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Stop the Legendary Bundling

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  • thegrandnagus1thegrandnagus1 Member Posts: 5,165 Arc User
    That Cryptic makes bundles because single ships don't sell, whereas bundles do, is a hard fact.

    Assuming this was mentioned in some interview/podcast, but can you explain what was actually said and by whom, so we are all on the same page.

    The-Grand-Nagus
    Join Date: Sep 2008

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  • foxman00foxman00 Member Posts: 1,478 Arc User
    That Cryptic makes bundles because single ships don't sell, whereas bundles do, is a hard fact.

    Assuming this was mentioned in some interview/podcast, but can you explain what was actually said and by whom, so we are all on the same page.

    Agreed. We have too many instances of people going "devs said X, or Y" with no context or link to written or verbal evidence.

    I also remember them mentioning something about singles compared to bundles. But it is best for everyone here to see/hear the comment so we dont get bogged down in "Oh devs never said that!!!!, Or "devs actually said this!!!!" arguments
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  • strathkinstrathkin Member Posts: 2,666 Bug Hunter
    edited August 2021
    While I watched most of the Stream, I missed the part you guys were eluding toward.

    While they could make two 6000 ZEN Ship packs, as I suggested on first page; question is would they... despite being more affordable, in two separate purchase for those on a tighter budget.

    As several like supporting Cryptic, yet can't always fork out the higher cost packs.
    Post edited by strathkin on
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  • evilmark444evilmark444 Member Posts: 6,950 Arc User
    That Cryptic makes bundles because single ships don't sell, whereas bundles do, is a hard fact.

    Assuming this was mentioned in some interview/podcast, but can you explain what was actually said and by whom, so we are all on the same page.

    He's always vague about it because they aren't allowed to give specific details, but Kael has said on stream several times that internal data shows that bundles sell significantly better than individual ships do.
    Lifetime Subscriber since Beta
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  • thegrandnagus1thegrandnagus1 Member Posts: 5,165 Arc User
    edited August 2021
    That Cryptic makes bundles because single ships don't sell, whereas bundles do, is a hard fact.

    Assuming this was mentioned in some interview/podcast, but can you explain what was actually said and by whom, so we are all on the same page.

    He's always vague about it because they aren't allowed to give specific details, but Kael has said on stream several times that internal data shows that bundles sell significantly better than individual ships do.

    Cool thanks. And earlier Som said this:

    The "selling better" was in reference to how many people bought it, not to it being more expensive, thus Cryptic is getting more money.

    So in his vague statement Kael not only said that bundles sell better, but also specified they sold better not simply due to the higher price but to the number of units sold?

    The reason I'm asking is because I would actually like to be able to use this statement in the future when people ask why they can't buy the ships individually. However to be able to use it we need to clarify what was actually said and not be putting it in our own words.

    The-Grand-Nagus
    Join Date: Sep 2008

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  • redeyedravenredeyedraven Member Posts: 1,297 Arc User
    edited August 2021
    IMHO, the least they *could* do would be to have a dynamic discount-system like LoL does for example - reducing the price by any items you already own. I already have the uniforms and playable remans, so it'd be nice if that'd be subtracted from the total cost.

    Also, 35% off is a little lame... most of the smaller legendary bundles were 50% off on their initial run.
  • jonsillsjonsills Member Posts: 10,354 Arc User
    The fact that they're offering a number of bundles, but not a lot of individual ships, should be all you need to know the bundles sell better. Each ship can be assumed to take about the same amount of time to design, and Cryptic (like any corporation) will take the action that gets them the most profit in the end except under unusual circumstances, so the fact that they're selling several ships at a time for one bundled price rather than popping out individual ships at a faster rate tells us that the bundles sell more, thus bringing in greater profit, than the individuals.
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  • thegrandnagus1thegrandnagus1 Member Posts: 5,165 Arc User
    jonsills wrote: »
    The fact that they're offering a number of bundles, but not a lot of individual ships, should be all you need to know the bundles sell better. Each ship can be assumed to take about the same amount of time to design, and Cryptic (like any corporation) will take the action that gets them the most profit in the end except under unusual circumstances, so the fact that they're selling several ships at a time for one bundled price rather than popping out individual ships at a faster rate tells us that the bundles sell more, thus bringing in greater profit, than the individuals.

    I've made the same argument several times. But there is a difference between reasoning it out and actually saying "Cryptic said this". If we are going to do the latter we need to be able to provide the actual quote.

    The-Grand-Nagus
    Join Date: Sep 2008

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  • sennahcheribsennahcherib Member Posts: 2,823 Arc User
    davideight wrote: »
    Cryptic has stated many times in the past that the reason why they focus on bundles is because single ships have historically never sold well, while bundles, of pretty much any type, have always sold better.

    As the above posters mention, they aren't going to stop doing something that makes them more money... especially when their data shows more people want this then ships by themselves.


    yeah mathematecally they sell better, cause i have to pay the ship i want, and one i dont want - yeah market-logic i know. i wont buy anything where i have to double price for sth i actually never wanted.

    its different if you make a 10 ships pack and i dont like like 2 of them, but those 2/4 bundles where 1-3 ships are useless JUNK i have to pay 2x /3x the price to get the one ship i wanted.

    i didnt buy the leg ambassador, though i liked it, cause it came with 3 ships i didnt like - and i dont buy this cause its 50% junk - i didnt buy the other leg packs cause they were full of junk tokens, that doubled the price.


    its not that sthose ships dont "sell well" they just cant milk 100dollar out of a single desired ships that way. THATS the explanation.
    It keeps the majority of players away from having ships and soon the game will be empty, cause they only feed the big buyers.

    There are plenty of bundles going all the way back to the T5 days where the ships have been available both individually AND in a bundle, so they have tons of data from those ships to know which method sells better. It doesn't matter what you or I prefer, Cryptic will always go for the business model that produces the most sales.

    I would like to know these mysterious numbers. How many players buy these bundles, and how many players would have buy a single ship? Cryptic doesn't have currently a reasonable way of making money; they just want instant money without a long-term vision. this is why they try to sell bundles after bundles after bundles.
    when you have reached level 65, your ship worth nothing, because you have nothing to do with her. I don't understand why players keep buying ships.
    As i write these lines one of my characters stands in front the bank console on new romulus, because i don't know what to do in game.

    As someone who has played since beta (2008) I totally get where you are coming from. I've got all the ships I actually want, and have found whenever some new ship happens to peak my interest and I buy it, it's not long before I revert back to the classics I really love.

    So why do I keep playing? It's a combination of this being the only Trek MMO, habit, time/money investment, and actually enjoying the game itself. I actually enjoy going back and replaying episodes (some I don't, but most) with different themed crews and ships.

    My advice to you: if you are bored and don't know what to do, play whatever mission/TFO you can't remember the last time you played it (with the one exception of it being something you absolutely hate). But playing something you haven't played in a long time can be pretty fun.

    I play at sto since 2012 myself, and I left the game a lot of time, for differents reasons and if I keep playing at sto, this is for the same reasons as yours. From time to time, i create a new character or I modify an old one and i redo the old contents, but for the new characters at lvl65, the game is too tedious (grind for the reputations with poor gear, the upgrade system totally unfriendly etc). this is why I delete them after a moment.

    And now, everything is sold in bundles. I was already disppointed by this love of bundles since the temporal recruitment. if you wanted to have a tos ship at level 65, you had to buy 1 t6 and an other low tier ship for the skin or the second choice was to buy the mega bundle.
    Finally, I spent almost as much money to buy what i wanted, than the price of the bundle.
    I'm not the only one to do that, but this choice is now removed and cryptic loses customers.
  • horridpersonhorridperson Member Posts: 665 Arc User
    > @westmetals said:
    > As mentioned... I do not actually mind the concept of bundles in general.
    >
    > I just don't like the ones with the "upgrade your character to level 65" stuff, because that is useless to someone who does not intend to start a new character.

    That wasn't much of an upsell for me either. I enjoy leveling a character. I guess some people don't. Maybe if there was an option to sell it rather than open it. I don't know what someone would pay to avoid the grind but at least it would make someone happy.
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  • trekfangrrrl#6910 trekfangrrrl Member Posts: 111 Arc User
    protoneous wrote: »
    While it can be helpful to remind people what Cryptic said about various things on a live stream, without offering your personal likes and dislikes this can create the illusion that you don't have an opinion of your own, and can come across as kind of prematurely squashing or dismissing any discussion that may be important to other folks.

    It's like the current ground patrols thread where you mentioned what Cryptic may have said about ground content but also offer your own opinion on the same. This can go a long way in achieving a balanced response that encourages some discussion and acknowledges things that may be important to other people so perhaps isn't necessarily a waste of time.
    The fundamental difference is that the quality of ground combat is a subjective matter, thus warranting an opinion. That Cryptic makes bundles because single ships don't sell, whereas bundles do, is a hard fact.
    i get the biz side of it, but you always seem to advocate for cryptic and not the player. for once, can you just be supportive of players and ideas without shielding cryptic? i mean, there are things id like to own, do, etc, but i realize id never get that, or in reality want it. looks cool, but nope, dont want it.
    And there is a reason for that. I have been going to video game forums for quite a long time now, and in all that time I've noticed an inescapable fact. Most players are not worth supporting, and are, near universally, far worse then the developers(not just Cryptic but in general) then they demonize.

    Any time the devs won't add a feature a person wants its because the devs are lazy. Any time a feature doesn't come out like a player thought it should its because the devs are incompetent. Any time people ask for something they say would be popular, and the devs respond that data shows it wouldn't, they are just lying/manipulating data so they can be lazy/incompetent. Any time something is sold for a price higher then what someone believes it should be, or in a manner other then they personally want, its because the devs are greedy/price gouging. Any time any of these things goes on for any significant amount of time its because the devs are actively conspiring against the playerbase to not add something that would totally make money... because reasons! All honest conversation, and calls for communication from devs, are met with attacks of the same buzzwords used above. These same people have formed a culture propagated by YouTube gaming "journalists" like Angry Joe, Yong Yea, and Jim Sterling, who prop up this sort of attitude/mentality as being acceptable, and correct, allowing it to go on, and grow in size and ferocity, over the years.

    You ask why I rarely, if ever, support players... Its easy, what have they ever done to warrant support from? Why do you think I would want to support people who act that way in the first place? I don't support them because most players are simply not worth supporting. Same reason why most people outside of gaming culture don't support it either. Its a fairly miserable state of affairs, and I hate that the thing I enjoy has been dragged down into a ditch by these people.

    I'm actually really glad you made this post because it reveals a lot about why you act the way you do. You clearly have a deep hatred for the players of most games and most certainly for the people posting on the forums, so I have to ask you a direct question:

    Why are you even here?

    Don't get me wrong; you have every right to be. But when you so clearly hate most of the people here and basically think they are human trash, why do you spend all your free time constantly engaged in petty bickering?

    Do you actually even play this game or do you just spend all of your time talking about how disgusted you are with the players and the people that post on the forums?
  • evilmark444evilmark444 Member Posts: 6,950 Arc User
    Having spent a lot of time on other game forums, particularly the WoW forums, I have to admit that Som does have a little bit of a point when it comes to players. STO doesn't have this problem as much, but in WoW it doesn't matter what the devs do there are ALWAYS a large number of people on the forums demanding that all the devs get fired (even prior to the current lawsuit that's going on, which I will not address on this post). As a whole playerbases tend to be deeply divided on what they actually want, with many people having unrealistic expectations, and the one thing most are able to agree on is that they are unhappy.
    Lifetime Subscriber since Beta
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  • sthe91sthe91 Member Posts: 5,403 Arc User
    protoneous wrote: »
    While it can be helpful to remind people what Cryptic said about various things on a live stream, without offering your personal likes and dislikes this can create the illusion that you don't have an opinion of your own, and can come across as kind of prematurely squashing or dismissing any discussion that may be important to other folks.

    It's like the current ground patrols thread where you mentioned what Cryptic may have said about ground content but also offer your own opinion on the same. This can go a long way in achieving a balanced response that encourages some discussion and acknowledges things that may be important to other people so perhaps isn't necessarily a waste of time.
    The fundamental difference is that the quality of ground combat is a subjective matter, thus warranting an opinion. That Cryptic makes bundles because single ships don't sell, whereas bundles do, is a hard fact.
    i get the biz side of it, but you always seem to advocate for cryptic and not the player. for once, can you just be supportive of players and ideas without shielding cryptic? i mean, there are things id like to own, do, etc, but i realize id never get that, or in reality want it. looks cool, but nope, dont want it.
    And there is a reason for that. I have been going to video game forums for quite a long time now, and in all that time I've noticed an inescapable fact. Most players are not worth supporting, and are, near universally, far worse then the developers(not just Cryptic but in general) then they demonize.

    Any time the devs won't add a feature a person wants its because the devs are lazy. Any time a feature doesn't come out like a player thought it should its because the devs are incompetent. Any time people ask for something they say would be popular, and the devs respond that data shows it wouldn't, they are just lying/manipulating data so they can be lazy/incompetent. Any time something is sold for a price higher then what someone believes it should be, or in a manner other then they personally want, its because the devs are greedy/price gouging. Any time any of these things goes on for any significant amount of time its because the devs are actively conspiring against the playerbase to not add something that would totally make money... because reasons! All honest conversation, and calls for communication from devs, are met with attacks of the same buzzwords used above. These same people have formed a culture propagated by YouTube gaming "journalists" like Angry Joe, Yong Yea, and Jim Sterling, who prop up this sort of attitude/mentality as being acceptable, and correct, allowing it to go on, and grow in size and ferocity, over the years.

    You ask why I rarely, if ever, support players... Its easy, what have they ever done to warrant support from? Why do you think I would want to support people who act that way in the first place? I don't support them because most players are simply not worth supporting. Same reason why most people outside of gaming culture don't support it either. Its a fairly miserable state of affairs, and I hate that the thing I enjoy has been dragged down into a ditch by these people.

    Thanks for your perspective and critique of gaming culture. With that said, some people think that you come across as a Cryptic shill, Cryptic Defense Force kind of guy, etc. I personally do not hold these sentiments but thanks for helping me understand what position you come from. This helps for people to understand each other and stop with the name-calling, unconstructive criticism, etc. that I see in the forums, social media, etc. where some people not all act entitled, hate Cryptic with a passion, take words out of context, etc. I also do not agree when people put players into two camps: player vs. Cryptic Defense Force. We all play the same game so we are all players even if we do not agree with each other. Even though I am not perfect, I want to be salt and light in these forums and social media which means treating those I have a personality conflict and/or difference of opinion with dignity, respect, and consideration of what they say and/or believe even if I do not agree with a little, some, or not all of it.

    Now onto the topic at hand, I am not against Legendary Bundles or any bundles. Though I can understand people wanting to purchase ships separately and that should also be an option. Personally, I think that upgrades should not be part of such bundles just ships, costumes, species unlocks, etc. This decision also seems to be a response to the hatred against lockboxes and/or the laws passed in certain countries restricting their use. I personally still do not understand and have heard the arguments for and against that concept which I will not rehash. I do understand why people did not like it in Star Wars Battlefront 3 (?) though. Those are my two cents on the matter. :)
    Where there is a Will, there is a Way.
  • jennycolvinjennycolvin Member Posts: 1,100 Arc User
    edited August 2021
    I'm actually really glad you made this post because it reveals a lot about why you act the way you do. You clearly have a deep hatred for the players of most games and most certainly for the people posting on the forums, so I have to ask you a direct question:

    Why are you even here?

    Don't get me wrong; you have every right to be. But when you so clearly hate most of the people here and basically think they are human trash, why do you spend all your free time constantly engaged in petty bickering?

    Do you actually even play this game or do you just spend all of your time talking about how disgusted you are with the players and the people that post on the forums?

    I envy your patience, but if I may: you'd be better off just ignoring his posts. He's not worth the time and effort.

    Now, onto the topic at hand: legendary bundles are all well and good, but I support OP's idea of allowing people, even just for only a few days a year, to buy single legendary ships.
    That should accomodate those that have no problem buying the complete bundle and those that, for whatever reason, can't or don't want to.
    Neither option shouls automatically exclude the other and in fact, they can and should coexist.
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    Not agreeing with someone doesn't give you the right to be an TRIBBLE.

    Ci sono tre tipi di giocatori:
    - quelli a cui non va mai bene niente... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
    - quelli che sono talmente imbesuiti da credere a qualunque cosa i dev dicano, perfino che la luna è fatta di formaggio... e vanno sul forum a trollare;
    - quelli che credono a quello a cui è giusto credere, sono d'accordo con quello con cui è giusto essere d'accordo e sono critici con quello che non va;

    Ai giocatori dei primi due tipi, gratis in omaggio un bello specchio lucente su cui arrampicarsi. E una mazzata in testa per la loro poca intelligenza e compassione verso gli altri giocatori che non la pensano come loro.
    Agli appartenenti al terzo tipo, invece, dico grazie. Anche se non sempre si riesce a mantenere la calma, siete quelli per cui vale la pena incazzarsi.
  • fazemladaiyafazemladaiya Member Posts: 166 Arc User
    edited August 2021
    I buy all Legendary ships anyway and consider any items in the pack to be mere bonuses. Everything in STO is affordable compared to some other games that have run me off due to pricing. I can name another game where the prices are aimed at the crazy wealthy and not normal gamers. I would not object to Cryptic making single ship offers, but either way I prefer the bundles and look forward to snagging these when I get off the road for my next hometime.
  • discojer2#5455 discojer2 Member Posts: 40 Arc User
    True. I used to play a game that had a new mount every month (and every month it had slightly better stats) and the mount would be in a gamble box akin to our promo boxes.

    (OTOH, they could be traded, so there was a hand me down economy that we don't have here)

This discussion has been closed.