Well, here's my $0.02:
At the height of my participation, I had 4 accounts. The primary reason for that was plots. As GM of Erus Ex Istaria, I had an obligation to hold some of the key plots in our guild communities, so I had to have extra accounts to do so. My 4th account was simply to allow me to hold a lair for myself. Anyway, that's my primary reason for multiple accounts.
My secondary reason for multiple accounts is storage. Yes, I know, even with guild hall plots full of silos and storage buildings, etc, there just wasn't enough storage. Especially when you are acting as the Librarian, materials master, etc for a big guild. The worst part of this is stack limits. I can get tons and tons of bulk, but stacks are the real limiting factor to storage. You can store 9999 units of the biggest thing in-game, but you can't store more than a few hundred different things, between vaults and plot structures. Many things are individual (ie, non-stackable), armor pieces, jewelry, keepsakes from quests (my adult statue from my RoP, for example), et cetera. I had multiple mule characters whose only reason for existing was to have more vault space. It certainly was a serious PITA to constantly do inventory management.
With the amount of storage available in modern server equipment, there is really no excuse for severely limited storage space anymore. Yeah, I know the HZ servers are the same nearly 3 year old ones which have whatever space they have, but storage upgrades are cheap, and with the servers nearing the end of their normal service life, strong consideration should be given to easing some of the storage restrictions as the equipment is replaced/updated.
Lastly, the last reason I had multiple accounts was for concurrent logins. I dual-boxed a good bit of the time in my last year or so, and I occasionally had folks who would try out HZ on one of my other accounts.
Horizons is an older game now. It doesn't have that "new" smell anymore; in fact, it smells like it has been dredged up from the sewers, which is pretty much the case. Many folks are put off by the simple fact that it was a stinker to start out with, and went seriously downhill from there. As such, attempting to squeeze more money from people, despite whatever justification you make, just won't fly well with most of them. You have to remember that you're not marketing to a new crowd here; beyond the fact you can't market HZ to the "new" crowd (read: WoW, EQ2, GW, VG, etc) you're left to enticing old folks to come back and bring their friends. The past is already a bitter enough pill to swallow without a price hike coating on top of it.
I think it is a good idea that this new system be designed around some a la carte deal, which allows folks to tailor the specifics of their accounts to their individual needs. I also think that you should have some basic package deals which are consistent with the existing rates/features. Price hikes on the same exact feature set will NOT be welcomed.
Here's my analysis of the pricing:
Code:
$13 a month (Yeah, I know, it's $12.95, but let's drop the "market pricing theory" crap for a minute) gets you:
5 character slots -- I evaluate these at $1/month each
1 plot slot -- I evaluate this at $5/month each
1 concurrent login -- I evaluate this at $3/month each
Another way to look at it is from a base+add costing, which would be broken out something like so:
$5.00 -- Base Account Fee
$3.00 -- Plot Fee
$2.50 -- 5 character slots at $0.50 each
$2.50 -- 1 concurrent login
In my case, I was paying 4 x $12.95 = $51.80 a month for this (values in parenthesis are for base+add method):
$20.00 ($20.00) -- 4 plot slots
$10.00 ($ 5.00) -- 10 character slots (2 active, played characters; 8 closets)
$ 6.00 ($ 5.00) -- 2 concurrent logins (I rarely, if ever, used the other two)
($ 5.00 -- Base account cost)
$36.00 ($35.00) per month actual value I was getting for $51.80 a month
I knew I was paying for much more than I was using. Having the ability to trim off what I didn't need was something I often lamented after back in the day.
As for the character / storage situation, I think that offering an additional "more vault storage/stacks on a character" option would be nice to have. Something that Guild Wars does is their vault box is shared amongst all characters on the same account. I'm not sure it is technically feasible for this to be done, considering things like bound items and so forth, and it is a "feature" request; something which should have a very low priority right now. However, the ability to add some amount of extra storage to individual characters would be a seriously nice thing as an account option.
A la carte options generally have a higher cost if you pieced them out individually, so it might be preferable to make up some "package deals" which would actually cost more if built a la carte from the ground up, but you give a discount for certain package deals, like the "Basic", "Gifted (Standard)" and "Ancient (Enthusiast)" deals.
Let's assume the following, then:
Code:
$ 8.95 -- fee for "Basic" package deal
$ 5.00 -- Base account fee
$ 3.00 -- 3 character slots x $1.00 each
$ 5.00 -- concurrent connection
$ 4.00- -- package deal discount (31% savings)
$12.95 -- fee for "Standard" package deal
$ 5.00 -- Base account fee
$ 5.00 -- plot slot
$ 5.00 -- 5 character slots @$1.00/ea
$ 5.00 -- concurrent connection
$ 7.00- -- package deal discount (35% savings)
$24.95 -- fee for "Enthusiast" package deal
$ 5.00 -- base account fee
$10.00 -- 2 plot slots @$5.00/ea
$10.00 -- 10 character slots @$1.00/ea
$10.00 -- 2 concurrent connections @$5.00/ea
$10.00- -- package deal discount (40% savings)
Extras:
$5.00 -- each additional plot slot
$5.00 -- each additional concurrent connection
$1.00 -- each additional character slot
$0.50 -- each additional multiple of vault storage for one character (ie, whatever you have, you get 100% more per each level of this purchased)
Additional bonuses for package deals are at your discretion; shoulder buddies, collectibles, whatever. Freebies as enticements are always good. Oh, only give hatchies as shoulder buddies if Dragons can have elves, dwarves, gnomes, etc as shoulder buddies, too. Personally, I would rather not see shoulder buddies of any of the existing player races in the game, but that's just me; not really all that special, and open for abuse.
Re: Billing Feedback
Originally Posted by RuneDragoon
. Here's how I look at it:
. People in the EU should be doing almost as well as we are though, assuming that they would be charged in US dollars.
); and the ability to start out with an "entry-level account" until you are hooked 
and want more, more, MORE!!! mwaahhahaha...
Sorry...