Platinum Prices:

[Pappus]

Prices are just too random and without real planning.

 

As an example completely rushing a loki would cost you: 75 ( 3 parts ) + 50 final step and you would still need 20 (slot) + reactor ( 20 ). Not only would you have paid more platinum but also have used up 110k credits and other mats.

 

That is just one example to show, that the rushing 'generalized' pricepoint at its current iteration is awkward at best.

 

Other examples would be: Catalyst/Reactor rushing, Volt, Mag,...

 

It also should be a difference if you rush it with 6h crafting left or 3d. By staying at full price all the time you are only discouraging the customer to rush at all the more time passed.

 

 

Weapons:

 

Sicarius: 12k credits // 120 Platinum

Furis: 15k credits // 120 Platinum

Lato: 4k credits // 50 Platinum ( this is already borderlining scam )

MK-1 Braton: 8k Credits // 50 Platinum

 

Basically all weapons, that you can purchase for creds are overpriced.

 

Akbolto is another good case. You can only craft it, even if we assume the mats are free you get it for 225 plat I think while you get a 50k credit weapon for the same price. However the akbolto crafting will cost you more then 100k to craft so the plat value you gain from buying it is greatly better than most other cases. It also doesn't help for most 'could purchase with cred cases' that it comes supercharged.

 

This is not how I think a good pricing structure looks like.

 

Once you have a good marketplace price structure you can fix the rushing future price determined by how much time is saved (safed?) and how costy the item is on the marketplace.

 

 

 

 

[Regentlord]

I think it is generally well known that the pricing isn't good yet.

[ProfessorMeeseeks]

I somewhat agree with this. I do believe weapons/frames in general are overpriced. They do come supercharged but a potato only costs 20 platinum so in the long run it would be better to just build them. I think that DE would get more sales if they lowered the cost of weapons. As of right now I wouldn't dare spend 175 platinum on a weapon. If weapons/frames were cheaper, I would consider buying my weapons/frames straight out. The only thing I've used my platinum for is potatos and my sentinel. Everything else feels like a rip off.

[Pappus]

Isn't good yet is unacceptable.

 

They are losing customers with this. If a new player with not a big wallet and little grinding time comes. Willing to spent maybe 5-10$/month sees, that a single weapon costs up to 15€ he might turn around and leave.

 

What would you think if you went to burger king//mcdonalds and see a simple burger at 5$ and double cheese at 3,50$? ;)

 

Now those oddities are at every corner. Peeing 0.5$, taking a dump for free.....

 

Pricing is not a thing to be done in the near future. It had to be done weeks before pricetags were set.

[NeoSoulz]

ya i also think having to buy warframe blue prints and then having to find 3 more just so you can make it seems a bit unreasonable... plus the build time is a bit long as well...

[LordLokai]

i havent and will not buy weapons at present prices... i hated planet side 2 because guys were 7-8 bucks a pop... if you think i am paying 10 or more for one in this game yer nuts >>

[Pathyriel]

I agree that the pricing needs some work. It's important that they make enough money to keep the game running. If they charge too much they will scare away the people willing to pay, too little they might not make enough. 

 

First, it's a bit of a scam to obfuscate the price of plat by making the numbers mismatched (ie 75 plat for $5.00). It should be more like 50 plat for $5, 100 plat for $10, ect.

 

Next, there should be a lot of somewhat small plat transactions. Almost no one balks at spending a few cents for something. If half a million people spend a few cents over time, however, it becomes real money. Chances are we'd spend more than we normally would a little at a time rather than a big sum all at once.

 

Imagine you start building something after a night of play and go to bed. The next day you log on ready to play and you see that your weapon (or whatever) has a few hours to go, but the rush price has dropped. You might think well it's only 5 plat to finish, an I'd like to play with it now instead of wait until tomorrow. Over time those little transactions will drain our plat pools.

 

The downside of having a lot of small transactions is they need a lot of content so theres always new things to buy. They best solution is more vanity items in game. They've said they don't want people running around with silly hats or whatever, but I still think theres a lot of potential for vanity items, such as power effects, alternate suits, alternate suit UV's so the color patterns break in different ways, unique helmets. I think they are working on things like that, but not fast enough.

 

I don't think Frames should be too cheap because they would feel less special, and everybody would have every frame, but spending over $10-$15 on a frame feels a little high to me. I think the $5-$8 range is better for frames.

 

I also think they need to do some kind of "free frame of the week" so people can get a feel for different frames or weapons which would ease our hesitation to spend money on something we may end up disliking.

[Pappus]

I still think, that frames are good in the 10-15$ price range. Although it seems like a lot you save a lot of grind on that one and it ensures that not too many people just buy all the friggin warframes and are literally done with the game.

 

You have to realize how it is people tend to not come back to games. People play & are into it and if they drop out they are lost likely gone for good or gone for years. I think it is very likely for people to stop playing once they have all their favorite warframes and even if you really like half of them and you buy a single one or two that gives the game a longevity of maybe 200 hours, which is not a lot of time to spend money on.

 

So warframe prices should be a little bit discouraging and weapon prices should be a lot more encouraging.

 

So given that new warframes are effectively the only content I would, for the time, make them a lot harder to get via F2P. Especially in terms of materials. Farming a complete warframe with credit farming included takes like 2-3 hours tops and that should not be the case at all. It should be really heavy on the materials so you just can't start forging all 3 blueprints at once then purchase the last BP and call it a day for 3 days ;)

 

While this may seem to be unrelated to the issue, it actually adds to the issue of pricing. The warframes aren't really worth 15$ yet because once you know tolstoj farm and g ood material farm it is maybe worth 5$ as you said. For someone that isn't very efficient you might get a 10$ish respone in terms of correct pricing.

 

So try this:

 

Make all weapons except 1 shotgun, 1 rifle, 1 melee weapon, 1 pistol and the starter weapons non purchaseable by credits. Increase the warframe material cost by somewhere between x5 to x10. Make sure warframes don't use the same material twice. I think loki costs on two parts 500 rubedo so that could potentially mean 10.000 rubedo which is too much of a single material.

 

Keep the weapons where they are at now in terms of material cost or think about doubling them too. That way people that switch frames are in somewhat of a pickle and may feel to relieve their pain by spending a couple of bucks.

 

It may sound harsh, but the reality is that we won't see most people just doing a map for the heck of it. Nothing to farm anymore and they are gone. This will help to keep players that currently pool in to stay until something else beside farming is considered endgame.

[Drev]

Don't forget they already made a F*** ton of money from founder packages alone...

Edited April 13, 2013 by Drev

[Pappus]

It doesn't really matter how much they made. For every founder there is a lot more non-founders and they cost money too and will continue to do so. There is no such thing as made enough money.

[Hezekiah]

Prices are way off.......Definitely needs work. 

 

That being said, I did purchase 2 warframes, the 75 platinum ones, and have three total, which seems fair, and the higher prices for the other warframes feels fair as well, prices for weapons are way off though.  

 

I agree that 800 rubido/frame is kind of high, replace rubido with something else on one of the blueprints because farming for rubido becomes more of a chore than actual fun.

[MJ12]

I actually ran the numbers for Plat prices in another thread:

 

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/23880-cash-shop-prices-how-much-should-things-cost-an-economic-analysis/#entry213559

 

Check it out, this gives hard numbers to 'why do the prices seem way too not worth it'.

[Elhazzared]

There is a need for a standard plat/cred value (even if it doesn't has a direct trade) to make a good correlation however I don't think the OP makes just good points...

 

In first place pay for rushing? Are you out of your mind? The whole point of forging an armor rather than buying is precisely not spend any plat at all! You cannot take that into account. You can take the catalyst into account. Can being the operative word since you might have a blueprint and have no need whatsoever to buy it with plat. At best I'd say you'd have to spend 20 plat and that might not be needed.

 

Also some warframes cost 75 plat only why? Because they are the starting warframes. The starters have a lower price, it makes sense. The reason why the lato is cheaper is because it's a starter weapon.

 

Now I belive that charging high values for weapons/warframes is good. Why? If you want to be lazy or don't have the time, pay for it, otherwise get it in game. Customisation options or convinience options (like slots) should be cheap so everyone can buy them. I nfact I only agree that catalysts should be kept cheap as they are because you can't obtain them easly in game.

 

So yeah. There should be more of a direct correlation of credits/plat although not for all. Say, you can make plat prices for weapons be 200 times lower. So a 10K rifles is 50 plat an so on. this wouldn't work for warframes since they effectivelly cost 95K or 105K in credits (discounting mats) so you need to make this a bit higher on warframes like 300 times so a warframe would be like 350 plat for the most expensive ones...

 

At any rate, it's only the math that could be changed however the buisness model itself is pretty good already. You can have everything for free and that which you can't is reasonably priced like colour palettes or slots... Actually I'd prefer to see weapons slots at 10 plat cause you know, 12 is kinda of an odd number, but that's me.

[Pappus]

I actually ran the numbers for Plat prices in another thread:

 

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/23880-cash-shop-prices-how-much-should-things-cost-an-economic-analysis/#entry213559

 

Check it out, this gives hard numbers to 'why do the prices seem way too not worth it'.

 

That is a good baseline for them to pick. I don't really mind how they make their ironclad pricing rule as long as they do it though. I just wanted to give the essential feedback here so they get someone employed with a lot of gaming hours in the last decade under their belt and some economic sense.

 

There is a lot of stuff to consider in pricing, which we cannot know. For example their plans how often to release new warframes. It makes a difference on pricing if warframes are to be released bi-weekly (Riot stye, but I think even they can't keep that up anymore) or on a longer cyclus for example.

 

Same goes for weapons.

 

Very good work on getting the SoE numbers as comparison.

[matrixEXO]

Doesn't matter too much imo. They will eventually reduce or balance the prices out and the optional reset will allow us to get back all platinums purchased. They also realised how it will go thus decided to go with the "Keep all plats and unique items after reset" idea so that people won't squabble over their spent cash.

While I doubt they might be able to give us back out plats spent on specific non-plat only products, they might do that as well after the price reconstruction.

Edited April 14, 2013 by matrixEXO

[neKroMancer]

Doesn't matter too much imo. They will eventually reduce or balance the prices out and the optional reset will allow us to get back all platinums purchased. They also realised how it will go thus decided to go with the "Keep all plats and unique items after reset" idea so that people won't squabble over their spent cash.

While I doubt they might be able to give us back out plats spent on specific non-plat only products, they might do that as well after the price reconstruction.

 

Agree, the optional reset should come with a price rebalance. We all agree that the price of frames and weapons are generally too high for average spending budget but rebalancing the price without any kind of chance/compensation to founders/paid players will make an uproar in the community.

[AsianJoyKiller]

Thing is, you've got to balance out and consider how much the time/money tradeoff should be, and it's in a bad absolutely terrible spot right now.

Let's look at Warframes as an example. They cost about $20 if I recall, roughly 200-300 (300+ if a few cases) worth of Platinum.

$20 for 1 frame. That's a pretty hefty price, unless the time sink involved in getting a frame is multiple dozens of hours, which, in my experience getting the neccesarry pieces for 4 different frames, is not the case.

In my mind and general impression I've gathered from hanging out on the forums of a lot of F2P games, that large of a price tag is off putting for your average consumer. And it's entirely unacceptable to plenty of F2P gamers out there, who would rather grind for hours and hours rather than spend a single penny.

Prices need to be attractive and reasonable, something that makes people want to impulsively buy an item. For the most part, aside from speeding up build times, weapon/frame slots and a couple other things, prices right now are pretty ugly for anyone with anything resembling a modest disposable income. It's not like Warframe is the only game available to us (nor is it so very unique I'd argue), and it's not like people don't have interests outside of Warframe that they like to spend money on. It's an easy choice, for me at least, to pass on spending money on Warframe.

Edited April 14, 2013 by AsianJoyKiller