Best Of

Overall, this loyalty thing is useless, dumb, and wasted the time of whoever put it together, but it doesn't fit in with monetization conversation.

Is it? Suppose you wanted to make the webstore more attractive to the majority of players who currently use the in-app purchase mechanism, but you didn't want to add too much bonus stuff or units or whatever that would have a significant impact on the game economy. How would you do that?

I wanna meet the person this moves the needle for. I got the great bag of magic beans for sale.

That's like saying you want to meet the person for whom a free cocktail moves the needle for first class flights that cost several thousand dollars. On the one hand, no one person is going to admit that it would. On the other hand, no airline is going to find out by getting rid of it and seeing how many passengers they lose.

No it’s not. One is an established service offering customers expect and are used to the other is a brand new unknown thing meant to entice new users priced in the stratosphere.

Not sure why you are so stuck on defending what’s objectively indefensibly priced.

If you think your perspective is either objective or reasonable, I do not believe I’m capable of eliminating your confusion in this regard.

I’m not the one stuck on anything. I’m just explaining my position, like I always do. Tomorrow I’ll be “stuck” on something else. As this is not my design, I’m not in a position to defend it from anything. I simply find it reasonable, and trivial to justify from a design perspective. The fact that some people see these things as “prices” even though they aren’t, and “too high” even though they are intended to be high, is something you have to defend, as the person choosing to attempt to promote a novel philosophy.

All I have to say is: I don’t think anyone who reaches the position of game economy designer would see it that way. You’re the one that has to somehow convince them to adopt your perspective. Good luck with that.

I don’t need to be a game economy designer to see how poorly this is priced but sure let’s put up those airs….

Or we can look at the pricing models of other Kabam art like the “elite” purple border profile pictures, priced at 500 units each, a real world valuation (that a Kabam game economy designer set) of $20 USD. These “guitar cloths” have them been assigned a real world value that’s 86x (that’s an x not a %) more than the current highest price for pixel art in this game. It’s a valuation that’s approx. 80% more than Dark Phoenix, a trophy Character that was a top milestone reward in an event that paid out far more.

So don’t worry about my “confusion”. Like I said it’s objectively poorly priced… by Kabam’s own standards.

I get that these are supposed to be fun trinkets, that they are supposed “meaningless add ons… but sorry these prices ain’t it. Maybe if they were reasonably attainable then that goal would be hit. Heck we get one of these emotes for free every BGs season. This serves more as a warning sign to get a new hobby

Also saying these emotes cost $2000 is like saying the polishing cloth that comes with a new guitar costs $2000. You are buying the guitar, Gibson is happy to toss in the cloth for free.

As someone that owns a guitar right around that value, I'd like to know where my free polishing cloth is.

But let's get to the real issue of this being a terrible and inaccurate analogy. The only access I have to that free cloth (which may or may not exist for free) is through the spending. Okay, that's fine, the analogy kinda works there. The only access to these emotes is through insane spending. Cool, we can get there with this.

But Gibson doesn't advertise that "free" cloth as a reward for being loyal to the brand, and you have no reasonable free access to any Gibson guitar without spending. There's no structure of spend X get X. If I want to access ANYTHING from Gibson, I spend. Access to this game begins at being free. You guys said, "hey, we want to reward loyalty". Not surprising, a great deal of detail was left out - ya know, the usual detail that would've upset most players prior to launch rather than after launch.

The issue is not the emotes. The issue is not the incursion crystal. This issue is not that they're overvalued to Pluto and back (and yes, you're getting plenty more along the way and these are just freebies). The issue is that you put a price tag on loyalty for a game predominantly made of players that don't or can't spend and told them that their loyalty means absolutely nothing and will go unnoticed and unrewarded.

It was a pretty fair and reasonable assumption for all of us that at least with the market points we get every week we might be able to build up to something cool in this new loyalty program. But apparently an emote every 86 weeks or an incursion crystal every 4 years is just too much for the people that can't afford them.

Why not reward the loyalty of the largest portion of your player base? Because if they all go, so does the game.
Why not reasonably reward the loyalty of your moderate spenders? If I do the math, my (current and likely to be reduced) spending, since the sigil doesn't even get you points, and since the monthly units are only in game, will probably be able to garner about 500 points per year, maybe as much as 2,000 if I get a cyber weekend or J4 deal. Huzzah! In just 6 short years I'll have a new emote! Here I am spending probably $30 a month on average, fluctuating depending on the month, and I'm being told that I'm not loyal enough to have a reasonable chance to earn low value items in customer loyalty program. What about the rest of the moderate spenders like me?

With this "loyalty" program, you haven't just reserved stuff for spenders. You've reserved stuff for the wealthy players and only for them. At the end of the day, should they get more for their spending? Absolutely! Definitely not begrudging that big spenders have access to more stuff, and especially not upset that this is the stuff that they get special access to. At the end of the day, it is those spenders that do the most to keep the lights on.
But to call this a loyalty program is tone deaf. You've just told 99% of your players that they're not loyal enough, so why should they be?

If something isn't for everyone, stop pretending that it is until we find out that it's not.

Nah this guys trying to get Employee Of The Month by saying nearly all the right things and he’s using my thread to do it. I don’t know how to feel about this. 🤔

The quest is still gonna be outdated in a few months and there won’t be any reason for anyone to play it only for the rewards… if it’s meant to be content that holds value over a long time… it’s the opposite of that.

Making rewards relevant far into the future is also something that's difficult to consistently make happen...

Maestro holds down the fort in Necropolis, but that isn't something that can be done in every quest that's released, especially as we're increasing the frequency of popping out Endgame Content.

But you have radiance currency now, that you can update the store.
Wasn't that the purpose of radiance?
Use it.

No.

Radiance is for competitive content.
Wheel of Fate is not competitive content.