15 replies to this topic

[Sable Dove]

Simple idea: give players a daily allowance. Maybe ~150000 C-Bills. Not much; one or two games' worth. So that players who don't have time to play very regularly have the chance to actually make some progress. If they only have time enough to earn 1MM in a week, for instance, they're not going to stick with the game for long, because it'll take them over a month just to get a new engine (which I feel are pretty overpriced, but that's another matter).

I'm not saying hand out millions of C-Bills every day, but a little bit to help out players who would otherwise get bored of the grind because it's a waste of their limited time if it's going to take months just to outfit a mech and find a build that works for them.

That's all. Contrary to what some might believe, forcing players to grind too much does not make them pay real money. It makes them quit.

[Tasluk]

nah

[Sable Dove]

So, you support the idea?

Because you offered no constructive feedback, meaning the only reason you posted is to bump the thread so more people can see it.

[Beeman]

I would say...well, I don't know. This might be a reasonable alternative to first wins of the day(which some people seem to unreasonably detest).

Seems familiar, though. The developers might've said a loooooong time ago that you would earn a salary based on your rank in community warfare.

When I saw your thread title, I thought you'd be suggesting a daily(or weekly) free stipend of MC money...which would be a fantastical suggestion. I remember when World of Tanks had this implemented(for testing purposes during the closed beta). You would earn 150 gold per day provided you took part in at least one battle(they later removed this due to idlers who'd only log in for their daily gold >_> ).

It was a really interesting incentive to keep playing, honestly. It was also not enough to support constant premium time or free experience conversions on a regular basis. I think after a couple weeks of saving up, I had almost enough gold for two weeks of premium time...but if I'd kept saving for like 35+ days, I'd wind up with enough for 30 days premium.

I thought that was a really good balance between offering something for free while still giving incentive to spend on gold. You give people a taste of premium time and they get hooked. I have a hard time playing World of Tanks without premium time because it feels so slow(but still do it occasionally because I hate life, apparently).

The same concept could probably extend to this game. If they crunched some numbers, they could probably figure out a really sweet spot for this type of allowance. Like 100MC per day or even 50MC per day might be good. Might even justify the extreme cost of some of their cosmetics(though they might have to drop one time use options for camo).

I'd say now is the time to test this sort of thing, but they claimed that they'd never do another full-on data wipe(thus no refund on purchased/spent MC up to this point) so that's kind of out the window now. We totally went open beta too soon >.>

[Eddrick]

With "Premium time", it would make sence. Without, just sounds like something to eliminate grind and maybe give people a reason to play less.

[Alois Hammer]

Sable Dove, on 23 February 2013 - 05:52 PM, said:

Simple idea: give players a daily allowance. Maybe ~150000 C-Bills.

...because the game wasn't dumbed down "simplified" enough by taking out Rearm and Repair? Why not remove all expenses while we're at it. Since having to earn C-bills to buy things is such a drag on the game, why not just make all Mechs, weapons, and equipment free while we're at it?


No...just no. Let's stick with "Want C-bills? Play the game then."

Never understood the idea of "fair" meaning "coddle the people who don't have time to play." Seems to me the person playing more having more money is as fair as the word can possibly mean, but maybe that's just me and I don't understand the modern "Special Olympics" mentality of "Show up and claim your reward because you made a bare-minimum token attempt."

[MasterBLB]

The only reasonable solution for these who don't have time to play and earn CBills it to allow to buy CBills for MCs.Save your time,spend real money instead - your choice.
And this solution would benefit PGI as well.

[Duke Blaine]

Giving people a constant flow of money is probably not going to be the best solution to the problem. One thread mentioned having only certain mechs available to certain Inner Sphere factions... could be a solution. Each group has a group of available mechs... not only mechs but items to modify mechs with (Ultra's ER lasers most equipment from the ... legendary (lost tech of the IS). This would be a huge change in the game play, but possibly the best way to balance things out.

[Hotthedd]

Sable Dove, on 23 February 2013 - 05:52 PM, said:

Simple idea: give players a daily allowance. Maybe ~150000 C-Bills.

Hey President Obama. Congratulations on winning re-election and all, but maybe you should quit playing MW:O and get back to work?

[boobooo42]

Sable Dove, on 23 February 2013 - 07:18 PM, said:

So, you support the idea?

Because you offered no constructive feedback, meaning the only reason you posted is to bump the thread so more people can see it.

nah. Your suggestion is as bad as your trolling.

[Roland]

Quote

Simple idea: give players a daily allowance. Maybe ~150000 C-Bills. Not much; one or two games' worth. So that players who don't have time to play very regularly have the chance to actually make some progress.

The game already has a mechanism in it to support this. It's called buying MC.

That's a pretty core aspect of the business model they are using. You can either play for free, or you can choose to spend some amount of cash to avoid some degree of grinding. Thus, you aren't really paying to win, but are instead paying to save yourself time.

So, no.. you're not going to get paid money just for sitting there doing nothing in a game that you aren't paying anything for anyway.

[Onyx]

Alois Hammer, on 24 February 2013 - 06:42 AM, said:

...because the game wasn't dumbed down "simplified" enough by taking out Rearm and Repair? Why not remove all expenses while we're at it. Since having to earn C-bills to buy things is such a drag on the game, why not just make all Mechs, weapons, and equipment free while we're at it?


No...just no. Let's stick with "Want C-bills? Play the game then."

Never understood the idea of "fair" meaning "coddle the people who don't have time to play." Seems to me the person playing more having more money is as fair as the word can possibly mean, but maybe that's just me and I don't understand the modern "Special Olympics" mentality of "Show up and claim your reward because you made a bare-minimum token attempt."

Ahh, my old friend, the straw man with reducto ad absurdum.

He's very obviously not asking for free equipment. Hell, he's not even asking for free mechs. At 150k a day, the absolute cheapest mech at ~1.7MM CB is 12 days of idleing. A full month of being idle would net you a mere 4.5MM C-Bills, barely enough for most mediums assuming you're strictly idling your way to profits.

As a result of having this system, the players who are casual, the weekend warriors, the bad players, people who don't have time, and so on and so forth, will be heavily incentivized to play the game and, potentially, spend money. Most F2P games have only 5-10% of their population pay for the game, but F2P games live and die based off of their community. Anything that promotes a larger community is better for the overall health of the game, period. As long as it's not significant enough to trivialize the grind of the game, it will be good for the health of the game. And at ~4.5MM per month, that's hardly something I'd call significant over the long haul. In fact, it doesn't need to strictly be a daily guarantee that you get regardless of anything. It can be a daily first win, it can be daily if you play one battle (first game of the day). It can be 7 days of money from the last time you logged in and then shut off to encourage playing but making sure those who don't have time feel like they keep up. Or it can just be 4.5MM per month in C-Bills that will ammount to a mech every ~15-60 days, give or take on extreme cases when the devs I believe intend to add more mechs than could ever hope to be subsidized by this.

This isn't your ad hominem example of coddling the player. This would be a strategic attempt at player retention at something that barely passes, in practice, for an actual stipend. For the average player, they earn ~58,000 C-Bills per match (likely a guess, but seems "right"). This is equivalent of less than 3 average games for the average player per day. Hardly coddling the player. If you want to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, premium mechs and being a good player would net you that average per win, especially if you use a premium or founders mech.

This move, be it a daily stipend, a time limited daily stipend, a first win of the day or first game of the day (I favor first win, since it favors playing well over merely playing) would, on the whole, be beneficial to the game's longevity by helping to hook those who are on the fence to keep the community active and, ideally, growing. Both of these are vital to the success of F2P games.

As for "simplifying" the game, let me tell you from a perspective from one of the best players in World of Tanks on the NA server, as well as someone who plays War Thunder and few other games that punish you for dying or taking damage. This game is better for not having repair and rearm. Here's why.

In world of tanks, if you don't have premium, it takes you months as an active, good player to go from tier 1 to tier 10 in just one line and afford it. Like, 6 months. If you're a good player without premium and have a ton of time to burn. If you have premium, the time can be compressed down to weeks. As in, I've clocked ~2 weeks to burn from tier 1 to 10 by being a good player with premium. The reason for this is that the game had scaling costs based on what you brought and, in the case of WoT, the tier of tank you had. They were designed to start losing money without premium around tier 7, and with premium at tier 8 or 9 depending on how good you were. The difference is night and day in terms of monetary income. In a tier 9, if you made 30k in income but lost the tank, you're looking at breaking even or even potentially losing money depending on how many rounds you shot. But, with premium, and assuming you didn't waste too many shots frivolously, you'd be looking to make between 10 and 15k credits in profit. In effect, they made premium a way to continuously grind from tank to tank without stopping, and made being free to play impossible to grind up, in a game that heavily promotes tiering up.

Furthermore, there's a less-known secondary effect that most good WoT players will observe when you have repair and maintenance costs. "Why are you firing HE shells in an Object 704?" (A tank with a gun that can frontally penetrate every tank in the game except a small handful). "Because it's cheaper." "Why didn't you charge?" "I didn't want to pay the repair bill." That's right, having repair costs actually promotes people who remotely care to be thrifty with their money. They take less risks, they try less out, and they generally camp more as a result of monetary sanctions for doing something stupid. This causes the game as a whole to slow down and be a hell of a lot less interesting than MWO is right now where people aren't afraid of engaging in combat and slugging it out. You're not punished for dying, so dying isn't stressful. But, I can speak for myself when I say that winning is more fun than losing, so I at least try to spend my mech carefully even though losing it costs me nothing aside from losing time from having to grind a tinge longer.

Overall, I see nothing wrong with wanting to offer some form of daily allotment of C-Bills, though I'd personally prefer a flat 150k for the first win over a strict "you get 150k daily" system. And repair and rearm just is not healthy for the game. Maintenance fees in general aren't. They seriously promote bad gameplay.

[boobooo42]

tl;dr, but I saw WoT mentioned in there someplace.

[Beeman]

I can see maintenance(repair and rearm) being good for faction wars. I honestly think...and I"ve said it several times before(in other threads, at least) that faction wars should be much more restrictive just 'cause it's so lore-oriented.

We can suck all the casuals and people on the fence and what-not with lack of repair and rearm, freedom of mech customization, flamboyant-*** camo and more. That's all good. We need those people 'cause who knows...they might go looking into the lore side of things and get sucked into faction wars, trying to rank up and developing those playful prejudices against other factions that compelling faction-based games tend to promote. On top of that, seasoned veterans of community warfare might frequent the standard matchmaking queue just to relax a bit and play with silly mechs.

The developers can bank all they want on features that benefit standard matchmaking and even implement wild casual features that encourage community growth. That's what we need and so long as community warfare is almost strictly loreplay...everyone will be happy. Casuals can customize the mess out of their mechs and run whatever cheese build or flavor of the month builds might exist while the long-time BT/MW/TT fans can bask in the glory of lore-based strategic combat in community warfare.

Everyone wins.

[PhoenixFire55]

It is actually a good idea. I wouldn't just give away c-bills right now tho, but maybe when community warfare comes out there will be some sort of 'faction salary' c-bills payout each day/week etc. as long as you are actually helping your faction in any way.

Edited by PhoenixFire55, 25 February 2013 - 06:03 AM.

[Corvus Antaka]

No. But a first win of the day 100% cbill bonues would be awesome. keeps people coming back, gives a nice bonus, and sometimes you really have to chase that win.