Stretch Goal Confusion

Of those 32,000 you have 11,000 who have backed the game for less than $45 because they got cheap early bird tiers in the Kickstarter (first responder, etc) and haven't upgraded at all since. They probably won't spend more money.

That leaves 21,000 backers, most of them at lower tiers. Only 1,800 at the Citizen level or higher. Yet 12,500 would need to buy a $20 foal to reach the goal.

I'm going to cave and buy one. But for this goal to be reached, either more people are going to have to buy the $100 package, or we're going to need to bring in a lot more backers.

 

It ain't gonna happen. The horse goal might be met if they don't introduce the other stretch goals for a good, long while, but opening the other goals up will create too many options. I'm not confident there will be enough people interested in the stretch goal store to even reach the horse goal on its own, but when overall purchases end up getting split between different stretch goals, I don't see how any of them will get met at the set prices. It would help quite a lot if we could count a portion of pledge upgrades toward stretch goals, IMO.

 

I applaud your support. I would like to throw cash at everything in the stretch goal store but I'm going to work on pushing my pledge higher first. I really hope Shroud has a good showing at E3 so we can pickup a lot more backers. E3 Linkage

 

They're adding one stretch goal into the store a week. Splitting our voting dollars is going to make this tough.

 

It is frankly quite devious of them, isn't it ?

If we don't achieve the stretch goal, they essentially don't need to change their schedule, and can add the functionality whenever they intended to originally without any added effort on their part.

However, they still get the money that went towards trying to achieve the goal in the first place. So win-win for them if we fail.

So, actually it is in their best interest to add as many different options and split our money as much as possible, so none of the goals are ever achieved ahead of time.

I get what some of the other more vocal posters are getting at regarding this approach, though I'm pretty confident the devs did not have that in mind at the time.

The best thing to do is simply achieve the goals early and prove everyone wrong.

 

That's actually NOT in their best interest. They don't want to not achieve these goals. It's better for the game and community moral/hype if they achieve them all. There's no hidden meaning or secret scam going on here. It's really quite black and white.

 

Personally, I agree with you, there is no "hidden agenda" here, as some of the conspiracy theorists on the forum have tried to point out.

Good call on the "goodwill" aspect, from a purely monetary standpoint it is easy to miss that.

Too many years dealing with EA has colored my opinion, I guess.

 

It's a win-win for them.

If funding starts pouring in like mad and we achieve stretch goals, then they will get more money than the cost to add the features. They win.

If we don't make the stretch goals, they effectively get money for nothing and we're not allowed to use that money to increase our pledge. They win.

 

It is black and white, yes, but I don't think it was well thought out. The funding just isn't there. Even if we bring in a boatload of backers from E3, I'm reasonably confident people will prioritize pledge upgrades over stretch goal store purchases because the stretch goal store purchases are expensive relative to their associated rewards and the comparable value of pledges to pledge rewards. For anyone who cares about the rewards they get, it is always--at every tier--more advantageous to put money into your pledge than it is to buy stretch goal stuff.

I totally understand that the ultimate goal of the stretch goal store is to fund the game and that people shouldn't care so much about the rewards. I say that preemptively because I know someone will come respond with a statement along those lines. But the thing is, people do care about their rewards, and Portalarium is in a pickle with respect to implementing this idea. Specifically, they can't introduce rewards to the stretch goal store that would compete with pledges at cost because then backers might feel disadvantaged holding their pledges, yet they can't hope to succeed with the stretch goal store in its current form because it's darn near impossible for a lot of backers to foot the extra expense in addition to their target pledge tiers.

It's a conundrum! While the stretch goal store idea seems like a good one at first glance, it has a lot of holes, and I will be sincerely surprised if any of the goals are met.

 

Good Idea but not a good stretch goal if they don't reach the target you are left with 3 pets in the Garden might be acceptable for some but if you don't own a land deed 3 pets stuck in your backpack.
So only about 2000 backers will benefit if it doesn't reach the target. If the 2000 backers get it close to the $250000 target others may decide to contribute. BUT
with the new incentive for the ancestors tier offering a land deed most will use any extra funds they have to reach that tier.
So Bad timing that they launch at the same time.

 

Remember the days when making a game people wanted to play was the responsibility of the game designer and not your own pocket book? Ah those were the days. SoA will probably go down as a case study of crowd sourcing gone too far.