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Holy crap this turned out longer than I intended O,o tl;dr at bottom!
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I feel like the price of things in the game make it entirely inaccessible to a semi-casual player. I'm a full time student and I work 20+ hours a week. I still get in a good amount of matches over the weekend but I feel like I'm making barely any progress. I understand with the Free to Play model that this encourages players to use cash to buy things.. and I'm okay with that.. but the cash prices are too high for me to justify paying for something too.
I don't want this to come across as an entitled "GIVE ME ALL THE THINGS" post. I've played Tribes: Ascend, League of Legends, and Planetside 2 pretty extensively. I've put over $100 into Tribes, close to $100 into League, and about $40 so far into Planteside 2. I bought the $100 Founder pack for Firefall. Unfortunately I didn't learn about MWO until after the Founder packs weren't being sold anymore.. otherwise I would have purchased one. Clearly I don't have a problem investing in the games that I enjoy.
But the prices have to be justifiable. Last night I went into the mech lab and played around with the Camo on my favourite Centurion. I got this really badass looking custom paint job and I was pretty excited about it.. until I looked at the prices. I had used premium colours so it was going to cost MC.. How much? 2,750 MC... That's about $13 for a custom colour job. I cannot justify spending that kind of money on a skin. That's about the equivalent to a Legendary skin in League of Legends. Legendary skins in LoL provide enough visible content to be justifiable. They provide customized animations, emotes, etc. In MWO I'd just get a colour scheme. I might justify $13 on customizations if I got custom jump jet colours, and the colour of my PPC or lasers were changes, I had some sort of glow effect on the mech, or it was shiny.. SOMETHING.. Not just a custom paint job.
The prices of the mechs are in a similar situation. IIRC it's about $20 to buy an Assault mech with MC.Now these guys pack a decent amount of punch.. That's not TOO bad; still more than I'd like to pay but justifiable with the amount of firepower they can hold.. I'd say knock $2-4 off that prices and I'd be happy spending money on it. Light mechs on the other hand are not that much cheaper. I don't have the game open right now but if I remember correctly they're $12-14. Lights do offer a good amount of utility but I feel like this prices is way too much. I'd say $6-8 would be better.
One of the other large problems with this is the trial mechs... I've been told they change but in the almost month I've been playing they've been the exact same. They should change either weekly, or even if just 1 of them changed per week. This would allow us to play with different mechs and find out ones we like before we decide "Okay, I want to invest the time to save up the CBills for that mech" or "I want to buy some MC to buy that mech".
But even after you pay for these mechs there's still the cost of outfitting them. If you paid for them with MC you're in a bit better shape. You didn't have to grind up the 8,000,000-13,000,000 that the larger mechs cost. But as it is the CBill gain is WAY to low for anyone hoping to custom build one of those bigger mechs with just CBills. I'm by no means a great player, but I'm not terrible. My KDR is 2.0 on the nose. My accumulative CBill gain per match is 125,000. At that rate it would take me about 84 matches to buy or build a 10,000,000 mech. I'm just guessing with this but let's say the average match is 7 minutes (Feel free to correct me if you have a more accurate statistic on that). That's almost 10 hours of playing to build 1 mech.
And the last thing I'd like to bring up.. XP gain... In my opinion is actually too high. Yup, I did just say that. XP gain for mechs is too high. I bought a Centurion a few days ago and I had unlocked every basic efficiency for it before I could even fully outfit it how I wanted. To fix this I don't really thing that the XP rate should be decreased (contrary to what I just said) but I do think that the price for basic efficiencies should be increased. These efficiency unlocks offer a huge advantage (25% increase? really?!) and should be a reward for playing and mastering a certain mech. Not something just handed out all willy-nilly.
Another idea that I think would be cool would be instead of outright buying a 25% boost why not let us buy it in stages? 1,000 XP for 10%, 1,000 more for 15%, and 2,000 more for 25% This would force people to choose more carefully where to put their points, and give them more of a feeling of ownership over the mech they've been investing time in.
So these are my thoughts on how the economy of the game should be adjusted to provide not only a more rewarding experience, but also more incentive to spend money on MC.
tl;dr : CBill gain should be increased, MC price of mechs and paints should be decreased, XP Cost of efficiencies should be increased.
Also something to think about, just to get people to get some MC, even if it's just a little 1 time purchase. How about a permanent 10% boost to CBill gain for anyone who buys MC?
Edited by FerretWithASpork, 25 February 2013 - 05:02 PM.
