No mistake was made on Funcoms part. If you cannot take the time to complete the battle pass that is your issue.
Literally takes a few hours if you rush through it. Any failure to complete the battle pass is purely your mistake.
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This, right here, hits the nail on the head. Whenever there’s a “pay to not play” option, it’s because that aspect of the game has been intentionally designed to not be fun.
It’s not a mistake. It’s not an error. It’s by design.
That is debatable. Or rather, it’s not as simple as that. I’m pretty sure there are at least two forces at work here.
Any game designer worth their salt wants their game to be fun. And for a long, long time in the history of games, it was a simple adage that if the game isn’t fun, it’s because the game designer didn’t do a good enough job. They thought their game would be fun, but they were wrong. End of story.
Fast forward to the present, where we have in-game purchases, microtransactions, F2P and freemium games, and all that crap driven by corporate greed. Now you have a second force at play: coerce people into paying.
Suddenly, you have to “balance” the “let’s make our game fun for our players” ideal with the “but not so fun that they won’t pay” extortion.
Now look at Conan Exiles. They brought in a “monetization expert” to squeeze more money out of it. And the results are… well, they would be entertaining if I wasn’t a fan of this game, if I was just watching this from the outside. Suffice it to say that whenever I look at what’s going on in this aspect of the game, I hear “Yakkety Sax” in the background.
No offense, but that’s just speculation. It’s an explanation that sounds really nice, but just because it’s nice, doesn’t mean it’s true.
Here’s an alternative explanation, which could be just as true or false as yours: they looked at the revenue, they looked at what people are saying about BP and BLB, and they’re trying to get just enough people to finish the BP “for free” in order to have those people spread the word to future newcomers, so that those newcomers would also buy BP.
That’s also speculation, of course.
My point is that we don’t have any evidence that Funcom made a mistake that misled people into buying premium BP, so there are no grounds for furiously demanding a refund.
“I regret spending money on this” is not enough to get your money back.
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For me to entertain the idea it could be false is to say that Dennis and Andy were potentially lying in a livestream, I’m not prepared to make an accusation along those lines.
I think this is a bit unfair. After calculating how quickly someone can complete a Battlepass compared to before with the new boost in effect. I could understand why someone would be upset. But there’s a difference between buying the premium and realizing they could have just put in say 45 minutes of work after the fact and regretting it because they didn’t do their research, and finding out that the time saved suddenly lost its value after the fact and there was no way of knowing.
Just so everyone is informed. With the current boosted rates, you can 1-60 a Battlepass in one day if you have 20 boosts saved up.
I don’t know what they’re supposed to have been lying about, even potentially. Unless there’s something I missed when I watched the recording of the stream, the boost was announced at the 27:30 mark, and they discuss it until the 29:20 mark.
They say that:
- from 2022-11-11 until 2022-11-21, there will be a “double XP event”
- the event is more about the BP XP than the character XP
- their data indicates that, by and large, most players are behind where they (Funcom) envisioned they (players) would be at this point in terms of BP progress
- the base XP rewards for the challenges will also be higher, and will be kept higher
- they base their adjustments on the data they have, and try to adjust things in a way that will make more people happier
That’s about it. At no point do they talk about the quality of the challenges and whether it’s fun to grind them or not. You’ll also notice that they didn’t say they would take the premium BP option away. The premium BP stays, which means that the “grind vs fun” balancing act stays.
They’re not lying when they say that they want people to play the game and have fun. But you also won’t get them to say, publicly, on the record, what the internal power dynamics look like between the game designers and the monetization expert. No company will ever go into those details publicly.
You have your own speculation about why it’s important to adjust the BP progression. I have mine. Both are speculations, because there’s no evidence in the stream (or anywhere else that I know of) to support either. Pointing out absence of information is in no way an accusation of lying.
Yes, there’s a difference. In one case, you didn’t do your research. In the other case, someone got a benefit you didn’t. That’s the difference. You know what isn’t different? You don’t automatically deserve to get your money back in either case.
We’re not talking about debt relief here, or commuting a prison sentence because something was decriminalized, or anything like that. We’re talking about “I spent money on X and now things are different and I regret it and I want my money back”. I can empathize with that regret to a degree, but that doesn’t mean a refund is deserved or owed.
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This right here. In all neon bright orange for the world to see. 100%.
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They were expecting for more player to complete the BP in time with the amount of XP for the challenges that they initially set. And they were mistaken, because apparently for the most players this was not enough. Yeah yeah, I know, YOU can complete the BP in five hours. But most of the players are not. And to correct their mistake, they introduced the XP boost to help players complete the BP.
The mistake — small original XP values for challenges.
There are no wrong ways to play the game. You CAN NOT tell people how they should play the game. From the Devs Stream before 3.0 release I learned that the devs were designing the BP in a way to let the players to complete it as they play. Not to cheese it in Admin mode. Not to cheese it in 2 hours. You don’t force players to change the way how they play the game and then blame them if they do not consent. Apparently the devs failed to design the BP progression that appeals to the masses.
No, they did not. The current Battlepass is going to end soon, and was always going to end before the new Chapter 2 pass was rolled out. The only reason for the double xp is to convince anyone who did not already buy the Battlepass to crap or get off the pot so to speak. Since they are running out of time to complete it, the double xp is only to encourage final sales with the buyer having confidence they’ll be able to finish the pass they bought so late while making their purchase worth it. This pass and items are going away and will not be purchasable again in the future. What funcom should have done, and i believe Dennis said they will be fixing, is adding a timer or expiration date to the top of the pass so eveyone can track when the pass expires.
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I wouldn’t say mistake is the right way to interpret it.
I think adjustment is more accurate.
In the livestream before 3.0 was released, I recall Dennis stating that they would be monitoring player progress in the Battle Pass and make changes based on the data.
That seems to be what is happening from what I am seeing.
As far as requesting a refund-
Its always frustrating when you buy that shiny thing you want, and then it goes on sale the next day.
But that doesn’t entitle you to a refund, you just had bad timing.
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You can play the game any way you want. You can also spend money any way you want. None of that gives you any right to get your money back.
Bingo. They adjust stuff all the time. You don’t see people asking for a refund because their favorite weapon got nerfed.
I don’t understand why it’s so hard to understand that there’s a purpose behind the BP progression and also behind the premium BP.
Seriously, why do people here think BP progression exists at all? Why not just buy the BP and you get everything in it without challenges? Why do some BP levels give you Crom coins back? Why didn’t they make the BP automatically finish itself and give you the remaining rewards at the end of the chapter?
All of those design decisions have a purpose. And the purpose isn’t merely to have additional fun content to engage with. There’s more to it than that, otherwise they would have implemented a different system.
Sure, it sucks that you spent money on something and then they changed things in a way that made your purchase less valuable. Shіt like that happens all the time, and people don’t get their money back for it. Framing it as some kind of defect that warrants a refund is disingenuous at best.
EDIT: There’s another misconception I just noticed, so I figured I would address it in this same post.
If you paid attention to that stream, you would also have noticed that they accounted for the fact that people will cheese it in single-player and deliberately decided to allow that.
So yeah, they designed the BP to be possible to complete as you play and also to be cheesed through. They deliberately made it so people could choose which one they want.
Want to engage with it as part of your normal gameplay? You can. Want to get it out of the way by spamming through it in single-player? You can. Want to pay to skip a portion of it? You can.
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I can’t unferstand how someone who wants to complete the battlepass is unable to do so.
Go to Single Player, give yourself admin permissions and you can complete the BP overnight. It’s that simple.
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I still see this differently. The customer spent the money that they would not have otherwise spent. And I still think it’s the company’s fault.
That’s the problem, and precisely what the commentors in this theead have been trying to explain to you is the problem with your outlook on this situation. The customer is NOT always right.
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Considering that’s exactly how the battle pass works, they certainly can.
You can complain about it all you want but that’s how the current battle pass is implemented. And it was very obvious from the start how it was implemented. Now it’s suddenly a problem for you? Now you think you should be compensated in some way? Give me a break.
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Speaking for myself, I just meant the premium battlepass was just intended to save a little time.
Would I have known they’ll give an XP boost for free a few days later, I’d have rather joyfully spent the same amount of croms in the bazaar… 
Really, this is not about money, this is about balance.
I just wanted to say: please don’t take any of these back-and-forths with other people as an attack on you. If you mean one thing, and @3LiON takes that and runs with it to say a different thing, and then we argue about that different thing with them, then those discussions don’t necessarily reflect on what you were initially trying to say 
Yep. And if I had known the pandemic was coming, I would’ve done a lot of things differently in 2019. As they say, “shіt happens” 
We all make decisions based on imperfect knowledge.
I don’t see what this has to do with the purchase and refund of additional BP levels. that’s exactly what you bought with the premium BP. levels for the BP, i.e. what you need to complete the BP in time, and now you want to refund it? 
no they didn’t. they did what they announced right at the beginning. they adjust the xp when their data still shows too many uncompleted BPs.
and that is exactly what was announced before the release of the BP. it will be readjusted if necessary. there is no money back for that.
then you now have the chance to finish the BP. with more XP or more money. I still see no reason for money back just because the player miscalculated his own time.
and that’s exactly what was said several times before the release of 3.0 and the BP. it’s not funcom’s fault if players don’t inform themselves.
I don’t think you and @CodeMage quite understand what I am talking about. And I don’t think that you want.
What you mean is that FUNCOM should compensate Premium buyers by spending their money in something that wasn’t very useful. The benefits of Premium were too little for its cost, especially because there was some problem with the xp, right?
Well… it was clear from the start the Premium wasn’t worth it. Funcom might show some good will towards players who bought something pretty much useless, but it isn’t as if it was a scam. Premium was OBVIOUSLY useless from the get go, unless you only have like 15 min per day to play (and even so). Could the realization of that fact be transformed in a gesture of good will from funcom towards players who bought something pretty much useless? It could. They could reward those people who spent extra money with something more useful, but it’s only a gesture of good will, since there was no foul play on their part.
Yes but as true as we can not turn back in time, the ‘balance in the Force’ could be easily restored by a little move from Funcom.
If they want to go on selling premium stuff, my hint is : keep it rewarding. 