If there is one bit of misused terminology in the MMO F2P space that gets on my nerves, it is probably “microtransactions.”  This is in part because I am old enough to remember the idea being discusses back in the 90s under the guise of micropayments where an end user could use a credit card to buy a batch of a virtual currency in order to be able to buy things that were priced below the viable threshold for a credit card payment.

Back then credit card processors would take 10% of the transaction as a fee, with a fifty cent or one dollar minimum fee.  In that reality if you wanted to sell something online for 25 cents and you wanted to take credit cards, you would lose money on every sale on transaction fees.

The solution was to make the end user buy the new currency in more viable chunks… ten dollars was seen as the lowest viable threshold for that back then… and then they could use the currency they received to make smaller transactions like your 25 sticker or whatever.

This was all blue sky dream world stuff that fell apart before it ever really got going, at least as a general concept because there still had to be somebody handling the transactions and they wanted a fee… at both ends in many cases… and because VCs didn’t want to deal with piddly sub-dollar transaction amounts to make their money, but mostly because most individuals trying to turn their hobby or art into a business were fine selling stuff for more money and getting screwed by the credit card company than jumping into bed with any number of shady outfits who were ready to screw them as hard, or even harder, at the sub dollar level.

So it was never really a thing, but the idea was revived for MMORPGs when they were out looking for ways to boost revenue.  Even back in the first decade of the century the cult of “the line must go up forever” was starting to be felt.

So when SOE introduced Station Cash back in 2008 they used the term microtransaction and the hope was that we would get some interest that would be inexpensive in the context of a $15 a month subscription fee or the, at the time, $25 Station Access monthly subscription.

What we got was… well, not much.  I didn’t take screen shots back then, but it wasn’t great stuff and the cheapest item was a modest duration xp boost for one dollar, while they were selling better potions for ten bucks a throw.  At the time I was irked, though in hindsight that was some pretty cheap stuff given where cash shops have gone since then.  I mean, a full gear cosmetic set for ten dollars and a cosmetic pet for seven dollars seemed like crazy talk at the time, but have you seen what Blizz is charging for that sort of thing now?  And Daybreak?

So I bristle a bit whenever somebody who should know better calls Blizz selling WoW pets and mounts on their web site for real world cash a “microtransaction.”  Sorry, no, that is just a transaction, the same as if I had bought something at Amazon.

I am past the 500 word mark here and I have clearly only started sorting through my personal baggage on the whole RMT, cash shop, microtransaction front.  I do love to hate the cash shop, because it brings real world cost/benefit analysis into my games and because stocking and promoting the cash shop becomes and all important activity in games, often to the detriment of bug fixes, feature updates, and actual content.  I mean, LOTRO sure as hell got a new cash shop fast when it was on their “to do” list, while game breaking server lag issues festered and support for resolutions beyond 1920×1080 got pushed off to the “never gonna happen” category.

So let’s get to Palia.

Also, since I have avoided getting to the point until this far down the page, Tipa’s AI Daily Blog Roll is going to write some nonsense summary about the above and probably ignore what I’ve actually got to say.  My chaotic, stream of consciousness style is bad for AI, a fact that makes me happy.

Palia is free to play.  Free to download, free to log in and play, and surprisingly free with how much anybody unwilling to pay is allowed to do.  But nothing in the Wall Street capitalist wasteland is really free.  There is, of course, a cash shop.

The thing is, while I remain something of a cheapskate, I have also reached a point in my life where I feel I ought to support the things I use, lest they go away.  This is especially true on the internet, where free is the opening bid for most things and anything of quality is behind a pay wall.

This is one of the problems of the internet, that lies, conspiracy theories, and propaganda are free but actual news usually costs… or if it doesn’t cost, it constantly has its hand out asking for donations.

So when I was getting to about 20 hours of play time in Palia I figured I ought to buy something from them to support the cause.  They are offering a quality online product and, while they have a cash shop, they are not completely in your face about it.  They are do not, to use LOTRO as an example, but a handy little “spend money to make this easier” button in nearly every single dialog.

I am sure they’ll get there under the stewardship of Daybreak and EG7, but for now Singularity 6 is pretty generous and somewhat low key.

Anyway, in order to “pay my way” or whatever, I decided to buy the Founders Pack, which runs $30 and gets you some cosmetic goodies including a pet bee, which already has the ability to bring stuff back to storage for you when you’re out in the field, something you have to otherwise unlock for your pet within the game.

So some advantage purchased, but the game is “cozy” and not “comparative” unless you play the in-game board games with other players, so I cheated my way out of the experience of unlocking that ability for that specific pet, a sacrifice I was willing to make.

The founder’s pack did not give me any in-game gold or supplies or xp boosts or anything like that, so even advantage was at a minimum.

It did, however, hand me 3,400 coins for the cash shop.  That is a number that could be a lot or not very much at all, depending on how things are priced in the cash shop.  I am always optimistic and think it will be a lot, which will ironically make it easier to spend.

And spend I must if I truly want to support the game.  It is known.

I once saw somebody… either on Reddit or in the Massively OP comments… declare that if you really wanted to support LOTRO you should buy LOTS of LOTRO Points and never spend them.

I was aghast.  This was absolutely wrong, and I responded with something along the lines of “Dear boy no!  You MUST spend ALL the coins!”

The thing is that cash shop currency is like a gift card.  You have paid for a token that you can redeem for goods or services.  But the company in question has promised you that, and until you actually do use that currency or gift card, they must keep it on the books as a liability, something they owe.  Too much of that and it starts to drag down the balance sheet.

As such, my gut says that the company should been encouraging you to spend, possibly by pricing things such that you feel you are getting value for your pretend money.

Now, I will say that they don’t keep track of every single account and their coin balance in the accounting system.  This won’t be like your employer going after you for having too much vacation time accrued.  In Silicon Valley you know the company is having problems when they start hounding people about that in an effort to make the books look better.

Currency is fungible, unlike those silly blockchain tokens people were using to front scams a couple year back, so accounting keeps track of a total with an estimated value they owe people and every time somebody spends some, they take that out of the pile and reduce their liability by that much.

So, even those 500 free LOTRO points I get every month for having purchased a lifetime subscription back in 2007… best video game purchase ever… help out if I redeem them.  Me wandering into the game to buy the latest expansion with those accumulated points helps out on the balance sheet.  Not as much as it would if I had got out the credit card and paid with real world currency, it is not nothing.

This is the reason that EQ and EQII make you log in and press a button to redeem your month subscription currency.  It is also the reason that, as soon as you do log in and redeem your 500 points, they immediately throw up a selection of amazing deals for, all worth exactly 500 points, because they would very much like you to just not accumulate points at all.

For me, however, the problem remains the same now as it was in 2008; not much in the shop seems worth the points being asked.

Sure, I can sometimes find something in there worth the price.  In LOTRO the discovery of a carryall that would hold all you task board items was a revelation that made my run to Mordor earlier this year… was that really something I did in 2025, it seems so far in the past now… much more enjoyable, allowing me to optimize my daily task quota for reputation gains with extreme prejudice… or something.  I bought that as soon as I found out existed and paid full price and had no regrets. That and the “all the tasks” board in my little Bree housing allotment kept the faction party rolling.

Which is great.  The LOTRO Store has items I will spend my points on.

Palia, however… well, they are going all in on cosmetic outfits.  And they seem kind of pricey.

Part of that is the fact that I value all cash shop points in my head as a penny each… except in EVE Online, where PLEX is five cents a piece… because that is the replacement value of the points.  It doesn’t matter if they are free, if I spent them all and wanted to replace them right away, that is the cost in my brain.

Also, I know that most companies price things so the points are not exactly a penny.  Palia gave me 3,400 coins for $30.  Meanwhile LOTRO actually charges more than a penny a point at the lower buy amounts.  But I am not keen to keep that all straight in my head, in part because it is work and in part because companies do this “not quite a penny” fuckery on purpose so you can see that something is 5,000 XBox points and shout “fifty bucks for that” without having some fan boy retrort “well akshully it is forty-seven dollars at eighty-three cents” in an effort to delegitimize your complaint.

I am pretty sure Microsoft got in trouble for this in the EU, the whole “not quite a penny” thing, which is also why I think CCP sells PLEX by default at five cents per.

Taking my time getting to the point here, aren’t I?  This is what flow of consciousness writing gets you.

To wrap this back around to Palia, when I go to the cash shop and I look at the cosmetic items and outfits… and I should heartily approve of them selling only that… my brain puts on the spending brakes when it sees that the Rapunzel outfit set is 3,400… or $34 in my head, and ain’t no virtual outfit worth that much money.  I could buy a Happy Meal with that kind of cash.

Seriously, that price breaks me

Now, I appreciate the work that went into it, and that I could buy just one of the three looks, and that they are not playing any “boys only / girls only” games with this, so if I, Wilhelm Arcturus, want to dress up as Rapunzel, then I am absolutely allowed.  They even show me how I will look when the present the outfit.

Ain’t nobody wants a piece of this

There are also better and cheaper items and items on sale and blah blah blah… but the problem is that it is all online.

Shopping online when you know EXACTLY what you want is an incredibly efficient and satisfying experience.

Browsing online is sheer torture to me.  See variety, comparing items, finding that thing you saw five minutes and 73 clicks ago… it is all frustrates me such that I spend five minutes in the cash shop then say, “screw this, I’ll go water my crops or something” and away I go.

As such, I am still sitting on 3,400 cash shop points and have no idea what to buy… and I guess that is the TL;DR for the post.  I probably could have gotten there about 2,000 words ago, but sometimes I gotta be me.

But maybe there will be something new today on Black Friday that will get me to spend those points.