I know this has been mentioned before but I thought I'd bring it up again.

I have a roommate who is interested in Vendetta, but the moment I told him it's pay-by-the-month he got turned away. I'm sure we could get a lot more players if we had a pay-by-the-hour option. You would pay a certain fee for x amount of hours, then you can play those hours whenever you wanted.

I play all the time, when I can, I wouldn't think of paying by the hour.
I would be brok(er)!

A choice may be good, but there are so many things that could go wrong.

I think you actually get more bang for your buck with the current plan. Now I know that most subscribers scramble to use up as much of their time as possible. And that sometimes you may have months where you only pay for a couple of days. But seeing as what the alternative is, I think the current plan is better. One of the biggest positives is that you'll always know what you'll be paying. And if you ever find yourself in some serious addiction, you may be slapped with a HUGE bill with the hourly plan. And that, my friend, would suck.

What I'm saying is that you pay in advance for x amount of time, not play then pay.

depends on how much the amount per hour

And that's the question. How much an hour would you pay?

Ten bucks is cheap.

10 hours a month (2.5 hours once a weekend)- $1.00 hour
20 hours a month (1 hour, 5 times a week) - $0.50 hour

How much time do you spend online in a given session? How ovften do you go online in a week?

I'd say make it $1 per hour, with a minimum requirement of buying 10 hours play time. So if someone plays less than 10 hours a month, they'll be better off with the pay-by-the-hour plan, but if they play more then they should go with the regular monthly rate. Maybe with discounts for more hours - say, $0.75 per hour for 40 or more hours, $0.50 per hour for 75 or more hours.

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Some numbers: My Account Info page shows I signed up 2004-10-30 23:28:04, and have spent 32 days, 23:20:09 in-game. Not all of that's actually playtime, as I do sometimes leave VO logged in while I'm not there, but anyway... paying $0.50 per hour (the very lowest I think a pay-by-the-hour plan should be), I would have payed about $395.75 for the time I've been in-game. On the 3 months for $26.99 plan that I'm using, I have paid $80.97 + $31.98 for preordering the box. I'm happy with the monthly plan.
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And build in automatic refills when their time is up.... You'd automatically buy another 10 hours when you run out. That way your game play isn't interupted in a crucial moment.

Hmmm... maybe give the player a 15 minute warning before time runs out, with the option of refilling their time, but defaulting to kicking the player off if they don't respond with authorization to rebill their account. Just me personally, but I'd rather it didn't automatically rebill me without my knowing about it. I know when my monthly billing cycle rebills me, I might not know when my pay-by-the-hour plan is about to run out.

Naah, its stupid. Imagine you just got into great capship war and your paid hour runs out just about time yr making cappy go boom.
The way it is now is good.
And at 10$ for the whole month you think its expensive?
Bah, its 2 cokes and a sandwich.

You could have both options, y'know.

No way. youd be spending far more, and it would be a lot to keep track of. not worth it at all. If your friend is worried about spending money, surely they can buy 1 month, and cancel it if they feel they cant afford it that month. besides, 10 dollars (£5.64 in the UK :P) a month, for 24xhowever many days in the month? thats a MUCH better deal. Pay as you go is for people who cannot understand that you would be saving money, and getting a much better deal

Kes

1$ an hour! eep!

I have payed 3.99 just so I could get online for 2 hours in the past. now *thats* a ripoff, but I was very desperate...

having pay by the hour could be similarly expensive... 1 dollar for 2 hours? at $10, that would get you much less than 1 hour per day...

The only way I could see it being attractive is if you had the option of paying by the hour up to 10 dollars, at which point you got a month subscription. I think I would be pumping out a bill of over 100 dollars a month! That way people who aren't as addicted as some, and only play a couple hours a month might be more inclined to join in.

.02 cents per hour if you want to do it that way, based on a 30 day month, with 720 hours a month, to be equal to the $10 a month that it is now. If you ended up using all your hours, didn't sleep and did nothing but play you'd end up giving them an extra $4.40 a month roughly.

Just pay the $10 dollars it's much easier and your supporting the devs that are working hard to bring you more and interesting content.

My roommate will not be spending as much time as everyone else in-game, I don't know why you're all assuming that. He'll only be logging in every so often and so he doesn't want to pay the $10 a month when he could pay less with a pay-by-the-hour option.

Besides, if he finds he's spending more time than he thought he would, he can switch to the normal billing option.

Two words: Demo Account

If you want to keep playing, pay monthly. Paying by the hour is a bit counter-productive really. Those of us who work all day and play one hour a day won't be getting Guild much money (and if you make it too expensive per hour for low-users, nobody will play)

And then you have students, many who are off for the summer, who will put in many more hours of play, who are obviously not able to afford that much due to the fact that either their parents are paying for them, or they're working low-wage student jobs. (And you can never make anything cheap enough for students)

I would suggest that there's nothing inherently wrong with the system, and it should remain as it is. Guild gets their money up front, and you can play 24x7 as much as you want for your pay period. Everybody wins.

$10 for one hour and a free month. It's the new VO plan sign up now while supplies last!

Dragon Empire has the exact reason for this in his post. People want to pay less. And that is why this is probably a bad idea. People /would/ pay less, and GS would make less. This isn't based off of abstract reason, but a desire by people to pay less and get more. Sometimes cheapness needs to be denied.