@Pikolu I am merely stating what kabam stated as reason. I am okay with whales spending their money to go through carina v3. But what kabnam said is,revive farming is killing skills as a player with skills levels of a cavailer level can easily beat carina v3 with revive farming. So it is essential to remove revive farming. My question is,if skills is the issue,they can still make item use limitations in eop like aq/aw instead? Which will affect both ftp and whales. Their reason is lame. Revive farming removal just killed contents like aol,lol and eop along with carina v3. But obviously,it improved story contents and eq/variants. Now people restart the quest instead of revive spamming on story content.
Recently the gap between paid players and free to play players are widening. The revive farming removal is a great proof for this.
These 2 things are not a condition of the other. The gap started widening the day this game was released and offers were available. The gap will never close and it really doesn't matter in the totality of the game. Revive farming will never close the gap either. People just need to accept that there are 2, completely different paths in the game and that's ok. F2P shouldn't ever think they'll be on the same level as a mega whale who can afford to get every offer out there. It's not just feasible.
Revive farming has only be removed for a couple of weeks and is in no way responsible for any gap between players who spend and F2P summoners. Revive farming hasn't existed that long, it came about because of the changes to acts 1-3. Did it happen before then? Of course but it was quite a bit more work because of longer paths and less chance of finding the resources. Arena was the main mode to get the units to help clear content.
Just play the game your way and don't worry about other accounts. Only worry about where you want to be in the game.
Their reason is lame. Revive farming removal just killed contents like aol,lol and eop along with carina v3. But obviously,it improved story contents and eq/variants. Now people restart the quest instead of revive spamming on story content.
No, it brings that content inline with what they want it to be. It's "Everest" content for a reason. It's meant for you to take your time to build out your team and formulate a strategy. Research fights and prepare for it. Not spend hours getting 100 revives and just plowing through that content in 3 hours.
The "cash grab" justification comes up, in my opinion, because there's a perceived race between spenders and free Players. This is folly. There is no competition, and the game allows Players to play for free or by spending. There is no competition. Nor is it going to phase out people playing for free. The misconception is the more people spend, the less F2P matter. The reality is the more people spend, the more possible it is for people to play for free. People are never going to have access to what people buy, for free. That's true at the most basic level. Players are paying for access to something they don't have for free. Spending accelerates progress. Aside from the occasional rare item that's collectible, the vast majority of spending saves time. That's about it. It's not necessary in this game, and it's also not logical for people to expect to go toe-to-toe with the vast spenders without spending. It's not even a comparison, let alone a competition. Thank you for giving some thoughts on this, DNA. I agree with your stance. Thank God people spend. It means people have a game to complain about. 😉
There is a desire by many players that the game be free-to-play compatible. Answer: It really isn’t. It’s not that kind of game. You probably have to at least purchase the sigil, the daily card subscriptions, units to complete key content, and at least some of the deals during the major deal events. Otherwise, it will simply be too hard to keep up. I think there is still a legitimate complaint when blatant price gouging occurs. For example, if Titan crystals are monetarily expensive but become the only realistic way to get good 7* champs, then I complaints that these are not being offered at reasonable costs are fair game.
There is a desire by many players that the game be free-to-play compatible. Answer: It really isn’t. It’s not that kind of game. You probably have to at least purchase the sigil, the daily card subscriptions, units to complete key content, and at least some of the deals during the major deal events. Otherwise, it will simply be too hard to keep up. I think there is still a legitimate complaint when blatant price gouging occurs. For example, if Titan crystals are monetarily expensive but become the only realistic way to get good 7* champs, then I complaints that these are not being offered at reasonable costs are fair game.
You don't have to "keep up". Just play and have fun, and ignore what people ahead of you are doing. Easy.
I don't understand the relation between the number of players and the notion that, since we have fewer spenders, the whales have to carry their payment weight. It's not consumables, a factory makes 100 pencils for 100 people and the cost is X, x/100 for each player. The production is one thing, the game, even if there s one person playing it or 1 million.
Second, the problem is not that we have money offers in the game, but the nature of them, the strategy. Since there s fewer spenders overall, we have to make the whales to spend more to make up for the loss. That leads to monetize even more aspects of the game, having ridiculous offers that, don't only make the gap between ftp players and spenders bigger than in the past years, but now there s also a gap between casual buyers and rich people. This new gap is growing by the month, and make even more casuals to stop buying things. At the end, the whales will also stop carrying, because they won't have and actual competition except among themselves, IF they haven't already quit of frustration because of the input issues.
The solution is, to fix the game, first of all, and second, to make casual spenders to actually want to continue giving their money to a game that's competitive for them.
Example: I was buying the daily monthly offer every time. I stopped, when I realized that I couldn't compete with people that have 40+ r4 6 stars in the first 3 months of paragon, when I was only getting one/month (special irregular content like EoP not included). I can't seriously compete in BGs, because I have high prestige but not every r4 possible, I can't move on to a big alliance that gets the "good stuff" because of the same reason, so it was pointless. The same will be happening with r5s, and 7 stars, and in a bigger scale, since Kabam decided to accelerate the offers, they now give 4 packs of them in big spending events, someone who may got the batches of 3, they won't necessarily get the 4, that s $200 more. That, is a cash grab.
Cyber weekend was their biggest sales weekend in the history of the game. I don't think they have any issue bringing in the money and I don't think input issues reach as many people as you think they do. There's always been a big gap between casual spenders and the mega whales. It didn't just happen. Casual spenders aren't going to be anywhere near as close to things in the game as mega whales. No one can be.
Were you buying the daily offer because you thought it would help you catch up to the mega whales or you were buying it because of the value of the offer? If you weren't a mega whale to begin with, you're never going to catch up. You can't go back and buy all the past offers or participate more in past gifting events. The daily offers aren't something that'll get you there either. Now if you're not buying them because you can't be competitive, I'm not sure how that correlates. R3's and R4's aren't that big of a difference in this game. It's not that big of a gap and with BGs, you can only have a 30 player deck and you're only fighting 3 of those at most of it goes 3 rounds.
Also, do you think they aren't trying to fix the game what what you think is broken?
No daily offers, the monthly cards. Plus most of what was offered in CW and July 4rth. At the start of paragon, it was easy to catch up, sort of, but then, we had the huge monitazation wave of BGs and the track was lost. Then, the Banquet came up, plus the 4 instead of 3 CW packs increase (the cash grab), and it was impossible to follow up. So, from spending $700.00/year, now I m very close to ftp. The whales will keep spending X amount of money, not a truckload of more from last year, because whales don't buy everything in their sight, that's not how it works, but I won't, way less than last year. And there's hundreds of people like me, and that's, in the grand total, a money loss in the future. There's no "gap balance" anymore.
And to be frank, no, I don't think they try to fix the game, at least not as fast as they supposed to.
I don't understand the relation between the number of players and the notion that, since we have fewer spenders, the whales have to carry their payment weight. It's not consumables, a factory makes 100 pencils for 100 people and the cost is X, x/100 for each player. The production is one thing, the game, even if there s one person playing it or 1 million.
Second, the problem is not that we have money offers in the game, but the nature of them, the strategy. Since there s fewer spenders overall, we have to make the whales to spend more to make up for the loss. That leads to monetize even more aspects of the game, having ridiculous offers that, don't only make the gap between ftp players and spenders bigger than in the past years, but now there s also a gap between casual buyers and rich people. This new gap is growing by the month, and make even more casuals to stop buying things. At the end, the whales will also stop carrying, because they won't have and actual competition except among themselves, IF they haven't already quit of frustration because of the input issues.
The solution is, to fix the game, first of all, and second, to make casual spenders to actually want to continue giving their money to a game that's competitive for them.
Example: I was buying the daily monthly offer every time. I stopped, when I realized that I couldn't compete with people that have 40+ r4 6 stars in the first 3 months of paragon, when I was only getting one/month (special irregular content like EoP not included). I can't seriously compete in BGs, because I have high prestige but not every r4 possible, I can't move on to a big alliance that gets the "good stuff" because of the same reason, so it was pointless. The same will be happening with r5s, and 7 stars, and in a bigger scale, since Kabam decided to accelerate the offers, they now give 4 packs of them in big spending events, someone who may got the batches of 3, they won't necessarily get the 4, that s $200 more. That, is a cash grab.
Cyber weekend was their biggest sales weekend in the history of the game. I don't think they have any issue bringing in the money and I don't think input issues reach as many people as you think they do. There's always been a big gap between casual spenders and the mega whales. It didn't just happen. Casual spenders aren't going to be anywhere near as close to things in the game as mega whales. No one can be.
Were you buying the daily offer because you thought it would help you catch up to the mega whales or you were buying it because of the value of the offer? If you weren't a mega whale to begin with, you're never going to catch up. You can't go back and buy all the past offers or participate more in past gifting events. The daily offers aren't something that'll get you there either. Now if you're not buying them because you can't be competitive, I'm not sure how that correlates. R3's and R4's aren't that big of a difference in this game. It's not that big of a gap and with BGs, you can only have a 30 player deck and you're only fighting 3 of those at most of it goes 3 rounds.
Also, do you think they aren't trying to fix the game what what you think is broken?
No daily offers, the monthly cards. Plus most of what was offered in CW and July 4rth. At the start of paragon, it was easy to catch up, sort of, but then, we had the huge monitazation wave of BGs and the track was lost. Then, the Banquet came up, plus the 4 instead of 3 CW packs increase (the cash grab), and it was impossible to follow up. So, from spending $700.00/year, now I m very close to ftp. The whales will keep spending X amount of money, not a truckload of more from last year, because whales don't buy everything in their sight, that's not how it works, but I won't, way less than last year. And there's hundreds of people like me, and that's, in the grand total, a money loss in the future. There's no "gap balance" anymore.
And to be frank, no, I don't think they try to fix the game, at least not as fast as they supposed to.
There never was a "gap balance". There never will be.
How fast are they supposed to fix the game in your terms? Is there some sort of guidebook that says "input issues should take 3 weeks to fix" that the devs aren't adhering to? Are you aware of some secret timelines that the rest of us aren't or is it more they haven't fixed it as fast as you've wanted them to?
I'll keep saying this to everyone who has that mindset- more money won't fix the bugs and if you know more about how to fix those issues, tell them or get a job there and make an impact. Until then you can't say how fast something should or shouldn't take to fix.
I m not discussing the input fixes again, and not here to derail the thread. I m not saying they don't try to fix them or they re not working fast enough, they just don't have this as a priority, I m not a programmer, but I know we could have had a smooth game for a year now at least. I worked in the mobile gaming industry.
Anyway, I m not one of those saying that 7 stars have to be more accessible to everyone, Thronebreakers even, I think the progression level should determine what you get and in what rarity, I m against being Proven and have even one 6 star in your roster. I like, and ws expecting the 15k actually, and I also pro the Titan crystals, but only if the transition from them to the regular 7 star pool doesn't take ages, it should be as much time the featured 6 star champs take to get to the basic.
That is all they worried about! All the money coming in should be used to correct the issues with the game!
For every dollar you spend, 30 cents goes to Apple and Google. Probably something between 10 and 25 cents goes to Marvel/Disney. 10 to 20 cents goes to operating costs for the game. The rest, 25 to 50 cents on the dollar goes to Netmarble to cover their acquisition costs, provide a reasonable rate of return on investment, and stock the lunch room with kimchee. Netmarble probably makes a good 50 to 100 million USD a year in gross profit on MCOC. However, they did pay hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire Kabam in the first place about six years ago. They're going to want to make that money back. Typically you'd expect an acquisition like this to have a 20%-ish ROI, which means you'd expect them to break even in about five years, plus or minus a couple years. So Netmarble might be finally turning a profit on the Kabam acquisition (I am ignoring things like the investment cost to develop the IP, vis-a-vis Realm of Champions). They are not exactly swimming in money.
Exactly zero cents goes to Kabam. Kabam as a wholly owned subsidary of Netmarble does not get any of the game revenue. Netmarble decides what their operating budget will be, including capital costs for equipment and salary and contract budgets for employees and consultants. Kabam has no ability to make more money and spend it how they want, any more than someone at McDonalds can try to sell more french fries to buy a new car.
I am curious, what do you think would happen if Netmarble did go under? Would that just be the end of mcoc or could kabam function independently?
Hypothetically speaking if Netmarble went bankrupt or otherwise failed as a business, its assets would go on the market and sold off, and a profitable game like MCOC would almost certainly land somewhere. Hopefully not with EA. I would imagine NCSoft would be circling that auction like a shark.
I don't understand the relation between the number of players and the notion that, since we have fewer spenders, the whales have to carry their payment weight. It's not consumables, a factory makes 100 pencils for 100 people and the cost is X, x/100 for each player. The production is one thing, the game, even if there s one person playing it or 1 million.
The issue is not the stuff people use in-game. That's almost irrelevant to supporting large playerbases. The problem is the infrastructure to support large playerbases. Game infrastructure doesn't scale discretely. You can't just buy one more player of cloud. If 10,000 players play your game or 100,000 or 1,000,000, you have to scale accordingly. And online gameplay is bursty: you cannot design for average load, you have to design for maximum load. Even players that play for a few days and quit cost money: they take up storage you have to pay for, because you don't want to purge those records in case they come back.
Also, people probably assume there's economies of scale that dominate the costs: the more players, the less they cost incrementally. But that's not true, or rather that's not the only factor when implementing systems at scale. Scale factors have a cost. In other words, if I'm designing a system to service a thousand people there are things I will not bother doing that I will have to do if the system is intended to service a hundred thousand people. As the system scales up, costs start to appear that don't exist at smaller scales. Presuming that the cost to service 50,000 players and 500,000 players is easy to extrapolate is not always accurate.
It takes more work, more development, and more infrastructure to support games with more players.
Second, the problem is not that we have money offers in the game, but the nature of them, the strategy. Since there s fewer spenders overall, we have to make the whales to spend more to make up for the loss. That leads to monetize even more aspects of the game, having ridiculous offers that, don't only make the gap between ftp players and spenders bigger than in the past years, but now there s also a gap between casual buyers and rich people. This new gap is growing by the month, and make even more casuals to stop buying things. At the end, the whales will also stop carrying, because they won't have and actual competition except among themselves, IF they haven't already quit of frustration because of the input issues.
The solution is, to fix the game, first of all, and second, to make casual spenders to actually want to continue giving their money to a game that's competitive for them.
All you would need to do, then, is figure out a way to do something no one in the history of F2P gaming has ever been able to figure out how to do: get most of their players to spend.
This is not a straight forward problem. It gets to the heart of why F2P gaming displaced subscription-based games almost universally. It comes down to this: a game in which most people are spending is a game most people don't want to play. When someone approaches a game for the first time, whether you *can* play it free or not, if they see everyone spending, they assume they too must spend to keep up. That game is not a "free" game even if it is theoretically free. And in practice, they are right: any game that is "so good" that everyone "wants to spend" is a game where everyone must spend. Because anyone who doesn't stands out in the crowd as someone at a distinct disadvantage.
In an F2P game, although every game operator wants to get as many players to spend as possible, there is nevertheless a psychological feedback loop that happens when the majority of players don't spend. It means every new player is surrounded mostly by other free players. It isn't just theoretically possible to not spend, it is also practical to not spend. And this makes the game much more friendly to newer players. And new spenders come from new free players. If you ossify the playerbase with veterans, you're on a permanent decline.
F2P gaming is not just a simple matter of setting up a store and charging for stuff. There's a whole system of economy, operation, and psychology that intertwines in ways we didn't even know existed when the model was first introduced. We didn't know it would take over so completely back in the day, because on paper its just a different way to sell stuff. It isn't. There's a specific momentum to it that takes time to study and understand.
How would you limit acquisition of Rarities to Titles? That would be broken progression as far as I can see.
That s already happening, offers with limit, content and rewards available according to progression, what do you mean?
Technically, someone can amass Rewards without doing specific Story Milestones. Acquire enough Shards, and you can open a 6* Crystal. How do you propose they prevent someone who is Proven from having a 6* in a way that isn't broken?
Hey you think kabam can find new ways of making money? Like skins and maybe othet stuff that affects the BG lets say by small to no amount? I am sure there other ideas besides skins but its the first one to pop up
Yes and no. Yes, there are games that generate a lot of revenue selling what the industry calls cosmetics. Things that don't really affect gameplay, and are there mostly for players to show off.
However, the key problem with selling anything in an F2P game is that the players have to value it. Different players value different things. There are games in which players are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on things that do not help them in the game at all, because they are motivated by the social dynamics of showing off cosmetics. Or they are driven to customize their avatars as a form of expression. For such players, cosmetics are worth something. For other players, they are worth nothing. They don't help conqueror content, they don't help advance in progression, they don't help defeat other players. So they are pointless.
If you're going to make significant revenue selling cosmetics, I think this is something you have to do right from launch. Because you need to send the message that this game is about that, and attract the kind of players that want that. If you don't, you don't attract such players. In fact you repel such players, because they are less likely to play a game in which they cannot express themselves in this manner. If you then try to introduce it years later, most of the players who would have spent money on such things aren't around, while the players you do have will laugh at the offers.
You've basically self-selected a playerbase that wants what you've been selling all along. It is hard to fundamentally change a monetization model for this reason.
In an F2P game, although every game operator wants to get as many players to spend as possible, there is nevertheless a psychological feedback loop that happens when the majority of players don't spend. It means every new player is surrounded mostly by other free players. It isn't just theoretically possible to not spend, it is also practical to not spend. And this makes the game much more friendly to newer players. And new spenders come from new free players. If you ossify the playerbase with veterans, you're on a permanent decline.
Ok, let's say I understand the rest. So, if the ftp pool suffers shrinks, new spenders are getting fewer by the time, and the game suffers. Same with casual spenders get them to spend even more. Everyone has to be happy, right?
LET ME BE CLEAR OF THIS:- I HAVE NO ISSUE RICH CLEARING CARINA V3 IN A WEEK. After all they have to get something for their money right?But look at the reason kabam stated, revive farming is killing skills. I mean what? Spending 5k units per run won't kill the skills?anyone reading my article,please answer this question. How spending 5k units per run(all bought with odin vault) don't kill the skills but revive grinding will?
To put it bluntly, both players trivialize the content. But only one of them is donating money to support free to play players. This isn't just about Kabam's bottom line. This is about we the playerbase. Every time someone trivializes content, exploits a bug, or otherwise breaks the game economy, it is we the rest of the players that pay. It is like someone cheating on an exam. He doesn't just get a better grade. He steepens the curve and lowers everyone else's grade. Someone who blitzes Carinas with a thousand revives is taking rewards out of everyone else's pockets. They just don't see it, because the way those rewards are lost are in invisible balancing operations. The stronger the players get, the harder the content gets. If players are just naturally getting stronger, well that's fine. But when a few players *appear* stronger because they can trivialize the content in unintended ways, that *also* makes everything harder over time, but only those players benefit. Everyone else falls behind.
Spenders return something to the playerbase as a whole in exchange for cutting ahead in line. They essentially collectively pay for the gameplay of the free to play players. We accept that trade on day one when we play this game. Spenders will get ahead, but they pay for the game to exist and they allow the vast majority of free to play players to play the game. What do the revive farmers give back to the playerbase in exchange for blasting through Everest content? Nothing. They just make things harder for everyone else.
Whenever Kabam tries to balance anything, someone always says "well what about the spenders?" The spenders pay for the game, and in exchange they get more. This shouldn't have to be repeated EVERY SINGLE TIME a balancing question comes up. Spenders are always the exception, spending is balanced economically separately from everything else, but the rest of the game still gets balanced even though spenders exist.
There is a desire by many players that the game be free-to-play compatible. Answer: It really isn’t. It’s not that kind of game. You probably have to at least purchase the sigil, the daily card subscriptions, units to complete key content, and at least some of the deals during the major deal events. Otherwise, it will simply be too hard to keep up. I think there is still a legitimate complaint when blatant price gouging occurs. For example, if Titan crystals are monetarily expensive but become the only realistic way to get good 7* champs, then I complaints that these are not being offered at reasonable costs are fair game.
And yet 95% of players don't spend.
Honestly, this is one of the *best* F2P games I've ever played in monetization terms. You can literally do everything free to play. You can get almost everything free to play (the few things you can't get are trivial). You can even be, to at least some extent competitive with the highest tiers of the game. This is not true for the vast majority of free to play games, and none of them that are comparable to MCOC that I'm aware of.
Ok, let's say I understand the rest. So, if the ftp pool suffers shrinks, new spenders are getting fewer by the time, and the game suffers. Same with casual spenders get them to spend even more. Everyone has to be happy, right?
Happy enough. Because for a monetized game to survive, and for that matter for a progressional game to be worth playing in the long run, no one can be totally happy. Progressional games must have things out of reach for players to strive for, or the game becomes pointless to play. And spenders need to have something they want that they can't other wise get, or there's no point to spending.
Progressional games and monetized games are both built on a fundamental premise: wanting is more important than having. And because of this, no progressional F2P game is going to be appealing to everyone. There's too much variation in what people want. You have to strike a balance that is guaranteed to make the game too easy to be worth playing for some, too difficult to be possible to play for others, too expensive for some spenders to want to spend on, and too trivial in value for others to consider worth spending on. You're going to lose people in all four directions, and your goal is to try to find a reasonable center of mass to try to target in the middle somewhere.
I've been studying game design since I was ten, reading financial disclosures for decades, and testing GPT since it became publicly available. I believe I'm qualified to state that if you haven't worked in or experienced a game studio environment guessing about how they work is futile; if you don't understand corporate financials simply applying math to them will not get the results you want; and don't use ChatGPT to try to fill in gaps in knowledge while it is still experimental, heavily steerable by prompting and subject to hallucinations.
"And to be frank, no, I don't think they try to fix the game, at least not as fast as they supposed to."
Well unfortunately they didn't go with my idea to sell plane tickets to Hq and let you yell at the programmers that they're "not working fast enough"
I suggested they work smarter not harder to fix the game faster, and they suggested I climb down off their backs and climb up the nearest tree in order to see farther.
Ok, let's say I understand the rest. So, if the ftp pool suffers shrinks, new spenders are getting fewer by the time, and the game suffers. Same with casual spenders get them to spend even more. Everyone has to be happy, right?
Happy enough. Because for a monetized game to survive, and for that matter for a progressional game to be worth playing in the long run, no one can be totally happy. Progressional games must have things out of reach for players to strive for, or the game becomes pointless to play. And spenders need to have something they want that they can't other wise get, or there's no point to spending.
Progressional games and monetized games are both built on a fundamental premise: wanting is more important than having. And because of this, no progressional F2P game is going to be appealing to everyone. There's too much variation in what people want. You have to strike a balance that is guaranteed to make the game too easy to be worth playing for some, too difficult to be possible to play for others, too expensive for some spenders to want to spend on, and too trivial in value for others to consider worth spending on. You're going to lose people in all four directions, and your goal is to try to find a reasonable center of mass to try to target in the middle somewhere.
Exactly, I agree and that s what I ve been saying. We need a middle ground, that I don't think it s exactly achieved in our case.
Comments
My question is,if skills is the issue,they can still make item use limitations in eop like aq/aw instead? Which will affect both ftp and whales.
Their reason is lame. Revive farming removal just killed contents like aol,lol and eop along with carina v3. But obviously,it improved story contents and eq/variants. Now people restart the quest instead of revive spamming on story content.
Revive farming has only be removed for a couple of weeks and is in no way responsible for any gap between players who spend and F2P summoners. Revive farming hasn't existed that long, it came about because of the changes to acts 1-3. Did it happen before then? Of course but it was quite a bit more work because of longer paths and less chance of finding the resources. Arena was the main mode to get the units to help clear content.
Just play the game your way and don't worry about other accounts. Only worry about where you want to be in the game.
People are never going to have access to what people buy, for free. That's true at the most basic level. Players are paying for access to something they don't have for free. Spending accelerates progress. Aside from the occasional rare item that's collectible, the vast majority of spending saves time. That's about it. It's not necessary in this game, and it's also not logical for people to expect to go toe-to-toe with the vast spenders without spending. It's not even a comparison, let alone a competition.
Thank you for giving some thoughts on this, DNA. I agree with your stance. Thank God people spend. It means people have a game to complain about. 😉
And to be frank, no, I don't think they try to fix the game, at least not as fast as they supposed to.
How fast are they supposed to fix the game in your terms? Is there some sort of guidebook that says "input issues should take 3 weeks to fix" that the devs aren't adhering to? Are you aware of some secret timelines that the rest of us aren't or is it more they haven't fixed it as fast as you've wanted them to?
I'll keep saying this to everyone who has that mindset- more money won't fix the bugs and if you know more about how to fix those issues, tell them or get a job there and make an impact. Until then you can't say how fast something should or shouldn't take to fix.
Well unfortunately they didn't go with my idea to sell plane tickets to Hq and let you yell at the programmers that they're "not working fast enough"
Also, people probably assume there's economies of scale that dominate the costs: the more players, the less they cost incrementally. But that's not true, or rather that's not the only factor when implementing systems at scale. Scale factors have a cost. In other words, if I'm designing a system to service a thousand people there are things I will not bother doing that I will have to do if the system is intended to service a hundred thousand people. As the system scales up, costs start to appear that don't exist at smaller scales. Presuming that the cost to service 50,000 players and 500,000 players is easy to extrapolate is not always accurate.
It takes more work, more development, and more infrastructure to support games with more players.
All you would need to do, then, is figure out a way to do something no one in the history of F2P gaming has ever been able to figure out how to do: get most of their players to spend.
This is not a straight forward problem. It gets to the heart of why F2P gaming displaced subscription-based games almost universally. It comes down to this: a game in which most people are spending is a game most people don't want to play. When someone approaches a game for the first time, whether you *can* play it free or not, if they see everyone spending, they assume they too must spend to keep up. That game is not a "free" game even if it is theoretically free. And in practice, they are right: any game that is "so good" that everyone "wants to spend" is a game where everyone must spend. Because anyone who doesn't stands out in the crowd as someone at a distinct disadvantage.
In an F2P game, although every game operator wants to get as many players to spend as possible, there is nevertheless a psychological feedback loop that happens when the majority of players don't spend. It means every new player is surrounded mostly by other free players. It isn't just theoretically possible to not spend, it is also practical to not spend. And this makes the game much more friendly to newer players. And new spenders come from new free players. If you ossify the playerbase with veterans, you're on a permanent decline.
F2P gaming is not just a simple matter of setting up a store and charging for stuff. There's a whole system of economy, operation, and psychology that intertwines in ways we didn't even know existed when the model was first introduced. We didn't know it would take over so completely back in the day, because on paper its just a different way to sell stuff. It isn't. There's a specific momentum to it that takes time to study and understand.
However, the key problem with selling anything in an F2P game is that the players have to value it. Different players value different things. There are games in which players are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on things that do not help them in the game at all, because they are motivated by the social dynamics of showing off cosmetics. Or they are driven to customize their avatars as a form of expression. For such players, cosmetics are worth something. For other players, they are worth nothing. They don't help conqueror content, they don't help advance in progression, they don't help defeat other players. So they are pointless.
If you're going to make significant revenue selling cosmetics, I think this is something you have to do right from launch. Because you need to send the message that this game is about that, and attract the kind of players that want that. If you don't, you don't attract such players. In fact you repel such players, because they are less likely to play a game in which they cannot express themselves in this manner. If you then try to introduce it years later, most of the players who would have spent money on such things aren't around, while the players you do have will laugh at the offers.
You've basically self-selected a playerbase that wants what you've been selling all along. It is hard to fundamentally change a monetization model for this reason.
Spenders return something to the playerbase as a whole in exchange for cutting ahead in line. They essentially collectively pay for the gameplay of the free to play players. We accept that trade on day one when we play this game. Spenders will get ahead, but they pay for the game to exist and they allow the vast majority of free to play players to play the game. What do the revive farmers give back to the playerbase in exchange for blasting through Everest content? Nothing. They just make things harder for everyone else.
Whenever Kabam tries to balance anything, someone always says "well what about the spenders?" The spenders pay for the game, and in exchange they get more. This shouldn't have to be repeated EVERY SINGLE TIME a balancing question comes up. Spenders are always the exception, spending is balanced economically separately from everything else, but the rest of the game still gets balanced even though spenders exist.
Honestly, this is one of the *best* F2P games I've ever played in monetization terms. You can literally do everything free to play. You can get almost everything free to play (the few things you can't get are trivial). You can even be, to at least some extent competitive with the highest tiers of the game. This is not true for the vast majority of free to play games, and none of them that are comparable to MCOC that I'm aware of.
Progressional games and monetized games are both built on a fundamental premise: wanting is more important than having. And because of this, no progressional F2P game is going to be appealing to everyone. There's too much variation in what people want. You have to strike a balance that is guaranteed to make the game too easy to be worth playing for some, too difficult to be possible to play for others, too expensive for some spenders to want to spend on, and too trivial in value for others to consider worth spending on. You're going to lose people in all four directions, and your goal is to try to find a reasonable center of mass to try to target in the middle somewhere.
I've been studying game design since I was ten, reading financial disclosures for decades, and testing GPT since it became publicly available. I believe I'm qualified to state that if you haven't worked in or experienced a game studio environment guessing about how they work is futile; if you don't understand corporate financials simply applying math to them will not get the results you want; and don't use ChatGPT to try to fill in gaps in knowledge while it is still experimental, heavily steerable by prompting and subject to hallucinations.