Potato Famine 2.0

[Magnar21]

I've been playing a few months now somewhat causually. In that time, at least 4 Orokin Reactors have spawned through alerts, and I've been unable to grab even one. If it doesn't spawn while im at college, it's spawning while I'm visiting friends, and if it's not spawning while I'm running errands, then (like today), it despawns right before I get up this morning.

 

I was hoping for some way to aquire these outside platinum, but at this point, either I am extremely unlucky, or the alert duration is way to short. Please DE, provide some method of aquiring Orokin Reactors more consistantly, even if it's just increasing the length of the alert.

[Sarge111]

Reactors should have a ten hour alert duration IMO. Unfortunately my opinion doesn't matter much.

[SynisterDoom]

I've been playing a few months now somewhat causually. In that time, at least 4 Orokin Reactors have spawned through alerts, and I've been unable to grab even one. If it doesn't spawn while im at college, it's spawning while I'm visiting friends, and if it's not spawning while I'm running errands, then (like today), it despawns right before I get up this morning.

 

I was hoping for some way to aquire these outside platinum, but at this point, either I am extremely unlucky, or the alert duration is way to short. Please DE, provide some method of aquiring Orokin Reactors more consistantly, even if it's just increasing the length of the alert.

usually after every livestream (bi-weekly) there is a 24 hour tater alert, the dev team was adventureing through germany for the past month or so so tahts why there hasnt been one. I think the next live stream is this week

[AttackNitro]

If you are unable to get even the 12hours long alerts (every 2 weeks there is one after the livestream) then you will have to stop being so stingy and buy some platinum.

 

You don't need more than $5 to get plenty of potatoes.

[NalkorRN]

I've been playing a few months now somewhat causually. In that time, at least 4 Orokin Reactors have spawned through alerts, and I've been unable to grab even one. If it doesn't spawn while im at college, it's spawning while I'm visiting friends, and if it's not spawning while I'm running errands, then (like today), it despawns right before I get up this morning.

 

I was hoping for some way to aquire these outside platinum, but at this point, either I am extremely unlucky, or the alert duration is way to short. Please DE, provide some method of aquiring Orokin Reactors more consistantly, even if it's just increasing the length of the alert.

This right here is why I'm always for having the potato alerts last 24 hours. There was less than 4 minutes left on the Orokin Reactor alert when I checked the twitter and when I logged in, it was just over 2 minutes left.

[Magnar21]

If you are unable to get even the 12hours long alerts (every 2 weeks there is one after the livestream) then you will have to stop being so stingy and buy some platinum.

 

You don't need more than $5 to get plenty of potatoes.

While that is always an option, some of us are getting through college right now, and don't have much money to spare. Hence why I'm playing one of the few truly free F2P games. IMHO, the only things stopping Warframe from being completely perfect, is the rarity of Potatoes, and to a degree, weapon/warframe slots. But that's off topic isn't it?

 

On topic, I got the last livestream's alert, but that wasn't a Reactor was it? :)  I would love to just have a 10 hr duration on Potato alerts. I really would like to potato my trinity, and possibly my Frost Prime, when that blueprint finally drops.

Edited September 18, 2013 by Magnar21

[magusat999]

I agree with the OP - 5:00 am is really ridiculous. I missed it because like most normal people I am asleep at that time. Just because there is an option to buy doesn't mean that's the only way - the free ones cannot be replaced with one you purchased, it will always be one you could have gotten extra no matter how many you buy. I thought there was a longer window for potatoes, but apparently that has been cut back. Very disappointed.

[Anorax_Xarona]

It was actually 8 AM for me when that alert went off, and if I hadn't heard my phone buzzing at me I would have missed it.  I was also under the impression that Reactor/Catalyst alerts lasted several hours, this one was just over an hour, and while there's *@##$ing about "5 am for you isn't 5 am for everyone", which we all know, the people that DID miss it and can't or can only rarely afford platinum miss out on something EXTREMELY useful to their gameplay.  I had to dig out $5 change last week to get a few catalysts, weapon slots, and a reactor for my new Vauban.

Perhaps they could even go so far as to make a Reactor/Catalyst BP as a potential reward for surviving a while in Survival missions, would give people more reason to stay longer than 5 minutes.

[Magnar21]

It was actually 8 AM for me when that alert went off, and if I hadn't heard my phone buzzing at me I would have missed it.  I was also under the impression that Reactor/Catalyst alerts lasted several hours, this one was just over an hour, and while there's *@##$ing about "5 am for you isn't 5 am for everyone", which we all know, the people that DID miss it and can't or can only rarely afford platinum miss out on something EXTREMELY useful to their gameplay.  I had to dig out $5 change last week to get a few catalysts, weapon slots, and a reactor for my new Vauban.

Perhaps they could even go so far as to make a Reactor/Catalyst BP as a potential reward for surviving a while in Survival missions, would give people more reason to stay longer than 5 minutes.

Not only do I agree with your comment about missing it if you don't set some kind of alarm, I love the idea of having a change for Potato BPs as Survival rewards.

[Archistopheles]

 Unfortunately my opinion doesn't matter much.

 

I'm upvoting your self-esteem, brother.

[Magnar21]

Well, it's nice that they will be putting up a Reactor on the livestream alerts, but that doesn't help with the one I missed due to the horrible timing and short duration. I am looking forward to getting a reactor, finally :p

[NalkorRN]

I'm upvoting your self-esteem, brother.

Let me balance out the humbleness. My opinion is all that matters and I say every Orokin Reactor/Catalyst and Forma BP alert should last for 24 hours, and every Livestream should have one afterwards, even if there was one earlier in the day.

[RoboDoge]

Why should they last 24 h? Just for some people to have convenience?

 

Primary tactics of DE are those of selling potatoes and forma, not giving them for free. I am not taking their side, but if you are free2play or dont want to buy potatoes then you should depend on pure luck ( will of RNG gods). If you cannot wait, invest some money in plat and buy that stuff that you need/want.

Edited September 18, 2013 by RoboDog

[NalkorRN]

Why should they last 24 h? Just for some people to have convenience?

 

Primary tactics of DE are those of selling potatoes and forma, not giving them for free. I am not taking their side, but if you are free2play or dont want to buy potatoes then you should depend on pure luck ( will of RNG gods). If you cannot wait, invest some money in plat and buy that stuff that you need/want.

Oh please, DE is not going to starve if Potato and Forma alerts last 24 hours. I can't craft weapon/frame slots, nor can I grind for Sentinel cosmetics or the scarves. Each potato costs 20 platinum, 3 of them is less than 1 color pack.

[RoboDoge]

Oh please, DE is not going to starve if Potato and Forma alerts last 24 hours. I can't craft weapon/frame slots, nor can I grind for Sentinel cosmetics or the scarves. Each potato costs 20 platinum, 3 of them is less than 1 color pack.

Try to take this point of view.

 

24 h alert is around 20 k people getting potato. 20 000x 5 $ ( 75 plat, if people bought plat without discount ) =100 900 $. So it isnt that low amount of money. Nobody is saying that 20 000 will buy plat, but if even 2000 of them buy it, it is 10 000 $. It is not the perfect math here, simple example. DE is making alot of money on potatoes and forma, and they are not willing to pull their own teeths with offering to many free potatoes.

[NalkorRN]

Try to take this point of view.

 

24 h alert is around 20 k people getting potato. 20 000x 5 $ ( 75 plat, if people bought plat without discount ) =100 900 $. So it isnt that low amount of money. Nobody is saying that 20 000 will buy plat, but if even 2000 of them buy it, it is 10 000 $. It is not the perfect math here, simple example. DE is making alot of money on potatoes and forma, and they are not willing to pull their own teeths with offering to many free potatoes.

Here's the thing, if people want the taters/forma to begin with and are willing to pay anyway, they'll still pay. This won't change their spending habits at all.

[MeteorKing]

Aren't alerts randomized?  Legit question, here.

[NalkorRN]

Aren't alerts randomized?  Legit question, here.

They're supposed to be, but ever since the potato famine, where no potato showed up on random alerts for over 4 weeks, people questioned the supposed-randomness. Some still do.

[Magnar21]

Wall of Text incoming.

 

Why should they last 24 h? Just for some people to have convenience?

 

Primary tactics of DE are those of selling potatoes and forma, not giving them for free. I am not taking their side, but if you are free2play or dont want to buy potatoes then you should depend on pure luck ( will of RNG gods). If you cannot wait, invest some money in plat and buy that stuff that you need/want.

Legitimate point, but here's my perspective. If there is a flawed system, it is the obligation of the developers to fix it. If the developers have the power to make a system better (and not in regards to money but the system itself), but chose not to, then they are doing something wrong as developers. This is speaking from a perspective of someone who has done programming, although I do understand, there are restrictions to this, such as funding and time.

 

DE does not rely on the sale of potatoes and forma. They rely on the players' commitment (whether conscious or not) to purchase their goods. It is in DE's best interests to create ways for the players to enjoy their game, without feeling shafted for not spending a cent.

 

Before I throw in alerts into the mix, let me ignore them for simplicity, just for a moment.

 

 

 

Here's an example that you might recognize (first hand account, and some details might be a little off): Bioware's SWTOR. This is a game that had a respectable amount of subscribers and players. They added a trial every month or so to entice new players to come in, and it worked. I know of several players who would just come on the trial weekends to get a taste of a rather good game, even if it was buggy and a carbon copy of WoW in a Star Wars skin. Things changed when they made it "Free to play", when suddenly more players came in, but it didn't last. No one stayed. Why? Because even though there was enough freedom to allow you to play through 100+ hrs without paying a cent, the game practically rubbed **** in your face in order to tell you that, in case you hadn't figured it out yet, subscribers get more than you do. Not that that's a bad thing to do, but it was the way they did it. Rather than saying, "hey, come over here to the paying side, we have FREE stuff", they chose to say, "here's some rewards for your quest. Oh wait i forgot, you don't pay. Oh well, I'll just take that reward off your hands".

 

Oh, you'd rather have a game without a subscription? Ok...... How about Firefall the Game? Now that is one of the best Free to Play games out there. There is absolutely nothing in the cash shop (outside of cosmetics and the usual exp boosts) that cannot be easily acquired in game with minimal difficulty. Even LGVs (motorcycles), once a Founder's Pack only item, can now be crafted with in-game currency. Sure, it can be a little grindy at times, but still, there is nothing preventing you from actually maxing out a given frame, and making it the absolute best you can.

 

Now enter Warframe. That was (and still is) a great game, but they have reserved some non-convenience items for platinum only. Namely, character slots, weapon slots, and Potatoes (formas come close, but you can acquire them rather easily in the void, so those don't really count). Every other item can be acquired in-game, or is simply a convenience (or cosmetic) item. While some might argue that none of those items are required, I doubt a single person can doubt that having those 3 types of items makes your experience in Warframe much, much better.

 

Question: If selling items that are required to maximize fun is the only way that Warframe can survive, then how is red5 (Firefall devs) able to continue as long as they have?

 

 

 

Weapon slots are needed in order to adapt your playstyle to multiple environments. Workaround? Level all the junk/filler weapons first, then sell them. Downside: Selling a weapon requires you to craft and rank it up again, if you ever want to reuse it.

Warframe slots are the same as weapon ones; if you don't spend platinum, you have to spend a lot of time to reacquire a frame that you've sold, and re-rank it.

Potatoes are required to effectively use certain weapons past lvl50, or just to make certain weapons viable at all. Want to know how that feels? Try aquiring a Hikou or one of the other really inefficient weapons on a brand new account (ofc, after you acquire the resources) and try to do a solo mission with them. Some weapons just don't work well when not potatoed.

 

 

Now, let's look at alerts. It's a randomly generated mission, with random rewards, with each mission available during a set time period varying depending on rewards/missions. All in all, a good concept, and does increase the immersion of the game, to a point. Let's look at the example this morning: I have been monitoring the alert feed for the past few weeks, since RL keeps me from the potato alerts so far. I turn on my pc, only to find that less than 30 minutes before i got up, the Reactor alert ended.

 

Now why did that happen?

1) DE sets the alerts up to occur randomly

2) the alert started while I was sleeping

3) The alert duration wasn't long enough for me to get to it

 

Real Life keeps me from the alerts, since they happen randomly. That wouldn't be a problem, except they are consistently too short for me to get to them. (Hey, that wouldn't be as much of problem if they had an IOS/Android app *hint hint*)

 

 

 

TL;DR:

It is never a good idea to create a game where the only way to acquire a needed item is through either a cash shop or RNG completely beyond the player's control. Having a random drop from a boss is one thing, creating random alerts is another. Creating random alerts with short enough duration that the only way to reliably acquire them (if they deign to appear) is to no-life around the PC, don't sleep, don't talk to friends, don't go to school, etc., is unfair to players that cannot fit that standard, and should not appear in a modern game.

[Xenrax]

Try to take this point of view.

24 h alert is around 20 k people getting potato. 20 000x 5 $ ( 75 plat, if people bought plat without discount ) =100 900 $. So it isnt that low amount of money. Nobody is saying that 20 000 will buy plat, but if even 2000 of them buy it, it is 10 000 $. It is not the perfect math here, simple example. DE is making alot of money on potatoes and forma, and they are not willing to pull their own teeths with offering to many free potatoes.

Holy cow!? A 10% player conversion rate!?

I'd LOVE to know what planet you're living on because that type of dream-wishing only happens to people who are now unemployed.

Typical conversion rates (based on publicly available data from GamaSutra) come out to ~5 percent at BEST and closer to 1 to 2 percent in the F2P game category. It is much higher for mobile games (closer to 7 to 10 percent) but WarFrame is NOT a mobile game. :P

You also fail at basic math.  20,000 * $5 = $100,000 and not $100,900 or w/e magic number you seem to be pulling out of the Void.

 

All prices and pricing methodologies should go by the non-discounted price if you want to obtain NEW customers.  Those that paid $100+ or whatever for the 'discount' (lol) are already going to spend that regardless of how pricey the items are because they're deeply invested enough to spend that much on a whim.

 

There is a severe logical fallacy in making the false assumption that people who can get ONE blueprint for a 24 hour duration after a livestream (that is scheduled in advance and doesn't always happen on a weekend) are somehow LESS inclined to spend money on the game for other additional Orokin items or other market items.

 

One blueprint (which still requires tons of mat farming) for 24 hours every ~2 weeks (at best?) is not something that has a statistically-significant chance of severely impacting current or future market purchases of said Orokin items.

 

Source:  Myself, as my work is monetization consultation for various F2P games.  I'd go into details but NDAs and all that.  Take it for what you will.

Edited September 18, 2013 by Xenrax

[RoboDoge]

Holy cow!? A 10% player conversion rate!?

I'd LOVE to know what planet you're living on because that type of dream-wishing only happens to people who are now unemployed.

Typical conversion rates (based on publicly available data from GamaSutra) come out to ~5 percent at BEST and closer to 1 to 2 percent in the F2P game category. It is much higher for mobile games (closer to 7 to 10 percent) but WarFrame is NOT a mobile game. :P

You also fail at basic math.  20,000 * $5 = $100,000 and not $100,900 or w/e magic number you seem to be pulling out of the Void.

 

All prices and pricing methodologies should go by the non-discounted price if you want to obtain NEW customers.  Those that paid $100+ or whatever for the 'discount' (lol) are already going to spend that regardless of how pricey the items are because they're deeply invested enough to spend that much on a whim.

 

There is a severe logical fallacy in making the false assumption that people who can get ONE blueprint for a 24 hour duration after a livestream (that is scheduled in advance and doesn't always happen on a weekend) are somehow LESS inclined to spend money on the game for other additional Orokin items or other market items.

 

One blueprint (which still requires tons of mat farming) for 24 hours every ~2 weeks (at best?) is not something that has a statistically-significant chance of severely impacting current or future market purchases of said Orokin items.

 

Source:  Myself, as my work is monetization consultation for various F2P games.  I'd go into details but NDAs and all that.  Take it for what you will.

You ever tried running a business of you own? With not enough resources?

 

I just used example, not facts, and you jumped to a conclusion that i said that 10 % of the people will buy plat. You my friend do not know how business is run, and that "money is a god" is the teachings of every businessman. No matter what people try to think, everyone is working for money.

 

DE made this game to make money, not for our satisfaction. It is simple as that.

Edited September 18, 2013 by RoboDog

[Xenrax]

The Orikin items are 100% necessary beyond a certain point.  Period.  So they are a 'necessary' item that is only available with money.  The alerts and RNG-login are minor patches to the problem.

Good companies like Valve and even Nintendo show that if you cater to your market and provide GOOD SERVICE then people will support that type of service.

 

Supporting this type of attitude with the 'companies exist only to make money' is utter crap.

The real answer is 'companies exist to provide a good, a service, or some combination of the two'.

Regardless of what you provide, you are offering something for money and if your offer is poor than your current and potential future customers will have an issue with that and be vocal about it.

I believe this video says it better than I can.

Edited September 19, 2013 by Xenrax

[Nagisawa]

The worse thing a business can do to it's customers is to make their customers feel like they HAVE to do something.  Forcing someone to do something is the best way to make them dig in and not do it.

[Xenrax]

-snip to save space-

Exactly. DE is using ethically-questionable coercive skinner-box gameplay systems to:

-force players to be ridiculously underpowered for the content they're in; I love a challenge if I have the basic tools to overcome it with reasonable effort

-force players to *try* to find a newbie-friendly clan (good luck with that); playerbase is increasingly hostile and not newbie-friendly

-force players to pay money for necessary Orokin items

 

This could all be mitigated if there was either some way to earn platinum without paying (perhaps through a daily event) or an even better idea to provide 1 'newbie package' with an Orokin Reactor and a Catalyst.  Perhaps even with 5k credits to start the player off on a positive note.

[Nagisawa]

Exactly. DE is using ethically-questionable coercive skinner-box gameplay systems to:

-force players to be ridiculously underpowered for the content they're in; I love a challenge if I have the basic tools to overcome it with reasonable effort

-force players to *try* to find a newbie-friendly clan (good luck with that); playerbase is increasingly hostile and not newbie-friendly

-force players to pay money for necessary Orokin items

 

This could all be mitigated if there was either some way to earn platinum without paying (perhaps through a daily event) or an even better idea to provide 1 'newbie package' with an Orokin Reactor and a Catalyst.  Perhaps even with 5k credits to start the player off on a positive note.

Exactly.

 

There needs to be a way for people to get everything in game without spending anything but time.  But if you want them sooner, if that's what you want, then you can pay for Platinum.

Edited September 19, 2013 by Nagisawa