Strap in, this is going to be really long and verbose, even by my standards.
Before I start, though, I have one heartfelt entreaty for you: if you’re going to reply to this thread, please try to do it in a way that won’t get it locked and de-listed. Try to avoid rudeness, verbal attacks, and anything that will generate a bunch of flagged posts, because that’s the fastest way to get the moderators to nuke a topic.
Okay, let’s get this show started.
Pricing
For 4 years, the DLC business model taught players to expect a mixed but large bundle of new content for $10. And after 4 years, Funcom decided not only to change how the content is bundled and released, but to raise the prices to a degree that, frankly, has to be seen to be believed.
It’s no exaggeration to point out that the vast majority of the offerings are at least 10 times more expensive* than the DLCs were. Anyone who thinks it’s unreasonable for people to react to this change is being either naive or disingenuous, but even that is preferable to being called “cheap” or worse.
And sure, you can offer all sorts of justifications and explanations, but that will just make people expect those justifications and explanations to be true, i.e. to have some kind of quid pro quo effect. But we’ll get to that later. I’ll save that bit for the end, because it’s only tangentially related to the monetization.
In the meantime, let’s move on to the next most commonly brought up grievance.
FOMO
This is, for some weird reason, a highly controversial topic on these forums. It’s not like Funcom invented FOMO-based sales tactics, or like Conan Exiles players invented the expression “FOMO”, yet there are people here who will ridicule anyone who even points out that those tactics are employed in the new monetization model, and the attacks will get worse if you dare to say you dislike those tactics.
Anyway, there’s not a shred of doubt that those tactics are, indeed, heavily leveraged in the Battle Pass, but they’re also present to a lesser degree in the Bazaar. Sure, by now we’ve seen that the Bazaar offerings do get rotated back into circulation, but people still have to face the dilemma of buying an item now, at the price they see, or waiting to see if it will come back later at a more reasonable price.
Again, several justifications have been bandied around, ranging from naive to disingenuous. Things like “keeping the content above the fold”, “organizing the store”, and “everyone does this” are among the favorite excuses. That last one is at least honest, because it acknowledges that this is being done on purpose, to pressure and manipulate people into paying more.
And that’s where we jump on the ridicule bandwagon, because just saying that maybe it doesn’t feel nice to be pressured and manipulated, invites attacks. You see, if you cave in to the pressure, then you’re weak-minded or have some kind of a psychological problem. And if you don’t have a problem resisting the pressure, then why are you even complaining? It’s like people have a hard time understanding that even though I won’t die of poisoning from someone else’s fart, I still don’t want them to fart at me as a general principle.
Regardless of what people think of the FOMO tactics employed in BLB, it’s evident that FOMO in BP is causing some very real disappointment in newcomers to the game. Whether it’s a good idea to do that to the people you’re trying to attract to your game in hopes they’ll spend money on it in the future will be left as an exercise for the reader 
At any rate, the problem of disappointing newcomers wouldn’t exist if Funcom brought the BP content into BLB (and obviously charged more money for it than they did in the BP). But it also wouldn’t exist if the next commonly brought up grievance didn’t exist, either.
Sharing
We’re again dealing with something players have been taught to expect for 4 years, which is that when you buy digital content in Conan Exiles, what you’ve paid for is the ability to produce instances of that content and do with them what you will, including giving them to others. You cannot transfer the ability to produce individual instances, but you can give each of those instances away.
And now you can’t do that.
This is a conversation that happens with some regularity:
- “That’s an awesome looking horse!”
- “Thanks. It’s from the previous Battle Pass.”
- “Oh, so that’s where it’s from? Bummer, I only started playing 3 weeks ago. I wish I had been here to get it. I would definitely pay for that.”
- “Yeah. I wish I could craft one for you, but Funcom won’t let me do that anymore.”
Of course, the commonly offered answer is “if they allowed that, everyone would just get their stuff for free”. This ignores a whole bunch of evidence to the contrary, that I won’t bother bringing up again because it always falls on deaf ears.
Another commonly offered answer – and a more honest one – is “if they allowed that, it would affect their sales”. That’s completely true. The question of what Funcom might gain in return is an interesting one, but a much more interesting one is why this problem is suddenly so much bigger than it was with DLCs. Methinks it might have something to do with the pricing. Huh, what do you know, it’s almost as if there was some kind of a pattern to all of these tactics, some sort of shared underlying cause… 
To be fair, the request to allow sharing isn’t always about wanting to give other people gifts. Sometimes it has to do with the fear of getting banned due to mismanagement of the official server moderation – we’ll get to that later, too – and sometimes it has to do with the aversion to buying a pig in a poke, which brings me to the next common BLB criticism…
Lack of Transparency
The way it used to work in the beginning was that you open the Bazaar, something catches your eye, you click on it and take a closer look, maybe make some assumptions about what you’ll get, and then click to purchase it.
Sadly, that process ended in disappointment often enough that it bears pointing out. Maybe you bought an item because its description implied an in-game functionality that it doesn’t possess. Or maybe you bought a bundle and there was something missing from it (and maybe it’s still missing after quite a while).
So now people are rather leery of buying stuff from BLB. “Has anyone bought X? I have questions about it” is popping up more and more, on the forums, and in the in-game chat too.
Various solutions have been proposed here. The approach that seems to be favored by Funcom is to promise they’ll show everything in the UI. It’s the least satisfactory approach, because although you can show some stuff in the UI, you can’t actually show everything you need without turning the Bazaar UI into a miniature replica of the game itself. On the other hand, it’s not hard to understand why this approach is, apparently, their favorite. Other approaches are riskier in terms of sales
One of the approaches favored by some of the players is to give content creators (e.g. YouTubers) temporary access to content, so they can showcase it and people can get informed. This idea was brought up when @Wak4863 announced he wasn’t going to be able to keep paying the … uh … completely reasonable and entirely affordable prices in the Bazaar just so he can help his viewers get informed.
Another proposed approach is to allow sharing, so people who bought something can let people who didn’t buy it try it out. I’m not going to spend more words on that, since I’ve already talked about it. I’ll just say that I personally don’t think this is the best way to allow people to try stuff before buying it.
One other approach that has been floated around is an introduction of try-before-you-buy refund policy. Basically, the idea is that when you buy X from BLB with a simple press of the button, you can get your Crom coins fully refunded with another simple press of the button, no questions asked, as long as you do that within a certain time limit. And, to avoid abuse, if you buy X again after getting a refund for it, the time limit either resumes where it stopped (i.e. it does not start over), or you’re simply not allowed to refund it yet again.
What about common responses to this grievance? Surprisingly, this particular complaint hasn’t caused anyone to hurl vitriol at those who voiced it. At least not when we limit the complaint to the lack of transparency itself, rather than the next common grievance that gets brought up and that makes the lack of transparency such a problem in the first place…
Quality Issues with Monetized Content
Remember the bit about buying something that doesn’t do what you thought it would, or doesn’t work at all, or isn’t there even though you paid for it? Yeah, unsurprisingly, people really don’t like paying for defective stuff.
But that’s not the only problem people have with the quality of the stuff from BP and BLB. There’s also the issue of (arguably) P2W content, like walls that make raiding harder or skins that make pets immune to direct damage. Just as people don’t like paying for defective stuff, they also don’t like being forced to choose between 1) paying for stuff they’re not really intrinsically interested in, or 2) letting their in-game opponents have a significant advantage over them.
Neither of these complaints should be controversial, but… well… by now, you know how this goes: if you dare complain about it, you will be ridiculed because “it’s only a game” and “there are bigger problems”.
Mitra help you if you say that this ruined your enjoyment of the game, because the fact that you don’t enjoy competing against people who paid for a significant advantage is somehow your own personal failing. Similarly, complaining that it’s been 2 months and you still don’t have one of the things you bought with your money makes you entitled. And woe betide you if you dare say something along the lines of how you expect a certain level of quality to go hand-in-hand with certain prices…
Still, if you’ve played this game long enough, you really shouldn’t be surprised about these quality issues. Every game has its share of bugs, glitches, and issues, and somewhere within that bigger picture lies Conan Exiles, where complaints – or at the very least puzzlement – about the quality assurance outcomes have been a constant over all these years since it came out.
Which brings us to the final commonly voiced complaint about the new monetization.
Base Game Quality and Improvement
Remember how I said “we’ll get to that later” in two places in this awful wall of text? Well, we’re getting to that stuff now. Like I said, it’s arguably somewhat tangential to the monetization, but it deserves to be mentioned.
We’ve heard a lot about how the new monetization is supposed to provide the money Funcom needs to keep developing this game. Naturally, people assumed that the considerable difference in the price would have some sort of positive net effect on the quality of the base game and everything that surrounds it.
These assumptions are quite varied. Some people expected that we would see new base game content more often. Those are the least disappointed people, because we are getting more regular base game updates now. Or at least, they’re more regular when compared to the time without updates between Grave Matters and the Age of Sorcery. Some of us still remember the time when base game updates didn’t take 9 months to happen.
Others expected the major updates to the base game to be… more satisfying? Bigger in scope? Richer? I’m not sure what’s the best way to express it, but the reactions to the Chapter 2 of Age of Sorcery speaks for themselves, and even the sorcery itself ended up disappointing a fair number of people after the initial novelty wore off.
Yet others expected better quality. Fewer bugs is something everyone wishes for, but people also assumed that maybe more money meant that bugs would be solved faster – especially if they’re low-hanging fruit with easy solution – or that more effort would be poured into hunting and fixing bugs. As a software developer, I’m well acquainted with the difficulty of diagnosing and fixing bugs, so I kind of understand why you can’t solve that just by throwing money at it, but there have been bugs for which this criticism is completely valid. As for the rest, there’s a different complaint hiding inside this one, and we’ll get to it presently.
Before we get to that, let’s also quickly mention that some people assumed that more money would mean better moderation of official servers. I’m not going to spend a lot of words on that, because it has been discussed ad nauseam, but the general consensus is that the official server moderation needs to be improved. Even among those of us who don’t think that people are being banned left and right without breaking the rules, the feeling is that Funcom should at least help people understand how they broke the rules so they can avoid doing it in the future.
But that only brings us to the complaint-within-the-complaint that I mentioned when I talked about bugs, because it also applies to server moderation and many other things. And it has to do with another assumption that stemmed from the idea that more money would bring some kind of improvement.
Namely, people assumed that Funcom would, at least, improve its communication with the playerbase. For a while now, that communication has been in decline, both in terms of quantity, and in terms of quality. It is, perhaps, a testament to how good that communication used to be that we’re still so expectant and hopeful that it will improve.
Of course, not one of these assumptions is really warranted. More money does not necessarily mean improvement. You could call it rising costs, you could call it inflation, you could call it a shift in priorities, you could call it greed – you could give it any name you want and justify it any way you like, but there’s nothing in this universe that makes it some kind of a natural law that more money will improve things.
When these assumptions are proven wrong, complaints inevitably follow. And those complaints will receive the same reply, expressed with varying degrees of politeness (or rudeness): you’re the one who assumed that, they didn’t promise it.
To be fair, the response is correct. Funcom really didn’t promise most of these things people expect. The only thing they did say they would do is establish a more regular cadence of updates, and so far they seem to be keeping to that.
Conclusion
Wait, there’s a conclusion to this?
Well, yeah. Although I primarily wrote this so I can link to it the next time someone answers one of these complaints with “yOu JuSt WaNt FrEe StUfF, yOu ChEaPsKaTe”, there is a bottom line to this wall of text.
The foremost conclusion I want to point out is that people really aren’t merely complaining about the price. The complaints about the new monetization have been varied and most of these complaints are legitimate. There are real issues with Battle Pass and Black Lotus Bazaar, issues that go beyond the pricing.
Let’s make one thing perfectly clear here: Funcom is under no legal obligation to do anything about any of this. If you came to this thread, and by some miracle you read this whole godawful post, and your first thought is to point out how Funcom doesn’t have to do anything and they’re not breaking any laws, don’t bother. I’m doing that right here, so you don’t have to add your non-contribution to whatever discussion might come out of this.
While we’re at it, let’s clarify another thing: this is not a Prophecy of Doom and Demise. I’m not saying that the “game is dying”, or that the “game is losing players”, or even that “Funcom will lose customers” because of this. In fact, it doesn’t necessarily matter that these grievances are being repeatedly and persistently brought up by many of the players this game has accumulated since its release. Even in the unlikely event that these things drive away the majority of the existing playerbase, it’s still perfectly possible that the game will end up generating enough profit to remain in development for quite a while. So again, if that’s the one thing you want to reply here, I’ve saved you the work of doing that, too. You’re welcome.
So is there any conclusion to this whole sordid word salad, other than “no, we don’t just want free stuff”? Yeah, there’s one more, actually: don’t let a handful of people shut you up.
You might have noticed that this post would have been a hell of a lot shorter if I hadn’t spent a lot of words also describing the common attacks on those who voice these complaints. There’s a reason I devoted verbiage to them: I want everyone who shares at least one of these grievances to be aware of the toxic tactics these people use to derail and shut down the discussion.
Make no mistake, there’s no excuse for coming to the forums to rudely scream imprecations at Funcom. All of the complaints I described above could be and should be expressed politely. But I’ve seen enough to know that even if you do so, there are people who will do all they can to engage you in discussion that has nothing to do with the problems you’re trying to point out. Worse, some of them will outright bait you into reacting in a way that will allow them to derail the discussion.
My sincere advice is to learn to recognize and ignore that. Start out as polite and calm as you can, ignore the bait, and refuse to engage with pointless arguments and sophistry. Explain your problems and discuss possible improvements. And if you do happen to get sidetracked into speculating about Funcom’s motives, or if you stumble and use emotionally charged language, when you get called out, don’t rise to the bait, either.
Because the final conclusion I want to offer is that leaving your feedback about monetization on these forums will not make things worse. It might not make them better, but who knows, maybe it will. Personally, my hope that Funcom will listen to us has been dwindling for quite a while now, but I still harbor some of that hope. Even if it’s misplaced, I’ll give it up when I feel like it, not when someone tries to shut me up. You deserve the same.
* Yes, really, 10 times. If anyone isn’t convinced and needs to see the math, just let me know and I’ll write yet another bloody wall of text breaking it down for you.
Time to start reading I guess lol
I would of clicked…
. I will just be disgusting here and expand it a bit more.