It's actually like 1,000 MC for a premium color most of the time iirc. This thread and my own experience with wanting colors, but not being willing to expend the amount of MC they cost kind of makes me wish I could view the demand curve for mech cosmetics. You know, as the price goes down, the number of people willing to purchase a given item will rise, and I kind of wonder if the current price has been calculated to give maximum profit to PGI or if it was just something they set and hoped for the best.
For example, if 1,000 people buy premium colors at 1,000 MC a shot, that's 1,000,000 MC expended. If lowering the price by half to 500 (or 250 for most colors) MC a pop attracts more than 1,000 people like me, they'll have more than broken even on the sale. I suppose that the part I do not know is whether or not cutting the price by half is the ideal point of the demand curve to attract the amount of buyers that will expend the maximum total amount of MC, and that part is difficult to calculate even if one were to have all the data from color sales in the past because you have to take into account people who already bought the colors, people who would buy them even if the price didn't change but are hoping for a lower one and basically playing a waiting game with the company, and people who wouldn't buy the colors at any price.
Economics is a sloppy, complicated, discipline for something labeled a science.
I suppose from a personal perspective, for me to spend MC on colors and patterns, four things would have to happen in a certain order. First, a Locust hero must be made. Second and third, said hero and TDK must go on sale. Fourth, colors must go on sale. I suppose that TDK going on sale prior to the creation of a Locust hero would be sufficient for the purpose of my budget plans as well, though hardly ideal. Heh, there exists a decent chance that I'd break down and buy the hypothetical Locust hero at regular price as well, if it looks particularly appealing to me. That goes back to what I said about the company and consumer playing a waiting game. It's kind of like playing chicken and seeing who elects to spend money/lower prices first.
So, first hero mechs, then colors, is what I'm saying about my personal priorities. The practical use of the C-bill boost outweighs the novelty of painting my mech like I used to do irl.
Also, to the OP, yes, they are expensive, and yes, that does suck sometimes, but that does not mean that the company is trying to screw you out of money for nothing. The company is concerned with its own survival first, and that means putting customers pretty high on its priority list. If they are offering products at a given price, usually this is because it has been determined that this price is the ideal one at which to sell said products by a department devoted to that kind of math. Considering that the game lets people like me skate along and not pay anything at all if I don't want to, the quality of the product is far superior to WoT imho, and lacks the pay to play aspects that I distinctly recall from my higher-tier games there. It really is the best of both worlds here despite still being in a sort of evolutionary process of balancing rife with growing pains.
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SecretlyAFish, on 02 October 2014 - 06:17 PM, said:
