MysteryMan wrote:caeser wrote:Good discussion and thanks again for the replies.
I don't want this thread derailed by a pricing discussion, we have plenty of those. So, looking at it in a vacuum, the obvious question for me is why would game ownership want to do this? Would an option such as this attract more players? Would it actually help generate revenue in a way I'm not thinking of? From what I understand, other games do this, so there is a precedent and I am assuming some data is available out there somewhere.
We are doing this because people asked to have a better cost per card and allow new users to spend maybe $20 and get a decent low star deck. Our users asked for something, we tried to see what the core issue driving our users request were, and did something that should hopefully take care of that. This reduces randomness which is one of the larger cost factors in the game in theory - we'll see how it works in practice when we implement it and will act accordingly once we see it live.
edit: I still don't like MM. It's not fun, doesn't help the community, and doesn't teach the player anything useful. If the lotto gave gran I doubt people would still play MM.
See,
this is the problem. $20! $20 for some low-rarity file, such as carbuncles prebuilt+EX11 Ref. And that's
it. Beyond that, someone has
nothing. Look, MysteryMan, when you're running a F2P model, you're going to have a long tail type of system going on. Most of your users will be not low-spending players, but
free players. And guess what?
Those players are
content. Without them, you'd have a sandbox of a few spenders playing among themselves with nobody else around to throw in a quirk here and there.
Repeat after me these three words please:
Players. Are. Content.
Players. Are. Content.
Players. Are. Content.
By saying "well if you want to be a free player, your only role is going to be to get stomped on by the good players", why should anyone stick around? This is why I have
yet to see an uber-successful F2P game. Namely because every time someone makes an F2P game, their first thought isn't "how do we take advantage of the fact that people can play our game for
free and create a huge audience and maybe get $5 per month if we're lucky per average user and continue to grow our player base" but usually, it's "how do we create just the right amount of
pain so that freeloaders give into the sunk cost fallacy, and one instance of spending leads to another?"
And when owners go down that second path, those who play for free are the first ones to get hurt and start to leave. Couple that with the fact that the errata hits the free players first and foremost (prime example is with pixies--after set 8, they became a meta, but aside from Blacksun, everyone thought they were a joke. Then pixie faction packs got sold, and then just about every pixie except pixie healer and magic greatsword pixie got nerfed. Sure, Logress can give the excuse that "pixies were running rampant in Folrart and were having higher RP", or you can call a spade a spade and say that "pixies were winning more often than anything free players got before, so they had to be nerfed so that players wouldn't be content with one file and would spend money on other things").
See, the issue with F2P is that the management's need to make money actively
gets in the way of providing a good, happy playing experience for the majority of the players--because the majority of the players are free players. And if they can viably
stay free players, then the game doesn't make money and shuts down.
See, you have a zillion events of "hyper rarity lotto! EX lotto! Gold boxes! Spend your gran this way! Spend your gran that way!", but the way for free players to earn gran is at 2 gran ($.02) per 10 minute game or 10-15 cents a day in MM (or ~7.5 in free lotto). To put that in better perspective, imagine that suddenly, the price on your rent increased 100%, and a bunch of new companies moved in selling a bunch of luxury goods. Yachts! Sports cars! Luxurious condos! Yet you only remained with your current job. Oh sure, there are all these fun, fancy spending options--but you don't have the money to spend on them to begin with!
Honestly, it's pretty sad actually--because Alteil has the best art of any CCG, and a rather interesting gameplay system. Yet the completely arbitrary 25 card limit (why not 36? Why not 49?) and the fact that it could rightfully be called "Cash Warriors" gets in the way of it proliferating and being a game that's actually enjoyable to play. Thus, the few players that are left spend more time on the forums talking rather than actually playing the game.
