333 replies to this topic

[Bront]

CBill earnings are bad, and have been bad for a while now. Earning between 80,000-120,000 cbills a match is just not enough, and it's costing the game players, and PGI money.

Uh oh, here comes a bunch of numbers

Your average player without premium time (PT) rakes in the fore mentioned 80,000-120,000 cbills a match (Good players may earn more, bad players may earn a bit less, this is ultimately an average over hundreds of matches for an average to below average(AKA New) player). We'll put that number at 100,000 for math purposes. We'll also assume that, say, from hitting play to getting back to the mech lab takes about 10 minutes on average. Sure, it can take over 20 sometimes, and sometimes it can be under 5. 10 is a nice, round number we can do some math with.

So, how much does it cost to kit out a mech? That can vary, but I'll throw some numbers out here.

Using the Shadowhawk 5M as a baseline for IS mechs (because it comes with all the upgrades and an XL Engine stock), and throwing around a little extra money to customize the weapons a bit, we get to around 10,000,000 cbills to kit it out (8.5 for the mech, 1.5 for extra stuff to mount on it). Some mechs will cost more, some will cost less, but we'll use this.

But that's not all. We now get to modules, that have become a nessessity in the group queue if you want continued success. You get 2 weapon modules at 3,000,000 each, and 2 regular modules at 2,000,00 to 6,000,000 each. We'll ignore consumables, as they eat at your earnings more than cost for the mech build. So, that's around 10,000,000-18,000,000 cbills for modules. WHile it's usually closer to 18 mil, we'll take the middle number of 14,000,000.

So, the mech build is 10,000,000, and the modules are 14,000,000. That's 24,000,000. For one mech.

But wait, don't you need 3 mechs to master a chassis? So, that's 2 more 10,000,000 purchases. We'll even be kind and share the modules, so no extra cost. So that's 44,000,000 cbills for 3 mechs, only one of which is fully kitted out with modules.

So, back to our earnings, at 100,000 a drop, that's about 440 drops to earn the cbills to build those mechs. At 10 minutes a drop, that's 4400 minutes, or 73 hours, 20 minutes of game time. To build 3 medium mechs, and outfit modules on one of them.

Think I was low on earnings? if we go up to 120,000 a drop, you're at about 367 drops, or just over 61 hours of game time.

How about we ignore the modules? Plenty of folks don't drop with those. Well, now we're down to just 30,000,000 for the 3 mechs, or 300 drops, or 50 hours of game time (or 250 drops and 41 hours 40 minutes with 120,000 a drop).

But wait, what about the 8,000,000 bonus CBills from being a new player?

So, that's 80 (or 67) fewer drops needed, saving a new player a little over 13 (or 11) hours. Once.

So, Bront, what's your point? That's a lot of numbers

My point is this. The lowest amount of time spent in the game with the above numbers is just under 42 (31 with the new player bonus) hours to master 3 medium mechs. 3. Part of the fun of this game is playing many different mechs, building them out, trying new things, and collecting them. With the current CBill grind, it's hard to keep new players interested long enough for them to start getting the payoff for their play (owning 3 of the same chassis so they can master out all the skills, forget putting modules in). That's an awful lot of grind to get so little for it in the game.

But how does that hurt PGI?

It hurts them in several ways.

1) Mechbay sales. I've argued in another thread about them being available for CBills, but at the moment, they aren't, and they're the very definition of a micro-transaction that MWO is looking to encourage. If it takes me a day of playing the game in order to even need one of these, that could be anywhere from a week to a month of actual time before I need to spend a miniscule amount of money on them. So it's seriously hampering a potential money-making transaction.

2) Customizations. There's little need to buy camo on mechs I don't own. Much like Mechbays, camo is hurt by the ability to get mechs in the first place.

3) Gaining free players. Free players help keep a game alive, and provide content for players who pay in a PvP F2P game. If the grind it so taxing, free players simply won't stick around.

4) Converting free players to paying players. Allowing players something to show in the game they play for free will tend to make them comfortable opening their pocket books for the game. The more free players you keep, ultimately you get more that end up becoming paying players.

Won't raising CBill earnings prevent money players from buying mechs with MC?
Yes, and without CBill mech purchase data, I can't say if that's a big income stream with PGI outside of the pre-sale packages they've been working on (which clearly are a big income stream, because they keep doing them). It may cut down on MC mech sales for standard mechs (which most players feel are too expensive anyway), but it could easily make up for it with mechbays and camo costs, or in premium time/hero mech sales.

Remember, we're also growing the player base by making the game more accessable, so there could be high volume small item sales increases to make up for lost MC Standard mech sales. They could also find other ways to let players spend money (can be discussed elsewhere).

But I own everything I want. I don't need CBills anymore.

Modules were aimed at this crowd, but that's a possible end game in every game anyway. Folks with all the CBills that are still playing will continue to play anyway, and aren't really effected by a potential CBill boost.

That's a lot of text, can you sum it all up (TL;DR)?

The grind in MWO is currently pretty bad. It can take days of real game time to earn the in game currency to afford all the things that make the game fun, let alone the top tier gear that competitive players need (Modules). Reducing this grind will ultimately help increase the number of players who come and stay, increase paying players, give folks better reasons to buy the small items, and provide for a better game experience for new and current players alike. I think PGI needs to consider raising CBill earnings to help the new player as well as the long time current player experience, particularly as they have worked on adding things for players to spend their CBills on that are extremely expensive (more so than many mechs). I think they have a lot to gain, and very little to lose by making such a change.

[keith]

okay u say it takes 73 hours rough to get enough for 1 mech. i did the math in another thread, if u just bought mechs bays for all currents mechs it would cost u 50 bucks. at 1 new mech a month, thats means u need as a semi f2p person u need to do 73 hour of gaming per month. for a cheap person thats only 2.43 of gaming per day. don't forgot pgi ppl have to eat too.

Edited by keith, 15 October 2014 - 03:18 PM.

[Bront]

keith, on 15 October 2014 - 03:12 PM, said:

okay u say it takes 73 hours rough to get enough for 1 mech. i did the math in another thread, if u just bought mechs bays for all currents mechs it would cost u 50 bucks. at 1 new mech a month, thats means u need as a semi f2p person u need to do 73*3 hour of gaming per month. for a cheap person thats only 220 hours of gaming per month or 7.3 per day. it would be their full time job assuming 100k per match. don't forgot pgi ppl have to eat too. things sound about right to me

Actually, I said 73 hours for 3 mechs and 1 set of modules.

[keith]

Bront, on 15 October 2014 - 03:14 PM, said:

Actually, I said 73 hours for 3 mechs and 1 set of modules.

damn did the skiming thing again... well it gets cut down 2.43 hours a day over a month. doesn't seem that bad

Edited by keith, 15 October 2014 - 03:19 PM.

[LauLiao]

Hasn't PGI said that they are going to be adjusting C-bill rewards?

[FupDup]

The Paulconomy™ knows no mercy, no respite.

[KamikazeRat]

so...i hate being THAT GUY...but, the grind is just how F2P works. it makes buying PT and reduce your grind by 50% look really good.

not saying i wouldnt enjoy more C-bills per match, its just how the f2p business model ussually ends up working out. i think they are doing this in a slight manner with the improved rewards system, and they did just up the rewards for conquest as well. i think its as close as you're going to get. so see how all those tweaks play out then rerun your numbers.

Edited by KamikazeRat, 15 October 2014 - 03:20 PM.

[MadPanda]

I remember fondly buying mechs with cbills late 2012 early 2013. The prices are just too high right now compared to what we get from a match. I'm saving all my cbills right now for the king crab and thats many months away. Just goes to show how much insane grind is required to get one set of 3 mechs.

[VanillaG]

You are over exaggerating the cost of the additional mechs. The other Shadowhawks go for a little over 4mil a piece so you can reuse your XL engine between all three of them so they go down to around 6mil a piece depending on what you want to do with them. Once you have certain amount of equipment it barely costs you anything to play Mech Barbies.

[Bront]

LauLiao, on 15 October 2014 - 03:16 PM, said:

Hasn't PGI said that they are going to be adjusting C-bill rewards?

It has. They didn't say rewards would be going up, just that there would be more role warfare bonuses. If it becomes a true bonus, and not simply a way to let lights and mediums earn as much as heavies and assaults can, then perhaps they are listening.

KamikazeRat, on 15 October 2014 - 03:18 PM, said:

so...i hate being THAT GUY...but, the grind is just how F2P works. it makes buying PT and reduce your grind by 50% look really good.

not saying i wouldnt enjoy more C-bills per match, its just how the f2p business model ussually ends up working out. i think they are doing this in a slight manner with the improved rewards system, and they did just up the rewards for conquest as well. i think its as close as you're going to get. so see how all those tweaks play out then rerun your numbers.

But there are other grind mechanics built into the game as well. The Rule of 3 requiring you to buy 3 mechs in the first place and XP/GXP grind to unlock modules. In many ways, the way you can bypass the GXP requirements with MC and mech XP is a great example of ways to encourage small MC expenditure to bypass grinding and get players to invest a little bit of money.

I do get that F2P games will have grind. My point is the amount of grind in this game is excessive compared to what reducing that grind a bit could do for the player base.

Edited by Bront, 15 October 2014 - 03:26 PM.

[BourbonFaucet]

KamikazeRat, on 15 October 2014 - 03:18 PM, said:

so...i hate being THAT GUY...but, the grind is just how F2P works. it makes buying PT and reduce your grind by 50% look really good.

not saying i wouldnt enjoy more C-bills per match, its just how the f2p business model ussually ends up working out. i think they are doing this in a slight manner with the improved rewards system, and they did just up the rewards for conquest as well. i think its as close as you're going to get. so see how all those tweaks play out then rerun your numbers.

Well, not ALL F2P's have nearly the kind of grind MWO has. TF2 for example, will allow you to get any weapon through the drop system or trading, and cosmetic items require a preimum account. You can spend 1 steam dollar on an item in the shop and become a premium tf2 player who then has full access to all the features. Everything in the game that changes what characters can do is easily accessible to newcomers. In fact, many of the better players of the game swear by the default weapon builds as being the most powerful and flexible, meaning newcomers are competitively equipped right out of the box.

The problem with MWO's grind is that you need to grind in order to not be a drag on your team. You NEED double heat sinks in most 'mechs if you don't want to shut down every 5 seconds. You usually need endo to get more tons out of your builds, and sometimes you need an XL. All of these take far too long to grind, even with both premium and hero bonuses stacked.

Finally, if PGI doubled the amount of MC each package gave, thus reducing prices, it'd definitely make the game seem less expensive and encourage lots of smaller purchases from newer players.

Edited by Techorse, 15 October 2014 - 08:28 PM.

[Nightmare1]

Frankly, the current amounts seem okay to me. If you run ten, 8-minute matches with a 2-minute turn-around in between (10 minutes total), and earn 100k per match, then you just earned 1,000,000 C-bills in 100 minutes (1 hour and 40 minutes). That's 10,000 C-bills per minute. Seems reasonable to me.

Of course, you can always throw in Premium Time and Hero Mechs to speed things up. I can double that 100k figure pretty easily, halving the time required to earn that 1 million. Fifty minutes for 1 million, again, seems reasonable.

PGI has to make money. They set the C-bill rewards this way to encourage players to buy their Hero Mechs and Premium Time. Frankly, that doesn't seem unreasonable.

Of course, if PGI were to raise C-bill rewards, I certainly wouldn't complain. My point is just that the current grind really isn't all that bad, and is a lot better than several other free to play games I have played.

Edited by Nightmare1, 15 October 2014 - 03:27 PM.

[ImperialKnight]

While I would like CBill earnings to increase, your math has some flaws in them. There are ways to amass CBills much faster.

Modules are fixed costs. I only have 1 of each and only those that are useful. So far it has cost me about 24mill CBills. That's shared across ALL my mechs. So you can't factor them into the long running math

I also do not use consumables. Period. And I have not found myself becoming less viable.

While it costs a lot to buy a mech, you also get money back for selling stuff. What do I sell?

- Single Heatsinks. I keep about 15 of them for troll builds. Otherwise I sell them all
- STD engines. I only ever keep 1 of each STD engine I get from mechs. Engines do give you a nice chunk of the CBills back that goes towards the next mech.

Sharing equipment
This saves you a lot of CBills. I strip ALL my mechs that I am not currently using. I keep only about 1-2 mech in each weight class ready to go. For e.g. I only have about 6 AC5s that go around ALL my IS mechs. I also sell some weapons that I have too many of. Like Medium Lasers


All that said, I wouldn't mind if PGI increased CBill earnings by about 10%. It's a fine point to balance grinding that just feels too tedious but not too much such that you feel like buying Heroes and Premium Time but not to the point you give up

[Troutmonkey]

Want more CBILLs? Hand over your Credit Card, because that's how F2P works.

I haven't paid for premium time, but I have purchased a hero mech (Misery) and it was a great investment. Outside of that I still make a reasonable amount of CBILLs, at around 120'000 in a decent game, 100'000 in an average one (winning, of course). Sure you have to "grind", but when the grind is simply playing the game, I don't think it's too bad. It's not like grinding in MMOs where you spend hours shooting at a cave instead of actually playing.

[Jetfire]

I would just like to see an adjustment that rewards proportional to the value of the mechs you killed, killing a clan mech should yield proportionally more CBills on the core concept of salvage.

[Bront]

VanillaG, on 15 October 2014 - 03:24 PM, said:

You are over exaggerating the cost of the additional mechs. The other Shadowhawks go for a little over 4mil a piece so you can reuse your XL engine between all three of them so they go down to around 6mil a piece depending on what you want to do with them. Once you have certain amount of equipment it barely costs you anything to play Mech Barbies.

2 million just to buy Endo and DHS, another 1-2 million for weapons, so closer to 7-9 depending on where they start with, and that's assuming you're happy with just 1 XL and share or use standards they came with. The Atlases run over 10,000,000 to start and need a full makeover, while Hunchies are cheaper.

I used a baseline mech to do some general math. It's not perfect, lots of rounding. But hopefully the numbers get the point across.

[VanillaG]

Jetfire, on 15 October 2014 - 03:28 PM, said:

I would just like to see an adjustment that rewards proportional to the value of the mechs you killed, killing a clan mech should yield proportionally more CBills on the core concept of salvage.

There is little cost difference between a Clan mech and pimped out IS mech of the same tonnage. So the salvage payout will remain the same.

[Burktross]

As much as I'd love increased earnings, people don't like the premiss of buying more things at a faster rate, though less expensive, as compared to buying few expensive things.

I really think the mechbay potential is big though-- he's right, the fun is trying new things. It'd probably be easier to make money selling mechbays than selling $30 mechs.

[F4T 4L]

In my view, free to play should be a grind.

Premium time should remove that grind, though, and currently I don't believe it does that to the degree it should.

[BourbonFaucet]

Bront, on 15 October 2014 - 03:29 PM, said:

2 million just to buy Endo and DHS, another 1-2 million for weapons, so closer to 7-9 depending on where they start with, and that's assuming you're happy with just 1 XL and share or use standards they came with. The Atlases run over 10,000,000 to start and need a full makeover, while Hunchies are cheaper.

And it's this that ticks me off the most. I have to mentally add in upgrade costs when looking at 'mech prices, and sigh heavily when I realize I still have a few million more to go. I don't think by the time 1 chassis is mastered you end up with enough to master another one...