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How about account wide unlock mastery grind for lockbox ships?
captaintroika
Member Posts: 210 Arc User
For those who havn't checked it out, all the upcoming ships for the Jem'Hadar expansion have a new feature: an additional mastery level that you can grind to unlock them for all the chars on your account. Why not do this with lockbox ships? One of the biggest obstacles to really doing good alts at the moment is that a lot of great traits are lockbox ship only, and thus it's impractical to get them on more than one char without being an uber whale.
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It's only the Jem'Hadar Vanguard ships that have this feature. The Cardassian ones do not have it.
The Cardassian ships don't need it, they're already cross-faction usable.
Edit: As for the OP's suggestion, I would love being able to unlock lockbox ships across my account, even if it requires a bit more mastery grinding. But why limit it to loxkbox ships, how about Lobi and Promo ships as well?
Cryptic will never make lock box ships or their traits account-wide unlocks, they make money on selling the whales multiple copies of "must have" ships.
U can apply this token to any character only ship (lobi, lockbox, event phenix ships), and unlock it for all 2ns on account...
Because they would lose money.
There are a lot of lock box ships that are highly desirable due to their traits. If you could unlock the trait account wide, you would only need to acquire one ship instead of one for each character. While your suggestion would be well appreciated by the players and no doubt very much appreciated, I wouldn't count on it happening any time soon. Simply put, Cryptic wants players buying keys trying to get lobi or find the ship in a lock box.
It's not really a greed thing either.. they have to make money somehow. A suggestion like this would likely take a big chunk out of profits, and that could end up being bad for all of us.
As is usual with games that rely on gamble mechanics for revenue, the majority of the profit comes from a relatively small number of whales that spend enormous amounts of money. Their spending habits are unlikely to change because there's always something new and fresh coming out.
Also, yes, I would like if this applied to lobi/promo ships too.
SWTOR gets their primary revenue off of subscriptions. The reason I don't play that game anymore is because every little thing is locked behind a subscription, it has one of the worst and most restrictive F2P models of any game out there. STO is the opposite, it has an incredibly unrestrictive F2P model, but that comes with the caveat of Gamble Boxes being the primary source of revenue.
If STO kept it's current Free to Play model and adopted SWTOR's gamble free market place, it would go under in six months tops. In order for STO to adopt the system you want and still remain financially viable for cryptic, they would have to implement serious restrictions on the free 2 play model to encourage (force) subscriptions.
Sorry, but pass. I prefer things the way they are in STO. I really enjoyed SWTOR, a friend gave me a 3 month sub a couple years back and I played the game and enjoyed it. The day the sub ran out was the last day I ever played, the game was awful if you didn't pay for it. At least with Gamble Boxes I can just choose to ignore them, I don't have that option on SWTOR.
As someone who is a founder in SWTOR, respectfully I don't believe you're understanding the full difference between the STO model and SWTOR model as there are drastic differences in how the gear is treated. In SWTOR if I as a Sith Juggernaught tank purchase one of the single bladed lightsabers from the Cartel Market, that item comes with 4 modification slots and a little bit of force power baked into the weapon itself, which is standard for all force users. What I put in those 4 modification slots determine what the overall stats will be. Let's suppose I go into a Flashpoint/STF over there and run into a Sith Sorcerer who has the same hilt as me. Although in our hypothetical scenario we have the same base hilt in terms of looks, their stats will be drastically different due to our difference in mod choices for the weapons. Where as my Jugg would have a purely defensive focused weapon, the Sorc would be purely damage or healing focused, depending on his chosen role. Although it's the same cosmetically it's 2 completely different weapons in terms of functionality. I could chose one of the 30+ different hilts in the game at this point in the Cartel Market and elsewhere in the game, and no matter which one I choose, it would not afford me any additional advantages at the end game. With STO, that same thing can't be said.
WIth STO for example, if I purchase an Arbiter Battlecruiser, the bridge officer seating, universal console, trait, and base ship stats themselves, will all effect my performance at the end game. The same goes true with any other Cstore, lockbox, lobi, or free leveling ship within the game. Their stats, seatings, and any consoles or traits are all factors that can and often do effect performance at the end game. Although in SWTOR yes most everything is account wide with an additional purchase, that's because it's purely cosmetic and has no value end game.
This also doesn't take into account the other major differences as well. In SWTOR everything a sub has, a preferred or free to play can also have, it's just going to be a slog to get there and there are more restrictions. With STO yes some of the ships don't unlock account wide, but there are far far fewer restrictions and it's much easier for a free to play to gain everything a long time life member has. With STO there is alot less grind for end game stuff. Overall the 2 systems simply aren't as comparable as they seem to be.
Like I said we're not going to debate the merits in here of whether lockboxes should be used or not, because bottom line is right now they are being used. With that said, the lockboxes along with promo ships and such are a large money maker and they would lose a good chunk of change (and players) if they swapped to a SWTOR type sub model. While it would be alot more convenient to have everything be account wide, it won't happen due to cash reasons. That I will bet you.
Anyways that's my 2 cents on this. I also felt like I needed to make the differences between the 2 games more clear.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
Like I stated above I would greatly appreciate being able to unlock these ships on my alts, however, I won't hold my breath.
And I agree with you 100%.
Unfortunately, that money they would make from us pales in comparison to those that currently just throw their wallets at the current system. The combined new sales from you and I wouldn't even put a dent in what they get from some of these whales that just play the entire game via Credit Card.
The truth is, I never really realized how crazy some people get with spending on Video Games until I started playing STO. It's absolutely nuts how much some people are willing to plop down for online games.
I stopped bothering with the store quite a while ago and that pack actually coaxed me into dropping zen on it day one.
Fairly sure there's actually a good number of people who are tired of seeing new ships but nothing fresh to use them in or are tired of the escort overload and would be more willing to spend zen for account based things that aren't ships.
They've lifted faction restrictions for Romulans and Jem'Hadar. They've built the unlock code/tech for the Jemmie ships.
Whales are whales, they'll spend money on what they want regardless. I'm kind of a baby whale I guess?
Account unlock is going to make people who didn't invest in alts become willing to do so, and that is going to increase their net income, full stop.
I was willing to drop $200 in Zen to get a Temporal Light Cruiser when that was launched. If I can account unlock that to fly a T'liss as a Romulan or a D7 as a Klingon, I'd play alts immediately, and start spending on them.
On the whole, I think they have more to financially gain than lose, IMO. I think the percentage of the player base that drops money on lockbox ships for alts is a very small minority.
They might not sell as well as ships but they really need to expand the breadth of the store beyond a slowly stagnating ship market. It's also easy to say something doesn't sell when there's not been anything new to buy from that part of the store. We had the D bridge recently which was pretty pricey being a full interior and I honestly can't recall many others added into the game since the store launched.
There were some cosmetic ship parts sold in the store way back which I bought to make my ship look a bit different. Another thing that got dropped for no good reason other than to get more money by locking specific parts behind a full vessel.
Games like lotro or path of exile have proven that cosmetics do sell. It depends on whether they have the willingness to give them a proper try.
Maybe the next triple bundle of faction ships they could add a cosmetic unlock pack as a purchase option to allow folk to buy a single ship and also the cosmetic looks.
If they don't give it a good chance of success of course it will seem like noone wants the things.
Reality is, Cryptic have their bean counters; they've done the math. Full stop.
The only reason this can be made profitable for the new Pay'Hadars, is because they would otherwise be unprofitable, period. They would have been so far behind in grinding for all reps and such, that few would even start one, what with all the spec trees and all. But if they were to start doing this for all our existing toons, however, they'd start losing money, for sure. And for the reason I mentioned at the start of my post: because it would be implementing a policy in which people would wind up having to pay less.
Even if they do some day allow us to account unlock these ships, the ones you listed are all different. At best, you would get the Connie unlocked, but would still have to gamble for / buy the other two.
for R&D ships should be a MUST!
Ten Forward Weekly: Cryptic's looking into adding more T6 mastery levels in future, based on reception and data from ViL. Nothing more has been said on the matter (as far as I'm aware.)
There are only three possible targets that come to mind:
Ergo: maybe, and feedback threads like this could be useful in getting a sense of the arguments around the latter possibility. Resume thread.
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Although actually considering those ships would depend on having content to play them in or not.
If you're space rich, and you buy a zahl and astika for each character, then an account wide unlock for mastery would destroy sales from that type of player.
At the end of the day, cryptic won't leave the system as is or change it based on player feelings or player feedback. They'll do it based on mathematics and financial projections.
there's a very very select few exceptions to the rule with "tunings" being one of those exceptions. All they really do is add an extra little visual effect to a weapon. Think of it as their equivalent of a deflector visual from STO. By and large 99% of the items on the Cartel Market can be reclaimed, with the consumables and things like tunings and what not being exceptions.
General Audience: Believe me folks when I say you don't want a model like that of SWTOR coming to STO. To make up sales most likely as I pointed out prior it would mean there had to be other restrictions in place. I wouldn't exactly see it as being unreasonable for Cstore ships to have their traits go account wide off a single unlock, but the lockbox and lobi ships I simply don't see it unless they have some other way to make up for potentially lost sales. I wouldn't exactly complain like I said if they did do it, but I'm not going to hold my breath on it.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
Same.. I utterly suck at generating credits, I rarely have more then a couple hundred Million on hand at a time. Right now, I have even less then that.. and I still have a wide array of lock box ships on several characters without spending any money.
You can absolutely have anything you want in STO without spending a dime, much less being a whale.
Lockbox ships should be BoA, then you could pass one around your toons and grind out the mastery for each.