Putting myself in MA's shoes for a moment.
1. I run a business -
not a charity
2. My goal is to make $ and be profitable (hasn't happened latelty
)
If I were running MA my target audience would be adults with jobs. One adult that deposits $50 to $100 a month brings in the same amount of PED to me as would 50 players who borrow their parents credit cards twice a year to deposit $10 each time. If I ran MA, my goal is to go after the person who has a stable job or a secure income, someone who can deposit on a monthly basis, because if I can get him to play my game, he's worth 50 other players that come here looking for handouts and 'get rich quick schemes' that aren't willing to deposit.
If I create tools that increase the supply of sweat, it isn't going to do anything for the players except drive the price of sweat down. When demand remains the same but you shift supply upwards, the result is an oversupply of said resource, and the price comes down.
So in short, creating new tools to increase the amount of sweat does nothing at all for the game or price of sweat except allow you to get more sweat -- but now that you're getting twice as much and selling it for twice as little you are no better off.
Back to me running MA
O.K., So if my target audience is Adults with jobs, and I have server costs and employee costs and building costs to make -- I need depositors. I can't run my business unless I have income coming in, if I increase the demand for sweat by creating new BP's and in turn raise the price for sweat -- I've allowed players to make more PED/hour by not depositing.
If I'm running MA, I want to discourage non-depositing, because I see non-depositors as free loaders.
It's true, I want to allow others to try my game for 'free' before they buy into it, because there have been many players that tried the game out for free, and months, even years later deposited. This is a fine line I must walk, because if I allow players to essentially 'make it' in my game without depositing they take potential $ from me, and other players who deposit, this is something I want to avoid at all costs.
So how do I let players experience the game, play for free, but not really take $ from me or other players? Well this is very easy to do now by giving them items that have no resale or trade value, but that still allow the player to experience all the different types of game play.
The days of players starting out without depositing and getting rich by just sweating are pretty much long gone, as it should be in the eyes of MA. There's no incentive to create a higher demand for sweat if I'm only going to attract the people I don't want to attract (a.k.a. non-depositors looking to get rich for free).
In turn, my focus should be on advertising, bug fixing, etc. This game could use updates to the user interface, and a whole slew of alterations to the game play, GUI, economy, as well as minor changes to basic mob/user interactions; however, I'll leave those for discussion on another day!
-MsP