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1) Bad experiences with other MMOs (Star Trek Online in particular)
2) The announcement that the new skill system will involve substantial work to grind up.
3) The announcement that respecs will cost EC and MC (*Edit: C-Bills and MC. Momentarily stuck in the wrong game)
Now while I am enough of a Battletech/Mechwarrior fan (going back to the eighties) that I'm hoping this post will get noticed for it's attempt to be constructive, I've been a hardcore trekker from 1966. So it was a big thing for me when the above factors drove me out of STO last February. Admittedly Perfect World Entertainment is a MUCH worse company than any I have ever dealt with. People on the forums here who complain about Russ and his work are ignoring the fact that he actually appears to love the game. That makes a huge difference to someone like me coming out of the "Wild East" culture of customer exploitation that is PWE.
But all that aside, I'm worried that Russ may not be aware of how factors two and three are going to impact the income from their "bread and butter", the battlemech sales. I spent a few hundred on this game last year, but nothing at Christmas with nothing planned for this time forward. I'll never need another battlemech or mech bay... and without those I don't foresee being interested enough to bother with things like paint jobs and cockpit items.
This is because of what I think of as the "Unfinished Rules Tax".
First off let me state that grinding is a bad idea for any game developer. Grinding doesn't give me something to do, it's just time I spend not playing the fun game I want to play, in the way I want to play it. During the eighties, game developers were all D&D nerds and we've been cursed with "leveling" ever since. A very small amount of it can give a (tiny) sense of accomplishment, but more than that is just boring. If the end-game is good then that's where people want to be, and MWO is all end game (not that I wouldn't mind single player missions and a story to start).
So now that we are going to have bad grinding attached to an interesting skill system that let's us customize, what's the problem? Just make the grinding less...
The problem arises from all the planned changes to the rules. Each of these will require respecs if you want to be competitive. With that costing real money for MC and some time to regrind the skill system, players will have to maintain their builds for the first time. No longer will you have an interesting game with diverse roles and combinations where you can play whatever you feel like in the moment. You'll have a few mechs that you've been able to keep competitive and everything else will require a price in money and boredom before you can play it again. So you will effectively be paying a tax every time the rules change if you wish to stay competitive.
In STO, when ship sales started to drop and players started to desert them, they thought they needed to squeeze harder on other things to make up revenue. What they should have done is not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. I had 17 toons in STO, and it wasn't nearly enough to cover all the tactically interesting build/ship/captain combinations even before they introduced their skill system. Yet even with a regular cash influx from a lifetime membership I couldn't be bothered to maintain one build, because of the "Unfinished Rules Tax'.
Of course the URT was most offensive when they were clearly not fixing bugs until enough people had respecced around the bugs to pay for it. But even if PGI avoids this odious behaviour, most people are going to start resenting new rules. Even rules changes that make the game "better" will meet resistance, or worse ... quietly cause a drop in mech sales. In fact they may already be experiencing this, since radical changes to the quirk system had me holding back on buying anything for the quirks.
Respeccs need to cost NOTHING. This is not a source of revenue to fund the game, but a revenue killer over time that is hard to find in the metrics.
Edited by Robinson Crusher, 20 January 2017 - 11:59 AM.
