I am going to be breaking this post down into several sections as it is very long, but I hope you find it informative. Also - this is not an inflammatory thread, I am simply attempting to discern what the plan will be regarding the introduction of Clan Mechs from a financial standpoint: that is MC, not CBills.
The Real Cost of Clan Mechs
A while ago I calculated that the Daishi will cost somewhere around 15,000 MC, if not more (
here). However because this translates into roughly $65 USD, no matter how you slice it this is an absolutely exorbitant amount of money. People will actively avoid paying for Clan Mechs with money, and we know that PGI will put in some free alternative to obtain them otherwise the game will enter into a phase of actual P2W.
So in short; $65 dollar Daishi's just aren't going to fly. But what does this actually mean?
Well first, let's take a look into how PGI actually comes up with the MC values for (non-Hero) Mechs. Currently the conversion rate is 2,500 CBills to 1 MC. Let's use the Atlas AS7-D-DC as an example that I can demonstrate this as proof:
Notice we have the two values, CBills and MC. Well if we use the conversion rate of 2500:1 as I rated before, then it should come out to 4,195 MC.
10,486,012 / 2500 = 4194.4048 MC
Not quite 4,195, but literally so close that we can see PGI simply rounded up the figure. Now let's see what happens if we apply this again to the Daishi shall we?
29,350,000 / 2500 = 11740 MC
So wait a minute here, if I said that the Daishi will cost about 15,000 MC how come my figure is completely off? Good question. Originally PGI based their CBill values off of rough estimates and the canon costs of the variants. However later on they then actually normalized the values by taking account of the real cost of the components. It's why the Atlas AS7-D is 9,676,072 CBills despite the fact it's cost according to TT is 9,626,000 CBills. This may seem like a slight difference, but on some Mechs and some variants in particular the cost gap between the lore/TT figure and the MWO one is a pretty big divide.
Now because they did this, I can "recreate" a Daishi by using IS equivalent parts. In all likelihood this number will be off by a great deal (in that my figure will be cheaper than the actual one), but it is something of a working model.
(Daishi Prime)
Chassis: 100 Ton Assault (5.918,640 CBills)
Armor: 608 points FF/Clan (319,984 CBills)
Engine: 300 XL (4,900,000 CBills)
Weapons:
- 1x LRM-10 (200,000 CBills)
- 4x ER Large Laser (1,600,000 CBills)
- 4x Medium Pulse Laser (480,000 CBills)
- 2x Ultra AC/5 (800,000 CBills)
Ammo:
- 2 Tons Ultra AC/5 Ammo (18,000 CBills)
- 1 Ton LRM Ammo (30,060 CBills)
Equipment:
- 10x Double Heat Sinks (120,000 CBills)
- 3x CASE (300,000 CBills)
Sub-total: 14,686,684 CBills
Sub-total MC: 5875 MC
Not so bad right? Right, but there's a few things being left out of this figure. Such as the TT equation that PGI will apply that goes into basic Mech building. So let's go ahead and add those multipliers.
14,686,684 x 1.25 (Omni) x (1+[100 Tons / 100]) = 36,716,710 CBills
Total: 36,716,710 CBills
Total MC: 14,687
And suddenly we have a problem. This Daishi Prime ends up costing roughly $65 USD. Especially when you consider that the Daishi Prime is one of the cheaper Configurations. You must then realize that this is an absolutely inordinate amount of money. So much money that they'll never actually move more than a few units via MC; which is entirely counter-intuitive to the way that PGI plans on making said money in the first place. It is only logical that PGI would never squander such an opportunity to bring in additional revenue. Especially since the cost of a single Daishi Prime will cost roughly the same as TWO Hero Atlas's. For reference on how PGI determines their MC pricing and what the future Hero Mechs will cost, reference this thread:
here.
PGI's Possible Solution
The solution that PGI has is one that we can clearly see them working towards. Originally PGI announced that they'd be doing a
sale on Dragons for a meager 20% on January 25th. Based off a poll taken during this sale,
a very small number of the population actually took advantage of it. For the most part, the Community seemed to believe it was a rather lackluster offer. They then surprised us a week later and
cut the MC price of all the current Trial Mechs in half, the response to this offer was met with a significantly greater positive response. From there they did the bi-weekly update,
implemented the new color palettes and adjusted the MC values of these items. They also did something that is quite unusual: they refunded MC and CBills to account for these price changes. And this in particular is very important for the point I am going to make, so please remember it. From there we currently
have the 30% Medium Mech Madness deal that isn't quite as good as the 50% deal, but it is still a better discount than the original 20%.
When I see these constant fluctuations in deals, I assume that PGI is gathering information based on sales to try (as Russ has recently stated doing) and hone in on a specific series of discounts that the community likes. Now since PGI has already refunded MC and CBills once before, they have set a precedent that they will undoubtedly happen again. Since the Clan Mechs by and large will be abhorrently expensive and not sell very well at all (Seriously, $65 USD a Mech?), they will have to adjust the MC prices in order to make them more appealing for more players. Now how can PGI do this? Simple. Take the current MC values of (non-Hero) Mechs and slash them in half. PGI then only has to refund a portion of the MC back to the player's account for these adjustments with no fuss from the Community. With this change PGI will be able to add the Clan Mechs at more “reasonable” MC prices that the community will have already been used to; while allowing more frugal players to suddenly buy Mechs that were previously out of their price range. And that's pretty much how I foresee the addition of OmniMechs going.
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Norris J Packard, on 11 February 2013 - 12:46 AM, said:
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