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Stop Using The Drifter Store
powerphist
Posts: 10 Arc User
Seriously if you want to charge us money to buy things then just do it. Spending money on a box that may just give you an alternate curancy just feels like im being gouged. I generaly don't want whats in the boxes anyway. This new grav bike the widow looks awesome, and I realy want it, but Ill be damned if Im going to spend a ton of money opening grab bags to try to get an alternate currancey to buy it. Just put it in the c-store and Id be happy to just buy it honest. Or if you realy want us to get an alternate currancey to get it, then find some way for us to generate that currency in game. It just doesn't seem honest the way its being done now.
Post edited by powerphist on
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[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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Dominus Drake Primus Database ,Also @Pyromasher ingame
100 keys guarantees a widow sometimes less. You get other stuff with it as well. 100 keys cost 9000 Zen or about 90USD. So you are going to buy the bike if it is there at 9000 Zen? Your logic does not make sense at all. You will still complain it is too expensive. If you think it is too expensive or cannot afford it then don't get it. It is not compulsory for game play. You can also farm Gs to buy keys from others who spends real cash to buy from store to sell for Gs. This is an online game not a charity or social welfare.
While she has been rescued
what diabolical mastermind
was behind the devious brain-napping of
the Volterrific Dr Cerebellum?
You can grind questionites, refine them, trade for Zen. Or you can grind Gs and buy the keys. There are people selling a key at 100g each. These are the ones who spends money and supports the game.
Your assumptions are false.
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.
The old Drifter Salvage Boxes noticeably gave up to 10 Salvage.
The time it took realistically to get the Daily Drifter Salvage Box Daily (granting 2-10) was about 20 minutes to an hour.
The time it takes to farm enough Q with a daily (2000Q) was 15 minutes to about an hour, which depends on Alerts you needed to complete and their availability.
Nemcon Q farms (on average 2600 but can get up to 6000 with a few 1500s or a lot of 500s) takes up to 15 minutes.
Gravitar Q farms (on average 1500, factoring double reward and diminished reward with each success) takes 15 minutes with an average successful party.
Conclusion based on exchange rate:(190Q per Zen)
Questionite converts on average these days of 10 Zen per 2000. You need to farm 20,000 Q to get a key which takes about:
Dailies = up to 4 hours
Nemcon = up to 2 hours
Gravitar = up to 2 hours if you switch every two runs
All that time to get the two Drifter Salvage you want for Q farming (2-4 hours for 2.8 on average) versus the time it takes to get a Drifter Salvage Box Daily (1 hour for 2-10).
Don't forget that you get more from a lock box than just Drifter Salvage.
But I still rather do the Drifter Salvage Box Daily since it rewarded more of what I wanted since the inherent worth of a lock box's drops are worthless (just vehicle mods 97% of the time). Naturally someone would want to do the thing that gets Drifter Salvage faster.
If Drifter Salvage Boxes were to return as lock boxes and were to drop often you could realistically get 200 DS in just 20-40 boxes (2-10 ave.) rather than 50-100 boxes (2.8 ave.). But the inherent difference in profit for PWE is $40 and $100. Most people who would spend $40 worth on boxes are likely to spend $100 for the same thing.
And yours are true? I am currently in possession of 2 widows. Actual amount spent? US$20 for keys, the rest of the keys are purchased with Gs for 1 bike. The other I traded a hawk and more Gs for it. I have no issues spending cash on a game which I hope will not close down due to freeloaders who expects everything...well... FREE!
Oh if the question is where did I get so much Gs, I farmed them using something called time. And, I have spent more than that. I have another 7k Zens sitting in my account wondering if I should buy an R8-R9 catalyst or wait for some promotion to come along.
Yes, that is why it is called a grind. That is the asian MMO from what I hear. Spend time or spend money. They do not want it to be that easy. That is the whole point. They want the value of the bike to be worth 9000 zen.
I do not even want to count the time taken to actually farm Q as it is actually quite fast with nemcon. Rather, I think the cap here we want to talk about is the daily refine limit of 8k for majority of players. At an exchange rate of between 180q to 200q for 1 zen, 100zen takes about 2.5 days to refine. In other words for 100 keys to gaurantee a widow bike, it takes 225 days to refine enough questionites to trade zen, assuming the cheaper pack of 10 keys. Alternatively a player can spend 90USD which, equates to 40 cents a day across those 225 days.
What is more, at the end of the day, there are many people who get by the game without latest tank or latest bike. They are not necessary for the game play. Following my analogy in another thread, if a person cannot afford to get a Ferrari, he/she can still cycle or take the public transport to work. Howeverm if that person wants to have a flashy and nice ride, then he/she better expect to pay for it.
That's nice...
But you said 100 keys guarantees you a Widow. I opened 100 boxes on the PTS, no Widow...
There is no guarantee point and stating such actually less assumption and closer to a lie...
M-O-O-N, that spells @Rhyatt
Originally Posted by mijjestic: Ultimately, though, MMO players throwing stones at each other in this fashion is basically one nerd pointing and laughing at another nerd whose glasses are thicker.
Laws yes!
100 boxes gives a minimum of 200 salvages (over and on top of mods, other vehicles, legion gear, become deviecs dpending on which box you opend) which gaurantees you can then buy the widow off the drifter store since that is the price. Do you even know what you are talking about, dude?
Anyone who buys those catalysts are clinically insane!
for the same cost of a single r8-r9 you can buy keys, sell them for Gs and buy 3 or more r9s !
Actually, that is not really true. Each catalyst cost 3000 zen. You can get about 33 keys which can sell for 3300Gs at the current rate. Each R7 gambler's lucky gem cost about 400Gs at the cheapest in AH. You can get about 8 of them. That is not even enough to fuse for 2 R8s, much less 1 R9. Even if we are to look at the impact prism, each R7 at best cost 200Gs in AH. 3300Gs will only fuse up to 3 R8s, still not an R9. Perhaps if we are looking at endurance mods or sentinel brooch then there may be a possibility to get an R9. If each R7 is 50Gs, 3300Gs can get 66 R7s which then fuse to give 2 R9s. But all that is excluding the cost of safeguard catalysts to bring you to that level. Trust me, I have done the maths on this and while I will spend money on this game, I am not yet insane haha.
The real issue is, who really needs an R9 when the increment is so little for so much cost. Perhaps, CO should really re-evaluate the R9 mods benefits. I am probably the very few people who are pushing towards the R9. I have 7 R9s, 2 R8s Gambler's Lucky Gems, 1 R8 Con Armoring, 1 R8 Impact Prism and a R5 avoidance core (cannot be fused or ranked up) on Paragon now and that is so close yet so far. Is it worth the US$120? I usually pay for things with a mix of real cash (to support the game) and grinded currency (questionite trade or Gs).
(crosses finger they will increase the R9 mods' benefits significantly, muahahaha more POWERFUL!!!)
I just rather use keys on Drifter boxes for more salvage each.
Oh yes, my mistake there because I am not one who actually plays many alts. So I never ever bother to farm Q on multiple toons to refine. Would be nice if they allow me to shift some of the unrefined Qs to other level 40s for refining but all that will actually do is to cause the value of Q (in relations to Zen) to depreciate.
Let's redo the maths then for the sake of looking at the values which CO is tagging to their stuff. Assuming that a player then takes 15 minutes to do a nemcon run ang gets about average of 3000q in lock boxes each run. That will be about 45 minutes of farming for 8000 plus zen per toon.
In other words, CO is saying give us 40 cents and we will spare you the 45 minutes of grinding pain. In most developed country, that is far lower than the hourly wage of an individual. This will not be the case for those in developing nations. Having said that, the question will then be "Are the bikes worth that much to a player?". If they are not worth it, then do not farm for them and do not buy them since they are not a must for the game. If no one is wlling to spend a million on a Ferarri, the company either has to close down or better low its prices so someone will buy them. However, if there are still a minority who will pay the premium for such luxury goods and the profit is better than selling cheap en masse, they will continue to price at that level. Furthermore, this could be a situation where they position these bikes as ostentatious goods (the higher the price, the more who will want to buy them) whether rightly or not.
The prices are pitched ideally at the equilbrium to maiximise profits as any business organisation will rationally do based on the limited market information it has. We also know what happens for early adopters. They pay the preimum price but after some time, the prices of these goods will drop and become more accessible to the masses. Sales of old costume packs, travel powers etc are precise examples of that. It is a price to pay for being an early-adopter and being the envy of other players (not to say that owning a widow is much a big deal to be envious about; I will always prefer a Maserati IRL).
However, the devs can choose to never bring them back some of the old stuff (no reason not to since no additional cost in development) but be sure they will be replaced with something even better. Heroic gear? Legion gear? How about a 5-slot Sacred/Holy/Divine/Godly/Cosmic gear. That may come with a 1% chance, in a lockbox which requires a key which may have a 1% drop chance from a Key Lockbox which requires a cosmic key which cost 100 zen. P2W I hear? Yes, we need someone to pay so that we have a game to play. We need someone to pay so that F2P can P4F.
This is not an argument but rather a discussion of the pricing of z store items and factors which influences them.
Gah! You're right, of course. I was looking purely at drop rate and ignoring the salvage...
I apologize for my previous post... :redface:
M-O-O-N, that spells @Rhyatt
Originally Posted by mijjestic: Ultimately, though, MMO players throwing stones at each other in this fashion is basically one nerd pointing and laughing at another nerd whose glasses are thicker.
Laws yes!
No worries, just an oversight, happens to anyone.
Nothing sucks like when you spent a lot of time getting excellent gear and then coming back a few months later to find all your stuff is worthless. It's a blatant cash grab and a "F*** YOU!" to your loyal customers. Mega-sized MMO's get away with it because they have a huge player base that is addicted.
I agree with the issue with justifying the R8's and R9's. The benefits are so tiny, interesting to only people who PvP or wish to perfect/max-out a character. And there's too few people playing PvP now to make that appealing for most. Even if it was, the price is outlandishly high for one of those Rank Up catalysts.
The more profitable method in the long-run is to push sales dollars with a lower margin.
RetCons & Rank Up catalysts, if the prices on those were cut in half you would see a long-term triple gain in sales. You can magnify this even more if you advertise to bring in new players, and encourage frustrated older players to come back.
Instead they are creating a tiny elite group of wealthy individuals who can just stand there with there top-notch gear waiting for the next power creep cycle, and they are basicially expecting this tiny group to financially support everyone. Eventually the larger player base gives up, only logs in to get their daily missions done, and the tiny elite group gets bored.
In a weak economy, luxury goods are not good businesses to invest in; the good area for business growth are smaller, frequent transactions or things that have long-lasting benefit.
To-do list:
1. Test this with a 50% off sale on RetCons and Rank Ups
2. At the same time advertise the game (word-of-mouth, page on the PerfectWorld website, Steam, Facebook, Google, etc.) touting F2P, freeform, lifetime, and the character creator / costume editor
3. Collect statistics on purchase histories and conduct polls to find strength & weakness in sale strategies.
4. Profit!
PS: They NEVER should have made Legion gear. Period.
Consolidate the currencies! (Please!)
Does your Champion have a theme song? (share it!)
Got a funny in-game screenshot? (share it!)
Please fix the Overdrive energy unlock! (Should help promote thematic build diversity!)
Legion Gear doesn't count as power creep, because it was only available for a limited time, and so did not permanently raise the power floor of the game; it's also not really required for anything.
This game, currently, doesn't actually have any power creep. Any time that the power level has been raised, it was sort of built into everyone from the onset. The only ones feeling the pressure from it are the npcs.
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.
*cough*... Which game are you playing, again? For example Gloves with 30% resistance penetration and/or breastplates with 250 avoidance do make a quite big difference. Ok, not so much if you got ghetto rank 5's slotted into your gear, as the majority of the legion "users" do. But with proper high rank gems, you can not even compare scr gear to legion gear anymore. The items itself are THAT limited, every pvper happens to own a full set, just saying.
NX, I understand what you said about the power creep and how it nullifies all that was done previously by players. I had to throw away plenty of acclaim gears which I spent hours farming. However, that is just how a game grows. Level cap raise, more powerful enemies, more powerful gear etc. The only thing they did not do right now is change the actual level cap but toons today are perform easily at a 5 or even 10 levels higher than they were before on-alert.
When you mentioned that targetting a small group of rich paying customer is not appropriate strategy in a weak economy, it is not clear what you define as weak? Are we are talking about the number of players?
We all know that when we have a huge but poor market, it is good to sell cheap stuff to the masses because the number of sales would far offset the reduction in profit from the price (think selling canned drinks in China). In this case, it seems that that is not the case for CO. Of course I have no actual figures whatsoever to base this on but it seems our playerbase is small. However, amongst that small number, I suspect many of them comes from the developed countries and I am even suspecting that the age profile tends to be in their mid 20s to 30s. In other words, they do have the purchasing power. However, as I already stated very clearly, these are my assumptions. I am sure the business people in CO will have the actual data and figures which they use for their marketing, sales and pricing.
However, I too hope as you do that they could sell more, sell cheap. However, this certainly requires more players (who buys) to make it profitable. For more players, we do need more publicity and more content, which needs more money etc. I truly wish this game is as huge as some of the top MMOs around.
Power Creep requires continued access to the gear to be considered as such. Legion Gear is simply a limited time offer that you didn't take advantage of; it's a marketing ploy designed to motivate you to spend money the next time an explicit limited time offer comes around, or even to motivate you to spend on the suspicion of implicit limited time offers.
btw, loved you on That 70's Show.
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.