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Give and Take
bluegrassbeast
Posts: 1,906 Arc User
So, any healthy relationship -including one between a business and their customers - is a matter of Give and Take.
To wit, a company wants to make a profit, ideally as high a profit as can be managed before the customer grows weary of their shenanigans and finds another business to patronize -one with a better price,or at least more frills and perks for the same price.
So let's stop, rationally, and see why this system being completely out of synch this past year or so may be causing so much discontent.
Give
+ Steel Crusade+
Fairly decent content. Not quite an AP or CS, but repeatable, with a good enough plotline. Introduced Mechanon into the game. Downside - introduced the godsawful, near-unbeatable-in-any-Zone-but-One mess that was the open-world finale. Rewards for a victory were equally sparse and insulting. Time-limited to event. Still, overall a decent bit of permanent content.
+Reawakened Automaton+
Can we give this back? Awful build, terrible synergy, all to unlock a broken power, a power lifted off a Become device, and a re-skin of an existent power. Making Subbers suffer through not just an AT, but a terrible one. Still, in fairness, its not a wholly awful idea - just mostly - if it were mechanically sound and had good, worthwhile rewards. Which it wasn't, and didn't.
+Global Cap for Silvers+
No real downside to this, save for how it ties into a point I'll address below. Long overdue.
+ Subscriber Costume Pieces+
No downsides to this one, except for non-LTSers who miss one. The emote controversy I'll not touch though it does make one somewhat concerned.
Take
-Costume Price Hike-
Do I need to explain why this is nothing positive at all to the players, who justly were peeved at it? What's worse, it added indirectly to the ongoing devaluation of subscriptions. Freeforms, global caps, CSs/APs, now the Stipend buying less... while I begrudge the Silver set none of their gains, you've made Gold look less and less desirable with no real polish or pad to value by doing so. It's not reassuring to see - in fact jerking the prices up by 100z pretty much screams "give us more than you already are/did!" Blatantly.
-Broken Costumes-
Ugly, clipping, unfinished, and disregarding feedback in a rush to shove things out the door. This coupled with the above is damning.
-Forums-
I'm not going to sugarcoat this - these new forums are trash. What's worse, the missing titles - which were either paid for, a reward for a charity drive that to my knowledge people still haven't received the full rewards for, or paid for via LTS.
-Powers in Lockboxes-
P2W. Kiss of death for a F2P game, and an awful droprate besides. If I have to explain why this is a terrible idea and why the Suit forcing it on us should be fired and banned from the industry henceforth, there's no hope here.
-Lockbox Notifications-
Only the Suits want these. No one in the playerbase does. Not the people sending them, not the people getting them. Either give n option to fully disable their appearance, or dispose of them utterly.
Compare the two lists. Take a good, long look.
Then wonder why you're about as popular as a kid named Sherman down Savannah way, folks.
To wit, a company wants to make a profit, ideally as high a profit as can be managed before the customer grows weary of their shenanigans and finds another business to patronize -one with a better price,or at least more frills and perks for the same price.
So let's stop, rationally, and see why this system being completely out of synch this past year or so may be causing so much discontent.
Give
+ Steel Crusade+
Fairly decent content. Not quite an AP or CS, but repeatable, with a good enough plotline. Introduced Mechanon into the game. Downside - introduced the godsawful, near-unbeatable-in-any-Zone-but-One mess that was the open-world finale. Rewards for a victory were equally sparse and insulting. Time-limited to event. Still, overall a decent bit of permanent content.
+Reawakened Automaton+
Can we give this back? Awful build, terrible synergy, all to unlock a broken power, a power lifted off a Become device, and a re-skin of an existent power. Making Subbers suffer through not just an AT, but a terrible one. Still, in fairness, its not a wholly awful idea - just mostly - if it were mechanically sound and had good, worthwhile rewards. Which it wasn't, and didn't.
+Global Cap for Silvers+
No real downside to this, save for how it ties into a point I'll address below. Long overdue.
+ Subscriber Costume Pieces+
No downsides to this one, except for non-LTSers who miss one. The emote controversy I'll not touch though it does make one somewhat concerned.
Take
-Costume Price Hike-
Do I need to explain why this is nothing positive at all to the players, who justly were peeved at it? What's worse, it added indirectly to the ongoing devaluation of subscriptions. Freeforms, global caps, CSs/APs, now the Stipend buying less... while I begrudge the Silver set none of their gains, you've made Gold look less and less desirable with no real polish or pad to value by doing so. It's not reassuring to see - in fact jerking the prices up by 100z pretty much screams "give us more than you already are/did!" Blatantly.
-Broken Costumes-
Ugly, clipping, unfinished, and disregarding feedback in a rush to shove things out the door. This coupled with the above is damning.
-Forums-
I'm not going to sugarcoat this - these new forums are trash. What's worse, the missing titles - which were either paid for, a reward for a charity drive that to my knowledge people still haven't received the full rewards for, or paid for via LTS.
-Powers in Lockboxes-
P2W. Kiss of death for a F2P game, and an awful droprate besides. If I have to explain why this is a terrible idea and why the Suit forcing it on us should be fired and banned from the industry henceforth, there's no hope here.
-Lockbox Notifications-
Only the Suits want these. No one in the playerbase does. Not the people sending them, not the people getting them. Either give n option to fully disable their appearance, or dispose of them utterly.
Compare the two lists. Take a good, long look.
Then wonder why you're about as popular as a kid named Sherman down Savannah way, folks.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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Comments
One of my chief problems is the costume price hike. I would have been okay with this if they would have, say- reduced the price of the substandard costumes (if even by a dollar or two) and 'grandfathered' all the better costumes at their current price, and then 'from this point forward' elevated the price of costumes.
I wouldn't even mind paying for new powersets if they were sold in new AT's and had proper time balancing them and had at least 5 new powers thrown into them.
What about becomes? I haven't seen a new one in some time... so why not give us the powers they come with as an incentive? What about some of the costume parts they wear?
I would be fine if we had to pay for comic/adventure packs. I've never had issue with this, and I still have no idea why these went free. As long as worthwhile rewards are involved, I don't see how this can be a problem.
I'm still disgusted by how vehicles turned out. You know what, I don't care that we can't completely build them from the ground up. I just at least wanted the option to get a variety of colors. My character often has different color schemes depending on his environment, and even though my vehicle is just a 'travel thing' I use... I'd be willing to pay for different paint jobs for the thing that I can switch around.
I don't like that we've had costume parts removed from the game. I hate that. I can understand seasonal parts going away, but these were gutted for good. We've these and a MOUNTAIN of other pieces, and I think a variety pack 2 is LONG overdue.
If this game had a new zone, with entirely new enemies and could bring me up at least 5 levels, I'd be willing to pay for that.
You know what else isn't a bad idea? Selling alternate animations to powers. Why not sell 'War Machine Arm Guns' that work just like 2-gun Mojo? Why not sell different 'weapons' for the Power Armor weapons?
There, some relatively reasonable ways to monetize the game- some of which aren't really anything more than making something available to players.
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The exceptions to this is permanent sidekicks.
This game promotes multiple characters and shouldn't rely on the systems of other games to determine pricing and unlock fashion. Cryptic should be focusing on increasing the value of each character slot which can only be done by making things unlock account wide and by adding things for free to the game that encourages the purchases of character slots and freeform.
but all they did was took my heart.
Thru the throaic cavity.
And pair of kidneys.
And left lung.
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
They asked identifying question, which I gave with a lot more detail than they asked for and they changed the acct to my new email.
WOW had a problem with a hacker, they did the same. I answered the identifying questions,they Changed the email for me and logged it to the acct guard for me.
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