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Fair price of a hot ship???
wanghunglo42
Member Posts: 170 Arc User
If Arc/Cryptic were to end the gambling system and sell a top prize ship (Voth Bulwark, Elachi Sheshar, Xindi Narcine, etc) to you directly, what would you consider to be a fair cash price?
"As with all living things, each according to his gifts."
Post edited by wanghunglo42 on
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Cash price? Unless your talking EC's (price was at 500M last night).... TO MY UNDERSTANDING THAT TOPIC IS FORBIDDEN.... Such sites tap Cryptic revenues, and often cheat players.
In the unlikely event that they would make their way to the C-store 3500-4000 zen or more is to be expected.
Based on current C-Store prices, I would expect them to sell for $40-50.
Based on sensible prices comparable to purchases in other MMOs, $10-15.
Based on what I paid to get my Temporal ships and associated Lobi items, about $90.
Based on what I would actually pay right now, $0.
I feel even that is a little high, but I have bought 2 ships at that price (Guardian, Phantom.)
I would prefer 2000 - 2500 Zen, but I know there is no chance of a global price reduction. The bar has been set at 3k for T6 and that's as high as I go.
Assuming that fleet upgrade will be the standard of 1 module for 500 zen, they will make another $10 off me when those release.
Assuming that, I would pay a total of 3500 Zen for a T6 Fleet, so I would pay 3500 Zen for the current Elachi Ship.
That's a cash price of $35.
So I'm asking what would be a fair CASH price for a top ship in your opinion?
"As with all living things, each according to his gifts."
pretty much this. right now my thinking is to grind the EC to buy a bug for my main, and that's it. I've pretty much got my main Fed, and 4 alts, a sci fed, a eng fed, and a tac rom and klink. the other toons will pretty much languish except to do doff missions and collect dilithium
i thought that way but after seeing what was in the box, i went woth the DR pack. I knew I would use the qib, and guessed i would use the phantom scryer and guardian. (turns out i use the eclipse and dauntless) add to it the Boffs and Doffs, the intel uniforms the upgrade tokens and tech upgrades made it worthwhile to me
Never mind what is fair ... consider what they cost right now.
T5 Zen... $25
T6 Zen... $30
T6 Fleet... (Expected cost $40-50 depending on actual module count)
T5 Lobi... 800 Lobi (20,000 zen) $200 max (actual average is 5 lobi for an average cost of $160)
T6 Lobi... 900 Lobi (22,500 zen) $225 max (actual average is 5 lobi for an average cost of $180)
Limited time ships (Jem Attack / Bull / Elachi Dread) Based aprox on chance pull $500
That is what they COST right now.
If you are not willing to spend $500 on one of the limited time ships... then don't buy into there promos. That simple.
Suggesting that they are going to take any of the ships they make $500 or so on each Right now and sell them for 50 bucks is just nuts.
100% Agreed.
Cryptic is making money hand over fist for a few lines of code and there laughing all the way to the bank.
IMO Lobi ships are Cryptics bread and butter and has been said each Lobi ship has a cash value between $180.00 - $225.00 :eek:
They're making so much cash off of the Lobi and Lock Box ships that I'm surprised that they are even still offering Zen Shop ships.
The chance system is craptastic for the players but fantastic for Cryptic and it looks to be working has intended for them
There's an interesting point in that. People always go on about how they didn't spend any actual cash on a lockbox ship. However, someone did. The cash made it's way into Cryptic's pocket whether or not one person actually paid for it all at once - the Keys were still purchased with Zen that someone bought - yes, some of it undoubtedly comes from Lifetime and Sub stipends, but not the majority.
Regardless of whether or not you personally spent $400 on a lockbox ship, the playerbase as a whole is spending almost that much on each. Those things just rake in cash.
But doesn't this apply to every other MMRPG on the Internet ??? Not a single one of them is a charity... The fact is, and will always remain, the reason why STO exists is to make money !!!
What a Crock of S...
MOST people are "Grinding Dilithium" and "Buying Zen on the Exchange" to get the boxes for the ship. That nets Cryptic NOTHING ! ! !
How is Cryptic paying for content?
So where is this 'Zen' coming from ? Surely you don't think that it all comes from Gold Account stipends...
You fail to understand grasshopper.
Where did the zen come from....
Some whale that bought your D that's where.
Zen only comes into the game when someone buys it... if you didn't farm the D the whale couldn't BUY it from you with $.
EDT-- even if it came from gold account stipends... umm that means someone still paid Cryptic a monthly sub fee.
A valid point, but the margins we are talking about are really insane when you think about it. What do you think there are, a thousand or more of each lockbox ship in game? Multiply that, by say, $350 assuming that the actual pure Lobi cost is $400 and some of the keys come from "free" or stipend Zen, and sometimes you will get a Lobi-heavy streak going, you are looking at $350,000 worth of each lockbox ship. As a minimum.
For the level of actual development and bug fixes we actually get in STO, is this really a game that looks like hundreds of thousands of dollars of work actually gets done between lockbox ship releases?
That's not counting sales of everything else in the store - STO is merely a cashcow - the money is being re-invested in the game only in the most cursory way.
Many MMOs, even former AAA release operate on a much slimmer budget, without doing insane lottery systems, and still release new content regularly, fix bugs promptly, and still turn a healthy profit.
It's a difference of degrees, and by degrees I mean orders of magnitude.
If you mean when people say there making money hand over fist type comments.
All you have to do is look around. Go to ESD head to space... and count.
Find the 20 ships closes to you and see what they are. The costs on most of them will be hard. (fleet ships / T6 ect) Some will be a range... like lobi where you know max of and as low as. A few more will be a bit harder to know exactly (jem dredd and elachi dread) cause they are time limited and different promos have had different drop rates... however you can assume there all north of $300 with out going over $500.
Do that and add it up... seriously if you find 1 in 20 End game toons that isn't in a ship that has made Cryptic money I would be shocked.
Ah, grasshopper,
you can. A company can make money hand over fist off it's customers that pay, while driving away a majority of it's player base. The game then becomes no fun to play because queues are empty, you can't find a team, your fleet is dying, everything is being nerfed, grind, grind, grind. etc. There is a time lag as people come to the awareness that the signs they see of the game dying aren't just a one time oddity, or just because of [whatever excuse here].
I'm willing to bet because of the delay in reporting that Cryptic next two 10q sec statements will show increased profit over the last quarterly report. One because of the sell of DR and zen for dil to upgrade, the second {smaller} from all the event's they are running and extra sales. You can't keep those events up or people stop coming to them.
Well, in theory for the older LTS subs, the total stipends have outstripped the price paid for the account, so there is, at least arguably, *some* free Zen in the system, but yeah, I made effectively the same point in my last post.
Ummm. To say that cryptic is against gambling because they are a western company is not the best kind of reasoning. At that point I would have to say that Los Vegas is asian.
The only reason why PWE seems to be blamed is because they had existing systems already and they brought them to cryptic. Yes cryptic wasn't wasn't like this under atari but where would this game be if under atari. Maybe we can have season 4 again where all we got was shoot mode and red alerts. I'm pretty sure we would have less content.
As far as im concerned cryptic seems to have gotten a free pass on the gambling side as long as the players keep pointing at PWE and keep ignoring the fact that the US is big on gambling too.
The T6 Lobi Ship is 900.
The Loch ness monster would agree with you 100%!
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!