How some things are and how *I* think they should be...

sirsitsalot

In another thread, angrytarg called Free-to-play "a rotten, backwards business model," and went on to say "They introduce relatively overpowered gear/items with every new advancement of the game so all the players will buy that stuff to remain "top dog". And this will repeat for every new thing they introduce and the circle will never break. "Top Dogs" have very fragile egos, you know " The sad thing is that based on how things have been going lately, this description is proving to be accurate.

The thing is that it doesn't HAVE to be this way. It didn't start OUT this way. At some point, Cryptic/PWE decided that quantity was more important than quality, and it all went sideways from there, and keeps on sliding.

I am all for them making money. They are a business. That's what businesses are in business to do. I don't mind them putting a dilithium price on everything. As long as there are things that people want in the C-store that need Zen, people who don't want to spend their own money to get it will sell their Dilithium on the exchange for Zen, while the people who are looking to pour Dilithium into the grind mechanics to get through them ASAP will spend real money on Zen to buy said Dilithium. It's a perfect system. As long as there is a need on both sides of the exchange, then Cryptic gets a much more steady flow of revenue than subscriptions ever offered.

Free to play is exactly that. It does not cost us a penny to PLAY this game. What we have is a Pay to Get-Stuff/Get-On-With-It model.

If I had been calling the shots, I would have made it where advancement from 50-60 would require Tier 6 XP, and redesigned the other sector block content to pay out Tier 1-5 XP by doing the respective missions there. I would also have instituted an XP upgrade system:

2 Tier 1 XP = 1 Tier 2 XP

4 Tier 1 XP = 1 Tier 3 XP
2 Tier 2 XP = 1 Tier 3 XP

8 Tier 1 XP = 1 Tier 4 XP
4 Tier 2 XP = 1 Tier 4 XP
2 Tier 3 XP = 1 Tier 4 XP

16 Tier 1 XP = 1 Tier 5 XP
8 Tier 2 XP = 1 Tier 5 XP
4 Tier 3 XP = 1 Tier 5 XP
2 Tier 4 XP = 1 Tier 5 XP

32 Tier 1 XP = 1 Tier 6 XP
16 Tier 2 XP = 1 Tier 6 XP
8 Tier 3 XP = 1 Tier 6 XP
4 Tier 4 XP = 1 Tier 6 XP
2 Tier 5 XP = 1 Tier 6 XP

XP could only be UPGRADED, not downgraded.

I would even stick a Dilithium cost to the upgrade process. 1 RD for every higher Tier XP traded for.

At least 1 ship in every Tier should be freely obtainable in the game. No Dilithium cost. No Zen cost. No EC cost. Consolse should no longer be included with C-store ships. The ships themselves would be skins for their respective Tiers. The consoles would go on the Dilithium store. Anything that has an effect on Stats should be relegated to the Dilithium store.

I would remove the Dilithium cost to crafted gear and increase the resource cost to balance it. I would make it so that gear with specific stat mods can be crafted. No more of that gambling TRIBBLE. I would make the best craftable gear 1% less effective than the best gear obtained on the Dilithium store.

Regarding Dilithium Earning, I would make it so that a public version of the Dilithium Mine opens up and can be advanced by anyone who wishes to participate. Those who contribute to its advancement would build up bonus refinement rights. When the public mine reaches max Tier, this reward would pay out to all participants. Furthermore, the mine must be maintained with a wide variety of needs. Those who contribute will recieve small refinement bonuses.

those who are a member of a fleet whose Dilithium Mine is at max Tier would receive a 50% increase in these bonuses.

The more things that have a dilithium cost added to them, the more ways Dilithium needs to be earnable. And they need to be able to refine more of it without directly increasing the cap, which needs to remain in place to keep the market from being flooded. So incentives to participated in Dilithium Production related content makes sense. And that content needs to ALWAYS be available. No lockouts. No cooldowns. If a player wishes to put in the bulk of his time on it, then he should get rewarded for that effort.

And as far as the "if they can get it too fast, then there won't be anything for them to aim for" mentality goes? If new stuff to aim for is actually produced and introduced on a regular basis instead of this once in a blue moon TRIBBLE, then that will not be a problem anymore. If Cryptic would stop putting so much effort into finding ways to TRIBBLE off the community and put that much more effort into actually creating new PLAYABLE content, then they might be able to close the distance a little between them and the players in terms of content consumption.

Cryptic's motto seems to be "Take as much as possible and give back as little as possible"

The ration of Give:Take needs to become 1:1

I think I'll stop here...

noroblad

not sure the point of the XP types, seems overly complex. Just scale it... new area, worth more, if that is what you want. The issue isnt the xp value of things --- that seem to be about right after the last poke at it. The issue is the sheer amount of XP for each level and the specialization points "levels". It is too high... period. Cut by 50% seems like a good start, if not cut by 75%. Its just too much to earn 50 levels past 60 at these rates.

there are free ships at all tiers. Most from events. If they give *everyone* a free c-store ship at t5, they have to give lifetime something else -- that was one of the biggest perks. I get where you are coming from but devaluing the purchase by giving away what people bought is not a good way to get a repeat customer ... hmm, i might buy that, but they will just give it away if I wait on it... !!

Crafting could use work. Its a lot better than it was though ... 2 years ago, the only items worth crafting were a purple melee weapon and the pre-modular kits; and those were only good for players that did not have access to better. Or maybe a lowbie item for a new alt. Nothing else worth making. Now, people craft items and use them. That is an improvement, in spite of the gambling. Im not sure letting people pick 3 mods would be a good idea.... too easy to get top weapons that way. 1 mod, maybe, but not 3. And pvp mods need to be optional (disabled).

There is no problem earning dil daily. Its all over the place, go get it... you can easily earn more per day than you can refine. I am not keen on increasing the refine cap ... it will devalue the currency too much, and that effects the ability to convert to zen, which is in a decent place right now. If it gets skewed wrong, there will be NO zen for sale, because if dil is easy to get, no one will buy zen to get dil... and the market goes away, which hurts a lot of people. It should always be worth buying zen to sell for dil.

I dislike the entire concept of time-gates on unimportant things. I get it for the dil cap daily, etc. But this 30 day log in to race for a ship thing is frustrating. Upgrade your weapon and log out for the day because you have no weapon is frustrating. Do a STF and fail because someone else messed up (on purpose, sometimes) and get locked out for an hour is frustrating. Time gates for these sorts of things are not FUN.

taylor1701d

You make some good points OP.

The only thing I have to add is that "Gamification" / "Freemium" wave is only just begining.

The good old days of small developer teams churning out games for their own joy and pride, working off of shoestring budgets, and out of a love for video games is over. Sierra comes to mind, with their many fantastic DOS games. IE: Space Quest, Kings Quest etc

We used to buy a console, or computer, and a game, you could play ALL content in those games. For a one time price of admission.
Sadly, nowdays the gaming industry is a Juggernaught. It's a money making machine, in a never ending quest at increasing their bottom lines.

Its just the way the business is these days, and is not likely to change, unless ALL of the gaming community would boycott any games that fall into this catagory of f2p/freemium model. Which won't happen.

I can trace the change in the gaming industry back to the beginings of W-o-W and when subscripton play took off. Ever since, the game industry has been pushing the limits on what they could charge for a gaming experience....then came "in game purchases", and all hope was lost for the average gamer.

Sad thing is, this is only the begining of the new wave of gaming. The biggest developers nowdays hold more sway then Hollywood.
They also bring in boatloads more profit.

The only thing one can do is, get used it, and move on, or play less games, or quit completely.

There's no chance of the past glory days returning. We'll only see more of this kind of monetization in the future. Better to accept it, then holding on to the glory days, and being continually disapointed in what developers choose to do.

dalolorn

taylor1701d wrote: »

The good old days of small developer teams churning out games for their own joy and pride, working off of shoestring budgets, and out of a love for video games is over. Sierra comes to mind, with their many fantastic DOS games. IE: Space Quest, Kings Quest etc

I feel compelled to point at such games as FTL: Faster Than Light or Star Ruler 2. And those are just examples I'm aware of.

Edit: Mind you, I agree that the gaming industry as a whole is going downhill. SR2 is really big news in my eyes, though - if you try hard enough, you can mod it on a deeper level than the Space Empires series without messing with the executable, as almost all of the game is in external, human-readable data/script files. So neat.

(It's a shame that it lacks ground combat and is, barring mods I can't even conceive of targeted at core game mechanics, a fairly standard example of the 'RT4X' subgenre that games like Sins of a Solar Empire are currently spearheading... but you can't have them all, I guess.)

taylor1701d

sirsitsalot wrote: »

@taylor1701d

If the game is going to be a live, on-going product involving servers and a staff to maintain it, then I can accept monetization in as many ways as possible. It has to be profitable in order to be prioritized.

The problem lies in the fact that once a developer prizes quantity over quality, we get what we have with this game. So yeah. They should monetize it all they want, but they need to stop and think about whether or not their next money sink is going to actually threaten the pre-existing ones.

PART of it is our fault. I mean people in the community who, rather than drawing the line and saying "This far and no farther" in terms of how much they grind for and then complain about it.

We don't HAVE to grind for everything all the time. We CAN be selective of what we grind. But we are not being. We act like we HAVE to go after it ALL. And because we chase that cloud, Cryptic/PWE sees quantity as being more profitable than quality.

I remember back when they told us that Klingon content wasn't prioritized because it wasn't profitable. Well our willingness to keep on swallowing the TRIBBLE they've been tossing us, and then keep coming back for more in a new flavor next season, has only served to justify them to keep churning it out.

We're feeding the metrics they want to see fed. We scream that we want to play our way, but thus far, we've been playing THEIR way and have grumbled about it, but have played none the less. Yes, what STO is facing IS a monster. But it is a monster we helped create.

I decided that I do not like the direction the game has been going. And since I made that decision, I have spent no money on it. Whether that has an effect on the direction they go doesn't matter. I am in control. I have not surrendered control to them. I am not in their target audience. I accept that. It just means that they get no money from me. It's no skin off my nose.

Too many of us have surrendered control. Anyone who says "Cryptic is forcing us to _____" falls into that category. Cryptic is not forcing any of us to do anything. Anything we do with STO, including whether or not we even bother to log in, let alone spend any money, is entirely on US. We talk about how Cryptic needs to take responsibility for their actions. Well, so do we.

It's our money. It's our time. It's our choice.

If we have the opinion that Cryptic sucks as a developer, then why the hell do we keep giving them patronage? If we really hate them and what this game has become, then we have a choice:

1 - Stick with it and keep hoping and praying that someone pulls their head out and switches the track this train is on.

or

2 - Pull the emergency break and get off.

It's either one or the other.

You're correct, the only way to get the point across to them is to close our wallets (that's one metric they cant ignore).
You're right that we keep "asking for it" by not Holding the Line, seems more and more to me, that these tactics from the gaming industry are becoming almost accepted as this new wave moves on, the more exposure we have to it the more it becomes normalized.
Which in turn makes it harder and harder to Hold the Line.
At one point, the glory days will be all but forgotten, (except by those who grew up during that time) i'm a little frightened what will become of the gaming industry 10-15 years down the road..

And I understand why some people have given up here, even one of our finest Fleet VA's has retired, and she was a great person and I miss her, but I completely understand her reasons, and many of the issues you point out, led to her quitting.


All this being said, in the end I still really do like STO (its actually the only game I play religiously - that's not happened since my days of Diablo2 LoD)
And I hope their monetization can eventually be balanced out as you've suggested.

Maybe PWE/Cryptic are pushing the limits right now in order to find the sweetspot between monetization, and free play optons. I dunno, but since DR, its been hyper moneitized, and I think the players push back on these changes should indicate to them, that the limit has in deed been reached.
Let's hope they can see this, and realize any furthur pushing of the limits may hurt them in the long run.
As you said they need to "stop and think about whether or not their next money sink is going to actually threaten the pre-existing ones." --- Or even threaten the game itself !

taylor1701d

dalolorn wrote: »

I feel compelled to point at such games as FTL: Faster Than Light or Star Ruler 2. And those are just examples I'm aware of.

Edit: Mind you, I agree that the gaming industry as a whole is going downhill. SR2 is really big news in my eyes, though - if you try hard enough, you can mod it on a deeper level than the Space Empires series without messing with the executable, as almost all of the game is in external, human-readable data/script files. So neat.

(It's a shame that it lacks ground combat and is, barring mods I can't even conceive of targeted at core game mechanics, a fairly standard example of the 'RT4X' subgenre that games like Sins of a Solar Empire are currently spearheading... but you can't have them all, I guess.)

I'm going to take a look at the games you've suggested (I've been considering adding a new title or 2 to my small playlist of games) there are indeed some shinning lights still left in the industry, just seems to be getting harder and harder to find them these days.



Thanks for the suggestions.