Quicksilver Kalasa, on 07 April 2016 - 07:22 AM, said:
This is kinda false, after all, people buy the collector's edition of these packs which gives you an identical variant with a special paint scheme and c-bill boost as well.
The only reason I even got the heroes I did is because one of them might be powerful some day (like the Oxide) and I don't want to miss out, that's a bad problem to have in any game. Part of the reason many heroes were ever pay-2-lose were most likely because they were afraid of a certain hero being too powerful (like the 6M Oxide of yore).
That said, I'm not really sure why people are clinging to this hero like they are, arms are often the most fragile part next to legs on light mechs, so having firepower there is often a detriment (there are always exceptions though).
I get the argument, and frankly it would’ve been better for Piranha to do something like this from the outset.
But as we all remember from the Project Phoenix Fiasco, people around here take their purchased exclusivity
VERY. VERY. SERIOUSLY. If Piranha started releasing normal C-bill variants of Hero ‘Mechs – even without the Hero camouflage or C-bill booster, you can expect all those weird people who bought Phoenix specifically for the exclusivity of it, and who buy Hero ‘Mechs specifically because they’re not available to the plebeian masses without fat stacks to drop, will erupt in an outroar of nerdrage the forums have not seen since the days of 3
rd person camera.
Even assuming Fup’s thing of immense C-bill cost for Hero layout variants – and let’s face it, there would be no such massive C-bill sink involved – my experiences with Guild Wars 2 (briefly: GW2 allows you to buy gems, the cash shop currency/MC equivalent, with in-game gold via an in-game currency exchange interface where you can swap gems for gold and vice-versa with other players in a money market sort of dealie) have shown me that a great many players will cheerfully spend thirty hours grinding out twenty IRL bucks’ worth of in-game currency, so long as they don’t actually have to pay that twenty bucks.
Which, admittedly, is
fantastic for the handful of guys who run the conversion the other way and sell the gems everyone is working their butts off to not have to buy, but that’s neither here nor there.
Folks will put hundreds of dollars of work hours into avoiding the tiniest of real-money charges in their games. They will go
way the hell out of their way and exert
far more effort to do things the free way than the hour or two of work it took them to earn the money they’d need to do it The Paid Way, simply because
paying for things in a F2P game has earned a nasty stigma in today’s vidja-gaemin’ scene. ‘Whales’ are seen as bloated, horrible slobs with no self-control and serious social issues because they don’t have anything better to spend their money on than their gaming hobby, while the Plucky Heroes who do everything the freebie grindy way are cool cats who’re Stickin’ It To The Man and working the system for all it’s worth, Champions of the Common Man in a world where gaming has the sheer, contemptible gall to
cost money.
Can you really blame Piranha for not opening that can of worms and just telling people that if they want the occasional nifty toy, they can help pay for the servers?
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