Battle pass feedback

The Stream literally said -

Part of the paid battlepass rewards will be the crom coin investment intitally put it (essentially making it freeish) You can then use the coins to purchase the next battlepass (essentially making a battlepass a one time purchase that enables it forever)

The time commitment to complete a battlepass is 26 hours of normal game play over a 90 day period. (with the ability to easily change the xp awards if the initial rollout isnt working as fast/slow as intended)
Battlepass is completeable on private/singleplayer/ and official servers.

This is one of the more generous battlepass systems ive seen across any games.
The rotating offers in the lotus shop is def annoying would def rather see everything available at all times and just have sales rotate on time basis.

If having to play a game for 2 hrs a week to unlock cosmetic items is too much then I dont know what to say. You wont even need to invest any money past the initial investment (I sure wish riot did that with TFT instead of buying a new pass every season)

The only thing that seems really egregious is single use items for the transmog. For a pc player im sure it wont matter with mods BUT its a double edge sword for console users - They finally get cool stuff pc had through mods, but now they also have to constantly pay for some of it.

Everything else is free and will enable all future actual game content to be free which is a big boost/bonus. (though ill assume any new “maps” are going to cost money)

3 Likes

Not entirely to this one’s liking.
But not the doom of the planet.
Generally positive.

Cash Shop rotates.
Fine and dandy. One can acquire now, or one can be patient and get it sometime later. If someone comes later to the game, eventually everything becomes available and they can still spend their money on the item when it returns.

Battle Pass.
It works on Private servers. Excellent.
Items gone for ever after the Season ends. Not the implementation this one would prefer. A more expensive addition to the cash/dlc shop would allow them to get more money out of the late arrivals. And they must expect to be drawing in new players. They have just finished an aggressive trimming of servers and players. There must be an expectation of drawing in new blood. Growing the community.
In the interests of generating sustained revenue, this one would much prefer an earn now, or purchase (at higher cost) in the future.

General.
Single use items that are character (rather than account) bound? This one laughs long and hard. Will Crom Coins be character rather than account based? Jest. Barely.

TLDR; they do need to generate lucre to fund the included updates, no complaint there. Cash shop rotation seems reasonable. Battle Pass is not where this one would like it for sustained utility.

5 Likes

So let’s break this down into 2 parts.

Firstly, whether or not this is a greed-driven move will stem entirely from whether or not you will lose access to the items within the pass should you fail to complete it before the next one rolls out. If you can simply continue to make progress at your own pace and eventually own everything you paid for regardless of what pace you perform the content at, sure, it’s fine, no greed complaints there. However, if it operates as most battlepasses do where content (and subsequently your money) is simply lost if you don’t feel like playing the game that much (or paying an extremely ridiculous pricetag to buy out the levels), then yes, that’s 100% pure greed driven because there is no motive to make battlepasses like that EXCEPT for the purpose of leveraging scummy business practices that manipulate psychological factors like FOMO into making people feel forced to buy rather than letting the quality of the content merit the pricetag on it’s own.

Which brings us into issue #2, survival games really aren’t the type that a battlepass works in. Battlepasses exist in many BRs and other live service games because they are easily accessible and offer a symmetrical gameplay experience for all players, meaning every player has the exact same capabilities once they start a session regardless of any prior playtime or investment, that’s obviously not true at all in a context where groups exist with days, weeks, months, or even years of stockpiled materials to throw at doing these challenges in a matter of minutes while for a fresh player this would suddenly become a multi-hour ordeal depending on the challenge and how much setup it requires.

This also expands further when we open up the question of whether challenges can be completed on official, singleplayer, or private servers and whether or not you can qualify for them if cheats (like the in-game kind, not 3rd party kind) have been used. If you can only complete challenges on officials then it’s literally just a kick in the teeth to anyone who doesn’t play officials. If you can do it on singleplayer and private worlds then presumably that means cheating would have to be allowed due to the nature of mods unless they’re also now going to ban that element of the game from anyone who wants to get this battlepass content. And if you CAN cheat, then it completely and utterly invalidates the entire idea of forcing players to do these challenges to begin with since you’ve now just turned the game into a tedious daily checklist of opening, completing whatever random garbage, and closing it again all just to get the content you already paid for.

There really is no benefit whatsoever to doing a battlepass like this as opposed to the same old DLCs they’ve been doing now. Nobody who wants the stuff in them is going to suddenly love the game and play it all the time if they weren’t already, it’s just going to be irrelevant to the people who don’t care enough, a tedious burnout machine for the ones who do like it but aren’t hardcore nolifers of the game, and the ones who ARE nolifers likely would’ve just purchased a regular DLC anyway, making the entire thing irrelevant to them.

So yes, while it’s not greedy for them to ask for money to continue development, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for them to take completely unnecessary and poorly thought out actions to meet that goal, driven by no real greater design intent or foreseeable goal than greed. We’ll see how bad it is, but the fact that they did this at all is not a great sign of their intents or their foresight.

5 Likes

The live stream 6hrs ago answered all this - The time commitment goal is so absurdly easy it sort of questions why have a battlepass but even then it helps more consistent player counts and frontloads revenue since its essentially a one time purchase as long as you complete it every season (90 days)

If you diddnt catch it the battlepass completion goal is 2 sessions of normal play of 1 hr a week over 13 weeks (seasons are 90 days). So 26 hrs of normal gameplay not taking time out to hunt the specific tasks offered. (if thats how it actually plays out will see but thats the goal and how they are building it)

Yeah you can “cheat” the system in private/single player but what are you really cheating ? Saving yourself maybe 20 hrs of gameplay for cosmetics, doesnt seem like a big deal as long as they meet their goals (they did mention they have the system build so its easy to change tasks and xp awards for them so they can alter to meet this goal as needed which is good to hear)

1 Like

You mean, casual gamers? That’s a HUGE number of potential customers you are just writing off.

Imagine a pizza shop that only sold to fatties, and refused service to anyone who was not eating out of a trough. It’s not good business taking advantage of your most loyal customers while inconveniencing literally everyone else.

3 Likes

You’re forgetting a lot of people only play these types of games at major content drops though. I’m personally in that boat, I don’t play much unless I or my friends get the itch to play it for a couple months, and then it’s uninstalled entirely until something new comes out or that itch hits again. But up until now, I’ve been able to simply purchase every DLC (with the exception of Riddle of Steel because… lame) and it didn’t matter that I didn’t want to play right then because I would still have that content no matter what. I know for a fact I’m not alone when I say this business model can do NOTHING but hurt my desire to play as well as my willingness to invest any sort of money into the game as I’d just be throwing it away in most cases.

To recap, with this idea Funcom will have gone from “If you give us money, you get content, end of transaction.” to “If you give us basically the same amount of money and then jump through hoops for us that weren’t necessary before in a time limit that wasn’t imposed before, you’ll get basically the same content.” It doesn’t matter how “easy” the time investment is, the fact that there is one at all is still a HUGE turnoff for my investment into the game.

4 Likes

That’s whales. Not casuals.

3 Likes

Whales hate battlepasses it requires them to play the game - though I guess there is a system to pay more to buy battlepass levels for whales - though pass looks insanely easy to complete anyway.

1 Like

No…wishy washy folks. I hate using a car sales analogy but if they are at the dealership, like the car, like the price, what’s the issue? Very few times can you leverage the sale. People hem and haw around purchases all the time. And it’s great some people are willing to pay top dollar for individual items…hold up.

Quick poll. Say battle pass is $10USD. Would you be willing to pay $5 per individual items that was under 50% of the completion and $10 for items above the 50% completion mark? I hear people wanting to pay individually for items as they see fit. I’m curious if it would actually provide suitable profits for FC or was that monetization expert right?

Paying to complete it is literally what defines a whale my guy.

1 Like

Folks can anyone here in the community help a poor fool out…? I am an Offline Singleplayer, and I do not play online unless it is a round at a friends house. I do not play CoD, Fallout76, Fortnite or any of these online ‘battle pass’ games. And here in lies the problem for me; I do not know what a battle pass actually is! I tried looking it up on the interwebs, but I am still genuinely finding it kind of confusing. So I have a polite request for any who may be willing to help.

Q: Could someone please better explain to me what exactly a battle pass is and how it would work?

Just keep it simple if we can please.

3 Likes

Pizza places are constantly running poromoruons that tab into impulse biying. And that is what (not writing out the 4 letter catch phrase of the month) really is. A promotion to trigger an impulse buy. Self control is the key. but then again we have a ToS on officials because this player base lacks self control.

Soo, yeah, time limted is not a worry for me.

Battle passes are like exclusive membership things and last a “season”…around a fiscal quarter. You pay a cost and you play. As you achieve certain tasks you get points to get online merch for game play, almost always cosmetics. Its a way to get different items and provide fiscal support for games. Usually battle passes are set up in free to play. Which begs the question…will FC drop the price of the core game?

Traditionally battlepasses are cosmetic content that is released every however many months, usually timed to drop with other large content drops like new characters/maps in most games they’re in. Usually, you can get the content by leveling up your pass by completing various in-game tasks, usually something simple like “Kill X amount of Y enemy” and there’s often two different “tracks”, one that is free and has maybe has an item every 2-5 levels depending how greedy the provider is, and a “paid” track where you pay an upfront cost that just gives you access to the rest of the content. If you don’t complete the pass before the next one comes out, you lose anything you didn’t reach the level for and effectively whatever % of your investment as well.

3 Likes

A battlepass is a ingame - task system that offers rewards. In conans example you will be given tasks that award pass xp - after reaching xp milestones you receive rewards. In this case cosmetic items.

There is a free version with a small ammount if rewards and a paid version with more rewards.

What we know so far:
The paid version will refund your money (crom coins a premium currency) after completion so the next battlepass is free or you can buy different stuff in the shop.
Battlepasses will last 90 days after which a new one is putup and you lose progress into the previous.
The stated goal of how long to complete a battle pass is aprox 26 hours of normal gameplay

1 Like

It sounded like the core game was going “free”

1 Like

This one isn’t saying it is new.
Just that it’s not what this one would prefer. The pass is going to be mostly cosmetics and single use items. In that case unless the seasons are complete rehashes, the items would retain allure based on their own merit. Inherent impatience will drive participation early on. That the actual rewards will be of a very specific nature would allow sustained sales afterwards. Why waste the dev time to make new items, when existing items are present?

To keep the seasons viable, the aesthetic needs to be fresh. That will give the contents of previous passes the same sort of desirability that cultural packs have.
Honestly, it just seems odd not to double dip in this regard, especially if they are going to be trying to draw a perpetually growing player base.

But again, this one doesn’t consider it the end of the world or the end of the game’s playability. Far from the first or last time there will be disagreement.

This one’s hardline (whether this one is offended into not spending. Not quit playing. This one already bought the game and enjoys it well enough so no need to set the self on fire to singe someone’s eyebrows) was going to be temporary cash shop items. Rotation addressed that sufficiently enough. It’s still a little artificial scarcity, but it isn’t needlessly obnoxious against players who arrive later.

1 Like

They said the paid version will refund the cost in crom coins if you had most of it done but not completed. like… 94% (judging from the value they gave which was like 57 out of 60).

3 Likes

Then, if that is the case, there is nothing to complain about. They are changing the entire basis of the game’s business to a F2P and therefore battle passes are just the standard.

1 Like

It was just a quick comment in the stream and sort of a side talk - it could be nothing it could be moving to FTP (honestly the base game goes on sale so often now for cheap enough it may as well be free for the base game)