Radical play-time related idea Options

[Jerky]

I've brought this up on IRC before, and I want to document it before I forget. I'll start with a little background:

One of the things we want to do with PW is really target and attract a certain type of gamer. This type is definitely a veteran RPG gamer, who is probably in college or older. They ideally do not have gobs of time, because they should be busy with studies and lives (jobs, families, etc). With most of our ideas, we are targeting this type of player, due to us designing the type of game we would like to play ourselves, and most of us fall into that category.

In thinking about how to nicely dissuade power-gamer types and farmers from trying to dominate our game, I've tried to think of ways on how to make it harder for them, while also catering to our target player type. The thought I had was to have a free, and a regular pay account have access to a certain number of hours per month of play time. The trick is finding the true sweet spot of what our target player really has, in terms of free time to play. The players who want to play more than that would have to pay more for it. This allows us to cash in a little more for players who are cashing in on our game, while also serving (hopefully) to dissuade them from trying to dominate our game, and thusly dillute the purity of the RPG experience.

The other problem is determining what play time is and what social time is. If a player just wants to log in to chat with the guild/friends, it would probably be in our best interest to not count such "play" towards their hours, should we try such a system.

What got me thinking of this system was cell phones. They have proved that an ala carte billing menu can work well with people. This could be along the same lines as a prepaid phone, which there are a lot of now.

I will add my disclaimer now that this could be a very bad idea, but I think with the right amount of finesse, it could end up becoming something viable.

Anyways, since I am at work, I don't have time to outline it further, so this is just the gist. I think we need a list of pros and cons in order to truly refine it, and make it viable.