Personally I have always said that all items except rep and story rewards should be account bound and Lobi items/ships and lock box ships should be account reclaimable but the whole time people are willing to spend thousands on getting the same ships and consoles on multiple characters Cryptic would be mad from a bussiness point of view to do that but at the same time it would show good will towards their customers if they did and many people would see more value in lockbox/lobi stuff instead of seeing it as a rippoff.
Personally I have always said that all items except rep and story rewards should be account bound and Lobi items/ships and lock box ships should be account reclaimable but the whole time people are willing to spend thousands on getting the same ships and consoles on multiple characters Cryptic would be mad from a bussiness point of view to do that but at the same time it would show good will towards their customers if they did and many people would see more value in lockbox/lobi stuff instead of seeing it as a rippoff.
The problem is there's no shared storage. Account Bound ships would be way more lucrative if you, nonetheless, needed to buy more than one to have more than one 'equipped' at a time.
Ah!. Thats me before coffee.
My rant relates to the Lobi ships I have that are currently stuck on characters I no longer play. So yes, all the ships I buy now are strictly Zen or event ships that are account wide.
I just don't want to bother with a Lobi/Fleet ship and unlock it on the wrong toon.
Especially when things like the Delta Recruit program swing around and I'm tempted to re-roll a few of my characters but wait! the old ones have some Lobi ship unlocks on them.
Or, if I delete a character, please for the love of all that is holy, give me the lobi / fleet credit ships back to give to another toon.
Give you your one time purchases back if you delete a toon. lol come on man
One don't delete your toons... why ? Have you really hit the limit. If you really have 56 toons then delete toons that don't have lockbox ships if you really must. (if you have lockbox ships on all of them then your not really asking cryptic to now say one per account was enough sucker) If its your too cheap to buy toon slots... then Cryptic making their grand prize ships account wide isn't going to prod you to spend more $.
Yes if you roll a new toon if you want more lockbox stuff you'll have to buy it. Consider that when you roll a new toon. When you roll a Promo event toon you are hardly required to consider them your "main" if you have purchased a good number of Zen store ships you should have plenty of options for zen store t6 ship traits ect to build a perfectly playable toon.
As far as refunds on fleet modules on deletion go... hey ships cost ONE fleet module a ship. Its hardly like anyone is loosing out on tons. (and why should you get a refund after playing something potentially for years) Their is only one ship that costs more then one. If you have more then the lukari ship that costs you more then one fleet module.... again your not a good spender anyway.
As others have said... if Cryptic ever decides to account unlock Lockbox stuff. It would be time to enjoy the last month of the game. Such a move is a we are loosing the IP fire sale move.
Give you your one time purchases back if you delete a toon. lol come on man
One don't delete your toons... why ? Have you really hit the limit. If you really have 56 toons then delete toons that don't have lockbox ships if you really must. (if you have lockbox ships on all of them then your not really asking cryptic to now say one per account was enough sucker) If its your too cheap to buy toon slots... then Cryptic making their grand prize ships account wide isn't going to prod you to spend more $.
You seem to be operating with two contradictory viewpoints:
In one, you deny the value in having all the ships available on the "active" toon.
In the other you posit that whales are only buying ships because they have many toons, all of which need the ship to be re-purchased.
You can't have both. Pick one.
Yes if you roll a new toon if you want more lockbox stuff you'll have to buy it. Consider that when you roll a new toon. When you roll a Promo event toon you are hardly required to consider them your "main" if you have purchased a good number of Zen store ships you should have plenty of options for zen store t6 ship traits ect to build a perfectly playable toon.
I do consider it. And I don't buy stuff that I otherwise would buy because of it. I change my main every now and then. And when I do I want access to the ships I have worked for and paid for.
I - and others - am literally not buying things because they lack persistence. This is bad for Cryptic.
As others have said... if Cryptic ever decides to account unlock Lockbox stuff. It would be time to enjoy the last month of the game. Such a move is a we are loosing the IP fire sale move.
I am not opposed to this. If you have multiple toons, and you want them all to have all the ships, then you buy repeats. This makes sense and caters to the whales.
However, destroying items that people paid for because they violated arbitrary expectations about how many toons they should create and play is removing value from those items and reducing sales.
Economics is full of unintuitive and unintended consequences. Read "Freakonomics" some time. It's a good read.
Shall we put some basic math to this?
The supply curve for ships is fixed: Cryptic sets the price and sells as many ships as at that price point as demand warrants.
The demand curve for ships is more interesting.
There are whales - they have a disposable income that is focused on STO and they can afford ships and character slots and want both for whatever reasons whales have. Being whales they don't delete characters, the whole point is to have more. So regardless of Cryptics policy regarding refunds their demand curve is unchanged. Even in the case that they do delete the occasional character and not have to rebuy items, that disposable income of theirs? Its going to be spent, and its going to be spent on something STO related, until/unless they Cryptic shop literally runs out of items to sell them. Unlikely.
Then there are other players with disposable income, but its spread over several games. These players will concentrate their disposable income on games that offer items that have greater perceived value. Commodities with permanence are valued more than commodities that are used up quickly, buying is better than renting etc. Making special purchase more valuable - making them 'permanent't shifts this demand curve to the right, so now it intersects the supply curve at a higher point. i.e Cryptic sells more ships.
You really need to explain where and how demand will drop for a commodity with increased value.
Over the years this games devs have talked about all sorts of things that have never happened and never will happen.
We where going to get PvP scoreboards. We where going to get PvP overhauls. We where going to get more STFs before they turned them all into ques. We where going to get a full on Romulan faction before that became a 10 level tutorial.
We where going to get KDF content... and now KDF just tag along and at best the mission givers call them Dahar Master instead of pink skin.
You been around a good while ruin. You know as well as anyone. What the devs say and do are two things. What a dev hints at in passing on some stream. LOL ya forget about it.
The chances of Cryptic giving everyone multiples of one time lockbox/lobi ships, refunding fleet modules if you delete a fleet ship or the toon its on, or even making Phoenix token ships account unlocks. Are a big fat zero.
I have no doubt they have already noted the loss of revenue directly related to the account unlocking of event ships and gear. To think that they would remove the biggest grind factories in the game... on the chance that a few people might buy a couple keys one month. I don't see it. I mean if they did make Lockbox and Lobi ships account unlocks... why in goodness name would you buy any keys at all once you won a ship. A new box drops... you win the ship, you buy the lobi ship. Then what your done ? I guess grind over see you in 3 months for the next box. Its not even a logical ask, and if a dev really did mention the idea on a stream, they either passed some raunchy brain gas... or they have no control over such things and had no idea what they where talking about.
This game needs more account bound and accessibility. Things are already too expensive for a lot of people, or too time consuming, or resource intensive. Too many alts, have stockpiles of things they don't need that other characters do. I'm a single person playing several characters, not several people with hours upon hours to spend on things like lock boxes and grind.
You been around a good while ruin. You know as well as anyone. What the devs say and do are two things. What a dev hints at in passing on some stream. LOL ya forget about it.
The chances of Cryptic giving everyone multiples of one time lockbox/lobi ships, refunding fleet modules if you delete a fleet ship or the toon its on, or even making Phoenix token ships account unlocks. Are a big fat zero.
I have no doubt they have already noted the loss of revenue directly related to the account unlocking of event ships and gear. To think that they would remove the biggest grind factories in the game... on the chance that a few people might buy a couple keys one month. I don't see it. I mean if they did make Lockbox and Lobi ships account unlocks... why in goodness name would you buy any keys at all once you won a ship. A new box drops... you win the ship, you buy the lobi ship. Then what your done ? I guess grind over see you in 3 months for the next box. Its not even a logical ask, and if a dev really did mention the idea on a stream, they either passed some raunchy brain gas... or they have no control over such things and had no idea what they where talking about.
Pretty much 100% agree here. I still think it's possible that they'll test this awful idea on a single new lock box ship and/or new lobi ship at some point without making it retroactive.
When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
Even when reading patch notes, don't believe it until you can confirm it in game.
Whenever I hear phrases like "we're looking into it" I always think about the gag where police are commenting on the hole in the fence around a nudist colony.
It's possible. But at this point we're just sitting on our butts waiting to see what happens, and THAT'S certainly not good for their revenue.
But I'll tell you one thing: If they make an accountwide box ship, I will get it. If they make it a single-toon ship, I will not unless they make it absolutely amazeballs. Since selling endless powercreep like this isn't viable, and we've seen the flop that is poor promo/box ships where they just don't move, they clearly need some means of cushioning underperforming releases, by improving their value to the buyer as something OTHER than a powercreep wagon.
Of course you will get it. Everyone would get it. Once. Then it would never ever be of any value to Cryptic ever again. Oh the account wide unlock lockbox ship made it to the Infinity box. Who would care. lol
Sure it would be a win for people with 50 pylons. But what value does it really bring Cryptic. A 3-4 week sales boon then NOTHING.
Even when reading patch notes, don't believe it until you can confirm it in game.
Whenever I hear phrases like "we're looking into it" I always think about the gag where police are commenting on the hole in the fence around a nudist colony.
And that hole in there fence would be their revenue if they made lockbox ships an account wide unlock so unlike the gag that hole will never be there so no fun for us! lol
But yeah master key sales would drop as a result of this change and even if the dev's want to make it happen the business guys would never let that happen! and if it got to point when it would not hurt their profits to do so then well thats not good...
Without actual figures none of us know how much is or might be spent and by who.
Master keys are getting ever closer to the point of stagnation caused by cryptics singular focus on the assumption that ships = content over attempting to introduce other revenue streams.
Remember that subs got removed and other than a one off LTS there is no form of regular income for the game that isn't ships or keys (which fall under the same umbrella because they're the access to gamblebox & lobi ships)
Shield cosmetics could have been used as a revenue option but they got buried in the gambleboxes under a chance of a chance via the weapon crates, How many space barbie fans would have willingly paid a per character zen cost for a nice visual over seeing the gambling side and thinking nope not doing that and keeping the wallet closed. Weapon cosmetics have been suggested time and again but we get told the nonsense excuse of its not canon despite the myriad of colours linked to a single energy type already when most just want the option to unify a colour instead of a daft looking rainbow boat.
They may have got a chunk of cash from CBS for adding disco into the game but how much was already spent as a result of the VA costs for victory is loading? How much of the playerbase on console has left due to the reluctance to fix the queue bug, a core mechanic in the game?
They need to take a look at how they make their money if they're going to survive and while we get the odd glimmer of hope like the elite starter pack or the levelling newbie disco ship the focus is still far too much of pushing ships onto players.
I've put more money into PoE than I do STO because to me the game is good enough and becomes new enough each league that there's a feeling of compulsion that the devs deserve support for the work they do. The quality of the work for sto doesn't.
Shield cosmetics could have been used as a revenue option but they got buried in the gambleboxes under a chance of a chance via the weapon crates, How many space barbie fans would have willingly paid a per character zen cost for a nice visual over seeing the gambling side and thinking nope not doing that and keeping the wallet closed. Weapon cosmetics have been suggested time and again but we get told the nonsense excuse of its not canon despite the myriad of colours linked to a single energy type already when most just want the option to unify a colour instead of a daft looking rainbow boat.
We've been here with ship skins. They weren't sufficiently popular to continue selling (see. being folded into fleet variants and now included simply as a bonus for c-store ships.) Cryptic does have data on what kind of microtransactions people go for and it's worth pointing out that any "oh no, I won't spend money on gamble boxes" point is rather missing the moderating existence of the exchange.
Buy keys, sell for EC, use EC to buy what you want. That includes shield visuals. You can also work towards them through saving EC over time. It's a moot argument to say "oh, if only they let me buy this directly" because you can do that right now. The amount gained by trying again to sell stand-alone ship cosmetics in the c-store would seem to be only proportional to the cost difference (something that can also be moderated by adjusting shield visual supply through lock box odds, if it were a significant issue.)
And weapon cosmetics aren't happening for two reasons. 1. prohibitively difficult to implement, it's not analogous to shield visuals (however much the forums conflate the two.) 2. It's non canon. Each weapon in the game has an identifying visual effect. Star Trek weapons have always done this. You see someone firing a federation phaser, it looks like a federation phaser. You see a Andorian phaser, it looks like a Andorian phaser (ie. blue, note that for the color argument) and so on and so on through to the new weapon variants that Cryptic's created in the same mode. Someone can of course chose to equip other things to their ship (your rainbow cruiser is entirely on you) but there's a 1:1 relationship between what a weapon is and what it fires. Changing weapon visuals would break this canon relationship which is core to the visual design language of the series (you can read identifying information from the FX.) It's not going to happen in any foreseeable future.
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Is ship moving? If yes then show warp trail according to slot.
Is beam firing? If yes then show visual according to cosmetic slot.
All weapons then show the same colour and effect, with locks in place such as only phasers can use phaser visuals like the fed blue/orange etc. Instead of the game checking to see what each individual weapon is and applying that visual. Underneath a beam is a beam and a cannon shot is still a cannon shot.
Unless of course by prohibitive you're alluding the the ability of the devs to make things work.
If they wanted a serious chance on the shield cosmetics in lockboxes then they'd have had them as a padding item in their own right not buried under the weapon crate RNG.
As I said cryptic are far too fixated on ships = content for a healthy longterm budget, it is stagnating and will continue to do so. Less content means less ec earned by regulars meaning less of a market for the whales and exchange gougers so they'll stop spending as much.
They need to expand the scope for how they make their money and (to get back on topic) making even the traits from the one off ships would be a step towards making those ships of more interest to more people. More interest means the market gets a boost in demand.
But what value does it really bring Cryptic. A 3-4 week sales boon then NOTHING.
Better than the NOTHING followed by the NOTHING they're currently getting.
If that was the case CBS would have already taken their IP back and shuttered the STO servers.
Cryptic is under contract. If they don't make royalty payments to the IP holders they don't get to keep using it. So clearly someone is spending money. Its not you ok... make no mistake your demand in order to open your wallet is a none starter.
Like it or not gamble boxes make bank. Go look at the exchange and count how many keys are being sold for EC right now. There are somewhere in the range of 2-3k keys on the exchange at any one time. You can watch the keys move... you can watch the lockbox cast offs get posted on the exchange. (so no people aren't just reselling keys there using them) Bottom line is a good $3-5k dollars worth of keys move just in the key->ec market every single day. There is an additional $2k or so in zen posted on the exchange at any moment... and I would wager at least twice as much actually changes hands every day. A lot of that zen is ending up in Zen->key->EC conversions. (that is also not counting the handful of whales that simply open their wallet buy zen and keys, and use them. I can't tell you how many gamblers Cryptic has hooked but I'm going to bet there are a few spending way more then is healthy)
Anyway point is... the game is doing fine. You can look at the game markets and glean a pretty good understanding of the financials behind STO. No the game doesn't have a massive player base, I doubt there are more then 10-15k players many of whom likely only play a few hours a month. However they are still managing to attract thousands a day into their lockbox/key exchange grinder. I can't tell you how that compares to people simply buying ships directly with Zen... but I'm going to bet there is no way in heck outside of zen ship launch windows that Cryptic is seeing $4-5k a in direct zen store sales.
Unless of course by prohibitive you're alluding the the ability of the devs to make things work.
Yes, they've directly stated on Ten Forward weekly that letting players change weapon visual FX would take a huge effort, well beyond reasonably expected returns, if there wasn't an IP issue to consider (which there is.)
They looked into it, answer is "no for the foreseeable future."
As I said cryptic are far too fixated on ships = content for a healthy longterm budget, it is stagnating and will continue to do so. Less content means less ec earned by regulars meaning less of a market for the whales and exchange gougers so they'll stop spending as much.
They need to expand the scope for how they make their money and (to get back on topic) making even the traits from the one off ships would be a step towards making those ships of more interest to more people. More interest means the market gets a boost in demand.
Or directly undermine the sales of those ships. What you're looking for is new content packages that offer original traits, ships, and other items that aren't easily packaged in other formats...such as we saw in the ViL and AoD starter bundles (including items which historically don't sell well on their own but still found a viable place in the c-store.)
We do get new content in monetized channels. Even what you buy on the exchange from lock boxes results in money for Cryptic because someone along the way ultimately spent money for the zen on the originating lock box key (and your exchange activity helped provide a reason beyond immediate item use), be that directly or through an LTS. But, marketplace expansions do have to respect historical trends of what does and doesn't sell. Simply insisting that things are stagnating doesn't overcome that. There has to be a deeper structural reason to believe that items like ship cosmetics would be better served by the c-store (as stand-alone items) rather than packaged in other formats (be they with ships, lock boxes, T6 reputations, and maybe even events. Cryptic has to maintain an ecosystem of incentives to support player activity and the basic inclination to spend money on the game, not just reductive store listings.)
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
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Ships, weapons and other lockbox frippery are stuff, not content you can participate in. Missions could probably be done faster if they relied less on known trek characters and created their own to use, also save a few quid on VA costs. Although the downside would be a return to the ridiculous scenario such as the one where tnae is talking with taris and its the same person voicing both.
There's also the QA side which as we've seen is almost nonexistent, otherwise before the storm wouldn have had a better scaled map to compensate for boffs, nexus mission wouldn't have required players to jump onto the warpcore to interact with it or indeed have geordie get his head stuck in the door to 10 forward every time he went near it.
If the team is that small then all the more reason to be looking into other possible revenue streams that are less time consuming but still seen as providing some value to those that would buy into the items. Time constraints was part of the excuse given for romulans being shafted on the last couple of bundles and the lack of veteran ship& shuttle for jem hadar.
I like the idea that if you have the ship, make it available to alts via the C-store for a moderate sum, say 1K per alt. the downside is that the Keys would not longer be as popular, so maybe make it 2-3K per toon
I like the idea that if you have the ship, make it available to alts via the C-store for a moderate sum, say 1K per alt. the downside is that the Keys would not longer be as popular, so maybe make it 2-3K per toon
Well that is sort of always the case though.
Here is the hard reality some people don't want to accept.
Zen ships are less then.... yes many are cannon ships ect. But they are less then.
Fleets are a step up... and yes you get a discount on them if you already bought the zen ship.
Lobi are a step up from there.
Lockbox from there. (arguable lobi and lockbox are pretty close)
Special Pack super lockbox ships are up from there again.
Now having said that there is 100% a Zen value for every single one. You can already buy ANY ship you want in the game with zen.
The average lobi ship goes for 220 mil EC. Or aprox 5500 zen give or take.
The average lockbox ship goes for 300 mil EC. Or aprox 7500 zen give or take.
The average Special pack ship goes for 900 mil ec. Or 23,000 zen give or take.
Could a 3k zen PER toon unlock of Lockbox/lobi ships make sense. Well ya perhaps. That isn't the craziest idea I have heard. It would be a discount past the first one... they would have to add a system to the exchange to count unlocks of ships. But that isn't a big deal it would work much the same way on the back end as the account unlocks work for the reclaim stores.
At the same time instead of Zen... perhaps they could use the Fleet store as a way of doing the same thing. Adding a Loot box category to the fleet ship store. Setting the costs accordingly Perhaps say 12 fleet modules (6000 zen worth) for one single lockbox ship (although with fleet modules sitting around 10-11 mil each this would be a massive discount... not sure if fleet modules would adjust up or if Cryptic would have to set the cost more around 20-25 fm per first ship)... and a 50% discount for additional copies of the same ship bought on the same account. This would also eat up all the free modules people are about to get... shouldn't really devalue the lockbox proper wins, and give the QQers a more direct I just want to buy it price. (as I have already made clear you can buy any lockbox ship in the game right now with zen)
Nothing...followed by nothing from YOU. You seem to be under the mistaken impression that you and your few dollars matter at all to this game. It really doesn't matter. Especially when to pry those few measly dollars from your hand, they have to do something that will harm the good will of people who spend THOUSANDS. You really are insignificant to the company and them keeping the lights on compared to those players.
Am I though? Quite sad if so.
But, if we consider total demand to be the sum of "casual demand" and "whale demand"...
then we can look at the demand due to casual players like myself. We mostly choose each month how much of our disposable income goes to gaming, and how much goes to STO specifically, and for us, 'persistent' unlocks - store items that are not deleted along with characters but are returned to the account - adds a LOT of value to the items. So the demand for ships due to casuals can only increase if the ships are made - not account wide unlocks - but at least account persistent.
The demand from whales? I really can't hazard a guess as to how many ships a whale has on a character, but two thoughts come to mind: 1. Theres a limit to how many ships a single character can hold even counting unlockable ship slots *1, and if you are collecting everything you are probably not unboxing every ship on every character. So account wide ship unlocks are not going to reduce demand for ships. 2. Whales are trying to collect all-the-things and again - with limited ship slots per toon, are NOT going to be deleting characters to rationalize their ships onto fewer characters. So account wide ship unlocks will not reduce demand. 3. There are so many things in lock boxes to unlock that whales will always be able to spend their disposable income on keys for lockboxes. So demand for ships will not be reduced with account wide special ship unlocks.
*1 I'm not sure - can you unlock more ship slots per character indefinitely.
So, to summarize:
1. Refunding special ships and other store purchases upon character deletion increases the demand from casuals.
2. Account wide unlocks of special ships also increases demand from casuals.
3. Refunding special ships and other store purchases definitely does not decrease demand from whales.
4. Account wide unlocks of special ships also does not decrease demand from whales.
Comments
The problem is there's no shared storage. Account Bound ships would be way more lucrative if you, nonetheless, needed to buy more than one to have more than one 'equipped' at a time.
Give you your one time purchases back if you delete a toon. lol come on man
One don't delete your toons... why ? Have you really hit the limit. If you really have 56 toons then delete toons that don't have lockbox ships if you really must. (if you have lockbox ships on all of them then your not really asking cryptic to now say one per account was enough sucker) If its your too cheap to buy toon slots... then Cryptic making their grand prize ships account wide isn't going to prod you to spend more $.
Yes if you roll a new toon if you want more lockbox stuff you'll have to buy it. Consider that when you roll a new toon. When you roll a Promo event toon you are hardly required to consider them your "main" if you have purchased a good number of Zen store ships you should have plenty of options for zen store t6 ship traits ect to build a perfectly playable toon.
As far as refunds on fleet modules on deletion go... hey ships cost ONE fleet module a ship. Its hardly like anyone is loosing out on tons. (and why should you get a refund after playing something potentially for years) Their is only one ship that costs more then one. If you have more then the lukari ship that costs you more then one fleet module.... again your not a good spender anyway.
As others have said... if Cryptic ever decides to account unlock Lockbox stuff. It would be time to enjoy the last month of the game. Such a move is a we are loosing the IP fire sale move.
You seem to be operating with two contradictory viewpoints:
In one, you deny the value in having all the ships available on the "active" toon.
In the other you posit that whales are only buying ships because they have many toons, all of which need the ship to be re-purchased.
You can't have both. Pick one.
I do consider it. And I don't buy stuff that I otherwise would buy because of it. I change my main every now and then. And when I do I want access to the ships I have worked for and paid for.
I - and others - am literally not buying things because they lack persistence. This is bad for Cryptic.
I am not opposed to this. If you have multiple toons, and you want them all to have all the ships, then you buy repeats. This makes sense and caters to the whales.
However, destroying items that people paid for because they violated arbitrary expectations about how many toons they should create and play is removing value from those items and reducing sales.
Economics is full of unintuitive and unintended consequences. Read "Freakonomics" some time. It's a good read.
Shall we put some basic math to this?
The supply curve for ships is fixed: Cryptic sets the price and sells as many ships as at that price point as demand warrants.
The demand curve for ships is more interesting.
There are whales - they have a disposable income that is focused on STO and they can afford ships and character slots and want both for whatever reasons whales have. Being whales they don't delete characters, the whole point is to have more. So regardless of Cryptics policy regarding refunds their demand curve is unchanged. Even in the case that they do delete the occasional character and not have to rebuy items, that disposable income of theirs? Its going to be spent, and its going to be spent on something STO related, until/unless they Cryptic shop literally runs out of items to sell them. Unlikely.
Then there are other players with disposable income, but its spread over several games. These players will concentrate their disposable income on games that offer items that have greater perceived value. Commodities with permanence are valued more than commodities that are used up quickly, buying is better than renting etc. Making special purchase more valuable - making them 'permanent't shifts this demand curve to the right, so now it intersects the supply curve at a higher point. i.e Cryptic sells more ships.
You really need to explain where and how demand will drop for a commodity with increased value.
We where going to get PvP scoreboards. We where going to get PvP overhauls. We where going to get more STFs before they turned them all into ques. We where going to get a full on Romulan faction before that became a 10 level tutorial.
We where going to get KDF content... and now KDF just tag along and at best the mission givers call them Dahar Master instead of pink skin.
You been around a good while ruin. You know as well as anyone. What the devs say and do are two things. What a dev hints at in passing on some stream. LOL ya forget about it.
The chances of Cryptic giving everyone multiples of one time lockbox/lobi ships, refunding fleet modules if you delete a fleet ship or the toon its on, or even making Phoenix token ships account unlocks. Are a big fat zero.
I have no doubt they have already noted the loss of revenue directly related to the account unlocking of event ships and gear. To think that they would remove the biggest grind factories in the game... on the chance that a few people might buy a couple keys one month. I don't see it. I mean if they did make Lockbox and Lobi ships account unlocks... why in goodness name would you buy any keys at all once you won a ship. A new box drops... you win the ship, you buy the lobi ship. Then what your done ? I guess grind over see you in 3 months for the next box. Its not even a logical ask, and if a dev really did mention the idea on a stream, they either passed some raunchy brain gas... or they have no control over such things and had no idea what they where talking about.
Whenever I hear phrases like "we're looking into it" I always think about the gag where police are commenting on the hole in the fence around a nudist colony.
Of course you will get it. Everyone would get it. Once. Then it would never ever be of any value to Cryptic ever again. Oh the account wide unlock lockbox ship made it to the Infinity box. Who would care. lol
Sure it would be a win for people with 50 pylons. But what value does it really bring Cryptic. A 3-4 week sales boon then NOTHING.
And that hole in there fence would be their revenue if they made lockbox ships an account wide unlock so unlike the gag that hole will never be there so no fun for us! lol
But yeah master key sales would drop as a result of this change and even if the dev's want to make it happen the business guys would never let that happen! and if it got to point when it would not hurt their profits to do so then well thats not good...
Master keys are getting ever closer to the point of stagnation caused by cryptics singular focus on the assumption that ships = content over attempting to introduce other revenue streams.
Remember that subs got removed and other than a one off LTS there is no form of regular income for the game that isn't ships or keys (which fall under the same umbrella because they're the access to gamblebox & lobi ships)
Shield cosmetics could have been used as a revenue option but they got buried in the gambleboxes under a chance of a chance via the weapon crates, How many space barbie fans would have willingly paid a per character zen cost for a nice visual over seeing the gambling side and thinking nope not doing that and keeping the wallet closed. Weapon cosmetics have been suggested time and again but we get told the nonsense excuse of its not canon despite the myriad of colours linked to a single energy type already when most just want the option to unify a colour instead of a daft looking rainbow boat.
They may have got a chunk of cash from CBS for adding disco into the game but how much was already spent as a result of the VA costs for victory is loading? How much of the playerbase on console has left due to the reluctance to fix the queue bug, a core mechanic in the game?
They need to take a look at how they make their money if they're going to survive and while we get the odd glimmer of hope like the elite starter pack or the levelling newbie disco ship the focus is still far too much of pushing ships onto players.
I've put more money into PoE than I do STO because to me the game is good enough and becomes new enough each league that there's a feeling of compulsion that the devs deserve support for the work they do. The quality of the work for sto doesn't.
We've been here with ship skins. They weren't sufficiently popular to continue selling (see. being folded into fleet variants and now included simply as a bonus for c-store ships.) Cryptic does have data on what kind of microtransactions people go for and it's worth pointing out that any "oh no, I won't spend money on gamble boxes" point is rather missing the moderating existence of the exchange.
Buy keys, sell for EC, use EC to buy what you want. That includes shield visuals. You can also work towards them through saving EC over time. It's a moot argument to say "oh, if only they let me buy this directly" because you can do that right now. The amount gained by trying again to sell stand-alone ship cosmetics in the c-store would seem to be only proportional to the cost difference (something that can also be moderated by adjusting shield visual supply through lock box odds, if it were a significant issue.)
And weapon cosmetics aren't happening for two reasons. 1. prohibitively difficult to implement, it's not analogous to shield visuals (however much the forums conflate the two.) 2. It's non canon. Each weapon in the game has an identifying visual effect. Star Trek weapons have always done this. You see someone firing a federation phaser, it looks like a federation phaser. You see a Andorian phaser, it looks like a Andorian phaser (ie. blue, note that for the color argument) and so on and so on through to the new weapon variants that Cryptic's created in the same mode. Someone can of course chose to equip other things to their ship (your rainbow cruiser is entirely on you) but there's a 1:1 relationship between what a weapon is and what it fires. Changing weapon visuals would break this canon relationship which is core to the visual design language of the series (you can read identifying information from the FX.) It's not going to happen in any foreseeable future.
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Is beam firing? If yes then show visual according to cosmetic slot.
All weapons then show the same colour and effect, with locks in place such as only phasers can use phaser visuals like the fed blue/orange etc. Instead of the game checking to see what each individual weapon is and applying that visual. Underneath a beam is a beam and a cannon shot is still a cannon shot.
Unless of course by prohibitive you're alluding the the ability of the devs to make things work.
If they wanted a serious chance on the shield cosmetics in lockboxes then they'd have had them as a padding item in their own right not buried under the weapon crate RNG.
As I said cryptic are far too fixated on ships = content for a healthy longterm budget, it is stagnating and will continue to do so. Less content means less ec earned by regulars meaning less of a market for the whales and exchange gougers so they'll stop spending as much.
They need to expand the scope for how they make their money and (to get back on topic) making even the traits from the one off ships would be a step towards making those ships of more interest to more people. More interest means the market gets a boost in demand.
Better than the NOTHING followed by the NOTHING they're currently getting.
If that was the case CBS would have already taken their IP back and shuttered the STO servers.
Cryptic is under contract. If they don't make royalty payments to the IP holders they don't get to keep using it. So clearly someone is spending money. Its not you ok... make no mistake your demand in order to open your wallet is a none starter.
Like it or not gamble boxes make bank. Go look at the exchange and count how many keys are being sold for EC right now. There are somewhere in the range of 2-3k keys on the exchange at any one time. You can watch the keys move... you can watch the lockbox cast offs get posted on the exchange. (so no people aren't just reselling keys there using them) Bottom line is a good $3-5k dollars worth of keys move just in the key->ec market every single day. There is an additional $2k or so in zen posted on the exchange at any moment... and I would wager at least twice as much actually changes hands every day. A lot of that zen is ending up in Zen->key->EC conversions. (that is also not counting the handful of whales that simply open their wallet buy zen and keys, and use them. I can't tell you how many gamblers Cryptic has hooked but I'm going to bet there are a few spending way more then is healthy)
Anyway point is... the game is doing fine. You can look at the game markets and glean a pretty good understanding of the financials behind STO. No the game doesn't have a massive player base, I doubt there are more then 10-15k players many of whom likely only play a few hours a month. However they are still managing to attract thousands a day into their lockbox/key exchange grinder. I can't tell you how that compares to people simply buying ships directly with Zen... but I'm going to bet there is no way in heck outside of zen ship launch windows that Cryptic is seeing $4-5k a in direct zen store sales.
Yes, they've directly stated on Ten Forward weekly that letting players change weapon visual FX would take a huge effort, well beyond reasonably expected returns, if there wasn't an IP issue to consider (which there is.)
They looked into it, answer is "no for the foreseeable future."
Or directly undermine the sales of those ships. What you're looking for is new content packages that offer original traits, ships, and other items that aren't easily packaged in other formats...such as we saw in the ViL and AoD starter bundles (including items which historically don't sell well on their own but still found a viable place in the c-store.)
We do get new content in monetized channels. Even what you buy on the exchange from lock boxes results in money for Cryptic because someone along the way ultimately spent money for the zen on the originating lock box key (and your exchange activity helped provide a reason beyond immediate item use), be that directly or through an LTS. But, marketplace expansions do have to respect historical trends of what does and doesn't sell. Simply insisting that things are stagnating doesn't overcome that. There has to be a deeper structural reason to believe that items like ship cosmetics would be better served by the c-store (as stand-alone items) rather than packaged in other formats (be they with ships, lock boxes, T6 reputations, and maybe even events. Cryptic has to maintain an ecosystem of incentives to support player activity and the basic inclination to spend money on the game, not just reductive store listings.)
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Depends on the definition of content.
Ships, weapons and other lockbox frippery are stuff, not content you can participate in. Missions could probably be done faster if they relied less on known trek characters and created their own to use, also save a few quid on VA costs. Although the downside would be a return to the ridiculous scenario such as the one where tnae is talking with taris and its the same person voicing both.
There's also the QA side which as we've seen is almost nonexistent, otherwise before the storm wouldn have had a better scaled map to compensate for boffs, nexus mission wouldn't have required players to jump onto the warpcore to interact with it or indeed have geordie get his head stuck in the door to 10 forward every time he went near it.
If the team is that small then all the more reason to be looking into other possible revenue streams that are less time consuming but still seen as providing some value to those that would buy into the items. Time constraints was part of the excuse given for romulans being shafted on the last couple of bundles and the lack of veteran ship& shuttle for jem hadar.
Well that is sort of always the case though.
Here is the hard reality some people don't want to accept.
Zen ships are less then.... yes many are cannon ships ect. But they are less then.
Fleets are a step up... and yes you get a discount on them if you already bought the zen ship.
Lobi are a step up from there.
Lockbox from there. (arguable lobi and lockbox are pretty close)
Special Pack super lockbox ships are up from there again.
Now having said that there is 100% a Zen value for every single one. You can already buy ANY ship you want in the game with zen.
The average lobi ship goes for 220 mil EC. Or aprox 5500 zen give or take.
The average lockbox ship goes for 300 mil EC. Or aprox 7500 zen give or take.
The average Special pack ship goes for 900 mil ec. Or 23,000 zen give or take.
Could a 3k zen PER toon unlock of Lockbox/lobi ships make sense. Well ya perhaps. That isn't the craziest idea I have heard. It would be a discount past the first one... they would have to add a system to the exchange to count unlocks of ships. But that isn't a big deal it would work much the same way on the back end as the account unlocks work for the reclaim stores.
At the same time instead of Zen... perhaps they could use the Fleet store as a way of doing the same thing. Adding a Loot box category to the fleet ship store. Setting the costs accordingly Perhaps say 12 fleet modules (6000 zen worth) for one single lockbox ship (although with fleet modules sitting around 10-11 mil each this would be a massive discount... not sure if fleet modules would adjust up or if Cryptic would have to set the cost more around 20-25 fm per first ship)... and a 50% discount for additional copies of the same ship bought on the same account. This would also eat up all the free modules people are about to get... shouldn't really devalue the lockbox proper wins, and give the QQers a more direct I just want to buy it price. (as I have already made clear you can buy any lockbox ship in the game right now with zen)
Am I though? Quite sad if so.
But, if we consider total demand to be the sum of "casual demand" and "whale demand"...
then we can look at the demand due to casual players like myself. We mostly choose each month how much of our disposable income goes to gaming, and how much goes to STO specifically, and for us, 'persistent' unlocks - store items that are not deleted along with characters but are returned to the account - adds a LOT of value to the items. So the demand for ships due to casuals can only increase if the ships are made - not account wide unlocks - but at least account persistent.
The demand from whales? I really can't hazard a guess as to how many ships a whale has on a character, but two thoughts come to mind: 1. Theres a limit to how many ships a single character can hold even counting unlockable ship slots *1, and if you are collecting everything you are probably not unboxing every ship on every character. So account wide ship unlocks are not going to reduce demand for ships. 2. Whales are trying to collect all-the-things and again - with limited ship slots per toon, are NOT going to be deleting characters to rationalize their ships onto fewer characters. So account wide ship unlocks will not reduce demand. 3. There are so many things in lock boxes to unlock that whales will always be able to spend their disposable income on keys for lockboxes. So demand for ships will not be reduced with account wide special ship unlocks.
*1 I'm not sure - can you unlock more ship slots per character indefinitely.
So, to summarize:
1. Refunding special ships and other store purchases upon character deletion increases the demand from casuals.
2. Account wide unlocks of special ships also increases demand from casuals.
3. Refunding special ships and other store purchases definitely does not decrease demand from whales.
4. Account wide unlocks of special ships also does not decrease demand from whales.
Micro Economics 101 covers this material.