I've refrained from asking these questions before as the response would be lengthy would like y'all to comment on the overall economics of the game.(Feel free to abreviate my post down to questions if you use it.) Also, I appologize in advance for the massive wall of text but there's good if rambling stuff in there I promise.
With regards to the in game macro economy I am interested in knowing,
1) In what direction are you developing the sphere wide economy for when community warfare kicks in. While I suspect merc companies will get paid by houses for taking jobs, how will houses gain resources to spend on equiping units, hiring mercs, air support, etc.
To make idle speculation based off of how real economies sort of kind of work, Will it be based on worlds controlled? If so, will different worlds have different economic value based off of factories, natural resources, etc and will those resources be stealable during raids or destroyable. I can see destroying an ammunition factory reducing the available ammunition for reloading house mechs engaged in a campaign or increasing the cost of ammo to merc companies in the region. I can also see destruction of food shipments giving an enemies pilots reduced reflexes shown by slower arm movement and torso twist speeds. Do you have any plans of making the macro economy anywhere near this complex?
2) Have you considered hiring an economist to help you develop a dynamic sphere wide macro economy? You could totally find an economist working on an MS or PhD who'd stick with the game for years as part of their thesis for a $20k a year stipend (all the brains for less with extra creativity). If you already have hired one can we have his/her name so we can read his works and get an idea of the kind of things he/she might suggest?
3) How might the clan economy differ from the IS economy once they invade with regards to distribution of resources and availability of equipment. Will it be related to zellbrigen as a means of encouraging clan tactics instead of IS focused fire tactics?
With regards to the current economy,
I'm actually fine with most of it but it seems kind of silly for a capture win to not provide Cbills for completing the mission objective. Also paint costs a silly amount of money but I figure free paint is there as a cbill sink to encourage people to buy stuff with MC though I doubt it will work.
With regards to the MC economy
How exactly are you deciding to price things? I can't help but feel that your pricing of pretty much everything is more than a little bit off (hero mechs being an obvious exception as they give real in game benefits). I'll give a couple of examples.
Most of the nicer decorations like that mighty classy Urbie are obviously intended as impulse buys rather than premeditated purchases. Now, you are charging between $4-6 for something that serves no purpose to the game and adds nothing new to the experience (unless you give me my WW2 style pinup calender in which case I'll die from distraction). That is of course the cost of a latte at Star Bucks (less than even) so the price seems about right intellectually. However, since I have seen very very few of them (and I die a lot) I can't help but nottice that you didn't sell a whole lot of them. Partially I think this has to do with the denomination of MC since 1000MC sounds like a lot but 100MC would be more paletable. I also think that for a f2p game, $4-6 may be too much for impulse buy items whereas $1 may get you 10x the purchases. An easy way to test this would be to have a one time only 2012 holiday special clearance sale with lower prices so you can compare purchasing data for each item at the different prices and use that to better target you impulse buy items. (I'll bet you a baked good for each member of your staff [and my baked goods are darn tasty] you'd have a higher rate of income during the sale than over the course of time that those items were on sale at full price).
The other glaring example is paint. You may recall I launched a temper tantrum movement in protest where all my mechs were painted basic blue. As it turns out convincing people to part with 1 million cbills for blue paint to protest the cost of paint is difficult (and ironic), but look at all the boring green mechs in the game. All those lovely colors and patterns that could be on mechs and no one hardly uses them despite the awesomeness that is the zebra awesome. Is it any wonder with the cost for paint jobs being $2-3 dollars for a pattern+colors when you cannot own the colors or the patterns? I can't help but think that if a paint job were 20-30 cents people wouldn't mind paying for them each time as . For those who want to use camo as you know camo I would imagine you could sell entire color packs that they get to keep for the prices you are asking now. So for a color subscription that gives all the colors and camo patterns that are to be released (with say the exception of graphical patterns like the Phranken) you could probably get a one time 2000-3000 MC payment without too much trouble and sell individual camo sets with say a winter camo pattern and the winter colors for 500 MC and continue to sell individual colors and patterns piecemeal. Combining these two different options would give you both the collector and microtransaction crowd and increase profits significantly compared to the current model.
Premium time
So... you get more cbills and XP? That ought to appeal to the busy gamer who likes the game but... since said gamer is well busy they're not likely to play often enough to justify a monthly premium account. Do you have any plans to sell blocks of time instead? Say you can buy 1 hour of in match premium time for 50-100 MC or so. Well that's worth it if you're a busy professional with kids because if you're playing you're earning more. Whenever the time runs out you can pop up a message after the match asking if they'd like another hit for another X MC and offer discounts if they buy bigger blocks of premium time. You could also include a projected time to buy a certain mech or finish their pilot tree with and without premium.
Also, for the more active players what is the incentive to get a premium account? They already have all the XP and cbills they need. So, you need more incentives in the monthly premium accounts. This could range from a free non-hero mech each month and a mechbay to keep it in, free ES and FF upgrades, unlimited repaints (premium account gets free premium paint), a monthly MC allowance that has to be spent each month, all bonus XP is instead GXP, etc.
So, basically do you have plans to expand the benefits of a premium account to make it worth it?
Thanks for reading Garth.
TL:DR- Sorry the TL:DR got too long and needed its own TL:DR so... MWO economy... what's up with that?
Edited by Narcissistic Martyr, 08 January 2013 - 10:35 PM.
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Homeless Bill, on 08 January 2013 - 08:06 PM, said:
This topic is locked
