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Post Re: Begining of the Game
Classes would have value at all levels, if the Progression system did not have massive amounts of Power creep/Vertical Progression to it; But not, your guys's solution to everything is "Hey, lets add some item, with ultra-amazing stats on it!"
"no no, wait guys i got this! lets adds more Stats!" Power power power, maybe if you got off that band wagon you'd find intellectual ways to engage the players.

Further, You are confusing "the design of the game" with "what is in it" Which are huge differences (and if you actually knew what you are talking about you'd know that). Which is exactly the point i was making.

I have yet to get a straight answer on what "Niche" this game "is", all i hear is mindless zombies repeating the same thing over and over "Its not about money, or people".... And that is Success!

*rolls eyes* If you really believe that you guys have been playing games to much and need to get out in the real world a little. <-- Seriously.

Star sonata was a great game back in the day (or so i hear), It had more people (and most likely more income) I wish i played it then, maybe i could understand the transformation of the game more to give an accurate idea of what exactly was happening, but now.. all i have is the opinions of some very old players, which are unanimously in agreement.

Look, No one (Including me) is advocating this massive change that will change the way the game is...

No one is advocating you give up that uniqueness.

What i am saying is, That uniqueness needs more reason to it, and ways to engage players in an intellectual way, not in "dahhh, More PowAH!".

Reworking the game to have a more reasonable progression system (It does not need to change from what it is, IT JUST NEEDS TO BE TONED DOWN LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE)... Well not everything, just the ships, modules etc.
Quote:
"it HAS to be this way";


You are the only saying "IT HAS TO BE THIS WAY!@#!@#!@#!@#!@#"

Right? Because it "HAS TO BE" what you "WANT IT TO BE" Which is "POWER POWER POWER, DUHHH"

You guys dont care about the game, you just want to propagate this noob pvp concept of "pay to win".

Yes thats right, Star Sonata is "Pay to win".
You guys are a bunch of hypocrites with your "dont make it pay to win" nonsense

Pay to get access to end game = pay to best items = pay to win.
and no amount of bullshit will change that.


I am the only advocating, that the game needs more balance, and to be more likable to others "out side of the niche", not you. You are the ones sticking to this unknown nonsensical bs.


Tue Jun 03, 2014 6:02 pm
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Post Re: Begining of the Game
uhmari wrote:
stuff

The design of the game is the intent behind it. The intentions are good, the implementation is lacking but is constantly being improved. It takes time, everyone is aware of that and the dev team has been and is aware of what needs fixing.

uhmari wrote:
Look, No one (Including me) is advocating this massive change that will change the way the game is...


Lol what? You've made 3 or 4 huge threads about changing every aspect of the game to fit your vision of what it's supposed to be to 'fix' everything.

uhmari wrote:
Reworking the game to have a more reasonable progression system (It does not need to change from what it is, IT JUST NEEDS TO BE TONED DOWN LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE)... Well not everything, just the ships, modules etc.

You keep saying this, but I don't think it means what you think it means. More reasonable by whose standards? Yours?

part started with wrote:
You are the only saying "IT HAS TO BE THIS WAY!..."

and ended with wrote:
... Pay to get access to end game = pay to best items = pay to win. and no amount of bullshit will change that.


Without a monthly subscription, this game would permanently die in a few months to a year. Not from the community leaving, but from the cost of servers and wages being in the red every month. There is no "item shop", there is no pay for power leveling, the is no pay for cosmetics. The only income is from subscriptions. So until a point in time when the dev team can afford to run the game without a subscription model, that's how it's going to stay.

There has to be an incentive to pay, and the incentive is currently access to the buildable parts of space and a few other things that justifies a $10 price tag for people. You could play to level 9999 if you wanted to without ever paying a cent, but the base building and colonizing is what keeps players playing and paying. Some people don't find value in that, but most long-term players do.

Pay to win is paying for a direct advantage over other players in terms of power. Paying the subscription doesn't give you 2x the income or 2x the xp for life or 2x the storage space or whatever. It gives you access to a member's only area that has better returns on your time investment. Pretty much exactly like early runescape. Does paying a monthly subscription to access better parts of the game constitute as pay to win? I don't think many people would agree with you. That's like calling EVE pay to win because you have to pay a subscription in order to even play.

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Tue Jun 03, 2014 6:28 pm
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Post Re: Begining of the Game
Quote:
You keep saying this, but I don't think it means what you think it means. More reasonable by whose standards? Yours?


The problem is Vertical progression has killed the game, the solution (or standard) learnt from that is what i have been saying (and what extra-credits said in the video i posted) "as long as they are competitive, its fine" (meaning, they need to fight each other on a near (but not fully) grounded position.

Quote:
Without a monthly subscription, this game would permanently die in a few months to a year.


So double standards? i put in logical solutions that would vastly increase this games income that are for cosmetics or convenience and its "pay to win" but when i call this system "Pay to win" its now an argument of how income should take place?

Double standards.


Look, I am not against the subscription, but it should not be "forced" on people or "should be forced on everyone fully". This "Pay to get access to end game" is old, out dated, and is "pay to win".

Either make it a subscribtion based game or not, but i will advocate for F2P fully, with an item shop because if done right, its good for the players and the company.


Tue Jun 03, 2014 6:49 pm
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Post Re: Begining of the Game
JeffL wrote:
There's also an alternative proposal on the back burner to do a really big overhaul to the way classes work such that they don't take skill points and are instead unlocked as you level up. If we ever decided to do that, then we'd be much more inclined to outright give a class at the very beginning.

Im very interested to learn more about this.

uhmari, this seems a little off op topic but there are practical issues with converting to item/cash shop that require insight and alot of work on a staged progression conversion to be done. The games not likely to survive such a transition when you take the variables into account, it seem's far more wise to stick to the current business plan. You say may it fully subscription based or not, but it was in the past (basically) and I like the amount of leeway they've given to f2p. P.S.~ Im not entirely sure why your stating this game is pay to win and simultaneously trying to advocate an item shop system in a thread that has to do with early game.


Last edited by LethalLoki on Tue Jun 03, 2014 7:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Tue Jun 03, 2014 7:04 pm
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Post Re: Begining of the Game
Sorry for getting off topic.

I'm also super interested in the RPG aspect of becoming more powerful just by leveling up. That would be really cool and it would probably help with the sense of making levels feel meaningful.

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Tue Jun 03, 2014 7:19 pm
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Post Re: Begining of the Game
Quote:
P.S.~ Im not entirely sure why your stating this game is pay to win and simultaneously trying to advocate an item shop system in a thread that has to do with early game.


Pay to win (In its proper context, and not just spouting it because you dont like something) is ...

Paying the game for something that gives you an unfair advantage in the game, no limited but usually including statistical gains, items,and bonus's.

By putting a subscription on the game at level What ever, you say "In order to progress beyond this point you must pay" but i say that converts to "If you have to pay to get beyond this point, and that area of the game includes experience gains, economic advantages, or gear, its giving them the fore mentioned, and as a result is pay to win".

The game needs money undoubtedly, but it should not be under the current content, Instead the game should look at doing something like "pay this subscription and you get bonus's like leveling faster, or reduced repairs" as opposed to "required content".

That equates to a lot of things, but it may be for example "cosmetics",

If the game swaps to something like i mentioned (for example, Instantly gaining access to special ships sets, that belong to a race for say 10-20$) Undoubtedly even with its current population on an unlock 1 time per a character (account)
the game will make more annually.


Tue Jun 03, 2014 7:30 pm
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Post Re: Begining of the Game
JeffL wrote:
redalert150 wrote:
I personally think "locking" someone in from the beginning to a class is more fun then having no class, its going to make players want to start the game as different chars and actually use all 5 char slots. Besides there is always skill resets which can be introduced to players much earlier if this change were to go in.


Yeah, I think I'm coming more around to this line of thinking. The other aspect of this is that if you choose your class at the beginning, you have just a hair more emotional investment in your character. After all, you've looked at the choices, thought about which class you like the best, then chosen one. You might as well play a little bit before quitting to justify your choice...

Of course, the two things that have really held this idea back are 1) classes currently take skill points, and it's a little bit weird to give people skills at the beginning using our current system, and 2) There are no low level capital ships, nor do I really want to add low level capital ships, so that kind of makes Fleet Focus classes as initial choices to be a bit weak.

Not that these things can't be overcome, but we just did a huge class rebalance, so I'm not jumping into any major new changes on this front too quickly.


I don't think giving players free class skill is a huge deal at all, once you hit level 2kish everyone has more sp then they know what to do with. As for the issue with fleet focus at low level, how about they get a slave instead. I actually think that's a great idea.

One thing I know for sure though is that this is exactly what SS needs at the beginning and would hate to see this stuck in back burner please reconsider setting this aside!

P.S. Stop feeding "it" guys...

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Tue Jun 03, 2014 9:51 pm
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Post Re: Begining of the Game
uhmari wrote:
Pay to win (In its proper context, and not just spouting it because you dont like something) is ...

Paying the game for something that gives you an unfair advantage in the game, no limited but usually including statistical gains, items,and bonus's.

By putting a subscription on the game at level What ever, you say "In order to progress beyond this point you must pay" but i say that converts to "If you have to pay to get beyond this point, and that area of the game includes experience gains, economic advantages, or gear, its giving them the fore mentioned, and as a result is pay to win".


This isn't pay to win in the traditional sense. Pay to win is literally paying money repeatedly in order to win. Pay to win is spending RL cash on in game items in order to gain an advantage over someone else who is competing in the same category that hasn't paid. Pay to win would be buying olympus ships for cash whenever you wanted one from an item shop.

The reason the SS subscription model isn't pay to win is because it isn't throwing F2P players into a competition with P2P players. It isn't giving players a competitive advantage over other players. It isn't a double standard, you just have an unrealistic view of subscription models.

Is EVE pay to win? What if EVE offered free to play content like being able to mine asteroids in hi-sec, but anything else you had to pay a monthly subscription for? Would you still cry pay to win?

SS has always been a pay 2 play game; it isn't like it was originally a f2p game, then they added a paywall.
uhmari wrote:
The game needs money undoubtedly, but it should not be under the current content, Instead the game should look at doing something like "pay this subscription and you get bonus's like leveling faster, or reduced repairs" as opposed to "required content".


This is pay to win. If you can throw cash at the item shop and gain a competitive advantage over players you are directly competing against, that is the essence of pay to win.

uhmari wrote:
If the game swaps to something like i mentioned (for example, Instantly gaining access to special ships sets, that belong to a race for say 10-20$) Undoubtedly even with its current population on an unlock 1 time per a character (account)
the game will make more annually.

Everything other than cosmetics is considered pay to win. Where do these special ship sets come from? Somebody has to make them, SS has to pay someone for an entire high quality set of ships that people would be willing to pay cash for.

You also have an unrealistic expectation of the percentage of people that pay for things in F2P games. Here's an article outlining some statistics in relation to f2p monetization:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2 ... pay-report

2.2 percent of the f2p population spends money on in game f2p purchases.

Before you bash my source, the 2.2 percent is pretty insignificant. It could be as high as 10% and SS would still lose money solely with an item shop with relative current size and player numbers. The 2.2% applies to mobile gaming, but for actual f2p desktop gaming, it's a lot lower than 2.2 percent.

So let's do some basic math here. Let's say for simplicity's sake that SS has 1000 accounts subscribed on a monthly basis (last I saw, it was about 800 ish according to Jey's player statistics). Lets make it as easy as possible and say $10 a month per account nets SS $10,000 a month, or $120,000 a year.

Of those 1000 accounts, let's say that all of them are actual players. I'm not sure of the actual number of people who play on those 800-1000 accounts but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and we'll treat each account like a single person. I know that it's probably less than half of that, but we'll stick with a 1:1 to make a point. If this were a f2p scenario, 2.2% of those 1000 people would buy f2p purchases from an item shop for cash, like cosmetics, or ship packages or something. 2.2% of 1000 is 22, we'll round up to 25 just to make a point. So 25 people have to somehow contribute $10,000 a month consistently in order for your claim of an item/cosmetic shop making more money to be even remotely close to true.

That's $400 a month per person on cosmetics alone. That is just not even close to being realistic, much less "the game will make more annually". That's not even to mention that you'd have to pay an artist (or in this case a contractor since SS doesn't have a dedicated artist) for new cosmetic items every month and let me tell you, it's not super cheap to contract out professional quality artwork of any kind for use in a commercial project.

I know the math isn't perfect because it didn't include currently active f2p accounts, but this was mostly to make a point about how little an item shop would do for a game of this size. Until SS is a lot bigger, it cannot sustain itself solely on an item shop business philosophy, ; it just will not work because the numbers aren't there.

Until you admit that you are wrong about SS being able to sustain itself on an item shop philosophy, you will not have another word of discussion out of me.

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Tue Jun 03, 2014 9:59 pm
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Post Re: Begining of the Game
SS simply does not have the playerbase to support any kind of an item shop. SS is also missing a lot of possibilities for cosmetic stuff that are normally found in other mmos. Theres no equivalant of visible armor, no mount system, nothing like guild or player housing. In short ss only has ship and maybe eventually station graphics as non power items that could be in a shop, its rather limited

And what would a reasonable alternative to this "vertical progression", horizontal where theres a lot of items of about equal power? Players need to feel more powerful as they level up. Again sudden power jumps or lots of worthless items can be fixed by tweaking either the power of the items, there cost, or there availability.

SS is old enough and established enough in the playerbase and there expectations as it that more then moderate tweaks have a high likelyhood of causing people to quit, mmos and rpg are different then other kinds of game in that players see there chars as there own.


SS does have problems but i think nothing except maybe class skills are in need of a complete redesign. The fact that getting class skills for most classes too early is very detrimental is bad design.


Tue Jun 03, 2014 10:59 pm
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Post Re: Begining of the Game
Quote:
And what would a reasonable alternative to this "vertical progression", horizontal where theres a lot of items of about equal power? Players need to feel more powerful as they level up.


Think of it like a tool box. Do you get a bigger Wrench for every problem do you have, or do you have lots of tools for various situations? Such should be the case with the game. However the game is using bigger wrenches to each time, and obviously that destroys the equipment, or in this case the game.

It should not be totally taken away however, that is the point i made before. It just needs to be toned down.

Lets put this math on paper to give an idea, But before i do that, remove everything from your mind about current game values; every thing like "how many damage this does, or class that gives, or how much is needed to do xyz (instances, pvp etc)

Now lets say for example's sake the current game starts at 100hp, and end game caps at 300,000 Hp in its more extreme form.

Lets say the average survival rate of a end game ship is 15 seconds would out healing (just passive regen etc).

What we want to do is change the hp so it starts at 100, and ends at 1000 (as per example). The Survival rate itself will not change, it will still be relative to the amount of damage being dealt. So the "feel of combat" does not really change to much, you just have more people in your "combat zone" (what is food to you, and what you are food to).

Think of it as Wow Level 8 vs a WoW level 10. can they fight? Yes, Are they Equal? No. The level 10 has another 2 talents, as well as some new gear (as per level). It works similar to a level 1 fighting a level 60 in wow. Instant shot dead. No competition and no cooperation.

Keep in mind the values above can be changed.


Wed Jun 04, 2014 12:29 am
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Post Re: Begining of the Game
Quote:
. Pay to win is spending RL cash on in game items in order to gain an advantage over someone else who is competing in the same category that hasn't paid.


That is careful wording there, And shows intellectual dishonesty. Putting any more in the game to gain any direct or Indirect way which is combat related (Pve or PvP) is Pay to win.

Not "competing" i can provide lots of examples that violate this carefully inserted part you added to beat around the bush.


Wed Jun 04, 2014 12:31 am
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Post Re: Begining of the Game
Once again, you haven't experience enough of the game to realize how many "tools" are out there.

You cannot use your entire toolbox until you have the skills for it, and as a level 180, I'll guess you're at about tech 8-10. You've unlocked maybe 20% of the tools you'll have later on. And each level you unlock allows more tools and gear and options which you so desperately crave.

Have you even bothered to look at the massive spread of items and weapons and shields on the wiki pages?

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Wed Jun 04, 2014 12:48 am
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Post Re: Begining of the Game
Quote:
That's $400 a month per person on cosmetics alone. That is just not even close to being realistic, much less "the game will make more annually".


Blizzard did a report in 2007 (i think) that showed the average spending rate of a gamer annually (They are saying 100% of people) is around 3600$

Aruging against the f2p is nonsensical, this one simple aspect has cause the gaming industry to be the ONLY industry in the united states to have Increase of revenue consistently since the 9/11 attacks; Not only that, b ut the industry has grown from 6% Increase to 13% Increase annually.

In short, the industry is on fire for income based on the F2P - Item shop.

The issue with it is that 1. It can be complex to introduce to games that are not designed with it from the start and or have difficulty finding things to sell.

Take League for example, which was constructed from the foundation up to have this kind of model.

Generally speaking, Studio's that use f2p concepts make around 300 million a year. Arguing the Subscription is superior at income to f2p model is nonsense and could not be farther from the truth.

Now that being said, the question remains, Will this game currently make more income then its subscription base, and the only way to dictate that is to know the actual numbers; but we at this point are focused on "paying the bills" not "making profit, that comes with more people, and removing this pay to win model is working for that benefit, and the benefit of the game.

Further, i am not advocating "get rid of subscriptions" in fact, the opposite, I am advocating we should buff them to find ways to make then even more advantageous then forced game play. Greed is the key. I think this solution can be found in the passive benefits (Exp gain for example), or possibly even 5 bonus skill points every 10 levels (provided that all players will get there (Ie maxed skills) eventually this should not hurt to much.

we can talk about that, and even beyond that we can buff the subscription beyond
At this moment, get the money raking in then move to removing the content restriction.


Wed Jun 04, 2014 12:53 am
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Post Re: Begining of the Game
Quote:
Once again, you haven't experience enough of the game to realize how many "tools" are out there.


I can list the "tools" in this game on corn on my right pinkie toe...

(seriously though i dont have corn on my feet).

Tools are not modules. Tools are the effects of them. You have a misconception about that. Shield regen, and more shield regen, is still HPS, and HPS builds have direct counters / or address high dps weapons better, as opposed to burst.

So you'd use a HPS build to counter ROF weapons, and a DR Build to counter burst weapons.


Wed Jun 04, 2014 12:55 am
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Post Re: Begining of the Game
uhmari wrote:
Quote:
Once again, you haven't experience enough of the game to realize how many "tools" are out there.


I can list the "tools" in this game on corn on my right pinkie toe...

(seriously though i dont have corn on my feet).

Tools are not modules. Tools are the effects of them. You have a misconception about that. Shield regen, and more shield regen, is still HPS, and HPS builds have direct counters / or address high dps weapons better, as opposed to burst.

So you'd use a HPS build to counter ROF weapons, and a DR Build to counter burst weapons.



HPS in this game means healing per second. Shield regen cannot overpower DPS here. It just doesn't happen. The output of a Shield Monkey though, can stop the DPS of most classes.

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