68 replies to this topic

[patataman]

6.528 hours of banked PT, that's 9 months and 2 days. I didn't purchase any of it, all is from mech packs and if i'm not mistaken a Christmas gift 2 years ago.

The funny thing is that if i could activate smaller portions, like a week or 3 days for a weekend, i would have 0 banked PT by now, and i would be willing to buy more.

[Airwind]

currently i view premium time as a waste as i dont play regularly. would definitely help if it can be activated by hours or by no. of matches. that would be fair to paying players and encourages buying of the premium time.

[Moebius Pi]

Honestly, they really need to switch the in-game UI to have the "Activate X amount of days Premium Time", instead of hiding it in your profile as others folks have said. I don't see any legitimate excuse for that beyond as a cheap means to get you to waste it. Which in turn... well, it really does make it a waste. It's a nice freebie with some packages (well, sorta), but on it's own? To hell with it, not when the UI forces you to activate it all at once and you're still limited even with the obscure profile option.

[Isolani]

I am fine with Premium as is. It amounts to what you would pay monthly for a subscription in most online games. That is far better than the shorter term boosts that a lot of "Free" games sell...you end up spending three times as much money in small boosts instead of $15/month. Honestly, I don't even buy just straight premium time because it comes included with almost any bundle or preorder at this point, so I just always have some from buying the mechs I want.

Premium time is fine, just leave a good thing alone. I have played a lot of F2P games, and most of them cost you A LOT more than $15/month for 30 days worth of boosts.

[TamCoan]

I've no problem with how they have premium time tick away. I just wish they would allow me to active it in week chunks. I do remember when it was all-or-nothing activation over a year ago so they did improve it by allowing you to active just a months worth.

[LordNothing]

there was some talk in the town hall where you could pay mc to get premium rewards on a match by match basis. in that case just buy a huge block of mc, and pay out on your better matches. it will probibly be a low value option because if it was better it would obsolete premium time packages.

i think there are enough events handing it out, and you get a huge block every time you buy a mech pack. it would be nice if there were 3-day blocks in the store for the people who only have time to play on the weekends. i would also buy large blocks if i could activate a week at a time. the problem with 30 day banks is, who wants to play mwo for 30 days straight without a break?

Edited by LordNothing, 04 April 2016 - 05:44 AM.

[sycocys]

In my opinion the 30 day min time is actually harmful to the game because it makes player feel the need to play the game rather than them just playing in shorter bursts.

Why is that bad? Because the game has a ~7 minute game loop that is extremely one dimensional and consists of almost no variation no matter the mode or weight class you play. Basically the more people play the more the shallowness and flaws of the game begin to glare in the faces of the players. It makes players feel ripped off both by quality of game and the fact they have a running timer that they paid for.

People running in shorter bursts are going to be far more likely to overlook the flaws of the game, and if they get bothered or frustrated with things they won't feel like they are shafted with a black dong if they are only losing a couple days of premium time when they take breaks.

[TLBFestus]

WarHippy, on 31 August 2015 - 11:21 AM, said:

This topic comes up from time to time, and boils down to two different view points. One group sees premium time as a subscription that you buy for ~$15 a month that should keep ticking away regardless of if you are playing or not, and the other group pretty much wants to be able to milk every last second out of the premium time. Neither side is wrong exactly, but neither side is particularly willing to budge on their view.

For me I am fine with the way it is, and while I see the benefit of having premium time only ticking away while I am playing I also understand that the price would need to drastically go up to cover it. As an example you have 28 days of premium time but you only play a couple hours a day. If it only counted when you played it would last for 336 days. That is nearly a year of premium time for less than $15. Do you really consider that a good idea?

Hippy, you are making the mistake of thinking that current premium time would be converted to the some number of hours and people would get 24 hours of "active only" premium time for each day of premium time that they have in it's current form.

People would keep that, and use it up, running continually, until it expires. PGI could then offer another alternative, "active only" premium time and let the consumer decide which best suits them. It could work something like this;

Quote

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.

Assuming the numbers are tweaked correctly and they would need some good statistics, which I'm sure PGI has, to tweak them appropriately, they would not lose any money.

People would have MORE options, and PGI would likely have more income.

I think if you ran a poll (Why doesn't someone do that? As a TLB I'm too Lazy) I'm sure you would find that a lot of players would really like this option and would take it.

Instead of people not using their premium time, and NOT buying any more, you would find that that audience of non-spenders would be more inclined to buy small blocks of time whereas in the past they spent nothing.

You'd still have the people who like premium time as it exists spending money on it, but you'd add another cohort of people spending money on the game that otherwise would not. Isn't that what PGI wants, more people spending money on the game?

Edited by TLBFestus, 04 April 2016 - 08:59 AM.