Let's Talk About Membership

I love the game, as I think most people here do, and I have, for many years, supported the game via paid membership. I think this is pretty normal. A couple years ago I had some unexpected spikes in cost of living, and I decided to end my membership, while continuing to actively play the game.

It raised a pretty ugly truth, and one that isn't easy to sugar coat. Membership is an extremely pay to win system in Sindome. It's impact can vary wildly from being a tiny little weekly perk, to literally being a make-it-or-break-it, sink-or-swim thing that hugely shapes the progression and reach of your character, especially over the long-term view of a 6, 12, or 18-month membership. I'd like to put up a few numbers to illustrate my point here, because I don't think people are quite aware of the bigger picture since we play a very in the moment, day to day game.

If you are a mixer, and you have a fairly average apartment, you can expect to pay around 4-5k per week in rent. At 4500 chyen a week, that comes out to 18K a month, which is 108,000 chyen per six month membership. That's a lot of fucking money. That's the difference between owning a car, a nice set of armor, or a lot of plot gas for other people.

This problem starts to get significantly uglier when you talk about topside, because the game is balanced around keeping mixers out of topside by comically inflating rental unit costs and offering ways of discounting it to the 'appropriate' characters. There's some cheaper rental units topside, but there is a strong, themely culture of expecting corporates to act and dress nicely, and to not live in the topside ratty apartments more suited for service class salaries. If we say that an average, decent quality apartment runs you around 8,000 per week, you're talking about 32,000 chyen a month, and 192,000 per six month renewal period.

That's a lot of fucking money by any metric. It's more money than most characters will ever see in their life. That's 200 odd job tiny plots for others. That's a luxury vehicle. That's gearing out an endgame character and loading them for war.

I don't want to just focus on the big spooky numbers though, I want to also talk about the day to day. While subsidies do increase with job progression, said job progression is also tied to performance, and people can, and do get demoted for fucking up in their jobs. Not only do you lose weekly salary with a demotion, but you also get double-dinged by losing a higher subsidy rate. It is not an exaggeration to say that the difference between the weekly take home between a member and a non member in a corporate job is quite literally 70% of their entire paycheck. That's nuts, folks. Trying to compete against members as a non member is insane. Your ability to bounce back from a death can be a month, or it could be five or six months.

Now, to come up for air. I want to support the game. I want others to support the game, I want SD funded with a nice nest egg that grows so we have our little trust fund and a game to keep playing. But we need to uncouple tangible, serious in-game benefits from membership.

I still want people to be rewarded for being a member. Here's some ideas that I think are fun and neat, and don't impact the actual gameplay:

Give us fancy text in OOC channels.

Give us a cool forum badge to show our pride with.

Give us a free @redecorate once a year if we have a membership.

We could have members having unique emotes and socials in OOC channels.

Let us have higher-res, larger images, or fancier player profiles on the website and forum.

Let us have access to unique but not gameplay impacting in-game perks, like special car paintjob colors, or new makeup or textile colors.

There's a ton of things we can do to show our support and be cool and themely doing it, both in game and out, but please consider removing having more chyen every week as a membership benefit. It's really busted. I don't know how to fix the problems of wanting longer apartment rents, or what to do about about how the economics and recycling of apartments would look under a new system. I'm just asking for some sensible reform here on the way the game monetizes itself, and to do it in a way that is a fair, balanced and level playing field for all players, and not in a way that really heavily pushes membership, as it is now.

Thank you.

However, many automated income systems that that change impacts are not usable as a corporate citizen. You lose access to many others after graduating from the corporate training period unless that change was reverted.

Mixers interact with automated income much more heavily than your average corporate citizen does. They're not blocked from using many of them in the mix, but realistically speaking, jane from HR isn't going to be trading in crack rocks to thugs for money on any consistent basis and living to tell the tale.

I don't think the answer is to simply tell people to cheat their jobs harder, because that's also a very specific playstyle that not everyone enjoys.

You also make a few points I'm struggling to connect the dots on in regards to staff investment. I think staff are staff because they enjoy the various aspects and duties of being staff. A builder likes writing new places, bringing toys and props to life and seeing all their neat creations being used and loved by players. A GM and SGM enjoy bringing the world to life with puppets and running plots both large and small. I would assume these people enjoy their jobs when people ask them to build things, or get invested and involved in the stories that they're trying to tell. Unless Johnny and Slither are like, holding cheer rallies for staff when they hit 10 new members, I fail to see how game engagement things have anything at all to do with credit card swipes.

I also want to see people supporting the game, as I said, and funding the game is a fantastic thing we all benefit from.

Perhaps we could open up a discussion and try and brainstorm ideas for ways in which a supporter pack model and incentive structure would work, being mindful that we both want to show our support and fund the game, but also not be giving people major IC benefits in doing so?

I mentioned things like reskins, fancy colors and the like, but what about actual content submissions? Path of Exile has, for many years, majorly funded their entire game studio by allowing people to pay for content submissions. That creates a whole different set of issues, which is why I didn't recommend it at first, but I'm trying to think of ways in which it could be done over here to drive funding and let people show support.

I could see something like being able to pay a donation fee on a very heavy lockout timer to submit an item design to the game. Perhaps once a year, that way the staff doesn't instantly get a 18 year design backlog. You can pay say, $50 and submit an item request. Balance would be entirely in the hands of staff, quartermaster and builders for items that might need mechanical balancing. You describe the broad strokes of what you would like to see added, and they handle the detail.

I think that would get people invested in the game in a big way. People love being able to say "yeah I added that cool thing to the game" and it has a similar deep emotional connection as something like a permapad you helped design, but without the very real and serious workload overhead of digging, describing and coding an apartment that's twice the size of most of the businesses in the game.

I think people would go absolutely apeshit for it, even if a lot of the more 'mechanical' object requests would be simple reskins. Like, who doesn't want to be able to brag about adding the DickBlaster 9000 shotgun to the game, even if it's a 1:1 clone behind the scenes?

I also think this could be neat for your staff engagement concept as well, because it can get the creative energy that being a staff member requires going.

I really have a hard time thinking of anything that staff would agree on to a majority that players would actually want, housing wouldn't even pass that benchmark now it just got grandfathered in. Maybe someone can think of something but I do think it would have to be pretty novel compared to existing stuff.