Nova Knife
Seituoda Taskforce Command
Caldari State
783
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Posted - 2013.01.04 10:27:00 -
[1] - Quote
Wondering what you people think.
Aurum is intended to be a way to save time (and isk) as well as look pretty in Dust. Yet, if you look at what you actually get for an aurum pack, IMO it's not a heck of a lot. Sure, the merc packs are a nice deal, but look at it this way:
To stay stocked on active + passive boosters, if I remember right you are spending something like 30$ a month at current prices. That's without even buying any suits or other things.
What if you don't want boosters, and just use it for suits?
Assault/Scout suit types follow a 50, 70, 110 aurum progression, and Logi/Heavy take 10-20 more per tier. Most weapons follow 30 or 50 for standard, then 50 or 70 for advanced, and 90 for prototype.
You spend about 20$ on 40,000 aurum.
Being realistic, I don't think anyone will use an entirely aurum dropsuit with nothing but aurum modules. Likely, most people will just use a suit for the visual appeal or to save isk, and then maybe a weapon. Maybe shield extenders or damage mods. Let's say you use a standard assault suit (50 aurum), an advanced 'Killswitch' GEK assault rifle (50 aurum) and then the rest goes to ISK modules.
Let's say you divide your aurum half between the suit and gun, 20k aurum each. That's 400 valid spawns for every 20$, (or roughly $0.05) Five cents for a suit and a gun. What if you wanted some shield extenders? Stick on two enhanced shield extenders (30 aurum each)
You're now looking at 160 aurum per suit instead of 100. That gives you 250 spawns (at $0.08 per suit) and that's not even a very good suit. Consider for a moment how fast one can blow through suits. I consider myself an above average player. I'm not the best out there, but when I don't want to die, I die maybe 1-3 times per round. (That said, I generally adopt a kamikaze playstyle and die 5-10 times, usually a suicide deep in the enemy redline mind your, or pulling off a bonzai charge on big blobs of enemies)
Let's say for the sake of arguement, I play 10 rounds of ambush a night. Most ambush I'm rounds never reach the end of their timer, as one team usually ends up being cloned out. There's usually 2-4 minutes left on the clock when this happens, so we'll say the average ambush round is 12 minutes long. 10 rounds of ambush then translates into two hours of play every night. On average, most people I see die between 3-13 times.
Let's say you play those ten rounds and die 5 times each.
That is 8000 aurum a night using just a suit, weapon, and two modules. (That works out to 4$ lost) At that rate, You'll have run out of aurum after your first couple rounds on the seventh day.
What if you just use the suit/gun fit? 5000 aurum, $2.50 lost. 8 days of casual play.
Just the suit? 2500 aurum, $1.25 lost. 16 days of casual play.
Not a whole lot, right? Double nearly every one of those numbers if you switch everything to prototype. Half the playtime. 20$ can last a casual player mere -days- if they use even just a prototype aurum suit with only ISK modules/weapons!
What does this mean for the 'hardcore' player who spends 5-10+ hours on dust a day? They can run out in merely a day or two running nothing but aurum suits, possibly one day if they use more modules! Is it really going to be worth it to them to invest 20$ for a day or two of play? (Trying to be objective about skill variances here. People who die less than 5 times a match will be able to stretch out the aurum a bit, but the majority of people I see, 5 is a generous average)
What would happen if we dropped the cost of aurum items, to give people more bang for their buck?
Something like 10/20/30 progression for standard/advanced/prototype instead of the current one. I'll run the above examples again with those numbers.
Suit @ 10 + gun @ 20 (Also equal to just using a proto suit) = 1333 fits / $0.01 per fit / $0.50 per night / 40 nights of play. 20$ for just over a month for a 'casual' player two hours a night isn't bad. That's not even considering boosters.
Suit @ 10 + gun @ 20 + 2 extenders ( @ 20 each) = 571 fits / $0.03 per fit / $1.50 per night / 13 nights of play! Also not bad.
One could consider making modules cheaper than suits/weapons as well, to add incentive to use them. There's no question people will use the suits to look fancy or weapons to stand out as a status symbol or e-peen. But modules? Nobody can see you're using them. Unless you need them for the lower skill requirement or the fitting cost, or just to save ISK... You're better off just using the ISK versions and saving your aurum for the good stuff.
TL:DR = People can burn through 20$ of aurum too quickly, and don't really get a whole lot for their money. Reduce overall cost of everything that uses aurum (especially boosters), to encourage people to use it more. Perception of something being 'worth the money' is a HUGE deal. Someone should be able to buy their monthly boosters and still be able to get a lot of fitting for 20$. |
Nova Knife
Seituoda Taskforce Command
Caldari State
783
|
Posted - 2013.01.04 10:51:00 -
[2] - Quote
The Black Jackal wrote:I definetly see your point here, though in CCP's defence they need to make money from this game and the current Booster costs etc, give them around the standar price for a subscription.
30$ to keep boosted for the whole month for active/passive boosters is 'around standard?' (That doesn't include enough aurum to buy any suits or items)
That's twice what the game we're joining up with (Eve Online) costs to play per month!
I'm not saying CCP doesn't need to make money. I'm saying they'd make MORE money if they lowered the price points. You get less from each individual sale, but it becomes a much more attractive purchase and more people will be willing to spend, increasing the overall volume of sales. They need to make their profit off of making more people want to buy aurum, not by gouging the people who'd buy it anyways! |
Nova Knife
Seituoda Taskforce Command
Caldari State
783
|
Posted - 2013.01.04 19:18:00 -
[3] - Quote
@ Odain
I didn't even mention the secondary market for a reason. You cannot use Eve as a baseline with plex, because The price of plex for ISK is essentially whatever folks can get away with. It's far higher than what it used to be not because of demand or inflation, but because a few wealthy plex traders manipulated the market into a steady yet massive price increase, to almost twice what they were.
The exact same thing will happen with dust.
Things will not be sold for ISK for something low. You make an ISK 'profit' off of whatever price you sell aurum for, because it's ISK you didn't have before and you didn't give up anything ingame to get it. However much people think ISK is 'worth' is irrelevant when it comes to a player market. The prices will be insanely high and then come down via market pvp until the orders become steady, and then steadily increase the price again.
Regardless, this post is not about that. The secondary market is a whole ball of wax I don't and Didn't want to touch in this thread. The whole point is that if you want to buy aurum gear for a month at current aurum prices, you're looking at like 50-60$ for even people who play a couple matches per night. Like Telc said : That's just insane! No other game I know charges even close to that for a single account. "Extra" content or no, It's just not a very attractive purchase. Like I said in my OP. Aurum should be an attract buy. They need to make their money off making -more people want to buy- as oppposed to making more money off the people who'd spend the money anyways.
Most subscription games these days charge $15-20 a month. Dust is free to play. Sure, microtransactions mean you can spend however more (or less) you want on the game, but you shouldn't have to surpass the monthly fee of a subscription game to get a month's worth of items as a casual player. As someone who plays 10-16 hours at a time here and there, I'd see myself spending more than that to keep myself sustained for a month, and I'm fine with that. At current prices I'd be buying 3-4 aurum packs of 20$ a month if I ran the aurum suits I wanted to be using this whole time, and kept myself stocked with boosters! Someone who plays as much as me shouldn't need to be spending 60$ a month to look pretty! But I'd happily give them 10-15$ for my boosters and get a whole mess of suits for another 5-10$ |
Nova Knife
Seituoda Taskforce Command
Caldari State
783
|
Posted - 2013.01.07 16:30:00 -
[4] - Quote
Bunch of posts in here just kind of reinforcing what I was saying in the OP.
Aurum should never be a 'need to buy' thing (and it won't be), but it should always be a 'want to buy' thing. (Not currently the case)
Most people in this thread who've commented have said they only buy the boosters or BPO items and then maybe use the aur from merc packs for named aurum items if their fittings are tight.
That's kind of wrong imo.
The entire thing that makes it so 'unworth it' for them to purchase the normal suits is the fact you get so little of them, in relative terms.
Also something I neglected to mention in the OP : Merc pack items (and all beta rewards in general tbh) really should get their count increased. 50 units of something is practically nothing. Many players can burn through those in 3-4 matches. You should get at least 150-200 copies of something with a merc pack, unless it's something -really- good, then maybe 75 or so.
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