A balanced approach to content -I mentioned (in one of these long posts) earlier how I honestly can’t tell at times what your goals are. Let’s look at the recent changes to XP. What was the goal there?
Was it to encourage grouping outside of the dailies? Because you failed there by not listening to the community and giving the quests that needed bumps the bumps they needed. Plus adding the hardcore server and crystal cove at the same time was just a horrible, horrible idea. No offense to whoever made that call - but take them out back and beat the stupid out of them with a phone book (and since phone books barely exist, use the modern equivalent – beat them with a desk top. Seriously).
Was it to sell pots? Because that’s kind of a shit move and part of why your community doesn’t trust you. Kind of like walking over and purposefully knocking a drink out of a customer’s hand to get them to buy another one.
Was it to get people to quit playing and make the servers even more empty? Because well done on that one if that was your goal.
Was it to get people to become VIP? Again, kind of like walking over and cutting off half of someone’s sandwich hoping they’ll buy another.
Was it to get people to buy more packs? Because if one product is selling better than the others, you don’t balance it out by making the top tier sales item shittier. You improve your other products.
You have a unique challenge for your sales that you seem to struggle with balancing out. I think part of the problem is you look to the wrong equivalents for your sales examples. Your model seems to be based on Apple’s of forced obsolescence of old products. Old Apple phones intentionally become shittier the older they get to force you into buying a new one. This works for them because they’re not simultaneously trying to sell you the new model AND a 10 year old model. They don’t want you to use their old phones – you want people to run your new packs.
It’s been easily 20 years since I bought one, but a better model would be music. The last I remember prices a new CD was priced about 15 bucks and an older release by the same band would be somewhere in the 8-12 dollar range – frequently discounted and on sale. Especially bad releases were either permanently dropped down to about 5 bucks – or completely phased out in shame (I’m looking at you Restless Isles).
The older it gets, the more the price drops. You don’t keep the price the same and constantly jack up the price of the new release too. It's also worth noting that older releases can be sold again and again as remastered with bonus tracks.
But that’s only part of the problem – lets go back to my formula of what makes a quest or pack successful.
XPxLootxfun factor = sales.
So you want your new pack to sell well, and you want your old packs to sell but not be so good that people don’t need the new pack. The obvious answer is to make the new packs fun, but to be fair – that’s not always easy.
Traditionally how you’ve handled it was to put all your eggs in the loot basket. You jack up the pluses on the loot, it adds to the power crawl which doesn’t always encourage the sales but often gets people to quit because of the insane rate of trying to keep up with the meta. Old packs become quickly obsolete, the gear isn’t even worth feeding to a jewel let alone using and now no one runs the quests or buys the packs.
And there’s our challenge. How to keep up sales on the old and the new?
Which brings us back to “know your product.” The more you improve by just jacking up the numbers of new gear, the more worthless you make old gear and the wider the divide between new players and meta becomes.
5 years ago I would have pitched something along the lines of a cross pack crafting system. Specific types of filigrees for gear (not weapons) that only drop in certain packs. Want ghostly? You have to farm this pack. Want deathblock? Run this pack and so on.
If you keep jacking up the pluses on new gear you’re going to create a game where only one or two packs need (no, HAVE) to be run. Right now a new player can just grab RL and be mostly covered in heroics. Outside of XP, they can get by with mostly just RL for the last half of heroics (if they make it that far with the shitty starter gear).
Instead of jacking up the pluses and set bonuses that outdate older ones completely, you need to be designing new, useful, and mostly customizable gear.
Slavers is still useful, GS is still a bit useful. Why? Customizable. The new gear added to Necro 4 not all that long ago is completely worthless. Why? Set bonuses that became outdated 2 minutes after release and nothing unique or sought after.
And that unique and sought after will always sell packs. Do you know the must have or worth farming items in the game? We do. You really should learn what they are because that’s what you need to be adding to gear, not just “this pack gives plus 20 STR to be better than the last pack that only gave plus 15.” The more you jack up the stat bonuses, the more you increase the power crawl in the future.
Best way to balance it out is customizable gear with unique boosts with low drop rates of ings starting out. Drop the ings needed a few releases later to keep interest in that pack up. Two year old gear should be good, just not as good – not completely worthless and not worth bothering with in such a short period of time.
Remember - the goal should be to create new loot that eventually becomes "not as good as the newest thing but still useful" and stays that way, not "worthless 2 minutes after they farm it."
In conclusion - Am I bit of an asshole for what I've said? Maybe. But I was told once a good friend rubs lemon in your wounds to make sure you don't make the same mistakes over and over and I honestly believe you'll find more ways to improve your game, customer satisfaction and your revenue here on the vault than you ever will from the paladins on the forums.
I can't stress that enough - you let them get away with saying things the rest of us would get (and have gotten) infractions for saying. I can say this without hyperbole - Thrudh alone has cost you far more in sales than he spends on the game even if he was your biggest whale.
So I loaded up my dummy account to make a toon in which you can heap loads of much deserved appreciation on me for my efforts to keep you in a job. I don't know how it's working on the new server but I can tell you this - it took me five tries to finish the intro quest.
Five fucking times.
The AI and pathing of the NPCs are all over the place. They're running into walls, swimming in the air, disappearing, standing at walls if you go too far ahead. You massively screwed up their pathing with the last update, just thought you should know. For everyone one new player in Korthos there's probably 10 who gave up and will never spend money on the game.
Fix it.
My sock toons name is:
Unboundotto on Cannith. There's a subtle clue there on what I'd like
Send me stacks. Send me stacks and implement even half my suggestions and maybe I'll log back in to help you retain new players and together we'll keep the game alive a few years more.
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An Open Letter to Severlin (Read 14503 times)
