On top of that cost of play decreased in my book. You can buy from tt rookie hunting/mining gear and can go hunt specific v low maturity mobs and or/mine. I believe you can get 100rookie bombs for 1ped and 100probes for 50pec or something. If this isn`t a reduced cost to play, don`t know what is.
Exactly. Biggest change is that L came in to play, and that whole change to tiering of UL to make it always succeed brought myself and a lot of others back in to playing more. Up til then there was this huge invisible ceiling... The ceiling is still there since the cost to upgrade the gear is still high, but now at least you know that if you pay the price it will work always.
I honestly think the rookie gear and puny mobs, along with tier change was some of the smartest things FPC and MA has made in YEARS... Now, if there was only a rookie sword that cost less then the TT sword does, lol.
Its no secret I love using viper whip on those puny to up my whip skills... and lower cost to play enough that I can play every day for hours if I want. That is huge change! It allows me to get continual skill gain even if it's not much, every single day of the year if I choose... and without having to be bored to death sweating at Neas for the rest of forever.
The cost to play doing that is very, very low per hour since it does roughly same damage as the kiwio rookie rifle. It would be good if they would introduce more UL gear like the whip that does that low amount of damage. The tt fists are ok on the puny, but really they lead to too much overkill since average hit does 5 damage and puny has 10 health... so average takes 2 hits with the fists, but if one of those hits does not do 5 you are looking at overkill on the third hit. I use the whip to help with that and use it as a finisher, but not everyone has a finisher that does that little damage, unless they are using kiwio... Kiwio would be nice if it was UL, but it's not. Biggest disappointment with rookie gear is that it's all L... good for new folks, but not so great for folks that want to use it forever as a finisher. I guess this is good for the whip crafters who make the L versions of the viper, lol.
I do have a bigger whip now, along with other nice low level UL sib stuff, so hunt bigger stuff sometimes (love the Corn about one TP jump west of Zeus), but the lowering the cost through puny helps me skill daily whereas otherwise my deposit level would just make me a weekend warrior so to speak... That is enormous... it means the many micro depositors that are just casual gamers stand a chance. However, they have a lot further they can take this... The average cost to play and participate is still far higher then most casual gamers like I think. Rookie gear is a nice first step, and removing rent is a nice second step, but there's still an entire micropayment level of the rce that needs a lot of development to really be a global system that many will like and participate in daily.
If WOW is like 15 bucks a month, they need to get things at a low enough payment level where the average participant can chase down puny and stuff like that for 15 bucks a month to really be competitive for that audience... Right now they have it at around the one dollar an hour if you are uber eco and swunt puny like I'm doing some, BUT, 15 hours is not an entire month... That's one hardcore weekend a month... still a long ways to go til 15 bucks a month can get you through an entire month without having to go sweat at Neas or do other stuff that's not related to the main professions... Decrease cost of rookie gear and stuff even more. Create even punier puny mobs with 5 health, etc. Don't stop developing more mobs on the high end, etc. just make it cheaper to get to lower micropayment level to spread the chances that everyone can play every single day of the year if they choose to without having to deposit every single day of the year... make more interesting things to do for free (more starter quests, etc.)
