157 replies to this topic

[Fut]

Prosperity Park, on 08 September 2014 - 07:48 PM, said:

You sound jealous. I don't think you are, but you sound it with that tone.

******* amazing that you were able to notice their tone via text.

[shintakie]

Roland, on 09 September 2014 - 11:35 AM, said:

I have no opinion regarding specific prices, but I am a firm believer that you should be able to grind ANY content (barring purely cosmetic elements) through purely in-game effort.

That is, you should be able to play a F2P game without spending one cent, and drive ANY mech in the game. Further, you should be able to drive it as soon as anyone else, and not have to wait for it to be released for CBills at a later date.

Now, it may cost you a MOUNTAIN of cbills to purchase certain things... that's perfectly fine. But you should ALWAYS be able to get them via purely in-game means.

This is what keeps a game from being P2W.


And the reality is, tons of folks will still pay money for those things, because they have more money than they do time to grind in game. That's the fundamental basis of good F2P titles.

That's actually the STO model. Everything ever is purchasable with in game money. Literally everything, even costumes and such. Its a great model I wish more games would adopt.

[Garandos]

shintakie, on 09 September 2014 - 11:48 AM, said:

That's actually the STO model. Everything ever is purchasable with in game money. Literally everything, even costumes and such. Its a great model I wish more games would adopt.

Thats not true, i played STO for about 2 years.

There are a LOT of things you can not buy for ingame money (which are energy credits)

What you CAN do, is trade your Dilithium (for those who do not know it, a limited ressource, needed for high end gear)
for Points you can use in the store.

But those points have to be traded to you by other players, so, someone HAD to purchase them first, meaning:

You buy it with hard earned cash, maybe not YOUR hard earned cash, but someone had to put it up.

[Torgun]

Garandos, on 09 September 2014 - 12:22 PM, said:

Thats not true, i played STO for about 2 years.

There are a LOT of things you can not buy for ingame money (which are energy credits)

What you CAN do, is trade your Dilithium (for those who do not know it, a limited ressource, needed for high end gear)
for Points you can use in the store.

But those points have to be traded to you by other players, so, someone HAD to purchase them first, meaning:

You buy it with hard earned cash, maybe not YOUR hard earned cash, but someone had to put it up.

At least they had a way for players to buy and sell items to each other. We only have mechlab that has monopoly and will rip us off every time we sell something.

[Ph30nix]

shintakie, on 09 September 2014 - 11:32 AM, said:

When you say 1 dollar for a light, what exactly do you mean? Do you mean 1 dollar for a Commando or 1 dollar for a Jenner?

If its the former, does that mean you really want PGI to sell a mech for 50 cents? Do you not realize how bad of an idea that is?

I'm all for mechs being too expensive and needing to be brought down in price, but you're absolutely insane if you think a business model like yours would be sustainable.

At the end of the day, halving price of mechs across the board would be a great start. A Boars Head costing 20 dollars isn't really the end of world. Its about as much as other F2P games price their more expensive commodities.

think of how many mechs there are in the mechwarrior world
if PGI streamlined creation process they could churn out new mechs VERY FAST
and how does $1.00 per mech equate to $0.50? and since we need 3 vairants most people would buy them all at once anyways so $3.00 right off the bat.

Don't forget these are items that really cost very little to create (people in their spare time using same resources have created mechs in hours that look just as good as the PGI ones there are even threads of people showing them off have to hunt for one i remember one guy made a king crab and it looks sweet) and once created can be sold again and again with no additional costs.
Now true they need to make sure to balance income vs operating expenses and we dont know the total playerbase
but frankly Heavy advertising + lower costs would create a fairly constant stream of income i feel.

Oh and basing opinion no prices of OTHER F2P games is not a smart thing because frankly just about every other F2P game is a massive ripoff in itself and people are just stupidly shell out the cash for some dumb reason.

[Garandos]

Ph30nix, on 09 September 2014 - 12:52 PM, said:

Oh and basing opinion no prices of OTHER F2P games is not a smart thing because frankly just about every other F2P game is a massive ripoff in itself and people are just stupidly shell out the cash for some dumb reason.

Thats simply NOT true at all o_O

take league of legends, as horrible as i find the game, because of its community, it is nowhere a rip off,
f2p and p2p get acess to the SAME stuff at the SAME time.

there is no pay to use first, there is no pay to get "special bonus nobody else will get"
there are even NO absurd pricetags.

STO is the same, nothing buys you any early acess, nothing buys you "special stuff" and nothing is priced as insane as here.

If i buy a 3 ship pack in STO i pay 50,-

and i am SET for endgame, with 3 variants of one ship, so i can tailor my playstile to my current needs.

Here? 50,- get me about TWO hero Mechs, with the need to buy at least 4 other variants to level those two up.

PLUS thanks to 3*4 i am not even really free to choose what to play, except, i take longer then average wait times.

And about "take 1,- for a mech" ahum, not a good idea.

Thats a thing, well, you need, with everything you create, to aim at an breake even point, which is, when the investment starts paying for itself.

If you take 1 Dollar for something which does cost, lets be REALLY low here 20K to make, you need to sell 20K Units ONLY to break even(!)

this does NOT include any money made, still, while you wait for the Break even to occur, you have ongoing costs, bills to pay and stuff, so you can not simply say "Lets hope we reach 20K sales soon!"

[Kjudoon]

Vanity items should be cheap and abundant. ( <$1 for individual items and <$5 for collections )
Impatience items should be expensive ( >$50 per item or >$200 for collections)
Limited items (like Hero Mechs) should be moderately priced. ( Fill the gap between $10-30 )

When you develop a PvE game, you can sell bonus content packages as long as they're cheap.
Consider a very cheap subscription game for access to all the items for those who like that style of play

PGI, remember, this is a luxury and that means in sour economic times like this, people will choose necessities over your product, so price accordingly.

[headclot]

Just giving this a bump so that it does not fall below the first page

[Tombstoner]

repeatable Solo mission packs with performance driven rewards like mechs.
unique weapons( -1 ton, -1 heat,- 1 weapon count twords ghost heat, longer range, faster cycle, limit one per mech)
unique hard point placment limit one per mech....
true to form franken mechs.... attach another mechs arm modle to your mech.
funny walk or run gait.
color chainging cammo. start as red but drift into blue then black finaly white.
player painted camo design with pgi aproval of cource.

[Budor]

They could sell more stuff to generate more money.

I would buy hangar fluff: new hangar, hangar decorations, hangar techs, hangar backgrounds, hangar sound package...

[Ph30nix]

Garandos, on 09 September 2014 - 01:00 PM, said:

Thats simply NOT true at all o_O

take league of legends, as horrible as i find the game, because of its community, it is nowhere a rip off,
f2p and p2p get acess to the SAME stuff at the SAME time.

there is no pay to use first, there is no pay to get "special bonus nobody else will get"
there are even NO absurd pricetags.

STO is the same, nothing buys you any early acess, nothing buys you "special stuff" and nothing is priced as insane as here.

If i buy a 3 ship pack in STO i pay 50,-

and i am SET for endgame, with 3 variants of one ship, so i can tailor my playstile to my current needs.

Here? 50,- get me about TWO hero Mechs, with the need to buy at least 4 other variants to level those two up.

PLUS thanks to 3*4 i am not even really free to choose what to play, except, i take longer then average wait times.

And about "take 1,- for a mech" ahum, not a good idea.

Thats a thing, well, you need, with everything you create, to aim at an breake even point, which is, when the investment starts paying for itself.

If you take 1 Dollar for something which does cost, lets be REALLY low here 20K to make, you need to sell 20K Units ONLY to break even(!)

this does NOT include any money made, still, while you wait for the Break even to occur, you have ongoing costs, bills to pay and stuff, so you can not simply say "Lets hope we reach 20K sales soon!"

well LOL and STO are in a way doing thigns right
in LOL you dont have to spend a dime on anything you can over time earn anything you want ingame they dont even have a "mechbay" limiter
in STO (need to play that again) you can again buy everything with in game currency now they do have the limit you have to trade dilithium for the premium currency which for that someone else has to buy the premium currency.
but there are people who will buy the premium all the time and its very easy to convert dilitium to premium so you can go that route.

as for the cost, again we have already established PGI is horrible when it comes to setting costs and doing just about anything.
There are people in their spare time who can make quality maps for marginal costs and as i said people who with same resources have made mechs in a few hours that are on par with what PGI offers.

if they greatly streamlined their mech making processes (which they should) they again can easily churn out mechs in hours if they want and have new mechs every week. So at that point cost should be pennies each.

Also yea you would have to sell 20k to break even, but if they are $1 chances are alot of people would say screw it and buy one. Again it really depends on the player base, but thats also why i say they need more aggressive advertising.
to get a nice rotation of new players who come in spend $3-$5 play for awhile and either stick around and continue spending money or leave and they still made a few bucks from them.

OH and i will say Heros in MWO you also have to factor in the built in *semi* premium time for them. when i got my death knell i was in that thing for a few months straight with no premium time active so it paid off big time.

other games you buy the thing for $30 and thats it you just get the hero there is no continued benefit.

Edited by Ph30nix, 09 September 2014 - 03:14 PM.

[headclot]

Hey everyone,

Keep up this awesome discussion. I really want MWO to continue to be a game that we play for years to come

Edited by headclot, 09 September 2014 - 06:19 PM.

[Dark Jackal]

headclot, on 08 September 2014 - 09:43 PM, said:

100% this

I'm not.

The guy in the youtube has no concept of what businesses use and mean by Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. Does anyone actually believe institutions that have a mutual relationship with respected clients want to risk their business by calling them "whales"? As what I have on the side to the left by my name suggests the level of user I am in relation to the wider MWO community is very simple business policy and not something dreamed up by siphon hosing FTP like they're downloading people's money. If you understand how credit card companies work, a real business model, then it become clear how it aims to achieve on a purely business model each level of engagement and the rewards.

I never liked this guy's video as it has too many generalizations, makes too many assumptions, and falls onto false logical arguments. It is akin to saying A = B, B =C, thus A = C which is actually not proof of anything considering most likely A does not equal C in true actuality.

[headclot]

Dark Jackal, on 09 September 2014 - 06:30 PM, said:

I'm not.

The guy in the youtube has no concept of what businesses use and mean by Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. Does anyone actually believe institutions that have a mutual relationship with respected clients want to risk their business by calling them "whales"? As what I have on the side to the left by my name suggests the level of user I am in relation to the wider MWO community is very simple business policy and not something dreamed up by siphon hosing FTP like they're downloading people's money. If you understand how credit card companies work, a real business model, then it become clear how it aims to achieve on a purely business model each level of engagement and the rewards.

I never liked this guy's video as it has too many generalizations, makes too many assumptions, and falls onto false logical arguments. It is akin to saying A = B, B =C, thus A = C which is actually not proof of anything considering most likely A does not equal C in true actuality.

What would you suggest then?

[Pjwned]

Lily from animove, on 09 September 2014 - 07:39 AM, said:

A lot of games offer renting weapons over buying them even if this is more expensive. Thats othing unusual. And how is it insulting? Someone may rent a mech for one time. and buy the full price one. another gyu may only be bale to spare lower amounts of money per month renting the mech once for 7 days a month. and after a year gets it for free. Nothing wrong there.

How many of those games let you rent equipment by making you pay real money though? I know there's some Korean grindfest MMO stuff (bleh) that does that, but to be frank those games might as well not exist for the sake of comparison because of how different the games and the demographics are, and I can't think of other examples of games that do that.

As for it being insulting it's more about how much of a ripoff it would be to rent something 10 times before owning it and end up paying significantly more money than if you had just bought it. I also just don't like the concept of renting mechs much personally, especially not for real money, and especially when trial mechs are already rental mechs in a way anyways.

[Pjwned]

Jacmac, on 09 September 2014 - 07:47 AM, said:

You guys do realize that mech sales are a zero sum game for PGI right? There comes a point at which long time players don't want any more of them (how many people want a thousand mechs in their inventory?), and besides that, the canon is all used up. PGI's only way of survival at that point is pay to something-you-didn't-use-to-pay-for. It seems obvious that there is little or no growth in the playerbase and there would have to be something major released to turn that around; sales and lower prices aren't going to do much for new player growth.

Sales and lower prices (for MC, let's put aside c-bill costs and such here) alone may not do much for player growth, but if players (like me) feel that the cost is too high for what you get then they're not going to spend much money, if any at all.

Onmyoudo, on 09 September 2014 - 08:16 AM, said:

I am another person wanting lower prices. If all mechs were a third the price they are now, more in the "Steam sale" range than the "Just released yesterday" range of prices for other, full games, I'd be much more willing to buy and spend MC. It would also take new players a hell of a lot further, rather than having them MC buy an Atlas and get destroyed, then quit in rage.

It's hard for me to agree much more with this, the value of buying MC to get some stuff is, to be frank, pathetically low, so you end up needing to spend a lot of money to really get anywhere that way, and to me that seems like a bad business model. Of course you can still make do without spending MC if you go to a lot of trouble grinding out matches in frustration, but then that means you're not spending money.

Techorse, on 09 September 2014 - 08:56 AM, said:

On the topic of lowering prices, maybe they could just give more MC per package instead of lowering all the in-game costs.

So basically you'd still get twice the bang for your buck if the $100 package gave 50,000 instead of 25,000 MC, but they don't have to go back and micro-manage all the prices if they need to shift them up or down. They can just change the amount of MC in each package instead.

On the topic of lowering prices, maybe they could simply just give more MC in each package rather than change the in-game prices themselves.

So for example, give 50,000 MC for the $100 package.

That way they don't have to change every last price in the game, they can just change the overall cost percentagewise by giving more MC in the package.

I realize it's a business decision but personally I don't like the fact that I have to spend $7 minimum to get a package of MC, I would like to be able to spend less at a time; it wouldn't hurt to also increase the amount of MC given per package.

Roland, on 09 September 2014 - 11:35 AM, said:

I have no opinion regarding specific prices, but I am a firm believer that you should be able to grind ANY content (barring purely cosmetic elements) through purely in-game effort.

That is, you should be able to play a F2P game without spending one cent, and drive ANY mech in the game. Further, you should be able to drive it as soon as anyone else, and not have to wait for it to be released for CBills at a later date.

Now, it may cost you a MOUNTAIN of cbills to purchase certain things... that's perfectly fine. But you should ALWAYS be able to get them via purely in-game means.

This is what keeps a game from being P2W.


And the reality is, tons of folks will still pay money for those things, because they have more money than they do time to grind in game. That's the fundamental basis of good F2P titles.

I do mostly agree with this (although I do think prices are too high) but personally I don't see a big problem with releasing mechs for MC first as long as the mechs are available for c-bills within a reasonable amount of time. I do think the clan mech release schedule is a bit of an egregious example though, the c-bill/MC release for each mech should've been spaced apart by 1 week instead of 2 if you ask me.

Torgun, on 09 September 2014 - 12:45 PM, said:

At least they had a way for players to buy and sell items to each other. We only have mechlab that has monopoly and will rip us off every time we sell something.

I'm honestly not really seeing how a player-run market would be much better in this game, not to mention it seems like a big hassle to implement properly.

Edited by Pjwned, 09 September 2014 - 09:43 PM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

Dark Jackal, on 09 September 2014 - 06:30 PM, said:

A = B, B =C, thus A = C which is actually not proof of anything considering most likely A does not equal C in true actuality.

If A does not equal C in 'true actuality', then A never equaled B or B never equaled C in the first place, that's how logic works.

Either way they use abstractions and generalizations for a reason. With specificity comes a narrowing of scope, you can no longer apply general rules. With any sort of design field you see this a lot, because different scenarios require different attention. You don't want to bother with details until you get the top level done. No sane person designs a large system from bottom-up, you go top-down.

Honestly considering they are in the field of consulting with game companies to help make their games better and the fact that what they say does make sense, I'm more willing to bet they have the more valid opinion in regards to F2P than you do about Credit Card companies (which survive under entirely different circumstances). Not to mention if all you took away from that video is that companies actually call whales, whales, then I think you are focusing entirely on the wrong thing.

Edited by WM Quicksilver, 09 September 2014 - 09:14 PM.

[Dark Jackal]

WM Quicksilver, on 09 September 2014 - 09:13 PM, said:

If A does not equal C in 'true actuality', then A never equaled B or B never equaled C in the first place, that's how logic works.

Ah you see, you have to see the caveat on the point I was making. This is easily missed by folks that have not taken any college level history course and maybe did not have the benefit of a professor make a point about how people come to determine what A, B, C are and what makes them equal within their own minds.

Reality of information is not the same as someone logically putting it together for you AND you decide to believe him without doing anything part to understand the subject matter. In other words, I was saying not to take whatever the guys says at face value because his works are solely on logical arrangement rather than provide actual knowledge. Sure he believes he has some insights but also feels not to provide any tangible proof of his arguments for you. Reality demands proof not just mere belief.

There is a saying that knowledge is power. Having knowledge provides you a means to figure out on your own and come to your own conclusions about the objectivity of his statements. That being said, you have to do your own homework and ask the right questions. For example, have you ever come across a successful Fortune 500 Company that considers it's Platinum members whales?

So why believe this whale of a tale?

Edited by Dark Jackal, 09 September 2014 - 09:33 PM.

[Dark Jackal]

headclot, on 09 September 2014 - 06:43 PM, said:

What would you suggest then?

I have already made suggestions in another Free to Play thread and that is basically not having PGI re-invent the wheel and to not be ashamed to stand on the should of giants that have made FTP a success. I'm sure PGI is actively doing that anyway because we all want to implement the successes of others because we know it works and that is how they started their project from the get-go. This is no different than in any other business as the real rewards are usually being first to market for a product before all similar competing products go live to market.

I don't see the benefit of some person on youtube with a modulated voice without any sort of face to face interaction just provide animated slides of drawings without tangible examples that can provide people a means to come to the same conclusions, i.e. proof.

[Pjwned]

Dark Jackal, on 09 September 2014 - 09:32 PM, said:

Ah you see, you have to see the caveat on the point I was making. This is easily missed by folks that have not taken any college level history course and maybe did not have the benefit of a professor make a point about how people come to determine what A, B, C are and what makes them equal within their own minds.

Reality of information is not the same as someone logically putting it together for you AND you decide to believe him without doing anything part to understand the subject matter. In other words, I was saying not to take whatever the guys says at face value because his works are solely on logical arrangement rather than provide actual knowledge. Sure he believes he has some insights but also feels not to provide any tangible proof of his arguments for you. Reality demands proof not just mere belief.

There is a saying that knowledge is power. Having knowledge provides you a means to figure out on your own and come to your own conclusions about the objectivity of his statements. That being said, you have to do your own homework and ask the right questions. For example, have you ever come across a successful Fortune 500 Company that considers it's Platinum members whales?

So why believe this whale of a tale?

It seems (emphasis there because I'm not actually sure) like you're saying people should believe you more despite not really providing any relevant, tangible proof for your argument either.