333 replies to this topic

[gregsolidus]

A part of F2P is kneecapping the player's progress, working as intended.

[Bront]

gregsolidus, on 15 October 2014 - 03:34 PM, said:

A part of F2P is kneecapping the player's progress, working as intended.

But they already do that with the extreme limit of 4 mech bays. Using my math earlier, you do the extreme grind of about 24 million cbills a mech, and in 160 hours, you've got 4 mech bays filled with maxed out, tweaked out, moduled out mechs. And you're done. A lot of grind, a small limit, and now I need to spend money. Reduce the grind, and folks hit the bay limit faster and feel that they can fill mechbays fast enough that there's a reason to buy more, and boom, you've turned a non-paying player into a paying player.

[Alek Ituin]

Endo should be 1.5 million, DHS should be 250k.

Endo is optional, it's only necessary when you absolutely need those last few tons to make the build. DHS is abso-f**kin-lutely mandatory to even play on a majority of our maps, unlike Endo.


Mandatory upgrades should be cheaper than optional upgrades, not more expensive.

[NNQM]

I actually wish the outcome per match was way less than the current one. It is frustratingly easy to earn the c-bills for another top-tier mech (one or two days of intense play is just nothing of a chalange), so getting say another Atlas for my stable gives such a low happiness now. Everybody can pilot any mech at almost no cost/effort, and this makes me feel playing a counter strikes with robots, not the Battletech. I would love saving my c-bills months and months along, waiting for another great mech to put my heands on - that would give the game a motivation it deserves. Just my very own opinoin though.

[gregsolidus]

Bront, on 15 October 2014 - 03:40 PM, said:

But they already do that with the extreme limit of 4 mech bays. Using my math earlier, you do the extreme grind of about 24 million cbills a mech, and in 160 hours, you've got 4 mech bays filled with maxed out, tweaked out, moduled out mechs. And you're done. A lot of grind, a small limit, and now I need to spend money. Reduce the grind, and folks hit the bay limit faster and feel that they can fill mechbays fast enough that there's a reason to buy more, and boom, you've turned a non-paying player into a paying player.

While I don't take umbrage with your point your logic assumes a player wants more than 4 bays to use beyond storing variants they temporarily need for mastery and technically don't need to modify or even use or that they even want more than four mechs to begin with. Some people don't Pokewarrior. Hell, the King Crab will be the second mech I legitimately own and I did just fine since CB till now without upgrading my Centurion beyond basic.

Edited by gregsolidus, 15 October 2014 - 04:15 PM.

[Livewyr]

I think that is the idea behind encouraging... "premium" and "hero mechs"

[cSand]

Well, a couple days of premium time cost next to nothing and you can earn enough significantly more.

IMO, if you don't pay with $$, you pay with time

your choice!

[Livewyr]

cSand, on 15 October 2014 - 04:17 PM, said:

Well, a couple days of premium time cost next to nothing and you can earn enough significantly more.

IMO, if you don't pay with $$, you pay with time

your choice!

^This
Just think, they could make it so you cannot do certain maps without premium! (or game modes, or any other thing like that.. I have seen games do it.. lol)

[Bront]

gregsolidus, on 15 October 2014 - 04:12 PM, said:

While I don't take umbrage with your point your logic assumes a player wants more than 4 bays to use beyond storing variants they temporarily need for mastery and technically don't need to modify or even use or that they even want more than four mechs to begin with. Some people don't Pokewarrior. Hell, the King Crab will be the second mech I legitimately own and I did just fine since CB till now without upgrading my Centurion beyond basic.

THen you never spend money anyway most likely, While the game should cater to you to a point (as it appears to), you're not he target money demographic anyway.

cSand, on 15 October 2014 - 04:17 PM, said:

Well, a couple days of premium time cost next to nothing and you can earn enough significantly more.

IMO, if you don't pay with $$, you pay with time

your choice!

There's a balance between grind being easy enough that anyone can do it, and hard enough that it's discouraging. I think MWO leans towards the later more than the former, as it is one of the big negitives I hear about the game, that it just takes too long to grind stuff.

[Mothykins]

VanillaG, on 15 October 2014 - 03:24 PM, said:

You are over exaggerating the cost of the additional mechs. The other Shadowhawks go for a little over 4mil a piece so you can reuse your XL engine between all three of them so they go down to around 6mil a piece depending on what you want to do with them. Once you have certain amount of equipment it barely costs you anything to play Mech Barbies.

... Allow me to point you to Clan Mechs, and the steep upfront cost that can't be mitigated by this. I:


As for the people who are all "Well, this is how FTP works, spend money and you'll earn faster"

I own two Hero Mechs. And a non-free Champion. Does hardly anything to mitigate the grind. It'll take me THREE MONTHS to afford all the Mad Doge variants for Cbills ( I do not have the money at this point to drop on clans OR I WOULD) which is mildly irritating, as I realllly want to try out some of the IS mediums in the intern but CAN'T without setting myself back a month or two.

A lot of the folks who say this also seem to have Badges from Pre-order Packs though. Here's what's going on; They have chassis. Lots of them. So they just play and play, and have fun with their toys, and it might take them a month or two to master each chassis (unless they play lots, then maybe a few weekends). In which time they've saved up massive amounts of Cbills and can afford anything they want. They never see the grind again, because they bought enough 'mechs to never have a point where they weren't trying something new.

Meanwhile, people like me, Who've sunk $100 or so into the game over a year, are still grinding away. I:

[ImperialKnight]

Bront, on 15 October 2014 - 04:26 PM, said:

There's a balance between grind being easy enough that anyone can do it, and hard enough that it's discouraging. I think MWO leans towards the later more than the former, as it is one of the big negitives I hear about the game, that it just takes too long to grind stuff.

Go and play Hawken and War Thunder for a few weeks then come back and we'll have this discussion again.

Cavale, on 15 October 2014 - 04:28 PM, said:

A lot of the folks who say this also seem to have Badges from Pre-order Packs though. Here's what's going on; They have chassis. Lots of them. So they just play and play, and have fun with their toys, and it might take them a month or two to master each chassis (unless they play lots, then maybe a few weekends). In which time they've saved up massive amounts of Cbills and can afford anything they want. They never see the grind again, because they bought enough 'mechs to never have a point where they weren't trying something new.

I like how this argument comes from someone who bought a preorder pack himself.

Edited by knightsljx, 15 October 2014 - 04:35 PM.

[Scratx]

Cavale, on 15 October 2014 - 04:28 PM, said:

... Allow me to point you to Clan Mechs, and the steep upfront cost that can't be mitigated by this. I:


As for the people who are all "Well, this is how FTP works, spend money and you'll earn faster"

I own two Hero Mechs. And a non-free Champion. Does hardly anything to mitigate the grind. It'll take me THREE MONTHS to afford all the Mad Doge variants for Cbills ( I do not have the money at this point to drop on clans OR I WOULD) which is mildly irritating, as I realllly want to try out some of the IS mediums in the intern but CAN'T without setting myself back a month or two.

A lot of the folks who say this also seem to have Badges from Pre-order Packs though. Here's what's going on; They have chassis. Lots of them. So they just play and play, and have fun with their toys, and it might take them a month or two to master each chassis (unless they play lots, then maybe a few weekends). In which time they've saved up massive amounts of Cbills and can afford anything they want. They never see the grind again, because they bought enough 'mechs to never have a point where they weren't trying something new.

Meanwhile, people like me, Who've sunk $100 or so into the game over a year, are still grinding away. I:

Yeah, Clan mechs are all up-front cost. On the other hand, they have next to zero hidden cost, and many of the configurations can even be used stock without feeling gimped.

But I absolutely see the grind... and I actually feel the better way to handling it isn't necessarily raising c-bills but instead revamping the skills so the difference between basics and elite isn't so stark. That way it wouldn't be effectively mandatory to buy 3 of the same chassis anymore if you want to be competitive.

Given that we now have more chassis than there were variants back when I joined in closed beta, I really can't see how this would hurt. In fact it'd give more of an incentive to branch out and try out more mechs.

[Angel of Annihilation]

I have a tendency to agree with the costs being out of line, especially for modules which can cost a mechs worth of C-bills each and you need multiples for each mech (roughly 15 million C-bills per mech if I wanted a unique set of modules for each mech without having to swap).

Now earnings might not seem out of line but you have to consider that this game currently has 141 unique, non-hero variants in the game. once the Clan Wave 2 release will will have an additional 12 more. Also we have the upcoming 3 King Crab variants plus we already know they are working on at least one more IS Assault and Heavy mechs for release in the near future. That brings our total up to 162 at the very least, likely by the end of this year.

Now if we start adding up the potential cost if we wanted to own one of each and fully outfit them we are talking probably an average cost of 25 million C-bills per mech (cost of mech, upgrades, equipment modifications and a full set of modules) and this might be a bit low. At 25 million C-bills each x 162 mechs we have the small sum of 4.050 BILLION C-BILLS.

At the 140k C-bills I average I earn per match that will only require me to play 28,928 matches. If each match only on average take 10 mins and I do nothing but play match after match after match (No down time building mechs or testing) playing 28,928 matches would only take me 4,821 hours of game play or only 200 full non-stop 24 hour days of game sessions. If I rather calculate it on an average 3 hours per day that I can usually play on average, that means I will only have to play 1607 game sessions. Therefore if I play 3 hours a day, 365 days a year, it will only take me 4.4 Years to consume the existing and announced content in game. Of course this doesn't count the anticipated cost of actually participating in CW either.


I mean even a modest stable of 30-40 mechs, fully outfits which is what most people will eventually likely have, will cost a player roughly a billion c-bills If he doesn't heavily invest real money into buying shortcuts like the Clan pack. Even then you still have significant outfiting costs for things like the DHS, Endo, FF and XL engine upgrades on IS mechs and the Omnipods on Clan mechs, not to mention costs for buying weapons to change load outs. Even if the only mechs you owned were cash purchased, you would still probably need to invest 300-400 million C-bills for these sort of costs plus modules.

So yeah, it is pretty darn obvious we don't make enough C-bills or at the very least things such as modules should be more like 250k each, not 3-6 million each.

[Burktross]

NNQM, on 15 October 2014 - 03:49 PM, said:

I actually wish the outcome per match was way less than the current one. It is frustratingly easy to earn the c-bills for another top-tier mech (one or two days of intense play is just nothing of a chalange), so getting say another Atlas for my stable gives such a low happiness now. Everybody can pilot any mech at almost no cost/effort, and this makes me feel playing a counter strikes with robots, not the Battletech. I would love saving my c-bills months and months along, waiting for another great mech to put my heands on - that would give the game a motivation it deserves. Just my very own opinoin though.

I can safely say you're the odd man out. If you want to punish yourself, make an empty group and throw your cbills into coffers. People don't have as much patience (rightfully so) and time for months worth of play adding up to one mech.

[gregsolidus]

Who is going to have 40 separate mechs?!?

[Zfailboat]

I have no problem with paying for Premium time, nor do I have a problem with the C-Bill rewards - I actually think these are both about right. I DO have a problem with paying for "Premium Time" and still getting shafted on when you can buy mechs with in game C-Bills.

Games with subscriptions do NOT make you then buy the newest content. Sure they might have a new patch once every 18 months for 60 bucks. But this is NOT twice or 3 times a year at 200 + dollars.

IMO they need to reward people who buy premium time better. Something along the lines of - people who bought at least 6 months premium time between Jan and December 2014 get 50% of packages or some such.

Make people get something like a loyalty bonus for "Subscribing". Not just - oh hey more c-bills that you can only really a benefit if you don't drop $250.00 in 1 hit.

[Mothykins]

knightsljx, on 15 October 2014 - 04:30 PM, said:

I like how this argument comes from someone who bought a preorder pack himself.

Not sure if being honest or sarcastic.

[Green Mamba]

Yeah during Open Beta C bill earnings were much much better.I know they want you to burn MC instead on all the Mechs

[Agent 0 Fortune]

How many matches/hours to earn enough GXP to unlock all those module slots? I think that is your bottleneck

[White Bear 84]

Hmmm I typically earn between 150,000 to 200,000 per match, with the occasional 250,000 round thrown in there.. ..with premo you are laughing.

All you need is lots of assists, spots, damage.. ..if you have it TAG it and NARC it. Save your teammates with savior kills and blow off lots of components.

I wouldn't say not to more $$$$, but easy enough to save up for a new mech already.

That said, I have 99 problems but having 117 mechs in my mechbay aint one..