This Months Rewards are Meh

@Bzus if @kaeshiva can't have invincible molds (which would be the first choice) can she (and we) at least have molds that have a 1000 or 10,000 durability, priced proportionally the same? For all the tools please.

 

Having large durability or no durability molds, you also need to consider the impact of alts and botting.

 

How so ? / Can you explain

I absolutely load my alt up, put her and the smelting box on my extra monitor, and click the smelt button every so often while I'm playing my main off doing interesting things. This is because I found I was using over 30 hours a week of playtime sat watching progress bars so I absolutely made an alt. I don't know anyone who actually sits and watches their character refine hundreds of items. That's got to be the most boring thing possible. Most people do it while netflixing or at best, multitasking.

Now, if I'm going to sit my alt down for a protracted several-hours-of-smelting sesssion, I'm going to load her up good. I'm going to buy a hundred ingot molds and several thousand coal and take her and the smelting box down to the basement since performance impacts refining speed more than any of the skills do, and there she will sit and I will click the button whenever I look over and she's not working.

When she's done, I will have her sell all the broken ingot molds back to the shop for 5 gold each. That's her "pay"

Having infinite durability molds (or even higher dura molds with proportional costs) is not going to change this process except to save me time/ convenience at the 'buying and selling' steps. And also save me frustration/bafflement at the "why does it not use 1 mold until it breaks, why must it randomly seelct a fresh one every time" aspect. Its a very small time saver.

In terms of cash sink, honestly, the mold impact feels pretty minimal - I don't even account for it as its like <1% of the ore to ingot cost. For other molds like longsword mold etc. its even less.

So, with this change, Port could:
- make life a little more convenient for crafters
- mitigate a very small cash sink in game to create real cash revenue

Since other functional items (like expert tables, CF vendors, TF deeds) do exactly that - mitigate cash sinks for real cash revenue, I think that precedent is pretty well established. I certainly save a LOT more money not paying taxes than I would not buying ingot molds...

I mean I don't know, we don't see this data. I'm sure Chris can look at his spreadsheets and see exactly how much money was spent gamewide on ingot molds this week and decide if that's something they're willing to sacrifice in order to get some more $$ income. That's up to them. I'm merely saying that a prosperity mold kit is absolutely something every serious crafter would throw money at.

 

I don't totally agree with this. However, the repetitive items are somewhat annoying.

• $15K: Darkstarr Wand
• $30K: Darkstarr Throne (Reverse Colors)
• $45K: Darkstarr 1h Sword
• $60K: Darkstarr Clock Tower (Reverse Colors)
• $75K: Darkstarr Coronated Leather Helm and Darkstarr Longbow
• $90K: Darkstarr Dungeon Room with Clock
• $105K: Darkstarr Trident and Darkstarr 2h Axe
• $125K: Darkstarr Black Leather Armor

The various equipment is great. If anything, I'd have replaced the two duplicates (with reversed colors!) with a couple easy, low-hanging DarkStarr themed items. At 30k, a /pocketwatch emote, so we can always check the time with our own Chaos-engraved pocketwatch, and at 60k a DarkStarr Statue Dungeon Entrance eternal pattern.

The problem, as noted, is that there is not a lot to spend "new money" on anymore. I could grab another set of Blue Flame Torches from the Make-A-Difference Store, but I have no interest in buying more CotOs when I play offline most of the time. And I won't subscribe until there is an option to get the SPO option back. They really need to maintain a "Recently Added" tab on the Add-On Store, and keep items added for this release available until the next release, so there is at least a small amount of things to spend real money on.

Almost anything they add that needs new graphics should be able to be repurposed into new content. New items generally mean a simple skin change allows them to be both Crown Shop and craftable. New pets mean new animals you can encounter in the world. New emotes mean NPCs can use them, and again they can be repurposed for other content.

I'd love to see a Pet-themed telethon, just to get new models into the game. Rats, frogs, lions, parrots, etc.

 

Looking through the store again I think the biggest mistake was the expiring of houses. What are the new vikings going to live in? What are the incoming elves going to live in?

I think Port should consider UN-expiring those houses unless they have a plan to get more houses in game real quicklike.

Raise the price on them over what people paid before the expiration, so those people aren't getting screwed. Or deal with the wrath of another devaluation, at least we'll have some houses for sale again.

 

I dunno... that sounds like a lot of dense work for them in one release. I kind of see it like a nice rounded meal - mostly vegetable, with some "meat" on the side, and maybe a desert. I'd go for something like (per release, in no particular order):

1. A new painting
2. A new pet
3. A new weapon pattern
4. A new armor pattern
5. A new potion effect (i.e. the enlarge/reduce potions)
6. A new decoration
7. A new emote
8. A new title
9. Etc

... and obviously some of these are more difficult than others. Whereas, what we see this time is mostly armor and weapon patterns... when I have chests full of them.

 

Personally I was hoping for more housing alternatives. Period. Maybe something pirate themed? Pirates had to come ashore once in a while. Some even had really nice digs there.

Or maybe a haunted house. RG style

Something the size of a Keep/Castle would be nice. Or if we're stuck on the city size, maybe some kind of castle with roof access?

throwing ideas out there ;-)

 

Great ideas! It's the repetitive stuff, really. That's all I, personally, have issue with. Again, I love the idea of chaos, it's symbology and dark themes and @DarkStarr . It's just the repetition on items that should be special and compelling and convey rarity.

Someone brought up the question of rarity in this thread too. I think that has merit enough to be discussed as well (multiple free accounts).

 

Reverse colors? That's not very chaotic.

 

That made me snortle!

Why not a big statue of DJ Darkstarr... well... DJing? But if they did this then they should add spray paint and tagging. So I can write: ( I better not get dinged for this awesome geeky quote either!)

Los locos kick your @$$. Los locos kick your face. Los locos kick your balls INTO OUTER SPACE!

 

Am I the only one who would like them to save titles for something more meaningful? Like achievements, etc. The devs making up new titles just for the sake of new titles isn't something very appealing...

Btw, not sure how they can do new pets every release unless they're just changing minor things like color. & if they're adding new animals entirely, I'd like to see them consider putting them in the wild first. The ideal situation is that we get the common version of an animal in the wild, then if we get rares at all, they're variants. One of the biggest problems with the add-on and rares model is that so much is taken out of the crafting economy and put into the RMT economy, when ideally you want as much as possible in the crafting economy. This has an even bigger impact for pets I think, because you want those animals out in the game world.

 

DJ Darkstarr statue. Now you're talking!

 

For the mounts stretch goal, equestrian statues of Lord British and Darkstarr.

 

Cleaning up a model is fairly tedious but if they do one a month that should still be easy enough to complete a stretch goal.

What I would like to see from our July telethon is a @Lord British talking mouse pet. A fairly simple model that we can attach functionality just like the Chattering Bart.

Plus then every sewer and City zone will have rats available. Be nice to have another vermin other than rabbits.

 

The emperor..

he wears no clothes

 

Mice are not the same as rats ! But both would be nice in the game. As well as Giant Rats, and POTs could have sewer grates that spawn rats.

Also btw, not sure why you'd consider rabbits more vermin than squirrels !

 

Hey, I can explain this! And it does benefit Portalarium!

Yes, there are some people who want to profit from Shroud of the Avatar; or at least, know that something they are buying as an Add-On today won't be the next 1/3rd price special on the Marketplace. Remember, some people want the monthly Livestream Rewards but sometimes have no opinion about what to get with their purchase. When I get asked what to buy I always suggest anything that's expiring.

Why expire?

There are many items on the Add-On store that are simply... unpopular. Or perhaps, buggy in some way (rumored to be a problem are Kobold capacitors and coils, "Ye Old Hot Tub", things with heavy animation costs for Unity, etc.) Some were just .. well.. not in line with Port's artistic direction -- like the Blue and Red sofas...

If Port expires them, then people buy them up before they are gone (sometimes multiples), and Portalarium gets more sales on that item. This revenue might be higher than the projected revenue for those items for the next few years out. This is a winning strategy for players and for Portalarium.

From a company labor management standpoint, each item on the Add-On store requires maintenance at some level. It could be simply keeping the the time reasonable that each player has to take to scroll through them all, or having to updated prices periodically, or whatever. The Team Stand up notes are filled with recent mentions of tweeking the add-on store, that's part of the cost for having lots of items. It's in the best interest of Portalarium to add in new items each month, and its also in their best interest to not let the store get too crowded.

This all inevitably returns back to development to create better items, develop more of the game, and keep their maintenance requirements in check.

Sincerely,

Engineer

 

What?????

Amazon must be going down the toilet because they sell EVERYTHING. Oh wait........
That is just about user experience of the interface. If the UX is good and search is good, the skies the limits for the size of the store as far as the shop is considered. Now whether that may items in the game is good for the performance is different, but expiring does not remove them from the game, so actually makes that worse as you now need new items to replace the old item which adds more items to the game client.

Investing a percentage of your dev time in your income stream is not a bad thing to be doing. The opposite is bad thing. No money, no game......
Expiring items does not stop the dev time to maintain them, only the dev time to maintain them in the store. I'm going to guess that is much less dev time than to fix bugs that will appears as they upgrade unity etc over the years. The difference is that future dev time to support the expired items is all sunk dev time as it will never again generate income....

This may be true, but as they are planning for 5 episodes then long term this is probably bad, but if you have a cash flow problem could be good. That figure of the next few years is nearly impossible to calculate, as if the player base increases 2-3 years could become 6 months for example.


Regards
Spung

 

Brother, are you suggesting a Jack Herer statue?

If you want to pique my curiosity give me firing movable cannons , working catapults or in other words things to Start SOTA world war 1 especially with the “no loot” option for POTs. Let us fling granite rocks or cannonballs at each other’s property.

“Grins”

R/Boris/El Pirata/Black Sails Forever