Optional Payment System - rewards both cash players and free players

## **Overall Description**

In-game cash shop, or micro-transaction system, is not uncommon in F2P games. However, some games only allow certain items to be obtained by spending real money, which could cause balance issues to the game. Some games, on the other hand, would allow players to purchase the item if the player either pays for it or spends time in game. This way, players are more flexible on whether they should pay or spend time on some items, which encourages them to stay in game.

## **Example for Demonstration**

### *Paladins: Champions of the Realm*

There are 2 currencies in Paladins, gold and crystal. In Paladins' in-game shop, some items can be purchased with either gold or crystal, some items can only be purchased with gold, and some items can only be purchased with crystal. Gold can be earned by playing matches and receiving from daily login reward. Crystal can be earned by spending real cash and receiving from daily login reward. Therefore, although free players will spend longer time to earn some items that can be purchased with crystal, they will be able to get them eventually as long as they are dedicated to the game.

### *League of Legends*

There are two points in League of legends, riot points and influence points. Almost everything can purchased with either riot points and influence points. Influence points can be earned by playing matches, and there is a daily first-win reward, you can get double influence points when you win the first match everyday. It's hard to play League of legends without any purchased champions or skins, free-to -use champions are too limited. The easy way is spending cash to get riot points therefore to buy any champion you want. You can also buy any champion with influence points, it just will be take long time cause you have to spend lot of time to get influence points through playing matches.

## *Wildstar*

*The mmo Wildstar has created a system for players to get creative with how they want to spend their real money in game. Not only does Wildstar support an in game market place where players can buy game items with real cash but they also offer a new C.R.E.D.D system. CREDD allows to buy a month of subscription time with real money and then sell it for in-game money. This system helps the casual and hardcore game communities. Casual games can get gold and hardcore gamers who have ingame money can pay for their subscription with the in-game money they have already farmed. This design decision also potentially solves the problem of illegal gold sellers.*

**Hearthstone:**

In Hearthstone, players can earn gold from playing the game and complete the everyday mission. And when players want to buy cards, play contesting mode or open a new adventure zone, they always have two options to get it -- pay money or use the gold they earned. So even though a player don't spend any money on the money , he can also collect all the cards of the game if he spend enough time on it.

## **Battle Cats:**

In Battle Cats, the money used in each battle is indicated in the up right corner. In the screenshot here, 4000 is the wallet cap, which is the maximum amount of money one can have in the battle. 845 is the money currently available which can be used to deploy cats into the battle field. The currently available money increases over time automatically (earned by the other working cats in the background, as the game put it). The wallet cap can change as the player spend money to level up (see the bottom left corner, the player is currently on level 2 and can spend 180 to upgrade to level 3) Levelling up increases the wallet cap and further increases the rate of earning money. This mechanism is fully functioning without the player spending any real money. However, the initial earning rate in the battle (so the earning rate at level 1) can be increased (thus following earning rates are all increased) by doing research etc, which can be done by spending the game money. The player earn the game money by winning battles but can also spend couple dollars to buy the money. The progress is still pretty significant without spending any money but if the player chooses to, she can progress even more quickly by spending real money.