116 replies to this topic

[-Halcyon-]

I'm not spending cash on premium time if I can't pause it. I don't know how many other players feel this way, but I would bet if a pause were added PGI would see a huge increase in usage of premium time.

If you factor 8 hours of sleep, plus another 2 hours of doing "stuff" around the house, you only get 14 hours usage of the 24 hours you paid for.
And that's ONLY if you play non stop for 14 hours.
Realistically you're going to play maybe 4-6 hours, or maybe 7-8 if it's a weekend day and you really have nothing you need to do.

That's over 50% of the bonus wasted.

Is PGI really that hard up for grubbing cash that they can't add a pause function so we can fully enjoy our product?
The way it is now, I will never buy it.

[FupDup]

I've always wondered what it would be like if some kind of ambitious F2P game out there were to allow for both traditional boosters (i.e. ticks down over time) and then add new option for a "per match" booster.

Elaboration:

"Subscription" Premium Time Model (Current)

• Based on a duration of time, i.e. 7 days
  
• Ticks down during that whole time
  
• Provides boosts to whatever in-game currencies are available,
  
• Tends to benefit players who are highly active (play multiple days per week, and/or many hours at a time)
  
• It would be cool if it could also give some other benefits like access to more trial mechs, free camo on any mech while active, etc (proposed addition to current model)

New "Per-Match" Premium Time Model

• Instead of being based on "X" amount of time, it's based on "Y" number of matches played
  
• Naturally, since it's based on matches, it doesn't tick away while you're not playing
  
• Also, since it's based on per match, you don't have to worry about long matches messing up your bank!
  
• As a drawback to this, it would probably be priced such that it gives you "less bang for your buck" than the "Subscription" model
  
• However, the plus side is that you don't get charged for what you don't use, and therefore this model would still be much more worth it for people who can only play sporadically (i.e. not very often and/or only a few matches per day every week or few weeks)
  
• Since it's implied that people using this model would not play very often, this would probably provide a larger C-Bill and XP boost than the Subscription model; but there wouldn't be any side-benefits like camos

But of course, every game developer is hooked on the "charge people for what they don't use model" like some other real life companies are, so I doubt that such an awesome policy would ever be adopted by anyone. :\



TOO LONG; DIDN'T READ:

• Subscription Premium Time would provide the most benefit for active players who can get online quite often
  
• Per-Match Premium Time would provide the most benefit for sporadic players who can't play very often for whatever reason

Edited by FupDup, 09 November 2014 - 09:59 AM.

[Scratx]

How would you price it?

[GreyNovember]

IIRC, one day of premium time is 250 MC.

A Match normally takes about 10 minutes.

If a premium match was 50 MC, it'd be less efficient, but far more convenient playing for an hour.

[FupDup]

Scratx, on 09 November 2014 - 09:49 AM, said:

How would you price it?

Is this question for me or the OP? I'll assume the former, since I can't speak for the latter anyways.

• Basically, we'd have to gather some statistics on how often a typical person using traditional premium time plays. I.e. how many games they can manage to play within their "subscription" allotment.
  
• Then, we'd figure out how large we'd want the "Per-Match" model's bonus to be (larger than the current 50% certainly). Maybe 75%? This could use some spitballing.
  
• The number of "matches" provided by this new model would be lower than the average number of matches played by an average person using an equivalently priced subscription model (same price but fewer potential "matches" in other words), based on how large the earnings boost would be (more boost = fewer matches provided).

So, you'd get less overall bang for your buck, but at the benefit of not paying for "unused time." People who don't play often would benefit from this, whereas highly active players would benefit more from the current model.

Edited by FupDup, 09 November 2014 - 10:01 AM.

[Felbombling]

You can buy 1250 Mech Credits for $6.95. Coincidently, you can also buy 7 days of premium time for 1250 Mech Credits. Hey! If my math skills are correct, including taxes, premium time is just over $1.00 a day at that rate! Now let's pretend that you're a power gamer, not worried about blood clots in your legs, bad posture or other ailments that can result from prolonged sitting at a keyboard. Let's pencil you in for a good twelve hour session for your $1.00/day rate on premium time. You just played with a 150% boost on XP and earnings for less than ten cents per hour... and you're not satisfied with that rate? What does it cost you to go to the movies, and how far does your entertainment dollar stretch then? Putting things in perspective, I'd say that premium time is a good investment, even if some of it is ticking away while you sleep, eat, shower... whatever.

[Khobai]

Quote

But of course, every game developer is hooked on the "charge people for what they don't use model" like some other real life companies are, so I doubt that such an awesome policy would ever be adopted by anyone. :\

Some games do adopt that model. Where time only ticks down when youre actually playing. But they also charge more for the boosters as a result.

Quote

I'd say that premium time is a good investment

Its not really a good investment though. Not with cbill earnings as pathetic as they are now.

premium time was a lot more worth it when you could get 200-250K per match.

its not worth it for like an extra 25k-50k or whatever pathetic amount you get now

Edited by Khobai, 09 November 2014 - 11:46 AM.

[Water Bear]

What you're essentially asking is for the cost of premium time to go down.

They aren't really selling you time in game, they're selling you the equivalent of a one-month subscription. If that translates to an average of, say, 80 hours in game, then what they would do if time stopped while you were off line is sell you 80 hours of premium time for $30 or whatever it is.

I don't know why thinking of premium as literal time you buy vs. a subscription bends people's brains so much. When you are considering buying premium time, just ask yourself if you play enough in a month for a month of time to be worth it. The end.

Edit: I would add one more point. If you're going to argue that people who play more get more value out of their premium time in terms of rewards received, the exact same argument is true of the monthly subscription scheme -- people who play more get more out of it.

Edited by Water Bear, 09 November 2014 - 12:56 PM.

[The Boz]

League of Legends has premium time in both hour/day/week/month intervals, and match counts.

[darkkterror]

If they had a pause function or made premium time only count down while you were playing then I guarantee that they'd adjust the price of premium time accordingly such that you don't really save any money anyway.

[MadPanda]

StaggerCheck, on 09 November 2014 - 11:21 AM, said:

You can buy 1250 Mech Credits for $6.95. Coincidently, you can also buy 7 days of premium time for 1250 Mech Credits. Hey! If my math skills are correct, including taxes, premium time is just over $1.00 a day at that rate! Now let's pretend that you're a power gamer, not worried about blood clots in your legs, bad posture or other ailments that can result from prolonged sitting at a keyboard. Let's pencil you in for a good twelve hour session for your $1.00/day rate on premium time. You just played with a 150% boost on XP and earnings for less than ten cents per hour... and you're not satisfied with that rate? What does it cost you to go to the movies, and how far does your entertainment dollar stretch then? Putting things in perspective,I'd say that premium time is a good investment, even if some of it is ticking away while you sleep, eat, shower... whatever.

Hahahahaha. This post was a joke, right? Well I laughed anyway.

[Percimes]

My play time in MWO is too erratic for me to consider Premium Time. I can play 8-10 games each day one week and 5-10 games for the whole week after. Sometime not playing much 2 weeks in a row. Premium Time feels like throwing money away.

I prefer to buy Hero mechs and packages like the Phoenix, the Resistance or the maxing kit. I don't mind spending on long lasting things: colours, single use camo for my favorite mechs, cockpit items...

[Excalabur50]

It's an interesting proposition and in a way true the perception is that you are wasting premium time when you are not on, I got free premium time with my Jenner Mastery Pack and I felt like the premium time was slipping through my fingers as I wasn't able to play as much as I wanted to and it did feel frustrating and I guess it would be worse if you paid hard earned dollars for it.
Maybe PGI should consider a stop mechanism with paid for premium and leave it run for the premium time they give away?

[Joe Mallad]

what id like to see and I still think it would work is...

Say i buy 30 days of premium time... instead of me activating it and that whole 30 days counting down if im on or not. What if the day i log in to play, whether its for an hour or 14 hours, its deducts 1 day of premium time. And in that 1 day of 24 hours of time, I can then log in and play as much or little as i want as that 1 day has already been deducted. But at the start of the next full 24 hour day, if I dont log in... I dont lose any of my remaining 29 days? I decide I want to log in and play a bit more IDK, 3 days later. Then im deducted another 1 full day of premium time and I now have a full day to play as much or little as I want. The next day rolls around and I dont log in and my timer stops at a remaining 28 days left and waits for me to log in "whenever".

Edited by Yoseful Mallad, 09 November 2014 - 05:21 PM.

[Felbombling]

MadPanda, on 09 November 2014 - 02:12 PM, said:

Hahahahaha. This post was a joke, right? Well I laughed anyway.

Can't handle the math, Panda? I could re-write it in crayon for you next time, knowing that you frequent the forums.

[keith]

saldy this is 1 of the 2 things i agree pgi did right with their pricing, bays and PT.at 30 days it is the same as an mmo sub. that is fair. but they should have a boost per win too

[TLBFestus]

Every time I see a post on this I copy and paste my previous post;


Yeah, no way that they would sell premium time in it's current form as an "only active when online" function. As someone pointed out that is 168 hours of game time for a week, and about 700 hours per month. Buy one month and you've got 700 hours to burn.

If they did that they would have to step up "Mechs for Sale" production to ludicrous levels (This..is ...a ....joke)!


Now.....if they wanted to offer different Premium time Options it could look like this;
Regular Premium time as it currently exists, continual run down to zero in blocks of 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, or 1 year
"Online Only" Active Premium time which only runs when logged in. Naturally it would sell for the same price per block, but the hours you get would be drastically REDUCED.

Just for arguments sake, assume that the average player plays 2 hours a night, every night. That's 14 hours a week. On average there are 4.2 weeks in a month, which is 58.8 hours a month, or 705.6 hours a year.

Basing this on 25000 MC, for $100 (best deal) , meaning 250 MC per DOLLAR and then round everything to make it easy and they could sell "Online" Premium time for;

2 hours for 250 MC or $1 (equivalent to 1 day non-stop)

15 hours for 1850 MC or $7.50 (equivalent to 7 days non-stop)

60 hours for 7500 MC or $30 (equivalent to 1 month non-stop)

180 hours for 22,500 MC or $90 (equivalent to 3 months non-stop)

750 hours for 40,000 MC or $175 (equivalent to 1 year non-stop)

For the math geeks in the crowd, these are ROUGH figures based on 125 MC per Hour, based on 2 hours per day playing time, and then tweaked a little for "volume discount" effects.

I'm sure that these numbers would need some serious adjustment by someone with more math skills than I , but at least it puts things into some perspective and acts as a jumping off point for discussion.

Obviously I don't know if 2 hours per day is a good average or not, for some it will be too little and others too much, but therein lies the benefit of offering the option to buy it in the current "always active" blocks if you are a hardcore, live in your moms basement, wife divorces you and you don't even notice it kinda guy.

[Desolator]

Halcyon201, on 09 November 2014 - 09:26 AM, said:

I'm not spending cash on premium time if I can't pause it. I don't know how many other players feel this way, but I would bet if a pause were added PGI would see a huge increase in usage of premium time.

If you factor 8 hours of sleep, plus another 2 hours of doing "stuff" around the house, you only get 14 hours usage of the 24 hours you paid for.
And that's ONLY if you play non stop for 14 hours.
Realistically you're going to play maybe 4-6 hours, or maybe 7-8 if it's a weekend day and you really have nothing you need to do.

That's over 50% of the bonus wasted.

Is PGI really that hard up for grubbing cash that they can't add a pause function so we can fully enjoy our product?
The way it is now, I will never buy it.

/SIGH

Man are people just that damn entitled that they can't afford $14.95 for an entire month of premium.

If you can't afford less than $15/month on a game then you should probably not be playing games.

$15/month is the industry standard for a month of subscription, has been that way for over a decade. Try to keep up, or at least educate yourself.

[Angel of Annihilation]

FupDup, on 09 November 2014 - 09:56 AM, said:

Is this question for me or the OP? I'll assume the former, since I can't speak for the latter anyways.

• Basically, we'd have to gather some statistics on how often a typical person using traditional premium time plays. I.e. how many games they can manage to play within their "subscription" allotment.
  
• Then, we'd figure out how large we'd want the "Per-Match" model's bonus to be (larger than the current 50% certainly). Maybe 75%? This could use some spitballing.
  
• The number of "matches" provided by this new model would be lower than the average number of matches played by an average person using an equivalently priced subscription model (same price but fewer potential "matches" in other words), based on how large the earnings boost would be (more boost = fewer matches provided).

So, you'd get less overall bang for your buck, but at the benefit of not paying for "unused time." People who don't play often would benefit from this, whereas highly active players would benefit more from the current model.

2 years of playing WoTs and I have around 25 hours of actual time spent in battle. That being the case, in order to offer some sort of pause button, they would have to charge roughly $360 for 30 days of premium time.

Honestly I am sure there is some formula that would work but I can almost guarantee you it would be more expensive than we already have, especially for someone who plays alot.

Lets see, if the average person plays 4 hours a day, 6 days a week lets say. Figure that their actually time in battle is only 2 hours a day or 12 hours a week so 48 hours a month. That would work out to roughly 50 MC per hour.

So the question is, would you pay 50 MC and hour for premium?

Edited by Viktor Drake, 09 November 2014 - 07:46 PM.

[Naduk]

I really want to see premium time only clock down when i am logged in

I would buy loads of the stuff if i got to use it
Every time i have received premium time from comps and promotions i have only ever taken advantage of about 3% of it or less

I manage about 3-4 games a night when i have the time
Other times i cant get any gaming time for weeks at a time, it is out of my control as i do break fix tech work, you dont choose when ppl break stuff and my work times flux alot

I cannot utilize premium time in any real way
Its painful to have a weeks worth count out and i only get one game session in (2hrs worth used of 7days sucks)

I have almost 200 days of banked time from mech packs
I will never be able to pop it untill the premium system changes

It makes no sense as to why it was not login only from day1
It costs pgi NOTHING to produce
It requires no raw materials, time or man power for its production
It does not expire or go off
It never runs out of warrenty
It never breaks or requires maintenance
It has no limit on supply and cannot fail demand needs
Its value will only improve over time as more features use it (like private matches)

There is zero reasons to have it expire while offline
If it has more value in the eyes of players it will be consumed more