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Seeking feedback!
Hey everyone,
The current promotion is a bit of a new format for us, where we make it clear what prizes are left and guarantee all prizes have at least the stated value. It doesn't seem to have anywhere near the same appeal as other promotions we've run recently (stockings, globes, even the wheel which we're aware has major issues after feedback from the last time). Before we make sweeping changes, we'd love to hear your thoughts on what you do like and what you don't like about the current format. However big or small, we'd love to hear your thoughts!
The current promotion is a bit of a new format for us, where we make it clear what prizes are left and guarantee all prizes have at least the stated value. It doesn't seem to have anywhere near the same appeal as other promotions we've run recently (stockings, globes, even the wheel which we're aware has major issues after feedback from the last time). Before we make sweeping changes, we'd love to hear your thoughts on what you do like and what you don't like about the current format. However big or small, we'd love to hear your thoughts!
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That's just speculation though. I'd certainly like an individual system more, but it probably wouldn't have convinced me since the rewards just aren't up my alley anyway (I'd mainly want character art if I spent money on Achaea, which isn't something IRE even offers!)
As for the free side, I just about never do adventures because most of them would be OOC for my character to do, except the rare times it turns out to be something she already does (which kind of goes against the whole system).
The ability to see the prizes is nice, but one issue that might be contributing is that it also has an unintended consequence of us knowing when the big ticket items are gone.
For example, right now we have available:
It's not terrible, but the golden giftbox and the 150 credits are both gone. The silver giftbox is still in play which is okay. But the issue is that the board, at least if the helpfile is to be believed, won't reset until all the prizes are gone. Which means once the good prizes are snapped up and the board is full of chaff, everyone has to wait for someone to 'take one for the team' and open a bunch of doors knowing there's no chance for a big ticket item.
If you make the board reset once the prizes are gone or once every say, two OOC days, then I bet you'll see a massive increase in interest as people don't have to 'burn' keys to get the good prizes back on the board.
Since all I'm really going to get is some amount of credits anyway, the actual credit sale you're also running this month feels like the more attractive option if I wanted credits and was going to spend money to get them. I haven't done any calculations to see what potentially works out better, but I know exactly what I'm getting with the sale rather than gambling on getting good prizes with my keys. It's also all unbound credits, and those have much more utility than bound.
Results of disembowel testing | Knight limb counter | GMCP AB files
I would say regardless of level of progression of your individual character most players are trying to work towards something specific at any point in time. With the way promotions have more recently been done, the amount of market knowledge required to decide whether to resell or trade-in all of the random things they receive in the process of converting into the credits or lessons they're actually looking for becomes tedious and labor intensive which then becomes a barrier to entry.
While historically, the nature of items in game have shown relative levels of volatility in their pricing which shows fluctuating levels of supply and demand within the economy, more recently there has been a steady deflation or stagnation of price variability which suggests two things. Either there is a decrease in demand for the items being offered, or the supply offered has created some kind of a glut in the economy where demand doesn't keep up. As we have seen with certain items such as crowns staying pretty steadily in the 30-35cr range, other market forces can still influence the valuation, primarily those with a large market share (seller side) influence the relative prices of certain items. Another example is the comparatively low value of gems compared to supply.. though with a continuation of gems in the promo, I think we will start to see their prices falling soon as well as large quantities.
What does it all mean, Andraste?
People only tend to buy things that they want for their character progression (obv). And while earlier in game people can absorb some of this risk in a long term projective sense (with the understanding that they will be able to benefit from these competing currencies to some sort of longer term payoff) later game players or whales often have much of what they already need, and so are disinclined or de-incentivised buying into heavy gacha promos where there may only be 1-2 items worth pursuing (if even). The comparative risk or effort required isn't outweighed by the potential for reward.
So what's the answer?
There's a bit of a mess to sort out, but the item based progression system feels bloated to a point now where it seems to overshadow the level based progression system. There are a lot of items that have marginal value for the game that could be removed (sea tears, biscuit) or consolidated (such as talismans with duplicate benefit.. shackle and shadowcloak). There are also some items that seem comparatively strong per value that create balance difficulties (ie. urn, earrings). Talismans, Shop of Wonders and Artefacts as a whole, probably need their cost valuations looked at again (some increased, some decreased), and a more than a handful need rebalanced (monk banner, funeral shroud).
I am in strong support of promotions that allow folks to take part in some of the promo through in game achievement, but despite this.. it still feels as though the way IRE defines a promo is just another way to get folks to buy the same stuff, repackaged in a slightly different gacha skin. Look to other games whose monthly promos (even outside of the traditional holidays) still have strong thematic activities which rotate on a monthly basis and the items coincide with that theme. Maybe that's not exactly what Achaea needs or can support from a development standpoint, but some of this would help to offset the growing sentiments described in other threads about the monetization model.
I might suggest reevaluating the iron elite membership to determine whether it could improved in some way to provide added benefits and encourage more regular subs. This would on the whole feel like a better value, and encourage people to pay lower amounts of money which may feel more managable for folks versus large dips into the bank account on rarer occurrences. Even though the iron elite sub costs more than most other MMO subs have historically, people complain about it far less because it doesn't require them to go under hundreds of dollars at a time. Perhaps open up the option for a 2 or 3 tier sub package with scaled benefits based on contribution and offer something new or different to iron elite members each month AS A PART OF THE PROMO. For example, for elite members... Could have given them 1 free key per login day or something as an alternative or in addition to doing the adventures which is more in line with a freemium model.
We'll start with the promo:
Seeing what prizes are left is going to be an issue, unless you place a dedicated hard reset so that when the prize pool looks terrible, it'll reset and people will buy keys again. This is probably a simple change, but it benefits from a second change:
---Combine some prizes, and drastically increase the upper limit.---
Let's look at the prize pool left:
A sleeve is 35 bound credits at worse, bronze giftbox is 75~ credits at worst, 2 sleeves is 70, token is 50, 65, a page is currently ~20, pipe is 33, 75 custom (what a shit number, one and a half customs there) is 37.5, 75 for the discount vouchers, and 133-200 depending on arties for the silver giftbox.
If you also look at other prizes, many are derived by their resale value, and some people still overvalue things based on the whales buying them super early, or when some things were relatively rare (looking at you, stars/planar road that aren't worth much more than 5 credits in actuality), but got over-inflated very quickly. So for a lot of prizes, it requires an astute watching of market values, or just being a hoarding prick who waits for desperate people to pay well over any decent value.
So how do we fix this?
My first action would be to just piss off gambling all together, because very few things will piss off potential players than rolling the dice on a first purchase, getting a bunch of shit items and then barely making any return and thinking the system isn't worth it at all. Since that seems to ostensibly be off the table, I can somewhat stifle my hatred of gambling in games if the payout is seen as always worth a lot more, so that a small amount of risk exists, but your payout return still always, ALWAYS feels rewarding, and how do you do that?
Well, you already somewhat have a system in place: binding. Binding works amazingly well in many games, you can significantly up power/value of things by making them stuck to the recipient. You also have natural economy drains in the form of retirement, tradein and class switching. I would recommend changing promotions to only deal with binding things, stick them to the character, and greatly increase the payouts. However, this alone would cripple any kind of trading economy, so with this as well, work out a good price value, and allow players to buy from an NPC directly the promo items using credits. At this point in the games lifespan, binding credits is easily the LEAST economical way to use them after the initial 2500 additional lessons from binding (but you can also get this from buying bound from city sales, so patience can win over).
Even middle tier characters are artied up hard, so a general blanket increase in bound won't do too much damage, especially if you cycle the talisman shop and have people properly sink bounds there. Increasing bound credit receipt, adding a few auctioned items to delos will also help fix this (such as the combination arties, the items that have gone for 3-5k but at limited stock and only refill on random occasions and in small numbers), obviously buying bound caches/sleeves/gems/ etc etc. Hold 3 raw credit sale months to help pump credits back into the economy, or link bound prizes to unbound purchases and raw credit sales 5/12 months etc etc.
Finally, adding in ways to earn key pieces is a good thing, however, the reward level is kinda shit. 1 piece for medium and 2 for hard would have been a better balance to achieve, but don't reset the vault prize pools. This would have been the simplest answer, since free-to-play people are going to see any prizes as a good thing, and they didn't pay for it. This would naturally reset these things on their own. If you can't change the payment model, MAKE PLAYING THE GAME MORE REWARDING! Adventures would feel infinitely better if the renown was the minor "guaranteed" path to rewards, while we could do harder adventures for chances at equal rewards earlier.
Anyway, just my 2c, (1.42c with current exchange rates).
This promotion takes that away when the big ticket item(s) are claimed.
A good step in the right direction would make the big items always in there, but have them change every time one is claimed. That way if someone isn't interested in that item, they might be encouraged to purchase the next time the big item is won.
If I spend money on a game these days I want to know exactly what I'm getting for that money, especially with how much those RNG tickets cost. I think you'd have more success if you made it so you could buy keys to the vault (or stockings and what have you) in-game for credits and that all items in the pool was always available.
I think you should have every vault give a talisman piece on top of the prize, with a chance for a rare piece, to make the gambol worth it.
One thing I would like to expand some more discussion on is the prizes. We have made a big push this promo to ensure everything trades in for credits (since there were some concerns about that that came up in December). While I think that was the right move, I do wonder what prizes people would find more attractive. I admit we've steered clear of talisman pieces this promotion to try to give more consistent guaranteed value.
1. Any big ticket items that I could spin as worthwhile (Giftboxes are nice, but they're never going to be the entire draw to me)
2. Worthwhile small ticket items (I really don't need anything except the scrapper tokens, but I could always do without them. I also have an interest in things like elixirs and orbs and those are entirely missing from my understanding of the promotion.)
3. Anything that could be spun as new or interesting, I have had my fill of gems from the stocking promotion and this promotion added nothing really new.
4. Anything that could really advance my personal goals, which I believe @Andraste touched on pretty well with his post.
The rest of the mid- to low-tier rewards I've already touched on (trading in a pipe does not net 60 credits, so the key's are more expensive than they're worth).
Seems like this could be a great long-term "thing" to make adventures more engaging, and let people chase completing items, but the draw to START a bunch of the collections with no way to generate lots of the same stuff seems kind of awful.
So I agree with two things that have been mentioned here already:
- The bad prizes remaining definitely has completely squashed my interest.
- My bank account, though coming back steadily, has hardly recovered from the holiday spending. It'll probably be where it needs to be for me to waste money again sometime in mid Februrary or so, but right now, a large transaction from me just ain't gonna happen, even IF the prizes were all Godlike from the Vault. You guys could be giving away 2k credits for $200 and I still wouldn't be able to participate on that level right now. Not comfortably and without dipping into emergency/food funds. Stupid holiday spending cut me and the wife deep
- The prize board now resets if the biggest prize is won, this should help alleviate any situations where the remaining prizes are not the most desirable ones.
- The prize board will also reset on the 1st day of each in game month.
- When the board reset, the 'big prize' changes to be one of the following:
- 800 credits
- A gold giftbox
- A platinum giftbox
- A token that can be exchanged for ANY talisman piece (please message Makarios if you win one of these!)
- The artefact pipe prize has been retired and in its place is two artefact vials!
We'll be monitoring these changes going forward and be making additional updates if they are necessary.
Enjoy!
As for my midbie. I asked for help killing honours mobs it gave me. Cant get the people required. Cant do the quests given to me because of stupid op denizens I couldn't get the people required to dislodge. No seafaring. Honestly I'll admit the combat ones are my own fault for not being interested in combat.
So ,yes. I've been a citizen midbie in a city asking for help as well. Nada.
big bruh moment
would be nice to actually be able to get key pieces