23 replies to this topic

[Kushko]

I chose the Victor as an example and fit 3 variants with builds i would run and consider efficient/fun. To determine the price i made 3 fits and than subtracted the income i would get from selling the components i chose not to use.

The 3 fits are:
http://mwo.smurfy-ne...b510f74c69fb8fc
http://mwo.smurfy-ne...fc16806df05a1c2
http://mwo.smurfy-ne...e2246e2f416cf19

In all 3 fits i was not trying to save on c-bills nor was i spending more than i thought i should to make solid, diverse in imo fun builds for all 3 variants (feel free to comment on the builds but note that the validity of the builds is not really the point as much as the actual cost).

In the end the cost came to around 39.130.000 C-bills (i rounded down by a couple thousand). At the average income per hour (which according to pgi is ~600k) that comes to roughly 65h to effectively "max out" 1 mech type.

Lets say a semi casual MWO player puts in 10h per week or ~1.5h per day. For maxing (getting master skills) and equipping the Victor assault mech it would take the casual gamer a whopping 43 days. We currently have 20 mech types in game and several more coming within the next couple months (6 from just the phoenix program and apparently the usual 1-2 per month on top).

This is also not counting any modules or the purchase of any of the c-bill paints, both of which could easily add tens of millions of c-bills on top of that.

For me this is not an acceptable pace of progress, especially since at the time of writing this, acquiring new mechs is pretty much the only content we get in MWO. I'll let others decide for themselves and hopefully PGI will reflect on this as well.

*edit* Before someone else points it out; i could if i wanted to, only get 1 XL engine and swap it between the 2 variants that use it thus saving 5.3mil or 9h of play (which would put the total time at 37days). But to take a page from PGIs book where they noted the reason why swapping between dual heat sinks and standard or endo steal and standard exo still costs money after you buy the upgrade; it takes the little elf engineers that actually do all that work in the mechbay a lot of time and effort to do so, and i'm assuming swapping XL engines every couple matches would be no cakewalk either. Not to mention that 37days is still nowhere near acceptable.

Edited by Kushko, 30 August 2013 - 01:28 AM.

[ollo]

You forgot the modules you mastered them for.

[Kushko]

ollo, on 30 August 2013 - 01:27 AM, said:

You forgot the modules you mastered them for.

Kushko, on 30 August 2013 - 01:21 AM, said:

This is also not counting any modules or the purchase of any of the c-bill paints, both of which could easily add tens of millions of c-bills on top of that.

Also elite skills require 3 variants just like the master ones do, and atleast for me they are the main reason i try to "master" the mechs i own (also for the 2x basic bonus).

[RadioKies]

Please don't say things like:

But to take a page from PGIs book where they noted the reason why swapping between dual heat sinks and standard or endo steal and standard exo still costs money after you buy the upgrade; it takes the little elf engineers that actually do all that work in the mechbay a lot of time and effort to do so, and i'm assuming swapping XL engines every couple matches would be no cakewalk either

You'll put idea's in PGI/IGP head. Before you know it the day before launch they will make STD/XL engine switch an upgrade you'll have to pay for like DHS/SHS

[Jam the Bam]

I was doing the same maths the other day, it requires a phenomenal amount of time, especially for players like me who can only manage a few hours every other night (girlfriends don't take mech mastering as a valid excuse for not talking to them), they have jumped from a good position to a grind worse than world of tanks.

[Wintersdark]

I hope you're not counting 2 XL325 engines; it's pretty trivial to swap them back and forth like pretty much everyone has done all along. Sure, you'd probably want two in the long run, but you absolutely don't need a pair at the start to master them.

[Wintersdark]

Look, I get I'm always in these threads arguing against you folk. Don't get me wrong, I don't like the cbill nerf. I'd sooner have kept making how much money I was making.

My issue is that when you start over-exaggerating "How Long It Takes To Do X" you shoot yourself in the foot, because PGI sees that and dumps your post in the ******** bin right away. Just like that other fellow contending it would take 244 hours of play to get 4 mechs to a competitive level, because "you need to master 12 mechs to do that" (which is obviously not the case).

Exaggerating an already kind of crappy situation doesn't help convey your point, it just makes your post look ill-considered. Rather than trying to find a contrived Worst Case Scenario to make things look really bad, find the best case scenario. If that doesn't look bad, then it's not a big problem - but I suspect you'll still have a good point with said Best Case Scenario - and unlike the sillier posts, it's much, much harder to argue against such a post.

[Bilbo]

It costs me ~30 million cbills to pick up the 3 variants. ~156K General XP, and ~15min to go through and click everything. Then I pick the variant I'm most interested in and sell the other two to pay for the loadout.

Edited by Bilbo, 30 August 2013 - 06:55 AM.

[Kushko]

Wintersdark, on 30 August 2013 - 06:43 AM, said:

Look, I get I'm always in these threads arguing against you folk. Don't get me wrong, I don't like the cbill nerf. I'd sooner have kept making how much money I was making.

My issue is that when you start over-exaggerating "How Long It Takes To Do X" you shoot yourself in the foot, because PGI sees that and dumps your post in the ******** bin right away. Just like that other fellow contending it would take 244 hours of play to get 4 mechs to a competitive level, because "you need to master 12 mechs to do that" (which is obviously not the case).

Exaggerating an already kind of crappy situation doesn't help convey your point, it just makes your post look ill-considered. Rather than trying to find a contrived Worst Case Scenario to make things look really bad, find the best case scenario. If that doesn't look bad, then it's not a big problem - but I suspect you'll still have a good point with said Best Case Scenario - and unlike the sillier posts, it's much, much harder to argue against such a post.

Perhaps you should try reading my entire post before replying to it?

[Ransack]

Kushko, on 30 August 2013 - 01:21 AM, said:

it takes the little elf engineers that actually do all that work in the mechbay a lot of time and effort to do so,

LOL

[Rascula]

I think perhaps for those of us who rarely look at our girlfriends/wives/partners this expenditure of time isnt as relevant as to the rest of you folks...

And Bilbo seems to agree..

Bilbo, on 30 August 2013 - 06:55 AM, said:

It costs me ~30 million cbills to pick up the 3 variants. ~156K General XP, and ~15min to go through and click everything. Then I pick the variant I'm most interested in and sell the other two to pay for the loadout.

[Angel of Annihilation]

Kushko, on 30 August 2013 - 01:21 AM, said:

I chose the Victor as an example and fit 3 variants with builds i would run and consider efficient/fun. To determine the price i made 3 fits and than subtracted the income i would get from selling the components i chose not to use.

The 3 fits are:
http://mwo.smurfy-ne...b510f74c69fb8fc
http://mwo.smurfy-ne...fc16806df05a1c2
http://mwo.smurfy-ne...e2246e2f416cf19

In all 3 fits i was not trying to save on c-bills nor was i spending more than i thought i should to make solid, diverse in imo fun builds for all 3 variants (feel free to comment on the builds but note that the validity of the builds is not really the point as much as the actual cost).

In the end the cost came to around 39.130.000 C-bills (i rounded down by a couple thousand). At the average income per hour (which according to pgi is ~600k) that comes to roughly 65h to effectively "max out" 1 mech type.

Lets say a semi casual MWO player puts in 10h per week or ~1.5h per day. For maxing (getting master skills) and equipping the Victor assault mech it would take the casual gamer a whopping 43 days. We currently have 20 mech types in game and several more coming within the next couple months (6 from just the phoenix program and apparently the usual 1-2 per month on top).

This is also not counting any modules or the purchase of any of the c-bill paints, both of which could easily add tens of millions of c-bills on top of that.

For me this is not an acceptable pace of progress, especially since at the time of writing this, acquiring new mechs is pretty much the only content we get in MWO. I'll let others decide for themselves and hopefully PGI will reflect on this as well.

*edit* Before someone else points it out; i could if i wanted to, only get 1 XL engine and swap it between the 2 variants that use it thus saving 5.3mil or 9h of play (which would put the total time at 37days). But to take a page from PGIs book where they noted the reason why swapping between dual heat sinks and standard or endo steal and standard exo still costs money after you buy the upgrade; it takes the little elf engineers that actually do all that work in the mechbay a lot of time and effort to do so, and i'm assuming swapping XL engines every couple matches would be no cakewalk either. Not to mention that 37days is still nowhere near acceptable.

I am 100% with you on this and have made a couple very similar posts myself.

Right now there are currently 95 variants in the game are guarenteed to be in the game with Phoenix and Saber. This doesn't include Hero or Champion mechs. The average persons isn't going to be able to own or even try out 30% of them in their first year even at the old C-bill rewards so I really, REALLY don't understand the need for the nerf.

Right now in most cases you can figure needing an average of 10 million C-bills per mech to fully outfit them not including modules. If you don't have extra XL engines laying around then add another 5 million C-bills to this price tag. Hell even my Jenner cost me 10 million to outfit. This means a minimum investment of 30 million to Elite/Master out a chassis. The average hourly rate is something like 570k and change which means roughly 52.5 hours of gameplay is required for to get the average, midranged mechs competitive. If you want modules, double the cost and the time.

Now granted, at this point you have 3 viable mechs and/or you could sell 1 or 2 of the to allow for some limited reinvestment but 52.5 hours is the requirement to get your first competitive mech up and operational and more than likely it is going to be much higher due to R&D cost, i.e. how much you spend on upgrades that in most cases you will not like, nor keep on your mech thus you can either store them for no use or sell them at a major loss.

So is 52 Hours till getting your first well equiped, Elite unlocked a reasonable time frame? You tell me.

Edited by Viktor Drake, 30 August 2013 - 09:17 AM.

[Lostdragon]

I don't understand their reasoning on cbill income. I get that you want people to have some grind to encourage them to play more but to me it seems they would increase revenue through purchases of bays, paint, camo, and vanity items if players had more cbills to spend on new mechs. I personally am not going to pay $30-40 to buy just one standard variant with MC and I don't think most others will either.

[Hexenhammer]

The price of leveling an assault and being fruggal

AWS-8r
AWS-8t
AWS-8v

19,803,170

[Appogee]

Kushko, on 30 August 2013 - 01:21 AM, said:

For me this is not an acceptable pace of progress,

I agree. However, you're kind of missing the point.

PGI are trying to make the grind unacceptable - because they want you to buy stuff and avoid it. They want us to either:

1] Subscribe to MWO by buying ongoing Premium Time - bringing the grind in your example down to 22 days, or
2] Buy a Hero Mech - bringing the grind in your example down to 29 days), or better still
3] Buy those three Mechs outright with MC - bringing the grind in your example down to the 18 days needed to outfit them with your preferred loadout.

While I am no fan of the CBill nerf, I don't think calculating how much time it takes for us to get stuff for ''free'' is really the way to change PGI's mind on this.

The bigger issue here is that the grind is too long even for customers paying for premium time, hero mechs or purchasing stock chassis outright. Worse, by lowering the base rate of earning, they reduced the value of their own income-earning products to a point where many of us won't buy them.

I used to buy Premium Time. However, I haven't since the CBill nerf. Why buy Premium Time just to earn roughly what I used to earn for free before? If PGI had put up the Premium Time multplier to say 100% of standard earnings - more than offsetting the CBill nerf - then I'd probably be happy to start investing again in Premium Time. Til then, I'm not paying the same price for less.

Edited by Appogee, 30 August 2013 - 02:33 PM.

[ollo]

Appogee, on 30 August 2013 - 02:32 PM, said:

While I am no fan of the CBill nerf, I don't think calculating how much time it takes for us to get stuff for ''free'' is really the way to change PGI's mind on this.

You have the same flawed thinking as PGIGP: while the mechs may be 'for free', other things connected to them are not. If they let you, say, buy the first 50 mechs at the price of 1CB, i guess they'd make more total money than now on bays, camo, colors and other MC stuff. People are more likely to spend small amounts of money, as soon as they have to think if it's really worth it (like 20$ for a mech), the purchase rate drops dramatically. If the average gamer spends 15$ on mechbays, this should be well enough for PGIGP to double their staff, considering a AAA game with 100x the content and 10x the staff of MWO costs only 50$.

[M0rpHeu5]

PGI are couting on mech mastering players. After the CB nerf i gave up mastering

[Kushko]

M0rpHeu5, on 31 August 2013 - 08:41 AM, said:

PGI are couting on mech mastering players. After the CB nerf i gave up mastering

Pretty much where im at as well. I gave up on wanting to master mechs with the current income.

The one up side to this for me is Clan mechs not having variants so i really hope PGI dont try to force the 3 variant skill system down our throats with them. And tbh while i dont think ~30mil for a mastered IS mech is acceptable id be quite willing to grind and fork over ~30mil for a heavy-assault clan mech. I just hope they're released before 3050 IRL.

[Deathlike]

Kushko, on 31 August 2013 - 10:46 AM, said:

The one up side to this for me is Clan mechs not having variants so i really hope PGI dont try to force the 3 variant skill system down our throats with them. And tbh while i dont think ~30mil for a mastered IS mech is acceptable id be quite willing to grind and fork over ~30mil for a heavy-assault clan mech. I just hope they're released before 3050 IRL.

That's not the case... Clan Mechs have "alternate configs", so something like the infamous Madcat/Timber Wolf had a very popular stock build in the Madcat-D (2 Clan ERPPC + 4 Clan SSRM6).

Even the Thor/Summoner had a very popular variant in the Thor-C (UAC20s anyone?).

This is unavoidable.

Edited by Deathlike, 31 August 2013 - 02:14 PM.

[Royalewithcheese]

Jammerben87, on 30 August 2013 - 02:00 AM, said:

girlfriends

Sorry bro PGI demands that you take a vow of celibacy to unlock things in their robot game.