33 replies to this topic

[Blitxll]

To make a good game great you need a large player base and a good community. I feel that MWO has the latter.

To have a larger player base you have to give those new players incentive to want to stay and play your game. I think if you give them hope they will give you their money.

Having the ability to acquire everything in the game without paying can do this. Poor people love to grind or are at least more willing to when they see purpose in it. Eventually the grind will wear them down and either they quit or they buy. With this at least your having new players stay longer.

What I propose is a C-bill price attached to mech bays (10-20 mil a bay) and a GXP price attached to pay wall mechs (50,000 - 100,000). these are rough prices.

Only problem with this is it might be to little to late. I'm sure quite a lot of people have come through this game already and rarely do people come back after leaving.

[Alan Davion]

Blitxll, on 26 April 2016 - 03:54 PM, said:

To make a good game great you need a large player base and a good community. I feel that MWO has the latter.

To have a larger player base you have to give those new players incentive to want to stay and play your game. I think if you give them hope they will give you their money.

Having the ability to acquire everything in the game without paying can do this. Poor people love to grind or are at least more willing to when they see purpose in it. Eventually the grind will wear them down and either they quit or they buy. With this at least your having new players stay longer.

What I propose is a C-bill price attached to mech bays (10-20 mil a bay) and a GXP price attached to pay wall mechs (50,000 - 100,000). these are rough prices.

Only problem with this is it might be to little to late. I'm sure quite a lot of people have come through this game already and rarely do people come back after leaving.

How about... Not only no, but hell no.

I have a hard enough time keeping my GXP above 10k as I slowly work my way through the pilot trees, and the occasional dip to help out a mech skill.

I've got just over 70 million C-Bills now, thanks to buying some of the recent Mech packs, and buying the occasional C-Bill booster in the store.

I've seen some bad ideas here, and this one is right up there with them.

[JediPanther]

With over three years' data of how to monetize the game while still making it fair for the people who don't want to spend money pgi could print money if they just used a fifth of the ideas here. I like your idea of mech pays for c-bills. Those of use who run heroes and stock pile c-bills during events and promo premium time have a lot of c-bills that need spending. I got 20 million and nothing that interest me to burn it on unless I wanted a clan mech or two since they are horribly expensive even for just a light.

The gxp price I would drop by half. Even with pt and a very good match you net around 50-70 gxp. I think without pt and a good match I get 30 gxp. I know it is a very small percentage of your xp from a match that is used to make the gxp number.

[LORD TSARKON]

Blitxll, on 26 April 2016 - 03:54 PM, said:

Having the ability to acquire everything in the game without paying can do this. Poor people love to grind or are at least more willing to when they see purpose in it. Eventually the grind will wear them down and either they quit or they buy. With this at least your having new players stay longer.

What I propose is a C-bill price attached to mech bays (10-20 mil a bay) and a GXP price attached to pay wall mechs (50,000 - 100,000). these are rough prices.

Thats a Horrible way to "keep" players... especially newbie players.... MWo makes money on new mechs and mechbays (and other ways like camo and colors).

If I were a new player and wanted to get a 4th mech but had to pay 20 million C Bills... I would walk away.

Good Game Balance, weapon Balance, and a functioning and rewarding Faction Play system would increase the population... which in turn would turn more profits...

so you can see why PGI is having a hard time with keeping new players or having a large enough player base.

[LordKnightFandragon]

Naw, you make money with cosmetics, people love cosmetics, paint jobs, decals, inscriptions, ornaments, all the various things in game now.

[Blitxll]

You can't sell stuff to people that aren't there. You can't have cool maps and mechanics and balance if you have no one playing/paying for them.

At the end of the day this game needs to make money. Build a foundation to keep people playing and hopefully they will start paying. This is how the F2P model is supposed to work.

I think this game is awesome but the current F2P is not F2P.

[Alan Davion]

Blitxll, on 26 April 2016 - 04:26 PM, said:

You can't sell stuff to people that aren't there. You can't have cool maps and mechanics and balance if you have no one playing/paying for them.

At the end of the day this game needs to make money. Build a foundation to keep people playing and hopefully they will start paying. This is how the F2P model is supposed to work.

I think this game is awesome but the current F2P is not F2P.

And guess what... The foundation was laid and destroyed at least 4 years ago when the games balance started going the way of the dodo.

PGI would have to scrap all the changes they've made over the last several years and go back to square one in order to fix a lot of the problems the game currently faces.

And I think we all know the chances of that happening are less than zero.

Less and less people are playing the game because the sad fact is... It's just a bad game at this point.

[Wintersdark]

Blitxll, on 26 April 2016 - 04:26 PM, said:

You can't sell stuff to people that aren't there. You can't have cool maps and mechanics and balance if you have no one playing/paying for them.

At the end of the day this game needs to make money. Build a foundation to keep people playing and hopefully they will start paying. This is how the F2P model is supposed to work.

I think this game is awesome but the current F2P is not F2P.

It certainly is F2P.

The "paywall" mechs are absolutely not the best mechs at all. You can never buy a hero mech and not be missing out on anything. Few are even really worth using in the first place.

You start with 4 free mech bays, and by playing CW you can easily get 20 more. Then regular events reward more and more.



Look, I get wanting mech bays and hero mechs to be available by cbills, I do. But don't fool yourself: Of all the reasons for MWO being a niche game with a limited (but not bad!) population, hero mechs being MC only is extremely tiny. I'd argue, in fact, that anyone who left solely because of that wasn't going to stick around anyways.

[ScarecrowES]

Ummmm... so your plan to make PGI more money is for them to give away one of their primary income streams away... for free?

Makes sense.

So... Free to Play. The idea in a Free 2 Play game is not that you will literally never pay a dime to play the game. It's that you CAN never play a dime to play the game, but you will meet with certain undesirable restrictions, or be faced with myriad tempting incentives, that will make you want to plop down your hard earned cash.

You could play MWO for years and not pay into the game, if you choose. The idea is in making people choose to pay, and MWO does this very well. In fact, the Free 2 Play model is often far more lucrative than the traditional package price model. Interested players under a Free 2 Play model are vastly more likely to spend on incremental pricing than they would getting the same product for a set price. Folks like us are often called Whales. We're the ones who keep the game running.

So the price model has literally nothing to do with the player base.

The difficulty MWO faces is that it's a game with a steep learning curve, and takes a significant amount of investment of time and energy (and perhaps money) to start seeing reasonable rewards and a good gaming experience. Most potential players simply can't get through that curve, and quit. That's why your player base is small.

[Wintersdark]

Alan Davion, on 26 April 2016 - 04:37 PM, said:

And guess what... The foundation was laid and destroyed at least 4 years ago when the games balance started going the way of the dodo.

What the heck are you talking about? The game was never balanced. At best, you can argue balance wasn't too bad when we only had ~8 mechs, but even then there was a hell of a gap between good and bad mechs. I've got LOTS of videos from 2012 and early 2013, and in them you can definitely see what were - and were not - good mechs.

Weapon balance was terrible, too. Pulse lasers where utter garbage, LBX's were junk, LRM's where just as bad as they are now, machine guns and flamers where useless, SRM's where GROSSLY overpowered (Yo Splash Damage Bug!!), PPC's where pretty bad.

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PGI would have to scrap all the changes they've made over the last several years and go back to square one in order to fix a lot of the problems the game currently faces.

"Square One" wasn't balanced. It also lacked hundreds of mechs. There is no square one now.

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And I think we all know the chances of that happening are less than zero.

Even if it wasn't a total falacy, this is correct: it's not going to happen.

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Less and less people are playing the game because the sad fact is... It's just a bad game at this point.

Again, the hell are you talking about? The game's population has grown, not shrunk. Obviously the Steam release was a huge high point (way, way higher than the game had ever seen) but even with a lot of new Steamies wandering off, balance isn't why they did.

ScarecrowES, on 26 April 2016 - 04:41 PM, said:

The difficulty MWO faces is that it's a game with a steep learning curve, and takes a significant amount of investment of time and energy (and perhaps money) to start seeing reasonable rewards and a good gaming experience. Most potential players simply can't get through that curve, and quit. That's why your player base is small.

This.

This is exactly the "problem". MWO is a game with a lot to learn, a steep learning curve, and for a lot of players who aren't invested in the franchise they're just not willing to put that time and work in.

MWO is a niche product, and will remain one.

While there'll always be people who leave for one reason or another in how the game works, that will simply always remain the case, no matter what PGI does. Not that they can't improve things, but people need to stop deluding themselves thinking that there's one magic thing PGI could do to make the game suddenly have LoL populations.

[MechWarrior5152251]

The only thing that is not Free To Play is Mech Bays and Hero Mechs. Only the Mech Bays have any impact on game play.

I even have 3 champion mechs I did not pay for from events.

[Alan Davion]

Wintersdark, on 26 April 2016 - 04:48 PM, said:

What the heck are you talking about? The game was never balanced. At best, you can argue balance wasn't too bad when we only had ~8 mechs, but even then there was a hell of a gap between good and bad mechs. I've got LOTS of videos from 2012 and early 2013, and in them you can definitely see what were - and were not - good mechs.

Weapon balance was terrible, too. Pulse lasers where utter garbage, LBX's were junk, LRM's where just as bad as they are now, machine guns and flamers where useless, SRM's where GROSSLY overpowered (Yo Splash Damage Bug!!), PPC's where pretty bad.

My point is, before the Clans came ROFLstomping along, it would have been a hundred times easier to balance out the weapons and mechs that were in the game already.

All pre-3050 mechs and weapons should have been added to the game first and balanced like it was in tabletop.

Then you can go ahead and throw the Clans into the fray and then start playing catch-up.

As it stands now, PGI is trying, futilely at that, to balance way too many things all at once, and it's clearly not working, given all the back and forth on several weapons we've seen over the last couple years.

I'm not disputing the fact that there were mechs that were OP and utter crap, I'm just saying it would have been way easier to bring the crappy mechs up into line with the middle of the road mechs, and the OP mechs down... When you only have one tech base to worry about, it's a lot easier to fix the problems.

As it is we have two completely different tech bases to worry about, and that's a big problem, as has already been pointed out ad infinitum.

[Wintersdark]

MechWarrior5152251, on 26 April 2016 - 04:53 PM, said:

The only thing that is not Free To Play is Mech Bays and Hero Mechs. Only the Mech Bays have any impact on game play.

I even have 3 champion mechs I did not pay for from events.

Well, you can get 24 mech bays free with little effort. That's enough to master 8 mechs without selling anything.


But also, things are not "free to play"; MWO is a free to play game. That doesn't mean everything in the game is free/available without cost, just that you can play for free and be fully competitive.

[Blitxll]

MechWarrior5152251, on 26 April 2016 - 04:53 PM, said:

I even have 3 champion mechs I did not pay for from events.

Did not know about this well I guess thats good to know.
Some pay wall mechs are superior to there variant counter parts. Oxide comes to mind.

[Wintersdark]

Alan Davion, on 26 April 2016 - 05:02 PM, said:

My point is, before the Clans came ROFLstomping along, it would have been a hundred times easier to balance out the weapons and mechs that were in the game already.

All pre-3050 mechs and weapons should have been added to the game first and balanced like it was in tabletop.

Then you can go ahead and throw the Clans into the fray and then start playing catch-up.

As it stands now, PGI is trying, futilely at that, to balance way too many things all at once, and it's clearly not working, given all the back and forth on several weapons we've seen over the last couple years.

I'm not disputing the fact that there were mechs that were OP and utter crap, I'm just saying it would have been way easier to bring the crappy mechs up into line with the middle of the road mechs, and the OP mechs down... When you only have one tech base to worry about, it's a lot easier to fix the problems.

As it is we have two completely different tech bases to worry about, and that's a big problem, as has already been pointed out ad infinitum.

No argument. Despite being a filthy, unrepentant Clanner, I think the game would have been much better staying fully pre-clan (even going so far as being purely 3025).

But, that ship sailed a long time ago(and, I should note, that it sailed at a time when even PGI didn't feel very good about doing it), and there's absolutely no way you can put them back in the bottle. Not even worth discussing anymore.

Blitxll, on 26 April 2016 - 05:04 PM, said:

Did not know about this well I guess thats good to know.
Some pay wall mechs are superior to there variant counter parts. Oxide comes to mind.

That's the only example; and even then, the Oxide is not the best mech in the game. A single Hero variant being better than it's non-hero variants in a game with hundreds of mechs/variants is hardly significant.

[Blitxll]

Wintersdark, on 26 April 2016 - 05:03 PM, said:

But also, things are not "free to play"; MWO is a free to play game. That doesn't mean everything in the game is free/available without cost, just that you can play for free and be fully competitive.

My proposition would keep more players in the game longer at the cost of $1 mech bays. they have to play for several weeks straight to get the C-bills for the proposed price of 20 million C-bills. How long would a player have to play?

With this idea (if people go for it) you have players that have to play longer if they want to unlock more mech bays. This keeps the more casual player around cause he knows he doesn't have to invest if he wants to keep playing but wishes to acquire more mechs. New players who "survive" this supposed mean learning curving during the current Meta of camping will have a goal to keep them interested in playing.

It will effect the bottom line negatively initially that is a guarantee but there is the potential that it will increase the overall gains in the long run. Like I said before you can't sell something to someone who's not there.

[Wintersdark]

Blitxll, on 26 April 2016 - 05:30 PM, said:

My proposition would keep more players in the game longer at the cost of $1 mech bays. they have to play for several weeks straight to get the C-bills for the proposed price of 20 million C-bills. How long would a player have to play?

With this idea (if people go for it) you have players that have to play longer if they want to unlock more mech bays. This keeps the more casual player around cause he knows he doesn't have to invest if he wants to keep playing but wishes to acquire more mechs. New players who "survive" this supposed mean learning curving during the current Meta of camping will have a goal to keep them interested in playing.

It will effect the bottom line negatively initially that is a guarantee but there is the potential that it will increase the overall gains in the long run. Like I said before you can't sell something to someone who's not there.

But that's already the case.

You can get 20 more mech bays, garaunteed, if you want - for free.

[Blitxll]

Wintersdark, on 26 April 2016 - 05:31 PM, said:

But that's already the case.

You can get 20 more mech bays, garaunteed, if you want - for free.

This is true unfortunately FW is not very populated. I'm aware the mech bays are there to incentivize people to play but the huge wait times mixed with the lack of LP per match mixed with the lack of diversity between the maps it's not really an option. I want to enjoy my time playing not waiting.

If they some how implemented Quick play into the FW or earning LP in Quick play that would be a nice change. overall when I try FW I usually waiting 10mins+. When I get off work I don't want to sit in front of my comp waiting.

I think its my factions fault. What's a better IS faction?

[Alan Davion]

Blitxll, on 26 April 2016 - 05:30 PM, said:

My proposition would keep more players in the game longer at the cost of $1 mech bays. they have to play for several weeks straight to get the C-bills for the proposed price of 20 million C-bills. How long would a player have to play?

With this idea (if people go for it) you have players that have to play longer if they want to unlock more mech bays. This keeps the more casual player around cause he knows he doesn't have to invest if he wants to keep playing but wishes to acquire more mechs. New players who "survive" this supposed mean learning curving during the current Meta of camping will have a goal to keep them interested in playing.

It will effect the bottom line negatively initially that is a guarantee but there is the potential that it will increase the overall gains in the long run. Like I said before you can't sell something to someone who's not there.

There's a fine line between grinding for money that's fun, and grinding for money that says "What the F*** am I doing".

Currently MWO has a good balance between the two. Now something like World of Warships, that leans more towards the "WTF" side of things at least once you get past the Tier 5-6 ships.

MWO I find is much easier to earn credits in, and while the mechs are expensive, especially most Assault class mechs, doubly true on the Clan side, it's not going to make you want to tear your hair out.

[Lokesh]

Blitxll, on 26 April 2016 - 03:54 PM, said:

Poor people love to grind

Gold