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so, who wants to do a theoretical cost study on this?
patrickngo
Member Posts: 9,963 Arc User
Coldnapalm wrote:
and it got me thinking. Then Bioxi brought up his suggestion.
and that got me thinking about how many times EP's and Devs have said that PvP wasn't on the schedule because cost/benefit.
but we don't really have a ballpark on the cost, do we?
I'm not an expert. I don't work in the computer industry, I can't even manage to write HTML without TRIBBLE it up, and the last time I wrote a program it was in Commodore BASIC.
BUT...
some of you are pros, and some who aren't pros, keep up on the business side trends of the industry. so what's the relative cost difference between their proposals? how many man-hours would either of them take-Hypothetically speaking, assuming staff that know the engine well enough to even make the attempt, paid at reasonably standard rates, for that matter, how many people would need to be involved just on implementation for either of their ideas to take form?
I'll take anything from wild-TRIBBLE guesses to reasoned analysis backed up with sources here. The Question of the Day is...
What would be the most reasonable, yet optimistic, cost in manpower, time, and money, to revamp PvP while not breaking PvE-and how can it be paid for using Cryptic's monetization model?
TANSTAAFL-as physics (and Robert Heinlein) inform us, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
Hell, some business major might even be able to get a paper out of this. we have wild, pie-in-sky ideas, let's see if anyone can put ballpark numbers that fit the following:
Industry Standard practices for man-hours
Manpower Requirements for a projected six to eighteen month period of time (it took eighteen months to do Agents of Yesterday)
cost/man-hour
assume contractors/temps for much of the legwork, because Staff are already burdened developing "The next big thing".
basically a time and money budget to accomplish either of these ideas put forth by our peers. Note that Coldnapalm is self-described as a non-PvP'er, so he's not so much 'advocating' that he's totally married to the idea, but he at least put something forth that LOOKS workable, and he's regularly stated his ideas are rejected by PvP players-so maybe some feedback on those ideas from NON-PvP folks, might be in order, because as a casual PvP'er, I like his idea's core.
Naturally, as with all of these convos, don't expect Developer input or even examination. it's all purely hypothetical headgaming and maybe a try at more 'understanding' what kind of resource problem these (or any) ideas represent.
There is an easy solution to get PvP active again. One that is rather inexpensibe for cryptic to do and one that can even make them some money. Have PvP only ships and ground kits with the boffs/abilities that is set that you get from the zen store. For say...15-20 bucks a pop. These would take almost no dev time to code...but would require some forthought for balance. Have PvP only gear that you get for some dil off the dil store to equip yourself with. Make it bind on equip so the exchange can get it's play of it if that is what people want...and to let more newer players in by having some help from the older ones who can get the gear for them. Disable traits in PvP. Bam...balanced. Selfcontained so you don't interfer with the pure PvE people. It doesn't cost them oddles of dev time. They get money. Easy for new players to join in. Hell, we can even have a starter ship and kit to make it even MORE new player friendly. Once that actually starts to show there are players willing to do this, we can expand to things like leaderboard and matchmaking issues. But there is a solution. The problem is, the current die hard PvP people are rejecting it...so the ONLY viable solution can't go forward because of the old guard PvP...that means for the good of PvP and this game overall...you all need to go.
and it got me thinking. Then Bioxi brought up his suggestion.
and that got me thinking about how many times EP's and Devs have said that PvP wasn't on the schedule because cost/benefit.
but we don't really have a ballpark on the cost, do we?
I'm not an expert. I don't work in the computer industry, I can't even manage to write HTML without TRIBBLE it up, and the last time I wrote a program it was in Commodore BASIC.
BUT...
some of you are pros, and some who aren't pros, keep up on the business side trends of the industry. so what's the relative cost difference between their proposals? how many man-hours would either of them take-Hypothetically speaking, assuming staff that know the engine well enough to even make the attempt, paid at reasonably standard rates, for that matter, how many people would need to be involved just on implementation for either of their ideas to take form?
I'll take anything from wild-TRIBBLE guesses to reasoned analysis backed up with sources here. The Question of the Day is...
What would be the most reasonable, yet optimistic, cost in manpower, time, and money, to revamp PvP while not breaking PvE-and how can it be paid for using Cryptic's monetization model?
TANSTAAFL-as physics (and Robert Heinlein) inform us, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
Hell, some business major might even be able to get a paper out of this. we have wild, pie-in-sky ideas, let's see if anyone can put ballpark numbers that fit the following:
Industry Standard practices for man-hours
Manpower Requirements for a projected six to eighteen month period of time (it took eighteen months to do Agents of Yesterday)
cost/man-hour
assume contractors/temps for much of the legwork, because Staff are already burdened developing "The next big thing".
basically a time and money budget to accomplish either of these ideas put forth by our peers. Note that Coldnapalm is self-described as a non-PvP'er, so he's not so much 'advocating' that he's totally married to the idea, but he at least put something forth that LOOKS workable, and he's regularly stated his ideas are rejected by PvP players-so maybe some feedback on those ideas from NON-PvP folks, might be in order, because as a casual PvP'er, I like his idea's core.
Naturally, as with all of these convos, don't expect Developer input or even examination. it's all purely hypothetical headgaming and maybe a try at more 'understanding' what kind of resource problem these (or any) ideas represent.
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I'd guess it's out of the question any time soon, like in the next 6-12 months, because of the consoles. The existing staff and any new hires will be working at full capacity to get the consoles to parity while still trying to maintain and expand the PC version.
"But they could hire extra people" ?
Maybe, though they're competing with everyone else for the better people willing to work on games, and with the rest of the industry that pays more and offers a much better work-life balance. So "hire more" isn't so easy.
And hiring more people slows you down until they are up to speed. I've trained new hires and turned over maintenance of existing applications to current staff. In both cases there is the pain of not getting your own work done while you try to fill them in and are pestered with endless questions. Eventually it pays off, but not in the short term.
We don't know what any of this requires to actually implement in their game engine.
But I can tell you this:
Of course this would "dev time to code".
Aside from that someone would need to verify that there is actually a market for this. Just because you came up with a price tag for something doesn't mean it is one that will work.
The fundamental problem of a PvP revamp that works to improve balance and gameplay experience is that it requires a complex, non-easy solution. Calling something "cheap" or "easy" doesn't mean it actually is, if you're actually on the team implementing it.
And practically no one outside the team at Cryptic will be able to give reasonable figures for any of this, since it requires knowledge and experience to come up with such figures.
My character Tsin'xing
Not to mention it would also be pay2win as hell and will limit PvP to paying customers. So yeah it might be quick and might get some money but it would last for about a month until people realize cryptic just scammed them 15-20 bucks.
Attract players who actually want to play this game and keep rightly ignoring the ones that dismiss the core gameplay of the entire genre as "pointless grinding" and demand it be turned into some kind of dumbed-down shooter because they don't want to earn their power ups.
For rewards? Well unique rare items are always in high demand in MMOs. Gear, vanity items. Collectables. Depends on just how easy it has to be to implement. There are things already in existence that could be added as rewards, but new stuff is of course always better. Or stuff that's otherwise no longer available.
And then there's of course always dil and/or marks, but it's kinda hard to compete with CCA/ISA on that front these days.
The cost would be small in man hours as long as his PvP ships are not new models, just a copy-paste with different stats. That could be achieved in just a few hours depending on how many ships they make. Gear is even easier since they have templates, or they could just restrict it to basic gear.
The cost would be low, but so would be the money they earn, not everyone is willing to buy a new ship just to play PvP. The idea is really cheap but also ridiculously bad, since it will restrict PvP to paying customers, offers no rewards for the players, just costs and won't solve power creep. In the end PvP will be dead again in a month or so.
My proposal will cost more time and effort, but it's based on successful MMO games like Guild Wars and World of Warcraft. So quality and success are almost guaranteed, unless Cryptic screws up really hard.
Monetization is also based on their current STO lockbox system, with a bit from Robocraft, Overwatch and TF2. Basically you get a PvP lootbox for winning a match, the better your performance the better the lootbox. Inside the lootbox you'll find the usual stuff, including an exclusive ship. Since my idea is class based, that exclusive ship won't affect PvP and since the lockboxes can be sold people won't need to play PvP to get the ship. This is based on their current business system, which they know it works and gets them money.
As for rewards, at first they could be currency, materials, marks, etc. Then they can add cosmetics and other stuff, purchasable with both PvP points or Zen in case you want the instantly.
The thing is, you generally don't go into a software project with just a vague idea of what it's going to be. Basically everything you can put in a post on this forum is likely still too vague to make a good estimation.
A cursory check on the web suggests that a game designer might get 65,000 US $ a year, and a software engineer about 95,000 US $ a year.
Let's say we have a team of 6 designers and 6 engineers working on this project for 4 months (assuming this can be done in a a single season), we might have a cost of 320,000 US $ for salaries alone.
At the suggested price point of 15 $ for a PvP ship, we need to sell over 21,000 units before we make a profit.
Chances are the cost will be higher, since there are other people working at Cryptic, there is the hardware infrastructure.
An Estimation suggests that cost for a single on premises server is about 1,500 US $ a month. The game undoubtedly needs more than one single hardware server, though (even though Holodeck is considered one game server, it doesn't mean it is the same as a single physical server.
Going by the Servers identified for WOW and account for the much smaller nature of STO, we might still have something like 10 to 20 game servers just for Holodeck, so we're at 15,000 US $ a month for STO. We would need to sell 1,000 of our hypothetical PvP ships per month.
Still not included is the cost for the actual premises and all the stuff I might have forgotten to mention. (Software licenses, developer hardware, Q&A Hardware, organization stuff.) I am not even sure I am in the right ballpark yet, to be honest.
Source for Salaries:
Sources: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-jose-game-designer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,8_IM761_KO9,22.htm
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-jose-software-engineer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,8_IM761_KO9,26.htm
Server Cost:
http://www.sherweb.com/blog/total-cost-of-ownership-of-servers-iaas-vs-on-premise/
Server Count for an MMO (assuming that every IP maps to a physical server):
http://wow.gamepedia.com/Americas_region_realm_list_by_datacenter
This is not to say that things played exactly the same. One thing Diablo 2 did was to make it so players did half damage to other players. Why? Because realistically most players were glass cannons compared to monsters.
In Marvel: Avengers Alliance powercreep was a core aspect of monetizing PvP. You used the same weapons in PvP as PvE but your stats were calculated differently.. in a way that encouraged people to buy stuff to make them better. This was akin to getting a stat boost in PvP for each permanent admiralty card you have.
The real difference when it came to doing fights was the ranking system in MAA. At the beginning of each PvP season everyone got set to a rating of 800 for PvP and people would get matched against opponents with a similar rating.
Why? because the top players would utterly destroy the low tier players with godly stats and OP gear. It's not that the high tier players had an unfair advantage, not really. It's that they bought more stuff. Why did the devs encourage this? Wallet Warriors bring $$$$. Giving people methods to be wallet warriors makes PvP more profitable.
The trick then becomes finding a way to make the game FUN when you have people like this playing in PvP:
I wasn't even one of the best. AA had 5 basic PvP tiers: Silver, Gold, Diamond, Vibranium, and Adamantium. I was usually in Vibranium. The last tournament before the game closed my rating was 1422, and I was ranked in the top 5.75% of players.... yeah... I was also ranked as the 17,214th best PvPer in the game... so there was a lot of competition there.
The way it made it fun was to segregate the players to keep you from regularly running into the top players. The first method was your rating #. with a rating of 1422 you'd expect to run into anywhere from 1380 to 1450 ratings. Also, in tiers below Vibranium it matched people based on levels. Why? This is what happens to low level players when a max level player fights them:
All this made it so that you rarely had to be on the receiving end of a one-sided beating like that. Usually just if it was the beginning of a season(since everyone gets reset to 800 rating) or if you were a lowbie and managed to win enough to get into Vibranium... briefly.
My character Tsin'xing
In other words, what's wrong with PvP is that without rewards it only interests people like you, who take it way too seriously.
I think that is a problem. Without a reward, why should anyone really bother with PvP? If it was just the fun of the gameplay itself, people would play Infected Advanced and play around with other PvE Queues more. But the MMO grind focuses everyone on optimizing the reward/time ratio.
PVP titles can make use of grinds to force replay value (see. weapon skins in Counterstrike, Halo) but it's a very different dynamic (prestige focused.) Inevitably a lot would need to be done to sufficiently stock an STO PVP system, even in aspects of the game that would merely need to be repurposed to fit a PVP grind (ex. a ship skin system).
And, ultimately, I think the question does need to be asked (of the OP): what a PVP system would actually do for STO? Cryptic couldn't possibly do enough to make it (economically) competitive against purpose-built PVP games (ex. World of Tanks). It's a 5+ year old F2P MMO that's specialized on very different things than PVP. Furthermore, the effort taken away from other systems would mean STO wouldn't be as competitive (relative to what it could be) against games that focus on PVE, customization, and narrative storytelling (ex. SWTOR) which is probably a lot more critical for its continued survival.
There doesn't seem to be a good way of looking at the OP's proposition. PVP just isn't a good fit for STO.
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And of course I previously mentioned the PvP daily that gave dil. THAT was an incentive for people to PvP. No amount of rebalancing will make people want to PvP when there's no reward for it.
All this kibitzing about how the devs hate PvP is ignoring the important question.... Why do PLAYERS hate PvP? To me it comes down to having no reason to ever engage in PvP... at all... ever. If I run a story mission I can get vendor trash, if I queue doffing I can get stuff to make doffcrete for the fleetbase.... If I do PvP I get.... nothing. THAT is far more important than balance in terms of me avoiding PvP.
My character Tsin'xing
Cost: Enabling engine access to an unspecified, arbitrary quantity of volunteers. (Not bloody likely, but it is an alternative!
Benefits: If volunteers do their stuff right, revitalizes PvP - and, perhaps, produces a few fixes the main dev team can't afford to work on.
Of course, between the (AFAIK) major no-no of exposing game data to non-employees and the possibility for some greedy bigwig to respond by saying "Oh look, we can do X, Y and Z using volunteers and fire half the dev team!", it's never going to happen - but it's quite possibly just as viable as the rest of this thread.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
My character Tsin'xing
One of the biggest problem with PvP has always been the barrier to entry. Back in the Grand Old Days (of content droughts), when PvP was more of a thing then now, the barrier to entry was mostly the challenge of learning how to play effectively. The skill ceiling of PvP was high, and there are no "kiddie pool" to get your feet wet. You were thrown into the deep end with all the (dire) sharks that have played the game for years.
Then the first set items hit the game, and starting the long and steady creep of power - stuff you needed to grind (in PvE) and if you didn't have that, you were at a disadvantage.
A 15 $ entry fee would definitely not make things better. A major reason why the idea of fixed-ship-layouts was presented in the first place was to lower the barrier of entry. But if you put a price tag on it, you won't achieve that.
And that's one of the biggest problems for PvP - almost any improvement you could do seems to require bypassing or threatening the business model of PvP without overing an alternative monetization scheme that could compensate that.
Maybe the best chance for growing PvP is on the incentive side - offer decent PvP rewards.
I was someone that has turned into a total PvP snob that didn't play PvE at all. But all the power creep and the lack of attention to PvP soured me on the game and I left for 2 years. The dyson sphere lured me back, and I've been playing (and spending) ever since. But I have done perhaps 2 or 3 PvP matches since then. And why would I? The problems are still there, and worse, the rewards are elsewhere. If I wanted to well in PvP, i need all that stuff, but if I can entertain myself with all the required PvE activity, why bother with PvP anymore if I could advance another character by doing more PvE?
They need to find a way to create PvP rewards that are not exploitable. At bare minimum something like Dilithium + Choice of Mark rewrads. Maybe better would be a PvP reputation. I know some non-PvPers will hate that- maybe even me - , but scr*w them - if PvPers have to do PvE content to get their desired gear, why shouldn't PvEers have to do PvP content to get their desired gear?