I recently took a trip to a town about 3 hours away from where I live and stayed at a motel for 2 nights. There was a soda machine near my room selling cans of soda for 75c and bottles of flavored water for $1.50. I own a 2014 Jeep.
The can of soda, once purchased, would last a few minutes and then you're finished with it. The room was a thing I only rented out for 2 nights. The car I own, but it too will not last forever, due to wear and tear, and it requires me to constantly pay for fuel to keep it running.
These are real-world problems. In the digital world of CoT a lot of stuff has no natural expiration date and never runs out. That said, it would be a good thing for the company that sells and maintains the game to always have something that people could buy that they might need, like more cans of soda or more fuel for the car or another night's room rental. Stuff that is transitory in nature and can be charged for. In other words, "repeat business enablers". Stores that sell games often have a similar problem. Once you buy your copy of Monopoly, you don't need another one, ever. Magic: the Gathering tries to skirt this problem by printing a new set every 3 months and encouraging formats that require you to purchase the new cards (Sealed, Booster Draft, and Standard).
Is there anything that Stars could be used to buy that could be a repeat business enabler? Note that I'm not talking about costume pieces here. Nobody will buy the same costume piece twice, so you have to keep making new designs to get the same people to keep buying stuff. I'm talking about "design and make it once, sell it over and over" type stuff. Like cans of soda or fuel.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Well, I thought that one of the things purchasable with 'Stars' was the Subscription itself? That seems like a major expense, like the mortgage/rent on your house. It seems like, if you're paying for the Subscription, you really shouldn't have to pay for anything else.
However, one of the perks of paying for the Subscription - With Money - is a stipend of Stars, which might seem circular. I definitely don't see any point in using Stars to 'rent' a cola, so I can drink, metabolize, and excrete it. One might spend Stars to purchase a feature of the game which would not, otherwise, be available to the player/account at the time. For instance, I might pay Stars for access to Capes, before I had completed the 'Cape Unlock' mission. Or, for account-wide access to capes, After I had run the mission once through.
Frankly, I don't see Stars as an appropriate currency for temporary/ephemeral things. Let's buy those with IGC.
Be Well!
Fireheart
{Edit} On further consideration, something that I Might choose to spend a regular Stars payment on, would be a Drone Delivery Service. Like, I could use my PDA to order a care package of soda, sandwiches, bandages and Bactine (or Inspirations) 'online', and the Delivery Service would air-drop the stuff to me, a few minutes later. So, 'Special Services' might be something to 'rent' using Stars.
These are the things I could see in the Star Store that doesn't have a hard or practical limit to the amount you can buy.
Time limited boosters like XP, IGC, drop chance/rate and so on.
Rename, respec tokens.
Limited use access to bank/mail/crafting station (if limited in that way)/similar from anywhere in the world through charges.
Something similar to CoH's [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Super_Pack/Heroes_and_Villains]Super Packs[/url].
Perhaps even something like the purchasable sidekicks from CO could work.
As long as it isn't power enhancements that degrade like they do in DCUO. I really hated DCUO's system of your equipment getting beaten up as you fight and so you get less powerful till you repair it. I mean, that can make sense in a fantasy game where armor and weapons are so important, but, other than maybe Iron Man types, it doesn't really fit most heroes.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
The main danger you can get into with this is whether the average player would come to depend on regularly buying things like this in order to play and/or whether this gets too far into the realm of "pay to win".
Sure from the company's point of view it would be great if there were things you could buy with Stars that people would want to continually repurchase on a regular voluntary basis. I'm sure that while some players would be willing to do that others might see this as a sneaky imposition of a backdoor "subscription" depending on how important the items are to their overall gameplay experience.
I ultimately believe that there's a whole bunch of things that would be appropriate for the Star Store. I just think that each time something is considered for inclusion into the store it needs to be thoroughly vetted to determine whether the new item for sale would be something that players would "like" to have as an optional extra or if it could potentially become something that players felt they "must" have in order to fully enjoy the game. When players start getting the feeling/perception that they are being "forced" to pay for things just to have a minimally acceptable play experience (like Empyrean's point about DCUO forcing you to pay for your degrading gear) that's when they'll start to have a negative reaction to it.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
The repeat business enablers used in other games:
1. Magic Online uses virtual packs of virtual cards that you buy in order to make a virtual deck so you can play. There are also Event Tickets sold to allow you to enter various tournaments, which have prizes (the prizes are always some number of virtual packs of virtual cards).
2. Other MMOs sell keys to open lockboxes, the idea being that such lockboxes are essentially a gamble, so you have to buy a lot of crap to get a little useful gear. This is like selling lottery tickets to the "win a cool item" lottery instead of just selling the item directly, so it's a variant on the Magic/HeroClix sales approach of selling packages of randomized content so as to sell more packages, as people will just buy more to try to get the thing they want.
3. CoX had Superpacks, but they were totally avoidable as you could get equally good gear in other ways..
4. DCUO has degradable gear that makes the gear a thing that DOES wear and tear, and as such needs to be replaced.
5. I've mentioned in other places the idea of selling one-shot tickets to specific TFs or trials to the non-subbed (with subbed people getting the "Golden Ticket, all-day V.I.P. pass" while subbed).
6. There's always the "nuclear option" of making the game itself strictly pay to play, sub only.
If I had to rank my preferences from among just these options, I'd take 5 because I intend to subscribe. Failing that, I'd be happily willing to live with 4 or 6. I think lockboxes and keys are undesirable, personally, due to the "money for randomized product" aspect of it making it too close to gambling for me. At least with degradable gear, you pay your Stars and you get your gear fixed (or you discard old gear and make new gear, either way).
And I'm not saying the game has to have this, but I do think that any business can be helped by repeat business enablers, so it's important to identify them where possible.
If this type of stuff is only going to be available for IGC and not Stars, then why do I want a constant income of Stars for my subscription money? Or more accurately, why does the person I'm selling my Stars to for their IGC want to acquire Stars for IGC? It seems like without a repeat business enabler for Stars, the Stars just pile up and go unused, largely. This will cause people to stop buying them (i.e. stop subscribing) and it will drive the prices of things that Stars can buy way up in Stars. I think that kind of Star inflation would be really bad for the game. The only answer I have for that so far is "You pay cash for a sub, you get Stars with it, among some other perks, you sell the Stars to a non-sub who then uses the Stars to buy sub time for Stars." which is somewhat circular, but it does allow some people to play for zero money and others to get things they want for paying money. Presumably the non-subber will have to be content with lesser gear (or maybe he played on a sub until he got his gear then went non-sub later) since their play style is going to be to grind for items and IGC, sell of items for IGC then trade IGC to high-rolling subscribers for Stars so as to get a month of sub time for free. The only problem in that scenario is: what do you get with sub time that causes people to want to play on a sub so badly that they grind constantly for Stars to make that possible (or else pay $10-15 per month for it instead)? The answer to THAT question cannot be Stars, it has to be something else.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Actually, this isn't anything I've seen any game use real money for, including DCUO. The repairs and/or replacement in my experience are paid for with the in-game currency (which in DCUO happens to be called $), and usually is a fairly small portion of what you generate in normal play.
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
I agree that some form of sink for any renewable resource is generally a good idea and probably often necessary. As long as it doesn't clash with the genre and make the game less true to comics, less fun, or creates the o'le dreaded "immersion breaking", I don't have a problem with it.
Only two specific opinions 1) the "degrading gearz" thing i stated last post and 2) god no, not lockboxes, please... The horror. The horror. :O
The other things sound fine to me.
Yeah, it's not the expense, it's just the inanity and tedium of it that bugs me. It's boring, fiddly, and doesn't generally fit the genre.
Obviously I'm stating opinion and not fact :).
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Okay, so what if CoT had this system in place?
There's an up-front cost to buy the game, which comes with a few months of sub time included (~$50, you get the game and 3 months subbed) then after that, no subscription required, but if you do sub you get Stars AND some other cool stuff (not sure what) and your gear degrades a little slower than the non-sub person's gear. People NOT paying a sub are subject to, as I said, slightly faster gear degradation, which can only be fixed using Stars (subbed or not), which they would presumably only get by buying them from subscribers on the auction house for IGC. The subbers thus get the ability to fix their own gear and then still have Stars left over to sell to non-subbers in exchange for the IGC they want to buy more good gear on the auction house. In this scenario I bet the cash shop will still sell Stars, albeit at an inflated price, to non-sub players and subbers alike, if they just want more Stars.
As for the immersiveness of it all, I'm not worried. I think it can be explained, even in the case of like Daredevil, who mostly punches people, that his individual attacks are subject to getting worse over time if he doesn't invest some time and energy into practicing, resting, eating right, working out, etc to stay in top condition. The fixing of the gear can and should be interpreted differently by different people, but in all cases, the laws of thermodynamics guarantee that all things are subject to entropy, atrophy and erosion over time. It's up to the individual player to figure out how that affects their character, or choose not to bother explaining it, on their own.
That all said, the devs previously ruled gear erosion out, I think, due to it making the game too gear-centric overall.
I'm still curious as to what people think about it and how we'd all rank our preferences though, so it's an interesting discussion, for me.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I'm not specifically against the overall concept of "gear erosion" in MMOs. In some game settings (as mentioned earlier) everybody pretty much uses "swords and armor" to play so forcing everyone to periodically maintain their gear seems at least plausible. I'm just not absolutely sold on the idea of having it be a universal mechanic in a superhero game.
I accept that you could stretch the definition of "gear maintenance" out to paying for things like "off-camera" practicing or other activities that would represent things you'd need to do to stay in top fighting condition. But I'd have to agree with the Devs that I'm just not sure the relative need for reasonable IGC sinks in this game fully justifies forcing everyone to fall under a "gear erosion" mentality.
Since CoT is going to be fairly faction/alignment oriented maybe what the Devs could do is make it so that you have to pay IGC to various NPC groups in order to maintain "membership" with them or keep in their good graces. Again you could rationalize this all sorts of ways (e.g. villains paying protection money to mob bosses or heroes donating to "charity" to support worthy organizations). The net effect is that if you want to gain the benefits of being associated with these in game organizations you'll have to "pay" them one way or another. This would also give players a choice - sure they could choose not to pay any NPC group but then they'd be missing out on whatever benefits they could be getting from that.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I don't care what other games do, really. For all of my characters, their 'power' is inherent in themselves, no 'gear' need apply. It's already been established that there won't be 'gear' in CoT, so any argument regarding 'gear maintenance and repair' is moot.
This thread is, specifically about what to spend Stars on. Stars represent real-world currency, as the only way to generate more Stars for players to spend is for someone to pay for them.
So far as I can see, it looks like the only things people want to spend Stars on, is Services and Content Unlocks.
Be Well!
Fireheart
That would make sense to me. I'd personally be more motivated to spend "real money" only on things that would effectively be permanent/one-time costs.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
If I'm interpreting Lothic's comments right, in the most recent post, you are saying that you are against any "repeat business enablers" of any kind, of they cost Stars, is that correct?
I think that is somewhat overly frugal, as a stance on this, since subscription payers who pay $15 per month will likely be getting a lot of Stars every month with that. I can't imagine the amount of work the devs would have to do to get subbers to buy that many different things that would be sold on a one-of, buy it once and own it forever basis. I feel like having a constant influx of Stars into my account for paying a sub places a burden on the devs to come up with stuff to spend those Stars on every month, or else they just pile up and you get hyperinflation of Stars, not to mention people just ignoring Stars altogether because you can't buy consumables with them.
Let's assume for a minute that there are consumables that can be purchased with IGC. Assuming further that people could sell Stars for IGC on the auction house, this begs the question "Why would a person who has IGC want Stars, per se?"
I mean, I think Doc Tyche and others have espoused the concept of letting the non-subbers grind hours upon hours to get stuff for no money, whereas the people like me with more money than time can just buy some of the same stuff. If you set it up right, this ought to create a symbiotic environment where I, the rich subscriber, end up paying the you, the hard-working non-sub for your hard-earned items and IGC by giving you Stars that I get every month with my sub. This brings us back to the question of why the non-subber wants Stars at all? If it's only for one-of, permanent unlocks and purchases, I feel like those will be few and far between and the Stars I get as a sub will not be a great incentive to get you the non-sub to trade me items and IGC for them, like, at all.
Now, on the other hand, if there is some kind of repeat business enabler for Stars that all players can use and will want a continuous supply of, then that solves that problem nicely.
I'm mostly interested in figuring out what we'd want that to be, if it had to exist. CLEARLY it's less money for all of us to have to pay if such repeat business enablers DON'T exist at all. I'm not arguing against that point, I'm just more interested in the details if what we'd want it to look like if it did.
For instance, the devs apparently don't like gear erosion. If we rule that out, does it mean we have to have lockboxes instead? If that's true, which is worse, to us the future players? If gear erosion and lockboxes are both evils, which is the lesser of them? Or is the least offensive option the mandatory subscription to play, like CoX had circa 2004-2010? Or is it the pay-per-run TF scenario? Or have I left an option out?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
K, I'm going to float an idea I haven't fully thought through (cause that always works out), but what if there is a cap on all stars accounts?
It doesn't have to be a severe cap--it could be a hundred or a thousand or a million depending on how valuable stars end up being--but just something to keep people from collecting 18 bajillion stars. Monthly subscribers would get their monthly allotment but never past the cap. This way there'd be less need for a degrading star sink.
Again, it's an idea. Good one or a bad one? Not sure.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
What to spend stars on? I'd assume the store would be selling a lot of cosmetic stuff, individually or in appropriate packages. Things like costume sets, power themes, power animations, emotes, auras, base stuff, etc. Then you have new classifications or specifications as they are added to the game. Then you have account-level stuff like character slots, costume slots, renames, respec tokens, storage increases, more mission builder storage, and so forth.
I'm not saying that absolutely everything added to the game has to be paid for one way or another, but as long as the devs keep adding new stuff to the game there should be plenty of stuff to spend stars on.
If subscribers hit the cap, then why would they continue to subscribe? The devs would lose out on consistent cash that way. Plus some players might want to save up their stars if nothing released recently catches their eye, but there are a few things coming down the pipe in the future that they do want. If the cap is a very high amount, it begs the question of why even have a cap at all?
I "Do Not" like the term "Degradation" (maybe also "Erosion").
It makes me feel like its Food, and has a Shelf life.
Passage of time Should Not diminish the gear on any of the Alts I Raised, even if I haven't logged onto them in years.
Only time it SHOULD/COULD change is the Devs Nerf it, for everyone!!!
Returning players will most likely love that and not think twice which Game to hop back into when they finish with a longer running project from work.
Bad, in my opinion. In real world terms, Stars will be worth what MWM sells them for. Stars that are bought, but not spent, represent a zero interest loan to MWM. I see no need to discourage this behavior. ^_^
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
Hmmm. I didn't think stars were going to be the only or the main thing we got for subscribing. But I do like your idea of focusing on using them for aesthetics/QOL stuff. And like Izzy, I don't like time or battle degrading power.
I guess if stars end up leading to a good non-sub income source for MWM, then better to not have a limit. And, again, I'm not arguing for the idea, was just throwing it out there since some games do have that kind of thing.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Let's not presume that Stars will be Plentiful. I remember when we switched from Veteran's Rewards to 'Reward Tokens' and I found myself without enough Tokens to achieve the same level of 'stuff' I had gotten before.
We might expect that a subscriber's monthly stipend of Stars would be approximately the same as the cost, in Stars, for a Subscriber's level of access. However, it might not be so.
The Devs could easily decide that they wanted Stars to be more desirable/rare. They could set the default stipend low, then add and subtract 'bonus' Stars until they had a stable Stars economy. This might cause others, besides the inevitable 'whales', to purchase More Stars, so they can get all of the extras they want.
Let's not dream up horrible economic crises, before they manifest.
Be Well!
Fireheart
No I'm not against the general idea of what you're calling "repeat business enablers". I'm just bring up the point that it's relatively hard to have something that's designed to be "repeatedly repurchased" also be something that remains effectively optional. Just seems like it'd be far too easy for the Devs to make that commodity something that's so universally useful for gameplay that everyone collectively decides that you "must" buy those things to be effective. That's the classic slippery slope of "pay to win".
Besides it seems far too early to be assuming there's going to be a problem with people hording Stars in the first place. Sure that might be something that we need to consider, but let's get a little further into this before we start coming up with clever back-end solutions to problems that might not prove to be worth worrying about. Remember as Fireheart implied the Devs will control exactly how many Stars people will get for their subscriptions per month so if it turns out too many people end up hording them the Devs could simply reduce the number of Stars they pump into the game's economy. My guess is that they will start off fairly conservatively from the very beginning just to make sure the economy doesn't get flooded with them right off the bat.
Again as Fireheart implied are we already certain we're going to have a problem with this?
If things are planned well enough there should be a constant mix of new one-time items to buy as well as "services" (such as renames or respecs) to make things work out. Also I'm not against the idea of being able to buy "temp bonuses" like getting a say a +5% increase to earned XP for an hour. There are actually quite a few things they could sell for Stars that would be perfectly fine. Again my original main concern was that nothing you can buy for Stars should ever become so necessary or universal that players feel like they are forced to buy that thing just to maintain an acceptable level of game enjoyment.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I don't think anyone at MWM who has chimed in on the game economy or monetization has stated that the Stars are envisioned as being no more numerous than Paragon Reward Tokens were in CoX. I think they're thinking of them more like Event Tickets in Magic Online or PLEX in EVE Online. If I'm wrong, I hope a dev will correct me on this.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Ultimately I don't think it really matters what the overall "number" of Stars in the game will be as much as what their relative "value" will be pegged at.
Let's take for example something that will likely be for sale in the Stars Store: a character rename token. Now let's hypothetically assume that everyone agrees that those tokens should be worth (in terms of real life money) say $10.00. So how many Stars should equate to $10.00? That's the question we're really trying to answer here. It might be reasonable to scale it so that 1 Star equals 1 penny so that things like this rename token would cost 1,000 Stars. But they could just as easily peg a Star to be equal to 1 dollar (so the token would cost 10 Stars) or go the other way and say the token cost 10,000,000 Stars (making a Star worth only $0.000001).
Once the Star is assigned a relative value then the Devs would decide exactly how many we'd get per month with our subscriptions. If they go with "1 Star equals 1 penny " they might choose to give us 1,000 Stars per month. If that proves to be too much they could cut it back to 500 per month; too little and we might get 2,000 per month. Regardless the actual "number" of Stars doesn't really matter; it's their relative value that'll be what will matter.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I intend to be P2P my whole career. I do not want the monthly allotment of subscriber goodies, whatever that is, to ever expire. For that matter, even if I unsubscribe, what I earned remains and remains usable.
__________________
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The very existence of the taunting tank irritates, for it requires idiotic AI that obeys the taunt.
There are four issues I can see that make a criterion like this problematic:
1. If players lose nothing, literally NOTHING, by letting their sub drop, then they don't appear to have any reason to keep paying a sub. So can you expand on that and tell me why you think you or any rational person would continue paying for sub time if the devs follow your directive and set things up such that letting the sub lapse costs you nothing and takes nothing away from you that you previously had? I mean, exactly what things would fall under "what I earned remains and remains stable" and what doesn't? Is there any individual perk or right or game function that you can think of that dropping your subscription ought to cause you to have to live without? Because it is exactly those things (the things you lose when your sub drops) that are, ultimately, the reason people pay ongoing subscriptions, as far as I can tell. And if you're charging $15/month for a sub, then whatever it is, it ought to be worth that, every month you're actively playing.
2. Assuming everything we buy with Stars is ours to keep forever, and is infinitely durable, that is, that whatever purchased lasts forever with no timer, no erosion, etc, and further assuming we subscribers get an allotment of Stars every month with our sub, then one of two things is happening: either the permanent, durable goods we keep buying with our Stars are piling up, or the Stars, which we're mostly not spending, are piling up. Either way, as such things pile up, our need for more of them dwindles. I don't see a huge economy in name changes and other account services BS. That stuff is nice to have for the rare occasion when you need it, but not the kind of thing that you see most players buying every day like a pack of gum or a candy bar.
3. It sounds to me like the spirit of what you're saying is something like : Thou shalt not charge continued fees over time for stuff we deem essential, thus you may only charge for stuff we deem optional. This argument sounds to me like a person trying to angle for a free lunch. Metaphorically, you're demanding to get a daily hamburger for free and then deigning to allow the restaurant only to charge for use of napkins and straws, which one can assume most people would just as soon live without if they had to. Thus you, the player, do not have to pay any money for anything (after the up-front purchase of the game). I know hamburgers cost money to make every day, but so does a game. Something has to pay for the servers to remain running and the tech support people to be there to help with technical bugs, and the developers to keep developing new content. I doubt very much that people are going to opt to pay a purely optional subscription in order to allow the devs to keep the game running and the lights on, because people generally want to get something in exchange for their money when they spend it. I don't expect or want this game to run on optional donations.
4. If we keep getting Stars with our sub and we keep using them to make one-of purchases of stuff that people legitimately want, which stuff is permanent and last forever and never goes away once purchased, then by year 3 of the game the cost of entry to the new player is going to be something like $500. They, the newbies, will have to buy the game for $50 then buy all the cool stuff we've been buying during the last three years, which should amount to like $15 per month worth of stuff over the last 36 months.
So my argument here is this: If the sub is paying for stuff that's purely optional, then most likely nobody subscribes, like, at all. If what it pays for is somewhat more necessary to have, but durable enough that it lasts forever, then the barrier to entry increases monotonically over time and there will be no new players after a while. Thus the only option I can see that we really have is to charge a sub for things that are transitory or temporary in nature. Things that can be purchased then consumed or used up, or things that are toggled on and off by the subscription, and as such make the game play experience different while playing with a paid sub than what it would be like unsubbed. To me this includes or could include stuff like access to specific zones, missions, TFs raids, trials, better gear, better power sets, better hard caps on resistance, defense, damage, speed, HP regen, power recharge rates, endo recovery, etc. I know a lot of people are against that type of "Pay to Win" stuff, but I'm not against it.
I think if you really hate Pay to Win that much, then you're basically arguing for a Pay-to-Play, mandatory-sub-or-no-game-for-you type of game like CoX was in 2004-2010. And I'm not against that, for the record.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Radiac, I think (and admit I may be wrong), but in Context of Gorgon's quote here is in reference to [i]monthly allotment[/i]...[i]of subscriber goodies, whatever that is[/i]...[i]to never expire[/i]...[i]what I earned remains and remains usuable[/i].
This is not in reference to any additional services provided via subbing, but the stipend of cash shop currency. Gorgon appears to not want that taken away even if he/she were to unsubscribe from the game. I know you have strong opinions about the currency model of the game but slow it down and take what people are saying into context of what they are meaning.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Right, so my accumulated Stars continue to be useful and valuable, even if I stop playing/paying for a while. Any Stars that I sold for IGC are obviously gone, but my accumulated IGC is still good. The costumes and other items that I purchased with Stars don't fade away. Granted, any content that I purchased early access to, may have been rolled over into the general game over time.
Newbies who purchase 'the whole game' get whatever content is considered part of the 'basic game' at that time. Players who may have stepped away from the game for a while, but still have an account in good order, will also get access to the whole 'basic game' when they return and any other content which they might have unlocked before they left. Resuming a Subscription gains access to everything available to other Subscribers at that time.
Now, another thing I would pay Stars for is Character Slots. In fact, I seem to recall using in-game Store tokens to buy Character Slots on every game I've played. I've bought Extra tokens (with money), so that I could acquire those slots. I suspect other CoT players and subscribers would do the same.
Be Well!
Fireheart
CoH being my 1st MMO, I didnt quite get why i had to buy the box and then pay such a high price every month, like a Utility Bill.
If back then someone explained to me, that part of that money was an investment into New Zones, New Content, New Foes, New Powers, etc.. in essence.. a New Game each year, maybe the novice me (back then), wouldn't have hesitated soooo much before subscribing. ;)
If the only two options I had to play CoT were either a strict Pay-to-Play scenario (a classic mandatory monthly subscription) or some kind of Pay-to-Win (where the game was designed such that it was virtually impossible to have a reasonably satisfactory game experience without continually buying various temp power boosters in the game store) I would go for the monthly subscription in a microsecond.
The primary problem with the Pay-to-Win mindset is that it actually penalizes you more as a player the more you play the game thus ironically encouraging people to NOT play for extended periods of time. Think about it this way: Let's say you're the type of person who's only going to play CoT say 5-10 hours a week. In that case it might almost make sense to go with some kind of Play-to-Win scheme because you might not quite get your full money's worth from a standard monthly subscription. But if you're the type of person who's going to play the game any more often than maybe 10 hours a week Play-to-Win would actually start to cost you MORE than a flat subscription because you're likely having to buy so many of your so-called "packs of gum or candy bars" just to be effective. Frankly as a person who expects to be playing CoT far more often than just 5-10 hours per week I would find any variation of a required Pay-to-Win model to be incredibly annoying to say the least.
I get that you're trying to think of ways that would supposedly help MWM make as much money as possible and to be honest I have no problem with MWM earning a profit from this at some point. But in the long run the best way MWM will get the most money from the most players is to NOT impose any kind of mechanic that forces continual, periodic payments in order to either keep your permanent stuff permanent or to even be minimally effective while playing the game. I don't want to RENT costume items I buy - I want to OWN them. I don't want to have to keep buying temporary "power pills" every ten minutes just so that minion level mobs won't crush me - I want to be able to play the basic game without having to worry about PAYING for it every few minutes.
Basically I hate the nickle-n-dime mindset of Play-to-Win so much in games like this that I'm the type of person who'd give MWM $100 a month if they could set me up with the kind of subscription that would let me have unlimited permanent access to ANYTHING in the game store for no additional extra cost. This means if I wanted to do a thousand character renames or respecs in a month I'd have them for no extra charge. It also means if I did no character renames or respecs in a month then that'd be fine too as long as I didn't have to think about paying them a few dollars here or there every 5 minutes. I realize that's not going to happen, but I actually suspect that far more people than you'd think would opt for my semi-crazy "unlimited $100 subscription" idea than any form of Play-to-Win for this game.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I would like to have a few costume slots per character as a basic right of playing. Say 3-5, with the option to buy more slots with IGC. I'd also expect a few (2-4) character slots as standard with the option to buy more, as many as I want, with Stars.
I happily gobbled up just about every Costume Pack in CoH as soon as it came out. I would do the same in CoT, I expect, provided I had enough characters to justify their use. There is the rub for me. I would also spend stars on additional CHARACTER slots. The balancing act would be whether I have enough Stars to purchase new characters with enough left over to get them the costume items they need.
I wouldn't mind the ability to buy individual costume items for a premium, and buying 'theme packs" for a per item discount. All for Stars, of course.
That being said, I fully expect to subscribe for the life of the game. So, I want my sub to be sufficient to allow me to purchase PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING I want as soon it becomes available. The assumption that I am paying my monthly fee when there is nothing, necessarily, new to buy. In other words, I want my subscription to be more economical than buying the individual items, assuming that I'm going to but almost all of them anyway.
I saw that it was mentioned that MWM could potentially reduce the amount of stars provided each month if they found the value of such stars to be too high. IE every subber was buying everything in the store and had lots left over. No. No they could not do that. Imagine if you've been playing for a year and getting 1000 stars every month. Then the next month you get just 500. You would be pissed. You'd be pissed if they even floated the idea that they would be reducing the amount of stars that you are paying for each month. By doing that they would have changed the value of your sub. You personally might not be pissed but the internet community is a very bipolar beast and very quick to anger and outrage. Their only option for adjusting the economics post launch to to adjust the cost of the commodities. If at launch a costume pack cost 200 stars and they find that to be to cheap the next costume pack is going to cost more. You can't change the price of existing in game items after they are launched either for the same reason you can't change the number of stars provided for the sub. Admittedly if given the choice of changing the number of stars or cost of existing items it's easier to get away with changing the cost of an item.
As far as what things to buy. Inspirations are a good place to start. Sure these drop in the game but if you adjust the drop rate you can tailor the demand of these items in the store. You can also provide tiers of these items. A random pack of 5 could cost 100* but a 5 pack of specific or matched insps would cost 150* or 200* Crafting materials could work the same way. By only offering basic materials "scientific goo" and requiring players to find the rarer items needed for crafting it doesn't become a pay-to-win. So if you used all your scientific goo already you can buy that and then use your "Extraordinary sparkle powder" that you beat (insert big bad name here) to get, to craft your new enhancement. Add these items to a list of character slots, inventory options, and costumes and you get pretty well rounded store that isn't terribly game breaking. I think there is plenty of "money" there for MWM. They can start there and if they find they need to do more or people want more then they can add those things later. It's really hard to judge what is a good item to go into the cash shop until you play the game and can say, "Gosh, it would be great if I could buy ."
If they really need a stars sink they can add one. Have a building in game branded with MWM with a mail slot that you can dump stars in. You'd click on the mailslot and a window would prompt you with something like, "By dropping stars here you are donating the cost of these stars directly to the developers which they are using to develop new things. MWM thanks you for this donation. All donations are final and non-refundable. How much would you like to donate? 10* 20* 10000*(I'm loaded!)"
Second Chance: https://store.missingworldsmedia.com/CityOfTitans/SecondChance/
Dev Tracker: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/fixing-dev-digest
Dev Comments: https://cityoftitans.com/forum/dev-comments
I'd agree that having to make "adjustments" like these would not be the ideal. That's why it's in MWM's best interest to make sure whatever values they start off with are extremely conservative. This means that the number of Stars we initially get with our subscriptions should seem almost too low to most people and the store prices should be set relatively high.
The reason for this is simple: It plays a little psychological trick on us silly players. If it turns out that minor adjustments become necessary then they most likely would appear to be positive improvements as far as the players are concerned instead of negative ones. In other words to make things "better" the Devs would likely have to give us more Stars and/or lower store prices. It'd be hard for players to be "mad" at changes like that.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
My responses to things that have been said since my last post:
1. I would appreciate a more thorough and profound understanding of exactly which things are to be counted under the "take nothing away when sub lapses" directive and which things are not. Clearly this is not a criterion that can apply broadly to EVERYTHING about the game, so something somewhere has to be fair game for losing it upon sub lapse, because otherwise the sub itself provides zero value for the subscriber and as such is totally pointless. That said, I think anything you buy can and should be yours to keep, if that's the deal you agree to when you buy it. Some things, however, probably could be sold as temporary licenses or permissions (like the CoX Crafting License) that are not permanent, or things like Enhancement Unslotters that get consumed when you use them. I'm not against that, for the record.
2. I think it has been firmly established that there will be no Inspirations in CoT, so that's one less thing to be able to sell.
3. I've noticed that people who complain about Pay To Win don't seem to care about things like XP boosters other such performance enhancement. If making things like Augment performance or inherent hard and soft caps a subscription-based thing (that is, if non-subs get one set of baseline numbers there and subs get something better) all that does is make your toon go through content faster and acquire stuff faster, so the effect is the same as the XP boosters and so forth, isn't it? And if it's PVP you're worried about, then I think you'd simply have to realize that running a non-sub toon against a similar subbed toon head to head is an unfair fight in the first place. People inherently understand that fighting a level 1 against a level 10 is unfair, so this is something that PVPers can and should acclimate and adjust accordingly to pretty quickly, I would expect.
4. I think the sweet spot in terms of a monthly sub price point probably needs to be scoped out, and I suspect that $15 per month is too high, especially given the type of stuff I seem to be hearing that I'm going to get with my sub. Something closer to $5 feels more appropriate for that and would be far less onerous on people, such that you might get a lot more subscribers, and a lot more people who like the game agreeing to 6-month or year-long subs.
5. Monkeying with the prices of stuff in the cash shop is probably going to happen anyway. Psychology tells us that people would rather buy something advertised as being "on sale" then feel like they're paying "full price". Heck, Magic card vendors that sell singles routinely put different price tags on different copies of the same card in order to get people to believe the card is worth $12 then sell them a "slightly more bandged up" one for $10. Either way the buyer is paying more than the seller paid for the card, so the vendor makes a profit. You can't do that trick with digital product, but you can have temporary sales that see certain things marked down from previous prices, thus prompting people to buy that stuff while it's cheap.
6. Any way you slice it, I think the dollar-backed currency of the game, Stars, should be set up such that it has a pretty solid dollars-to-Stars conversion rate that doesn't get messed with, like ever. If you have to re-evaluate the currency exchange rate of dollars-to-Stars in order try to fix some kind of problem, then the game economy is most likely already screwed up worse than a third world dictatorship, and that's the root problem. If it comes to that, the game is probably already dead.
7. I'm still not convinced that things like respec tokens, enhancement unslotters, prestige pets, and other such stuff are really going to drive an economic demand for Stars at large among players. I think the game needs to have something that you can and would always want more of, and that such thing should be purchasable only with Stars. If you make the game sub-only, it completely eliminates the need for Stars, as far as I can tell. At that point, anything you try to sell beyond the sub is something you could just charge money for in the cash shop and not have to bother. Stars are a necessary currency if there's a non-sub play option, and if the non-subs can get something they want for Stars that presumably the subs (who get stars every month) already have from paying the sub itself. To me, this will always end up being some combination of things that make your character more combat effective and permissions to enter gated content of some kind.
8. People hate paying for stuff and will always have a complaint about it, no matter what it is. Every monetization scheme you try has some knock against it. I don't think there is ever going to be any winning that fight. I've been reading that MMORPGs are kinda dead these days. I think this is because these games don't naturally lend themselves to the kind of predatory gambling-esque sales approach of Magic Online.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Radiac, no one from the game's business team has specified anything regarding the game's monetization model nor specified what will be in the cash shop. So the things you are referencing here are those stated by othter players.
The only information that has been provided by Missing Worlds Media is that the fame will be buy to play, with an optional subscription, and a cash shop. It has also been stated that the cash shop will not use any pay to win methods, and anything sold as an item in the cash shop other than account services, will be obtainable in the game through play. The game is being viewed as a service providing entertainment, the subscription will most likely be designed accordingly.
There are also some ideas about providing a stipend with the sub, trading cash shop currency in the game market for in game currency, and ideas about micro-subscriptions. None of these are finalized.
One of the reasons stuff like xp boosters are typically mot viewed as pay to win (though there is the occasional person whi makes this mistake), is that they don't provide a statistical advantage over other players perfomance in either a pve or pvp scenarios. In fact increasing the xp rate without an increase in drop rate can actually result in earning less drops due to the increase in leveling rate. When games like this that have no specific end-game-grind, getting to the level cap faster isn't much of an advantage over other players, it is more alike to providing a service to help the player get to a later point in the game they desire to play at.
And there are plentynof games with cash shops that don't rely on constant need of items for performance, that mostly provide cosmetics and service oriented purchases which have been and continue to maintain success.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
To be clear I have nothing against buying "temporary" or "one use" items from the Stars store. I don't know about anyone else but I never meant to imply that I would only buy "permanent" things from the store. If anything I was more concerned about effectively having to "rent" things. For instance if I buy a temp XP booster I realize that once I use it in game it'll only last for a short period of time, but I didn't want to have to essentially pay some kind of rent/tax on it just to keep it in my inventory. If I choose to buy something like that and then not use it for 10 years that's my prerogative. The idea of something like that "expiring" or "degrading" just because I didn't use it would seriously piss me off. And obviously whatever something starts out as (either permanently owned or temporary use) ought to stay that way. Things that are sold as permanent items should be permanent, period.
As far as clearly defining exactly what a subscription gets you in terms of what you'd actually lose access to if you chose to cancel it is as we know not 100% set in stone yet. But really there are all sorts of things we could talk about here. The first obvious one is that certain parts of the game (trials, zones, etc.) might require either an active subscription or a one-time fee from the store. Another way having a subscription be "useful" is that it could provide a discount to various store items. For example item X might cost the equivalent of $10 worth of Stars without a subscription but only $5 worth of Stars with a subscription. Again I suspect there are all sorts of ways MWM could do this.
First off the reason why things like "temporary XP boosters" aren't actually "play-to-win" is because (as Tannim222 mentioned) all they do is change how fast you earn XP; they don't make you inherently more powerful. An experienced player could probably still earn more XP per hour WITHOUT XP boosters than an inexperienced player could WITH XP boosters. You've got to remember that what makes something "play-to-win" is some kind of buff/boost that actually makes your character more powerful in a game mechanic way (i.e. more damage, better armor, etc.).
Also as far as I know no one is claiming or advocating for a system that automatically makes your characters more powerful in the game just because you have a subscription. The concept of having different character stats just because you either have or don't have a subscription is a pretty ludicrous idea to me.
I highly doubt that once the "Stars to Dollars" conversion rate is established that it would ever be changed. Like you imply if the Devs ever needed to reset that then there's probably a major game-ending crisis going on.
Instead of changing the conversion rate the Devs would simply (if necessary) change the price of things in terms of Stars. In fact that's really the whole point to having a virtual currency like Stars in a game like this in the first place - it serves as an abstraction to real money so you don't have to deal with real currency inside the game. This is why Stars will always be necessary for both subbed and non subbed players.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Could make some outfits limited to being unlocked via stars. Surviving off people wanting to look fashionable is how many a MMO survives.
Other items could be XP Boosts, Regen "Potions" (no idea what they're going to be called in CoT), and other various things that would just depend on how CoT is planning to play out.
Yeah I figure all of these things will appear in various forms in the Star store. The main point of this thread seems to be whether or not there needs a selection of standard temporary/expendable things that players will want to keep repurchasing on a regular basis that would somehow save the Devs from having to come up with huge numbers of "permanent one-buy" items every single month.
My basic take on it is that we already expect the Devs to provide at least some number of new "permanent one-buy" content per unit time regardless. Do I think that'll equate to like 100 new costume items per month? Maybe not. But the main concern then is whether there should be a sort of fall-back default product that people would want to keep buying regardless of new content and whether that product would represent something that would still be purely 100% optional or if it would be so universally desirable that it would for all intents and purposes be considered a "play-to-win" commodity.
My contention is that there's a fairly line between a "usefully optional" impulse buy and a "must have it to be minimally functional" necessity. I have nothing against being able to get temporary XP or IGC boosters or "healing potions" in general but if you make these things so cool that you'll want to buy them all the time then they're likely well on their way to being considered "play-to-win".
Bottomline I don't think anything sold in the Star store should be so amazing that I'd want to buy them every time I played. There are other ways to motivate people to buy things in the store beyond enticing us with CoT's version of Soylent Green.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Definitely. A new character slot is both permanent (the character slot doesn't expire) and recurring (I leveled up that character and now I need a new slot for my new character idea). Given the usual level of alt-itis in CoH players, selling additional slots for Stars may be quite lucrative.
The "rules" for [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Character_Slot]CoH character slots got fairly complicated[/url] by the time the game shut down. Even at the very beginning of CoH I believe (IIRC) you got 8 character slots per account which was increased to 12 when CoV launched.
I would suspect that CoT will start with something similar: Everyone begins with a certain number of free slots (maybe subscription players would get to start off with more) then you could get extra slots either by buying them in the Star store or maybe via other means like as awards or other methods. I suppose the real question I have for CoT would be what would the upper limit be for character slots per account. I think the max was 48 slots per account with CoH. For ease of programming there would likely still need to be -some- upper limit but I would think that given the cheapness of today's disk storage that upper limit could be pretty large (like say up to 144 or 256 slots as examples).
P.S. In case you're wondering I remember there were people in CoH who literally had 200+ alts spread across multiple accounts. No reason to think there won't be people like that again in CoT.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
From a programming point of view, I'd definitely want to set an upper bound on the number of slots, even if that upper bound gets increased at some point.
CoH's max was, I think, 48 slots per server. Since CoT plans to just have one server, I hope the number of character slots will be fairly high. 48 won't be enough for some of our more prolific players. :)
Starting out with, for example, a dozen slots with more being obtainable via various methods (buy with Stars, earn as a reward for finishing a specific TF for the first time, given for each month of subscription, and so forth) would seem reasonable. Being an alt-oholic myself, additional character slots would never go amiss.
Another possibility would be buying additional costume slots for Stars. Pay X stars and get an additional costume slot on one character. Pay X*Y and get an additional costume slot on all your characters. Nothing essential, but for those players who love having multiple costumes (entering costume contests, etc), it would be valuable.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Stars is the company's cash shop currency. Granted the following carries many heavily weighted "ifs", but bear with me. Should City of Titans be a succuss in of itself to not only support continued development of this game, but could place Missing Worlds Media in the position of developing other games. Should the company be able to offer more than one game, players may in turn choose to access more than one game (not all games need be MMOs either). Players purchasing Stars (or having a stipend of Stars with any subscriptions) would therefor have additional choices on where / what to spend those Stars on.
Again lots of ifs, and granted the cash shop needs to be set up for this particular game in mind as it is the only game currently being developed. My own personal list of cash shop purchases covers over 30 entire categories (some of these are singular, some of these categories are broad and have sub-categories). I won't be posting the list however, it is purely personal conjecture as I'm not on the business team, though I doubt is is very far from the mark of possibilities.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Yeah you're right: The CoH max was 48 character slots per SERVER, not just account. I sometimes forget that because I spent about 99.9% of my time on Virtue so for me CoH was already effectively a "one server" game. ;)
I've already kinda assumed that extra costume slots would be something they'd sell in the CoT Stars store. Like you say they could be sold as singles, multiples and other price points depending if you wanted them just on single characters or all your characters.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I have to admit, I have a selfish motivation behind wanting Stars to be desirable among all players. That motivation is basically that I want to be able to trade the monthly Stars I'll be getting as subscriber to non-subscribers in exchange for enough IGC to get rare and very rare augments and refinements. Assuming non-subs can buy some amount of sub time for Stars, and assuming the other 30-ish item categories Tannim222 has alluded to are enough to do that job, then I'm happy.
It seems to me though that Magic Online thrives by constantly selling Event Tickets and packs of cards to people, and EVE keeps selling PLEX because people keep getting their ships destroyed in big conflagrations from time to time. Those are both systems set up to create a need for money to be spent on an ongoing basis, to me. I feel like the games that are doing the best, financially, are the ones that have something like that, i.e. lockboxes or something similar. We may have differences of opinion as to whether or not CoT can make enough money to make it worthwhile (and to drive the production of the other games the company might want to make) without that sort of thing. I feel like at some point somebody in the boardroom says "If these lockboxes can make us more money per month than we're making now without them, then why aren't we doing that? We're leaving money on the table, aren't we?" and I don't have a good answer to those questions. I mean sure, in the long term people don't like the lockbox gambling, but in the long term individuals tend to waft in and out of games they like anyway. Are you, the player, against the lockboxes, or are you just tired of playing superheroes and villains for the time being and want to switch to something else now? I think it may be more the latter in some cases.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Once again I'm not fundamentally against MWM finding ways to make money with their cash store. Unfortunately the "superhero" genre doesn't directly lend itself to the kinds of things games like Magic or EVE do it terms of "built-in" reasons to keep buying stuff. It's not like The Flash has a fleet of spaceships he has to keep replacing.
The real trick is figuring out something that all/most superheroes would want on a regular basis that DIDN"T involve significantly boosting their basic combat capabilities. One thing off-hand that might fit that bill is the concept of buying (for lack of a better word) "clues" to special cases/missions. Maybe via Stars you could get the "keys" to random door missions that had an increased chance to have something relatively special in them as a reward. In effect it would be a kind of "lottery" system (like CoH's [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Super_Pack]Super Packs[/url]) but instead of just getting something handed to you you'd actually have to go play through the random mission to see if you won.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
You and me both. I had characters on other servers (mostly Champion, where I first played), but almost all of my time was spent on Virtue. And I could have used another dozen character slots there, easy...
Speaking for myself, I, as a player, am not fundamentally opposed to the concept of lockboxes, but I've rarely seen them done in a fashion that I am not opposed to. They tend to end up with all of the new/good content only being accessible via the lockboxes. Look at how CO is using them. New costume packs? Lockbox. New powers? Lockbox. Best gear (or material needed to make said gear)? Lockbox. I would [b]much[/b] rather just straight-up buy a new costume pack with Stars than need to gamble with a lockbox where I may or may not ever get the costume that I'm looking for.
And that's really the Catch-22 with lockboxes - if they made it so that there was nothing exclusive to lockboxes then people wouldn't be motivated to buy them. They have to bait them with stuff "you can only get here" in order to sell them which is the basis of why many people hate them.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I'd be careful in referencing Eve in connection to a game such as CoT will attempt to be. The business models and game design are very different. Eve is very much bent toward pay to win where casual players who aren't spending cash, while they can play and there are systems for them to play through in pve, the majority of the game design is geared toward cash spending. It is not meant to be a very casual friendly game that CoT is meant to be.
You're 'feelings' are conjecture as there are successful games that exist which do not directly rely on 'lock boxes or something similar'. Now I'm not saying such things are good or bad (that's an opinion which doesn't carry weight toward the discussion), nor am I saying something like a lock box or something else won't exist for this game either. The possibility exists in that nothing outside of the few genal guidelines already provided about the monetization model is set in stone. What I can say with a bit of certainty is that lock-box style systems are generally not positive points in game reviews, and there appears to be vocal majority opinion (which may or may not be representative of player bases as a whole within each respective game) that aren't in favor of them - most find them intrusive to the game world.
I do have a question I'd like to pose. And please realize that it is more of personal curiosity than anything even remotely being considered for this game (so toss my 'red name' status aside here for the moment). Radiac has frequently proposed a turn-style payment system for accessing content. This has usually met with resistance. However, for the sake of argument, entertain the following scenario:
Specialized content such as a task force be available to a team and once begun, that task force enters into a cool-down cycle. Let's say each task force is avaiable once every 24 hour period normally.
However, a payment in IGC can bypass the cool-down timer (let's say it is a flat rate each time). This means that the once-a-day access is still 'free' and not lost to someone who pays to access with IGC.
Now, these specialized pieces of content do provide a higher return rate of reward (so it is likely the expense will be compensated with interest), and may also yield a higher rate of return of rarer drops (or something unique).
In addition to the IGC unlock, a player may choose to spend cash and buy Stars in the Star Mart. With these Stars, they can buy bulk unlocks of special content keys instead of paying IGC to unlock the specialized content.
Recognizing that this could create a divide in the player base, those who can afford bulk unlocks with cash, or afford unlocks at a time with IGC, anyone teamed with a person with an unlock can access the same content, but may not obtain any specialized related rewards. Yes there would be a higher return rate of reward as said specialized content carries with it a higher base difficulty so returns of rewards (like xp and igc) as well as drop rates would be weighted accordingly. What probably woundn't count is the Challenge and Achievement portion of the reward system which tallies successive bonuses for completing certain types of content in certain ways if a player were running under the 'team pass'.
Would this be an acceptable scenario?
Again, please remember this is purely at this point, personal curiosity and not, I repeat not, anything remotely planned for this game at this time.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Since you've tossed aside your "redname hat" to propose this hypothetical scenario I'll pick it up, dust it off, and wear it for a moment in my capacity as an experienced player/amateur house rules designer for multiple RPGs and ask you the fundamental question: What "problem" would this kind of mechanic solve?
Is the primary objective here to create a money sink or is the sink secondary to a way to give players a chance to exchange spare ICG/Stars for chances at special loot? Either way I'm not instantly convinced this kind of hoop-jump would adequately satisfy either function unless there was more to it than simply "pay to re-farm content for chances at rare/unique drops".
I'm not saying that a "daily cooldown timer that you can pay to reset for special content" is bad in and of itself; I just don't really think you've "sold" it well enough as stated here. If nothing else this merely has the negative quality you've already pointed out of dividing the playerbase between those willing to pay for something like this and those who aren't. *shrugs*
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I'll agree that if they bring in some form of "lockbox system" then there needs to be something unique in them for them to be enticing enough for people to bother with them in the first place but at the same time it doesn't need to be so good that it becomes a "must have". I never really got that feeling from CoH's Super Pack's.
The main reason I would be against a lockbox system like CO's but perfectly fine with the one CoH had is that CO throws it in your face, especially when you consider the amount that drops in there. Heck, if you could place them in the game world proper then the collective player base could "convert" it into a Minecraft-type game.
Agreed - you've just perfectly summed up why I dislike the lockbox concept. Well - that and the gambling angle.
The problem is less with the interminable junk-boxes, which can't even be sold back to the game, but with the Keys. I'm playing GW2, where boxes and keys are on the loot tables, so sometimes you get a key to unlock one of the hundred boxes you've got stored. Problem, there, is that the boxes usually contain, effectively, junk. More stuff I have to store, because it's all Account-Bound. I bought two Bank expansions and it's Full of account-bound junk-loot that I can't sell or salvage.
CoH didn't do that to us and I expect CoT won't, either.
Be Well!
Fireheart
More the latter than the former. I'm curious as to what basis informs your opinion that time-gated content which carries a higher degree of difficulty, and with that, higher rate of return for rewards, would not be sufficient.
Granted, there would be more involved, as with this game's Challange and Achivement system, there would be unique badges that can be earned for successive completion of this type of content, and in conjunction with this system comes a unique reward system which affords the player to obtain other desired rewards. There could also be guaranteed rewards obtainable, from temporary powers, crafting resources, to power improvements such as augments and refinements, costume pieces etc...I wouldn't limit the possibilities there, if they would be more of an incentive.
There are several games which apply the method of time-gated content with purchasable unlocks for additional play throughs. However, none that I'm aware of allow the player to use any of the in-game currency systems to also obtain access. I included that possibility less as a need for a sink (though it isn't necessarily bad that it is one form of sink), but rather as a way for those who do not desire to purchase Stars or trade for them in the market so they could obtain their own pass for this type of content. Perhaps instead of using IGC, a key or token pass of some sort could be a reward drop in of itself. These could be account-bound or not, perhaps an item that could be traded on the market for igc or exclusively for Stars.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
My current game has giant-monster events on a regular schedule, but one can only collect the big reward-box once a day. One can repeat the event for fun and profit, but not for Big profit. I could see the top-tier missions run that way in the City, with a purchasable unlock for additional runs. Only the very top-tier missions need apply and if the game should develop such that those missions are no longer 'top-tier', then they should be released.
Be Well!
Fireheart
As many have probably already guessed, I have no real objections to Tannim222's time-gating + purchasable bypass idea.
I would like to point out that any system that has subscribers and non-subscribers as two viable options that coexist side by side will pretty much have to have some kind of division of the two in some way. As I have proposed in other threads, and earlier in this one, this could be in the form of conveniences/annoyances, or high power/low power, or content access, but at the end of the day, the non-sub's experience is not going to be 100% the same as the subscriber's, it just has to be that way. Any system that causes those of us with enough disposable income to spend it on a monthly sub has to convince us that the sub is actually selling us something that we want to buy.
One detail about the timer bypass though, assuming it can be purchased for IGC OR Stars, this sets a de-facto exchange rate for the two does it not? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I feel like eventually the IGC will be subject to inflation and people will say "To heck with Stars, I'm going to unlock my TFs using this fairly low-value IGC I have lying around". As such, you have to raise the IGC prices over time to compensate. Are people going to rage against that? I don't know.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
The suggestion to use Stars to unlock the time-gated content was to provide bulk keys at once with increasing discount of cost in Stars at larger bulk sizes.
The IGC-Stars exhange rate will likely fluxuate for a while, but will mainly rely on the a availabikity of Stars on the market, the demand for Stars on the market, and of course the 'value' of IGC in the economy.
While the inflation of IGC is an inevitability, if the economy is set up right, you won't experience the rampant inflation like the old game. And since the pricing for either the igc unlock or the cash-shop unlocks can be adjusted over time if necessary.
There are other applicable igc unlock costs, such as adjusted by time to unlock, where the more time there is since the last play through to the next play through can cost more and decrease to some minimal value (above zero), also frequency of plays can apply a multiplier of igc costs, there can even be a combination of the two.
Whereas the Stars purchased unlocks ignore the time-based nature of costs.
Honestly I'm not wedded to the igc inlock, only toward the concept that there would be a way to gain unlocks by play - which would probably lean more toward keys as rare-very rare drops. The in-game drops could even be specific to the level of the content to restrict higher level content keys dropping at lower levels and as players level each thoe of content key goes into the same drop pool. There are plenty of options there as well.
And the cash shop keys would be agnostic to the content level, making them more desirable diento ease of use.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Honestly, the non-sub, free to play players don't strictly need the IGC unlock, or the IGC-purchasable key unlock, to me. As long as the unlocks can be bought with Stars, and as long as Stars can be bought on the auction house with IGC (bought from people selling them, in the aftermarket sense) then the unlock is then therefore, technically, something players can grind for. They grind for IGC and then use that to get Stars off the auction house from high-rollers like me, then use that to get unlocks. That system gives people a reason to acquire and use Stars, so I like it, assuming it works as described.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I couldn't get to the end of most of the long posts. I might be odd, but if this game is as enlightening as CoH, and if the developers ask me to please pay a subscription that they might keep it alive, I'll pay. Then we have a symbiotic relationship. If anything resembling lock-boxes should show up, I trust I won't need that to "win". I'll "buy" into that, through market economics or perhaps even not at all, if and when it makes sense. Well, if there's any money left, beyond that sub. Now if that symbiotic relationship leaves me feeling I owe something, then of course I will buy those any-color-you-like monobrows.
I know I lack relativism on this, apologies in advance. I just don't play many games.
[size=14]"The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths." - Pushkin[/size]
[size=14] "One piece of flair is all I need." - Sister Silicon[/size]
Sufficient for what? I still don't think you've really answered what problem you're trying to solve here. People are going to find their own content to farm in this game without the Devs having to create obvious locations/content made specifically just for that.
I understand that other games have employed the "daily cooldown timer that you can repeatedly pay extra to reset for special rewards" concept in the past. I'm simply questioning if that mechanic is really an ideal one that we want to see in CoT. To my mind that leads to institutionalizing designated farming camps for those willing to pay for them. This was a type of thing that the Devs of CoH specifically mentioned that they actively tried to avoid.
Just because that kind of thing "works" as far as giving players something to do doesn't mean it motivates players to do fun, positive things. Granted you could spice it up with badges and other so-called "incentives" but after those are achieved all you're left with are Dev-designed farming hubs. I'm not against mindless farming if that's what a given player likes to do - I'm just against the Devs formalizing specific content and mechanics into the game just for that purpose.
I don't have a problem with the overall idea of a "subbed" player having access to things in the game that a "non-subbed" player doesn't. But even as you point out sometimes what motivates a person to maintain a subscription to a game has relatively little to do with obtaining access to exclusive content inside the game itself.
For instance I'm the kind of person who generally hates to "nickle-n-dime" things; basically I'm either all into a game or not. So for me a subscription is not a "special ticket to the VIP room" as much as it's a "pay once to get the entire buffet without having to worry about paying for a la carte things" deal. I'd much rather pay say a flat $20 a month to something than to have to pay a dollar or two here or there every day. Basically what I'm saying is that subscriptions for me tend to be far more about real world convenience than anything to do about getting access to special things INSIDE the game. That's "selling" me something I want without having to be given "backstage passes" to inside-track content or even built-in ways to avoid time-gated content.
So while it makes some logical sense that the sub player be given "something" in game that a non-sub player can't get I wouldn't want the Devs to go overboard trying to make the total difference between the two be vastly, diametrically different.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
One thing I find somewhat elegant about the "pay to farm" idea is that we've established in the past that people who want to reset and repeat a given TF or misison or something many times over and over basically just don't care about immersion there. Those players, presumably, cannot then cry foul about the immersion-breaking request for money to be allowed to repeat something faster than the game-imposed timer, if that's their intention. I mean, a person who fully intends to repeat the same mission eight times in the next two hours cannot turn around and claim that the reason they don't want to pay for that is that it harshes their role playing.
In CoH, the Quickie Katie was the thing people did for a while. The fact that it was so much shorter than anything else for the rewards was maybe an accident, but the devs could have done something like this as a response AFTER the game went F2P. While it was sub-only, I think that would have been seen as overly greedy at the time.
Either way, I can see a use for the cooldown timers on content here. Specifically, that they are an attempt on the part of the devs to encourage people to spread themselves around to different content and not to just farm the same "most efficient" TF or mission over and over and over. At least not on the same toon anyway.
Say, Tannim222, would the cooldown timer apply to the toon or to the player account?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Clearly there are all sort of players of these games ranging from the RPG purists to the Min/Maxer MMOers. Sometimes there are even the weird ones like me who can cleanly alternate between those extremes depending on what's happening at the time.
But just because can you force a player to pay for the right to farm a particular piece of content doesn't really make that kind of farming any more legitimate that anything else. All it'll really do is force people to figure out the best places for farming that DON"T require you to pay for it. Of course that's when the vicious downward spiral begins - once the Devs realize that people are avoiding the "pay-extra" farming content they'll throw in exclusive things to "motivate" people to farm that content. Suddenly you've got the situation where the only way to get special items X, Y or Z is to pay extra for them... Pay-To-Win anyone?
The only reason people started doing "Quickie Katies" is because they discovered it had a superior time versus reward ratio. Farmers will always exploit the things that give them the most reward for the least effort. Regardless it's clear the CoH Devs didn't "intend" for the Katie Trial to work that well in that way since it was completely nerfed in short order. [p.s. It actually took several months between when the Katie runs became a "thing" to do and when it got nerfed, but still that was relatively quick for that sort of decisive clamp down.]
The point (once again) is that the Devs of these games don't mind when SOME farming takes place as long as it doesn't get out of hand. The very idea that any Dev would actively create game mechanics like being able to pay for repeated run-throughs of locked content seems to be a 180 degree reversal to the mindset of the original CoH Devs. The Devs shouldn't waste time trying to stop farming completely (because we all know that's a hopeless quest) but at the same time they shouldn't be going out of their way to promote it either.
I don't see any real advantage to a "paying to farm" scheme other than forcing the REAL farmers to figure out alternative places to farm as best they can without paying. *shrugs*
A "cooldown timer on content" in the strictest sense is a simplistic anti-farming tool. Adding the extra feature of being able to buy "keys" to bypass the cooldown is at best a perversion of the original intent for having a cooldown in the first place. If the goal is to essentially find a way to "tax" farmers then I can only see that backfiring (like I said real farmers will find ways to avoid this) unless the Devs place literal "pay-to-win" items in their "pay-to-farm" content. I unfortunately remain convinced that this is the slippery slope all this will lead to.
Seems like if you really wanted this to be an effective anti-farm tool it'd have to apply to the account. We all know that if someone was serious enough about farming that they'd create multiple farm-capable alts to effectively bypass the cooldown. Of course then people could just as easily have multiple ACCOUNTS to do the same thing so here is yet another reason why I'm questioning the overall usefulness of the whole "cooldown" concept for CoT to begin with.
Surely there is a better way to keep certain content from being over-farmed without having to rely on an antiquated, ham-fisted timer?
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
A very good point. In CO, lockboxes drop constantly and thus constantly remind the player that they are getting something that they cannot access without paying real money (via keys) to unlock. In CoH, you could go buy Super Packs in the store, but if you didn't want to there was nothing in the game itself that forced that option into your consciousness.
Setting up multiple accounts to be able to farm is going to cost like $50 per account created, isn't it? One of the perks of an up-front cost to create an account is to make it harder for trolls to get away with trolling and reduce spammers spamming ads in chat. For those functions to work, I think you need to have a per-account buy price, so that when you ban an account, they have to pay to make a new one and/or stop spamming/trolling.
As for the slippery slope, what exactly is it a slippery slope into? More people doing more content to get more Synthetic HamiOs per day instead of the ONE they're normally allowed? People are paying to play specific content more often, and playing that content to get its rewards. That's MMO game play in a nutshell. All this really does is allow people who want to drop a more money to get their toons fully kitted up with the best gear at a faster rate than those unwilling to spend that money. But they're still doing that via playing missions and TFs and getting random drops etc, they're just doing MORE of the really lucrative content per day. So they're paying extra money to be allowed to grind faster, but they still have to grind, and presumably others (many who didn't pay) will get to ride along in the same TF runs with them, albeit maybe for less rewarding results, I don't know. So you're not just plunking down money to buy superior gear that nobody else has, or to raise your inherent hard caps, you're plunking down money to allow others to do a fun TF with you in the hopes that you'll get something good out of it for yourself, IF the TF ends in success. I have no problem with that.
As for the "It'll never work, min-maxers are too smart for that" point, I think it's easy to set the rewards for different things up such that the timer-gated stuff gives the best chances of getting the rarest stuff in the shortest amount of time. I mean really, that's the whole reason for timer-gating it in the first place. Also, whenever something new and different comes out, that will be the one thing everyone wants to do, over and over, for short while. This will mean that the new TF or trial will be able to monetize itself somehow, which is good.
In any event it's preferable to almost any other thing I've heard so far, to me. I like it better than lockboxes. I like it better than sub-only. Presumably other people on here like it better than simply gating some TF-like content for subs only then letting non-subs pay per run to get into it (and I say presumably because this idea has not met with the same total disgust that that idea gets whenever mentioned). I like it WAY more than making the whole game free after the up-front buy price and then subsisting on costume pieces, unsotters, character slots, and respec tokens. If it works and it causes Stars to be used up at some decent continued rate over time, I like it a lot. If every new expansion sees a flurry of Stars being bought and spent to do the new TF or trial, I like it there too.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Sure a cost like that might dissuade the average idiot spammer, but someone who really wanted to farm in this game would likely get several accounts regardless. Remember the trolls/spammers expect to get smacked by the Devs whereas most farmers do what they do for years without making a fuss.
The slippery slope clearly arises when the gated, paid-to-farm content in question provides the ONLY exclusive way to get certain types of items. That's strict pay-to-win. But the spiritually-adjacent nature of what you're talking about is still very much a cause for concern when you can pay to get more of something much quicker than someone else can. It might not be 100% play-to-win in the strictest sense, but it's still so close you can taste it. This scenario may be great for the company running the game but can annoy the heck out of most players.
Now you might counter what I just said with something like, "Well as long as the farm content in question isn't the ONLY place to get X, Y or Z then everything would be fine". Sure that'd be better, but let's step back and look at what that really means. If there was a special item XYZ that I really wanted and I had two ways to get it which way would I choose? Would I choose A) the way that I have to pay for (via the pay-for-farm content) or would I use B) the other way that would let me farm for it WITHOUT having to pay for the farm? Naturally if I was a serious long term farmer I'd choose option B. So if the serious farmers are going to opt for the least costly way to farm (even if it's not the absolute quickest way) why should the Devs go through the convoluted hassle of creating "pay-for-farms" in the first place? Real farmers won't use them and it only serves to nickle-n-dime the more casual player.
Again with the vicious circle: If they make something TOO desirable to farm then the Devs are forced to gate it. If they make a way to pay to unlock that gate so that you can continue to farm it then in effect you are paying to get access to that item which, as I have stated many times is circling the drain towards "pay-to-win".
The only way pay-for-farming will work is if they provide for some kind of benefit in those farms that you can't get anywhere else, even if that benefit is not item XYZ itself but some other tangible savings in the time/effort it takes to get item XYZ. This exclusive quality of "you can't get that benefit ANYWHERE ELSE" will only lead to the crash at the bottom of the slope. As a hypothetical if you absurdly made it so that the pay-for-farms let you get the special item XYZ a 100 times quicker (or let you get 100 of them in the time it takes you to get 1 of them in another way) then you're only further driving home the point that you effectively must PAY EXTRA to get item XYZ.
For what it's worth what you're proposing here is technically "less annoying" than other alternative forms of Dev-directed farming and/or "enticements to motivate" players to spend more money on a game. But something that is merely "less annoying" than something else is not exactly a ringing endorsement. Settling on "the lesser of two evils" when there's still a chance for a third alternative just doesn't sit well with me. *shrugs*
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I think that it would be less likely that professional farmers would use the 'bypass the cooldown' feature than more casual players that are wanting to get a specific item/reward and don't want to wait.
The professional farmers would, in my opinion, be more likely to simply have multiple accounts/characters to farm content and wouldn't feel the need to pay extra to do time-gated content. However, a player who is eager to get a specific reward for a specific character would be more likely to want to bypass the cooldown in order to get their character completed in less time. It's how I'd feel, anyhow.
The degree of "player patience" is a big factor in this. Dedicated long term farmers will favor long term profits over speed of return so they'll do anything/everything possible to avoid having to "pay" to farm anything. The only people who'll pay-to-farm will be the relatively impatient people who (true to form) will not stick with it for very long regardless because they'll either get tired of it or they'll eventually get whatever exclusively special thing(s) the farm offers and then quit.
Again it comes back to the fundamental question no one has really answered yet: What problem would "pay-for-farming" in CoT solve? Is it the only/best type of money sink possible? Would it be able to control/regulate farming in general? Would it be a guaranteed money earner for MWM? I don't think it could clearly do any of those things.
For what it's worth I begrudgingly see the value of strict daily cooldowns to regulate farming directly. It's just when you add the extra notion of "paying for keys to unlock those cooldowns" is where I start to see things unravel. Too many cons; not enough pros...
P.S. As I stated before the CoH Devs always said that they were specifically against anything along the lines of "spawn camps" or other forms of Dev-encouraged farming they saw happening in other games. While plenty of people ended up farming plenty of things on their own you'd have to agree that NOTHING in CoH was specifically designed or built on-purpose just for farming. The only thing you could rationalize being able to "buy keys to bypass cooldown timers" would be good for is for farming. I think the CoT Devs should stick to the original vision of the CoH Devs and avoid anything that that would overtly promote farming. Lords know players are going to do enough of it on their own; they don't need the Devs encouraging it.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
This depends largely on the necessary minimum amount of time involved to obtain the desired rewards. If the time to run through task-force-like content for a reward is shorter than playing through other types of reward (for even the high-paced earners), then the option to by keys falls in line with one of the desired goals of the cash shop in my opinion. That is purchasing rewards to reduce time invested to play.
From what I have gathered in other games, such systems are not typically viewed as "pay to win" schemes. I'm not saying Lothic's opinion is wrong, only that I don't find much evidience to support the opinion that such systems are 'wrong for the game'. If we start to apply that sort of logic, I say this is the slippery slope to be aware of. One could easily say that having a game with subscribers and non-subscibers has set up a 'pay to win system'. Most games with both subscriptions and free to play or buy to play gives subscription perks which provide an advantage over non-subsciber acccounts. There are perks such as a higher reward rate of xp and drops. Things like larger character and account inventories and wallet sizes make it easier for subscribers to obtain items as well.
What if subscribers had unfettered access to said time-gated content, or reduced cool-down? Would that be pay to win or incentive to subsribe over paying for bulk unlocks over time?
I may be wrong in this, but I don't recall much outcry over the CoH Incarnate system being pay to win even though it was provided to subscribers only. And there were plenty of powers provided through the incarate system that gave characters significant advantages in pve over those that didn't. As an aside, the I think the worse part was the paid access, it would have been great to provide a pass to team mates to play along, just not the particular rewards related to the content (imop) of course.
It is perfectly fine to have the opinion that one may not like such monetization systems. It is another entirely to apply negative labels to it in order to justify that opinion without any evidence to support it.
I do believe Lothic's opinions are valuable however and should not be outright discounted.
Radiac's opinion in that there should be a regular incentive for everyone to use their cash shop currency is also valuable and should not be outright discounted.
Yet, one thing to keep in mind is there appears to be a beginning concern for games (we're talking MMOs or on-line games here) with cash shops heavily reliant on cosmetics are starting to struggle to maintain reliable revenue. If this becomes a trend, we will most likely see a shift in how the market at large monetizes their games.
While we may disagree on the exact how tos and how nots, what I think we can agree on are the basics that:
1. There should be incentives to subscribe to the game.
2. There should be continued incentive for players to purchase items from the cash shop.
3. The cash shop should not be pay to win (in the most common accepted view of the phrase).
4. The cash shop should not be intrusve to the game world.
5. The cash shop should provide a method of purchasing items to save time played yet not necessarily(this is one of the proposed guidelines). Yet the played-through obtainable items may come with their own in-game rewards not available to cash shop purchases (such as a badge).
6. Anything the player has earned (non-consumable purchases) should not be taken away (either from lapse of time played or lapse of time subscribed). This includes any cash shop currency stipends for subscribers.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I think there are two kinds of items I could see myself spend Stars on in general, outside of the obvious like costume and character slots.
Random Roll Bypasses and Social Items.
A Random Roll Bypass would be a way to force the game to drop a Rare thing on the next time you complete something that has a random loot roll. Perhaps have it confirm you're spending it before rolling. You might not get exactly the thing you wanted (buying a certain item outright could be another use for Stars, of course) but you're getting something comparable that you might be able to trade directly or on the market for then thing you did want. Like in CoH's Incarnate system where it had a Rare and Ultra Rare table you could semi-randomly get at the end of a trial.
A Social Item is just that. An item with little to no combat use, but some kind of social use. I think it should be a random gift of some kind, it shouldn't be anything that would have any use in a mission. Just something fun you can give to others. Maybe you give everyone around you a free Reserve of some kind, or perhaps something like spend ten Stars to randomly give a star to ten random people in the area. But make sure everyone knows who did that, so they giver can gain the social fame for being such a nice guy. Basically, it's an item that you can pop to make everyone else around you know how awesome you are. I mean, yeah, it's blatantly bribery to make people think better of you, but hey, free stuff for people!
To respond to McNum's ideas first, I don't think people are ever going to pay enough real world money for items that "shouldn't be anything that would have any use in a mission" to the point where the game would be supported long term on those sales. I mean, costume pieces, sure, costume slots, character slots, etc all things I'd buy, if I needed them, but I doubt you're going to be able to survive on that stuff alone. To me, McNum's post is basically sating "I think you should only charge money for things no player has any self-interested reason to actually buy." with the tacitly implied idea being that no self-interested, min/maxing player will ever need to actually spend any money beyond the up-front purchase of the game. If that's where one chooses to draw the line, then the game company is going to go broke producing a game for you, I predict. I don't want the nice people making my game to go out of business in a year because I was too cheap or greedy to agree to buy anything that I actually want for money and demanded it be given away for no cost beyond the initial purchase. I would rather pay some money for some stuff and have a game to play 2, 3, 10 years into the future. Trust me, I've seen enough comic book / game stores go out of business to have learned that repeat business is a big deal. You can't have your most frequent store patrons enjoying your store at a cost of zero dollars per week and expect to survive. People who go to a store regularly and spend no money drive that store into the ground.
As for Lothic's arguments, all I can say is if you call Tannim222's idea, as described above "Pay to Win", I disagree with that label. And even if the public at large calls it that, I still disagree and I have no objection to the pay-to-bypass-the-timer concept.
Another point I want to raise: the people paying to bypass timers will still be getting randomly-generated rewards (I assume) and as such will be selling off a lot of that stuff on the auction house for IGC, presumably, then using that to either buy the Augments and Refinements they actually wanted or else they buy more Stars and repeat the TF again. Theoretically, this creates more Augments and Refinements, which drives DOWN the IGC prices of Augments and Refinements, making it easier for EVERYONE, including the non-sub players, to acquire that stuff using the IGC they've been grinding for. So basically, someone somewhere pours extra money into the game and the end result is that that person gets something they wanted after having grinded out some extra TFs, whereas meanwhile the rest of the gamers at large enjoy CHEAPER Augments and Refinements than they otherwise would on the auction house. I say that's a win-win scenario for everyone. Sign me the *BLEEP* up.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Ah, but you misunderstand. Social Items are not FOR Min/Maxers. Those people are easy to make happy. Sell something with a lot of benefits and little downside. Pay to Win and you have Min/Maxers buying stuff.
But if we want to avoid that... then we need to see who else we can sell to, and Socializers are a group worth catering to. Sell things that you can use when just loafing around in wherever the game's big social hub ends up being. Give out free "candy", set up a fireworks display, have your name in lights on a building for a day-cycle. Give your character a theme song when you log in. Get your character married to someone else's character. (With the option of a supervillain interrupting the ring exchange, of course.) I mean, we remember Sister Psyche and Manticore's wedding as a Dev run event in CoH. why not let players set something like that up?
Don't think mechanical power, think social power. Be influential, have the game highlight you, as a character and as a player, somehow. Heck, have a bid-war in Stars for a hero statue in a new area if you want. Show people that you can just afford to throw that many Stars away on a vanity project. Start a snowball fight... in summer. Have NPCs talk about how awesome you are when other players pass by.
There's plenty of options for social and vanity items to buy. Be it things to share with the community, or things to feed your own megalomania (perfect for a supervillain), I mean that is the difference between a villain and a supervillain. Presentation!
And yes, special costume sets could also be a Stars item. I sure would have bought the Roman stuff in CoH, if I could.
I just don't believe that you can make enough of that stuff, and generate enough interest in it, to drive a game company in the long term.
It's like, imagine you're in a mall and you're looking at two different stores: one that sells board games of all kinds, and one that sells scented candles. The game store has to keep finding new games to sell it's customers, and eventually the regulars will own like EVERY board game worth having. At that point your sales are limited to how fast the game companies can actually MAKE new games for you to sell, and to how fast you can get new customers. Meanwhile the Yankee Candle store keeps selling candles to the same people every week, like clockwork. Or Orange Julius. Or Bath and Body Works. The main thing those stores have that "Board Games R Us" doesn't have is repeat business enablers. People will eventually run out of candles and need to buy more, same for soap and lotions, and fruity soft drinks. You have to work a LOT harder to get people to buy stuff at the Board Game store than you do at those other places, BECAUSE they have repeat business enablers and the Board Game Store doesn't.
That's how I see it.
Edit: FYI, the board game store in the above analogy doesn't actually exist, but those other places do, and they're nation-wide franchises in like EVERY mall. I contend that this is due largely to the fact that there is demand for repeat purchases of candles, soap, and fruity soft drinks but not for buy-one-and-never-need-another board games like Monopoly and Stratego. If you want to put your kids through college, which one of those stores do you want to own?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
One more idea on the Pay to Win issue. I fail to see how someone else paying money to get rare Augments and Refinements faster than me hurts me in a game like CoT. There's no forced PVP, there's no requirement to have to interact with other people AT ALL if you don't want to, and there's really no reason to have to be as powerful as the next toon, regardless of whether or not you want to team with people. As long as you can tweak your difficulty settings to your own play style, and as long as you can then participate in content, I don't see where it makes any difference at all to me whether or not there are other people out there who are lightyears ahead of me in terms of gear and levels, assuming there are difficulty settings and so forth, sidekicking, exemping, etc like CoX had. If foolish pride, ego, narcissism, and arrogance are the only driving forces behind the Pay-to-Winners desire to pay to win, why not let them? That isn't hurting anyone else, as far as I can tell.
Furthermore, if I'm new to the game and I have friends that have been playing for like 3 years, I might want to spend some money to catch up to them in terms of gear. Why not allow me to do that? I don't see where that hurts anyone.
As far as I can tell, Pay to Win is only ever a problem for two reasons:
1. When there's forced PVP, you get ganked repeatedly if you don't pay to gear-up.
2. If the difficulty of the raids and TFs and trials etc is SO high that you need a specific team composition using specific gear with a specific strategy in mind to have any shot at completing it.
Neither of these was ever the case with CoX and I would expect them to be equally untrue of CoT. Therefore, no matter WHAT gear you can get for money, no matter how you have to go about getting it, it truly doesn't matter. I played CoX a lot and had like NO toons with totally decked out purples etc. NONE. I still got on teams, formed teams, did TFs, etc just fine. No problems. If anything, teaming with people who were more geared-up than I was allowed me to do tougher content faster and get better rewards because of it. So, other people having better gear than yours can actually be beneficial in a game like old CoX.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
But this is not an unproven idea. In fact, that whole "Buy something that benefits everyone else" item already exists in other games. There's an Extra Credits video that is highly relevant to this discussion. [url=https://youtu.be/Mhz9OXy86a0]Doing Free to Play Wrong[/url]
It's a warning about how you need to both avoid making the cash store something that it becomes fun to actively avoid because you can earn everything in game, but also need to avoid setting up a paywall in front of players where they HAVE to buy some item to progress. The latter one being why F2P has a dubious reputation as is. Buying stuff from the Star Store should be fun in itself. It's not like MWM doesn't have experience in getting people to happily give them money, I mean look at all the Kickstarter icons next to the posts here.
The kind of item I'm talking about, is in the video called a "Money Bomb". You buy it and throw it in a crowded area and loot drops on the ground, but you can't pick it up. Often this results in someone else dropping a Money Bomb and the one more until a cascade of money explosions is going on. Because it's fun to give everyone a random trinket. And with enough fanfare and celebration in the animation of doing so, then it becomes a party of being awesome to eachother. But if you want a specific example from a quite successful F2P game, there's the [url=https://goo.gl/3pWUeb]Pile o' Gifts[/url] in Team Fortress 2. A single use item that gives a random loot drop to 23 other people on the server as well as broadcasting to everyone how generous and awesome the giver is.
Social items are a proven concept. It allows you to sell things in the Star Store that you can't get anywhere else, but doesn't impede your progress. If you're a subscriber and have access to all other content from that, what are you going to spend your Stars on, anyway? Well, the ability to jump into CoT's equivalent of Atlas Park and turn it into a impov gift giving party sounds fun. I mean, could you imagine a supergroup synchronizing that? Suddenly 20 heroes rush the pace, drop items on everyone, and then it's a party.
I have no idea how expensive this should be, though. Probably depends on how awesome the gifts are. I'm leaning towards cheap, though, with gifts that are nice to have, universally useful, but nothing like a rare loot drop or anything like that. To make it so people will spend their spare change on it. The point would be to make it cascade so a lot of people spend a few Stars to make a lot of people happy. It's fun giving stuff. And you'll be getting stuff, too. Basically, Money Bomb style items done right can create spontaneous gift giving parties. Like Christmas, only wearing spandex and a cape.
To be crystal clear here I am not attacking the general idea of selling anything that people might want to buy in the Star Store. Obviously the more things that people buy (regardless if they are considered "social items" or "timer bypasses" or whatever) the better it will be for MWM which means the better it will be for players overall.
I don't even have a overt problem with being able to buy things in the store that would provide players with temporary boosts to things like XP/IGC earning or even increased rare drop chances. These kinds of things are relatively free from the problems of "pay-to-win" because A) everyone earns XP/IGC at different rates regardless and B) simply increasing the chances for generic rare drops doesn't GUARANTEE players will actually get those drops.
The focused problem I have here is the specific suggestion of the "pay-to-bypass-the-timer" concept because it encourages institutionalized farming for guaranteed rewards (the slope towards pay-to-win) and it goes against the spirit of one of the guiding principles that was established by the CoH Devs. The CoH Devs did everything in their power to AVOID encouraging or supporting farming in any way - they certainly didn't include any timer bypasses in their store. As I stated before they obviously didn't try to stop farming completely because that would have been impossible. But they did countless things over the years to control/restrict farming (e.g. the Katie nerf, the MA nerfs, etc.) so I find it almost incredible that a CoT Dev like Tannim222 would be so easily willing to overlook the precedent established by CoH in this regard.
At this point (or maybe from my earlier posts) you may think I just categorically hate all farming in MMOs. Far from it actually. It was never my top priority but I probably farmed a few thousand hours in my time in CoH alone. The important difference is that I understood there had to be LIMITS to farming to maintain the rarity of things that should remain rare so that the game's economy didn't collapse.
Lets's take for example the final version of the CoH Hami Trial where we were limited to running it once per day and only getting one Hami-O per day. [Note: I mention the "final version" because the original launch version of Hami was a chaotic hot-mess where you could potentially rack up multiple HOs in a few seconds if you were quick enough to screw over your fellow trialmates by grabbing their HOs before they could. All that silliness was rightfully nerfed almost instantly.] Anyway the reason why the Devs limited it to once per day is that they didn't want Hami-Os to become so common that everyone would end up with dozens of them and they became as cheap as Training enhancements. I fear the ugly spectre of "pay-to-win" when people like Radiac suggest ways (via the purchasable timer bypasses) to break the very controls the Devs put in place to maintain balance over such a critical resource.
To summarize I have no problem with the Star Store selling all sorts of things that could help players get a "leg up" while playing the game. I just think the store also needs to avoid selling those things which would specifically serve to circumvent the farming controls established by the Devs to regulate the game's economy and power balance. You know... just the stuff that could quite literally break the game in all sorts of nasty ways.
Ironically even though I live just a few miles from several malls I don't think I've been to any of them in years.
I know that nugget of information doesn't seem to apply one way or the other to your mall example. But I bring it up just to point out that it's worth spending the extra effort to see that we don't have to be stuck just buying the conventional "board games" or "candles" that we've seen offered by other MMOs. I once again get that you want "repeat business enablers" for CoT. Even I want that for CoT. I just think your specific idea for "candles" (the timer bypassers) are actually fairly dangerous and could lead to individual player "pay-to-win" scenarios that could destabilize the game's overall economy.
I'm not against "repeat business enablers" in theory. I just realize that anything which players would want to buy over and over again needs to be very, very, (and I mean) very well thought out to avoid the countless pitfalls it could lead to. I'm simply concerned you haven't thought through all the ramifications of what you're proposing here.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
One of the other nice things about the "pay to bypass the timer" system is that if/when Augments and Refinements start to get cheaper, there is less reason to pay to do the content any faster. So like, let's say they roll out a new TF called the "CountiesMan TF", and it gets you a "Fake Hamio", which is a cool new type of Augment to have. At first, people will probably want a lot of those Fake Hamios for their builds, so people will repeat that TF very often, probably paying for bypasses a lot. But once the market for those has been largely satisfied, then the street prices of the Fake Hamios on the AH will start to drop and people will largely stop paying for bypasses. Then after a while, people will have made more alts and the Fake Hamios will start to disappear off the market with less new ones replacing them on the shelf until the street prices slowly creep up again, thus prompting entrepreneurial players to buy bypasses and get some IGC while the market is ripe . The system regulates itself in that sense. At times when there's a strong enough economic driving force toward buying bypasses, people will do that, but that in itself alleviates the need for more bypasses and the purchases of them tails off. The system achieves equilibrium and/or oscillates about a steady state average rate of bypasses purchased per month, after the initial frenzy, eventually.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
The economy of CoT will naturally handle the existence of something like your "Fake Hamios" without the need for bypasses of any kind. The "ups" and "downs" would likely take longer because there would be fewer of your "Fake Hamios" circulating in the economy at any given moment than there would be with bypasses. But over time the same trends you identify here will still occur.
"So what's the problem?" you may ask. I'll tell you. If you threw something like your bypasses into the mix the "ups" and "downs" would vary much more wildly because speculators would be able to more easily flood the market at any given moment. You couldn't really count on an inherent value of the Fake Hamio because it could be over farmed in a relative instant.
To understand the ramifications of this look at the way gold works in the real world. The reason the gold market is fairly stable is because even though new gold is always being mined it gets injected into the global economy at relatively predictable rates. Now imagine if multiple gold miners could randomly decide to pay a wizard to suddenly triple their new gold supply for a while and they dump all that magically created gold on the market. Sure they'd make a killing for themselves (essentially an application of "pay-to-win" tactics against the game's overall economy) but at the same time they'd screw everyone else by flooring the market. You'd have yourself a serious case of "Market PvP" where the only winners would be the ones willing (or able) to buy bypasses. Can you now finally see that "pay-to-win" can rear its ugly head in all sorts of unintended ways?
The Devs of CoT will likely use cooldown timers to control various excessive aspects of player farming. While I understand you are very enthralled to the idea of being able have "repeatably purchasable bypasses" will YOU please try to understand that you are literally suggesting the Devs provide us with a formalized way to BREAK their own controls mechanisms. It's like you want to set up an official system to pay the refs of a football game to occasionally look the other way when you want to play a 5th down...
I'm sorry to say in those terms your bypass suggestion here makes no reasonable sense whatsoever. Could you please come up with an idea for things to repeatably buy in the Star Store that won't ultimately ruin/destroy some aspect of the game in general?
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Sorry, Lothic, but I believe the statements regarding what the CoH did or didn't do are at the least a slight exaggeration. I would say the did their best to resolve exploitive farming, but farming was still very easily done. Heck there were even threads on the old forums with players showing their earning rate, builds, what missions / maps (or what AE missions) were leveraged. The devs even had the data showing which ATs here the highest earners. Fixing thing where players clearly found a way to do things the devs didn't intend like Katie are less to do with farming and more about addressing an issue of poor design. They may be a relation, but it wasn't purely as an effort to stamp out farming. Your presonal disdain for farms may form your opinion, but realise that many players can and will farm, that many devs do not see farming as inherently 'ebil', but of an expected behavior and if moderated, even supported in a manner of speaking.
Also, I propossed the scenario of time-gated content with both an in-game and cash shop method of bypaassing the timer simply out of curiosity, not as a Dev propossing something specific for this game. I am not even on the business team and have very little imput on their decisions. Most likely no more input than anyone else, including posters on these forums, that exists outside of the business team.
Just because CoH did or didn't do something doesn't automatically stipulate that CoT must or must not do the same things. When it does come to the busines aspects, one must keep an open mind as the market has and will continue to change since the day of CoH. The only thing that is certain regarding the monetization of this game are those general guidelines that have been discussed. Right now the current consensus is the game will be buy to play, with an optional subscription fee. However, if the business team and management of the company of this game are serious about making the game a financial success (well, first we need a fun, enjoyable game that has a smooth launch), then they will need to make decisions based on the trends of the market place.
Right now, some of the data shows a couple of interesting things. Free to play (and I believe buy to play for free are included in this metric) MMOs in the west are on the rise. Those relying on purely cosmetic cash shops are beginning to show early signs of consistant revenue. Granted there are other issues with such games such as time period between expansions or dlc. Subscription based MMOs are showing a decline - though this data may be skewed because of the large percentage of subscription drop off from WoW.
Now let's back up a bit. You posed the question as to why it would be okay to allow people to pay to by pass timers to farm. The better question I believe is to ask why people play through task-force or let's say 'mini-raid' like content in the first place? Part of this is the for the fun of it, getting to experience the story presented within. The other is because this type of content is designed to be more challenging. Typically, one would expect more challenging content to also present rewards congruent to the challenge.
If it is thought of that this content is worth playting through because of it being 'farmed for rewards' as you indicate - then would not leaving such content consistently available result in exactly what you espouse to be adamantly deterred?
If the choice is to then not provide rewards congruent with the challenge presented, or that the rewards such as drops are availavle anywhere else in the game at the same given rate of availability - what will likely occur is that players will play this more difficult content for the experience of the story - the novelty of it. If there is something unique provided to the character outside of econimic or statistically driven purposses - such as a badge - then we will likely see it used a bit more often. But what will most likely not happen is regular use. Which would also likely result in less of this type of content being developed in the future.
In my opinion, such type of content should be consistantly provided through out various stages of the game, with some form of consistant release of newer types of this content with additional releases of content for the game. And that this type of content should be more difficult, should provide commensurate rewards, and possibly even unique rewards (not just necessarily drops) - but a method of obtaining hard (rarer) rewards within the game (even if they are available elsewhere or purely unique). To take this even further, with the possiblity of dynamic, procedural generation of map sizes, spawn sizes, we have the possibility of taking a typical task-force like piece of content and allowing it to ramp up to full multi-team content. Essentially the task force can be changed from a really difficult 1 team size of content, to an even more difficult multi-team sized content.
If such content is to exist in the game, and if the content provides commensurate rewards for the challenge, even possibly unique rewards - personally speaking - I don't think the busines design should shy away from benefitting financially. Whether it is by allowing subscribers unfettered access with non-subscribers on a timer, key purchase, or one time pay for the content as if it were a dlc package. I would hope that the system is set up to not divide the player base so that at least teams can enter such content under the leader's access even if any unique rewards - whether is it unique drops, merit-like rewards - or even merit-like purchase / crafting of unique rewards, and even badges would not be yielded to the account under the pass.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
The CoH Devs were never against farming in general. They simply believed its excesses should be controlled with consistently unbypassable mechanisms. They very specifically mentioned that they were against classic "spawn camps" - read into that what you will. If anything the CoH Devs were essentially neutral on farming: They never tried to stop it completely; they only acted to curtail overt exploits whenever players started to abuse them.
I myself said I am not against farming. I guess you skipped over the part of my earlier post where I said I farmed thousands of hours in CoH. I wouldn't waste thousands of hours on something I had "disdain" for. But even though I did farm all that time I completely understood the need for consistent supply and demand mechanisms to make sure the market remained reasonably stable. I was there in the early days when you could easily steal 6 or 8 HOs per Hami raid and as fun as it was to be there I realized how completely out of balance all that was. Controls must be established AND maintained, period.
Now having cleared all that up if you want to break with CoH tradition and make CoT a game that ACTIVELY SUPPORTS farming by allowing players to purchase bypasses to your own content controls in the Star Store then that'll be your collective prerogative. A lot of people will suffer from the various forms of market PvP you'll unleash with that, but if that cloud of in-game chaos is going to worth the extra bit of money you can make from it then who am I to get in your way.
Frankly I think there has to be at least 19 BETTER ways to make money from this game than to stoop all the way down to the level of endorsing market-based pay-to-win, but that may just be me...
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
To Lothic, I understand your Pay to Win argument, I just don't agree that it would cause harm to the game overall or to any subset of players that play the game. Please explain to me, in detail, with specifics, where it hurts any one player when another player paid more money and got a better build for his toon faster as a result? Simply stating that player A will have better gear than player B, and that's not fair isn't a compelling argument, to me. Any side-by-side comparison of any two players at any given point in time would yield differences in gear. This could be because the one player has been playing for a longer time than the other, or because the one guy is in a SG that takes better care of it's members than the other, or because one guy spend more money than the other, etc etc. In any event, The simple fact that one player has better gear than the other does not hurt either player, in and of itself, regardless of how it got that way, not in a game like CoX anyway, not as far as I can tell.
As for the timer bypass thing, look, CoX had ZERO gating timers on the Posi TF, the Sister Psyche TF, etc. You could repeat that stuff all you wanted all day and all night if you felt like it. Was that an example of CoX encouraging farming? I don't think it was. I used to get my new toons up to level 10, then do Posi, Posi again, then Synapse, then another Synapse, then Sister P, etc until I got to the Manticore TF and repeated that until I had just about out-leveled it. Plus there was a respec TF or three in the mix as well. It was fun, you got a guaranteed good item drop at the end, you leveled relatively quickly, you might have gotten most of the Paragon Protectors you needed for the Crey CBX-9 gun, etc. It wasn't farming, but it probably generated a lot of rare drops for my toons, more than I would have gotten doing missions by myself, to be sure. I don't recall the market for such items ever having the kind of violent swings you predicted as a result of that, and those TFs were totally free to do as often as you liked, no timers at all.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
One other idea, not all content necessarily has to have the same types of rewards. One TF might give better XP,, another might give better IGC, another might give better item drop rates. Or combinations of those. Just something to think about.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
The biggest problem, imo, with time-gating these "extra rewards" and selling "extra tickets" is to give players a large enough incentive to actually run the same TF specifically for those extra rewards multiple times a day. Solve that, preferably without resorting to gimmicks like exclusive drops, and we can continue to talk about the merits of time-gating those rewards.
If there is no such incentive then they will rather just create a farm run over multiple TF's, especially if they can get even more extras through mutli-TF challenges. I am assuming that all TF's will have an equal enough effort vs. reward ratio so there is no no high enough preference between them in this regard.
It is my assumption that the main reason people would want to pay extra to repeat a given TF more than once per day would be that the TF in question gives better Augments, Refinements, temp powers, etc as rewards at the end (upon successful completion) than would other similar content. I would include the possibility of things like HamiOs or other exclusive items as "in play" for the sake of discussion. I see nothing wrong with that.
You could even rotate which TF is the "good one" in any given week, like CoX's Weekly Strike Target (WST) after a few years when the TFs are aplenty. Then whenever something is new, you make that the WST for a while. The deal could be something as simple as "The WST gives a double item drop to everyone upon success at the end" while other stuff does a single drop, etc. Or maybe you get a specific thing like a Synth HamiO at the end. Or maybe you get the HamiO AND a random rare item when its the WST, etc.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
To answer the question of "Why do people do TFs" I think my answer to that, which is probably apparent from my above posts, is that you got better XP (due to the fact that you were teamed up with other people, possibly sidekicked) and because of the guaranteed rare drop at the end, if you were successful. And then of course I did the Incarnate stuff for the Incarnate powers, which is more of the same really. Progress on the Incarnate tree and more Incarnate components to make more incarnate powers with. So basically to push my character forward in level, and then in gear quality. I enjoyed the company too, but if soloing missions gave an XP bonus and rare drops at the end of the missions, I feel like I would have done more of that in CoX than anything else. I think EVERYONE would have soloed a lot more than they already did if that were the case.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Sorry, but I take these statements entirely has hybolic. There is too much insuffucient data to support the theory that the stated outcome would indeed occur. There could be any number of systems developed to ensure that even if there were time-gated content available the over all result would not have a huge negative impact, if any at that.
Again, put this back the other way, is just having access altogether to task force like content which will provide a higher return rate of rewards (among other things) going to result in this negative impact to the game? If not, then placing limits on this type of content could actually benefit the game if less players are running this more difficult to play content.
Another point is that there are any number of combinations of levels of access which could be applied. As I said earlier;
What if subscriptions had no timer or reduced timers (I admit the actual application should, if such a system were to exist, be no timers). And timers only applied to those with no sub?
And to be perfectly clear, I am not espousing this particular concept as something "that must be done for CoT". I'm merely seeking information out of curiosity.
Thus far, the arguments presented for and against have largely been based on bias of feeling to tangental topics - some of which has provided small bits of information I admit.
The quote above is a perfect example of the bias opinion rather than open discussion. The small bit of information I could take from it is "avoid a system that would negatively impact the game economy", which in of itself does not necessarily exclude the possiblity of time-gated content. If there were examples cited where such systems faild and how they failed - then the opinion would be based more on either direct experience or at least cited examples of where and how things with the design went wrong. At least then the argument and cited examples could be examined for their merit, and possibly lead to discussion on whether it is even possible to make changes to said system(s) or if the entire concept will always lead to the dead end of negative impact.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I hate magic/spirits/demons in games. I would avoid these in any game, thus I do not and will no longer play DCUO as they make you fight the very things I hate in a game to reach level 30. Mission lockouts were evil, and the long waits between available purchases in any game suck. I want a game that gives you a contact for your origin type and all of your missions would be for that origin, like mutation, not bouncing you all over the origins in the same missions every time you make a new character.
That's nifty, there won't be 'Origins' in this game, but I believe there are plans for 'Paths' which might suit your wants. Alternately, choosing your contacts with a bias against 'spiritual' missions ought to allow you to have the experience you want. However, what does that have to do with 'Stars' (purchasable with real money) and their use in game?
Be Well!
Fireheart
Even when compared to other TF's in the same level bracket? Though my understanding is that most of these "better rewards" in CoT will be gained from challenges and considering the multi-TF ones it doesn't sound like that big of an incentive.
Could work but it feels more like they are creating the solution before even seeing a problem to solve.
That would be an artifact of being on a team, not from doing a TF. I expect the same bonus to XP and general drops when on a team regardless of if I run a TF or not.
OK.
Correct me if I'm wrong but Incarnate TF's were not required for progression, they just made it more efficient.
Outside of the rare drops you seem to be describing more of the general difference between teaming and soloing rather than more TF specific things.
So to summarize: Only reason people will buy these "TF tickets" will be to get "better" loot faster? Not sure how sustainable that is in the long run, primarily due to the market.
You're entitled to your opinion on the matter of what type of villains, monsters, badguys, etc you want to fight with your characters. I have no problem with that. This discussion, however, is not even remotely related to the topic of this thread, ans as such your post should, in my opinion, have been posted somewhere else on this site, not here. Please try avoid hijacking this thread with totally unrelated ideas.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
To be clear, in CoX, BEFORE they rolled out Inventions, your best gear was Single Origin Enhancements (SOs). The fact that you got a guaranteed SO drop at the end of the original Posi TF was enought, at that time, to get me to do it. It was something other people wanted too, and as such you had an easier time trying to form, and maintain, a decent team if you said "Doing the Posi TF, come with use and get a SO, guaranteed" as opposed to "PUG forming, we're goign to street sweep and maybe do some random missions, or something". So the lure of the SO (an SO!!!) at the end wa senough to get other peopkle together to form a coherent team long enough to get me like 3 levels in on TF, which for the time period was really fast. The fastness of the levleing and the SO at the end of the TF (an SO!!) were probably part of what caused me to make mostly support-oriented toons, because those were the ones in demand for TFs at the time. Everyone was a blaster in the early days, so having a defender or controller was huge if you wanted to do TFs, which I did.
So please don't underestimate the power of the guaranteed rare drop at the end. It convinced many a player to do many a TF in CoX, in my opinion. And at that time, I would say that this WAS better rewards than you'd expect from soloing a few missions in a row. There you mostly got lousy TO or DO stuff, depending on level. And again, giving the gated TF strictly better gear rewards for successful completion does not bother me at all, nor does monetizing that TF somehow.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I think Seanzone is referencing the cool downs on the instanced teamed content in DC online. There are 3 types, Duos (team of two), Alerts (team of 4), and Raids (team of 8). All on their own cool down and everyone must have a game token in order to access the content. Lengendary status members are given a monthly alotment. There are even elite versions of Alerts and Raids which have their own cool down. Each have an additional token cost to unlock, the alert elite version can be reset separately of the regular alert, while the elite raid version counts against the regular raid version alert.
I personally find this to be a bit "busy" in terms of knowing what type of content is accessible at what time, and a bit over board so far as the costs in token passes. I can sympathize with the persons sentiment on that point.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Thinking back over the whole 'pay Stars to bypass cooldown' proposal, I realized that while cooldowns are often (usually?) associated with farming, they don't have to be. Another use of a content cooldown, which would have nothing to do with farming, would be a variation on Radic's previous idea where non-subscribed players would need to use a 'ticket' (purchased with Stars) to access certain content that subscribers would have unfettered access to. Modify that so that unsubscribed players have access to the Amerikatt Taskforce once a day, but can bypass the cooldown with Stars (purchased on the auction house from subscribers or purchased with straight cash) to run it as many times as they are willing to shell out Stars for, and you have a non-farming, non pay-to-win reason to bypass content cooldowns.
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