137333-ingame-costs-are-ridiculous

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When you get to System Daemons and give that a whirl, you can revisit the statement and tell me if you still think we are "obsessing" by making sure we have the right slots in our gear.


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It's the same no matter whether your are a free player or sig status, though with sig status you can grind plat faster. The costs associated with runing are: The materials: these will (hopefully) drop as supply goes up and demands goes down. They are VERY expensive right now, but hopefully will be less so in the future Add slot: except for token gear, you have to add a slot to your gear (if you want all the slots available). This costs plat. Re-Roll Colors: If you want to make sets, you have to get the right combination of runes in your gear. If you are not worried about sets, you'll still have to re-roll some slots, but not as much. Each time you roll it costs a lot of gold, and it will pick another color at random. Service tokens will allow you to pick the color you want. So you can avoid this cost by grinding omnibits/buying NCoins Destroy Runes: If you want to replace a rune, you either have to destroy the existing rune (very expensive) or extract it using service tokens. If you extract it, it is not bound to you and is still tradable. So, with service tokens, all of this becomes much more managable. That means either paying money (above signature sub price), or grinding a lot of omnibits. Signature service does not grand a stipend of service tokens or omnibits.


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Hmmm this doesnt sound very good.

Edited October 5, 2015 by Xorian


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I'm disappointed. You forgot to use the word "entitlement". Such a missed opportunity. You do realise that a lot of players were already optimised for endgame. They didn't get optimised overnight. They worked long and hard at it. Then the game went F2P, some core mechanics concerning gear and runes were changed and players have been asked to do it all again because the compensation measures provided (rune tokens etc) are inadequate to get players back to where they were before. And at the same time, in-game costs have been pushed up across the board. Things such as re-rolling rune slots, dyeing gear, repairs, crafting etc are all vastly more expensive than they were before F2P. But gold is not any easier to earn than before so everything is now designed to exhaust players gold reserves, suck as much gold out of the economy as possible and funnel players to the cash shop. This includes Signature players who are already paying and are now being asked to pay more if they don't wish to get their noses firmly stuck to the increased grind. It's got precious little to do with designing a good balanced, fun MMO that can make a decent proft and everything to do with manipulating people into parting with their cash regardless of the consequences for the long term playability / viability of the game. Anyway, defend it all you will - time will tell if the majority of players are willing to accept this or see through the cash grab.


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This is especially true when you consider that we've basically had this conversation before. Early on, dyeing was ridiculously expensive and they adjusted costs accordingly. Now, they boosted them back up, albeit not as high - but, hey, now you can spend real money to get around those costs! Sort of feels like how a store will jack up their prices right before offering a sale. Runing, I can understand being expensive, it wasn't exactly cheap before and was more limited as well. And honestly, I think things will even out in the long-run once the economy gets going more, but raising the prices on dyeing does irk me a little.

Edited October 6, 2015 by Cantatus


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The whole "play the long game" thing only works when the developers play the long game too and treat the time players have invested in their characters with respect. Otherwise, it's very easy to find all your hard work and effort have been eroded overnight after a patch, your past efforts now count for very little and you're being asked to do it all again. It's also very easy to find that what you thought was a healthy amount of savings of in-game currency is now worth much much less because overnight, thanks to a patch, the whole economy has been manipulated. MMO developers no longer play the long game. The F2P model almost guarantees that the short game is everything.


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This. We are not talking about just changing appearance of a set of gear. I am not arguing that outfitting your endgame equipment with super-powered runes should be free or anything like that. But does dying an outfit really need to cost 1p+? That really seems a tad bit excessive.


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Yes, massively so for many dyes. If you're only checking a rare dye like Supernova White then you won't see much difference (or perhaps its actually cheaper). If you're checking a common dye you'll see a HUGE difference. For example Zephyrite, a very common green dye. Before F2P this cost a few silver to apply to all costume channels (around 30s if I remember correctly). It now costs 1p 70g to apply to all channels at level 50. This isn't some lone anomaly, this massive price hike is repeated across the whole range of common and uncommon dyes.


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The thing I have never understood is if I already own the shirt, and I already own the dye why should it cost me anything at all to use that dye on that shirt? So it seems even stranger to increase those costs, that logically should exist in the first place. It makes no sense, unless of course you want to try an force people to buy some kind of "service token". All The Best


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Not to beat a dying horse or anything but usually when you guys say you are going to tweak shit based off of metrics we don't see a change till months later. The problem you face here is two different economies. On one hand you need gold sinks to get money out of the economy. So you taxed runes. Runes due to their... well utility have always been expensive, but this is a player to player cost so the money remains "In" the economy. So now players are seeing themselves hit twice, first from other players  selling bits and bobs for crafting runes, second by you for rolling slots. Once again you guys being horrible at itemizing things has come to bite the players in the ass. You could cut the reroll costs by a quarter and it would still be awful for a new level 50 trying to get into dungeons. As much as me comparing this to WoW is going to start a bunch of poo flinging chimpanzees losing their minds despite the fact that this game damn near crashed into the ground: Looking at what WoW has done with gemming and statting recently is probably the way to go. During the MOP expansion it was required to jump through about five different hoops just to get a piece of gear up to the point where it was actually a "Replacement" for the gear you are currently wearing. This is obnoxious, expensive and unfun for the player. So some wise sage said "Lets just do away with that shit." and ya know? They were right. On the other hand you have a problem where your (Carbines)  itemization system is literally worse than anything that has ever come before in that it throws a particularly odious RNG aspect into the fray. Here let me fix it for you: Change itemization back to where the primary needed stats are on the object itself. Simplify the stats set: Primaries: AP Support Common Pool: Crit Multistrike Switch Healer Focuspool Focusregen Switch Tank: HP Resists Make the gear sets on supports swap between the important stats in the switch column. And just throw away the "Glance"/"To hit" garbage because it's stupid as hell. The bosses are giants. Now strip out all but one rune on each piece of gear so runererolls to get a set bonus are still a thing "Top Tier Raiders" would do. Tada your itemization no longer punishes players, as a general rule ilvl would dictate what's an upgrade, and no one needs to consult a spreadsheet to see if they should hit the "Need" button. It also ensures that when a piece of "Support" gear drops, someone absolutely needs that. There's no wasted "Sharded" crap. Also make runes cheaper to make, there's nothing fun about running instances just to tear apart crap just so you can rune up for the instance you are actually running because it's circular as hell and it sucks. Now to make up for all the money you were attempting to gouge out of players (By the way: This kind of idiot brick wall is WHY you are currently free to play instead of enjoying a healthy sub base) make cute goofy outfits/housing plugs/bonus xp doodads and sell them to people. They will buy them if the costs are right. GW2 exists primarily due to it's gem store. Take the lesson there and run with it. EDIT Again: I mean honestly the fact that you don't have a half dozen "Pay" only houses that players can buy, and are selling packs of furniture that can already be gotten in game shows how far the ball has really been dropped on the cash shop. People would absolutely drop madbux on a neat house that couldn't be gotten via normal game methods. Ditto for furniture packs. Whoever is doing the costumes is on the ball though. Give that dude a cookie.

Edited October 7, 2015 by Rhymenoserous


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