Potential Delay to v44.1 Launch

We are currently working through some issues that may affect the release window of v44.1. This means that the update may not release on Monday as it usually does. We are working to resolve the issue holding us up as quickly as possible, but will keep you all updated, especially if the delay results in any changes to the content release schedule.
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Evolution of the game

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    Mitchell35Mitchell35 Posts: 1,897 ★★★★
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    Slay_Monster wrote: »
    Lively debate and I can see both sides of the argument.

    However I will throw this into the ring. In the retail world there is a marketing ploy that most retailers have adopted and it is the 2 for 1 offer. A bag of rice selling at $5 isn't perceived as being great value. But once it is offered at 2 for 1, suddenly the consumer does see value in it and the consumer will purchase that offer, regardless of perceived brand value. The consumer will switch brands for that better value offer. Sure the supplier makes less GP initially, but as demand increases the cost of production reduces and so not only does the retailer benefit but so too does the supplier. And due to the product being sold at a better value, the consumer actually buys more. In MCOC terms the cost of production is zero, so all they would be doing is increasing sales without affecting the bottom line.

    Another effective retail ploy are members programs or loyalty cards. These programs or cards ensure the consumers repeat business. The consumer does have the choice between retailers however if they can see better value via a loyalty program they will inevitably shop with that retailer. Uncollected is similar in nature to a loyalty program and as such it should be providing better value for the player. But apart from the Uncollected Arena crystals (which don't seem to deliver rewards as good as the standard Arena crystal per battlechip value) and GMC's (which again don't hold much value to the Uncollected in my opinion) there is very little reward. I am merely suggesting discounted rates across the board for the Uncollected portion of the community. Sure membership comes at a cost but the rewards are there.

    Both of these suggestions are based around one thing and one thing only. Customer satisfaction. If the community sees better value, the community will spend more. Except for those scummy FTP's.......thats a joke guys lol

    This is a bit of a (longer than I thought) tangent, but I think most if not all people who comment on the question of the value of cash offers, from the forums to the reddit to the Youtubers, seem to be completely unaware of the fact (and I use the word explicitly) that the goal of F2P monetization is *not* to provide the best possible value. There are actually two opposing priorities for F2P monetization, and one of them is to provide the *worst* possible value. What's more, this is actually a good thing.

    Prior to microtransactions and monetized content, online games could only reward players for in-game effort. That doesn't mean such games were necessarily perfectly fair, but in general the goal was to reward gameplay effort and skill with in-game rewards commensurate to that skill (as an oversimplification: even in such games there were things like login/calendar rewards which had a different purpose). Monetization systems and microtransactions created a new opportunity to generate revenue, but the question became: how to make them "fair?" For players already accustomed to the notion that rewards should only come from game achievements, the idea that you could buy your way to the same things it took players dozens or hundreds of hours of effort to obtain seemed extremely bad. This was a complex thing to balance: give too little value and no one would buy them, but give too much value and the game would be seen as "pay to win" where players could simply spend their way past achievements, which devalued in-game achievements, which could cause many players to decide that in-game effort was no longer worth performing, which decreased so-called "engagement" which ultimately cost you players.

    But this also created opportunities to make games that were structured to get *all* of their revenue from microtransactions, the so-called "free to play" games. The games wouldn't charge anything to play them, and would instead try to convince some players to buy things in the game to generate revenue. The problem was subtly different from the old-school monetization problem, but had similar aspects. You want - even need - to attract players to play the game, and initially they all get to play for free. You need some players to pay for things, or you can't make money. But if you give too much value to the players who pay, you'll get a reputation for being "pay to win" and you won't be able to attract new players, who ultimately become the pool of people who can be converted to paying customers.

    A successful F2P game must appear attractive to players who want to initially play for free. It must be possible to accomplish a lot, if not almost everything, without paying. And the perception must be that players who do pay do not have such an overwhelming advantage over them that it makes it feel pointless to put effort into trying to play for free. To do this, the monetization system must find the *lowest* value possible for its cash offers that is still *enticing enough* to attract enough buyers to generate sufficient revenue. This is done primarily through targeting. Offers are explicitly targeted at specific groups of players that have very specific needs at that moment. The offers can then provide extremely targeted value that won't likely appear to be worth it to most players, but will situationally be seen as valuable enough to those targeted players that some will go for it.

    The net result is that players tend not to buy "value" but rather to "scratch an itch" that is often temporary. They wouldn't ordinarily spend money to get X, but since X is something they need right at that moment it is temporarily worth more to them, and they are really spending cash not for a thing, but to save the time it otherwise takes to get that thing. In-game things might have no value, but everyone's time is worth a lot more to them. The way I tend to describe this concept is to say that F2P games tax impatience.

    There are good monetization systems and horrible, exploitive ones, given this mindset. But the one thing that *always* generates bad monetization systems is ironically the ones most people think are good ones: the ones that offer very high value for cash. By definition, those systems automatically destroy the notion that free to play is viable, and that tends to erode your ability to attract new free to play players. And without new free to play players, there is no pool of people you can try to convert to paying customers.

    It is actually not easy to get this right, and for all the things I think Kabam gets wrong, it generally get this right enough to work. Free to play is very viable in MCOC, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend MCOC to a person who wanted to play completely for free, if they were someone I felt had the patience to play for free. Conversely, there is a lot to spend money on, most of which have poor value, but if you want to throw money at a game, you can do that as well and you will get *something* for that money if you spend it carefully and strategically. It is not perfect, and occasionally it is head-scratchingly weird, but it is surprising how few F2P games get even this close.

    One last thing. Most of the time when someone is complaining about the low value of an offer, I'm tempted to explain this. But most of the time I don't for this reason: those complaints are actually necessary. If I was the monetization person at Kabam, I would *want* people complaining about those offers. Remember: if I was the monetization dude my goal is to make offers that most people think are so bad that almost no one will buy them, and thus those people think those offers are not actually helping anyone get too far ahead of them. Meanwhile, I want the targeted audience for those offers who actually want to buy them and willing to spend money on them to think that they are seeing a diamond in the rough, that they see value in that most people don't, which will only validate their decision to buy them. I know that's not universally true, but it doesn't have to be. In a game with a million players, it only has to be statistically true. And as the monetization dude, I'd be the only person in the world that gets to see those statistics.

    Every time someone complains about the value of an offer, they are actually helping to sell them in a weird sort of way. They just don't know that, because they probably don't believe a single word of this post. I find this to be one of the most ironic things about how monetization currently works in the games industry.

    Woah. And no TL;DR at the bottom? I’m disappointed @DNA3000 😆😛

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    DNA3000DNA3000 Posts: 18,704 Guardian
    Mitchell35 wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    Slay_Monster wrote: »
    Lively debate and I can see both sides of the argument.

    However I will throw this into the ring. In the retail world there is a marketing ploy that most retailers have adopted and it is the 2 for 1 offer. A bag of rice selling at $5 isn't perceived as being great value. But once it is offered at 2 for 1, suddenly the consumer does see value in it and the consumer will purchase that offer, regardless of perceived brand value. The consumer will switch brands for that better value offer. Sure the supplier makes less GP initially, but as demand increases the cost of production reduces and so not only does the retailer benefit but so too does the supplier. And due to the product being sold at a better value, the consumer actually buys more. In MCOC terms the cost of production is zero, so all they would be doing is increasing sales without affecting the bottom line.

    Another effective retail ploy are members programs or loyalty cards. These programs or cards ensure the consumers repeat business. The consumer does have the choice between retailers however if they can see better value via a loyalty program they will inevitably shop with that retailer. Uncollected is similar in nature to a loyalty program and as such it should be providing better value for the player. But apart from the Uncollected Arena crystals (which don't seem to deliver rewards as good as the standard Arena crystal per battlechip value) and GMC's (which again don't hold much value to the Uncollected in my opinion) there is very little reward. I am merely suggesting discounted rates across the board for the Uncollected portion of the community. Sure membership comes at a cost but the rewards are there.

    Both of these suggestions are based around one thing and one thing only. Customer satisfaction. If the community sees better value, the community will spend more. Except for those scummy FTP's.......thats a joke guys lol

    This is a bit of a (longer than I thought) tangent, but I think most if not all people who comment on the question of the value of cash offers, from the forums to the reddit to the Youtubers, seem to be completely unaware of the fact (and I use the word explicitly) that the goal of F2P monetization is *not* to provide the best possible value. There are actually two opposing priorities for F2P monetization, and one of them is to provide the *worst* possible value. What's more, this is actually a good thing.

    Prior to microtransactions and monetized content, online games could only reward players for in-game effort. That doesn't mean such games were necessarily perfectly fair, but in general the goal was to reward gameplay effort and skill with in-game rewards commensurate to that skill (as an oversimplification: even in such games there were things like login/calendar rewards which had a different purpose). Monetization systems and microtransactions created a new opportunity to generate revenue, but the question became: how to make them "fair?" For players already accustomed to the notion that rewards should only come from game achievements, the idea that you could buy your way to the same things it took players dozens or hundreds of hours of effort to obtain seemed extremely bad. This was a complex thing to balance: give too little value and no one would buy them, but give too much value and the game would be seen as "pay to win" where players could simply spend their way past achievements, which devalued in-game achievements, which could cause many players to decide that in-game effort was no longer worth performing, which decreased so-called "engagement" which ultimately cost you players.

    But this also created opportunities to make games that were structured to get *all* of their revenue from microtransactions, the so-called "free to play" games. The games wouldn't charge anything to play them, and would instead try to convince some players to buy things in the game to generate revenue. The problem was subtly different from the old-school monetization problem, but had similar aspects. You want - even need - to attract players to play the game, and initially they all get to play for free. You need some players to pay for things, or you can't make money. But if you give too much value to the players who pay, you'll get a reputation for being "pay to win" and you won't be able to attract new players, who ultimately become the pool of people who can be converted to paying customers.

    A successful F2P game must appear attractive to players who want to initially play for free. It must be possible to accomplish a lot, if not almost everything, without paying. And the perception must be that players who do pay do not have such an overwhelming advantage over them that it makes it feel pointless to put effort into trying to play for free. To do this, the monetization system must find the *lowest* value possible for its cash offers that is still *enticing enough* to attract enough buyers to generate sufficient revenue. This is done primarily through targeting. Offers are explicitly targeted at specific groups of players that have very specific needs at that moment. The offers can then provide extremely targeted value that won't likely appear to be worth it to most players, but will situationally be seen as valuable enough to those targeted players that some will go for it.

    The net result is that players tend not to buy "value" but rather to "scratch an itch" that is often temporary. They wouldn't ordinarily spend money to get X, but since X is something they need right at that moment it is temporarily worth more to them, and they are really spending cash not for a thing, but to save the time it otherwise takes to get that thing. In-game things might have no value, but everyone's time is worth a lot more to them. The way I tend to describe this concept is to say that F2P games tax impatience.

    There are good monetization systems and horrible, exploitive ones, given this mindset. But the one thing that *always* generates bad monetization systems is ironically the ones most people think are good ones: the ones that offer very high value for cash. By definition, those systems automatically destroy the notion that free to play is viable, and that tends to erode your ability to attract new free to play players. And without new free to play players, there is no pool of people you can try to convert to paying customers.

    It is actually not easy to get this right, and for all the things I think Kabam gets wrong, it generally get this right enough to work. Free to play is very viable in MCOC, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend MCOC to a person who wanted to play completely for free, if they were someone I felt had the patience to play for free. Conversely, there is a lot to spend money on, most of which have poor value, but if you want to throw money at a game, you can do that as well and you will get *something* for that money if you spend it carefully and strategically. It is not perfect, and occasionally it is head-scratchingly weird, but it is surprising how few F2P games get even this close.

    One last thing. Most of the time when someone is complaining about the low value of an offer, I'm tempted to explain this. But most of the time I don't for this reason: those complaints are actually necessary. If I was the monetization person at Kabam, I would *want* people complaining about those offers. Remember: if I was the monetization dude my goal is to make offers that most people think are so bad that almost no one will buy them, and thus those people think those offers are not actually helping anyone get too far ahead of them. Meanwhile, I want the targeted audience for those offers who actually want to buy them and willing to spend money on them to think that they are seeing a diamond in the rough, that they see value in that most people don't, which will only validate their decision to buy them. I know that's not universally true, but it doesn't have to be. In a game with a million players, it only has to be statistically true. And as the monetization dude, I'd be the only person in the world that gets to see those statistics.

    Every time someone complains about the value of an offer, they are actually helping to sell them in a weird sort of way. They just don't know that, because they probably don't believe a single word of this post. I find this to be one of the most ironic things about how monetization currently works in the games industry.

    Woah. And no TL;DR at the bottom? I’m disappointed @DNA3000 😆😛

    I'm not sure it would have fit into the posting limit.
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    TheReverendTheReverend Posts: 126
    Very insightful @DNA3000 two thumbs up!
  • Options
    Kade7175Kade7175 Posts: 304 ★★
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    belli300 wrote: »
    The game has evolved a lot and I beginning to wonder why certain things haven’t evolved with it

    Because there are, and continue to be, people for whom today is the first day of playing the game. Things in the game aren't designed around three year veterans, they are designed around maintaining a progress ladder that serves both veteran players and new players. Some things change, like the availability of certain things, but some things don't. In particular, the cash offers in the game are mostly targeted: they are targeted at players of different progress levels or different veteran status. Most players seem to think that once *they* have outgrown them, they should be changed. But so long as new players exist in the same situation as they were originally targeted at, those offers will continue to exist.

    To put it another way, you see the same offer at the same price over and over, and you assume something's wrong because it is so obvious to you that offer should "evolve." But the monetization guy at Kabam puts the same offer out at the same price over and over, and he sees people continue to buy it over and over, because the people buying it today are not the same people that were buying it yesterday, and that offer obviously continues to target a segment of players that want it and are willing to buy it. From his perspective, demand for the offer hasn't changed, so exactly nothing is wrong with continuing to offer it.

    Just because you've outgrown baby food, doesn't mean the supermarket is going to stop selling it, and doesn't mean the supermarket is going to charge less because it is now less valuable to you. It just means that aisle isn't meant for you anymore.

    So why cant the devs offer end game offers for end game players? Why cant they tier pffers and crystal rates for people playing for 3+years. Everu offer is targeted for low lvl players. The gmc are a joke. And once YOU get up higher you will see. A 2500 4* offer that pops up 3 tolimes a week is a joke at this point. A nice refresh of offers and perks for end game players would be awesome. It should be considered.
  • Options
    DNA3000DNA3000 Posts: 18,704 Guardian
    Kade7175 wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    belli300 wrote: »
    The game has evolved a lot and I beginning to wonder why certain things haven’t evolved with it

    Because there are, and continue to be, people for whom today is the first day of playing the game. Things in the game aren't designed around three year veterans, they are designed around maintaining a progress ladder that serves both veteran players and new players. Some things change, like the availability of certain things, but some things don't. In particular, the cash offers in the game are mostly targeted: they are targeted at players of different progress levels or different veteran status. Most players seem to think that once *they* have outgrown them, they should be changed. But so long as new players exist in the same situation as they were originally targeted at, those offers will continue to exist.

    To put it another way, you see the same offer at the same price over and over, and you assume something's wrong because it is so obvious to you that offer should "evolve." But the monetization guy at Kabam puts the same offer out at the same price over and over, and he sees people continue to buy it over and over, because the people buying it today are not the same people that were buying it yesterday, and that offer obviously continues to target a segment of players that want it and are willing to buy it. From his perspective, demand for the offer hasn't changed, so exactly nothing is wrong with continuing to offer it.

    Just because you've outgrown baby food, doesn't mean the supermarket is going to stop selling it, and doesn't mean the supermarket is going to charge less because it is now less valuable to you. It just means that aisle isn't meant for you anymore.

    So why cant the devs offer end game offers for end game players? Why cant they tier pffers and crystal rates for people playing for 3+years. Everu offer is targeted for low lvl players.

    This seems very obviously false to me. But as I'm probably not sufficiently end-game for you, my opinion doesn't count. Go find someone claiming that things like FGMCs and T2A offers are making the end game pay to win, and have that debate with them. Let me know who wins.
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