This Months Rewards are Meh

My Perspective on these. We do have some great ones that is for sure. Armor and Weapon skins are always welcome for Completely new looks. Myself I would love to see new houses, new furniture styles, POT only Deco and or NPC's (maybe ones that patrol?) Would be neat to have pet skins / summon skins and or spell effect skins (these are a long shot i know but have to put it in or it may never come ) New light colors would be cool. Like red. also really neat things as mentioned a clothing dummy, or other items of use or that do neat things always wanted. I'd love to see a pot/home placeable pond or pools. for POTS and even just for houses some rock outcrops small to large and various assortments.

 

I think one of the biggest problem is that Port is competing with other players selling Cotos for IRL money on the forums. I know of other players that have bought cotos from other players because they could get them for a fraction of what port sells them for. Port Shot Themselves in the foot by selling cotos at a discount a lot of people bought them and now are undercutting port. you can go on the forums right now and see people selling 10,000 cotos for 70$ cheaper than ports "Sale Price". They should of never allowed people to trade cotos for real money. They created countless of competition for themselves, it's gonna be interesting if port can't figure out how to get all those people that bought cotos as an investment to run out.

 

That's the real goal this month.

I wouldn't write it off just yet, but it does look like a long shot.

 

How to drain COTOs:

Interior and exterior house paint. Looking at the Elven City home, we have a minimum of 2 colors here, or it could be up to 4 if the roof and pillars/vertical beams can be colored separately.



A bucket of paint is 10 dyes. A city home like this is massive, it's going to take 100 buckets for the primary (wood), and 20 for the secondary (green). 1,200 dyes to do the whole thing.

This row home is much cheaper to paint, although it really has to have 4 color options. Roof is 5 buckets, primary is 8 buckets (more for a taller home), and the trim and roof fancy are 1 bucket each. Total number of dyes 150.



Of course, those won't all be store dyes. But some will.

And yes, it's going to lead to some wild disco houses. It will also lead to some very tastefully done houses. And a whole lot of barks and COTO's disappearing into the aether.

 

If they want to receive my money, they will need to add PvE content. Not deco crap anyhow. Just my 2 cents.

 

I wonder how many COTOs the deed upgrades have consumed. I know they cleaned house on me.

 

Hey! I only have 5! (Though I only make purchases for one.. for the record)..

In general have to agree though.. recolors always feels like meh.. Time and resources are limited so I guess it's understandable.. but it will always feel kinda cheap to just slap on a new version of the same texture to an existing mesh. They're hard to get excited about.

 

That and POT upgrades mean I'm not sitting on that many, and only until I get enough to use them again.

 

I will admit any new clothing items, that are dyeable, are most welcome indeed.

This is what I mean by fundraising for actual game content. I suggested maps to start with, then we could move on to maybe a quest or a special mob to farm for the month. That kinda thing.

I agree so hard on this. I feel RMT should have been a big no-no in general. I might be biased but POT ownership might be okay as they provide actual content to the game but... yeah, it's a problem in general.

 

How about more juggle emotes? For this month we could have a Juggle Darkstarrs head emote.

 

It's a really great idea! Although I don't really want to juggle @DarkStarr 's head, perhaps juggling flaming chaos spinning symbols or something!

 

Basically waiting to start questing, get my house and then turn it into tax free. Just this questing thing is in the way. lol

 

Also how about polearms get a kryss?

 

Yea, this is something I mentioned in the other thread.

I was skeptical that the switch in the model to encourage subscriptions would actually bring in the revenue they wanted. Personally I have doubts whether it will make the game "healthier" so to speak, because a lot of players liked being able to buy telethon items they missed or wanted extra copies of and some people will still pay extra subscriptions for duplicate rewards, they'll just be able to sell them for more igg because they'll be rarer and it cost more money to obtain. So you'll still have people who buy to resell; they'll just be a more elite subset of the community.

They could always lower the minimum COTO pack to 5 COTOs, and that will lead some people to prefer buying the 5 COTO pack over a subscription. But that's up to them.

 

Oh I love that idea. How about more instruments for the game like the missing horn. I had one song that asked for 3 horns. (horn1, horn2, horn3) and another that calls for many fiddles but of course fiddles could be lutes. Also many songs call for clarinets and saxaphones and a theorbo and bass instrument. Also a harmonica would be fun.

 

Birthday's and seasons are cool, but I think they are taken a little too seriously... fair enough they are good chances to get in some items that don't exist, but repeating too much stuff and several batches of birthday stuff might get in the way of items that are missing from the game, especially in a sense of gameplay and functionality. Im sure there are a lot of low hanging fruit that might take a little programming on the side (they are things that keep the $$$ rolling in could handle a little dev budget?)

Overall things are pretty cool, this is just a bit of observation. One example might be all those new cakes, but not one cake that has err an effect on the ahem body and vision? *ahem*.

Functionality and usefulness continued and all the bling is easier to handle

 

Why are people sitting on COTOs?


1. The new "sale" mechanic

Well, for one, they have this new 'flash sale' thing, where it randomly chooses so many items per day.
If you want something specific/expensive, then...you sit on cotos until it pops up. If you know its going to be on sale eventually, then you're better off waiting.

Not sure I'm a fan of this system - if you want to put stuff on sale, then put it on sale.
I'm not sure how much this happens, but I know someone was waiting for the bank device to get in the rotation before he'd spend, and someone else was waiting for the new epic trees, and so on. I bought a bunch of these on day 1 because I had to had them, then to my dismay, they were 25% off the next day. Lesson learned - I'll wait for the sales. Which means sitting on COTOs.



2. Lack of new/interesting things to buy

We recently got a bunch of new deco. Perfume bottles, vases, cherrytrees,birdcages, etc. I bought all of these. I know other avid decorators have as well. But this is a one-off cost and, especially considering how much space those trees take up, not something you're ever going to need a lot of, even if you're buying epic ones for a POT - they are well, big.

This goes back to the sale mechanic. In the past, if I was decorating something and I decided I needed this tree or this plant, I'd just log onto the web shop and buy it, confident in that if its worth x amount, its worth x amount. With this flash sale thing, now I'd more likely put the project on hold and try to pick it up on a discount . Its actually having the additional detriment of discouraging me to decorate.


3. Huge, sweeping changes

We've seen a pretty dramatic change in COTO economy in the last few months. With the cotos-for-bundles blowout and subsequent bundle expiry, and then the cotos-for-deed upgrades and cotos-for-town upgrades, its likely people are hoarding against larger projects or against the presumption that prices will continue to rise.

4. ....so what would you spend COTO on?

Functional stuff. While some of us do love our deco, there's a lot of players out there who simply don't care. Houses are storage-functional. Gear is disposable, and functional, and the pattern system is pretty rigid/limiting for some gear types due to lack of available patterns or, available patterns not working well together / overlapping / clipping /etc. in some combinations. We have been absolutely inundated with "rewards" weapons. ..I have boxes of swords, maces, axes, spears, bows, hammers, staves - that I'll never do anything with and certainly am not going to buy additional cosmetic variants.

The problem is twofold:
1 - rewards aren't that interesting anymore if its re-hash of the same
2 - other than a bank device, there's nothing functional to spend cotos on

Now I know this is the "pay to win" line - you don't want to sell things of gameplay benefit or that soapbox starts. But a lot of this stuff already exists.

I would shell out money, right now, for indestructible versions of the secondary tools - chisels, rasps, These things cost pennies, and the cash sink impact of me buying a new stone chisel for 100g every so often is beyond insignificant.

The cash sink impact of me buying new ingot molds is also beyond insignificant. Prosperity ingot mold, here take my cotos.

Variant footprint size crafting tables with same function? Maybe that don't use one of your precious light source spots? Again, take my cotos.

We have zone teleport now - so travelling places quickly is no longer a necessary sink. If you sold something like a teleportation stone or gateway or lunar rift type doohicky that could be placed on the POT and configured to a destination? (not random BS) Again, here, take the rest of my cotos. Even if that counted as a building slot, here have some more cotos so I can upgrade town more.


5. Last but not least, stop expiring stuff!

I have never understood this behavior, expiring stuff just creates rarity that benefits resellers, doesn't benefit Portalarium.
I run a shogun-themed town. Now new people coming in can't get the houses to fit the theme. Like, at all. Unless we're gonna be all bungalows and crafting pavilions. These assets are MADE, they exist, people will buy them - ya'll expired a ton of stuff that people were absolutely totally willing to purchase. Once upon a time, every new row house? "Off to Ardoris to spend coto buying the shogun one..." Now its....meh, guess we'll use this crafted one since there are NO DESIRABLE ALTERNATIVES TO PURCHASE.

I own a city deed that isn't water-capable. There's like a grand total of 2 non-boat options you can buy now. Everything else, if I'm going to spend money? I'm going to spend it buying from a player, not from Port, because Port isn't selling it.

At the very least, if you're going to expire stuff, make sure there's still some options left.

Talked to a new guy who fancied himself a wizard. Fell in love with wizard tower. Was ready to go buy himself a deed, realized he can't get that house unless a player's selling it. Despaired to scour the forums, trying to figure out what was a fair price or not. Stopped playing a few days later having not spent anything. If he coulda gotten the house he wanted, he would have bought the deed, the house, and probably stuff to stick in it, and maybe as a result stayed with the game longer and found new interests/things to purchase. I don't see how expiring helps any of us. If you want 'rare' old style stuff, fine - but make sure there's something reasonably equivalent available or you're shooting yourself in the foot.

 

And dont forget... even when you are a deco fan... now you are stopped by the deco limit. My Guild house is a 3 story viking. Always near the limit decorated...

 

I agree with everything you say kaeshiva, except maybe this:

If we were wagering I would put my money on these being a significant gold sink. Maybe worth it to them to get more money anyway, but I don't think it's insignificant. Tons of coppers adds up to quite a few gold.

 

I actually kept track of my chisel/rasp/etc. expenses when I was doing deco projects for others. Even a massive project with over a thousand crafted items this added up to a couple thousand gold, tops. But you're right, its speculation, and the way they degrade when you have more than 1 in your inventory is a bit confounding - I have a box full of half-dead rasps/molds/needles/mallets temptools. Even at 100 gold a pop, we're looking at what, 10,000 gold spend on temp tools in MONTHS of play, at least for me. Not even 100 cotos worth. If they were to sell a prosperity "mold & chisel set" I'd drop 100 bucks on it in a heartbeat. I'd even buy a set for my alt. I'm sure they can run the metrics to see how much of an impact that would have.

Almost all of the functional coto purchase items (cf vendors, tf deeds, prosp tool - even expert tables to some degree due to less fuel cost on failures), serve to eliminate cash sink in some small way. If they didn't there'd be no reason to buy them. From a mold/tool perspective, I could care less about the cash sink its more about the inconvenience of having to micromanage all the breaky-things.

Take the COTOs out of it and consider - you pay 100 gold for an ingot mold with 0/100 durability. Why not 1000 gold for one with 0/1000 or 10,000 gold for one with 0/10000 ? That would solve the problem, but its not revenue for port. I'm simply suggesting that they got a step higher and say ok, one with infinite durability, but it costs even more, as a coto purchase.