7 replies to this topic

[Borengar629]

Hello everybody.

I just recently returned to the game after my computer crashed very early in the open beta. So far I really have to say that I'm impressed by the improvements to the game.

Lately I read a lot about pay to win... there is even a topic about it 2 threads beneath this one. I read a little into it and I have to disagree. I myself own the misery, the heavy metal and the pretty baby and I don't think those are supirior to those you get for credits. In fact I think the Stalker 5S is much better than the misery but thats not the point of this topic.

What I see in the game so far -and I've been playing the a lot lately- is actually pretty balanced.
But there is a thing that strikes me a little odd.
Hero mechs are there to earn a little extra money. You buy them for real cash to raise your money ingame. And there unique variants as well.
Champion mechs on the other hand improve your XP-gain and by that your GXP-gain, that you need to improve your piloting skills. You also have to pay them with real money. They are not unique and don't grand any other benefit.

I think that is pretty unattrictive considering the pricing. Especially when you leveled it out the Champion mech quickly becomes obsolete, while the Hero still grands you money you need ingame.

As it is now you get I believe 5% of your mech XP as GXP, right? Champion mechs get you 10% more mech XP and therefore 0,5% more GXP. That is fair enough.
But to trade in the mech XP you earn you have again to pay real money. Thats not optimal.
Why not let the Champion mechs generate just that amount of mc that is nessecary to convert at least 10% of the mech XP to GXP. I don't think that would be such a loss for PGI considering that would get a lot of people to buy a Champion mech.
And they should also be unique variants. Either make a Champion mech version of every Hero mech as well or something completely different.

A lot of F2P-Titles allow players to earn the real life currency ingame but at a rate that still requires them to buy from the store with their real money.

As an exemple:

A normal mech grands you 1 GXP for every 20 XP
A champion grands you 2 Bonus XP and therefore 0,1 GXP Bonus
It also should give you 0,2 mc so you could trade some of the XP to GXP and make more use of it.

And there should be a interstallar market place where players can sell their stuff and buy from others.
Prices would automatically be regulated as they only can be between the buying and selling price of the regular game, so there would not be much room for exploits there. Seller would get just a little more than selling automatically and buyers could get themselfs a little discount.
And it would be a possiblity for players that don't have enough real money to get a Hero or Champion Mech. Their prices should be regulated by the devs It should be regulated how much 1 mc is worth in credits and vice versa. Than there could be just a normal pricing like all the other stuff.
The system itself could prohibit sellers from asking a price that is above the buying or bellow the selling price that is mandatory.

So. Sorry for that wall of text and thanks for reading it anyway Hope at least some like the ideas and other point out my flaws in a hopefully polite way.

See you all in the field.
Trick

P.s.: Sorry for my bad english. I'm german. I hope the point got across anyway.

Edited by Trickshot, 18 June 2013 - 08:24 AM.

[Zerberus]

Player driven economies indirectly promote farming, exploiting, botting, and other undesirable activity. As soon as there is real money to be made by selling people ingame advantages, half of china starts doing whatever it can to suck money out of players that want whatever advantage they can get and are willing to pay money for it.

Pgi has stated that player to player transactions are not even a consider4ation at this point, and I fully support this.

Also , hero mechs offer exactly Zero XP bonus. They have a 30% C-bill bonus.

Champion mechs offer a 5 or 10% XP bonus, but have nothing to do with hero mechs. The first was a community designed trial mech, the second was a "favorite" developer build. The Heros on teh other hand are (for the most part) based on canon loadouts of known "heros" such as Rhonda Snord, the Fang + Flame of the Takeda brothers, or Justin Allard`S Yen-Lo-Wang. Completely different concepts.

Edited by Zerberus, 18 June 2013 - 08:32 AM.

[Bhael Fire]

Yeah, allowing players to transfer in-game items promotes account hacking and farming. Right now, there's no incentive for hackers to hack accounts (other than to just be a jerk). Keeping accounts isolated makes sure it stays that way.

So, no.

[Borengar629]

Ok. I really haven't thought of that farming aspect. So a market would really be a bad idea I guess. But that doesn't effect Champion (Sorry for mixing it up with Hero in to sentences, I corrected that) mech at all. If they would generate a little bit of mc it wouldn't harm anyone, if there is no open economy.
Mostly that is, what I wanted to say. The market thing just came up half the way... I often get a bit off track writing

[Zerberus]

Generating MC would directly harm PGIs revenue. Even if it only generated 1MC /match, play nonstop for a week and you can afford 3 months of afford premium time that others have to pay real cash for. SO essentially a hc player buys a mech once, and never has to pay a dime for anything ever again. Hundreds of dollars worth of premium product given away, for the price of buying just one mech. And as soon as it becomes public, then every tom {Richard Cameron} and harry will buy one, and PGI will never make a dime on this game again. I dunno about you, but If I do work 40 hrs a week, I expect to get paid for it in something other than sandwiches Garth`s girlfriend /wife made over the weekend...

C-bills on the other hand are fair game, and what I assumed you meant, otherwise I would have said this in my previous post.

Edited by Zerberus, 18 June 2013 - 08:39 AM.

[Borengar629]

I think you exaggerate just a little bit.

If you would generate an average of 1 MC per match (which means to assume that you get at least 1.000 XP per match if it is calculated 1:1 with GXP generated) it would take you 300 matches to get a mech bay for example (I don't know whats the premium time's price but I think it is about 25 mc per day?).

Let's say an average match takes you 5 minutes (not even taking mechlab, loading time, etc. into account) that would result in you grinding your *** of for 25 hours to get a mech bay. Even to keep (let's assume my 25 mc per day is correct) up premium infinite you would have to play 25 matches every day. That is a little over 2 hours.

I highly assume that most poeple wouldnt' want to do that. For most players it would just be what I would want it to be. A nice benefit and a reason to invest into champion mechs.
And those hardcore grinders that would really finance their game in that matter wouldn't even be so useless. Average casual players want to launch the game and play. The more hardcore players there are, the more the needs of the casual players are met, as there is a richer playerbase.

And think of another MMO which is about flying around in space and shooting klingonnn... aliens. There they go even further. You have a real life currency, a normal and a special ingame currency. With real life money you can buy ships and stuff at a pricing just like the mechs here. The special ingame currency is pretty much a pure ingametime based grindcurrency. And there is a stock-exchange for players where they can trade real life money currency for ingame time currency. Look, I don't wanna say that this is a smart thing, but they actually still earn money with that game. Enough so they just released a big expansion two weeks ago.

I do admit, that this would influance PGIs business plan... but I don't think in a negative way. Think of the fact, that with 1 mc per game, it would take you literally thousends of games just to get the mechs worth back. I speak just for myself here, but I don't see me play the same mech again and again just to save a couple of bucks. But I see myself dig into my pocket, to make a little mc so I can transfer the mech XP from one of my mechs which is leveled to another one.

Again, that's just my opinion.

[Zerberus]

Trickshot, on 19 June 2013 - 01:37 AM, said:

I think you exaggerate just a little bit.

If you would generate an average of 1 MC per match (which means to assume that you get at least 1.000 XP per match if it is calculated 1:1 with GXP generated) it would take you 300 matches to get a mech bay for example (I don't know whats the premium time's price but I think it is about 25 mc per day?).

Let's say an average match takes you 5 minutes (not even taking mechlab, loading time, etc. into account) that would result in you grinding your *** of for 25 hours to get a mech bay. Even to keep (let's assume my 25 mc per day is correct) up premium infinite you would have to play 25 matches every day. That is a little over 2 hours.

I highly assume that most poeple wouldnt' want to do that. For most players it would just be what I would want it to be. A nice benefit and a reason to invest into champion mechs.

If you reread my post, I did not say "everybody" i said hc players, which I specifically meant to include competitive /league players and those that may aspire to earn a living doing it. But yes, a very slight exaggeration was there.

However, for a competitive player, 2 hours a day is a joke, they play that literally before breakfast /going to work. When I still played in the ESL, 4 hours of CS a day and 2 hours of Quake were what I considered "bare minimum" to keep my edges sharp. On top of a demanding 10/h day job.... if you love something and want to be the best at it, finding time is rarely a real problem unless you`re one of those people the makes it a problem for themselves.

For someone that is unemployed or actually earns their living playing a PC game (which ironically, player driven economies make much easier to do, because you can , for ex, have people pay you to play for them ["power leveling" services in WoW or "Elo raising" services in LoL would be 2 prime examples], or to farm x for them, or, or , or....), 100-150+ matches /day is nothing. 1 mechbay= maybe 3 days playtime. Get someone that multiboxes (which will start becoming commonplace as soon as real money can be made) , and has multiple accounts, and you`ve got the beginning of a big problem....

Quote

I do admit, that this would influance PGIs business plan... but I don't think in a negative way. Think of the fact, that with 1 mc per game, it would take you literally thousends of games just to get the mechs worth back. I speak just for myself here, but I don't see me play the same mech again and again just to save a couple of bucks.

The problem is that you assume it will not be exploited.... when it would in fact then be the first thing in the history of online gaming that does NOT get exploited.

700-1000 games /week for someone that earns their livelihood with a game and does it 12/h day is more or less par for the course. A rabid fan that is either unemployed or on vacation can also easily accomplish that. 1000MC/week doesn`7 sound like a bad deal at all, and eventually there will be enpough MC to fill the entire mechbay with MC generation mechs, and just drop, disco, drop , disco, drop, disco and blame connectivity issues. and "suddenly" youre makin 10k MC /week, for doing what amountsx to nothing, except ruining the game for everybody else... Do you think the guy in china who has a roof over his head becasue he doies this cares? He`s trying to survive, not protect your fun

That`s the issue. When it becomes a source of income, fun becomes secondary, and optimizing income generation becomes the prime directive. When you turn your hobby into a job, you don`t "gain" a cool job...You lose your hobby.

That is absolutely normal human greed . As soon as there is any way at all to "make" money off of this game, anything and everything that can be abused so as to make more money will, to a degree that in this game is unprecedented.

Hundreds of games have already had to learn this the hard way..... I don` see any reason that MWO needs to make the same mistake.

I understand your opinion, and respect it... but this would be the first in over 50 games I have been involves in the Beta phase of in the last 15 years that would be better off for it`s implementation... Especially if a player driven ingame-economy were to be added at the same time

BTW: Your XP /GXP conversion math appears to be completely off... GXP is 5% of XP.. 5% of 1000 is 50, 5 % of 100 is 5, and 1 is 5 % of 20. That means that even the worst of players /DC farmers would get 5MC match if th2 ratio were 1:1 GXP /MC.

Compared to that even my scenario is a complete non issue... An average player would earn about 20-25 MC + gxp (= 400-500 xp) PER MATCH. that would almost certainly break PGIs neck. 10-15 matches forp a mechbay, 1-4 days for a hero mech... Yeah, that`s faster than some people can afford them with REAL money.

Edited by Zerberus, 19 June 2013 - 06:42 AM.

[Borengar629]

Jeah. I guess my decimal place went off^^ But then again just make the ration MXP 20 : 1 GXP : 0,05 MC, so that 5% of GXP convert, that's 0,0025% of the XP per match. So if you score an average of 1.000, that would get you 2,5 mc per match.
But finetuning the numbers was not, what my idea was about in the first place.

It was just an example even with my -I have to admit that - mathematical flaw.

Of course it was about letting people get their mc at a reasonable rate. Believe it or not, that's pretty much exactly how all facebook or android games work. They all let you earn your money at a painfully slow rate to animate you to buy money to speed things up. And guess what. It works. Otherwise there wouldn't be shittonnes of such games out there. And my idae was to make champion mechs a little more attractive. Because I don't think they are right now. I understand that they are practically the counterpart to the heros as they give you more xp and heros more money. But there is only so much you can do with your xp without spending the money to convert it into gxp. And this is why they should provide you with a way to do that - even not completly and at a slow rate.

But I do have to admit that I really don't understand the "income" thing you came up with. If you're not able to trade goods or mc between players... how are you supposed to make money of it? Paying your rent in mc from now on? I don't think my landlord's gonna take it that easily. Maybe I miss the point there but I really don't get it.

P.s.: And I really hope you don't think this is about me wanting to save a little money. On the contrary. I do have a well paid job and do wanna support that game because I really like it so far. I already invested a lot of money into it as my founders thing (how do I get rid of this by the way... find it pretty embarassing) indicates.
I really want them to earn money with it. And I think, that changing the champion mechs the way I suggested would be a good way for them to get people interessted in buying one or two and to buy additional money to speed up the process.

Edited by Trickshot, 20 June 2013 - 11:08 PM.