http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?&postid=4996516#post4996516

I'm going to give Turbine my debit card immediately so that I can buy this.

Zonix was buying them for 12M pp. Must've had a line of people wanting to buy them with cash.

Screw Otto's Pox.  Just sell the damn stones.

Why sell stones when you can tack on a bunch of stuff no one wants and charge an extra $20?

Here's why they MIGHT release stones separately.  In this matter you can divide the player population into 3 groups:

1.  The player who can afford $50+ for fast TRing.  This player has a limit he/she is willing to spend.  Might be $50.  Might be $200.  Might be $800.  Who knows.  At any rate, they will buy as many boxes as they can up to their limit.

2.  The player who can't afford $50+ for fast TRing.  But can afford $30.  They are SOL currently. 

3.  Players who either do not spend money on TP or who do not care to spend money on buying fast TR's. 

If they released the stones separately, they would capture this range of the market that will spend, but currently cannot.  They are already getting the first group's money.  The first group will not spend less because the stones are less expensive than the boxes.  They will just buy more stones up to their cap.  Or stones + sovereign XP pots up to their cap.  Either way. 

But, by not releasing the stones separately, they are losing out on a portion of potential revenue.   I disagree that releasing the stones separately would alter the spending of the first group, though.  And I'm one of those "willing to spend $50 to speed up a TR" kinda people.

Pretty sure anyone who could spend $30 on a stone will spend $50 on a box if they don't have any other choice - or trade in game items to someone else who'll pay $50. Turbine is smart not to sell stones.

What Asheras and Bigjunk said. If Stainer's doing any pencilling-in for other threads, he can put me in the "Could spend $50 but won't; would spend $30 ten times over" column.

So there's another category of player; people who can afford it, but don't see it as good enough value at the current price. They will catch a proportion of those folks too, although of course not all.

Flint wrote on Apr 26^th, 2013 at 1:15pm:


They are absolutely not missing any relevant amount of money. Boxes sell like hotcakes when they go up, and then people beg for them to go back for sale when they're not. Zonixx had people begging him to find more boxes so they could give him $50 for them.

Maybe when you've saturated the market for boxes you start thinking about selling stones, but they are not anywhere near that.

Turbine obviously doesn't think they'd make more money, or they'd do it. They're incompetent in pretty much every other area, but the one thing they do have a sharp eye for is making money with f2p. Every data point is carefully tracked.

cdr wrote on Apr 26^th, 2013 at 2:04pm:

Turbine Q&A and development may be feather_of_sun'd, but their marketing people have a fucking clue.   However, they don't know jack shit until they test it, which they haven't.

Carpone wrote on Apr 26^th, 2013 at 2:18pm:

Of course they have a clue, they have smart people making detailed economic models and predictions.  They have tons of experience selling store items after becoming F2P.  They know what sells and what doesn't.  But tbh, if you think they'd make more money selling stones at $30 a pop rather than boxes at $50, you are delusional. 

Who the fuck gives 50$ for otto's trash bin? with this money i get whey protein for a month. and thats going to get me pussy.
Imho ddo doesnt worth 50$ itself let alone the trash bins..

Asheras wrote on May 2^nd, 2013 at 5:39pm:

Hahahaha.