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Another reason I'm willing to fork over $80 bucks for this thing, despite my (mostly) platonic love affair with the Battlemaster, is the cost it represents in time.
So in this package, if you fork over the funds even for the lowest one, and discounting the mechbays, which you'd probably have to pay for, but could conceivably get by selling old mechs, it takes a great deal of playing time to build up enough funds to buy a single mech.
Here's just a few (REAL general) numbers.
While games could potentially go 15 minutes, they usually go around 10, and some are over in 8 or less. Let's go with 10 minutes for the average match.
Even in a bad match, I'll usually clear 150k in c-bills pretty easily. Taking into account bad players and good players, let's go with 200k in c-bills each match.
The cheapest mech out there is the Commando 1B at 1.6 million c-bills. The most expensive is around 10.9 million (Stalker 5S, for some reason). I'm guessing the Locus will be at the low end of this, so rather than go with an average, let's just assume it's going to be comparable to the Commando 1B and call it 1.6 million.
1,600,000 / 200,000 = 8, so it would take 8 matches or 80 minutes to be able to afford one Locust. To buy all three with c-bills alone would take over four hours, which could be worth it. Of course, there's a safe bet you'll want to tweak the original builds and you can probably tack on an hour or two of play-time on top of that.
Let's call that six hours or so to get all three Locusts in the smallest package. Depending on what you do with your free time, that might be worth it, especially if you have three mechs sitting in your stable that you don't use (and by selling them, you could afford the Locusts that much faster).
At the largest package, you have to take into account that the mechs are going to be far more expensive. The Battlemaster is an 85 ton mech and the Thunderbolt is 65, roughly the same as a Stalker and a Catapult, so the price in c-bills will be in that neighborhood.
In order to afford one Battlemaster (guessing low that it will be in the 9,000,000 range), you would need to play an average of 45 matches, or for seven and half hours. To buy one. Of course, if you're a rockstar, you might be able to knock that out much faster and it would make sense to just grind it out rather than fork over the funds, but to buy just one mech, you're looking at nearly eight hours to buy one mech.
To buy all three, you're probably looking at 23 hours or so of playing, JUST to get all three Battlemasters.
For the entire package...well, you get the idea: you're probably looking at a few weeks of gaming JUST to buy the 12 mechs in the package and that doesn't even include the ancillary benefits of the mechbays, premium time, and so on.
For you, it might make sense to just play it out. For me? My time is precious and I have a lot of things to do outside of this game - for me, it's worth it to pay $80 to get a package of cool stuff rather than sit in front of my computer for two weeks straight, never leaving my desk, and eventually starving to death, friendless, as my dogs eat my corpse.
That's just me.
So in this package, if you fork over the funds even for the lowest one, and discounting the mechbays, which you'd probably have to pay for, but could conceivably get by selling old mechs, it takes a great deal of playing time to build up enough funds to buy a single mech.
Here's just a few (REAL general) numbers.
While games could potentially go 15 minutes, they usually go around 10, and some are over in 8 or less. Let's go with 10 minutes for the average match.
Even in a bad match, I'll usually clear 150k in c-bills pretty easily. Taking into account bad players and good players, let's go with 200k in c-bills each match.
The cheapest mech out there is the Commando 1B at 1.6 million c-bills. The most expensive is around 10.9 million (Stalker 5S, for some reason). I'm guessing the Locus will be at the low end of this, so rather than go with an average, let's just assume it's going to be comparable to the Commando 1B and call it 1.6 million.
1,600,000 / 200,000 = 8, so it would take 8 matches or 80 minutes to be able to afford one Locust. To buy all three with c-bills alone would take over four hours, which could be worth it. Of course, there's a safe bet you'll want to tweak the original builds and you can probably tack on an hour or two of play-time on top of that.
Let's call that six hours or so to get all three Locusts in the smallest package. Depending on what you do with your free time, that might be worth it, especially if you have three mechs sitting in your stable that you don't use (and by selling them, you could afford the Locusts that much faster).
At the largest package, you have to take into account that the mechs are going to be far more expensive. The Battlemaster is an 85 ton mech and the Thunderbolt is 65, roughly the same as a Stalker and a Catapult, so the price in c-bills will be in that neighborhood.
In order to afford one Battlemaster (guessing low that it will be in the 9,000,000 range), you would need to play an average of 45 matches, or for seven and half hours. To buy one. Of course, if you're a rockstar, you might be able to knock that out much faster and it would make sense to just grind it out rather than fork over the funds, but to buy just one mech, you're looking at nearly eight hours to buy one mech.
To buy all three, you're probably looking at 23 hours or so of playing, JUST to get all three Battlemasters.
For the entire package...well, you get the idea: you're probably looking at a few weeks of gaming JUST to buy the 12 mechs in the package and that doesn't even include the ancillary benefits of the mechbays, premium time, and so on.
For you, it might make sense to just play it out. For me? My time is precious and I have a lot of things to do outside of this game - for me, it's worth it to pay $80 to get a package of cool stuff rather than sit in front of my computer for two weeks straight, never leaving my desk, and eventually starving to death, friendless, as my dogs eat my corpse.
That's just me.
Edited by Dawnstealer, 28 June 2013 - 07:18 AM.
Shame, Locust could easily have been a fun 3 energy point 1 missile point mech or something else.
(and not one I would blame them for not considering either)
