I thought there was a forum feature whereby hovering the mouse on the reactions icon will show the avatar of the poster, but it seems like it is not working now.
Of course his followers are eating up the information like it's gospel.
I guess one of them found the thread and decided to disagree-bomb all of my posts in this thread. Which is pretty obvious when it happens to all the posts rapidly, and includes personal anecdotes involving tourists.
It is a shame those guys can no longer flag the post. Because it would be wrong of me to tag every Kabam employee and say "please read my posts" but when angry people used to flag them all, it forced Kabam to read all my stuff. Especially the most interesting and controversial posts. You can't buy that kind of visibility.
Now, they are forced to stand there and push the close door button in the elevator repeatedly not realizing the button isn't connected to anything. Because at this point, I'm pretty sure nobody cares who flags my posts with disagrees. Nobody who thinks I have credibility cares, and nobody who dislikes me is going to dislike me more due to disagrees. And when every single post suddenly gains exactly one disagree, it ends up looking kind of lonely, like a single person standing by themselves in the rain protesting something with a sign no one can read and chanting things no one can understand.
In particular, I don't really care, because I can't care. I have no idea what an anonymous disagree flag means, on one post much less a series of them. Without some additional piece of information, it could just as well be a forum software glitch. Whoever you are, if I don't know why you're disagreeing, your disagree is meaningless.
Not saying there's likely a rational reason here, given they are flagging posts about Australian tourists, but still.
Much like how people believe what Prof Hoff says, those same people think the disagree button matters for some reason. I just assume I'll get disagrees no matter what I write on here. I could say Kabam is the worst ever or the opposite and no matter what someone presses it. I'm with you in just ignoring them. The fact they'll press the button but not respond says it's just some petty person.
Of course his followers are eating up the information like it's gospel.
I guess one of them found the thread and decided to disagree-bomb all of my posts in this thread. Which is pretty obvious when it happens to all the posts rapidly, and includes personal anecdotes involving tourists.
It is a shame those guys can no longer flag the post. Because it would be wrong of me to tag every Kabam employee and say "please read my posts" but when angry people used to flag them all, it forced Kabam to read all my stuff. Especially the most interesting and controversial posts. You can't buy that kind of visibility.
Now, they are forced to stand there and push the close door button in the elevator repeatedly not realizing the button isn't connected to anything. Because at this point, I'm pretty sure nobody cares who flags my posts with disagrees. Nobody who thinks I have credibility cares, and nobody who dislikes me is going to dislike me more due to disagrees. And when every single post suddenly gains exactly one disagree, it ends up looking kind of lonely, like a single person standing by themselves in the rain protesting something with a sign no one can read and chanting things no one can understand.
In particular, I don't really care, because I can't care. I have no idea what an anonymous disagree flag means, on one post much less a series of them. Without some additional piece of information, it could just as well be a forum software glitch. Whoever you are, if I don't know why you're disagreeing, your disagree is meaningless.
Not saying there's likely a rational reason here, given they are flagging posts about Australian tourists, but still.
Brother, this kind of thing happens all the time. I’ve learned to enjoy it, because in my own experience, it’s just glaring evidence that you’re right and they are too dumb to form even the most basic of rebuttals, if there even were one.
As someone who does not spend anything in the game, this topic is not relevant for the game. But, I do spend on other apps, so this is interesting and useful. FYI, An ODIN costs INR7900 in India, which translates to 1053.30 USD as per today's conversion rate. So, its not that bad of a conversion if you factor in the taxes and operational costs.
Edit: Now this is really interesting. There is something called alternate tiers, where you can set different prices for developing and underdeveloped countries and India comes under this. So, only for specific countries, the price tier can be changed.
As someone who does not spend anything in the game, this topic is not relevant for the game. But, I do spend on other apps, so this is interesting and useful. FYI, An ODIN costs INR7900 in India, which translates to 1053.30 USD as per today's conversion rate. So, its not that bad of a conversion if you factor in the taxes and operational costs.
I think you misplaced the decimal in the USD value
Do U.S. locals pay the $99.99 for an Odin AND THEN a sales tax on top of that?
Yes
OK that makes sense then - my NZD price is $169.99 but that already includes our 15% Goods and Services Tax. If you take that off then the ex-tax price is $147.80, which is only $5.60 off the current NZD-USD conversion rate of 1.42:1, and well within reason for historical currency fluctuations if you were going to choose a local Odin price in New Zealand.
As someone who does not spend anything in the game, this topic is not relevant for the game. But, I do spend on other apps, so this is interesting and useful. FYI, An ODIN costs INR7900 in India, which translates to 1053.30 USD as per today's conversion rate. So, its not that bad of a conversion if you factor in the taxes and operational costs.
I think you misplaced the decimal in the USD value
Lol. Yes. I searched for 79000 instead of 7900 and it got added up. So ,its 105.23 USD instead of 99 USD for us in India.
As someone who does not spend anything in the game, this topic is not relevant for the game. But, I do spend on other apps, so this is interesting and useful. FYI, An ODIN costs INR7900 in India, which translates to 1053.30 USD as per today's conversion rate. So, its not that bad of a conversion if you factor in the taxes and operational costs.
Edit: Now this is really interesting. There is something called alternate tiers, where you can set different prices for developing and underdeveloped countries and India comes under this. So, only for specific countries, the price tier can be changed.
My understanding, based on when alternate tiers first came out, “alternate tiers” are special price tiers, not alternate pricing. Meaning, separate from the standard tiers 1 through 90, there are also seven alternate tiers called alternate 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, A, and B. In the US and in most other countries these correspond to tiers 1 through 5 (A and B also correspond to tier 1). These are all low cost items, 0.99 through 4.99 in USD. For these items Apple has alternate pricing for a set of countries, mostly developing countries and weirdly, Australia. These are intended for App developers to use when they want to make very low cost items targeting regions where people tend to have much lower amounts of disposable income. So basically it allows App developers to sell inexpensive stuff in poorer countries. Hypothetically speaking Kabam could sell a two dollar item for less than normal in Australia using alternate tiers. But there’s no alt tier code for something like an Odin, or even Peter Parker’s Wallet. Anything above $5 USD has no alt tier way to lower prices in other countries, at least as of the last time I checked.
My question is, how does Apple prevent people from buing the "best worth" option? A customer doesn't care for Kabam revenues.
Let us say someone lives in Australia and gets X units for Y *currency*, which is Z% of their monthly income. If they bought the price in let us say US, they would still get X units in-game, but for Y' *currency*, which would convert to Z'% of their monthly income.
As a result, people could actually save money by living in Australia and buying for US prices, which (in theory) could save them money. Same could got for maybe US and India? Idk, I just picked two countries at random. Point is, how does Apple prevent this? With VPN and maybe even foreign country bank accounts, this could be very well hidden. And for whales who spend tens of thousands of dollars, this could be quite a money saver.
I will give an example: I live in Czech Republic, a tiny state in the central Europe. Our currency is CZK (czech crown) and is usually around 25 CZK = 1 USD.
Odins in the US: $99.99 / 3100 units Odins in Czech Rep.: 2490 CZK / 3100 units
Current conversion rate is 1 USD = 21.99 CZK. Compared to US, here an Odin would cost $113.23
If I bought the US offer, I would pay 2199 CZK per Odin. It's 1.25 Unit/1 CZK versus 1.41 Unit/1 CZK
Now I will try to compare to Seatin: Up until December 2020, he spent $65k. That is 650 Odins. If he lived here, he'd have to pay approximately $8.6k more for the same amount of units. Which is quite a lot if you think about it, so what would prevent a local whale from getting the offers for US prices?
My question is, how does Apple prevent people from buing the "best worth" option? A customer doesn't care for Kabam revenues.
Let us say someone lives in Australia and gets X units for Y *currency*, which is Z% of their monthly income. If they bought the price in let us say US, they would still get X units in-game, but for Y' *currency*, which would convert to Z'% of their monthly income.
As a result, people could actually save money by living in Australia and buying for US prices, which (in theory) could save them money. Same could got for maybe US and India? Idk, I just picked two countries at random. Point is, how does Apple prevent this? With VPN and maybe even foreign country bank accounts, this could be very well hidden. And for whales who spend tens of thousands of dollars, this could be quite a money saver.
I will give an example: I live in Czech Republic, a tiny state in the central Europe. Our currency is CZK (czech crown) and is usually around 25 CZK = 1 USD.
Odins in the US: $99.99 / 3100 units Odins in Czech Rep.: 2490 CZK / 3100 units
Current conversion rate is 1 USD = 21.99 CZK. Compared to US, here an Odin would cost $113.23
If I bought the US offer, I would pay 2199 CZK per Odin. It's 1.25 Unit/1 CZK versus 1.41 Unit/1 CZK
Now I will try to compare to Seatin: Up until December 2020, he spent $65k. That is 650 Odins. If he lived here, he'd have to pay approximately $8.6k more for the same amount of units. Which is quite a lot if you think about it, so what would prevent a local whale from getting the offers for US prices?
Idk about Apple, but for Google, you get prices based on where you registered your account. You can never change it.
In South Africa Odin's are set at ZAR1999.99. If we consider the value of USD 100 in Rands, thats ZAR1458.88 (in current rate). We have a mandatory VAT (Value Added Tax) of 15%, so that equals ZAR 218.83. So the true value with VAT should come to ZAR R1677,71. That means somehow we have an additional ZAR 322,29 just added into the mix that is not local tax based. This price was bumped on Cyber Weekend last year from ZAR 1599,99, which was on par with the conversion and was acceptable (I guess). So in USD we are paying roughly $137 per Odin. The tiering system seems like a price gouge from both Apple and Google, but as with most US based products and services, Non-US based individuals live in a different reality. Capitalism at its finest.
My question is, how does Apple prevent people from buing the "best worth" option? A customer doesn't care for Kabam revenues.
Let us say someone lives in Australia and gets X units for Y *currency*, which is Z% of their monthly income. If they bought the price in let us say US, they would still get X units in-game, but for Y' *currency*, which would convert to Z'% of their monthly income.
As a result, people could actually save money by living in Australia and buying for US prices, which (in theory) could save them money. Same could got for maybe US and India? Idk, I just picked two countries at random. Point is, how does Apple prevent this? With VPN and maybe even foreign country bank accounts, this could be very well hidden. And for whales who spend tens of thousands of dollars, this could be quite a money saver.
I will give an example: I live in Czech Republic, a tiny state in the central Europe. Our currency is CZK (czech crown) and is usually around 25 CZK = 1 USD.
Odins in the US: $99.99 / 3100 units Odins in Czech Rep.: 2490 CZK / 3100 units
Current conversion rate is 1 USD = 21.99 CZK. Compared to US, here an Odin would cost $113.23
If I bought the US offer, I would pay 2199 CZK per Odin. It's 1.25 Unit/1 CZK versus 1.41 Unit/1 CZK
Now I will try to compare to Seatin: Up until December 2020, he spent $65k. That is 650 Odins. If he lived here, he'd have to pay approximately $8.6k more for the same amount of units. Which is quite a lot if you think about it, so what would prevent a local whale from getting the offers for US prices?
Idk about Apple, but for Google, you get prices based on where you registered your account. You can never change it.
You can change it @The_Sentry06 but you're limited to doing it once a year, and if you have Google play points account, you'll lose your tiering and credit.
My question is, how does Apple prevent people from buing the "best worth" option?
The short answer is, Apple can't really prevent this in the general case, any more than Netflix can enforce their region blocking for content. It is probably prohibited by some term of service somewhere, but in practice this is hard to police. When I've traveled overseas, of course my iTunes account is still registered in the US: I don't start paying the other country's pricing when I buy things.
You may yourself be committing a crime when you do this though. If for example you're evading your own localities taxes when you do this.
If only Kabam and their partners decide to put prices based on the average of the respective currency of that particular country, people would be happy to spend and there will be less free to play players imo. So win - win for all
If only Kabam and their partners decide to put prices based on the average of the respective currency of that particular country, people would be happy to spend and there will be less free to play players imo. So win - win for all
As previously mentioned, Kabam cannot set prices individually for different countries and regions. You can pick one country, say the US, and set the price there, but the Apple App Store (and the Google Play store) automatically sets the price in every other region based on a fixed item price table.
You can't even set the price arbitrarily. For example you can sell a tier 1 item for 0.99 USD or a tier 2 item for 1.99 USD, but you can't sell an item for $1.50. That's literally impossible. Apple and Google have fixed codes corresponding to fixed prices, and you can only choose one. You cannot fill in the blank on pricing.
Also, back when I F2P microtransaction games first really started appearing in their current form, I was told the conversion rate for players (the percentage of free to play players that eventually spend money) was 5-8%. These days with most gaming happening much more casually and on mobile devices, I've been told that number has fallen into the 1%-3% range and it doesn't really budge much across different games and monetization strategies. The simple fact is, f2P gaming creates the opportunity to play for free, and most casual gamers take that opportunity.
I don't even think that is a bad thing: the idea that the goal of an F2P gaming company should be to convert all their players into spenders is I think flawed. We have a simple way to do that: return to subscription gaming. And yet few games do this, probably because while everyone wants more spenders and more money, they know it isn't actually a good thing to do more than marginally improve matters.
When too many people spend and the spending advantage becomes too obvious and too ubiquitous, it discourages many casual free to play players from picking up your game. But those are your future spenders you're cutting off.
Comments
That's promising, I guess.
Edit: Now this is really interesting. There is something called alternate tiers, where you can set different prices for developing and underdeveloped countries and India comes under this. So, only for specific countries, the price tier can be changed.
If you take that off then the ex-tax price is $147.80, which is only $5.60 off the current NZD-USD conversion rate of 1.42:1, and well within reason for historical currency fluctuations if you were going to choose a local Odin price in New Zealand.
I'm assuming that the Google Play Store has to use the same prices, because something being cheaper on Google Play wouldn't make sense?
Let us say someone lives in Australia and gets X units for Y *currency*, which is Z% of their monthly income. If they bought the price in let us say US, they would still get X units in-game, but for Y' *currency*, which would convert to Z'% of their monthly income.
As a result, people could actually save money by living in Australia and buying for US prices, which (in theory) could save them money. Same could got for maybe US and India? Idk, I just picked two countries at random. Point is, how does Apple prevent this? With VPN and maybe even foreign country bank accounts, this could be very well hidden. And for whales who spend tens of thousands of dollars, this could be quite a money saver.
I will give an example: I live in Czech Republic, a tiny state in the central Europe. Our currency is CZK (czech crown) and is usually around 25 CZK = 1 USD.
Odins in the US: $99.99 / 3100 units
Odins in Czech Rep.: 2490 CZK / 3100 units
Current conversion rate is 1 USD = 21.99 CZK. Compared to US, here an Odin would cost $113.23
If I bought the US offer, I would pay 2199 CZK per Odin. It's 1.25 Unit/1 CZK versus 1.41 Unit/1 CZK
Now I will try to compare to Seatin:
Up until December 2020, he spent $65k. That is 650 Odins. If he lived here, he'd have to pay approximately $8.6k more for the same amount of units. Which is quite a lot if you think about it, so what would prevent a local whale from getting the offers for US prices?
You may yourself be committing a crime when you do this though. If for example you're evading your own localities taxes when you do this.
You can't even set the price arbitrarily. For example you can sell a tier 1 item for 0.99 USD or a tier 2 item for 1.99 USD, but you can't sell an item for $1.50. That's literally impossible. Apple and Google have fixed codes corresponding to fixed prices, and you can only choose one. You cannot fill in the blank on pricing.
Also, back when I F2P microtransaction games first really started appearing in their current form, I was told the conversion rate for players (the percentage of free to play players that eventually spend money) was 5-8%. These days with most gaming happening much more casually and on mobile devices, I've been told that number has fallen into the 1%-3% range and it doesn't really budge much across different games and monetization strategies. The simple fact is, f2P gaming creates the opportunity to play for free, and most casual gamers take that opportunity.
I don't even think that is a bad thing: the idea that the goal of an F2P gaming company should be to convert all their players into spenders is I think flawed. We have a simple way to do that: return to subscription gaming. And yet few games do this, probably because while everyone wants more spenders and more money, they know it isn't actually a good thing to do more than marginally improve matters.
When too many people spend and the spending advantage becomes too obvious and too ubiquitous, it discourages many casual free to play players from picking up your game. But those are your future spenders you're cutting off.
I'm moving to America!