**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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In a free to play game, most people don't pay. That's basically always true. So the people who do pay must subsidize a lot of others. In the old days of subscription MMOs players might average paying about $200 a year to subscribe to an MMO. If 20% of the players of a F2P game are subsidizing the rest, that suggests the average paying player has to be paying a lot more than $200 a year.
If you target players who demand a lot of value for that cash, your game quickly becomes pay to win, then even pay to play which is detrimental to the long term health of the game. Instead you have to target players willing to spend a lot for relatively little value in the game. That way those players subsidize the free players with the lowest possible impact on the game as a whole.
The question becomes: which kind of rewards target those kinds of players. And we don't have to debate the question academically, because the games industry has conducted this experiment over and over, borrowing from the gaming industry and elsewhere. Random rewards do that far better than non-random rewards. Non-random rewards become boring, random rewards become frustrating, but frustrating is manageable and boring is lethal.
The goal is to make a game that is interesting enough that many will play and some fraction will pay. It is not to try to keep as many customers as possible by catering to their desires. That's what a lot of armchair economists keep failing to understand about the F2P game industry. Their goal is not to convince as many people as possible to be paying customers, it is almost the opposite. And it is not to make a game that is as satisfying as possible to as many people as possible, it is to make it not boring to enough people to keep the lights on, and to counter inevitable turnover.