Regardless of preferences (this one would prefer if SLAVER armour had a bonus to concussive damage) it’s more of a transparency issue.
This one would like to know what they are getting.
Due to how the illusion system works, it would be extremely difficult to just add skins, there are items that serve as illusion materials, but how would we craft them? Hand crafted? At the thaumaturgy bench?
That’s an entirely different worm can. An adjacent one, but still distinct.
Back on point.
What this one would like is more transparency in what is actually available. Weapons we know the weight and damage for because they are either iron or Starmetal. No variance to worry about.
But with the armours, knowing the weight class and sub stat would be nice.
This one does not think DLC armours still have variable temperature resistances. Mixed bag in that, but regardless, a non factor.
Edit: In regards to having no bonuses on DLC gear… The matrix for this weight class with this bonus is not well fleshed out by the base game. That seems an area for improvement for this one. If they did develop the full bracket of sub bonus/weight class within the base game, this one would love to see the DLC bonuses out the window.
As matters stand now, a few of them provide somewhat nitche options not otherwise available. Which, while far from the pay to win apocalypse, could offer specific support for corner case builds.
I love to support active development teams because I am a long-term player. I think they would be better off getting rid of the cash store and concentrating more on the battle pass. When I recently completed the battle pass, I felt really underwhelmed by it. Receiving so many obvious filler rewards, such as reused skins, potions, and cash, was unimpressive. I really don’t know if I would support another battle pass in its current form after 1555 hours and years of playing, and waiting for new shop items just doesn’t seems to feel fun and feels like profiteering. I would have been quite excited, though, if even half of the stuff in the bazaar had been included in the battle pass. Please perform better, Funcom.
I agree. But for as long as they’re actual items, the descriptions should contain more details about what exactly you’re getting when you purchase the item.
XIV allows you to buy Crysta in any amount. They don’t sell packs of it. It’s always a 1 to $0.01 conversion rate. You want a $3.99 item? You can pay $3.99 directly, or you can buy 399 Crysta and use that. None of this pack bullshit where you pay MORE than you need.
The core difference between the XIV and CE models is that XIV also is highly active in development. Each expansion is adding dozens of free armors into the game.
You’re getting new armors from the dungeons, of which typically there is one at level x1, x3, x5, x7, x9, x0. Six dungeons for a base expansion.
That means you get around that many sets for Tanks, Casters, Healers, Ranged DPS, then the split groups. You’re also getting numerous new sets for your Crafter and Gatherer. You’re getting new Crafted gear. New special artifact armors for each job, new tomestone armors at the 10th level to finish out the expansion.
On top of that, you’re also getting free armors with the subsequent patches of x1 to x5 before the next expansion. More crafted. Raid armors. PvP armors. More tomestone armors. Trial EX glam items.
All of this. Free, rolled into an expansion cost and coupled with time to acquire it in-game.
Whereas the Mogstation stuff is typically Event armors after the event has passed, for latecomers to acquire it. Or some new special outfits.
Legit, you cannot compare XIV to Conan. They are miles apart in what you get for payments.
I mean, $60 for an Expansion, and you get DOZENS of armors, tons of content, new Housing items, all of that. Now look at Conan’s shop, where you don’t even get a fraction of that, but they expect you to pay $900 a year, when that $60 to XIV gives you much more stuff over that.
As far as ESO, I also play it. You get their currency free by paying a subscription. You basically get x amount of the currency per month subscribed. That matches the currency price. So you can buy x amount of currency, or pay the same price to sub for 1 month and get that much currency free, plus other perks.
Most of ESO’s content is stuff you can legit obtain for free in-game, by farming it in areas where it drops. There are some exclusives, yes. But again, it’s a much better design than Conan has, because you can still obtain it freely in-game, you just have to work for it. And a lot of the exclusives you can’t obtain in-game, are also functional. Like the target dummies that look like game enemies, to put in your home and practice combat on.
I would say some of ESO’s store aspects are pay to win, because you can get more House storage, more characters, companions that let you access a merchant/bank anywhere. Mostly convenience pieces. The only “whale” items in the ESO store are the largest houses. But again, most people who play over time, and have gotten all the DLC unlocks, they are subscribing at $140 a year, and getting 20k crowns for doing so. And so these whale items, are nice houses they can spend the crowns on. Same as the Lootcrate cosmetics. It’s something of a bonus in addition to all the subscription perks you get.
Conan has nothing like that. Which is why it’s shop is so much worse than either of those.
I don’t know where you are getting those prices for XIV, but I’ve spent far more in subscription and expansion costs in XIV than for all the DLCs I have in Conan Exiles. And right now, I have zero access to any of the content I paid for in XIV. Have to pay for that.
There’s also not 5,000+ hours of content in XIV. Maybe closer to 600 (Maybe a tad more with Endwalker) if you don’t skip cutscenes. Don’t get me wrong, XIV is probably my favorite MMORPG. But it doesn’t hold a candle to CE due to its reliance on MMO-Style repetition (to keep its players subbed for longer). And in typical SquareEnix fashion, more movie than game.
XIV sub is $12.99 a month. That’s $155.88
Expansions come out around once every two years. So, another $60.
So around $375 every two years.
Even paying that much, you’re still getting wildly more than you could ever get in Conan’s Bazaar with those prices.
No idea where you are getting 600, but that’s a dream.
I’m currently sitting on 134 days, 2 hours, 27 minutes on my main character alone. She was created Oct 1st 2020, so she’s literally 2 years and 2 weeks old at this point. That is over 3,200 hours put into the game.
And I’m nowhere near finished. I’ve cleared up through Endwalker, sure. But the side content? Still got the Deliver Moogle quests, Mount farms in SB/SHB/EW, relics from every expansion to do, Eureka, Bozja, and even stuff like Triple Triad and the Saucer games.
There is way more than 600 hours worth of content in this game. When you factor in the MSQ and Patch Quests, farming for drops from dungeons and raids, leveling all the jobs. And that’s not even including all the venues and group activities you can participate in, or the PvP itself in XIV.
Sorry, but CE is nowhere near as good as XIV is. CE has pretty much zero story. And the only comparison left to make after that is the PvP and Housing in both. CE has great housing, sure, albeit in an enforced primitive way due to the setting. Which for most would balance it with XIV, because XIV has more options for modern design and variety. And CE just lacks a lot of stuff in it’s housing. Conan’s PvP might be better, sure. Because PvP 2.0 in XIV is such garbage now with how unabalanced it is.
But to be honest, it was never a finished product as new content kept pouring in with each DLC and each update/ DLC added new content to the core game which created more bugs. The point here is that was was never meant to be a completed game regardless of the story told in the beginning because the DLC content always brought in new items to the core game. If it was just one game, it would be perfected and we would have left it by the wayside 3 years ago. The game as a service and constant pushing forward is why this game still has legs nearly 5 years after release.
DLCs added new cosmetics.
But other than Siptah, they added little meat.
Releasing in Early Access with many intended features coming soon is not the same as Game as Service. See Cyberpunk 2077.
There was a time when the map expanded, the story expanded, the challenges of the game expanded.
Adding snow fields created new things to consider and new challenges. Likewise the Volcano.
While the Wine cellar didn’t expand the challenges of field of play, it did add more story and more to do.
These weren’t linked to DLC.
Siptah was the first (and only) DLC that added content and kept the game moving forward as a game (the DLC probably helped pay the bills). Even then, there have been some squiggly bits about that.
Regardless, the model they pitched to Tencent was not the model the game had operated under before. But it is the model they have now. Not just the monetization model either. This one finds it difficult to express clearly in English the fundamental shift to a Game as Service model, especially when leaving game as product model. Part of it is the legalese. Part of it is the concept of additional content vs continuation of service.
Game as product adds content, Game as Service expands by default. Game as product can have interruptions to online availability for a span because the game, not the ability to play it in a shared environ, is what is being sold. Game as a Service, one is purchasing the privilege of participating and maintaining the opportunity to participate falls on the onus of the merchant.
This gets even messier when multiple platforms are involved.
This one rambles.
No hostility is intended, it’s just a very irksome transition that concerns this one.
Honestly, I think the concept of “Game as a Service” is a tabula rasa. It means whatever the person think it should mean. To me, as a developer, it means the underlying software is always evolving and should never be considered to be finished. Which isn’t necessarily good for the consumer if the developer uses that as a crutch to excuse the deployment of buggy code.
Also, I always assumed your first language was Ta’agra.
The holy grail for publishers is a game that keeps on paying them money.
Realizing that game developers are different from publishers, you either have the indy devs who are doing it for the love of the game, or the publishers who are doing it for the love of the money (understanding that there is crossover between devs and publishers, where some devs are doing it only for love of the money).
If you want to see more love of the game you’re going to have to start moving your interests away from AAA titles (largely).
Your appraisal of this one’s linguistics are entirely in concordance with how this one communicates here.
While a developer can use Game as Service as a blank slate to do any sort of on going project they want…
As a customer, if this one pays for a service, they expect the service to be up and running.
Furthermore, several industry juggernauts have demonstrated how they present games as service.
While it may not be (and may never be fully) a settled term, it has had wide enough industry usage that it’s not still in infancy so it has lost the greater market flexibility it had a decade ago. The expectations have had plenty of time to calcify.
When it comes to money and transactions, this is a Tencent game. Content may be Funcom, but the monetization and finances are the parent company.
You raise an excellent point with some of the pricing figures compared to the coin packs available for purchase. Honestly, that’s where it seems like the bulk of the effort was put into this so far – arguably predatory math.
For example, the premium battlepass still costs a total of 3000 coins. This is a misleading price because it requires purchase of the 5040 coin pack at $34.99 to meet that purchase price.
This is dishonest because the premium battlepass is advertised as having a much lower price than $34.99. The reason this is legal, though, is because we’re only buying the coins. It’s basically financial gamesmanship, and there are other examples of this in the pricing, as you point out.
Strategies like that can (and usually do) erode consumer confidence. Trust is always the most valuable commodity. If we can’t trust that the product will be delivered with quality at the price advertised, how many people are going to keep buying?
Seems like a gamble to me when being straightforward with pricing can prevent a fair few headaches in that regard.
I take discussions of trust in gaming communities with a grain of salt. We have people in these very forums who have stated Funcom is an extremely dishonest, scamming, racketeering entity controlled by insert-racial-slur-here, for the last 15 years. Yet they have purchased the game, its DLCs, the Battlepass, and in some cases on multiple platforms.
Then go on to say that when they play the new Dune game, they ‘hope’ that those practices don’t repeat. Yet claiming they’ve been doing them in Age of Conan, The Secret World, and other products, as said for the last 15 years.
Its really hard to take those opinions seriously. They’d have more merit if for example if they made those claims while playing another game and having ditched FC games entirely. But oddly enough, when I talk to people in games like Phasmophobia or Everquest (did a 5 month stint there earlier this year), or some other sociable game. People who had played Age of Conan, The Secret World, or even Conan Exiles had only decent things to say about them.
The biggest downside with the shop and battle pass is not being able to share the items with other players. Because they can’t see the visuals on their character because they don’t have the corresponding item on their accounts.
It doesn’t even make sense, I’ve never met a player that doesn’t buy a DLC or item just because they can get it from other players for free…
There’re probably minorities of players who think that way, but they are not the target customers anyway. Its not like because of these changed they all of a sudden buy the items from the shop -.-
So after reading countless posts and threads about coins, BP, and bazaar, I can tell you here is how I am dealing with it all.
I put down $20 on coin last month. I got the BP because that is too good of a deal for people that play regularly. I have reviewed the content providers (pixelcave was awesome in this) to see what is and what will be up for the bazaar. I make 3 lists [1) not interested, 2)interested if the price is right, 3) Take my money] and start watching the bazaar. I buy what I want when I can and that’s it. Done. I only had one regret and that was ancient armaments because that came and gone too fast and before I decided on this methodology. I already spent my $20 so FC has the cash and now it’s just up to me to determine the value I get out of the transaction at my leisure. I can’t justify dropping $50 every 13 weeks but 20? Sound more reasonable and it’s up to FC to get me to continue dropping cash into their system because I have Crom Coin sitting in my account…if they don’t entice me enough, I don’t spend it and have enough to get the next BP which will happen to be free once completed if they continue to not entice me enough. The power is in my hands now that i have made the initial purchase and FC is now working for me…how it should be.
They’re aren’t. They really, really, really aren’t. They’re working for their shareholders. Their obligations to you are minimal, and will never even approach anything resembling the concept of “working for you”.
Also, funcom doesn’t sell bazaar packs, they sell crom coins packs. So the moment a player buys a pack funcom reaches its main goal.
Bazaar Packs exist only to remove a specific amount of purchased coins from your account and entice a player into another coins pack purchase.
