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This discussion was created from comments split from: CDP Topic: VIP.
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Member Posts: 3,183 Arc User
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This is going to be long and at times might go seemingly off topic, for which I apologize in advance, but I don't know any other way of responding. Please try to read through the whole piece. Broken into more than one post due to forum constraints.
Background
I got into Neverwinter around mod5 when I got my first xbox after about a decade of not playing any computer games. Before that, I was into quests and the NW series (all of them). I used to play AD&D and have read most of the novels that came out until around 2005. When I started playing on the XBOX, I was not only new to the game, but also to gaming on a console and there was a steep learning curve. I had no idea about mods and so the change from mod 5 to 6 (EE) eluded me completely. I had no clue what happened or why, only that something was different about how my toon was fighting and people were angry in chat. As a new player, with a young child and a full time job, I was able to play only 30-60 minutes a day and eventually found my way into the newly formed Casual Gamers guild. This helped me learn to use mic and got me to chat with complete strangers. I found out how fun the MMO aspect of the game could be. As a side effect, my investment in the game grew. I found myself playing around 3-4 hours a day, switching to a more serious guild, getting family and friends to join, and eventually also putting real money in because I felt (rather naively) that I should support a game from which I derive so much enjoyment. Then coalgate happened. My TR's frustrations with the new mod6 zones and the impossible difficulty of Well of Dragons led me to really dig into online info. I became good at stabbing and learned from the community how the game "should" be played – in every sense of the word. I learned that there is an "us" (gamers) and a "them" (devs) and you're an idiot not to take advantage of the devs' mistakes and oversights when they are so ready to shaft their players. I did not like this mentality but I was truly fascinated by the behaviors and thought patterns I was seeing from other players. I was also at a complete loss as to why devs were operating a certain way. So, I started looking at the game through the critical eyes of one who works in the software industry, in one of the world's leading companies, discussed it with colleagues. My conclusions at the time were that Cryptic devs probably lack good KPIs, are suffering from the separation between business and dev (different buildings at the time, if I recall correctly), are suffering from the usual problems of flawed implementation of agile/lean methodology, and worst of all – have no notion of personas, user-centric design, or the value of customer retention. I began to wonder about the game's business model and could not understand why a model that on the face of it should fail, does not fail. Except that I think it did and it does, albeit slower than I would have thought. Turns out there are plenty of suckers out there and a helluva lot of gamblers who are addicted to popping keys. Live and learn. Of course, this only works so long as you have massive amounts of players to keep the momentum going and provided you don't alienate the gamblers by HAMSTER with their boxes.
There is a popular saying: You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. A corollary to that is that if you fool me once—shame on you for doing it, but fool me twice—shame on me for not learning my lesson. So, while the business model of getting new fools to buy VIP and keys with money (or a combination of diamonds exchanged for zen + $$$) seems to work from one mod to the next, it does require the product, the game, to keep luring players back and give gamers something to chase after, something valuable and elusive to grind after and make that AD or put in real money. I believe Mod 6 + coalgate decimated the population of the game and began a cascade effect that was detrimental to the financial health of the game. Mod 10, with its endless seas, silly HE farms and overly white glare proved devs had no idea about the "why" of the game. When people said they would like to fish, they most certainly did not intend the obnoxious style of fishing we got. When they said they love the HE farms in WoD (alas, now a thing of the past), they did not mean they would want the mind numbing romp SKT introduced. Following mods only strengthened my belief that there was a deep disconnect between how the people I engage with in the game perceive the game and how the developers see it. I think this is still very much the case.
Analysis
I am a design thinking (DT) coach in real life. While it is true that ANY customer interaction is better than none, it is also true that without understanding WHY people say what they say, you will never satisfy your customers' hidden, underlying needs and wants. Your changes will fail to make a difference. The classic example used to illustrate this is that if Henry Ford had asked potential customers how to make their rides better, they would have asked for faster horses and better built or more cushy coaches, not for a car with wheels and certainly not for the model T. The two CDPs published so far ask people for surface level input that allows you, the developers, to put lipstick on a pig and feel justified in doing so. This is NOT proper customer engagement. It is not user-centric design and as such, unlikely to solve ANYTHING in a meaningful, desirable way.
To glean meaningful input about VIP, or rewards or anything...you must first distill "What is the job of Neverwinter?" [see https://hbr.org/podcast/2016/12/the-jobs-to-be-done-theory-of-innovation if you don't know what I mean by this]. My experience has led me to think that the job or rather some of the jobs of Neverwinter are as follows:
- Katy, the army mom, hires NW to pass the time away when she is alone and needs company and wants to play something fun with a bit of challenge that can be dropped as soon as the baby wakes up and then picked up again and there will always be someone there and something to do that will keep her engaged for weeks until hubs comes home. She will then vanish from the game for a little while and be able to come back to it and it will still be the same, reliable, entertaining time killer that she needs it to be.
- Duck, the college kid, hires NW so he can stream it on his channel and make a quick buck. It's easier to play than a lot of the other games he could be playing and it's free. It's also fun, which helps, but the best part is that if you do it right—the game pays for itself and you can get to endgame without putting a dime into it, then teach others to do it in social media and make REAL money off the published content. Holy macaroni! Why isn't everyone doing this?
- Adam, the wallet warrior, works in a physically demanding job all day. He gets a weekly wage. He hires NW so that he can unwind at the end of the day. Other games take too much mental investment and he can't possibly be seen to spend his money on gambling, but keys...man...keys...and store items that give bragging rights... That rush is like nothing else. Feeling like a king—even if only for a few minutes—that is so worth hiring with hard earned money. Adam lives on pizza and weed anyway, so he has lots of leftover cash to throw at something. Something that doesn't require him to leave the house. And at endgame, he can make so much AD from the game and from boxes that he has 7 years of vip left. He'd quit if he wasn't too stoned to do it.
There are other personas to consider, some of them with far more impact on the game and its economy, but I'm gonna stop here. I hope these already illustrate the point I am trying to convey. You cannot hope to address anything in the CDP without asking WHY five times [see https://expertprogrammanagement.com/2019/05/the-5-whys/ ] or perhaps applying an empathy map [see https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/ ] to the information in the thread—because what people SAY in such forum discussions is certain to be different from what they would or actually DO in real life and not quite representative of what they THINK, and only a facsimile of how they truly FEEL. This isn't to say I would recommend doing this kind of exercise now. It would probably be a waste of effort. You are far better off doing customer journey maps [see https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/customer-journey-mapping ] and mapping out the pain/gain of whatever personas you identify and choose to focus on (but please, please, please...do not lump everyone into the categories of new player vs. endgamer – these are not!!! your personas. Because NW is not about endgame. It is NOT the job NW is getting hired to do and I don't care how many users SAY it's what they care about. Look at what they DO, for example CoDG farms for auctionable loot. And several mods ago, people farmed Epic Spiders rather than end game dungeons.)
VIP Feedback Pt.1
My personal customer journey with regards to VIP probably looks like this:
As a new player, just trying out the game, I have no intention of putting any money in. I hear from other players that I can make the AD needed to buy VIP by just playing but I soon realize I can't play the many hours it requires, not with dungeons taking me 2-3 hours and good drops being rare. It would be like a second job and I play to unwind not to work more. That concept of working for a game kinda annoys me, but hey, the game is fun enough so I'm not fussed. As I progress my character to levels 60, 70 and 80, I encounter big maps and I really start to feel the need for a better mount and for a signpost. My guild mates give me a fast mount (because they HATE waiting for me to arrive to HE runs) and someone is always around to open a signpost for me. Unless I am in old maps, during off-peak hours. Those instances suck. I need the boons and the Legacy shop items. So, I consider spending money on VIP to alleviate the pain. I find out that in my local currency, it is actually quite a bit for very little (Inventory is still my biggest pain). I am unhappy. Bad enough that I get lag due to the fact that I am not in the EU or US but now I have to go deep into my pocket for something that is quite basic in my opinion. I learn that there are discounts and I pray for a coupon. Never one when you need one but I keep grinding and eventually I get the signpost rank of vip. Now I realize that unless I keep buying VIP, I have no hope of using the AH to get ahead in the game, so I do the math. With the ZAX at around 500 (xbox :P) and a daily cap of 100k rAD, I have to grind 1000z monthly (20% off with coupon, if lucky), or 4-5 days of daily cap out of 30 each month. I have a tank and a healer so hitting that daily cap at level 80 isn't too bad of a grind. I do it and start buying my ranks without spending money. This means my endgame progress is slower but that's ok. It's not the job I hired NW to do in the first place. I'm in it for fun and for hanging out with people from all over the world. I love that I can be talking with people from NZ, Canada, and Germany all at once while slaying some silly boss of the day. Bonus perk—I keep my American slang current when my US friends join the party.
Fast forward some months, or years—I have vip 12 (anyone still remember the bank key glitch? That sold VIP12 faster than anything, didn't it, lol…) and now I just need to keep it so I save up for 40% off and similar deals. I'm hooked. Can't play without my signpost and the AH discounts. Without them, I would rather not play at all. But hey, to grind for 40% off is actually really easy, because I only need 16 days of grind for that! That's 1.5 days a month. Yeah, baby! F2P is the best. So I tell my family and friends this is the best game eva. And since I'm having a really good time but my toon is falling behind I even spend some more dosh on getting a bit of zen for later. But then...then something happens. Something drastic. Cryptic broke the rules of the game. Again. I shoulda seen it. ToS pretty much says it. I turned a blind eye to coalgate. Then keygate teed me off but no one quit so whatever. Then huntgate... Ghosttown. I shoulda quit. My friends did. Fool me thrice—shame on me, right? But, blast it, I like the basic premise of the game. Not gonna bail like all the other flakes. It'll get better. It has to. Roped a friend into the game. Gifted him heaps of gear and carried him through content. He mained a DC and loved it. Then mod16 happened...and there are no words to describe how swful this was and is. My in-game friends list of 140 NW players went down to 4 on a good day. 2 of the friends went as far as bequeathing me their entire virtual fortune to the tune of 8 digits AD. My husband stopped playing when Chult dropped. He was a SW and felt NW sucked all of his time without doing the job it was supposed to do—entertain him without aggravating him. I looked after his account for a while hoping he would return. He won't. He won't even stay in the same room and watch while I play. His account sits there lonely and I don't bother with it. Same with my daughter's account. She thinks the game is boring and anyway, she would rather play on her tablet.
After 6 years, with 20+ toons, vip12, around 900 rerolls on my main toon, and 3 Mastercrafting toons that earned me ungodly amounts of AD at the height of the craze, you ask me about VIP? It's a non-issue (unless you make it one!). I can get anything I want in game but I don't care to. I don't tell anyone they should get VIP unless they are sure they will play the game no matter what. I log in daily and play maybe 30 minutes, usually alone, even though I'm in an active alliance. No idea why I bother. I'd say I don't care about the game, but my actions indicate I still do. I think I want to believe it can and will get better. I will probably stop next mod, when my VIP runs out and further changes make the experience even worse. I collect the keys but I don't open any lockboxes. They just annoy me now because I feel cheated no matter which one I open. I have around 14kk AD and 6000z, not counting all the items I could sell on the AH which would translate to much, much more. I can sit on VIP for as long as I like. I can do and buy whatever I want in the game. I won't spend any of it until I see signs of improvement so that when something good happens with the game, I will be able to return and hit the ground running. I am endgame but don't bother trying ToMM. I don't work for a game and I am still upset about being excluded from Cradle runs because lag meant I was almost certain to fall off every time. I would rather solo Shores for fun than bother with any of the random queues. I help out peeps in the alliance if I happen to see requests but it's been so quiet of late...I just log off and go do something else. I'm sure I know why you want to remove rerolls from VIP, but rerolls were given to us because of keygate. Two wrongs do not make a right. The most fun I have had in game in the last month has been CoDG farms (I still fall off, but it's not an issue now) and burning those damn rerolls. I don't want hard content. I want fun content. I want to go into combat and feel like my toon is a beast all of the time, not just for 2 seconds and then have the joy taken away from me with cooldowns.
If you change ANYTHING in VIP that comes across as giving me less than I am due, I will be upset. But since I am paying nothing, I can understand why from your perspective, VIP needs to be changed. This kind of self-sustaining subscription model is clearly bad for business. Key model has the same self-sustaining flaw, which is why boxes were nerfed hard. Now, few people bother (no, they didn't stop spending on keys because of Preview, duh! They just noticed they can't keep selling the contents to buy keys). So how are you making money? Well, that's not the scope of the CDP nor anything you would really discuss with the community and that's as it should be. Respectfully, however, your flawed business model is really what needs to be looked at. VIP, accessibility, rewards...they are all symptoms, not the cause.
TBC
Since you asked...then I prefer to see VIP ranks added with new levels introducing perks that make my game experience better. I NEED on-the-fly access to a guild bank. I would like a daily/weekly/monthly coupon of my choice. In fact, when it comes to perks, I want to have choice. I would much rather grind for attainable "stuff" than for a chance at something. I LOVE the legacy store. Instead of grinding for rAD with which to buy stuff and be capped at 100k, I get to grind for the stuff I actually NEED which I would otherwise have to use rAD for. This is a good mechanic. More of this kind of mechanic, please. Choice is good. Guaranteed, known rewards are what I prefer. If you can get rid of RNG from the game altogether, even better.
None of it will matter, however, unless the game is fun again. To me, fun means fast-paced, exciting combat that does NOT require super fast reflexes. I don't care about classes anymore and I don't expect there to be balance. You have made it so that none of the classes are fun to play. They're ok at best. A shadow of their former selves. If/when the fun is back, give me a subscription model where I know how much I pay and what I get in return and give me assurances that you won't screw me over and nerf it. For example, improving odds on legendary mounts only to come out with mythic ones right after would make me really, really angry. Taking away anything I earned in game, like rerolls, would make me equally angry.
When I consider the bigger picture, as I reflected from the forums and what's been said in official communications, I would suggest that to get your cashflow back, you need to sell us a product that is paid for, cannot be traded, is account/character bound, and is something desirable to players (gets the job done) without it being perceived as P2W. If you reframe your challenge in this manner, I think you will be able to come up with much better ideas than "update VIP" and get out of the innovation rut the company has been locked into. Example (change as appropriate): How might we redesign our loyalty plan / subscription service in a way that will get players to spend real money, increase their loyalty (time spent, word of month=>conversion of new players), and be sustainable without requiring ongoing development effort, in a world where we are dependent on infrastructure developed outside our team, the playerbase already has years of accrued VIP and new player retention is low? Or if you want to keep it simple but still open up your solution space: how might we design a service that will make our longtime players feel valued? [see https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/define-and-frame-your-design-challenge-by-creating-your-point-of-view-and-ask-how-might-we]
Off the top of my head, I can propose some ideas (for others to build on, not saying these ideas are good), for example: Buy a discount. Let me pay a dollar to get a 40% off voucher for an item that will be account bound. Transmutes available for a limited time only, that are sold to VIP members only, for cash, bound to account. Let VIP members influence the look of cities. Let us erect certain statues or flags or whatever if we put our money (maybe zen or even AD is ok here) behind it. This would give players something to look forward to and you could even have alliances compete to have their banners in a certain city or zone or event. Could use it as an AD sink. Start using real-time offer management or at least some micro-transactions for specific scenarios. For example, when you get into a new zone and it dumps a ton of items into your inventory—give us a pop-up that instantaneously adds a bag for a modest fee (say 50% off Zen store, BtA). Or give us a pop-up that says gear is equipped with rank 8 enchants, but these can be upgraded to r10 for a fee of $xy. It won't break the game but would help new players. Similarly, how about you sell only the currency part of the expedition packs as a launch day perk to VIP players?
I could go on and on but this has gotten far longer than intended and probably too much to digest anyway. If it helps even a little, then it was worth it. If it doesn't, at least no one will be able to tell me I can't complain because I didn't bother contributing. ;-)
Thanks and good luck!
Wow! That was quite a read. If you had not alluded to it in your post I would not have guessed that english isn't your primary language. Thanks for taking the time to share your insights. I'm sure what you said will resonate with many Veteran and New players alike. Maybe someone on the team will be inspired or influenced by what you said. Unfortunately, a post of this size probably won't be read by many and will probably be branded as off topic. Their loss though, great post!
Don't agree with everything (not overly surprising), but very valuable nonetheless!