Well, “whale the whales good” is an organized fashion. It’s not smart, though, given F2P games with smart monetization make about half their revenue from non-whales.
Funcom doesn’t seem particularly interested in encouraging those, beyond maybe the odd cheap cosmetic.
But take, say, the agent system? Every bloody Asian browser game with those stupid Gatchas tries harder to get everyone to spend some, rather than just expecting the same old kind whales to spend a lot, no questions asked, again.
Taking a page out of those Asian games’ playbook, SWL could have boosters that say, “Hey, we actually stick it to our bloody RNG by guaranteeing this will actually have agents rather than bloody useless green gear dross”?
This could start as low as 500 Arum (one guaranteed ‘common’ dossier plus 3 random drops) and go up from there to, idk, the 10.000 Aurum mega booster guaranteeing 3 epic dossiers and 3 epic gears or whatever.
And while the latter would mostly be a goodie for whales, the former might actually encourage people on the fence about spending at least a little a bit more than those 125 Aurum boosters that quickly manage to feel even less rewarding than SWL’s lockboxes. (Because green dross gear is utterly useless by itself, whereas ‘just another distillate’ at least works within the gear system, no matter how much or little one might think of it.)
See? I knew you could figure out why I stayed around on your own. Sorry for the snarkiness, but you left yourself open for that one…
And you quoted me saying it wasn’t an opinion, but a fact with what I assume is a laughing emoji, however, the things I said were facts… How do you dispute that those three things are not facts? So, your quote and statement that it was “drenched” in cliché are false at best and a blatant white knight troll at worst. I like to believe the best and that you just misspoke.
You’re right about one thing though, the story can be done for free… I know, I have. Most of it twice you know, once before in another game…
Also:
What do I consider nickel and diming?
The multitude of sprint levels for increasingly ridiculous amounts of MoF and then aurum. Probably one of my biggest issues considering I had the best sprint in TSW and I hate how slow the earlier ones are.
The fact that they did not transfer all points over from TSW, simply for the off chance we’ll buy more in this game (ha fat chance). I would have just grudgingly turned this into sprints, but at least I would have been willing to spend more money.
This agent system with the ridiculously low agent drops even after spending real-world money on the boosters.
The ridiculous cost of opening up more weapons. If I wasn’t blessed with TSW unlocks I would have never even started here.
You only receive one-character slot for free and it costs $10 for additional slots. Considering there are three factions… Hmmm… Again, if I hadn’t played TSW…
Not to mention how alt unfriendly this game is with its events that can only be fully completed by one character unless you buy (with your limited daily resources) the items to complete outfits etc… I guess I may be behind on this one since I didn’t play the Christmas event and don’t know if they changed this one.
Costing your daily limited resource to post an item on the AH.
The only way to buy off of the AH is with your daily limited resources.
The fact that you need keys (that you only get ten of for free) to open the chests in the dungeons your run. What is that 1 maybe 1.5 dungeons?
Only able to buy cosmetics (or most, not sure if some can use shards) with your daily limited resources.
That’s 10… Is that enough examples for you? I recognize that some might not consider that nickel and diming, not sure why, but I accept that. If not though, what is your definition of the term?
This game is not designed to be F2P friendly… And if that’s the case… Why be F2P? Oh yeah, that’s right you failed as a subscription-based product… Now they are just failing in a different way.
You have to keep the F2P interested in order for the whales to want to pay into a game. Unfortunately, if others feel the same way I do and don’t spend money I’m never going to see the story progress. The sad part for me is that even though I am no whale, in the time I’ve played STO I’ve probably given a dev a down payment on a new house. I’m willing to support a game I don’t feel is ■■■■■■■■ me over. Sadly, since the point debacle where I lost several thousand points (yeah, yeah they are still in TSW, but so is your (generic you) lifetime membership), I swore I wouldn’t spend a cent… Not anytime soon anyway… But I keep watching for a reason to.
you are being overly dramatic, the Hex currency is meant for mitigating
pulling doubles IF you buy agent packs.
So that you don’t spend money without getting something in return.
Nobody forces anybody to buy agents.
We all really need to remind ourselves that we also do not work for free in our jobs. So yes, if you want it “faster” then you can spend money - you know, like the 15$/month fee that was the norm a few years back.
I completely agree with your post. You don’t NEED to buy agents you can slog through 100s of missions, bosses, dungeons, etc… And receive maybe 1… Unless you are not reading the same posts and complaints I am on the forums…
Buying them isn’t that much more successful either from what I am seeing. I am just happy others have done the research with their wallet and time so I don’t feel like I am missing out on something. And, maybe, I’m being overly dramatic… In someone’s opinion… But your argument only means anything if you are getting agents at a decent drop rate. Buying them isn’t necessarily the problem it’s the minuscule drop rates, even on the purchased boosters.
To be honest, I wish we could go back to a time when $15 got me access to everything in an MMO. However, that isn’t where we are today and I understand evolving, but we need to have discussions and let developers know we won’t accept crap F2P models either, which IMO, is what we have here with SWL.
Note I didn’t say crap game… I really like the game personally just not their specific F2P model.
Yeah, I’ll admit it was a tough nut to crack since all I had to go on were enigmatic statements like this:
Still, good to know you’re not even reading your own posts properly
You do realise the word cliche has nothing to do with veracity?
Urbane banter aside, your list is absurdly comprehensive - is there anything you don’t object to marks of favour your limited daily resources being used for? I’m not an economist but I strongly suspect that if they didn’t charge money for at least some aspects of the game, the game wouldn’t survive for long.
Sure, if you spend literally zero money it’ll take you a long while to get sprint 6, all 9 weapons, all 40 agents and every item of clothing on a separate character of each faction but you don’t need to do that at all, let alone quickly.
What exactly happened with you and the points transfer that made you lose thousands of points?
I’m not sure what you think you’re not getting access to in this game?
Since you pointed out you missed the Krampusing event they actually changed this there. You could get a seasonal login rewards on each of your characters.
then it’s failing pretty badly. If you spend around 150€, you might get those 200hexcoins. Then you get a BAG that has pretty high chance to get you agent you already have from those 150€. So you only turn 200 hexcoins into 4.
It does not really mitigate anything.
Blue packs/agents are completely useless. By the time you get enough hexcoins you already have half inventory purple and most likely only missing 1 or 2 agents.
It would make sense if you could turn drop items into hexcoins, because then it’s a way for someone to get SOMETHING after loong time of playing getting nothing.
In reality all the hexcoin shop does is giving you a 5% chance to get yellow item for every 75€ you spend. That’s the reality of shop and people who spend that kind of value (whereever they got it).
That would presumably mostly eliminate them fro appearing on the auction house, which Funcom probably doesn’t want.
What they really need to address is the poor value of agent boosters, which seem to have a 50 percent, if not higher, chance of dropping worthless dross green gear, which is not really all that mitigated by HexCoins the way the system works right now.
I think the use of direct quotes is making this too difficult to read so I will forego those for this post…
Not sure what you mean by saying my responses were enigmatic. I was pretty straightforward.
I said in my first post that I barely log in monthly (intimating that I log in at least monthly if not more (FYI I rarely log in more than monthly but some months I log in weekly, since you obviously are very interested in my playing habits).
I said I stay tuned in… Which at the very least says I pay attention to development or as indicated in my first post I log in monthly and check things out.
So, for now, I hang around. (again, says I check things out at least on the forums and website, but again I have already said I log in at least monthly).
Regardless, whether I play for the story or not is irrelevant. There has been no new story since before the relaunch and I could complete the story within the first month or so of playing in order to be prepared for new story.
“Nickel and diming” is an idiom not a cliché it means: “To assess costs or fees in enough small amounts that it adds up to a substantial sum.”
Wasn’t sure if you were a native English speaker or not so, wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. Either way devolving this conversation to a point of arguing over the definition of cliché is pointless, since the definition states exactly what I (and I’m willing to bet others) consider their F2P model to promote.
Things I wouldn’t mind paying for:
Actual agents, outright not just a chance for one, although no agent you buy in the shop should be exclusive to the shop.
Really cool exclusive weapon skins, if there were also plenty of choices also available for shards or quest/achievement rewards.
Really cool exclusive outfits and clothing, if we had a store in, hmm off the top of my head, maybe London that sold things for shards too.
Cheaper character slots. (never said buying one was a big deal)
Weapon page unlocks are fine too, but they need to be much cheaper.
Uninhibited AH slots where I can buy maybe 10 slots (and more) and never have to pay MoF to post again in those slots.
MoF purchases from the AH is ok, I guess, but it should have never been set up as the only way to buy things from other players.
Keys are fine for lock boxes (as long as lock boxes have nothing game breaking in them), but not to open the dungeon chests that you run.
Sprint types are fine (motorcycle, hoverboard, etc)
Pets
Emotes
Vanity items for your museum.
There are 12 things… That enough to make up for the 10 I consider nickel and diming?
As for my points… I had stopped playing TSW a while before the deadline to have your points transfer over that they imposed so, I lost about 4K.
The access comment was in another post that was in response to Mohric, and was more of my over-arching feeling about MMOs in general, but since you ask specifically for SWL I can think of a couple…
Dungeon chests… In most games I can keep getting gear/drops from any dungeon that doesn’t have a lockout. And even those that have lockouts usually have enough dungeons that I will run out of time or patience before I finish them all in a day/week.
Lock Box items… All of those items that are only available from lockboxes or other players would be available from somewhere in the world be it mob, quest, or achievement.
Have I answered all of your questions satisfactorily or is there more you would like to know?
This is hands down the dumbest conversation I think I’ve ever had. I called you cliched because your post was full of “angry gamer” touchstones (talking as if your opinions are fundamental truths that everyone else will discover eventually, overusing ellipses, saying “cash grab” because you know “hey guys, it turns out this company wants to make money from their product” doesn’t have the same scandalous air) and the enigmatic comment was pretty clearly sarcasm.
First of all: and secondly, the only person arguing over the definition of anything is you. With yourself.
As for your list of things, I feel like “buying specific items versus gambling for them” is an entirely separate can of worms - I don’t really want to get into that because I have absolutely no idea if that’s a viable business model and I strongly suspect you don’t either. I’m happy to discuss the rest of it though.
I would guess the reason they don’t sell stuff for shards because shards are only limited by player time and your shard income increases as you progress through the game. If they sell cosmetics for shards they’re either too expensive for new players or you can buy the entire store the day you hit Tokyo. Same goes for using shards on the auction house - since you can farm absurd amounts of shards at high level, new players are priced out by inflation. You clearly find it irritating that marks of favour are a limited currency but it’s like that for a reason - every player can earn the same amount each day (patron bonus notwithstanding), regardless of level so the economy isn’t tilted in favour of higher level players or those with more free time. Similarly, stuff like auction fees & dungeon keys are necessary to drain marks from the economy - if they weren’t there I suspect we’d see a lot more inflation.
Finally, I get why you’d be annoyed that your points didn’t transfer but couldn’t you have spent them on cosmetics and then transferred those in the second vanity transfer? At the end of the day, there were probably a lot of unspent points floating around on old TSW accounts so I imagine some limits were needed to stop SWL’s economy from tanking right out of the gate. Like it or not, the entire point of the relaunch was to try and bring in more money and the more premium currency that was transferred over from the old game, the less is going to be bought in the new one.
My apologies for misunderstanding your vagueness and attempt at sarcasm since there was absolutely nothing angry about my first post. The only thing I have is disappointment that the re-launch didn’t go better. Like I said I came back with high hopes after being gone from TSW for more than a year.
Also making money is a lot different than nickel and diming… If you can’t see that, then that’s on you. I hope you continue to enjoy paying and playing. By all means, it’s your wallet. Unfortunately, for the long-term health of this game, you better hope very few people feel the way I do. I may be in the minority, but I really doubt it.
Also buying specific items is common in many F2P games. I would have to believe that it is a profitable model otherwise other games wouldn’t do it.
Shards are the economy that players should be using to sell to each other. I also highly doubt that they would price themselves out as supply and demand would ensure that didn’t happen.
In TSW there was already a store where people could buy clothing for in-game cash, but you could also buy premium clothing from the cash store so, that argument doesn’t hold any water.
I also don’t mind that MoF are limited. I get the reason, but that’s why there should be plenty to buy for shards as well and everything shouldn’t be dependent on MoF.
As far as my points go why should we have had to use them all before? Everyone that had a lifetime membership got to carry theirs over, past the lifetime of that game. I’m also not 100% sure when they last time they offered the LT sub in TSW, but I feel like it was long enough ago that they had gotten their year and a half moneys worth out of it or pretty close. I definitely didn’t receive full credit for my points before they stopped development on that game.
Lastly, don’t take this the wrong way, but is this the first F2P mmo you’ve ever played? I have to ask, because almost every F2P game I have played have had systems like I describe and they seem alien to you.
It doesn’t seem like you get the reason - what would be the point of limiting marks of favour if you could use shards instead?
All your complaints basically boil down to “being able to get everything for free isn’t good enough because it takes longer than I’d like” which is fair enough, everyone’s allowed an opinion after all. I’m not as convinced as you are that your opinion is widely held though - the game seems to be pretty popular compared to TSW.
Compared to TSW, maybe. Obviously more people are playing the game.
Its free to, at the very least, screw around in once in a while, whereas TSW was premium purchase or whatever. Can’t really use a comparison like that.
Compared to other games with better F2P models, like Warframe, not even close. Just saying.
If TSW vs SWL isn’t a valid comparison because one required an upfront payment, then I daresay comparing an MMO to a shooter isn’t either for a whole host of reasons. Yeah it’s not the most popular free to play game of all time but I don’t think that’s the bar for success that Funcom have set themselves.
I would normally agree, but they need to improve the drop rate if not. I also didn’t mean all of them just a few that are a special quality (like NPCs we interact with in-game that are popular) that have very rare drops rates in the world (kind of like now but more so probably) but cost $20-30 in the shop. That may be a bit expensive but it’s for whales after all. Maybe throw in 2-3 low-level starter agents at $5 each as well.
I know I would in most games I play, buy a couple of the starter ones and maybe one of the rare ones just to get started with the system.
Oh, I get the reason. I just think they way they implemented the entire F2P system is terrible.
I am a frequent player of Star Trek Online. Like I said in my first post, they have other issues in that game, but their F2P model is pretty decent. They have premium currency - zen (game store purchases/limited currency trading), limited acquire currency - dilithium (max refine of 8K a day/premium currency trading), and they have game currency - energy credits that players use for trading. It works out well and they have similar type microtransactions.
In STO you can still buy things for decent prices on the exchange (supply and demand) except some of the more rare ships, but hey, those are there for whales and you really don’t NEED those ships for anything. Also, those expensive ships aren’t even usable until endgame so you have time to save up and figure out if they even match your playstyle.
The Rainbow Stride would like to disagree with you. Yes, it’s a sprint and therefore “just” a cosmetic, but you had to spend Funcom (not bonus) points to gain it.
You can’t compare it to TSW because that comparison is irrelevant, not because you are comparing it to a shooter, but because TSW is a failed game.
It is very important to compare it to other F2P games because that is your competition. TSW is not competition because the only money they have in TSW at this point is probably servers. In fact, I bet leaving TSW open is probably hurting them more than helping them (people that refuse to leave but would if no other choice). But leaving TSW open is more of a goodwill gesture than anything.
The important thing for F2P models to do is to be good enough that F2P players want to play it and feel that their grind is rewarded fairly. Why is this important? F2P fill the ques, buy things on the ah, make the world seem lived in. Those things are all important to whales. Without F2Players whales don’t invest. That is why a F2P game has to walk a fine line between generous and greedy.
