142 replies to this topic

[Sir Wulfrick]

Is there a point to this argument? If we still had re-arm & repair costs I could see the point, but even a loss gains money for a player. It seems that the argument is build on the premis that any given match must provide a certain minimum amount of CB. Why is that the case? So now we have 12 v 12 it takes longer to earn enough CB to purchase item X. So what?

[Leafia Barrett]

KuruptU4Fun, on 09 August 2013 - 02:57 PM, said:

If you want your 30% back, buy some premium time and ensure this game will be around for a while.

All right, bear with me here. Say I'm a new player. Ignoring the fact that I can only have 4 mechs, why the hell would I want to spend money to play Grinding Simulator Online?

Sir Wulfrick, on 09 August 2013 - 04:52 PM, said:

Is there a point to this argument? If we still had re-arm & repair costs I could see the point, but even a loss gains money for a player. It seems that the argument is build on the premis that any given match must provide a certain minimum amount of CB. Why is that the case? So now we have 12 v 12 it takes longer to earn enough CB to purchase item X. So what?

So what? So no new player is going to want to spend hours and hours in a single mech slowly grinding (yes slowly, even with premium time so don't even say that) just to get a new mech, especially when without the efficiencies unlocked, they're likely to spend most of their matches getting their butts kicked horribly, which in turn makes the process take even longer.

Edited by Leafia Barrett, 09 August 2013 - 04:57 PM.

[El Bandito]

I had only 40K for a bad loss--and that is before the patch.

[FatBabyThompkins]

Sir Wulfrick, on 09 August 2013 - 04:52 PM, said:

Is there a point to this argument? If we still had re-arm & repair costs I could see the point, but even a loss gains money for a player. It seems that the argument is build on the premis that any given match must provide a certain minimum amount of CB. Why is that the case? So now we have 12 v 12 it takes longer to earn enough CB to purchase item X. So what?

2 reasons

• New Players. The old system was still quite slow to get where you wanted to go to and definitely punished mistakes, which could very easily be made without foreknowledge of your actions. It took some work, don't get me wrong, but IMO, was a good balance. You were essentially given 9mil CBills during your cadet period. If you knew what you were doing, you could easily get into the mech you wanted to. But what if you didn't like that decision and wanted to try a heavy, or an assault, or even a light mech? Well, now you're grinding on this new system at ~500k CBills/hour. So now you buy Premium Time cause look what I could be making! And now you're making ~750k CBills/hour. Wanted to try that assault? See you in a couple days (with reasonable play time). Casual player? Good luck ever buying anything without real money. That is not friendly to new players
  
• We had it, and they took it away. Sounds like a bad argument, but you never take something away from someone, especially if it is rewards. You especially do not take it away and give some ill conceived reason (remember, this reduction was due to the capacity to get more money in 12 vs 12, not to reduce CBill payouts to earn PGI more MC). Analogies are receiving half of your food with a longer wait at a restaurant that you've been going to for the last several months. The ever present, working a 10 hour day but only getting paid half what you were. Instead of getting $20 from grandma this year for your birthday, you only got $10 and it was given to you a month late. You feel cheated, again, especially if given a bogus reason.

If this is a legitimate bug, say something and save face. If they wanted to generally reduce CBills, then say so. But don't say you're reducing CBills because you can make more in 12 vs. 12 (which is not correct, which many post, including mine, have shown).

[Chemie]

After cadet bonus, new players will realize they have to play all night just to buy a PPC....and leave

Veteran players know $30 bucks for a mech is crazy and have no intentions of spending a month grinding CB to buy another mech...and will leave.

A small subset will revert to the "modified suicide rush" first introduced in R&R days except now they will shot each opponent before dieing....but that gets old fast....so they will leave.

F2P has to walk a line of not paying out too much fake money to get real money to be spent but blatant money grabs are seen through....right now PGI pays no in-game and charges way too much for real currency. GG

Edited by Chemie, 10 August 2013 - 04:51 PM.

[KuruptU4Fun]

I'd be happy to on a general playing field to show you how a F2P game gets you to spend money on it:

http://www.gamasutra...0130626/194933/


Pay specific attention to this:

Premium Currencies paragraphs and Reward Removal.

Those 2 are the breadwinners behind MW:O.

Premium currencies has been around obviously. Now the enticement for those who did not purchase into the Founders Programs, Hero mechs or Project Phoenix are missing out on the rewards of mechs that come with with those purchases.

Now as a Founder, I was used to getting a % to XP and c-bill increase as a premium member but the percentage of a c-bill boost for running my Founders mech. The percentage of which is higher than any hero mech out there.

Should you be happy with what you're given as a F2P gamer? Every dev who uses the models in that article and this game feel that you should be.

Monitization of F2P games is the next wave of how devs make money. Console games are sure to follow, since the online passes for multiplayer games are going away. Those passes were given for free in a pre-order, but cost additional money if not.

Why not go subscription? Well that's fairly easy, and as I'm sure you've noticed almost every MMO around has left subscript based models to F2P. The only one really left is WoW. 4 months ago their player base was around 8.3 million, recently that dropped to 7.7. Not long before that (Blizzards subscriber base was at around 11 million to 8.3 within the previous yearly quarter)

PGI has presented you with the rationale that adding 4 more players for you to try and kill or more time to cap to gain that drop in winnings. How many threads have there been trying to disprove that including your own? The rationale is there, just not voiced to us the player base.

As I've hinted to above, I would have to run one of my Founders mechs and have Premium time to make up for the loss of earnings in that last patch. That leaves people who just want to stay F2P users at the back of the pack unless they buy into the game. Does PGI care about me any more because I have spent money on this game in buying what I have already stated? To some degree yes, they already know I'm WILLING to spend money, and if shown a good deal I'll spend more. To some degree no, because I know the value of what I've already purchased, and PGI knows if I don't see that value I'm nothing more than a F2P gamer.

Between iOS and Android games, Online Casual F2P games or MMO's the average gamer can pick and choose any game they want, come and go as they please and will ultimately not change anything.

Fat, you and I know the difference between a F2P customer and a F2P gamer. Any dev will smile and say losing a gamer does hurt their bottom line, but only because they're not a F2P customer. Those people PGI needs to keep to keep the lights on. Truthfully in the world of F2P, gamers mean very little.

[Biglead]

General Taskeen, on 09 August 2013 - 04:43 PM, said:

Ah yes, the GB with the huge CT. It is the "UnAwesome" of Mediums. Get a little bit more for your loss and getting cored in the first 3 minutes.

Ahh the ever famous Center Kin-torso.

[KuruptU4Fun]

Leafia Barrett, on 09 August 2013 - 04:54 PM, said:

All right, bear with me here. Say I'm a new player. Ignoring the fact that I can only have 4 mechs, why the hell would I want to spend money to play Grinding Simulator Online?
So what? So no new player is going to want to spend hours and hours in a single mech slowly grinding (yes slowly, even with premium time so don't even say that) just to get a new mech, especially when without the efficiencies unlocked, they're likely to spend most of their matches getting their butts kicked horribly, which in turn makes the process take even longer.

Don't just look at MW:O though, look at ALL F2P games across every platform whether they are games like this, phone games, or Facebook games. F2P games are here too stay, the presentation of getting ahead in these games is subtle. Because micro transactions equate to spending money in a vending machine for a soda or candy. It takes you a long time to see where the bulk of your money has gone, and by then you're addicted to the sugar or caffeine hard enough that it's difficult to quit. Hence the problem with obesity in America.

Why would you pay money to play Grindwarrior online? Because buying a weeks worth of premium time will show you that the grind of c-bills and XP just became easier, when it's gone you start thinking to yourself, why not buy a little more so I can buy the other mechs to get my favorite mech mastered faster...

Edited by KuruptU4Fun, 09 August 2013 - 05:24 PM.

[Sir Wulfrick]

FatBabyThompkins, on 09 August 2013 - 05:08 PM, said:

2 reasons

• New Players. The old system was still quite slow to get where you wanted to go to and definitely punished mistakes, which could very easily be made without foreknowledge of your actions. It took some work, don't get me wrong, but IMO, was a good balance. You were essentially given 9mil CBills during your cadet period. If you knew what you were doing, you could easily get into the mech you wanted to. But what if you didn't like that decision and wanted to try a heavy, or an assault, or even a light mech? Well, now you're grinding on this new system at ~500k CBills/hour. So now you buy Premium Time cause look what I could be making! And now you're making ~750k CBills/hour. Wanted to try that assault? See you in a couple days (with reasonable play time). Casual player? Good luck ever buying anything without real money. That is not friendly to new players
  
• We had it, and they took it away. Sounds like a bad argument, but you never take something away from someone, especially if it is rewards. You especially do not take it away and give some ill conceived reason (remember, this reduction was due to the capacity to get more money in 12 vs 12, not to reduce CBill payouts to earn PGI more MC). Analogies are receiving half of your food with a longer wait at a restaurant that you've been going to for the last several months. The ever present, working a 10 hour day but only getting paid half what you were. Instead of getting $20 from grandma this year for your birthday, you only got $10 and it was given to you a month late. You feel cheated, again, especially if given a bogus reason.

If this is a legitimate bug, say something and save face. If they wanted to generally reduce CBills, then say so. But don't say you're reducing CBills because you can make more in 12 vs. 12 (which is not correct, which many post, including mine, have shown).

OK, I see your point with regards to new players. Endless grinding is never that much fun (it's one of the many reasons why I refuse to play Planetside 2) and I suppose that there are some psychological reasons against removing rewards, but I'd still like to see some statistical evidence that the small (10-16%) reduction in rewards is driving away players.

There was a short time back in closed beta when the economy was adjusted upwards as a test. The end effect was making literally millions of CB per match. Everyone had a fully customised mech in under a day. The down side of this is, and this is I suppose where psychology comes in to play again, is that goals can be a powerful incentive to make people play for longer, and more often. Achieving all known goals, in this case bein able to afford any combination of mech & equipment, leaves few goals to aim for. Note I'm not saying that the in-game economy should be as miserly as possible, but excessive match rewards could easily bring about a fresh set of issues.

I also believe that the total reward for the cadet period should be higher - probably more like around 12 million CB. That would be enough for a newish pilot to buy any mech of their chosing and not have many matches to go prior to being able to afford to customise it. So the new player feels that they've been rewarded (new mech, cool this is what I want to pilot!) but still has the goals of having to save up for 2 more variants of the same chassis, or other chassis if they so chose.

I won't pretend to be a game designer, but I'm not seeing the 10-15% reduction that's been calculated as the end-of-world problem that many are making it out to be.

[Vassago Rain]

KuruptU4Fun, on 09 August 2013 - 05:13 PM, said:

Stuff.

The thing here is, PGI has not designed a good grind, so this is instantly felt, and people have noticed it. They should NEVER notice, or you've failed as an F2P designer.

[Lucian Nostra]

Sir Wulfrick, on 09 August 2013 - 05:22 PM, said:

OK, I see your point with regards to new players. Endless grinding is never that much fun (it's one of the many reasons why I refuse to play Planetside 2) and I suppose that there are some psychological reasons against removing rewards, but I'd still like to see some statistical evidence that the small (10-16%) reduction in rewards is driving away players.

There was a short time back in closed beta when the economy was adjusted upwards as a test. The end effect was making literally millions of CB per match. Everyone had a fully customised mech in under a day. The down side of this is, and this is I suppose where psychology comes in to play again, is that goals can be a powerful incentive to make people play for longer, and more often. Achieving all known goals, in this case bein able to afford any combination of mech & equipment, leaves few goals to aim for. Note I'm not saying that the in-game economy should be as miserly as possible, but excessive match rewards could easily bring about a fresh set of issues.

I also believe that the total reward for the cadet period should be higher - probably more like around 12 million CB. That would be enough for a newish pilot to buy any mech of their chosing and not have many matches to go prior to being able to afford to customise it. So the new player feels that they've been rewarded (new mech, cool this is what I want to pilot!) but still has the goals of having to save up for 2 more variants of the same chassis, or other chassis if they so chose.

I won't pretend to be a game designer, but I'm not seeing the 10-15% reduction that's been calculated as the end-of-world problem that many are making it out to be.

Woah easy there. we got that many c-bills a match BECAUSE of repair and rearm where you could easily drop 1 mil to fix and re-arm a mech, 5-6 mil if you ran an XL

We all got stupid rich though because they fixed you up to 75% for free with 75% ammo restocked free than people realized you didn't need to fix that XL engine..

Don't try and pass it off as they just wanted to give us all stupid amounts of cash for nothing, it was suppose to mostly go to repairing. We all just realized you didn't actually need to repair your mech (besides armor which was about 100k tops) and loaded up a spare ton or 2 of ammo to dodge paying for it.

Edited by Lucian Nostra, 09 August 2013 - 05:38 PM.

[El Bandito]

Sir Wulfrick, on 09 August 2013 - 05:22 PM, said:

OK, I see your point with regards to new players. Endless grinding is never that much fun (it's one of the many reasons why I refuse to play Planetside 2) and I suppose that there are some psychological reasons against removing rewards, but I'd still like to see some statistical evidence that the small (10-16%) reduction in rewards is driving away players.

It is not just 10-16%. When you calculate C-Bill earned per hour, it can go up to 40% loss, easily.

[FatBabyThompkins]

KuruptU4Fun, on 09 August 2013 - 05:13 PM, said:

...

Thank you for that reasoned and in depth response. That was a good counter argument.

I believe we are at a cross roads in F2P games. I just read this today and it pretty much sums up my own sentiments on F2P. http://penny-arcade....a-nervous-wreck

To me, F2P is a shady business model. It revolves around penalties and not being able to accomplish fulfilling enjoyment except through monetization. It ****** off all but the most hard core of players. Once you **** off a group of people, move on to the next and the next and the next. It inherently is an unsustainable business model. You also have to bring in enough continuous revenue to sustain all of the scrubs playing for free, further burdening those paying customers. In all, it's a system that pits producer, paid consumer and free consumer against each other. It breeds toxicity which in turn poisons the game, the player base and ultimately the enjoyment people get out of the system. That is my economic outlook on F2P and games that try to make continuous money. They're not designed for continuous operation, but rapid revenue generation and move on to the next operation.

As for an anecdote, I have several friends that play this game. Two are founders, which is where I was introduced. We were at an old fashioned LAN party where we had 8 players. We made our own pre-made, not knowing anything about the match making system, much less anything about the mechs and weapons (except from our old MW1-4 days). Our first three games we were destroyed 8-0. On our 4th game, the other team finally had a death. A team kill. Two of us pulled out our credit cards and dropped some MC. We bought some mechs. No change. By now, we had enough to buy some medium and heavy mechs, so they did, thinking it would help. It did not. After about 10 games, we called it quits.

A few of us, myself included, kept playing on the side. We've sense spent considerably more money for MC and Overlord packs. We get 4 of us together and have a mini-LAN with a 4-person pre-made. And kick some serious ***. We now have enough money to buy what we needed, including the variants. It was hard work, especially for the guy that was playing the Atlas, but he endured. Two of those players have already decided not to come back after this patch. They've spent over $100 on this game, but now see no future. These paying customers, who already saw the grind it already was, just double. It's not worth their time. Their words, "Thanks PGI for the fun, but you're not getting anymore money from me."

As for me? I'm content with keeping what I've spent (hint, more than them) and not giving anymore money. This is a game in a market where games are typically $50-$60 for less than half the content they had years ago. This game has less functionality and tactical depth than Tribes did almost 15 years ago and that was a one buy game.

I would not guess that many current players are going to be spending much more money if they just saw the future value of their current purchases cut in half. If that premise holds true, then PGI will need to bring in new players. Players that will pay for something they believe has a future, or at least tricked into believing their large purchase has a future. Those tricked players will leave and PGI will have to get an entirely new batch of players... unless there is a future they can believe in. That is fun. That's what gets players paying and, more importantly, retention. You're not going to be getting any new customers if your maps are empty.

[Elizander]

Biglead, on 09 August 2013 - 01:41 PM, said:

Or buy a Hero mech and get your 30% back.


Eh? Eh? You see what they did there?

What if I already had one before?

[Sarsaparilla Kid]

Chemie, on 09 August 2013 - 05:12 PM, said:

A small subset will revert to the "modified suicide rush" first introduced in R&D days except now they will shot each opponent before dieing.

Chemie points out a way to grind C-bills faster, rush out and get up to 12 assists, die, quit game, hop onto your next mech, rinse and repeat, but that will kill the game for those on the team trying to enjoy the game from a tactical perspective, won't it? The C-bill rewards need to be sufficient to prevent this kind of tactic from being more profitable than actually sticking around and working as a team.

[mack sabbath]

I just got 35.000 for a loss where I did 5 assists and some component damage in a trial mech followed by 58,000 for a win....this seems all messed up now, to me at least.

[Team Leader]

KuruptU4Fun, on 09 August 2013 - 03:51 PM, said:

Play Candy Crush Saga and see just how much a game can be monetized...

this is freakin candy crush and if you spend money on those sort of mobile games you must have more money than sense

(i really, REALLY hate monetized mobile games, sorry)

Edited by Team Leader, 10 August 2013 - 12:22 PM.

[KuruptU4Fun]

Team Leader, on 10 August 2013 - 12:05 PM, said:

this is freakin candy crush and if you spend money on those sort of mobile games you must have more money than sense

Yeah a friend of the family admitted she spends about $40 a week on Candy Crush, so yeah more money than sense. At least in MW:O your purchases can stack up, like Premium time and Hero or Founders mechs. $7 can get you a week of premium time (and come on, that's the cost of a value meal at most fast food restaurants) a months worth at $30 will get you premium time and 1 of a couple different Hero mechs.

Premium time gets you:
+50% C-bills
+50% XP

Hero mechs get:
+25% C-bill

Founders mechs get:
+30% C-bill

Either of those stacked with premium time is a pretty penny...

Edited by KuruptU4Fun, 10 August 2013 - 12:20 PM.

[Team Leader]

You mixed up the hero and founders bonuses. IMO they should both get 30%... so much for "founder loyalty"
And yes it is GOOD that those things stack up however they are far too expensive IRL for me to justify buying and its not enough of a bonus in my eyes... If PGI slashed prices by 50% across the board on everything I think they would more than make up for it in volume. However this 50% reduction in f2p cbills is completely unacceptable given their current prices, and does in fact border on "p2w" or more like "p2 be competitive". Its quite ridiculous, PGI and IGP are asking too much for too little.

[KuruptU4Fun]

Then that by all means is your opinion, and you are entitled to it. Thereby giving you every right to not spend money on this game to promote it's continued existence. So expect that your opinion is going to be put on a back burner because you are among the hundreds of thousands of F2P gamers, and not consumers. Which do you think ANY F2P dev is going to work with when it comes to making a game better? I (and in the past you) were interested in the future of this game. As such PGI paid some attention. Now that both of us are apprehensive in doing so, we are no longer investing in their future, just benefiting from the current state of it.