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Upgrading Companions is too expensive.
sereenawind
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users Posts: 0 Arc User
How many people her think that upgrading the companions is just too bloody expensive? I mean I'd love to get my cleric up even to green but Half a million Astral Diamonds for so little improvement is just ridiculous. I'd pay 1/4 million (250,000 astral diamonds) which is still really high but 1/2 million (500.000 astral diamonds. I would leave her as it is ( which is Exactly what I have been doing ever since I saw the possibility of upgrading her especially at that price)
May the Good Lord keep you always in His Loving Arms
Post edited by sereenawind on
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Personally i don't understand why they are at the level they are nor do i understand why anyone would want to upgrade them.
1) They are that expensive in order to encourage you to purchase a Zen Store Pet with Real Life Money.
2) People upgrade them for the Active Companion Bounus which is highest with White to Purple conversions (+300 to, say, Regen or another hard to upgrade stat.).
'Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.' Terry Pratchet The Thief Of Time
Basically this - upgrading companions is probably a better return on AD then going form Rank 8s to Rank 9 enchantments, and certainly better than from Rank 9 to 10. They are meant either for end-game raiders who are looking to max out their character or those who want to spend some real-life cash.
For the record, upgrading white to green is 300k AD, which isn't that much more expensive than the 250k the OP was prepared to pay.
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
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for Green/Grays - and almost no one will ever see them!
Curious as to what all the levelled out companions look like, walking around.
The irony...it burns!
My opinion, is that upgrading the default free companions should be very expensive. Upgrading award or promo companions should be moderately expensive, and upgrading -purchased- companions should be pretty affordable, seeing as you already paid for them once or a few times, depending. And seeing as they are character bound and are lost if you ever want to re-roll.. well. A whole separate topic.
The reason I think all this, is pretty obvious I think. If you didn't want to spend cash, that's fine. You have decided to be a grinder or to do without, as may be the case. So grind and pay the cost. If you won a pet or met the requirements for a promo, well you have served the providers of the game. These are two very different means of getting pets. One of them is attainable easily by the person who doesn't want to spend a dime. And if you purchased the pet, well you already paid for it. A discount might be in order, considering that you can lose the pet that YOU PAID FOR, and you also helped to support the longevity of the game.
Didn't click a poll choice, because I didn't care for the way it was phrased.
TL : DR - Cost to upgrade should decrease with increased investment in the companion.
BUT- They should make purchased companions account unlocks (even if they cost a bit more,) and that is a different topic.
Roland Mac Sheonin GF | Tarron Direheart SW |
The fastest way to get the prices down is to protest with your wallet. Simply put, don't buy items you feel are overpriced; if enough people boycott the high-ticket items, PWE will get the hint and lower their prices. Edit: The best example of this strategy working is when Cryptic changed enchantment removal; before, it used to cost hundreds of thousands of AD, nowadays, you pay at most, IIRC, 2.5 gold.
Taking a break from Neverwinter indefinitely...
Precisely: The cost of upgrading a single companion costs as much or more than outright purchasing one from the Zen Store. Hence some players will do just that: Purchase from the Zen Store.
See your above statement; you answer your own question/understanding.
Because these companions serve a real purpose. That purpose may be different for you than it is for me. It may not be worth even thinking of upgrading yours, but mine might be valuable enough to me to do so. It's all about business; Cryptic is a for-profit company, creating a 100% free to play game. They must find ways to creatively generate income so they can pay their bills (nothing in life is ever free, even if it looks like it is).
Hence, the extreme cost of upgrading companions plays a part, albeit perhaps a small one, in letting you play this game without requiring you to pony-up any cash whatsoever. It seems to me to be a win-win situation for you, me, and the studio developing the game we all love so much.
1. transmuting cost. This used to have insanely high AD cost but at some point cryptic decided it was too high and drastically lowered the prices and even is some case made them free.
2. unslotting enchants. Again, something that had insanely high AD cost that cryptic decided to flat out remove the AD cost altogether.
3. Refining enchants. When they initially started making the new refining system it had an AD cost for refining. But after many angry posts they removed the cost.
So just because something currently has insanely high AD cost doesn't mean that cryptic was right when setting that cost. Lets not forget that when a lot of these prices were set back during the release of the game it was easier to make ADs. Back when you could refine 50k (I think) rough ADs a day that they lowered to 24k. There were also many exploits that allowed players to complete dungeons very quickly thus making dungeon farming profitable for just about anyone without the need for a well organized highly geared team.
And of course lets not forget that cryptic has added many more AD sinks to the game since its release which also helps to cut down on the amount of ADs the average player has. Personally I think they should at least cut the prices by a third though cutting them in half would be far more reasonable considering we now have a reason to have more then 1 active companion thanks to the new active companion bonuses.
I mean its bad enough that for the average player to upgrade his/her companion from uncommon to epic costs 1,550,000. Now multiply that by 5 and it costs an astounding 7,757,750 to upgrade your whole team of companions. I've been playing since the game release and im not even sure I've made that much ADs since then, though I sure im not far off.
It takes a lot of trial and error on their part and, unfortunately, change takes a long time and a lot of approvals from particular departments and higher-ups and so on. I'm certain there will be a "correction" in pricing of many things (Z-Store mount pricing was "corrected" twice in a year - that's definitely nothing to sneeze at).
No, i don't answer my own question, there is a big flaw in your logic and i see many people propagate this idea without at least chewing a bit on it.
Purchasing a pet from Zen store doesn't necessarily need to be with real money, the question is for people who have 1.5M AD and want an epic pet and are faced with these 2 options. This can work the other way around aswell, people can buy AD with real money and upgrade their pets. NEITHER of the 2 options is strictly tied to real money.
As for the second theory which says white pets have better active bonus, afaik for pets that provide a single statistic (power/recovery/regen/Arp/etc) that amount is based on their quality. I mean if it's white is has 25, at green 100, at blue 250 (i think), at epic i don't know, but it doesn't matter what quality the pet started with.
I do think the upgrade path is too costly. I still think most of the higher end items in the game are too spendy. It's a matter of perspective I suppose, but I think lower prices encourage spending and alternate character development.
They just gave a lot of inventory space to Star Trek online I wish they would do it here.
I know the thread is about companions so going back to that topic. If it didn't cost so much for all the other things, upgrading pets wouldn't be an issue. I know this is a F2P game and what to expect and I am not trying to start a word war with anyone about this is how they have to make their money. I understand economics.
Sorry if you thought I was directing the "justify" comment towards you, I really wasn't, it was directed towards the overall comments people tend to make in any thread about AD costs for anything. I did understand what you were trying to explain with your original post. And again I apologize if you thought I was singling you out.
Actually you can make a R10 for a hell of a lot less then 1.5mil AD unless you're talking about actually buying everything needed to make a R10 then yea, I can see you're point. But since you don't need to buy everything or really anything to make a R10 I cant agree with you.
Not to mention the fact that not all companions give +300 bonus at max level so there's that problem. There are quite a few that only give +165 at max level which is less then a R7 gives, which at the moment you can buy R7s for about 70k in the AH.
So 70K vs 1.5mil, tell me how thats right? And just for the sake of the math, with 1,550,000 ADs I can buy 22 R7s. which more then enough to make a few R10s vs the cost of upgrading just 1 companion.
It would cost roughly 800,000 AD to get a normal pet up to Rare status. You can buy a blue one with a lot better stats or more effective in the Trade Market for a lot less than that. I bought the Mimic to replace the Man at Arms for 150k AD. To get a Man at Arms up to that level would have cost me 300k. I an buy a Ghost for 500k and that's a blue. It would cost 800k for the normal ones, and the Ghost its a lot better pet.
The only one worth doing it with at present is the Cleric companion, as its a really good healer.
Good points.
I will however say I personally think the Fawn is a better healer then the cleric disciple and you can buy the Fawn for about 200k in the AH, which is still cheaper then upgrading a cleric from white to green by 100k.
Taking a break from Neverwinter indefinitely...
I believe this is probably the best 'justification' for lowering Companion upgrade pricing I've seen yet. The simple fact is Astral Diamonds are generating income for the company (no matter if you are a 100% free-player; you are subsidized by the cash-spenders). The company must still generate the income. So it comes down to supply and demand, right now the demand outstrips the supply artificially (because of the high prices).
It's a matter of satisfying the demand yet generating the highest revenue. Simple business 101. The trick is you start high and inch your way down because once you go too low you can't go higher again because the backlash would be unbearable. Hence, I believe the above statement is spot-on, but Cryptic will move very slowly and cautiously.