333 replies to this topic

[Angel of Annihilation]

gregsolidus, on 15 October 2014 - 04:40 PM, said:

Who is going to have 40 separate mechs?!?

I have 41 currently not including the dozen or so I have bought, disliked and sold. Also have another 9 on the way with my Loki pack and also 3 more Freebies incoming. Would like to own about a dozen more of the currently released ones but earning 140k C-bills per match only goes so far.

[Ultimax]

Bront, on 15 October 2014 - 03:05 PM, said:

So, back to our earnings, at 100,000 a drop, that's about 440 drops to earn the cbills to build those mechs. At 10 minutes a drop, that's 4400 minutes, or 73 hours, 20 minutes of game time. To build 3 medium mechs, and outfit modules on one of them.




My point is this. The lowest amount of time spent in the game with the above numbers is just under 42 (31 with the new player bonus) hours to master 3 medium mechs.

Free to play is aimed at people who can't afford to spend money on games, generally these are the younger crowd (not always) and they tend to have a solid amount of free time.

So, 42 hours for the average free to play players should be peanuts.



Yes, playing a lot of mechs is part of the fun and part of the goal of the pricing scheme to have things "for free" is that they want to keep you in the game for longer.


The most important thing is that they retain players over long periods.

Edited by Ultimatum X, 15 October 2014 - 05:16 PM.

[Blakkstar]

Actually, the most effective business use of the F2P model would be for PGI to make chassis slightly cheaper, al la carte weapons and equipment more expensive, and require c-bill unlocks for the skill tree. It would drive garage slot sales while allowing casual players to get into new chassis faster, but toughen the grind toward mastery and min/maxing.

(Runs before people start throwing things)

[Mothykins]

Ultimatum X, on 15 October 2014 - 05:09 PM, said:

Free to play is aimed at people who can't afford to spend money on games, generally these are the younger crowd (not always) and they tend to have a solid amount of free time.

So, 42 hours for the average free to play players should be peanuts.

Yes, playing a lot of mechs is part of the fun and part of the goal of the pricing scheme to have things "for free" is that they want to keep you in the game for longer.

The most important thing is that they retain players over long periods.

Pssst, the people with low income and the "younger crowd" are the people with the least amount of Free time generally. I fit both. Reason I'm on so much is I'm between jobs and near a computer (Which means all these posts are between job search related activities. Which are between the 6-8 hours a day I've been spending fixing my house...)

Making $15 an hour full time I needed to get up at five, drive an hour, then spend from 8-12 hours working. Then an hour or more home, household chores, etc. I had, maybe two, three hours to me. that's it. My paycheck was eaten by my car insurance ($210 a month) fuel costs ($1.30 a Litre, so $4.92 a US Gallon. So maybe about $200-400 a month depending on traffic, leisure (Town is 15 minutes away, I live in a really dumb location of the GVRD.)) Rent ($800 a Month) Food ($200 a Month); At this point I'm nearly red lining. And no time to spend on the game, nor money. At $15 an hour.

My friend, who works retail, is also in school. He literally has no free time and his current forms of enjoyment are halfheartedly listening to movies on Netflix while studying. No money or time.

My other Friend, who is actually in highschool, has no free time due to course load, which, if you don't know, have gotten heavier and heavier in the last ten years; what was required for me to graduate six years ago is now half of what is required now.

The people with time have money. The people With Money have time.

The people without one don't have the other.

[Hospy]

The grind from me nowadays is acceptable because whenever I want to pick up a new chassis, I pick the third best variant, skill it up, then sell, purchase the next, etc until I end up with the one I want, swapping in my other mechs for variety.

For newcomers, there's a pretty massive grind to build a working stable of mechs without wanting to stab yourself in the eye, because after your cadet bonus ends, you're looking anywhere from 50-100 matches, in the same mech, before you can figure out what to do.

I don't mind the first situation, the second is just a horrible barrier to entry for new players.

Biggest thing I can recommend is either making the double heat sink upgrade free or at at least reduce the for ice considerably. You're basically faced with the prospect of having a lot of horrible matches for you and everyone on your team unless you pay the 1.5 million cbill tax.

[Ultimax]

Cavale, on 15 October 2014 - 05:25 PM, said:

Pssst, the people with low income and the "younger crowd" are the people with the least amount of Free time generally. I fit both. Reason I'm on so much is I'm between jobs and near a computer (Which means all these posts are between job search related activities. Which are between the 6-8 hours a day I've been spending fixing my house...)

Making $15 an hour full time I needed to get up at five, drive an hour, then spend from 8-12 hours working. Then an hour or more home, household chores, etc. I had, maybe two, three hours to me. that's it. My paycheck was eaten by my car insurance ($210 a month) fuel costs ($1.30 a Litre, so $4.92 a US Gallon. So maybe about $200-400 a month depending on traffic, leisure (Town is 15 minutes away, I live in a really dumb location of the GVRD.)) Rent ($800 a Month) Food ($200 a Month); At this point I'm nearly red lining. And no time to spend on the game, nor money. At $15 an hour.

My friend, who works retail, is also in school. He literally has no free time and his current forms of enjoyment are halfheartedly listening to movies on Netflix while studying. No money or time.

My other Friend, who is actually in highschool, has no free time due to course load, which, if you don't know, have gotten heavier and heavier in the last ten years; what was required for me to graduate six years ago is now half of what is required now.

The people with time have money. The people With Money have time.

The people without one don't have the other.

My opinion is that if you have neither time nor money to invest in a hobby like video games, then you should curb your expectations on how much you will be able to attain.


If I had neither, I'd spend most of my energy into securing them.

[Alex Warden]

hm... i´m not a really good player...i´d say my matches end up at 100-150k w/o prem or hero(some better, someworse) mostly... i´m not really playingmuch ... it took me 1 week to master my Direwolfs... not that bad i´d say... at the weekends i played maybe 5 hours a day... during week, maybe 4 hours in average (i played more than usual, because i wanted that f***er done ^^)... not sure if i even played every day during that process...

what i wanna say is: if you are playing the game alot, the money just comes by doing so... if you play it less, it takes you longer,that´s for sure... if you play maybe 1 day a week for 4 hours, well... you´ll have quite some long term goals lying ahead

you can´t expect to get any mech you want easy and fast,like 1 new mech every day (mastered) ... you CAN do it, but you´ll have to pay hard cash for that... or play the game like a fanatic just to make it clear: yes, sometimes i am sick of it, too... but that´s mainly because sometimes i just don´t enjoy the game as much as i normally do ... but basically i am totally okay with how things work...

if it was sooo easy to get new mechs for ppl who barely play the game, those who play it alot would get bored really fast, because WORKING for your mechs, thus earning them, is one of the larger goals in MWO

honestly... since MWO copied the concept from there, this comparison may be allowed: i personally feel it to be way less grindy then the upper tiers in World of Tanks

plus the fact that investing in ONE hero mech (there should be at least one you might like) and maybe buying a few days of prem every now and then (say, for a weekend when you know you can play a little more than usual) speeds up things ALOT... even without premium it´s SIGNIFICANTLY easier to get your cbills...

if you wanna stay cheap and never invest any cent into this hobby, well then... you know the drill... most people around here should be old enough to know that no one in the industry ever donates anything to you without you donating to them... be happy that it´s only time, if you so chose...

Edited by Alex Warden, 15 October 2014 - 05:59 PM.

[ImperialKnight]

Cavale, on 15 October 2014 - 05:25 PM, said:

Pssst, the people with low income and the "younger crowd" are the people with the least amount of Free time generally. I fit both. Reason I'm on so much is I'm between jobs and near a computer (Which means all these posts are between job search related activities. Which are between the 6-8 hours a day I've been spending fixing my house...)

Making $15 an hour full time I needed to get up at five, drive an hour, then spend from 8-12 hours working. Then an hour or more home, household chores, etc. I had, maybe two, three hours to me. that's it. My paycheck was eaten by my car insurance ($210 a month) fuel costs ($1.30 a Litre, so $4.92 a US Gallon. So maybe about $200-400 a month depending on traffic, leisure (Town is 15 minutes away, I live in a really dumb location of the GVRD.)) Rent ($800 a Month) Food ($200 a Month); At this point I'm nearly red lining. And no time to spend on the game, nor money. At $15 an hour.

My friend, who works retail, is also in school. He literally has no free time and his current forms of enjoyment are halfheartedly listening to movies on Netflix while studying. No money or time.

My other Friend, who is actually in highschool, has no free time due to course load, which, if you don't know, have gotten heavier and heavier in the last ten years; what was required for me to graduate six years ago is now half of what is required now.

The people with time have money. The people With Money have time.

The people without one don't have the other.

And PGI should cater to people with neither time nor money because??

Stop feeling entitled. Gaming is a luxury, not a priority nor necessity in life.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

Ultimatum X, on 15 October 2014 - 05:48 PM, said:

My opinion is that if you have neither time nor money to invest in a hobby like video games, then you should curb your expectations on how much you will be able to attain.


If I had neither, I'd spend most of my energy into securing them.

Problem is, these same people can often afford the occasional $60 for a full new game or you could wait and get GOTY editions of the larger games and get all the DLC stuff on top for less than that $60. $60 gets you nowhere near that amount of satisfaction here, which is part of the problem. If they want to be compete for people's time, they need to make prices competitive too, and they simply aren't right now.

They need to reduces the taxes imposed on players in general, $10-30 isn't worth it for something that's going to require its C-Bills worth in cost just to outfit appropriately.

TF2 has done it right in most regards of F2P. Easy hurdle of becoming a paying player (less than $1), you can play as a free player and still be perfectly competitive (without any grinding, this is the key difference), cheap prices with sales/discounts constantly, some of which are constantly on sale, which isn't a bad thing.

Edited by WM Quicksilver, 15 October 2014 - 06:12 PM.

[Mothykins]

Ultimatum X, on 15 October 2014 - 05:48 PM, said:

My opinion is that if you have neither time nor money to invest in a hobby like video games, then you should curb your expectations on how much you will be able to attain.

If I had neither, I'd spend most of my energy into securing them.

Yes, but the Demographic you've described before this doesn't exist. The young crowd has no money, nor any time. I've never had much of either (I say, looking at the screen of the multi thousand dollar machine before me...) And beyond a few hours each day spent to UNWIND, well...

Pretty much, from what I can gather, the average population on the forums is well over the age of 25. And most of the folks who seem to want the Cbills to stay down seem to be baby boomers, well into their 50's, remembering when they where 25 and playing tabletop when it came out; the same fellows who ruined the economy and razz people like me for not being able to afford a house already, despite the fact that I'm making what they did more than thirty years ago and the price of a pound of beef has gone up more than ten times what it was then. They already have it made. They have time, money, and expect my generation and the one after it to suffer for them.

I'm living on bare bones. I have fire heat, I live in 350 Square feet of house that I'm currently rebuilding because the friggen floor caved in. I was making $15 an hour. Well above minimum. I own my car. I have no debt (Right now.) I still can barely make it. And I HAVE spent money on this game.

But with the current Cbill earnings, Premium time is WORTHLESS. For the ammount of time I can spend, Premium time is WORTHLESS. A hero Mech helps, but it's not enough. The game play is stale, and unless you're trying a new mech, it doesn't really change. We have so many chassis that it would take me TWO YEARS with Premium to get all of them.

TWO YEARS.

Do you understand how much bullshit that is? That If I pump money into the game monthly It will take TWO YEARS to get the Current content, when there's more coming? Do you think that the average person is going to stick around to play when they figure this out? Do you know how many people have said "My friends quit when they realized how long it would take to get four mechs Mastered"? LOTS.


Also, **** you for saying that If I have no time or money I'm not allowed to try and relax. yes, because working my ass off and then being told "Hey, you shouldn't be playing games, get back to trying fruitlessly to advance in life" is totally the corrwect thing to say to people.

knightsljx, on 15 October 2014 - 06:01 PM, said:

And PGI should cater to people with neither time nor money because??

Stop feeling entitled. Gaming is a luxury, not a priority nor necessity in life.

Get actually rekt. I'm trying to make a point about the actual expectancy being unrealistic compared to the reality of the average person.

They need to make it so that the reality that most people don't have much money to spend doesn't stop them from spending. If I could get more mechs easier, I'd spend more on Camos, Mechbays, Heros. As it is, Man, It's going to take three months to NEED another mechbay for me. I need two other Chassis to go with that hero, and i'm not buying it until i know I LIKE the Chassis.

And I sure as hell don't need Camo for a Chassis I can't get.

Make sense?

[Mothykins]

WM Quicksilver, on 15 October 2014 - 06:11 PM, said:

Problem is, these same people can often afford the occasional $60 for a full new game or you could wait and get GOTY editions of the larger games and get all the DLC stuff on top for less than that $60. $60 gets you nowhere near that amount of satisfaction here, which is part of the problem. If they want to be compete for people's time, they need to make prices competitive too, and they simply aren't right now.

They need to reduces the taxes imposed on players in general, $10-30 isn't worth it for something that's going to require its C-Bills worth in cost just to outfit appropriately.

TF2 has done it right in most regards of F2P. Easy hurdle of becoming a paying player (less than $1), you can play as a free player and still be perfectly competitive (without any grinding, this is the key difference), cheap prices with sales/discounts constantly, some of which are constantly on sale, which isn't a bad thing.

Much more elegantly said then I.



I'm just out of session eight of Therapy, Overworked, stressed to hell, in massive physical pain and about ready to blow my top. Not going to delete my other post, but apologies to Knight and X for taking it out on them.

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

welcome to the paulconomy

[Mechteric]

OP: I don't think you should include the modules in your calculations. Modules are completely ancillary, and while some of them add a decent enough advantage (really just seismic and decay) they aren't a core part of the cost of a mech (and as such are more "end-game" content). Also you can buy one and be done with it, no need to make the cost part of every mech purchase.



But otherwise I agree to some extent that the earned CBills don't match up well fairly enough against the amount of time played to earn them.

Edited by CapperDeluxe, 15 October 2014 - 06:24 PM.

[WrathOfDeadguy]

It's worse than that, actually... it's not just the cost of acquiring, kitting out, and mastering three variants of four 'Mechs to fill out your stock limit of four 'Mechbays.

It's the cost of re-buying and re-outfitting at least three of those 'Mechs after you've got the last one mastered because you had to sell them to get the next one leveled up.That can mean having to sell off a 'Mech you really, genuinely like because you want to have options further down the road- say, one 'Mech in each weight class? Too bad, suck it up.

Small wonder I broke down quick and bought things. I did the math, and I didn't like the results. It's much more fun this way. Now that I have a stable of fun, practical builds, I can actually enjoy the slower progression towards other goals because I can fall back on my reliable regulars when the going gets tough or I discover only after sinking cbills (or in one sad case, MC) into a chassis that it just wouldn't meet my expectations.

[InspectorG]

FupDup, on 15 October 2014 - 03:18 PM, said:

The Paulconomy™ knows no mercy, no respite.

Ill take the Paulconomy over the Federal Reserve...

[Asmudius Heng]

I assume my low cBill earnings are actually a representation of my pilot spending most of his cash on ******* fueled sex orgies and follow up rehabilitation clinics he visits while watching the spinning wheel trying to find a new match ...

Blow and hookers, people its what drives the grind...

[SovietArmada]

Without premium, over a period of three days I can grind 30mil assuming I spend at least 10 hours a day playing. That's quite a lot. That would also be 45mil with premium mind you. That can buy you more than 3 mechs fully customized depending on your tonnage.

Compare that with say WOT, it can take a whole week with premium to grind the experience and silver needed to unlock and purchase your tank. That's A LOT longer.

MWO actually has the fairest earnings I have seen compared to all other MMO's i have played. Even after they cut the Cbill earning when switching to 12 players the earnings were more than fair.
You have to remember there is absolutely NO MANDATORY REPAIR AND REARM COSTS. That is huge when it comes to grinding.

Stop pestering PGI about this, it's ridiculous and has no merit.

[Ultimax]

Cavale, on 15 October 2014 - 06:17 PM, said:

Much more elegantly said then I.

I'm just out of session eight of Therapy, Overworked, stressed to hell, in massive physical pain and about ready to blow my top. Not going to delete my other post, but apologies to Knight and X for taking it out on them.

It's cool man, no worries.

I'm not saying you can't kick back and relax, and enjoy the hell out of mechwarrior. You can!

That's the beauty of this system.


It just means it will take you longer to earn all the things that you want.


I know that's not a consolation, but in order for there to be a game to play it's just a necessary barrier PGI has to put up to allow people to play the game for free and stay in business at the same time.


So kick back, enjoy blowing up mechs and be focused on what you want because you can get there and you can get the core things you want, just not everything at least not right away.

Edited by Ultimatum X, 15 October 2014 - 07:00 PM.

[Sorbic]

I just wish they would up the cbill rewards for damage done. I can do 700 damage on a team that gets rolled and my effort only earns 14,700 cbills from damage and squat over all. I'd love to see damage rewards bumped from 21 to at least 38. At least then you would feel like you got something for your effort, especially when getting rolled.

As it stands right now you are rewarded more for scratching (kill assist) another player than for doing 300dmg. It just doesn't encourage good play.

[Asmudius Heng]

Sorbic, on 15 October 2014 - 07:05 PM, said:

I just wish they would up the cbill rewards for damage done. I can do 700 damage on a team that gets rolled and my effort only earns 14,700 cbills from damage and squat over all. I'd love to see damage rewards bumped from 21 to at least 38. At least then you would feel like you got something for your effort, especially when getting rolled.

As it stands right now you are rewarded more for scratching (kill assist) another player than for doing 300dmg. It just doesn't encourage good play.

High damage does not always mean good play.

If you spend all your weapons heat and ammo and reduce enemies to scrap you are not killing efficiently. The less efficient your killing the less of an asset you are for your team.

Sheer damage is not a goo measurement of success