I'm probably dead wrong, but it feels like the Breach-skip C-store item was a test to see player reactions to that sort of microtransactions. If reputation marks for zen become a thing, what kind of pricing would you expect?
I'm probably dead wrong, but it feels like the Breach-skip C-store item was a test to see player reactions to that sort of microtransactions. If reputation marks for zen become a thing, what kind of pricing would you expect?
Technically, you already can. Reputation Marks > Dilithium. Then use that Dilthium on the Dilthlium exchange to buy, you guessed it ZEN.
I'm probably dead wrong, but it feels like the Breach-skip C-store item was a test to see player reactions to that sort of microtransactions. If reputation marks for zen become a thing, what kind of pricing would you expect?
Technically, you already can. Reputation Marks > Dilithium. Then use that Dilthium on the Dilthlium exchange to buy, you guessed it ZEN.
What he means is, instead of people playing the game they can bypass it by paying for marks etc etc to cut down time on things, like skip to end of rep by spending 2000zen that kinda thing.
I'm probably dead wrong, but it feels like the Breach-skip C-store item was a test to see player reactions to that sort of microtransactions. If reputation marks for zen become a thing, what kind of pricing would you expect?
Technically, you already can. Reputation Marks > Dilithium. Then use that Dilthium on the Dilthlium exchange to buy, you guessed it ZEN.
What he means is, instead of people playing the game they can bypass it by paying for marks etc etc to cut down time on things, like skip to end of rep by spending 2000zen that kinda thing.
This is my understanding as well. Spend Dilithium or Zen so you don't have to grind the Reputations. For 2000 Zen in Neverwinter, you can purchase a Campaign Completion that completes a Campaign (their version of Reputations) instantly provided you are at the right level and obviously haven't completed the Campaign.
When subs got dropped I was expecting them to start monetizing stuff more along the lines of how neverwinter does it with the perks for zen thing.
For STO I don't see the point in the rep skips as there's never much work involved in getting the daily token requirement filled. Neverwinters were usually spread across actual content (most modules were given a zone to work with) and had a variety of currencies.
Most of the events award 100+ marks with a daily bonus so a week will get the marks for t5 which is where the dil reward is, assuming of course they don't try and poke those with the breaky stick as they tend to do to the handful of things that work within STO.
I think paying Cryptic cash to avoid playing borked queues for Rep marks is an excellent idea and I'll gladly give up my beer money to do so.
I like turtles.
I don't know how they should price them, that's their business, but they should totally be selling marks.
I wouldn't buy them myself, of course, because I like earning rewards in gameplay. But reducing the amount of whine from those too impatient to actually play and making Cryptic some more $$$ in the process is pretty much win-win.
For STO I don't see the point in the rep skips as there's never much work involved in getting the daily token requirement filled. Neverwinters were usually spread across actual content (most modules were given a zone to work with) and had a variety of currencies.
Most of the events award 100+ marks with a daily bonus so a week will get the marks for t5 which is where the dil reward is, assuming of course they don't try and poke those with the breaky stick as they tend to do to the handful of things that work within STO.
Another good reason to sell them, it gives Cryptic good reason to make them harder to get in the game. Maybe even make reps/rep gear more desireable to have. Yay for capitalism!
It's probably the only thing that might save the reputation system (that and giving some TRULY awesome rewards for reaching Tier 6)
As it stands now, there are so many different mission rewards sets, with far, FAR, better stats and/or set bonuses, not to mention the gear from the 2 newer Fleet Holdings (especially the Colony World stuff! ) Or from 'free" event ships/content, most of the Rep sets are completely useless, or at the very least outclassed. (or, like the Omega Rep stuff, almost useless once you reach Tier 5, because you rarely fight that enemy ever again, so many of the bonuses are pointless, and as such all that "grind" was pretty much a waste of time by that stage)
And don't even get me started on the "Rep Store/s". 99.9% of that stuff is just pure rubbish, as generally you get better versions as rewards from the missions based on the Rep (or vice versa? )
This is probably the worst thing ever!! Pay to buy Marks and kill the queues right off! It might satisfy Cryptic's bank balance in the short-term, but it won't pad participation numbers, which is what Cryptic are looking to improve.
"You don't want to patrol!? You don't want to escort!? You don't want to defend the Federation's Starbases!? Then why are you flying my Starships!? If you were a Klingon you'd be killed on the spot, but lucky for you.....you WERE in Starfleet. Let's see how New Zealand Penal Colony suits you." Adm A. Necheyev.
I have never done and never will use pay to win to get through rep and events, it's better if you've earned it the hard way
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
It's a horrible idea which means it will probably happen.
Doesn't matter what any of us think though, as always Cryptic won't listen to players. If they think selling Reputation progress is a good thing.. they'll do it. They already kind of started it with the Jem'Hadar Vanguard (extra completed reps for the paid version) and with the 'Event Bypass' last time.
It definitely feels like more stuff like this is on the horizon, it's probably the real reason for the Red Alert nerf.
This is probably the worst thing ever!! Pay to buy Marks and kill the queues right off! It might satisfy Cryptic's bank balance in the short-term, but it won't pad participation numbers, which is what Cryptic are looking to improve.
1. Queues are already dead.
2. Most people don't spend money on F2P games, so there are still plenty of people left who actually want to play the game.
This is probably the worst thing ever!! Pay to buy Marks and kill the queues right off! It might satisfy Cryptic's bank balance in the short-term, but it won't pad participation numbers, which is what Cryptic are looking to improve.
If STO adopted Neverwinter's system, then it would be pay to instantly complete the previous Reputations. Still have to get Marks to complete the Reputation Equipment projects and complete the newest Reputation.
Unless they add a "Rep Starter Pack" Which contains enough marks/Elite Widgets/XP and EC to complete the rep to T6, and then an "Elite Rep Pack" which includes all the above, plus enough Marks/Elite Marks and "Reputation Dilithium Vouchers" (like the Fleet Dilithium Vouchers we already have) to complete a full set of the rep gear
I think paying Cryptic cash to avoid playing borked queues for Rep marks is an excellent idea and I'll gladly give up my beer money to do so.
I like turtles.
I thought $8 was a great bargain to avoid Breach AFKers 10 times.
The Breach Event before this last one, I ran it on 4 toons, I got pugged with the same AFKer at least 15 times.
And since an AFKer can slow the run down by 4-8 minutes, that one guy cost me 1-2hrs with his antics.
Nope, pay to skip. In Neverwinter you can either grind or pay up after two mods to complete a campaign, i.e. rep. You can never do this with the current or the last one. They've also made a sponsor token over there comparable with the one we have here, so after you've down a rep fully on one character you can sponsor your others so it only takes half the time.
This is a F2P MMO but that doesn't mean you don't pay in some form. If you don't want to pay in time/grind then you might be able to pay in cash. I've honestly been expecting something like this to come around too given the insane number of reps we have and how unfriendly that makes it for new players especially who don't have an older toon who can sponsor them. This would give them the ability to pay to skip ahead. Or for the rest of us just avoid content we don't like, like me and pvp if I don't want to wait around for an event to grind out the marks.
So essentially pay to skip or pay to progress faster.
Edit: Unless they somehow make it a token to instantly progress a rep to tier 6 then people would still have to run the daily projects which would take time. All it would then allow them to do would be to skip grinding the marks in the first place.
But all of this is speculation as we don't know if it's happening at all and if so what form it would take.
Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it.
I have no idea how it would affect the play time metrics but I would love to see something like this, especially now that it seems that the "easy" choice box method of getting marks is going bye bye. Casual players like me, and those that literally do not have the free time to play more than a few hours a week, like me, find it extremely difficult to do reps. I have had the experience myself that every time I play, I do nothing but run each toon through to get rep marks and yet a brand new rep comes out long before I even get close to finishing the last one.
I would gladly pay real money for the Zen to buy rep marks if that choice was offered. Of course I would also gladly pay real money to not have to do the exact same event day after day after day after day after...when there's an event. Even the most fun of the events becomes a grind after a while and again, for a lot of people, real life makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible to complete, even with the generous time frame allotted. The ability to slot something this year and complete it the next year was a very nice gesture on Cryptics part but for some, it just means that we are going to end up with a lot of uncompleted events piling up with no chance of ever catching up.
Heck, make it fair, for a new rep or event, set it up so that players can't just buy their way to getting the award before everyone else just because that have fat wallets. Don't put the marks/event items etc on sale until after that much time has elapsed. Like the recent event, sell 10 days worth of event tokens in the C-store, but don't make it available until day 10 of the event. Only make X number of rep marks available for purchase after enough time has passed for a player to have earned that many marks while playing.
And for Pete's sake do NOT put them in the lobi store at such a ridiculous rate that it's going to average $100.00 dollars or more just to acquire one days worth of them. Okay, that was an exaggeration, but not by much.
It's a horrible idea which means it will probably happen.
I think it's a good idea. I would never use it myself but I think that it would do a good job of removing a some of the AFKers from the queues. I don't think it would be widely used by 99.99% of players. I think the main customers would just be AFKers and maybe some whales.
When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
It's a horrible idea which means it will probably happen.
I think it's a good idea. I would never use it myself but I think that it would do a good job of removing a some of the AFKers from the queues. I don't think it would be widely used by 99.99% of players. I think the main customers would just be AFKers and maybe some whales.
And lazy people that don't want to grind for another get over 10 Reputations to Tier 5 for a Recruitment Event bonus. The same excuse could be used for Duty Officers, R&D, and Admiralty.
It's a horrible idea which means it will probably happen.
I think it's a good idea. I would never use it myself but I think that it would do a good job of removing a some of the AFKers from the queues. I don't think it would be widely used by 99.99% of players. I think the main customers would just be AFKers and maybe some whales.
And lazy people that don't want to grind for another get over 10 Reputations to Tier 5 for a Recruitment Event bonus. The same excuse could be used for Duty Officers, R&D, and Admiralty.
So what? If they don't want to work. Let them pay so we can continue to play.
When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
It's a horrible idea which means it will probably happen.
I think it's a good idea. I would never use it myself but I think that it would do a good job of removing a some of the AFKers from the queues. I don't think it would be widely used by 99.99% of players. I think the main customers would just be AFKers and maybe some whales.
And lazy people that don't want to grind for another get over 10 Reputations to Tier 5 for a Recruitment Event bonus. The same excuse could be used for Duty Officers, R&D, and Admiralty.
So what? If they don't want to work. Let them pay so we can continue to play.
Did I ever say I disapproved of adding these types of 'P2W' systems? If some people want to spend $5 to complete a Duty Officer Commendation, $10 for an Admiralty Campaign, or $20 for a Reputation, then let them waste their money.
Huh. Paying NOT to play the game. Wouldn't uninstalling it be cheaper and easier?
Star Trek Online Volunteer Community Moderator and Resident She-Wolf
Community Moderators are Unpaid Volunteers and NOT Employees of Gearbox/Cryptic
Views and Opinions May Not Reflect the Views and Opinions of Gearbox/Cryptic
Pay-to-skip is pretty much a standard feature in the mobile space. There are games in which every resource can be substituted with premium currency and every timer "finish now"ed. There are even games where if you fail a mission, it asks if you want to pay to un-fail it and keep going.
Cryptic goes to great lengths to please the type of players who want the game to be easy and fast. Always wondered why they do so little to monetize that segment. But judging by the breach tokens, they are working on it.
Compared to an exploitative lockbox system that regularly breaks/changes the meta, this seems like a relatively benign way to milk a few more shekels from the customerbase.
I'd be worried about the impact a change like this would have on system design... if the current systems weren't already insufferably miserable for the sake of 'metrics'. The addition of this monetization wouldn't take anything away from the game; just add another option for a wider playerbase demographic.
hardly... pay to skip grind. time saver... cutting out grinding = more play time. Pay2Win to me is using money to get exclusive skills/gear that cant be gotten in game... ie c store/lockbox ships/gear.
Comments
Technically, you already can. Reputation Marks > Dilithium. Then use that Dilthium on the Dilthlium exchange to buy, you guessed it ZEN.
What he means is, instead of people playing the game they can bypass it by paying for marks etc etc to cut down time on things, like skip to end of rep by spending 2000zen that kinda thing.
This is my understanding as well. Spend Dilithium or Zen so you don't have to grind the Reputations. For 2000 Zen in Neverwinter, you can purchase a Campaign Completion that completes a Campaign (their version of Reputations) instantly provided you are at the right level and obviously haven't completed the Campaign.
For STO I don't see the point in the rep skips as there's never much work involved in getting the daily token requirement filled. Neverwinters were usually spread across actual content (most modules were given a zone to work with) and had a variety of currencies.
Most of the events award 100+ marks with a daily bonus so a week will get the marks for t5 which is where the dil reward is, assuming of course they don't try and poke those with the breaky stick as they tend to do to the handful of things that work within STO.
I like turtles.
I wouldn't buy them myself, of course, because I like earning rewards in gameplay. But reducing the amount of whine from those too impatient to actually play and making Cryptic some more $$$ in the process is pretty much win-win.
Another good reason to sell them, it gives Cryptic good reason to make them harder to get in the game. Maybe even make reps/rep gear more desireable to have. Yay for capitalism!
As it stands now, there are so many different mission rewards sets, with far, FAR, better stats and/or set bonuses, not to mention the gear from the 2 newer Fleet Holdings (especially the Colony World stuff! ) Or from 'free" event ships/content, most of the Rep sets are completely useless, or at the very least outclassed. (or, like the Omega Rep stuff, almost useless once you reach Tier 5, because you rarely fight that enemy ever again, so many of the bonuses are pointless, and as such all that "grind" was pretty much a waste of time by that stage)
And don't even get me started on the "Rep Store/s". 99.9% of that stuff is just pure rubbish, as generally you get better versions as rewards from the missions based on the Rep (or vice versa? )
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Doesn't matter what any of us think though, as always Cryptic won't listen to players. If they think selling Reputation progress is a good thing.. they'll do it. They already kind of started it with the Jem'Hadar Vanguard (extra completed reps for the paid version) and with the 'Event Bypass' last time.
It definitely feels like more stuff like this is on the horizon, it's probably the real reason for the Red Alert nerf.
2. Most people don't spend money on F2P games, so there are still plenty of people left who actually want to play the game.
If STO adopted Neverwinter's system, then it would be pay to instantly complete the previous Reputations. Still have to get Marks to complete the Reputation Equipment projects and complete the newest Reputation.
I thought $8 was a great bargain to avoid Breach AFKers 10 times.
The Breach Event before this last one, I ran it on 4 toons, I got pugged with the same AFKer at least 15 times.
And since an AFKer can slow the run down by 4-8 minutes, that one guy cost me 1-2hrs with his antics.
Nope, pay to skip. In Neverwinter you can either grind or pay up after two mods to complete a campaign, i.e. rep. You can never do this with the current or the last one. They've also made a sponsor token over there comparable with the one we have here, so after you've down a rep fully on one character you can sponsor your others so it only takes half the time.
This is a F2P MMO but that doesn't mean you don't pay in some form. If you don't want to pay in time/grind then you might be able to pay in cash. I've honestly been expecting something like this to come around too given the insane number of reps we have and how unfriendly that makes it for new players especially who don't have an older toon who can sponsor them. This would give them the ability to pay to skip ahead. Or for the rest of us just avoid content we don't like, like me and pvp if I don't want to wait around for an event to grind out the marks.
So essentially pay to skip or pay to progress faster.
Edit: Unless they somehow make it a token to instantly progress a rep to tier 6 then people would still have to run the daily projects which would take time. All it would then allow them to do would be to skip grinding the marks in the first place.
But all of this is speculation as we don't know if it's happening at all and if so what form it would take.
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -- Benjamin Franklin
I would gladly pay real money for the Zen to buy rep marks if that choice was offered. Of course I would also gladly pay real money to not have to do the exact same event day after day after day after day after...when there's an event. Even the most fun of the events becomes a grind after a while and again, for a lot of people, real life makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible to complete, even with the generous time frame allotted. The ability to slot something this year and complete it the next year was a very nice gesture on Cryptics part but for some, it just means that we are going to end up with a lot of uncompleted events piling up with no chance of ever catching up.
Heck, make it fair, for a new rep or event, set it up so that players can't just buy their way to getting the award before everyone else just because that have fat wallets. Don't put the marks/event items etc on sale until after that much time has elapsed. Like the recent event, sell 10 days worth of event tokens in the C-store, but don't make it available until day 10 of the event. Only make X number of rep marks available for purchase after enough time has passed for a player to have earned that many marks while playing.
And for Pete's sake do NOT put them in the lobi store at such a ridiculous rate that it's going to average $100.00 dollars or more just to acquire one days worth of them. Okay, that was an exaggeration, but not by much.
I think it's a good idea. I would never use it myself but I think that it would do a good job of removing a some of the AFKers from the queues. I don't think it would be widely used by 99.99% of players. I think the main customers would just be AFKers and maybe some whales.
And lazy people that don't want to grind for another get over 10 Reputations to Tier 5 for a Recruitment Event bonus. The same excuse could be used for Duty Officers, R&D, and Admiralty.
Did I ever say I disapproved of adding these types of 'P2W' systems? If some people want to spend $5 to complete a Duty Officer Commendation, $10 for an Admiralty Campaign, or $20 for a Reputation, then let them waste their money.
Views and Opinions May Not Reflect the Views and Opinions of Gearbox/Cryptic
Moderation Problems/Issues? Please contact the Community Manager
Terms of Service / Community Rules and Policies / FCT
Facebook / Twitter / Twitch
Cryptic goes to great lengths to please the type of players who want the game to be easy and fast. Always wondered why they do so little to monetize that segment. But judging by the breach tokens, they are working on it.
Compared to an exploitative lockbox system that regularly breaks/changes the meta, this seems like a relatively benign way to milk a few more shekels from the customerbase.
I'd be worried about the impact a change like this would have on system design... if the current systems weren't already insufferably miserable for the sake of 'metrics'. The addition of this monetization wouldn't take anything away from the game; just add another option for a wider playerbase demographic.
Have no idea how much they should charge, but it should be substantial, like the 1000z to skip most of Breach?
hardly... pay to skip grind. time saver... cutting out grinding = more play time. Pay2Win to me is using money to get exclusive skills/gear that cant be gotten in game... ie c store/lockbox ships/gear.