The whales will buy anyways.
The phrase more money than sense applies perfectly in these cases.
Watch as the usual defenders come in with it’s my money and it’s not my fault you are poor plus a few other excuses to deflect how many of them are to blame for why live service games have absurd pricing models.
I would be willing to forgive in many of these cases if the companies actually were giving us some sort of meaninful return on these “investments” but they are not.
60$ price for a bundle, are players really buying that? 
Conan Exiles is still a fun game to play, but these bundles are too much.
What Currency?
I’m using a spreadsheet to keep track of Bazaar prices and if I need to add a new currency tab, i will be happy to do so.
This thread is free advertising. It makes people load up into the game and open the page. This affects the metrics in the game showing that the market is still popular.
Whether you purchase anything or not from the bazaar doesn’t matter. People bought tons of crom coin during the last sale. They have no reason to make prices lower since people continue to log in to the game, continue to browse, continue to play, and continue to purchase crom coin.
Are they buying it? Yes. And many of you already have. The purchase was at the crom coin.
Let’s get a little informal survey. Everyone reading this, how many crom coin have you purchased? Starting from when they offered them.
I’ll start first: 0 Crom Coin
You keep claiming that. Do you have any factual insight into what Funcom does with their metrics or is this just your own conjecture?
If it’s the former, it would be extremely interesting to hear more details. If it’s the latter, then we should all take that into account when deciding whether a random conjecture should be allowed to have a chilling effect on free discussion.
You hit the nail on the head there.
I have nothing against Funcom setting high prices and using that revenue for continued improvement of the game. I have other complaints about their monetization, but those are off-topic here.
Unfortunately, “improvement” is pretty much the opposite of what we’re seeing.
Then again, complaining here about the lack of quality and high prices is unlikely to change either of those. As long as there are enough people paying these prices despite the quality problems, neither the prices nor the quality will change.
And who knows, maybe a miracle will happen. Maybe talking about it will eventually make enough people question their choices.
Do you remember the statistics they posted a while ago? Measure quite a few things in game that seemed excessive (to some). It would make sense to track the number of times players view the bazaar to ensure it is easily accessible and to gauge interest. Personally I would believe it less likely that they don’t track this and would love to see evidence or even reasoning (actual reasoning and not flippant) to why they wouldn’t.
We’ve been talking about it for 2 years. Just as some other topics have been talked about for 7 years. Guess we’ve got 5 more years before maybe seeing a change in the opposite direction. Well assuming the 7 year old issues resolve sometime this week.
Maybe @Pugilist will put together a line graph of his data showing 2 years of progress in hard numbers for us. Or anyone else can, since he’s offered the data publicly.
I don’t have a crom coin balance so I don’t really feel the need to outside of curiousity.
Sure, the more metrics you can track, the better.
It certainly would.
What I’m calling out isn’t the claim that they track metrics and gauge interest, it’s the subsequent jump you’ve made in your post here and similar posts elsewhere: if you visit the Bazaar, it sends Funcom the kind of signal that makes them decide against lowering prices.
That’s the claim you keep making, and that kind of claim requires an insight into their methodology that isn’t publicly available to the average player.
One way to get that insight is through years of experience doing that kind of job at other studios. Another is to have inside information from Funcom. Maybe there are others, I don’t know.
What I’d like to know is whether you have that insight the rest of us don’t, or you’re just guessing. Normally it wouldn’t be an important distinction, but it became important when you started using your claims to try to discourage this line of discussion.
Like I said, it would take a miracle given that Funcom’s willingness to listen to feedback and engage with the playerbase is demonstrably on the decline.
That said, I’m perfectly fine letting people have discussions that I personally consider unlikely to produce change and I don’t feel the need to try to scare them into shutting up 
I’m not trying to discourage discussion. I’m just pointing out that the idea if you (not you specificially) keep saying the the same things over and over expecting a change, but don’t change behaviors, then no change happens.
We have a very mature game with a pretty solid core playerbase. Some may call this maintenance mode, but in my experience games like this do continue to receive updates and fixes for years on end. However they tend stuck in a direction that doesn’t change very much because the playerbase is so invested.
I mean look at the average play time of the forum user. If you have 3,000 hours in the game. You’re a ‘newbie’ in many cases. The players here are so damn invested that they aren’t going anywhere, and why would they? Slap $60 on a new title that may not give them as much return on investment?
So they linger on, refreshing their base, checking in every cycle to see if there’s anything for sale they want. Hoping a price changes, hoping a sale comes, or maybe something that even if overpriced might peak their interest.
You cannot tell me this isn’t accounted for. The idea mostly likely is someone will crack, dump some of their stored up crom coin, and then when the next sale on them comes, they restock, and the whole process repeats.
Its exacerbated by the fact that those with disposable incomes get way more for their value due to people avoiding buying stuff for as long as they do. Look at the Tranquility set posted by the OP. People buying that, to which there are few, are getting the prestige of exclusivity. They are pretty damn happy about that.
I’m pretty certain if they weren’t meeting goals, we’d see some pretty interesting changes. Instead we’re seeing stuff go for more and more prestigious value instead of everyman value. While there is focus to keep everyone else engaged with free content (of varying quality depending on bugs and the like).
To me its evident that the value placed on these bazaar items are not for the average player. Is that wrong? It doesn’t really affect me. I have my own issues that are outside the topic, so I don’t buy. So I can’t really say that it is or not.
That upsets some people. They buy the game, play the game, want something someone else has, and determines its not within their budget or more specifically isn’t worth the value placed on the object to them. The question is, how much does it upset them. Enough to withdraw from the game entirely? For some they did. For many others, well they haven’t.
My opinion on that front has been pretty consistent. I ask myself if the game is better or worse if the bazaar and its content didn’t exist. The answer is neither. So that tells me the game isn’t worse or better for it being in and how it is. The game I purchased is still here, and has increased in value to me since it came out with its content added.
That’s my opinion. That’s not the opinion of others. They want lower prices. They believe that lower prices will make the game experience better (on that front). I cannot agree or disagree with that. I’m not them. What I can do is suggest actions that might yield better results.
I’m not definitively saying that it will. I said might. But I would ask, what do they have to lose?
So lets go back to what I said about not viewing the bazaar specifically. If everyone here decided not to check the bazaar for let’s say… an entire age (maybe even go so far as remap the key to open it to prevent accidently opening it). Would it make their experience worse?
What is the worst case scenario if say enough people did it that Funcom did notice and did change something in a negative way? Is that even a likely scenario? Is that something that is even a legitimate threat? What would that even be?
I don’t believe it would hurt the game. I don’t believe such an action would even hurt or make the experiences worse. I am curious to know how it could be worse or hurt their experience. I think the most likely scenario is people fixate less on the bazaar and more on other issues.
What I think the worst case scenario (and please feel free to disagree with me on this point) is that Funcom ignore such a thing and doesn’t change anything about the bazaar. Yet it is something that those most upset by it would be able to section off and outright ignore.
Which isn’t something that can be done with major bugs and glitches unfortunately.
Yes, you’re pointing that out, but you’re not just pointing that out. You’re going one step further and claiming that the discussion is counterproductive, because it sends a signal that makes Funcom keep the prices high. You’ve done that repeatedly.
We don’t know what their goals are, either, so everything you wrote (at least up to this point) is just conjecture.
Again, I don’t mind conjecture at all. What I’m pointing out is that you’re using conjecture to discourage conversation. It’s a public forum, so that’s your prerogative, just as pointing it out for everyone is mine
As far as I’m concerned, it’s not wrong in and of itself. Just like you, I have other problems with the monetization that are outside the scope of this particular discussion.
…which is also outside the scope of this particular discussion
That’s a lot of conflation and a lot of conjecture and a lot of ascribing a uniform motive to people’s complaints. In reality, people have more nuanced opinions than “I WANT WHAT HE HAS! LOWER THE PRICES! WAAAH!!!”
But it’s easier to criticize them if we pretend they don’t
Excellent! When are you planning to do that? 
Because the “action” you say you’re “suggesting” would yield no results whatsoever.
Let’s look at it:
As I keep asking you over and over: why would opening (or not opening) the Bazaar have more influence on Funcom’s pricing decisions than actual spending?
It would make more sense to suggest that people shouldn’t spend money on the Bazaar. Except that there’s a not-so-small problem with that suggestion, too.
Every suggestion of boycott has the same problem: it requires believing that the same people who say things like “$60 for a bundle, are players really buying that” are doing so after spending $60 on that bundle. And that, in turn, requires an impressive degree of contempt for the people you’re talking to.
So let’s pretend you don’t believe that, which leads me back to the same question you’ve been dodging all this time: what’s the special insight that makes you believe that your “suggestion” would actually help lower the prices?
Lowering the prices is the end goal of the people you claim you’re trying to help, remember?
We have a weird situation in which a normal boycott wouldn’t work here. If someone refuses to spend $60 on a bundle, it doesn’t matter if they already purchased crom coin. Funcom’s apparently strategy is simple to entice people to stock up on crom coin, then slowly bleed it off over a long period before repeating. If they’re meeting their goals, they are unlikely to change. And so far everything looks like they are sustaining their goals.
As I said, I don’t think not opening the page at worst will have zero impact. Its up to the individual whether or not they wish to. But I don’t see the point of continually opening the page to see things outside one’s budget as prices climb higher and higher.
Today a 14 piece set is 3600cc, next age it will likely be 4500 or even more after another crom coin sale. I think its pretty obvious they are introducing their own form of inflation. Especially if many have 6000+ crom coin and double it in another sale.
Of course it matters, unless you believe that only one Crom Crypto purchase per player would somehow magically provide a sustainable revenue stream that would allow Funcom to meet their goals.
I guess it’s theoretically possible to keep attracting new players that spend money on the base game and exactly one purchase of Crom Crypto, but it doesn’t really seem like a sound business model, does it?
It sure does. So how does not opening the Bazaar change that?
Okay, but what about “at best” rather than “at worst”? How is this suggestion supposed to help?
I mean, the point is rather obvious: “Let’s see whether there’s anything in the Bazaar that meets my purchasing criteria.”
If the answer is consistently “no”, then all the views and all the metrics you’re generating don’t matter, because you’re not spending.
That also requires an assumption that people who refuse to spend their Crom Crypto because the prices are too high are irrational enough to say “You know what I really need? More Crom Crypto that I won’t spend on overpriced Bazaar offerings!”
Like I already said, let’s pretend you don’t believe that. But for the pretense to work, you gotta do your part and stop saying things that require beliefs like that
Still, all that is beside the point.
At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll remind you of the point: the end goal of the people you claim your “suggestion” should help is lowering the prices. So far you haven’t explained how that suggestion helps them reach that goal.
Can you actually explain that? Or are we going to go through yet another round of evasions?
The sustainable revenue stream is the ones purchasing crom coin, spending it, and then buying more. As well as those who purchased the crom coin on sale. To what happens to that crom coin between that event and the next one, well we have yet to see.
But that isn’t anything that isn’t already known and has been brought up in pretty much every thread on the subject.
Seems the discount is smaller if you already own part of the bundle. I already owned the onsen set and the price listed was over 2k croms for just the bar set.
Let’s review:
My question
Your non-answer
Right, I think we all know what’s happening here. Thanks for making it clear that there’s no need to keep trying.
I wish I could share your optimistic view on people.
Oh, there are certainly exceptions to the rule, but as a whole, what I just quoted is a pretty apt summary of consumers - not just Conan Exiles players, but everywhere.
I’ve read Daniel Kahnemann’s excellent “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, which is a great and layman-friendly description of how we make decisions, especially related to economics and spending. But I’ll wager most people haven’t, or are otherwise unconscious about how they actually make their decisions on spending their money.
when i saw that screenshot with the line “Find equilibrium in the appreciation of the simple things” it immediately brought the concept of Wabi-sabi
i’d rather find my tranquility in the game as it exists, warts and all, then buy a bunch of silly digital trinkets at any price. i mean, if 3600 cryptocroms is 60 bucks as you say, then at what price would it be worth it to you? 30? 15? 5?
i think the current price is absurd if 3600 = $60. (i dont actually know how much crom cryptos are “worth” since i havent bought any other than what i needed to start the battlepass) it’s an abusive price to be sure.
i just can’t really see how there would be any value in this stuff at all. my perspective is different, i realize that. some people want ‘nice things’ i guess. i’m a t-shirt and jeans guy, and i have never understood why people would pay $60 for a pair of designer jeans. if they dropped the price of those jeans to 30, i would still buy my $8 jeans at the starvation army. i just dont understand the mentality.