Currency purchacing in shroud and percieved loss of value

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Doctorface, Sep 27, 2019.

?

What do you think?

  1. Good point,the coto buying needs to change

  2. It's fine the way it is.

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  1. A'chelata

    A'chelata Avatar

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    Well, the person that answered you that way hasn't played in a month and is STILL that mad about things. Seems to be a side effect of trying to be a Portalarium customer.
     
  2. kaeshiva

    kaeshiva Avatar

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    While it is absolutely true that all COTO originally come from the source, the shift to the ingame COTO store has had a drastic impact on my (personal) buying habits.

    If I want to buy something worth say, 1000 COTOs on the store (picking something in middle range for example), I have a few choices:
    I can do a transaction (buy cotos) from the website (I'm assuming the button in game leads you same place?), then wait for them to show up in rewards, then open store interface, and spend.
    I can use a teleport scroll to my ingame COTO vendor of choice, spend ingame gold for COTO, then open store interface, and spend.
    Typically if you work it out, as was mentioned earlier in this thread, the GOLD > COTO exchange tends to be the better one (at least for now).
    And well....gold I get a bunch of playing the game....and can crank out more by playing more...so buying from someone else just seems the path of least resistance.

    So where did the COTO vendor get them from? Did he buy them from port? Or did he buy low, sell high, from other players? Where did THOSE players get them? Someone out there has got to be buying them to sell, as I'm fairly sure we have by now flushed all the bundle-cotos, reward cotos, etc. from the economy. I know when they added the ability to upgrade deeds and POTs there wasn't a COTO to be found for sale anywhere.

    So yes, this happens as has been described. Port got paid for the COTOs once, and it took a meandering path around through however many hands until I finally spent it.
    Everything is fine.

    Except!

    I have not taken out my wallet. I've set out to get exactly how many COTOs I need, bought what I needed, and that's where it stopped.
    The thing is, when I take out my wallet and buy COTOs myself (if they weren't available from COTO sellers, or if buying them for gold wasn't the better deal), I'm going to buy the big COTO package because its the best value. And because I have them, they will all get spent. Every. Last. One. On stuff that I either need, or don't.

    Its a subtle thing, but in the past when I wanted something expensive from the store, I would buy up store credit bit by bit until I had enough, and usually splurge when I got about halfway. Now I can just grind gold in game, buy COTO. I haven't bought any COTOs from Port in months. And I actually feel kinda guilty about that, but I simply don't need to get wallet out anymore. (Well, and lately the prices of some of the things in the shop have put me off, cough cough mannequins cough cough).

    Is it balancing out? are enough people buying COTO to cover my spend? Probably. But they're losing out on the impulse shopping, which for me well...is significant.
     
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  3. Elwyn

    Elwyn Avatar

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    All my crowns come from the $9/mo each from four accounts (except I don't even touch the ones from my main, and I'll probably be reducing to three accounts soon), and from buy orders on my private vendor. The last time I bought a large number of COTOs off of the web store was 2-3 months before they took the crown items store internal to the game, and I think the biggest chunk I ever got was 45 during a telethon.

    Yes, that's right, people with a lot of IGG can offer to buy cotos from other people who have too many. It's a two-way proposition. The way COTOs work was specifically designed so Port wouldn't be selling IGG, which would inflate the hell out of it, then nobody would want to buy more IGG off of the web store. Instead, you can buy new cotos to get IGG from in the game from other players.

    This is the psychological effect of taking the item store in game that I've been worried about for quite a while now. I think at this point the already-bought COTOs may have reached a point where many people have run out of things to spend them on and are sitting on a lot of them. My gut feeling is that if we had a lot of new players, they could start buying up more in-game COTOs, but I think it doesn't help that IGG clearly doesn't have enough sinks, so the exchange rate is about as high as it has ever been (around 18k-19k per 100).

    If you're worried about Port, sign up for the $9/month so at least they have a reasonably stable base income for better planning.


    Also, I'd like to point out that the "poll" is useless, since there are so many different ways people could want it to "change", and of course it would reach 90%. That's an equivalent of saying "this is broken" without any other information, you can't fix something without going into how it's broken.
     
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  4. Sean Silverfoot

    Sean Silverfoot Avatar

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    Most of my cotos are purchased directly thru Port. My way of supporting the game.
     
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  5. Sulaene Moon

    Sulaene Moon Avatar

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    Not me, why pay more when Port supports this second hand market? I'm not made of money so if I can enjoy a video game the cheapest way possible I'll take it. It's not my fault they allow it and they don't see how they are losing out. Good for you if you have the money, but I'm frugal and like to save mine when I can. Sorry not sorry
     
  6. Spoon

    Spoon Avatar

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    Gray-scale people, gray-scale.
    The world isn't just black-and-white. Its a wide range.



    That is not a bigger picture issue though.

    If discounts was a big issue for companies in general then we wouldn't see them used ubiquitously in all markets.
    Since we do see them in all markets including gaming then we do know that they work.

    Then looking at Portalarium's history we know that they have been running with discounts on and off for years. So their metrics must pan out.
    Hence we can deduce that discounts work as a revenue generator.

    Then in particular what we can see by looking at sales year to year is that there is a slump after summer and a slump after christmas with less revenue due to that is how the player metrics goes - people play more during summer and christmas and then less in the periods directly after that.
    The historical solution for that has been running sales at summer and christmas so you build a cash reserve for those slumps.

    So yes right now is a good opportunity to buy crowns for gold, the value has depreciated slightly with the fall slump.
    But no, that isn't necessarily bad for the project.

    That is not applicable to the context of this title.
    Making them tradeable was the point of them.
    https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...tions-on-monetization-thinking-on-sota.52340/

    This is tried and true in other MMOs which go for a player driven economy. EVE had an economy professor come in and help them with their economic model and it has worked for years and years with none of the issues you outline.
    https://secure.eveonline.com/plex/
    Entropia took that idea and was successful for a while as well
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropia_Universe
    etc etc
    It is a staple concept in most russian/east and northern european MMOs.

    Where you don't see it is in asian MMOs which has a different history and usually a lot larger issue with farming. Where the US has very much focused slightly more on the asian markets the last two decades.

    So it is not the concept in and of itself which is at issue here. It works really well if you have enough players.

    Which was why I linked to earlier discussions of this earlier in this topic.
    https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...-all-just-the-same.153727/page-3#post-1225835

    So the issue isn't the concept. It is the popularity in general of the title.


    Agreed that email isn't enough.
    However the email campaign that they did was a success (albeit short term only) where the cost-vs-gain was really great.
    I guesstimate that the labor cost was in the hundreds and the gain was in the thousands (albeit short term only). So quite successful in the short perspective.

    So yes emails are not enough agreed, but no, that email campaign for its purpose was a smart thing and a limited success.
     
  7. Sulaene Moon

    Sulaene Moon Avatar

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    So why haven’t they advertised liked they said they were going to do? Or do you think they are happy with the small numbers they have now?
     
  8. Cora Cuz'avich

    Cora Cuz'avich Avatar

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    But... grey scale literally is just black and white...
     
  9. Elwyn

    Elwyn Avatar

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    That was contingent on having game features working that wouldn't drive away new users and waste the advertising effort, the NUE (new user experience) work. At this point it seems that Ep2 is close enough that it might be good to wait for it before pulling the advertising trigger.

    Right now I get the feeling they're kind of treading water but still staying afloat, so they can't afford to just throw advertisement campaigns around all the time. They need to wait with advertising until it can count the most, or do low-effort stuff like the e-mail salvos.
     
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  10. Cordelayne

    Cordelayne Bug Hunter

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    I knew someone afflicted by gray-scale...nasty business that! ;)

    [​IMG]
     
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  11. Spoon

    Spoon Avatar

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    The literal part of your use of literally might be literally non-literal.
    ;)

    Funny thing though is that the old use of rasters/halftone would literally fake the appearance of gray-scale from black and white dots.
    [​IMG]
    Where the given value in each dot would either be black or white and never gray.

    https://www.phototraces.com/b/grayscale-vs-black-and-white-vs-monochrome/


    :eek: :p
    I heard that even if one survives they still burn you at the stake...

    Uhm?
    That had very little bearing on my post so I don't understand the context for such a reply to that post.

    But sure, let's go through that if you want.
    • They are not happy with the number of players that hey have now.
    • They are not happy with the revenue that they have now.
    • Hence why they are (desperately) doing all the changes that alienate the some of us old timers.
    • Why they didn't advertise like they said they would, there my reply would depend on which one of them that you mean.
      • Why they didn't advertise initially was because they had no capital and instead used a guerrilla marketing approach. Hence the use of Kickstarter, Twitter, STEAM early access, and things like Meretz and Seed Investor etc to get a word of mouth effect instead.
      • Why they didn't advertise the early access period as much as they said they would was because them going to gaming conventions etc relied on being sponsored by other companies. Which in turn relied on the success and numbers of the game. Which you might correctly interpret as a catch 22 kinda thing. So most of it relied on Richards personal brand. Like for instance where they went to the same events as Razer and Alienware as part of those companies efforts but where the proposed Razer campaign post release kinda slowly faded away (they even had the cloaks etc done).
      • Why they didn't advertise the launch of the game as they said they were going to was because the setup with the publishers failed miserably. Where any advertising by Blacksun and Travian was mostly to their respective existing base and not to a general gaming public. Also all the flack and issues with said publishers also caused a lot of work on the mgmt team distracting them from their most important period of potential advertising.
      • Why the word of mouth kinda failed at launch was because all of that was put to the then community manager who missed all the potential press releases like this and thus missed all the free marketing that the gaming press represent and instead focused with limited success on things like twitter etc while simultaneously missing helping fans promote the product.
      • Why they didn't advertise post launch as much as they said they would was because the revenue dried up when the telethons stopped being popular. (Where the players disagreed with the devs on why it became less popular in that the perceived value of doing them grew less and less as the items became more meh).
        Hence all the mass firings etc where after those the few remaining didn't have as much time to spend thinking of marketing strategies etc.
      • Why they didn't advertise as much as they said they would after that was because the CAC didn't pan out as intended. Chris did some trials and the CAC on those trials were just not good. (Which players like me in the forums mostly pinned down to them using the wrong type of ads targeting the wrong type of audience, we even saw examples of how to do it right from players that looked much better here in the forums).
      • Why they recently didn't advertise as much as they said they would is because they seem to be waiting on episode 2 and do it then.
      • etc
     
  12. Vladamir Begemot

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    That's a pretty good summary.

    I sit here, looking at Portalarium sitting on their gold mine, trying to run a national park, and wish they had a business person on the team.
     
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  13. A'chelata

    A'chelata Avatar

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    He left out the part about where they lost 1.5 million on a promotional advertising video that turned out to be junk. I can't verify the authenticity of that, just something heard through the grapevine.

    That's a pretty accurate statement tho, this game has/had so much potential, just not anyone on the staff who understands what appeals to the customer market. I've been hoping for 3+ years that their focus would widen to be inclusive of the market, but sadly I've seen nothing but the opposite.

    The good news is tho:

    https://archeageunchained.trionworlds.com/#

    :p
     
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  14. OzzyOsbourne

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    FIXED
     
  15. Fenrus MacRath

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    Out of the Blue and into the Black.
    That is a very bad sign. in a healthy economy there will be ebbs and flows between rise in currency and falls, but they will be tied to an inverse rise or fall in a secure commodity , such as gold. When the USD goes up in value(Buying Power on the world market) Gold prices fall as people are looking to take advantage of the increased value of the USD. When it falls (Decreased buying power) Investors abandon the dollar and seek security in the gold market driving the price of gold up. That's a healthy and predictable cycle. What we have here is a dual currency also backed by a secure commodity. You have IGG / COTOS and the security is USD. It would make sense that as igg went down in value, cotos would go up, but as you said , its not. This is because there is a HUGE amount of IGG and a HUGE amount of transferable cotos already in circulation and nothing to really spend them on. Add to this that the game is still pumping in tons of IGG and trying to fund their existence with the sale of more cotos into an already flat market .We are seeing a depreciation of both currencies and USD values going so low, that the opportunity cost and risk of failure is driving away the entrepreneur speculators who would be capitalizing and balancing free fall. With their disappearance, we can see the tell tale sign of an impending collapse. Players will continue to leave the game, the community will dry up and new players will cease to join. This will cause the Devs to stop working the project and the options will be server shut down, or sale to a company that will be looking to monetize every aspect of the game . Its bad boys and girls. I am not willing to speculate on mis appropriation of funds or poor business decisions, because I have ZERO insight into that and cant speak intelligently on the subject.
     
    Last edited: Oct 2, 2019
  16. Fenrus MacRath

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    I should start another thread to address this very question. Not just for myself, but for the countless others who I know have given up on the game, but still monitor the forums. It may even help others who are considering this difficult decision.
     
  17. Doctorface

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    PM me a link when you do, Fenrus, I would like the info for a document I am slapping together.
     
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