The Market. And Why, In Its Current State, Will Be Warframe's Downfall.

[Hayden11121]

Not going to bother reading 12 pages of this thread cause it's a ridiculous topic.  That having been said, here we go:

 

 

Name ONE item that is for sale for platinum (AND not for sale in BP form for credits) that affects successful objective mission outcome in any way...

 

/thread

Glaive when it first came out.

[Blatantfool]

Not going to bother reading 12 pages of this thread cause it's a ridiculous topic.  That having been said, here we go:

 

 

Name ONE item that is for sale for platinum (AND not for sale in BP form for credits) that affects successful objective mission outcome in any way...

 

/thread

 

 Nope. Not seeing how this one is a thread ender. Appreciate you giving your opinion though.

 

 That guy above you, though? That post had some real magic in it.

[BerelHawdos]

The weapons cost too much plat for how easy they are to get same with most of the warframes. If the don't lower the cost only new players might be fooled into buying them.

Edited November 1, 2013 by BerelHawdos

[Raidyr]

Please cite them.

The addition of coupons to the login lottery was a direct response to market price feedback.

 

How much time would you spend playing those 3 warframes?

 

34% of my 229 hours has been spent using the Frost that I bought when a 50% discount came up. That's more play than many new games give me for less money.

 

While normally the equation of money spent by time played is a decent way to work out how much dollars worth you got out of a game, with Warframe it's a bit more nuanced than simply seeing how much time you have spent playing a certain Warframe. You have to consider how much you would be playing if you simply had another frame that you got for free.

 

Also new games aren't the only ones competiing with Warframe. We live in an era where competiing digital services can drive down the prices of full AAA titles within months. Steam is currently holding a Halloween sale where you can buy games that came out this year or 2012 for cheaper than most warframes.

 

This is what people look at when they think about how much time they can get out of a given investment. Yeah sure, Ember sounds like a lot of fun. I like fire and her design looks neat. On the other hand, Sleeping Dogs is $7.50 and that has been on my wishlist for awhile. I could even get all the DLC. I think I will just grind it out and get Sleeping Dogs instead.

 

This guy nailed it. I said somewhat of the same thing on Page 10, but it fell on deaf ears from the looks of it. I'll repost, since it pretty much agrees with this post as well - just worded differently.

Replying to both posts here:

From what I can tell you are basically saying that warframes and weapons are allowed to be extraorbitantly expensive because potatoes and forma aren't, which I think is a decent point as long as DE plans on making money off of potatoes and forma primarily rather than actual content.

 

 

Not going to bother reading 12 pages of this thread cause it's a ridiculous topic.  That having been said, here we go:

 

 

Name ONE item that is for sale for platinum (AND not for sale in BP form for credits) that affects successful objective mission outcome in any way...

 

/thread

 

The idea of needs and wants in a video game is entirely irrelevant. I don't need anything to play Warframe. I buy stuff in it because I want to, and at the current pricing scheme, I simply don't want to.

[Xarfrax]

With the whole mastery/xp restrictions to the best weapons i don't mind the insane prices.
I got most mats already farmed by the time i hit the specific level to craft them so i don't see the reason for the cash shop at all besides for potatoes, boosters, extra slots and a handful of special helmets. They're all expensive convenience and should stay that way.
And if you want cheap plat, don't play for a day, reset your login reward and increase your chance on discounts.

[Nickeltoe]

I agree with everything you say and I know DE will never directly discuss marketing prices in open dialogue and they avoid the questions like the plague in the live streams, but...

 

Warframe has no "game" to it.  Repeat the same 20 or 30 kills millions of times.  That is it.  Make the frames and weapons all reasonably priced and the customer will get them soo much faster and see there is no end to the loop and no light at the end of the tunnel.  They have their animation team working on gun and new melee animations constantly or 1 cinematic in design council fvor Alad V for months.  No mention of Vors prize or any substance added to the game.  Reasonable prices will get customers to that end realization that there is nothing behind the curtain quickly.  That is likely why they are going to keep charging stupid prices.

[Temfist]

I agree with everything you say and I know DE will never directly discuss marketing prices in open dialogue and they avoid the questions like the plague in the live streams, but...

 

Warframe has no "game" to it.  Repeat the same 20 or 30 kills millions of times.  That is it.  Make the frames and weapons all reasonably priced and the customer will get them soo much faster and see there is no end to the loop and no light at the end of the tunnel.  They have their animation team working on gun and new melee animations constantly or 1 cinematic in design council fvor Alad V for months.  No mention of Vors prize or any substance added to the game.  Reasonable prices will get customers to that end realization that there is nothing behind the curtain quickly.  That is likely why they are going to keep charging stupid prices.

while your absolutely right about the need to keep the grind in, I believe it is reasonable to lower the prices on weapons and frames like Skana (possibly just making it a credit buy instead of the current Plat slot/potato combo it currently is) Trinity and Rhino, who you can get relatively early, like in your first 10-20 hours of gameplay etc. Keeping the price up for frames like Nova and Nyx is absolutely necessary, as they are late/end game frames, so making those "affordable" for casual players would mean anyone willing to buy them would, and a portion of the end game farming would be gone for them.

 

You could just remove the ability to purchase certain frames, and make them only obtainable through farming, but that wouldn't be profitable, so the DE's need to keep the prices high on hard to farm things, but easy to farm things, should be affordable. No one wants to buy a Fang for 130 Plat when you can easily just farm 1 Morphic from Vor and then do a bunch of Sargus Ruk runs for the Nano Spores and get some Orokin Cells too (respectively worth what the Current Market Place would regard as 50+ plat worth of materials in an hour or two...) Whats even worse is that the Fangs Materials listed seperately equate to around 170 plat, only 50 plat more then a supercharged, pre made fang that comes with a slot. so, if a non supercharged fang with no slot had a price, would it be 110 plat, maybe?

 

so buying it does save you a lot on materials by the markets standards which is good, but if that was it's price, your spending practically around 8 dollars for an hour or two of farming and the time it would take to rush the Blue Print.

 

is 8 dollars worth that to someone that doesn't have the time or patience to play the game for the first 20 hours to get to Saturn for Nano Spores? I honestly don't think that kind of pricing is doing anyone any favors on certain things, especially when the only argument for it would be that the player wants instant gratification and buys something, before they are familiar enough with the game to realize farming it would have required minimum effort on their part, and they would only have to wait 12 hours after collecting all of the materials before they could use it.

 

Maybe they find they don't like a weapon they bought afterward, and sell it, without realizing it was worth leveling up to 30 for the mastery, since they are new and probably don't realize how master works yet. They then become disgruntled and quit playing after learning later how much of a waste buying the thing was and can't play the game without remembering how much they regret their previous decision.

 

TL:DR, there are plenty of arguments we could make of why the current pricing is a bit non-informative and unrealistic on certain things, but ultimately, weapons and frames need to be priced differently based on difficulty to obtain, and crafting those weapons, AND frames, need to be restricted by mastery requirements based on how good they are...

[Dunkelheit]

Sorry to say, but it is their business and their prices. My bet is that there are a lot of people willing to pay the prices. Once you bought the plat, people dont associate the plat with money any more. So they see an item they want and they get it.

[WhiteSteel]

Completely agree with the OP, I always thought the prices were ridiculous. I hope they fix this mistake before it's too late... We can get everything for free, that means that when we do pay it's just to save time, and saving time is no where near that valuable...

[Arlayn]

Then again sometimes it depends... Sometimes I just go out and buy Vectis with plat after seeing its requirements which made me buy it... because no way in hell I will get resources like that...

[Avrose]

How can anything be over priced when you look at the amount of time it takes to farm something vs the amount you could be paid at your average job. If your playing for 4 +hrs to farm then seems fair to me it takes 80 bucks (assuming for a second you take home 10 an hr) to get it.

You want a great return on your money? Wait for plat discounts, buy plat and only use plat on things you can't get farming.

After I became master it took me 2 weeks to spend even half of the plat stored. I didn't need anything.

[Arlayn]

How can anything be over priced when you look at the amount of time it takes to farm something vs the amount you could be paid at your average job. If your playing for 4 +hrs to farm then seems fair to me it takes 80 bucks (assuming for a second you take home 10 an hr) to get it.

You want a great return on your money? Wait for plat discounts, buy plat and only use plat on things you can't get farming.

After I became master it took me 2 weeks to spend even half of the plat stored. I didn't need anything.

The difference between having a job, and not having a job...

 

If you make money it means you don't have time to be a hardcore player therefore you buy everything

If don't have a job, or  DON'T work a lot... You usually don't have the money to throw at the time(unless your parents are paying for it all). Therefore you farm like crazy.

Edited November 1, 2013 by Arlayn

[Wahooo]

The difference between having a job, and not having a job...

 

If you make money it means you don't have time to be a hardcore player therefore you buy everything

If don't have a job, or  DON'T work a lot... You usually don't have the money to throw at the time(unless your parents are paying for it all). Therefore you farm like crazy.

Nothing in game that is both on the market and farm-able requires hardcore time investment or is hard to get.

 

The only frames/weapons that require more than casual time and effort are primes, and they aren't on the market so don't count in this conversation.

[Bakim0n0]

False, he needs to spend platinum in-order to skip the beyond bearable grind. I would agree with you if the gameplay isn't extremely repetitive and if it doesn't take forever to get anything in this game. Sure they are using the same mechanics as many other free to play games but how far can you go to make a game so inconvenient that it still makes sense to say "buy for convenience". From the casual player's perspective this game doesn't cater to them as it's hard to get the items playing normally and hard to buy into the expensive platinum.

 

Simply put, it's inconvenient to buy for convenience.

I think you meant "beyond unbearable"

If you find the grind unbearable you shouldn't be spending money on warframe anyways because the grind is ALL THAT THERE IS.

Paying to skip past the only thing to do just seems pointless; and if you don't like the way a game plays it's not the game for you.

P.S. every game with progression has grind.

[KvotheTheArcane1]

P.S. every game with progression has grind.

The difference is though that most games have something to do once you grind out the best stuff, and the grind isn't based on 100% rng (i.e. they have some sort of system to ensure you get what you're looking for, like a token system)

[Avrose]

The difference between having a job, and not having a job...

 

If you make money it means you don't have time to be a hardcore player therefore you buy everything

If don't have a job, or  DON'T work a lot... You usually don't have the money to throw at the time(unless your parents are paying for it all). Therefore you farm like crazy.

My point is time is money, you either have time or have money.

[Bakim0n0]

The difference is though that most games have something to do once you grind out the best stuff, and the grind isn't based on 100% rng (i.e. they have some sort of system to ensure you get what you're looking for, like a token system)

Like what? Grind for more stuff? And most games DO NOT have token systems.

Edited November 1, 2013 by Bakim0n0

[KvotheTheArcane1]

Like what? Grind for more stuff? And most games DO NOT have token systems.

Like raids, more challenging enemies/bosses (and note I said "i.e." which means in example, which was what I was using the token system as.)

[Bakim0n0]

Like raids, more challenging enemies/bosses (and note I said "i.e." which means in example, which was what I was using the token system as.)

Right, but the majority of games have no such system; and the reason people run raids and such is to grind more content and chase more gear that is almost always locked behind RNG walls. Most games just tend to dress up the grind in more than one way to give the feel of something different (which warframe DOES need to get better about)

Also this game has "more challenging enemies / bosses" as you progress even if the bulk of the challenge is artificial.

[KvotheTheArcane1]

Right, but the majority of games have no such system; and the reason people run raids and such is to grind more content and chase more gear that is almost always locked behind RNG walls. Most games just tend to dress up the grind in more than one way to give the feel of something different (which warframe DOES need to get better about)

Also this game has "more challenging enemies / bosses" as you progress even if the bulk of the challenge is artificial.

But they run the raids because it offers a real challenge, which is my point. In WF the main difference once you get the "best" gear (as in highest DPS), the only change is  "Now I only need to hold down the fire button for a tenth of a second to kill most bosses/enemies!" (Or in T3 defense, it changes from 3 seconds to 2 seconds)

 

Also, WF kinda sorta has "more challenging enemies/bosses", but it's mostly just stats scaling straight up forever with nothing else required, which isn't a good example of a challenge. For example, good enemy/boss examples can be looked at in games like Lost Planet 2, Borderlands 2, Dark Souls, etc.

[Bakim0n0]

But they run the raids because it offers a real challenge, which is my point. In WF the main difference once you get the "best" gear (as in highest DPS), the only change is  "Now I only need to hold down the fire button for a tenth of a second to kill most bosses/enemies!" (Or in T3 defense, it changes from 3 seconds to 2 seconds)

 

Also, WF kinda sorta has "more challenging enemies/bosses", but it's mostly just stats scaling straight up forever with nothing else required, which isn't a good example of a challenge. For example, good enemy/boss examples can be looked at in games like Lost Planet 2, Borderlands 2, Dark Souls, etc.

Which is all fine and dandy... doesn't change the fact that those are still just grinding to progress (which was my origonal point).

I've seldom seen people raid without a desire to get *something* other than just killing time out of said raid be it personal advancement or the advancement of their friends.

[worxe]

People in this thread saying that "Hardly / No ones going to spend that money!", If the prices are that way, then its fair to also assume that they're being bought enough to justify that price.

It's ideological thinking to assert that lower prices = more buyers = more money, that is absolutely not always the case because people can perceive that the higher cost of a product is justified because it can mean exclusivity (which includes 'first to get') and that the product is better than it would be if it were charged at a lower price to name a couple. (Even if its not actually better).

Ethics aside, its a tidy way to get founders buying up all the market fluff quickly, if you got tons of it 275 is not often perceived as being a lot, founders got a HUGE amount of plat after all. Kind of like student debt (in some countries), why should schools/universities charge less when they know you have relatively easy access to an interest free large sum loan with high exposure to inflation subsidized by the government? why should DE charge less when they know you've got a ton of plat? (although I do concede that is taking a very complex problem and trivializing it, merely just trying to draw a parallel in reasoning)

Ethics considered though it borders on price gouging. Yes, petrol stations and mass production or mass distribution companies do it wholesale, but that does not make it okay, it is by definition an underhanded practice, it ticks people off to the point legislation gets drafted to curb it and it gets nastier depending on the product involved.

But inside a game like Warframe or any other F2P title for that matter? It's not a necessary service of course, its entertainment not dissimilar from a hobby. But I do honestly think many F2P models for games ride on this whole idea of pay a premium to skip the grind and exploits other people into being the content for a paying customers' game and that I don't think is a good thing. 

I say exploit not as in "OH NO SLAVERY", and while its not price gouging or huge plat expenses of in game items that I'm worried about, more that the market (with the game) perpetuates a divide between people trying to enjoy a single game by making one group somehow less 'capable' or 'fortunate' than others and makes them part of the content in a more lower ranking fashion than it does to those who buy into the game. Communities are pretty good at ripping themselves to pieces given the right environment so that takes care of itself, people just need the right stimuli to create that process and things like markets that involve RMT fill that role very easily.

Where it gets difficult to draw a line though is the fact that the paying customer is getting benefits because they paid for it and I don't think that should be punished at all. Where the lines I think should ideally start getting drawn however is when anything that suggests hierarchy, but that is not always even possible since it is such a broad criteria. People can assume skins somehow affect your attitude toward that player and be subjected to that, so even if it doesn't directly contribute to the game in ANY way other than visual its still capable of manipulating a persons perception, but I digress.

After pay2win, another is paying to skip the grind therefore be ahead of X group of people therefore on the top with far less effort required, even if its possible to get the materials and everything together it still requires time invested. Even if you already had those materials and are 'oh thats easy *click build*' at some point it still required time invested to get it. You are still behind Y person that got the Nekros frame first before you, or Soma first before you, or whatever first before you did and for that duration you or someone else is easily perceived then as being behind or not as 'good' or whatever derogatory category they can be lumped in, no matter the rationale behind it and the person owning those items can derive additional value from the fact that he/she has it for x amount of time before anyone else.

On another note, loss aversion plays a big role, where people like founders or high rollers perceive the time lost grinding for it as greater than the cost of the item in platinum itself. Platinum, like Station cash in Sony's titles and all those other fancy strawmoney models also create the effect of not being as easily seen as 'Real money I need for food and bills I instead spent on digital pixels'. Paired together and with other psychological motivators for spending are very effective in manipulating people to buy more and lessen that loss aversion effect of losing real money over infinite digital pixels. 

If people saw $100 AUD/USD/NZD etc in place of their platinum currency amount on the top of the Warframe menu I bet you'd be seeing VERY different spending habits. Also heard of the reasoning "work 2 hours, buy x amount of y cash to skip 6 hours of grinding"? Its a very realistic assessment of weighing up value gained to losses incurred.

I guess the cruel thing about it all is that developers or people using these methods don't have to know that they're doing it to be doing it, its very easy to adopt other peoples strategies without being able to scrutinize every single detail and regardless of whether its x or y persons fault, ultimately the developer is seen as the 'price-gouging capitalistic leech', the non-paying customers often feeling discriminated in some way, and the paying customers left with a bad taste and shelved as high rolling elitists when everyone just wants to play a good game for R&R/entertainment or otherwise, and get involved with a good community or group of friends and the developers themselves to share that with. 



tl;dr


Lower prices does not always equal more buyers.

&

My problem with the market, like many other markets using real currency > virtual currency in other F2P titles is not so much the price of the items they sell but the existence of the money-bought items themselves that I feel perpetuates schisms within the community and is like a trojan horse, it looks really appealing in terms of income to the developer and availability of options to a player, but carries a bad reputation as being the pay to get ahead, paired with a strawmoney currency is inherently manipulative and at the huge risk of it being blown out of control over the course of the games life time. The games' substance of progression and content ends up hinging far too much on the market, and the game itself is more shallow for it.


If you read the rest of the post then christ you're patient, i'm not sure its entirely coherent but its 5:45 am and I spent like 3 fricken hours on it already so.. thank you!

Edited November 1, 2013 by worxe

[KvotheTheArcane1]

Which is all fine and dandy... doesn't change the fact that those are still just grinding to progress (which was my origonal point).

I've seldom seen people raid without a desire to get *something* other than just killing time out of said raid be it personal advancement or the advancement of their friends.

Eh, yeah, there is still progress in doing the raids, but that doesn't stop it from being a real challenge (i.e. not enemies simply scaled indefinitely).

 

 

tl;dr

Lower prices does not equal more buyers.

 

Actually, it does, ever heard of price elasticity?

 

More or less it means lower price = less money per sale, but more sales, while higher prices mean more money per sale, but fewer sales.

Edited November 1, 2013 by KvotheTheArcane1

[ToeSama]

Which is all fine and dandy... doesn't change the fact that those are still just grinding to progress (which was my origonal point).

I've seldom seen people raid without a desire to get *something* other than just killing time out of said raid be it personal advancement or the advancement of their friends.

 

The grind is irrelevant. The RNG involved with the grind is not. Farming up what you need is a roll of the dice in any situation. You either get lucky, or you don't. The game doesn't reward skill or effort properly in its current model. It's all about luck and luck alone.

 

I sure many people wouldn't mind grinding for 5 hour if they were guaranteed to get something they wanted at the end of that 5 hours. As they're not, it's a problem.

[Bakim0n0]

Eh, yeah, there is still progress in doing the raids, but that doesn't stop it from being a real challenge (i.e. not enemies simply scaled indefinitely).

 

Never said it didn't.. challenge was not the topic I addressed but rather that all games with progression are grind based.

I also said that WF really suffers from a lack of mission variety and actual challenge / teamwork required outside of simple mechanics like invulnerability cycles and indefinantly scaling armor / hp / damage