor, money is.
A fee is just fine for alot of reasons, but 80ped
(which it is if you think about it) is far to high for alot of players that play on a limited budget.
And because of that high fee I haven't got to see if I even like RT so FPC gets all my peds instead
(and MA 50% of it too 
)
I should clarify here: I wasn't really commenting on whether 40 ped is too high or too low - that should be a job for the balancing team, perhaps. Maybe enough people will be happy paying the fee and switching planets regularly that they'll try to discourage it by putting the fee up at some point - who knows?
I was more arguing about the principle of having a fee, than the size of the fee itself. I don't know which of 35 ped or 45 ped would be more reasonable, for example.
Jay, yes I agree, even if there was no fee, the new planet partners would still have to make their planets attractive to get people to go there. I guess what I'm saying is that the presence of the fee will make them try
harder than they would need to if it was free, and it will also make them try harder to get people from outside EU instead of from other planets (which I think is a good thing...).
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A "try Rocktropia for free" promotion
I'm surprised there hasnt been a "try Rocktropia for free" promotion.[snip]
This is what have surprised me too, we should have at least had a week or one time round ticket to see the place and see if we want to come back or stay there.[snip]
My first reaction was surprise too. After a while though, I realised that for Rocktropia to do well, it's probably not really that interested in the people for whom the fee is too expensive. It's interested in the people who won't hesitate to pay the fee (because they will be the ones generating income), or the people who come from the outside world (because the fee will discourage them from going to another planet while they begin to spend).
That's related to this issue as well:
well, i understand the OP, but i don't like the fee.
My main point is that i never will find out if RT is an interesting planet where i could spend my money. The fee is way to high for me. With 40 PEDs i could go on a nice hunt on Calypso for some time and right now i don't have any spare money to spend. So for all those players living their avatars life on a rather low budget in EU, the fee is like a "Keep off my property" - Sign...
I hope you know what i mean.
I think I do know what you mean elcid, and I think a lot of people feel the same way.
I suspect the reality is that for players for whom 40 ped is way too high, they're probably not generating much of the income compared to the players for whom 40 ped isn't a problem.
Given that a server can only support a certain amount of people, maybe it's good for Rocktropia's early development that the players who go there and spend are the ones who have the money to do so (and will spend a lot)?
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The OP's in la la land dreaming of more players and better gaming
I would find the "Entropia Universe Experience" far more entertaining if I could travel freely between planets.
I agree for now, Xen, if I think of the short term. My argument is that for the long term, you will find the "Entropia Universe Experience" far more entertaining if there's a fee - because a fee means that the planets will compete or die. When planets are really competing with each other, they'll be better - and then your experience will be even better than having free travel, hopefully.
Your asking for seperation but before that happens in any type of healthy form the game needs more players and that will not happen until the game is much cheaper to play.
I'm advocating separation, but need more players to have it, as you say. By the same token, however, more separation is a way of generating more players! If it's hard for Rocktropia to get players to come from Calypso, it's more likely that Rocktropia will go to the big wide world and find more players there instead.
So I argue that the fee makes it more likely that we'll get more players.
The 40 ped fee in my view and the entire fee based transportation is just a small example of why this game deos not have more players with the biggest problems being the return rate and the general expense of items.
The population seems to have levelled out long before the concept of the 40 ped fee existed. I don't think it's stopping people signing up for one planet or the other.
To be more general though, and talk of fees in general being a hinderance - yes, perhaps you're right.
I insist, however, that EU only works because it is a RCE. In a RCE, we need people to participate in the economy. The greater the percentage of the population that contributes to the economy, the better. As far as wanting the game to be great is concerned, we're not really concerned about the people who quit because they're not prepared to pay for entertainment, or put the time in to be entrepreneurial and earn, or who want to play for free. They're welcome, but they get a relatively small vote. What needs to be done, of course, is more effort being made to show people how much fun CAN be had for a few bucks, and get more people in here.
Which leads to the next post:
MA has had years and years to build a playerbase and hasnt done so, what on gods green earth makes all these people think that all these new planets are going to have their own communities?
the people around here who think that each new planets is going to come with 10k new players to fill it are dreaming or high.
calypso has players from all over the world, where is this vast amount of untapped people? the moon? mars?.
I for one believe that we have a long way to go before we've saturated the potential to find players from planet earth.
Assuming there's say 1,000,000 registered accounts at the moment, and 50,000 players (just an estimate), that's say a 5% strike rate. I have two things to say about this:
1. The strike rate could be dramatically increased by not selling the thing incorrectly in the first place. If people signed up knowing there's a chance to win big, but being prepared to pay for entertainment, nowhere near as many of them would feel cheated and leave again.
2. 1,000,000 registered accounts is hardly anyone from Earth. It's less than the population of the city I live in. There's 6,000,000,000 or so people on the planet. Sure, not all of them have great computers with internet:
a) But give it time, and computers that run EU will be easier and cheaper to get hold of.
b) But I'll bet that most of the people who do have computers, haven't even heard of EU.
Earth is a huge untapped market. That other game has 15,000,000 players or something doesn't it? All of them are paying for entertainment!
We all know that MA doesn't do much marketing. They don't need to and they still make millions. In fact they've just outsourced the planet ownership partly in the hope that the planet partners WILL go and do some marketing.
If someone with the right business plan and budget comes along, someone with a far greater desire than MA to get out there and get some players and not mislead them on the way, and give them an experience they want to pay for, why on god's green earth
wouldn't they be able to sign up another million players and keep some of them just like MA has been able to do?
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Other comments with individual responses
Well, I don't like it and won't pay it. $4 to change my avatar's coordinates? Give me a break. If that's the main point of the fee, it's keeping me away extremely well.
I think this simply proves my point. Calypso attracted you to the universe, and keeps you. Rocktropia isn't good enough to win you.
That means Rocktropia has to work harder to get you. They have to come up with something so good that you ARE prepared to pay the $4 to go there.
Which means it's more likely they WILL come up with something awesome.
Which is why I think the fee is good. It is doing extremely well, as you say, at getting you to NOT be a Rocktropia customer because Rocktropia's not showing you that it's good enough. That's the way it should be: competition between the planets, incentive for Rocktropia to become good enough, better in the long term for the players.
I love
paying for things in a
free game.
Does that make sense?
The moment I deposited out of a desire to no longer be a complete n00b and to set up an armour business, this game for me was no longer a free game.
I speak as someone who contributes to the Entropian economy, not as someone for whom this is a free game.
Again, the people who don't deposit, and don't contribute to the economy, aren't the people whose opinions we should be putting much weight into when discussing the fundamentals of achieving a rich universe that is based on a
real cash economy[i/] (and I make no judgement or presumption about whether you're a depositor when I say that).
Freebies are quite beside the point imo. This is a RCE.
Haha, this is biggest pile of crap I've read in a long time!
Having something that suck's alot of peds out of the game and hindering people from going somewhere is a fuckin bad thing.
And what is up with the "successful, vibrant planets", you say this 800 times in your post. Just because you say it enough time, doesnt make it come true.
I'm sorry I can't join in your constructive debate that you want, but if it smells like shit and looks like shit, it probarbly is shit.
Fuck this shit.
All I have to say to this is that you're completely ignoring the fact that this game has to be based on a real cash economy or the whole premise fails. The RCE, as I said in the OP, MUST be respected or none of this works.
When someone can give me a real-world example of a successful exclusionist economy, I'll consider agreeing with you.
most first world economies were built up while tariffs protected local industry from importers.
how is a new planet supposed to justify spending on marketing to attract new players into their planet if they just leave to Calypso after picking pu their free stuff? how is it in FPC's (and their majority owner, MA) interest to allow players to wander off to new planets and give them the revenue?
maybe in time the competeing planets can do so more directly on the experience and gameplay they provide. but to establish the whole platform concept commercially, for the companies investing not the player base, restrictions make sence.
Oleg, my thoughts are along the lines of aridash's here.
Also, exclude is different to discourage. I would think it's ridiculous if Calypsans were excluded from Rocktropia and vice versa. That wouldn't work - it'd be two completely separate games. But to set up something of a barrier that stimulates an internal planet's economy is another thing entirely.
The country analogy is a good one. If it's cheaper to get labour from overseas, companies do it. But if the costs of achieving it are prohibitive, they don't - they go local instead. Such "tariffs" if you will, are a tool for the powers that be to monitor and regulate economies.
Same in EU - "no fee" means free flow of players between planets, and then another planet is no different to another land area. A 1m ped fee would mean no flow of players or goods whatsoever = exclusionist. A 40 ped fee means that certain things will be better to do internally, and some things will still be worth doing "interplanetarily" (did I just make up a word?). That gives rise to interplanetary trade, and all sorts of other lovely things that make the universe tick over.
My main (and only, afaik) problem with your post Mr.OP, is that you talk of multiple economies. There is only one economy in Entropia, planets are simply extensions of the economy that is already here.
This is one of the main reasons EU as a platform, cannot be as successful as it has the potential to be (imho) - it is impossible to live on another planet atm, because of the handicap that places like RT have, when it comes to competing on the universal market.
The way they've set up the inter-planetary marketplace, is detrimental to the game (imho), much like the micro-payment plan of APB is looking like it could be detrimental to APB's future. As much as I love APB right now, things like the economics of an online game, are purely up to the developers. Us as players can do only one thing; voice our opinions.
Profit, perhaps I should replace the term "economy" with "sub-economy", or "market"?
Now that I think about it, it makes more sense to talk about multiple markets in the game, not multiple economies. Fair enough.
Can you please elaborate on how the way they've set up the inter-planetary marketplace is detrimental to the game? I'd like to find out more about what you mean.
