He may be on to something. The few times I've tried to talk about EU on other game forums I was battered by people calling it out as an obvious scam. A few people even said the whole idea of an RCE is patently illegal (lol). Of course these were people that never tried the game or bothered to do any research.
So basically the idea of an RCE game may still be a little overwhelming/strange/completely foreign to most gamers. So much that they're not even willing to try it.
Oh I know about this reaction, yes they call it a scam and all the other nice words.
I believe what they try to tell us with this is that the cost to play is unreasonably high. Like, I put ten bucks in I expect it to last a while. But the game eats it like instantly--and so I call this a scam.
This is quite widespread, I know. However, from there to believing there's undercover MA employees posing as other players trying to scam you by trade, etc -- this is quite a stretch. (Or like this other guy who was certain there's no real players, every avatar around him was actually MA employee posing as a normal player.
)
Anyway, I believe the average cost to play is the root of all our problems. What's so terribly alien in RCE anyway? Just another micro transaction based game with a complex economy. A bit steeper learning curve but doable. But if you lose in a day what you expected to last a month, that's the real party pooper for most newcomers...
Affiliate system would work but it's not like tons of people have a lot of money. It will always be a niche I think. It might have a chance to get out and retain folks if all the day to day stuff wasn't tt food like oils and wools. The missed a big opportunity to make pills craftable and such.
Yes, well I do agree that the game has to punish the ones who can't figure out how to play it right and award those who do. This is called capitalism, people need incentives to work harder/become smarter.
So obviously socialism is not a solution. Like, by destroying markup you effectively take away incentive to try to play smarter, but in the end it only makes everyone poor and that's it.
The real solution is to shift the entire scale up. That's the magic solution to all our troubles. Those who are really bad would still lose, but they'd lose less. The "middle class" would come very close to breakeven. And the real magic would come from the "upper class" that has managed to master the game and earn profit. If the "upper class" is not less than 1% they're not like unicorn any more, something that very few have actually met and so tend to believe it doesn't even exist. If the "upper class" is like 5-10% the possibility to profit becomes undeniable and those people will become a natural advertisement for the game--way better than any artificial advertisement.
All that's needed is an increase in player base. It's not like you have to write a new code for each new player. That's the power of the software industry, you can make a new copy of your existing code for no additional cost (well, a small additional cost for increased bandwidth but that's so small it's irrelevant). The whole trick is to get out of the woods and then it's a chain reaction from then on.
In other words, the first million is always the hardest... but we already knew that. Easy to say, hard to do, I know...