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Suggestion for Lobi ships
shadow
Member Posts: 23 Arc User
Use the ships from the series concept designs. There are many ships that could be used like the original design for Voyager, the klingon ships from Discovery season 1.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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A hitch with that is mudd bundles, ancient lock box ships are prime fodder for those too. Because these are very old news, it's also debatable how much they'll move the needle for players. If you've really wanted [insert ancient lock box ship here], you've likely already gotten it over the years via the box, the exchange, mudd's (if available), or event campaigns. Shifting the price tag from a loot box or mega-bundle to multiply obscured currencies also may not resonate with players as a great deal, as its more difficult to perceive its value. That's especially true given that there's two ways to obtain lobi ships.
Method 1: opening lock boxes, which will cost more than a mudd bundle for one lobi ship (plus everything else the boxes contain but if all you want is a ship then that just amounts to an extremely inflated and ill-defined bundle). Method 2: the exchange, which is the only route by which lobi ships are generally desirable because the price isn't too far off standard c-store. Though if you're wanting Cryptic to charge roughly standard c-store prices for old lock box ships, there's a MUCH less obtuse way to go about that (ie. just sell it in the standard c-store). Lobi allows Cryptic to charge some extra premiums and hide the cost, but legendary and mudd's provides that desired up charge with transparency over said cost and explicit mitigation (ex. extra features like defined bundle goodies and account unlocks for RNG/Lobi ships). There aren't many opportunities these days for lobi to be the sensible ship release choice over other formats. When it was loot box or bust for fancy ships, the guaranteed buy bought lobi a lot of good will. But...we have loot box ships in the c-store by other means now.
New layouts for old lock box ships could provide a bit more oomph to the idea, and functional separation with other release formats (while also allowing the "new" lobi ship to eventually plug into them). However, that's getting into more work being required and this could easily feature creep into full new variants (including new hull, console, trait) that would demand another release format to justify costs. And even if you managed to throw a new ship into the lobi store, chances are that would take the spot of a more expendable c-store ship rather than a much more vital lock box ship (for Cryptic's bottom line). So odds are it wouldn't help improve the equity or accessibility of STO's economy. There's a narrow range where investment into lobi ships makes sense (from anyone's POV), and claims that it would benefit Cryptic need to be tempered by how many players really go for the highest tier of lobi and aren't satisfied by buying the Vengeance.
Per Jeremy, the Vengeance was the dominant ship by a long ways in lobi. Any new ship has a brief window of novelty buffing its lobi sales but it will quickly face the test of whether its sales survive in the face of the Vengeance juggernaut. If not, then there's very little net gain to the store for the dev effort (it's not growing the lobi market), folks just keep buying the Vengeance and engage little with the remaining ship selection. That may be a contributing factor why Cryptic moved away from lobi ships in the first place. Added investment =/= proportional returns, given the concentration of interest in one old ship and fixed patterns of behavior.
TL/DR: lobi isn't that shiny of a format anymore and probably wouldn't help much. It's probably fine to let the format fade and leave the lobi store to smaller scale (ie. 200 or less) buys. If we need a new way to release ships, then new c-store schemes (or sacrificing a low-stakes ship for an experimental format, ex. the R&D system) would be more promising.
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