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Economics of lockboxes? Open letter to the Devs.

penchantpenchant Member Posts: 0 Arc User
TL;DR? Just skip the thread. Lots of info to go over here, and not as many ways to dumb it down. Need explanations for most of it as its not quite intuitive.

So, first post in a very long time; some things i'd like to go over with arc/cryptic devs on the lockbox situation as it stands of this writing.

I'm also curious as to how hot a topic this is. Guess we'll see.

Lockboxes are pretty badly underutilized right now. There's several places that have done statistics on drop rates and what have you, and best as I can tell, (don't cry, players) the drop rates are fine, with the exception of lobi amounts.

Ideally what i'd like to see done first though, is reduce the drop rates of the boxes themselves. Right now the EC market appears to me to be basically crashed, with the value of even slightly rare items being thousands of percent higher than nearly equivalent, slightly more common items. This is a good indication you have way too much EC floating around in your market, and nothing to use it on. So...

Make the lockbox itself about a 1% drop rate, just guesstimating here. What you want to see is the price of the boxes on the market go to 10k-20k EC per box. The idea here is instead of flooding people with unwanted boxes and no keys to open them, use the boxes as an EC leech to drain all the excess out of the market. As it becomes more stable, you can alter the drop rates to hold it at a certain point.

Mind you, this will be useless if you don't get rid of all the useless junk out of the boxes. Pets should be cheap lobi or dil store items, NOT something that takes a players money and essentially pisses it away. Ship drop rates should remain the same, as they're basically jackpot items, but lose the fluff, and make gear drops a bit more common, again to bring them to a level where the average player can afford to fit a ship or a crew, thus burning more EC into the market.

Right now the EC price of master keys is on the high side of decent. 1.5m - 2.5m EC should be a target for the keys, idea being that someone playing 3-4 hours, at the end, could get a key and a shot at some drops they're after.

Long story long, what you would ideally want for the F2P system to be profitable for you, is some guidelines to keep people enticed to try lockboxes:

Firstly, no fluff in lockboxes. Stick to rare doffs, special gear/parts, and super rare ships. Leave cosmetics for the lobi/dil stores.

Secondly, make sure no single items equippable on a crew or ship go over 10m EC in your market as you have it setup now. You want your F2P players to be able to reach these items without pumping money into wallet upgrades and stuff. Playing a 'free' game, then having to pay before you can access content, is not a free or fun experience. However, you also don't want the items going much UNDER the 10m mark either, so they aren't easily affordable, thus enticing people to buy boxes to finish their kit.

Thirdly, again, as it is now, there's simply too much EC in the market. You need to bleed this off with entry/exit taxes (we have entry tax already, for selling items, but it could be higher) and make lockboxes both rare and desirable, so that people will spend, at the very least, 10k to buy them. Long time players will likely complain about an exit tax, but its both necessary at the moment, and adjustable by the devs later on, once the market is ...well, usable.

Also, to keep this problem from being a problem, you could always hire an economist to keep track of how the game currency is flowing, and what commodities need to be pulled or changed to make it all work. There's a good chance they'd tell you a lot of what I just did. Or, yaknow, you could just maintain the small and relatively loyal playerbase mixed in with a large group of people that play a few months before they get disgusted with how some aspects of the game are handled, and quit without buying much of anything. You're sitting on a mountain of cash and don't seem to know how to get at it.
Post edited by penchant on

Comments

  • leviathan99#2867 leviathan99 Member Posts: 7,747 Arc User
    edited May 2014
    That's an interesting idea. Another one would be another round of currency consolidations, this time eliminating EC as a currency.

    Merge Lobi and Latinum as outputs, first of all, creating Latinum.

    Then merge expertise and EC.

    Finally convert EC into half Latinum and half Dilithium at a determined rate.

    The exchange then uses dilithium.

    Along with this would be a change to refinement where, say, the first time you complete a queued mission every day, 2000 dilithium is autorefined. Special events/missions may refine more. This is 2000 that doesn't count towards the daily total for manual refinement. You get another for your first replay mission, another for your first PvP match. 3000 for your first Elite queued event.

    Maybe a base refinement cap and a refinement project for hitting T5 in each rep that processes unfrefined ore.

    Yes, it would be dramatically more refinement options available and it would revalue dilithium... But it would mean you've eliminated the redundant currencies of EC, Latinum, and Expertise.

    In favor of Lobi (renamed Latinum) and dilithium.
  • erei1erei1 Member Posts: 4,081 Arc User
    edited May 2014
    I always like when some random guy on the internet try to give some marketing advices to an established company. It's pretty much like the fat guys on his couch yelling at some sport players on his TV what they should do.

    What you are trying to do is change the whole concept of lockboxes. Currently they are hidden gamble. People get addicted, and do impulse buy they'll regret later. That's the whole point. That's why the boxes are pretty much free, to attract those gamblers.

    You are trying to make gambling difficult. People will need to buy a box AND a key for a ridiculous 0.5% chance to win the high price ? And you REALLY think it will be better for everyone ?
    I'll tell you what will happen. People will stop the impulse buying of keys. Obviously, since they'll need to buy the box first, and it will cost a lot, no more 20-50 box in the inventory that make you feel the urge to buy keys for them. Then, once they'll spend some hard earned money on a few (very few) expensive box, and waste some keys on them, to have pretty much nothing, they'll realize it's a scam. And you don't want them to realize that, do you ?
    On the other hand, price for lockbox ship will skyrocket, and pretty much nobody will be able to buy them, except for a few.
    pets should be cheap lobi or dil store items, NOT something that takes a players money and essentially pisses it away. Ship drop rates should remain the same, as they're basically jackpot items, but lose the fluff, and make gear drops a bit more common, again to bring them to a level where the average player can afford to fit a ship or a crew, thus burning more EC into the market.
    No fluff in locboxes. Only gear/doff/traits. It's already true.

    You want your F2P players to be able to reach these items without pumping money into wallet upgrades and stuff. Playing a 'free' game, then having to pay before you can access content, is not a free or fun experience.
    You don't need to pay anything to access end content. My fresh 50 always start it with the jem'hadar set (storyline reward) and some green-blue-purple polaron gear (cheap as dirt) from the exchange. It's enough for a 5K dps build, which is enough for pretty much anything except the hive and NWS.
    Also, allowing free player to have the gear for cheap for content they already have for free is not a good idea, don't you think ? Somewhere you have to tempt them into buying something, and since all the content is free, you don't have much choice.
    Thirdly, again, as it is now, there's simply too much EC in the market. You need to bleed this off with entry/exit taxes (we have entry tax already, for selling items, but it could be higher) and make lockboxes both rare and desirable, so that people will spend, at the very least, 10k to buy them. Long time players will likely complain about an exit tax, but its both necessary at the moment, and adjustable by the devs later on, once the market is ...well, usable.
    And annoy EVERYONE because you HAVE TO grind EC just to have enough for the money sink ? Especially the newest player you seem to aim at. They'll start with nothing, and the money sink will hurt them. But the veteran will simply ignore it because they have more than enough.
    In the end, long time player will not complain because they have enough to ignore this, while the new player will complain because they don't have much. 10K is nothing to me, I got millions and more. But when I started, 10k was a lot.
    Also, to keep this problem from being a problem, you could always hire an economist to keep track of how the game currency is flowing, and what commodities need to be pulled or changed to make it all work.
    Wrong game. The exchange in this game is not that important. If you want fun with a market that's really close to IRL, play Eve. Even some economist play this game and make studies on it.
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • leviathan99#2867 leviathan99 Member Posts: 7,747 Arc User
    edited May 2014
    Incidentally, Cryptic has had several devs who have studied economics.

    Knowledge of economics is not really the issue here.

    The issue is that multiple designers working over a game with multiple monetization approaches has some conflicting notions of what constitutes value in it. Then on top of this, players have differeing values but also differing notions of value, which means that things that seem broken or clunky to you may be the result of you misreading the intent of an admittedly design intent cluttered set of economies.

    The average economist working for a business in the US favors outsourcing or offshoring if it's good for the business and will cite the example of total surplus increases and a resulting economy that is larger than the sum of its parts.

    However, you can get into questions like whether the goodwill cost of the policy has net negatives, whether energy/production/taxes pose hidden expenses, etc. And this is going to be from the business' perspective and generally assumes not only that total surplus is higher but that the business' share of that surplus is higher.

    But if you had an economist working for employees of a plant that would be closed, they might note that while total surplus is higher, surplus for affected workers of the American plant shutdown might be zero or negative and might have a social cost in terms of education, etc.

    I use this example ultimately because my point is that economics is considerably more subjective than many folks like to admit and "hiring an economist" is tricky without first defining what you value. And Cryptic has people with a fair knowledge of economics working there. Maybe not designing maps and UI. (But then again, maybe.) But the issue isn't really with parsing the economics.

    The issue is:

    - parsing who and how the economy is supposed to benefit and if total surplus gains are indeed more important than the surplus of individual economic actors
    - assigning values to intangible or hidden costs (what is the value of character customization? or 10% crit?)
    - adjusting for psychological biases; market actors are not perfectly rational or efficient. IN THEORY (and it's a contested theory), whole markets should be rational and efficient but the entirety of the game's economy may not be a whole market (ie. a change to the economy of W**craft or TOR could actually have an impact on the dilithium exchange rate because of the effect of substitute goods and demand elasticity)

    You could have a dozen economists but you still need someone in Rivera or D'Angelo's position who manages decisions pertaining to value and no amount of pure economic analysis on this one game can dictate, particularly when you have so many intangibles and value interpretations floating around.
  • penchantpenchant Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2014
    erei1 wrote: »
    angry drivel snip

    20-50k isn't a lot of EC for a lockbox. Also, didn't speak anywhere of removing them from the drop table, so I dunno where you're getting "unavailable" from. Also, currently, if you want to buy an old lockbox normally, you buy it on the market anyway, so this isn't a deviation from what is already there.

    The drop rate on some items is .5% already, I didn't mention changing the high end drops at all, so...its still a gamble. And technically, some of the ships are near 2% drop rates. They're not all the same. The mirror ships, for instance...most of them are almost TOO common, but that's actually a handy way of giving players access to different ship types at 50, so they can experiment, which is also a good thing.
    erei1 wrote: »
    You don't need to pay anything to access end content.

    I said items, not end content. All the missions are available and the post isn't about gameplay.

    And yes, the money sink is necessary. A money sink is necessary in every game, because of the way money is generated spontaneously from repeatable things, enemies, etc. Technically, repairs and such should cost money, but the way the game operates, that amounts to charging bad/new players extra tax to play, which doesn't benefit subscriptions. The minor/major/critical repair items system is a reasonable way around that system, for the more elitist players who wont want to fly around with debuffs on them.

    Its not like its a 50% tax. The sell tax is good as it is, but needs a buy tax too, along with other things...you don't understand much about economics, do you? I mean, its okay if you don't, not like its a requirement to play or anything. But yaknow, you're overreacting to some minor changes, and i'm not sure you understood what I was saying. Though, it was a long post, I guess you just skimmed through it.

    And yes, it may annoy old players. I suspect it could be implemented in such a way that most won't even notice, and the rest can stick to trading face to face in ESD, as they have been for ...well, long as I've been playing.
  • penchantpenchant Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2014

    The issue is:

    - parsing who and how the economy is supposed to benefit and if total surplus gains are indeed more important than the surplus of individual economic actors
    - assigning values to intangible or hidden costs (what is the value of character customization? or 10% crit?)
    - adjusting for psychological biases; market actors are not perfectly rational or efficient. IN THEORY (and it's a contested theory), whole markets should be rational and efficient but the entirety of the game's economy may not be a whole market (ie. a change to the economy of W**craft or TOR could actually have an impact on the dilithium exchange rate because of the effect of substitute goods and demand elasticity)

    Couldn't you just use the sales demand as the judgement of value?

    I mean, all the items are universally intangible, none of it exists soon as you turn the game off, so I figure you could just use demand as a function of value, as few players will buy things they don't need (want, rather, because needing an intangible thing...yaknow). Then just work out a way of adjusting drop rates to keep the supply from outpacing whats available, and vice versa. Then you have fresh players coming in and spending most of what they have available on an item they want, that's actually accessible to them, and if they like it, would probably splurge a bit on keys and such.
  • erei1erei1 Member Posts: 4,081 Arc User
    edited May 2014
    penchant wrote: »
    I said items, not end content. All the missions are available and the post isn't about gameplay.
    Nice work skipping what I said and talk about something else. You don't need any ITEM (I hope it's clear now) to do any endgame content, except for the hive and NWS. And what you need can be acquired easily through rep and fleet. You don't need more.
    Lockbox ship are not necessary for anything. In fact, most of the time, they are not superior to most ship you can acquire another way.

    And yes, it may annoy old players. I suspect it could be implemented in such a way that most won't even notice, and the rest can stick to trading face to face in ESD, as they have been for ...well, long as I've been playing.
    And I repeat, old players will never be affected by a money sink. I have 150m and 1k+lobis + pretty much everything I want. Do you really thing I'll be annoyed by any kind of money sink ? And I'm pretty poor compared to many old players.
    On the other hand, the newbie who reach lvl50 with his free ship, jem'hadar set and about 1-2mil will be annoyed by any kind of money sink.

    It's too late for adding a money sink, unless you target endgame player. And I think it would be stupid anyway.

    And honestly, I don't think this game suffer by too much money. Yes some item are overpriced in the exchange, but most of them can be bought from fleet store, and even better. The only really expensive things are the ships, keys and (some) DOFF. But then, they are far from necessary, and we need some difficult to obtain stuff.
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • venkouvenkou Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2014
    penchant wrote: »
    Right now the EC price of master keys is on the high side of decent. 1.5m - 2.5m EC should be a target for the keys, idea being that someone playing 3-4 hours, at the end, could get a key and a shot at some drops they're after...
    Players control how much a c-store item is worth. Since c-store items are bought directly with zen, they should be the most expensive items to obtain.
    penchant wrote: »
    Thirdly, again, as it is now, there's simply too much EC in the market...
    If you follow what has recently happened, Cryptic removed several sources used to obtain energy credits. As a result of high resource requirements, due to expensive fleet and reputation holdings, the latest reduction in energy credit options is causing a problem. Other words, Cryptic is already starving the game of EC, and their actions have caused exchange prices to skyrocket. Our current problem is caused by having very little options.

    Second, while looking at the exchange, you should also notice something rather interesting. As a result of the game being veteran heavy, the vast majority of the purple gear is having a drought. When you actually do find a specific item, the price to buy it is extremely expensive. (see above paragraph for details).

    Prices on the exchange are a 'reaction' to the 'reduction' of available energy credit.

    Cryptic broke the economics of the game.

    Players reacted the opposite of what was expected.

    "Star Trek: Online" is now way too expensive to play.

    "Dragon Age: Inquisition" will be released very soon, so it will most likely take up the majority of my time. Instead of watching my money become vaperware, I can enjoy an entirely new game for $60. I do not want to play a game that works against my progress.

    I personally think its too late for Cryptic to change gears.
  • leviathan99#2867 leviathan99 Member Posts: 7,747 Arc User
    edited May 2014
    penchant wrote: »
    Couldn't you just use the sales demand as the judgement of value?

    I mean, all the items are universally intangible, none of it exists soon as you turn the game off, so I figure you could just use demand as a function of value, as few players will buy things they don't need (want, rather, because needing an intangible thing...yaknow). Then just work out a way of adjusting drop rates to keep the supply from outpacing whats available, and vice versa. Then you have fresh players coming in and spending most of what they have available on an item they want, that's actually accessible to them, and if they like it, would probably splurge a bit on keys and such.

    Which sale, though.

    It's also complicated because (as Geko has illustrated in an interview) they have a value associated with time spent in game even not buying anything that they use in capital budgeting (formally or ad hoc) because the social presence of people, for example, may value or devalue purchases.

    As near as I understand, they're managing a time economy, a dilithium economy, a C-Store economy, and an economy of player churn.

    I did have the same thought about measuring satisfaction through purchases once and using that as a diagnostic. But this is a social product. What if, for example, offering an item increases sales but repels new players? Then you have a dwindling revenue source that is equal to the rate of new players leaving. You also have to factor in that some purchases are one time, some are per account, some are per character, some are per bridge officer.

    I think a purely quantative approach might be doable but it would take economic expertise that might then be cost prohibitive. It could easily get sophisticated enough to keep a team of PhDs busy and in the field you're talking about (economics and finance) you could easily be looking at a seven figure expense for that team. Or maybe more because you probably want a team also fluent in game design.

    I'm not saying that economic analysis isn't valid. They're already doing it. I'm just not convinced that they need dramatically more than what they're doing. If anything, they probably just need some smarter decision tools and ways of collecting feedback. But I'm sure that what they have is pretty smart as is and is something I'd probably credit Geko for knowing his stuff on more than the vast majority of us on the forums. I think there's a lot of feedback that could be incorporated for a better view in-game and here. But collecting it isn't necessarily simple.
  • leviathan99#2867 leviathan99 Member Posts: 7,747 Arc User
    edited May 2014
    venkou wrote: »
    Players control how much a c-store item is worth. Since c-store items are bought directly with zen, they should be the most expensive items to obtain.


    If you follow what has recently happened, Cryptic removed several sources used to obtain energy credits. As a result of high resource requirements, due to expensive fleet and reputation holdings, the latest reduction in energy credit options is causing a problem. Other words, Cryptic is already starving the game of EC, and their actions have caused exchange prices to skyrocket. Our current problem is caused by having very little options.

    Second, while looking at the exchange, you should also notice something rather interesting. As a result of the game being veteran heavy, the vast majority of the purple gear is having a drought. When you actually do find a specific item, the price to buy it is extremely expensive. (see above paragraph for details).

    Prices on the exchange are a 'reaction' to the 'reduction' of available energy credit.

    Cryptic broke the economics of the game.

    Players reacted the opposite of what was expected.

    "Star Trek: Online" is now way too expensive to play.

    "Dragon Age: Inquisition" will be released very soon, so it will most likely take up the majority of my time. Instead of watching my money become vaperware, I can enjoy an entirely new game for $60. I do not want to play a game that works against my progress.

    I personally think its too late for Cryptic to change gears.

    If there's a scarcity of EC, the value would go up, which would drive EC prices down. I think you have it backwards.

    There's clearly more EC available if a master key now costs more EC or more demand for keys.

    It's also funny to me whenever people talk inflation in a game economy because there are fixed costs not associated with inflation, which causes new players to benefit from inflation.
  • penchantpenchant Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2014
    Actually, speaking of ways to do feedback, just today I found a survey on...surveymonkey, I think, that was about the lockboxes in particular. Given the questions, It did look as if it were made by the devs, rather than another player. That's actually what prompted me to write the post about lockbox usage.

    If they have taken out ways to make EC, I haven't noticed much of it, but then most of what I gain EC on is vendoring random drops. Seems the economy isn't active enough for selling these on the market to be a reliable source of income, but that's more an issue with a small playerbase.

    As for whether or not they can 'change gears', I think they can. The game's been on a positive roll for awhile, best as I can see. Though a lot of old players are leaving, best as I can tell the new ones are sticking around longer than they used to, thanks mostly to much more stuff to do a the endgame. It's still a very difficult game for hoarders/collectors to play :D hard to get all the stuff, but I suppose all F2P is similar in that respect.
  • tarrennistarrennis Member Posts: 166 Arc User
    edited May 2014
    We don't need any taxes! We are already taxed too much in real life. No matter what is done, the STO billionaires will always prosper & control the market :(
  • venkouvenkou Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2014
    If there's a scarcity of EC, the value would go up, which would drive EC prices down. I think you have it backwards.
    There's clearly more EC available if a master key now costs more EC or more demand for keys.
    Demand for master keys is still high; however, their exchange rate of sales has gone down. People are buying items at a slower rate. Exchange rate problems are not as simple as black and white.

    Exchange is currently in a bubble.

    Demand is high, prices are high, but the purchase of items has slowed.
  • dragonsbrethrendragonsbrethren Member Posts: 1,854 Arc User
    edited May 2014
    erei1 wrote: »
    I always like when some random guy on the internet try to give some marketing advices to an established company. It's pretty much like the fat guys on his couch yelling at some sport players on his TV what they should do.

    I'm just quoting this because I loved the analogy.
  • aelfwin1aelfwin1 Member Posts: 2,896 Arc User
    edited May 2014
    penchant wrote: »
    Firstly, no fluff in lockboxes. Stick to rare doffs, special gear/parts, and super rare ships. Leave cosmetics for the lobi/dil stores.

    That "fluff" went in there to better cover up the "gambling" that the Lockboxes were accused of being at their initial debut (which had somewhat sparse offerings) .
    Now "everyone" is a "winner" so it's not "really gambling" .

    But this in itself has turned into a gamble within a gamble .
    You might have seen this guy giving away free stuff from the lockboxes yesterday .
    Most of the stuff he got from opening 40 lockboxes was Doff packs ... which have a "chance" of giving you a good Doff (good Doff = not a purple Bartender) .
    Secondly, make sure no single items equippable on a crew or ship go over 10m EC in your market as you have it setup now.

    Don't be offended but I 'lol-ed' inside .
    Not happening .
    Why not ?
    The 500.000.000 EC cap on the exchange + greed + EC's value getting diminished (rampant in-game inflation) .

    Sure ... it would be nice ... , but it's not practical .
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