Please make boosters storable and only active when online

[Pseudohuman]

Is it possible to make boosters only active when you are online and freeze their countdown when you are not playing? I think this change would be appreciated by the players who play it in short but numerous sessions a day. Not all of us has a big block of time to take full advantage of boosters.

 

It would be also great if we could manually activate a booster instead of it being active immediately after receiving it. This is more important with the boosters received as a daily reward. I feels terrible to be forced to choose between playing the content you want and playing the content that is most benefitting from the booster.

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

DE:

OK, but first we'll analyze the avg statistics for 'short session' players to determine how much Longer a pauseable booster would last them in RealTime; then scale up the price so it matches the cost of how many normal boosters would have been purchased to match that number of days.

[Hobie-wan]

The point of the boosters, especially the freebies from logins, sorties, and whatnot are there to get you to play. That's the whole point. There's no way they'll ever make them pauseable or activate when you want to.

[Tsukinoki]

There are two, rather large, problems with your idea:

First is that the reason free boosters are active immediately, be it from the daily sign in or from a rare container, is to provide pressure to keep you playing.  They are supposed to make you go "Well I just got a booster...better play a bit more."

Second is that they would either have to massively reduce the time the booster lasts (e.g. no more month long booster, or 3 month booster from buying PA), or massively increase prices to make up for the fact that people would be buying far, far fewer.
And even then they would likely put some expiry date of "The booster expires within X timeperiod, use it by then or lose it" to stop someone from storing up an essentially endless amount of booster, and to encourage more booster sales.

A tertiary problem is what does DE do with all of the currently active boosters? 
I mean there are people with months of boosters currently sitting there....how far are those going to be reduced so that they aren't left with essentially endless boosters that no one would ever be able to burn through?

[taiiat]

as always, remember that if you got what you asked for, what would happen, is:

• Boosters would be less common
• Boosters would have dramatically shorter time values
• we'd probably get yet another type of Forma added into the game

Boosters are how they are in games because they are predatory by nature. their exact goal is to trigger fear of missing out and get someone to play a lot more than they might otherwise have done. even though that the expected time investment for anything takes Boosters (and l00t Abilities) into account and things are adjusted downwards accordingly to them existing.

 

so realistically it's not likely to change because the Booster is doing exactly what it wants. unless people just entirely stopped buying Boosters and stopped playing more when they have Boosters, there would be no financial incentive for the Business to consider doing something more ethical.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

No thank you, for all the reasons above. 

[Dubey]

• Boosters would have dramatically shorter time value

I'd be quite happy to trade the 18 hour login booster for a 6 hour I-can-pop-it-when-I-want booster.

It really sucks to login in the morning, discover I have an 18 hour booster, then have to go to work. Those are the only ones I feel should be modified. Even if they have a one week expiry on them to ensure you use them that week.

It'd also help mitigate the feeling of being forced to play content you didn't want to play today. Either that, or those 18 hour boosters should be limited to weekends.

[DCaedus]

I wish.

[Steel_Rook]

12 hours ago, Tsukinoki said:

First is that the reason free boosters are active immediately, be it from the daily sign in or from a rare container, is to provide pressure to keep you playing.  They are supposed to make you go "Well I just got a booster...better play a bit more."

Yeah, this argument comes up a lot, and it doesn't track for me. I get daily reset at 3 AM. Do you see any circumstances during which a booster dropping at 3 AM will get me to play for the next 8 hours? I might be working from home with a work day shifted into the afternoon, but I still want to be in bed by what? 4 AM? Even a game infested with P2W bullS#&$ like World of Tanks gives you "reserves" in a stockpile, for you to activate at your discretion in 1-hour increments. I distinctly remember a time when Warframe was considered to be F2P done right - Jim Sterling kept saying so, anyway. And yet arguments like this one serve to remind me just how much of this game's monetisation is well below average for F2P titles.

It's just odd to me that the gaming public is capable of the sort of double-think that'll decry Lootboxes an Battle Passes for being exploitative, but give DE a pass on appointment mechanics and uncontrolled boosters and artificial scarcity via Vaulting and the like.

[(XBOX)YoungGunn82]

15 hours ago, (PS4)haphazardlynamed said:

DE:

OK, but first we'll analyze the avg statistics for 'short session' players to determine how much Longer a pauseable booster would last them in RealTime; then scale up the price so it matches the cost of how many normal boosters would have been purchased to match that number of days.

 If thats how it goes, then having 1-3 hour boosters available for like 5-10 plat isn’t unreasonable and follows that model. 
 

That said I see nothing wrong with OP proposal. Resource booster timers as the are now are vary exploitive and encourage/promote an unhealthy amount of play time in one sitting. 

[Tiltskillet]

Other F2P games have had boosters that only run when online or even only when actively playing, so WF could do it too.  However I would expect their cost/rarity to go up and their duration to go down more than most of us would like.  DE might be more inclined to sneakily tamp down base affinity / resource gain too, and monetize some things they don't currently.

[(XBOX)BluLeSillyGoose]

13 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

Other F2P games have had boosters that only run when online or even only when actively playing, so WF could do it too.  However I would expect their cost/rarity to go up and their duration to go down more than most of us would like.  DE might be more inclined to sneakily tamp down base affinity / resource gain too, and monetize some things they don't currently.

Sad

[Tiltskillet]

6 minutes ago, (XB1)BluLeSillyGoose said:

Sad

Not necessarily.  It still might be a better system for more players than it would hurt.  It's just hard to predict what will happen when game companies change up their monetization, except that there would be downsides, obvious or not-so-obvious.

In general, the "no such thing as a free lunch" idea applies.

[Tsukinoki]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Yeah, this argument comes up a lot, and it doesn't track for me. I get daily reset at 3 AM. Do you see any circumstances during which a booster dropping at 3 AM will get me to play for the next 8 hours? I might be working from home with a work day shifted into the afternoon, but I still want to be in bed by what? 4 AM? Even a game infested with P2W bullS#&$ like World of Tanks gives you "reserves" in a stockpile, for you to activate at your discretion in 1-hour increments.

While this is a situation to look at I don't think its all that common to be in the situation of:
"I get the daily resets in the middle of the night, close to when I'm going to bed and I'm also playing at that time"
Even with shifted schedules.

Plus the longer you sign in the longer the boosters are...I mean I'm getting 51 hour boosters at this point whenever they come up in the sign in reward.

For the majority of players (the ones that DE are targeting with this measure) it works.
They sign in and go "I'm going to play a few missions and log out".
They get a booster for 4+ hours and go "Well I do need what this is giving me...I could play a few hours to not waste all of this..."
And that's when and how it works...and it does work.

Sure there are outliers that are like the situation you described....but they are far from common.

As to your WoT comparison:
How long do you get the boosters for?  1 hour?  Maybe 3 if you're super lucky?
Meanwhile what does Warframe give you?  8 hours?  51 if you have a high number of sign ins?
You're comparing two disparate systems that can't be directly compared because they are trying to solve two different things.

Warframes system is going "We want the player to keep playing...so lets give them a booster that ticks down so they want to sign in so as to not waste the booster"
WoT system is going "We made our system unbearably painful and annoying...lets give them a tiny respite from that so that they go "Well this sucks..." when it runs out and they buy more to stop it from sucking."  After all unless the person plays with a booster they won't know how bad the system is when the booster isn't active...

They aren't trying to approach things from the same direction....and WoT is arguably quite a bit worse than Warframes situation.

[xombob89]

16 hours ago, Tsukinoki said:

They are supposed to make you go "Well I just got a booster...better play a bit more."

Meanwhile: "You have played over an hour, please dont forget to take a break" :D

[Steel_Rook]

3 hours ago, Tsukinoki said:

For the majority of players (the ones that DE are targeting with this measure) it works. They sign in and go "I'm going to play a few missions and log out". They get a booster for 4+ hours and go "Well I do need what this is giving me...I could play a few hours to not waste all of this..." And that's when and how it works...and it does work.

At the risk of sounding rude, do you have any evidence to back this up? I understand that it might sound intuitively true, but my personal anecdotal experience tends to disagree.

 

3 hours ago, Tsukinoki said:

As to your WoT comparison:
How long do you get the boosters for?  1 hour?  Maybe 3 if you're super lucky?
Meanwhile what does Warframe give you?  8 hours?  51 if you have a high number of sign ins?
You're comparing two disparate systems that can't be directly compared because they are trying to solve two different things.

Each set of Reserves lasts either an hour or two hours - I forget exactly. However, the game tends to dispense them in large quantities. I remember sitting on about 20 of each kind of Reserve - Credits, XP, Crew XP, etc. And sure, a random daily booster in Warframe might be 24 hours (it's what I get), it's not like I'm going to sit down and play for 24 hours straight. If I get 8 hours out of that, that's still a lot. Meanwhile, I can just keep tripping World of Tanks Reserves when the previous one ends and use only as many as I actually need. Granted, I still end up with, like, 30 minutes out of the last 60-minute Reserve but that's a relatively much smaller loss.

My point wasn't to praise World of Tanks, though. The reason "I forget exactly" is because I haven't played that game in a couple of years. Every time I try playing it, I'm immediately reminded of the aggressive monetisation and P2W game balance, causing me to walk away after a match or two all over again. I was more commenting on how Warframe fails to clear even that low bar in this particular regard - and how we're defending it for that.

 

3 hours ago, Tsukinoki said:

They aren't trying to approach things from the same direction....and WoT is arguably quite a bit worse than Warframes situation.

Overall? Yes, absolutely. World of Tanks is a TERRIBLE game. Actually, let me qualify. World of Tanks is actually pretty good game completely undermined by its monetisation and progression systems. If you've seen much of my posts around the forums, you'd likely have seen me refer to Warframe in the exact same way. The difference is that at least in Warframe, I get my money's worth when I do buy into the P2W. The reason I don't really give a rat's ass about the various free daily Boosters is I'm almost perpetually running an Affinity Booster and have been running a Resource Booster since Deimos came out. Getting a 24-hour Affinity Booster for me doesn't mean I have to use it or lose it within the next 24 hours. It just means my existing 30-day Booster gets to last an extra day.

On the flip side, I can buy a month's worth of World of Tanks "Premium Subscription" which offers double credits and XP for €10. Getting the equivalent of that in Warframe - all of the available Boosters - would cost me 1000 Plat. That only comes to €10 if I purchase on 75% discount. If you've ever seen me argue that Warframe's prices are balanced around a 75% discount and retroactively inflated by a factor of four most of the time, this is why. If I hadn't bought the majority of my Plat at 75% off, I probably wouldn't have stuck around with Warframe. This is far from the worst F2P game on the market - no doubt. Many are worse than it. But it's not the kind of "BEST F2P EVA!!!" cornucopia that Jim Sterling and other starry-eyed fans tried to push it as back when rejecting lootboxes was seen a more important than fostering pro-consumer business practices.

[BahamutKaiser]

Why ask for bandaids? It would be better if the removed all boosters and made the booster rates native. They're the worst kind of "content".

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

4 hours ago, BahamutKaiser said:

Why ask for bandaids? It would be better if the removed all boosters and made the booster rates native. They're the worst kind of "content".

It's a 'free to play / pay to skip grind' game. Gotta monetize.

It is the very nature of this model that there will always be two sides to the game: Content, and Grind. Don't like it? then play a 59.99 one-time-purchase game instead of a "free" one.