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.
I think that a "cash grab" is used when there is an offer that simply costs more than is the value of stuff the buyers get. Like $50 for a 5* today, that would imho be overpriced.
I am personally fine with paying customers getting benefits over f2p, but it feels like an insult for Paragons to be offered 7200 t4b shards for 200 units. If there were huge boosts for spenders, I personally would love it. At least I'd feel like the money spent actually matters, and not that a too-high price tag is slapped on a trash value stuff.
For just $4.99/day you can help feed one dev in need. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee in NYC Starbucks after tip... Please consider sponsoring one of the devs today... you will get a personalized receipt confirming your purchase and some daily item each time you donate...
Logon now, and get that daily crystal from the unit store and sponsor a dev in need today...
For just $4.99/day you can help feed one dev in need. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee in NYC Starbucks after tip... Please consider sponsoring one of the devs today... you will get a personalized receipt confirming your purchase and some daily item each time you donate...
Logon now, and get that daily crystal from the unit store and sponsor a dev in need today...
I know this is satire, but people don't realize there's a distinct possibility the game wouldn't be here in its current capacity and duration without people spending. If that isn't a concern for them, then that begs the question, why are they playing?
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.
Well, it is objectively true that the game achieves *a* middle ground. Whether it is the one you want is a YMMV situation, but any change you make to it in order to add players in one direction is going to lose players from the other direction. Whether you can add more your way than you lose is, of course, where game designers make the big bucks. Or end up living in cardboard boxes.
For just $4.99/day you can help feed one dev in need. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee in NYC Starbucks after tip... Please consider sponsoring one of the devs today... you will get a personalized receipt confirming your purchase and some daily item each time you donate...
Logon now, and get that daily crystal from the unit store and sponsor a dev in need today...
I know this is satire, but people don't realize there's a distinct possibility the game wouldn't be here in its current capacity and duration without people spending. If that isn't a concern for them, then that begs the question, why are they playing?
On this I agree... this game doesn't use outside ad's or sponsors. It doesn't stop between every move and make you watch a 30 second video clip of some other app or game... it has to have ways to generate revenue.
I think that a "cash grab" is used when there is an offer that simply costs more than is the value of stuff the buyers get. Like $50 for a 5* today, that would imho be overpriced.
We all value stuff differently. What's overpriced to you might not be to me. That's the crux of how most F2P games design their monetization.
To put this another way, if someone out there *is willing* to spend $50 on a 5* crystal today, why not let them? They are basically donating money to the game, and asking for very little in return. The game gets cash. The player gets something they want. Everyone else barely notices what they got. Who's the loser here?
That crystal is overpriced to you. But it is not overpriced to the player who buys it. And every time we sell an "overpriced offer" to someone, the game gains revenue in a way that impacts the rest of the playerbase as little as possible.
Every time a player spends *any* money buying *anything* they aren't buying a thing with value. They are buying an advantage over other players of the game. Who's to say what it is worth to cut in line ahead of everyone else? There's no objective way to value a 5* crystal. The value is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. And the value to them is they now have one more 5* than everyone else who didn't buy the offer. If they think it is worth it and buys it, and you think it is not worth it and you don't buy it, isn't that a win-win? They got what they wanted, and meanwhile you don't think they got any significant advantage over you.
The perfect offer is one where someone likes it and buys it, and everyone else thinks they got screwed. Because that means they won't think those players got more than they should have for their money.
I feel you kinda HAVE to spend money at some point to progress your account somewhere at some point.
I've been playing the game for just over a year now. I've been paragon for about 2 and a half months, and I whale pretty hard. I spent probably about 25-30k in 10 months to get to paragon, and since I have tried to not spend nearly as much. And to be frank, it takes about 2 weeks to get enough stuff to take a 6* champ from r1>2, and I still spend, I always buy dailies, and other offeres as they come up. But I feel if you were to truly f2p, it would take 2+ years of daily playing to get to paragon with 0 spending. Because yes with alllllll the crazy rewards and stuff you could get, kabam has said themselves you're supposed to only do 1 at a time
@DNA3000 well when you put it like that, seems absurd to argue the game isn't a cash grab for spenders! I know f2p will disagree here but it does seem a bit ludicrous that spenders effectively get nothing more than an active f2p player does. Except the likes of magus etc, most big spenders only have 1 r5, same as f2p. When you put it likes this, the july 4th and cyber weekend offers seem much less enticing. Effectively you're paying for a slight jump ahead in progression. The only valuable offers to me are when something new comes out. E.g if the next big offer has a significant amount of 7 stars or rank 5 materials. Otherwise it just isnt worth buying in my eyes. They should really give more exclusive stuff to bigger spenders to keep them happy, as if they leave it will be bad for everyone. The 6 star weapon x last cyber weekend was a nice touch and they should probably do a similar thing this year, maybe give a 7star one? Or perhaps a 6 star jessica jones is more realistic.
A similar economic model is the reason Marvel bankrupted in the late 90 s actually.
You probably need to explain that, because I don't see it. In fact, I don't see any possible way for an entertainment and IP company like Marvel to adopt a F2P monetization model for licensing.
There was a narrative back then, which had a lot of truth to it, that the comic book industry had moved away from its populist roots and went too far trying to cater to the collectors, "investors" and upscale market. This concentrated a lot of revenue into the hands of people who were less interested in the IP, and more interested in the trappings of the IP. When the bubble burst in the mid 90s, it slashed most of the players out there, and Marvel was hit the hardest because they had also decided to ring up a ton of debt to fuel consolidating acquisitions that in retrospect were nonsensical.
This is nowhere near the standard F2P microtransaction supported model. Marvel was not giving away 95% of its comic books and selling a few hologram covers for hundreds of dollars. Marvel was selling 100% of their comic books, and increasing the prices for *everyone* with their up-market strategies. In fact, this is *precisely* what many people think would be fairer and less of a "cash grab" here: rather than have a few people spend a lot and everyone else spend nothing, "Make The Game Better" so everyone spends, and spends more.
This is much closer to the strategy that Marvel was using in the late 80s and early 90s, and it was ultimately catastrophic for them. Of course, Ron Perelman's stupidity also ultimately led to the desperate situation that gave us the Avengers, so there's that.
A similar economic model is the reason Marvel bankrupted in the late 90 s actually.
You're about 8 and a half years too late on that assessment because the game has had the same model since inception. The Items that are being offered have changed, but it's always been a "Freemium" game, and if it's killing it, it's been a rate of death for the books.
I feel you kinda HAVE to spend money at some point to progress your account somewhere at some point.
I've been playing the game for just over a year now. I've been paragon for about 2 and a half months, and I whale pretty hard. I spent probably about 25-30k in 10 months to get to paragon, and since I have tried to not spend nearly as much. And to be frank, it takes about 2 weeks to get enough stuff to take a 6* champ from r1>2, and I still spend, I always buy dailies, and other offeres as they come up. But I feel if you were to truly f2p, it would take 2+ years of daily playing to get to paragon with 0 spending. Because yes with alllllll the crazy rewards and stuff you could get, kabam has said themselves you're supposed to only do 1 at a time
At some point, if you have to get there at 800 mph you will need to spend money on rocket fuel.
It sounds like you managed to get from zero to the top tier progression of this game, a progression tier that took over eight years to emerge, in about nine months. That's almost one progression tier a month on average. You are spending not to get there, you are spending to get there instantly. Which is fine, but that's less a requirement the game has, and more of a desire on your part to progress far faster than the game would ordinarily accommodate.
Two years to get to Paragon as an F2P player is not a bad pace at all, really. The game is not going anywhere. It is not like a single player game where you play for 40-80 hours and you're done. It is intended to be indefinite gameplay. Getting to Paragon quicker simply means you get to wait there longer for the next progress tier to come out.
@DNA3000 well when you put it like that, seems absurd to argue the game isn't a cash grab for spenders! I know f2p will disagree here but it does seem a bit ludicrous that spenders effectively get nothing more than an active f2p player does. Except the likes of magus etc, most big spenders only have 1 r5, same as f2p. When you put it likes this, the july 4th and cyber weekend offers seem much less enticing. Effectively you're paying for a slight jump ahead in progression. The only valuable offers to me are when something new comes out. E.g if the next big offer has a significant amount of 7 stars or rank 5 materials. Otherwise it just isnt worth buying in my eyes. They should really give more exclusive stuff to bigger spenders to keep them happy, as if they leave it will be bad for everyone. The 6 star weapon x last cyber weekend was a nice touch and they should probably do a similar thing this year, maybe give a 7star one? Or perhaps a 6 star jessica jones is more realistic.
You're missing the point. The point is not that they don't give enough to spenders and they should give more. The point is they give as little as possible to spenders while still making enough revenue. If Kabam could sell a title to Bill Gates for a billion dollars they'd do that instead. Most of the time, the goal is to get people to spend while disrupting the game as little as possible. If they *need* to give away tons of stuff to get people to spend they will, but that will not be ideal. They would create more tension between the spenders and the non-spenders. Instead, they give away what they need to, and no more.
How do they know how much is enough? The spenders tell them, with their spending. Right now, the spenders are saying that the stuff they offer for sale is worth about $300M USD (that's what players are spending: Netmarble receives 70% of that from Apple and Google). If you don't want to spend that's perfectly fine. Kabam doesn't need your money, or rather it doesn't want to hand out enough stuff to attract your money.
Again, I m not talking about ftp, we re past that, the game needs spenders. I m talking about the model "if there's people that will buy whatever you offer them in whatever price even ridiculously high, why not keep this up". Marvel did that, the market overflowed with special editions and comics with low cost paper, and rebalanced the collectability system. Plus a few more factors of bad marketing strategy. A model that Image also adapted in a way on its first steps and got her almost closed.
I think that a "cash grab" is used when there is an offer that simply costs more than is the value of stuff the buyers get. Like $50 for a 5* today, that would imho be overpriced.
We all value stuff differently. What's overpriced to you might not be to me. That's the crux of how most F2P games design their monetization.
To put this another way, if someone out there *is willing* to spend $50 on a 5* crystal today, why not let them? They are basically donating money to the game, and asking for very little in return. The game gets cash. The player gets something they want. Everyone else barely notices what they got. Who's the loser here?
That crystal is overpriced to you. But it is not overpriced to the player who buys it. And every time we sell an "overpriced offer" to someone, the game gains revenue in a way that impacts the rest of the playerbase as little as possible.
Every time a player spends *any* money buying *anything* they aren't buying a thing with value. They are buying an advantage over other players of the game. Who's to say what it is worth to cut in line ahead of everyone else? There's no objective way to value a 5* crystal. The value is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. And the value to them is they now have one more 5* than everyone else who didn't buy the offer. If they think it is worth it and buys it, and you think it is not worth it and you don't buy it, isn't that a win-win? They got what they wanted, and meanwhile you don't think they got any significant advantage over you.
The perfect offer is one where someone likes it and buys it, and everyone else thinks they got screwed. Because that means they won't think those players got more than they should have for their money.
I agree...to an extent. I guess it then mostly depends on the conception of the market - aka should certain "bad" offers just be banished? It reminds me of the small drama when Logan Paul's Prime entered the market in GB and since the demand was high, the prices soon skyrocketed into hundreds of GBP for a single bottle of flavoured water.
While I agree that value of something is subjective and therefore it should be possible to offer anything for any price you can imagine, there is something that feels wrong about stuff being offered, that you can obtain for fraction of its price (like those catalyst top-ups, that offer stuff like 1/2 t2cc for 200 units, while you can literally buy the same thing in the shop, for the same currency, but much lower price).
As I am not a big spender for this game, averaging $30-40 a year for units and the occasional Platinum Tracks.
I would like to take this time to show my appreciation to all the Whales out there. Without you guys, this game would not have lasted long. I once had a game announce their shutdown right when I was fully enjoying the game, and it's one of my biggest fears ever since then
Again, I m not talking about ftp, we re past that, the game needs spenders. I m talking about the model "if there's people that will buy whatever you offer them in whatever price even ridiculously high, why not keep this up". Marvel did that, the market overflowed with special editions and comics with low cost paper, and rebalanced the collectability system. Plus a few more factors of bad marketing strategy. A model that Image also adapted in a way on its first steps and got her almost closed.
You can’t separate the two. But even if you invalidate the discussion by focusing solely on spenders, you still have the situation where Marvel attempted to get everyone to spend more, whereas the guiding principle of f2p monetization is usually to distribute spending among the willing. Even among the spenders, there are the minnows and there are the whales. We don’t squeeze the minnows, we let them remain minnows while we tease the whales to whale out.
If Kabam kept increasing the cost of the Sigil, if they eliminated the $5 special and replaced it with a more expensive $8 daily special, then MCOC would be following the Marvel premium strategy. Because the problem with the Marvel premium strategy was that there was no non-premium alternative. That’s why saying you’re not talking about F2P is invalid. With MCOC, there’s always an alternative. You don’t have to be a whale. You can step down to a minnow. You can step down to being completely free to play. Comic book readers in the later 80s and early 90s had no escape. It was pay up or leave. So they left. Here, people choose what they want to spend.
While I agree that value of something is subjective and therefore it should be possible to offer anything for any price you can imagine, there is something that feels wrong about stuff being offered, that you can obtain for fraction of its price (like those catalyst top-ups, that offer stuff like 1/2 t2cc for 200 units, while you can literally buy the same thing in the shop, for the same currency, but much lower price).
That feeling is normal. What is important to remember is that for every single thing you’ve ever bought (assuming you’ve spent cash at some point), there are literally thousands of players who believe you are a fool for spending money on that thing, in “just a game.” Many of them probably feel letting you buy that stuff is just fundamentally wrong.
Also, while it is sometimes the case that a pop up offer has literally odd ball value because the player can get that same stuff elsewhere cheaper, that’s not universally true. Often an offer appears to have poor value because one player can get that stuff cheaper, but not all players presented with that offer can. Or sometimes a player could get that stuff cheaper but are limited on quantity. They might have bought as many as they could at lower prices and might still be willing to buy more at a higher price.
Kabam could try to tweak or censor every single offer to be explicitly relevant to every single player that sees them, or we can do what the game does: present the offers to everyone qualified to have it, and let them decide if it is worth it or not. Consider all the times players have said things like “I wish I had the Cav offer instead of the TB offer” or whatever because of their special circumstances and needs. Kabam cannot account for all such special circumstances, but the players can easily do that for themselves.
So the offers get presented, and if the player thinks they are silly they just skip them, and no one else decides for them that the offer is too odd to present, because they could be wrong.
I think that there’s a bit of a strange relationship between the spenders and non-spenders in the community that is a bit more stark than other games that I have played where there’s a similar F2P/P2P relationship.
In most of the other games I’ve played whales are treated pretty well, people are impressed with their accounts, knowing it’s a pipe dream for those of us with different priorities and in many cases different bank balances. Here it seems like they’re treated as the enemy which I find to be a bit strange because there’s whales in all of our alliances and we all get on quite nicely up until it hits the forums, where it’s treated as a curse.
Ultimately these whales are keeping us afloat, and if they buy the stupid deals that’s their business, all it’s doing is giving them a minuscule advantage in most cases at the cost of a steak dinner. In many cases we indirectly benefit from the whales as they’re in our alliances, bumping our collective prestige, placing better defences, able to boost harder.
It’s a symbiotic relationship, the F2P need the whales otherwise the game will die or become a paid service, and the whales need the F2P otherwise the game will become an auction or simply die off when players’ prioritises change and there’s no new players to pick up the slack.
Something else about people seeing all the offers (at least those relevant and appropriate). Many offers inevitably will appear to have poor value, at least to many players, for all the reasons discussed above. And inevitably, many of these offers will be judged or even reviewed by other players, and this perception of poor value will spread.
I think a lot of players believe this reflects badly on Kabam. It makes them look “greedy” or “out of touch” or whatever. But it also does something else, something I don’t think Kabam explicitly intends, but does nevertheless benefit from. It subtly projects the notion that the game is not pay to win.
Think about it. You’re a new player. You see offers. Everyone tells you mostly not to spend, because they are not worth it. Now, if you’re a whale you’re going to ignore those players, because to you the cost of an Odin is worth less to you than the cost of a small fries is to the average player. But if you aren’t a big spender, you might take that advice, and not spend. And laugh with your new friends about how dumb those Kabam offer designers are, and how ridiculous the in-app purchase bundles are, and how it is so much better to just play the game and not spend.
You’ve just been convinced the game is not a pay to win game, and thus worth your time to play. If Kabam tells you the game is not pay to win, no one will listen to them. But all the content creators dumping on the cash offers? All the posters on the Reddit and the forums constantly talking about how “dated” the offers are? All the players out there telling new players to save their cash? New players will listen to them. They don’t realize it, and they don’t intend it, but they are ironically the best advertising there is for how good the monetization system is in the game. By trying to convince everyone it sucks, they are actually doing the exact opposite, in a way Kabam itself would never have the credibility to do themselves.
For years, I have found this to be one of the most delicious ironies of the game.
@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.
Great ! I love quitting the abyss when the collector have 1% hp left
My experience has been that it may seem like he's written a great deal, but if it's something he's written, he's taken the time and forethought to write something of substance. So it's most often been worth the read.
I think that there’s a bit of a strange relationship between the spenders and non-spenders in the community that is a bit more stark than other games that I have played where there’s a similar F2P/P2P relationship.
In most of the other games I’ve played whales are treated pretty well, people are impressed with their accounts, knowing it’s a pipe dream for those of us with different priorities and in many cases different bank balances. Here it seems like they’re treated as the enemy which I find to be a bit strange because there’s whales in all of our alliances and we all get on quite nicely up until it hits the forums, where it’s treated as a curse.
Ultimately these whales are keeping us afloat, and if they buy the stupid deals that’s their business, all it’s doing is giving them a minuscule advantage in most cases at the cost of a steak dinner. In many cases we indirectly benefit from the whales as they’re in our alliances, bumping our collective prestige, placing better defences, able to boost harder.
It’s a symbiotic relationship, the F2P need the whales otherwise the game will die or become a paid service, and the whales need the F2P otherwise the game will become an auction or simply die off when players’ prioritises change and there’s no new players to pick up the slack.
I've seen it go both ways, but there's always this tension between the spenders and the non-spenders, and the question of whether the spenders are getting a fair amount for their spending. In both ways: in the sense of whether they are getting too much and unbalancing the game to too high a degree, and in the opposite sense of whether they are getting proper value for their money.
This is a cultural thing. Each game has its own individual culture when it comes to spending, and those cultures are embedded in larger social cultures. For example, in most of Asia, there is more emphasis on value than game balance than in most Western countries. Here in the US, we have pay to win and that's bad. But in China or Korea, say, they have pay to win because of course it should win. Once upon a time MCOC had a Chinese variant. Not the Chinese servers for this game, but a completely different game that was loosely connected to this game but which had different monetization and other cosmetic changes. One of the contributing reasons for its failure was that it was perceived to be not pay to win enough. In other words, there was not enough to spend on, and not providing enough of an overwhelming advantage to spenders.
Here, in the past the conflict between free to play and spending was much more direct and heated. I think that's dampened a lot over the years, but you can still see where those differences have been conceded but not resolved. You still see "oh yeah well what about spenders" which is a thing you say when you haven't actually accepted the role of spenders in the game yet.
The rule of thumb I was taught way back when is the average book page contains about 300 words. The OP contains 2003 words, which would be about seven average pages.
I was going to say that would be a ludicrous book length, but to be completely fair I went looking for a book that had approximately the same number of words as my original post. It turns out that I was wrong, there are books with that word length out there. Here's the closest one I could find, clocking in at 2075 words long:
If this is your idea of a book, then I wrote a book.
@DNA3000 how many pages do you reckon you've written if you add up all your posts and comments tho lol
If I had to guess, about four million words on these forums, just about 13,500 pages total, roughly the equivalent of one average adult novel every two months. Printed out, this would be a stack of paper about four and a half feet high at 300 words per page, but given the limitations of formatting on the forums it would probably end up being closer to seven feet tall printed as written.
Rough rule of thumb: the entire Harry Potter book series (the original one) clocks in at just over one million words total. So I've written about four Harry Potters in six years.
Comments
I am personally fine with paying customers getting benefits over f2p, but it feels like an insult for Paragons to be offered 7200 t4b shards for 200 units. If there were huge boosts for spenders, I personally would love it. At least I'd feel like the money spent actually matters, and not that a too-high price tag is slapped on a trash value stuff.
Logon now, and get that daily crystal from the unit store and sponsor a dev in need today...
To put this another way, if someone out there *is willing* to spend $50 on a 5* crystal today, why not let them? They are basically donating money to the game, and asking for very little in return. The game gets cash. The player gets something they want. Everyone else barely notices what they got. Who's the loser here?
That crystal is overpriced to you. But it is not overpriced to the player who buys it. And every time we sell an "overpriced offer" to someone, the game gains revenue in a way that impacts the rest of the playerbase as little as possible.
Every time a player spends *any* money buying *anything* they aren't buying a thing with value. They are buying an advantage over other players of the game. Who's to say what it is worth to cut in line ahead of everyone else? There's no objective way to value a 5* crystal. The value is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. And the value to them is they now have one more 5* than everyone else who didn't buy the offer. If they think it is worth it and buys it, and you think it is not worth it and you don't buy it, isn't that a win-win? They got what they wanted, and meanwhile you don't think they got any significant advantage over you.
The perfect offer is one where someone likes it and buys it, and everyone else thinks they got screwed. Because that means they won't think those players got more than they should have for their money.
I've been playing the game for just over a year now. I've been paragon for about 2 and a half months, and I whale pretty hard. I spent probably about 25-30k in 10 months to get to paragon, and since I have tried to not spend nearly as much. And to be frank, it takes about 2 weeks to get enough stuff to take a 6* champ from r1>2, and I still spend, I always buy dailies, and other offeres as they come up. But I feel if you were to truly f2p, it would take 2+ years of daily playing to get to paragon with 0 spending. Because yes with alllllll the crazy rewards and stuff you could get, kabam has said themselves you're supposed to only do 1 at a time
There was a narrative back then, which had a lot of truth to it, that the comic book industry had moved away from its populist roots and went too far trying to cater to the collectors, "investors" and upscale market. This concentrated a lot of revenue into the hands of people who were less interested in the IP, and more interested in the trappings of the IP. When the bubble burst in the mid 90s, it slashed most of the players out there, and Marvel was hit the hardest because they had also decided to ring up a ton of debt to fuel consolidating acquisitions that in retrospect were nonsensical.
This is nowhere near the standard F2P microtransaction supported model. Marvel was not giving away 95% of its comic books and selling a few hologram covers for hundreds of dollars. Marvel was selling 100% of their comic books, and increasing the prices for *everyone* with their up-market strategies. In fact, this is *precisely* what many people think would be fairer and less of a "cash grab" here: rather than have a few people spend a lot and everyone else spend nothing, "Make The Game Better" so everyone spends, and spends more.
This is much closer to the strategy that Marvel was using in the late 80s and early 90s, and it was ultimately catastrophic for them. Of course, Ron Perelman's stupidity also ultimately led to the desperate situation that gave us the Avengers, so there's that.
It sounds like you managed to get from zero to the top tier progression of this game, a progression tier that took over eight years to emerge, in about nine months. That's almost one progression tier a month on average. You are spending not to get there, you are spending to get there instantly. Which is fine, but that's less a requirement the game has, and more of a desire on your part to progress far faster than the game would ordinarily accommodate.
Two years to get to Paragon as an F2P player is not a bad pace at all, really. The game is not going anywhere. It is not like a single player game where you play for 40-80 hours and you're done. It is intended to be indefinite gameplay. Getting to Paragon quicker simply means you get to wait there longer for the next progress tier to come out.
How do they know how much is enough? The spenders tell them, with their spending. Right now, the spenders are saying that the stuff they offer for sale is worth about $300M USD (that's what players are spending: Netmarble receives 70% of that from Apple and Google). If you don't want to spend that's perfectly fine. Kabam doesn't need your money, or rather it doesn't want to hand out enough stuff to attract your money.
While I agree that value of something is subjective and therefore it should be possible to offer anything for any price you can imagine, there is something that feels wrong about stuff being offered, that you can obtain for fraction of its price (like those catalyst top-ups, that offer stuff like 1/2 t2cc for 200 units, while you can literally buy the same thing in the shop, for the same currency, but much lower price).
I would like to take this time to show my appreciation to all the Whales out there. Without you guys, this game would not have lasted long. I once had a game announce their shutdown right when I was fully enjoying the game, and it's one of my biggest fears ever since then
If Kabam kept increasing the cost of the Sigil, if they eliminated the $5 special and replaced it with a more expensive $8 daily special, then MCOC would be following the Marvel premium strategy. Because the problem with the Marvel premium strategy was that there was no non-premium alternative. That’s why saying you’re not talking about F2P is invalid. With MCOC, there’s always an alternative. You don’t have to be a whale. You can step down to a minnow. You can step down to being completely free to play. Comic book readers in the later 80s and early 90s had no escape. It was pay up or leave. So they left. Here, people choose what they want to spend.
Also, while it is sometimes the case that a pop up offer has literally odd ball value because the player can get that same stuff elsewhere cheaper, that’s not universally true. Often an offer appears to have poor value because one player can get that stuff cheaper, but not all players presented with that offer can. Or sometimes a player could get that stuff cheaper but are limited on quantity. They might have bought as many as they could at lower prices and might still be willing to buy more at a higher price.
Kabam could try to tweak or censor every single offer to be explicitly relevant to every single player that sees them, or we can do what the game does: present the offers to everyone qualified to have it, and let them decide if it is worth it or not. Consider all the times players have said things like “I wish I had the Cav offer instead of the TB offer” or whatever because of their special circumstances and needs. Kabam cannot account for all such special circumstances, but the players can easily do that for themselves.
So the offers get presented, and if the player thinks they are silly they just skip them, and no one else decides for them that the offer is too odd to present, because they could be wrong.
In most of the other games I’ve played whales are treated pretty well, people are impressed with their accounts, knowing it’s a pipe dream for those of us with different priorities and in many cases different bank balances. Here it seems like they’re treated as the enemy which I find to be a bit strange because there’s whales in all of our alliances and we all get on quite nicely up until it hits the forums, where it’s treated as a curse.
Ultimately these whales are keeping us afloat, and if they buy the stupid deals that’s their business, all it’s doing is giving them a minuscule advantage in most cases at the cost of a steak dinner. In many cases we indirectly benefit from the whales as they’re in our alliances, bumping our collective prestige, placing better defences, able to boost harder.
It’s a symbiotic relationship, the F2P need the whales otherwise the game will die or become a paid service, and the whales need the F2P otherwise the game will become an auction or simply die off when players’ prioritises change and there’s no new players to pick up the slack.
I think a lot of players believe this reflects badly on Kabam. It makes them look “greedy” or “out of touch” or whatever. But it also does something else, something I don’t think Kabam explicitly intends, but does nevertheless benefit from. It subtly projects the notion that the game is not pay to win.
Think about it. You’re a new player. You see offers. Everyone tells you mostly not to spend, because they are not worth it. Now, if you’re a whale you’re going to ignore those players, because to you the cost of an Odin is worth less to you than the cost of a small fries is to the average player. But if you aren’t a big spender, you might take that advice, and not spend. And laugh with your new friends about how dumb those Kabam offer designers are, and how ridiculous the in-app purchase bundles are, and how it is so much better to just play the game and not spend.
You’ve just been convinced the game is not a pay to win game, and thus worth your time to play. If Kabam tells you the game is not pay to win, no one will listen to them. But all the content creators dumping on the cash offers? All the posters on the Reddit and the forums constantly talking about how “dated” the offers are? All the players out there telling new players to save their cash? New players will listen to them. They don’t realize it, and they don’t intend it, but they are ironically the best advertising there is for how good the monetization system is in the game. By trying to convince everyone it sucks, they are actually doing the exact opposite, in a way Kabam itself would never have the credibility to do themselves.
For years, I have found this to be one of the most delicious ironies of the game.
This is a cultural thing. Each game has its own individual culture when it comes to spending, and those cultures are embedded in larger social cultures. For example, in most of Asia, there is more emphasis on value than game balance than in most Western countries. Here in the US, we have pay to win and that's bad. But in China or Korea, say, they have pay to win because of course it should win. Once upon a time MCOC had a Chinese variant. Not the Chinese servers for this game, but a completely different game that was loosely connected to this game but which had different monetization and other cosmetic changes. One of the contributing reasons for its failure was that it was perceived to be not pay to win enough. In other words, there was not enough to spend on, and not providing enough of an overwhelming advantage to spenders.
Here, in the past the conflict between free to play and spending was much more direct and heated. I think that's dampened a lot over the years, but you can still see where those differences have been conceded but not resolved. You still see "oh yeah well what about spenders" which is a thing you say when you haven't actually accepted the role of spenders in the game yet.
I was going to say that would be a ludicrous book length, but to be completely fair I went looking for a book that had approximately the same number of words as my original post. It turns out that I was wrong, there are books with that word length out there. Here's the closest one I could find, clocking in at 2075 words long:
If this is your idea of a book, then I wrote a book.
Rough rule of thumb: the entire Harry Potter book series (the original one) clocks in at just over one million words total. So I've written about four Harry Potters in six years.