I think CoH just didn't meet the minimum Korean MMO grinding requirement.
I mean that problem would have been easily rectified.
Just sell everything above the DO enhancement level in an ingame cash shop.
That and make you run the shard tfs for a single SO when you hit max level.
Also, ICON was way too underpriced. Each costume slot should cost $20 with a single costume change costing $5.
That's what kills me about TERA, you know. The hair/face/body changes cost like close to $10.
It's a simple sql update statement.
The same statement you use to update your xp bar, you know.
Just well.. Yeah. Fleece the customer more.
To be fair, almost no change in any MMO is just "a simple sql update statement" - that's comparable to the people who used to say in City of Heroes that making new critters should be as simple as subclassing existing ones. No City entity (and for that matter no MMO entity for any major MMO I'm aware of) is a C++ class. Similarly, I don't think anyone uses a normal SQL database for actual running MMO state. Too slow.
Still, the larger principle is that many MMO gameplay options that are very simple to effect for the player are built on a lot of other work that has to get paid for on an amortized basis. MMOs (in the context of microtransaction type stuff) typically can't charge (directly) for the work they put into actually creating gameplay options, only on the act of acquiring them.
Consider body geometry changes. It would be so much simpler, and cheaper, to not have to support all those options or to support far fewer. Every option you decide to support requires significantly more work from the geometry people, the user interface people, there's more design and testing work, and there's more data to store. All that comes at a cost. If the decision at design time is to say we're willing to spend all those (tens of, hundreds of) thousands of dollars to add those features, but we need to make that money back so we're going to charge for the ability to use them, then what to charge players is less about what it will cost to change your nose length parameter in your character data, and more what was invested into the game engine to make that possible in the first place.
Furthermore, in F2P games the revenue from things that cost money has to subsidize all the other things that don't cost money. When you buy that +4 hammer of defenstration, realize that the +4 hammer of defenstration is also paying for the +0 hammer of minor bruising that everyone gets "for free."
That doesn't justify any and all microtransaction pricing, but it does justify disconnecting what it costs to directly mechanically perform a player requested option and what they are charged for it. What it costs to tweak a number at the time of the request has no bearing on what it actually cost overall to make that happen, and what the reasonable price for that should be.
