good thing f2p mmos aren’t the ones who started the battle pass system.
with a battle pass and in game shop i’d suggest making the game f2p but that would cause more problems than it solves 
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I’m trying to figure out the thought process that comes up with the idea that buying DLC-like items in game is somehow different than purchasing them on steam.
I’ve seen many different ways of handling microtransactions. I’ve seen games that are F2P and have shops in game. I’ve seen F2P games with shops outside of game. I’ve seen P2P games with shops in game, and those outside. I’ve even seen B2P games with these items for sale both in and out of game as well. In all six cases, I’ve personally not seen a difference.
If I click a steam store page to buy something like the Aquilonia DLC. And then use crom coin to purchase one based on say… for example Kushite bundle or somesuch (if they offer it). One is using a HTML format, another is using maybe… XML or in the case of Conan Exiles a UE Blueprint setup. Is that minute difference really a deal breaker for some?
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Right, but unless you pay for it, 80% of it is going to be locked away, right? I’m reserving judgment on a lot of these things since everything is (perhaps) still not set in stone. But I’ve seen lots of people suggesting that you don’t have to pay for the battlepass, and that’s of course true, but you don’t get the contents of it either, then, no matter how much you play.
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I will jump in this thread to welcome @Sloegin2001 and you again. My 
isn’t agree neither disagree, is just welcome 
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Feel free to express your worries without however consider them as facts. The forum still collects feedback, nothing is certain. Please read the pinned recap of Multigun, for us that English is not our native language, this recap is gold. Other than that this topic will soon enough be transferred in the already existing feedback for battle pass, so don’t take it personal if it happens, it’s just how they need to keep things in order.
So welcome again fellow exiles, nice to have you around 
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@Glurin… Miss your spirit m8 
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There isn’t, people are just too lazy to bother thinking for a second.
People think that Steam allows you to purchase games and additional content for those games, and a right to own what you purchase. It doesn’t. You don’t own your stuff on Steam because Steam doesn’t give anything physical to own.
What ppl purchase on Steam is a license to download that game an infinite amount of times as long as you adhere to the Steam EULA. That’s it. Whether you buy that content on Euros, Dollars, or Crom Coins doesn’t matter, you don’t get to “own” anything anyway.
The only difference, I guess, is that Euros are a currency that is recognized internationally and not a make-up currency whose value is under Funcom’s control. But let’s be real, if Crom Coins start costing an absurd amount of money new players would leave immediately, and old players like myself as well, so it’s not exactly in Funcom’s interest to do so.
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Second Life has its own made-up currency called Lindens. It’s a good historic view of the market. That kind of market is what Funcom is missing here. Buy, sell, trade… it’s all there.
This isn’t going dark unless on purpose.
You misunderstand. No one forced me to buy the existing DLC. I bought it. My issue is not with the existence of these things, but the change in the pricing. My issue is that they will become much more expensive. So yes, I do have an issue with that.
I’m defending the much cheaper value of existing DLC. The new system will, in my opinion have punitive pricing.
Again, it comes down to pricing. For existing DLC from the Steam page, it is quite beefy in terms of the amount of cosmetics you get.
As you said, a Kushite bundle from the store may be limited to much fewer items but have the added weight of having to acquire it by buying increments of Crom Coin bundles, which will probably exceed the current $10 price tag for a thematic DLC set. Just by the nature of in-game stores and overpaying for their in-store currency.
I really doubt they are doing this to throw content at us in a larger volume and at more affordable prices. I really doubt it will be as flexible as the paid mods Skyrim tried to do, where you could buy a chicken with a backpack for $0.14 cents. (which was a fiasco)
Yes, it’s better for Funcom, but it is worse for the consumer.
I’m not sure how many “levels” they will put in the battle pass. If 80% of it is going to remain locked away even if you make an effort to grind this thing, yes I agree with you that is no longer appealing.
They said in the trailer that you would be able to buy “levels” in the battle pass, of +10 or +15, something along those lines. If these levels approach Siptah levels of ??? grind, okay I concede that it is not a good idea.
BUT, I still think the offerings in the pass would be cheaper than anything coming in exclusively through the in-game store. Typically you are looking at $10 price tags for skins there. Sometimes the costs are higher.
We will depart the good old days of the $12 DLC bundle, where you get the building pieces set, armor and weapon skins and extra goodies in the form of either pet skins or placeables. That’s 3 for the price of one. I always thought that was a good deal.
Again, my issue is that the prices of cosmetics will sky rocket. They will leave this comfortable bargain zone for your wallet, esp when you find said DLC on sale in Steam.
Yes, of course they will make more revenue from this if they leave the Steam platform. But that is not necessaily a good thing for the consumer. I am arguing from the standpoint of not wanting to be preyed upon by questionable business practices for the sake of a company’s greed.
I have supported this game since day one. I have bought DLC and Siptah gladly when this content came out. Inserting an in-game store and a sesonal battle pass on us towards the end of the game’s life cycle feels predatory and them almost giving up on acquiring new users. (new users: People who will fork money for the base game, which has a more substantial price tag.)
They will try to milk what will be left of the community for whatever they can get out of us because they cannot expand the game’s player base any further.
And because of that we, the existing customer base, have to pay more for the same content we received before. I don’t appreciate that.
These are shady business practices. If they had done it from the beginning, it would be different. Why do you want to pay more?
The 3.0 update aims at turning the end user into a cash cow. Why is this thrilling news?
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Sadly I didn’t experience this. BUT, EA is famous when it comes to “unless you buy the DLC, you aren’t playing the game”. Cough, cough, I will take your example and raise you… The Sims franchise! 
Surely nothing else can top that!
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I think I’ll buy some stuf from the bazzar, probably all armor sets.
The only way to tell if the battlepass will work will be in the numbers/ whatever telemetry data they get from the game after its release.
These prediction topics are getting really boring.
Bad reviews on steam mean nothing as they can be influenced by streamers for good or bad, so forget that metric.
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If it doesn’t affect game play I don’t give a damn what they do or what they charge for cosmetics. If you don’t want a cosmetic that has nothing to do with gameplay - don’t buy it.
If you like a cosmetic then you buy it.
I have no problem with that model. I bought all of the DLCs but I only use a fraction of it. This way - I can buy the things I am likely to use and not worry about the things I won’t use.
This same thing exists with a ton of other games that I play (and support). Buy the cosmetics you like, ignore the ones you don’t. If you are that critical about not missing out,… pay attention to whats coming out and make sure you buy / grind what you want before it gets locked away.
I don’t play a ton of games as much anymore but for cosmetics that I want if I know they are limited time, I pay attention to whats coming down the pipe so I can make sure I get what I feel I want.
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It’s easy. They love money. See what they did with Age of Conan…
There is a dedicated Conan Exiles dev team. Has been since 2017. Now if you mean a game company should only be ever be allowed to work on one game ever at a time, that’s not realistic. And hasn’t been since probably the early 1990s. Funcom isn’t an indie sized company.
Sure, but the rewards include enough Crom Coins to buy the next Battle Pass. So if you wanted to buy it once, make sure you always level it up, every 3 months you would get a free Battle Pass essentially.
I fail to understand why people think this is a giant rip off. FOMO and those kinds of things, sure we can talk about that all day and that is understandable. But like, you are paying for 1 Battle Pass every 3 months, and you can basically get it for free afterword’s indefinitely. Like Taemien, I’m failing to understand why its different then buying a DLC every 3-4 months like they were being released in 2018 and 2019 (4 every year). Except this time, you could literally spend less.
Read my recap on the dev stream. If you had a bad roll on Challenges and did 5 that particular day, at bare minimum you would still get 1.5 levels. 60 levels total to complete it. And that’s assuming you got a terrible Challenge roll, 3 times in a row, and got nothing but “Common” level challenges.
Too good. Blew my mind whenever people would say the DLC was a rip off. The amount of labor that goes into those things. And then you compare it literally any other game out there (Fallout76 is a good one) and you are getting no where near the same return for the money spent in those said games as you did in Conan.
No idea how the pricing structure is going to look, but if it goes up, that would be the least surprising and most understanding of everything I’ve seen up to this point.
Rainbow Six Siege added the Battle Pass 4 years after it was released. Fortnite didn’t even start its Battle Pass until some time later, and its regarded as the game that started it all. Why is Conan Exiles the “shady” game?
Most of all, I disagree vehemently that you think this dev team is only interested in “milking” their players. That is not how dev teams operate in general. Not to mention if they wanted to “milk” the players for every penny, they could have gone a LOT more invasive. They could have made the BP a massive grind (and from what we can tell, it isn’t). They could not have given you Free Crom Coins as rewards in the BP so you can buy the very next BP without spending another cent. They could charge for rerolls on Challenges (common in other games). They could charge for EXP boosts on the Challenges. They could charge for actual power (Diablo Immortal). They could have content locked things like spells in Sorcery. They did none of those things.
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This is only in address to trepidation over Crom Coins.
The most common articulated anxiety this one has seen is that the coins will be sold in batch sizes that are deliberately not concordant with what anything costs.
For example, smallest Crom Coin bundle may acquire 250 coins. Battle Pass costs 200, all store items cost some divisible of 20.
Not that such a thing is at all what we are seeing, as we haven’t seen any of the bundles or prices (in any government backed or alternative currency) of anything. But that is the fear this one has smelled.
It is a mean season, and has been for some time, longer than any season has a right to be… This one expects trust, faith, and any expectation of good will to extremely rare, especially when there is an obvious potential for abuse. It’s a stretch to condemn people for expecting the worst.
On a personal level, this one notes that, during the Livestream, feedback was solicited. There were numerous other acts of transparency. So based on how much this one has enjoyed the game so far coupled with several good faith gestures, personal expectations are that the Dev team is not engaged in malfeasance. The monetization expert advising them may be anywhere from merely conventional/typical for profession, to a cultist of Mammon looking for ways to offer broken souls to their fell master through breaking their victim’s wallets. Can’t say, never met them. So far everything pinned on them has been fairly standard in industry (live service gaming), if both vocally loathed and not common in the specific genre.
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Conan is already acquirable for $3. This won’t stop cheaters from cheating.
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I’m not saying it is, though - I just want to make it clear what is supposedly free and what isn’t, since I’ve seen many people talk about it as if no money is involved at all. I certainly believe we should continue to support FC and CE if we want continual development, that stuff doesn’t come for free. Putting my money where my mouth is, I’ve bought every single DLC for CE there is (well except one I got for free due to being Chosen but everything before and after that. Yes I know the title nominally came with access to all DLC but it didn’t feel right to ask for it).
Wanting to continue supporting it is not the same as being a-okay with every possible kind of monetization though, and it’s my firm belief that some practices are more predatory than others. Discussing that is not at all the same as saying anything in particular is a rip-off.
Sixty. And of those, twelve-ish will be free, and the rest have to be purchased even if you unlock them via gameplay. Though as Multigun mentioned, there seems to be some way to earn Crom Coins which you can presumably use to unlock those - maybe? Odds are he knows more about it than I do.
That’s my point though, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but misinformation needs to be combated if there’s going to be any chance of having a meaningful discussion and providing feedback that is any use to FC.
Oh and FOMO is something I distinctly dislike, because it only servers to engender a feeling of urgency, making people spend money they really didn’t want to spend at that time. From what they said on the stream, that’s something they’re doing very deliberately on the advice of some expert, and it’s the opposite of what they’d normally have done. That bit did not sit well with me, particularly because Funcom has been such a benign company in this regard up until now.
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Conan is a live support game
This one thinks it may be more accurate to say it will be.
At present, it’s very challenging to say it is.
Historically it hasn’t been.
The XboX version was rendered unplayable for months with no response and months more before it was fixed.
Beyound that, the studio completely shuts down for about a month each year.
Just because a game is still being updated does not mean it is a live support or service game.
Honestly, that’s one of the reasons this one is in support of more standardized monetization. They obviously need more funds to support a more robust team to both produce content on a steady basis and address bugs that come up.
Possibly even get a fully functioning office outside of Norway that can take it’s month off in a different part of the year than the Fellesferie so the live aspect of the game doesn’t suffer a blackout for weeks on end, while at the same time the much deserved vacation can still be respected.
Perhaps an Australian office?
They could have an “I can’t believe it’s not Fellesferie” in December or January to escape the heat.
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Yeah I think that’s because their old method didn’t work to be an actual live support game
So yeah you’re right
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I completely agree with the sentiment.
With that said, I only watched the two minute trailer on Steam, but I did feel that it was out of character for them when they brought up the battle pass + the in game store. If they are doing it on someone else’s advice they really should use their own vision as the game’s developers and go with the community.
To take someone else’s advice outside that conversation makes as much sense as other games following WoW’s design iterrations even when it didn’t make sense for their game. When WoW dumbed down their combat, every other MMO out there also did the exact same thing and they ruined their game’s content.
What makes sense for this person giving the advice (and their experience) may not make sense for Conan Exiles. I really don’t like it when developers implement things they know nothing about, because “they’ve seen someone else do it”. It’s a horrible practice and everytime I’ve seen it done, it has ruined that particular game I was playing, without exception.
Funcom, please go back to doing content DLC like you used to - I don’t even mind if you bump up the price from $12 to $19 for cosmetic DLC but don’t adopt things from others for no reason. An in game store and a seasonal pass will radically change Conan Exiles. It won’t be the clean, fresh, visceral experience I’ve been used to playing. Leave the marketing out of game. You can put it on the launcher, even.
It will become a cluttered mess of ideas and you will end up dropping the title because you’ve ruined its foundation. Think from the beginning, how far you’ve come and the fact that you’ve never changed the original design philosophy and don’t give in to outside influences. There isn’t another Conan Exiles out there in terms of quality and you should be proud of that. Don’t ruin the experience.
I don’t mind paying you more for DLC if you are in need of money. I don’t mind buying the Sorcery update at the level of another Siptah expansion level content. But please keep this kind of nickle and diming outside the game I’ve come to love. Your company’s name depends on decisions like this. I think the respect of not giving in wins you customer loyalty and that’s not something games with a cash shop and seasonal passes will ever have. Because they’re meant to be a theme park. Transitory. Whoever stays and buys, great. Whoever moves on, that’s fine too. F2P doesn’t care about that.
Because they have adopted a revolving door philosophy when it comes to the consumer. Whoever buys, buy, whoever doesn’t, doesn’t and they don’t care if the customer is retained. In a game like Conan Exiles you want to retain said customer. Pushing them into grinding a battle pass and teasing them with a cash shop is not the way to win or keep their loyalty.
Don’t clutter my screen with an in-game shop next to where I spend feat points. Don’t have missions across my screen to unlock yet another gimmick that has nothing to do with playing. Don’t tease players with in game content they may not be willing to fork over cash for.
Announce the DLC and whoever wants to buy it, buys it. Don’t turn Conan Exiles into a casino with blinding lights and a diso ball.
Don’t aggressively market in-game. Everytime a person logs in to play, they are reminded they haven’t attained reward A or haven’t bought knick knack C, until they cave in or generate a lost interest in the game. Respect the player’s space. Respect your company’s name. Don’t sell out.
In the end, you might regret it and there will be no going back to “the way it was”.
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Yep, exactly. And there have been other forum queries discussing this too - let alone Dennis’s coverage in the Announcement. Very clear.
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BattlePass: periodic challenges with rewards. Do all the challenges and you make back the cost of the BattlePass. The Twitch test for the Watcher items a case in point, and referenced by Dennis in the Announcement.
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Exiles Shop: As per DLC, which offer a complete bundle per DLC for a set price, this sold offering is for all the component parts for new offerings. Players that choose to get the items on offering can then get what they want. I bought all the DLCs. I will likely buy all the new offerings too. Other players on my servers did not, but certainly would have liked to get parts of the DLCs - one player only was intersted in the build-pieces and two others in the cosmetic weapon and armour skins.
As Dennis (Funcom) stated, players have always been able to choose what to buy over and above the core game. The only difference here is that they are offering that choice at a micro-level. I do hope that they also offer a bulk-buy option to those of us that want complete bundles, but hey ho if they do not.
ALL games require funding. Nothing is free. I would never work for free, and I expect the Design/Dev/Prog staff at Funcom are the same. We are getting what I think of a whole new game in 3.0 with Sorcery - and the new skill progressions. A full revitalisation.
ps: I have always been completely against monetising pay-to-win content. Funcom have demonstrated with the DLCs that they are primarily cosmetic reskins of existing items. By breaking the DLCs down into buyable components, they give players more leeway to what they buy, and open an entire frontier of opportunities for their Dev staff. The BattlePass adds more.
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