Cosmetic Items

This game needs to be monetized at some level, obviously, and since the chosen path for PoE is cosmetics, here are my suggestions:

Cheap (less than $1 USD)

Moderately Costful (within $2 USD and $10 USD)

Luxury ($10+)

I think a good strategy is to have some items that are really tempting, they're cheap, to hook players into getting used to getting items from the item shop. Spending a dollar here and there will stimulate interest in the shop, and as shown in other games, much of the barrier of entry to purchasing a good from an item shop is that lack of an initial first time purchase. You want to stimulate that, so having some dirt cheap items of 50 cents or less could really get some people interested in at least browsing the shop.

I'm thinking these items should permanently effect items, so you can trade them and enhance the value of a given item, allowing players who don't want to spend money can acquire whatever effects they want, if they're willing to trade for them and search out items already enhanced by other players.

The only downside to this idea is that from what I understand about PoE so far, items are pretty transient, so people might be turned off to the idea of purchasing item enhancers for items they may not necessarily want to keep forever. But then again, it would enhance their value for other players, so it would make them good trades, it's not like the money would be entirely wasted when you find something you want to upgrade to... I'm not sure.

So here are my cheap suggestions:
Minor armor/clothing dyes (maybe 2-3 charges for a single dye item)
Minor ability dyes (change your red fire spell into a violet one)
Minor capes or character ornaments, attachments, minion skin changes
Item re-namer?

Moderately Costful:
Particle/aura attacher - Your normal looking sword now has flames, smoke, frost, flies, light, etc. spewing from the hilt. Maybe you can use it on your minions or a piece of armor too. Perhaps you can apply it to a character model, envelop them in shadow or flame.
Minion Models - Your minions now have a different/unique model when summoned
Pets - they've been mentioned before, non-combat pets
Model Selector - Change the model of a weapon to a different one? I could see this as problematic in PVP, where you could make one commonly-used staff to look like another, to fool other players, but perhaps not?

Luxury: Big cosmetic changes like animation changes (the way your character walks or swings their weapon) to total model changes (like a male witch? female marauder? Playing as a non-human witch? etc.)
Perhaps a cosmetic mount for your player? Not sure how that would work.

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I think one good way to look at this, is to take an interesting approach I've noticed from following the developers of Dwarf Fortress.

Imagine a story. A player going through a game, developing his character. Make items, animations, pets, etc. to let that player create their own perfect rendition of what they want to look like.

I know my first PoE character will be a necromancer of some kind, a deadmancer, using minions and death magic. I would /love/ some cosmetic items that would enhance this flavor (a pet crow, or maybe changing spells to use crows as art, some glowing rune art to add to my robes, the ability to change my normal looking staff into a "skull staff", changing my zombie minions to skeleton minions, etc.). Imagine some items you can purchase, some skins and models and particles to change up, to really let me "roleplay" this character. You know what I mean? Imagine some class archetypes, cosmetically, and make items so players can become that thing. A dragon tamer. A handsome rogue. Ask yourself, what does a handsome rogue like to do? Maybe a unique backstab animation for such a character. Put it up for sale! This sounds like a good framework to approaching cosmetic items, create a theme, but also encourage players to mix and match.


Anyway, just throwing out some ideas, would like to hear other's ideas too.

I intend to post a compilation of everyone's great ideas and to refine my initial post and throw it up on the suggestions forum, so generate your ideas here and let's discuss them critically!

Custom sounds! Already suggested, and backed up with heavy arguments, but no conformation from GGG if something like that will or won't be added to $ shop.

EDIT:

For the sake of less mess on General Discussion, post your suggestions here:

http://pathofexile.com/forum/view-forum/3

This is a good post, they need as many things to add to the cash shop that don't actually have a direct effect on gameplay as possible.

I was talking to Jonathan and he said that there will probably be an item to increase storage. Now I'm okay with that, however i've seen it all too many times. First it's just an item to increase storage space, then it's just an item to increase belt size, then it's just a sword that kills everything on the screen in one shot.

And blam we have an uneven playing field. I'm still quite nervous about F2P games.

Really nice post, awesome ideas. I would pay for a gender change, but i don't like the mounts thing.

And yeah this should probably go in the suggestions section of the forums.

The mount is admittedly a bit hard to balance. I was just thinking cosmetic for your character to ride... but it would be awfully silly if your mount (be it a horse, an elephant, a cat or what not) still kept you at the normal walk/run speed. Probably wouldn't work.

And custom sounds would be cool. Especially for PVP - like if you kill someone, it taunts them? Or perhaps a passive sound for your character? Or new sounds for certain abilities?

As for this being in suggestions... this is more of just an idea generation thread. Maybe I'll post a compilation of everyone's thoughts in the suggestion forum? Or if this is better suited for the suggestion forum, a mod could just move it if they felt the need. Or I can remake it there later.

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anubite wrote:

As for this being in suggestions... this is more of just an idea generation thread.

Having suggestions posted on high traffic General Discussion area is sure way to have them drowned with general info. It's about suggestion visibility / longevity.

If they ever add mounts to PoE, I'll commence mass BOTNET DDoS attacks ):o=

I'd totally pay for a banner on my back like samurai/blademaster(wc3)

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tormenta wrote:

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anubite wrote:

As for this being in suggestions... this is more of just an idea generation thread.

Having suggestions posted on high traffic General Discussion area is sure way to have them drowned with general info. It's about suggestion visibility / longevity.

If they ever add mounts to PoE, I'll commence mass BOTNET DDoS attacks ):o=

Fair enough. I'll move this thread when it dies.

As for mounts - please forgive me - I'm just trying to think of some interesting things we can add to enhance a player's look. I wasn't trying to imply it would do anything gameplay-wise.

A banner sounds like a good idea. Adding a banner with a lot of different banner art to choose from would be rather cool.

-Items skin (it would be cool to have a whole set made of bones for the witch in rpg and arpg your character has a weird look sometime)

-Skin color for characters

-Gender change is a good idea ^^

-Some item with charge, when used you look like a mob or a champion for 30 minutes for example "liquor of Brutus" with a cooltime of 1 hour.Not quite sure about it though ...

-Minion skin is a really good idea

-Characters skin for example an amputated arm for the marauder kinda adding to the horrific atmosphere or a decrepit corpse for the witch (there's always a cost for black magic^^).

-A walk animation or voices for ingame macros.Don't know if it's in ?

-Blood color when bored with red, nah just joking or not ... as an option for example

_ UI alternate style (specific to classes,tribal for the marauder, iron for the templar etc

-Maybe they a should add one or more specific slot in your inventory to enable modifications,like this you can remove the effect when you want.It would be bad to have an item with charge because if you use it on your sword and you find a better loot ten minutes later ... what about a hand ?like this you could equip five rings enabling modifications.

I just hope it won't alterate too much the game design ,please no Santa claus skin ;p

Here is my little contribution.
Please don't blame me for my english,i did my best.If something is not clear ask me ^^

i'd like too see item "Jonathan's Beard" to enhance my appearance.