Star Trek Online Lock Boxes and Lobi Crystals – MMO Anthropology

SUMMARY With the transition to free-to-play, Star Trek Online has seen some interesting decisions when it comes to how they address their audience and potential customers to give them money. First they started by providing the dilithium exchange and a capability to translate microtransaction currency (C-Points) into in-game commodity money (dilithium.) Everything available for C-Points therefore becomes available to people who can trade dil for C-Points. Free-to-Play Implications www.youtube.com Dilithium Exchange www.youtube.com Then they introduced lock boxes with the Cardassian lock box and now the Ferengi lock box. The primary source of income on these boxes is people interested in winning an extremely rare ship from inside them–this was the case for both the Cardassian and Ferengi lock boxes. Boxes drop for free, but to unlock them you must by a key for 100 C-Points — in current exchange terms that’s about 30000 dilithium or almost 4 days of grinding dilithium. 100 C-Points can also be bought for about .25 USD. The Ferengi lock boxes also contain a new currency, Lobi Crystals, which can come in small or large quantities in the lock boxes. This is designed to incentive people to buy more keys; however, since they’re another unexpected gamble they’re still a bit of a tax on the community and are seen as such. Also during this introduction of new lock boxes some drama erupted with Massively took some discussion from STO Dev Borticus as meaning that the developers …