Dev update 2020-03-08: new account resources
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As noted above, keep the lifetime sub. Anybody that buys the game and turns out to love it will want to upgrade to a lifetime sub. Fans with lifetime subs still will buy the extra stuff too, but they won't be dividing up their spending between CPU time and the extras, they will just be spending money on the extras.
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@artch It's still very much pay to win, changing the token duration doesn't fix that. As long as they are a tradable commodity I can sell tokens to gain an resource advantage through market purchases. While competing for GCL it's quite easy to spot when some players have had their pay day.
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@tun9an0 Pay-to-win is when you pay to the game administration to gain benefits. But in this case you pay to another player to transfer his benefits to yourself. He loses his credits (which he legitimately obtained in game, not just created by real life investment), you gain his credits. Zero world balance, no administration actions involved, it's just player-to-player relationship. If there were no tradable commodities, there still would be other options to achieve exactly that: "I transfer $10 to your Steam Wallet, you transfer XXX credits to me".
But in your suggestion of different max CPU, the more money you pay, the bigger benefit from the administration you have, which is clearly pay-to-win.
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@tun9an0 just look at EVE Online, the PLEX system is similar and everybody gets to profit from it.
As soon as big event starts people buy PLEX like crazy and liquidate them in order to prepare for the event.
This boosts the entire economy every time and sly people use this to buy PLEX at good prices allowing them to play for a long time worry free before they need to "grind" again.
The entire CPU System is there to ensure that people keep interest and keep the lights on, your actions are completely different if a sum x of legal tender is involved.
Don't believe me? Play a two rounds of Poker with your friends, one without money and one with money at stake you will see a immediate change in their behavior.@deft-code I have one for the same reason, even if I actually don't really play on the official server much and more on privately hosted ones. But I like the option.
It was more of an idea, not really to be taken seriously.
@artch I dunno, LtSubs are pretty powerful thinking carefully about it let's me believe that LtSubs shouldn't be allowed to trade CPU Tokens.
Seems somewhat fairer to me, if you win some they should be converted into pixels instead.
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@artch Sorry perhaps my use of the word max CPU is confusing. I do not mean people should be able to go outside 300 CPU or whatever their GCL allows. I was only suggesting you could pick something in the middle between 20 and and your max potential. Say someone has a potential 120 CPU (from GCL) based on a long running 20 CPU colony, if they buy a token they can't suddenly use this extra 100 CPU effectively especially if it's short term. If you'd sell volumes of CPU he could choose to use it for say an extra 10 cpu for 240 hours instead of 24 hours. Otherwise you'd sell him 100 where he'd only be able to squeeze out 10.
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@mrfaul Sorry I am not sure what you are trying to say here except that EVE is also pay to win? I surely would not lose interest in Screeps if there were no tokens. I have enjoyed playing poker in the past just fine with fake money, by just keeping score.
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@deft-code I like the lifetime sub for similar reasons. I just don't want to have CPU time be to a factor in my gaming decisions other than the current GCL limits.
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@tun9an0 said in Dev update 2020-03-08: new account resources:
@mrfaul Sorry I am not sure what you are trying to say here except that EVE is also pay to win? I surely would not lose interest in Screeps if there were no tokens. I have enjoyed playing poker in the past just fine with fake money, by just keeping score.
Ask any EVE veteran and he will say to you that it is very far from pay to win, even if you have a tons of ISK that doesn't help you much if you have no clue what you are doing.
The PLEX system allows them to provide a way to play the game without the need to spend a single rl dime, instead by investing meaningful work inside the game.
EVEs economy is almost completely player driven without players it would collapse and PLEX are something in its backbone.
Screeps current market model doesn't have that and I believe this change will give the market a whole new value.To reiterate what artch said "pay to win" is when you can buy an advantage from the games provider that is impossible to achieve otherwise.
This model doesn't do that, it just gives you tokens that you can sell. If nobody wants to buy from you, you won't see a single credit.
Sure you can sell it at dumping prices but once the demand is satisfied its over.
This is a bigger loss for you, because everybody else just gained a very valuable resource.You also completely missed the point of the poker example, playing poker with a monetary value even if its something silly like a buck to participate changes how you play the game.
It gives the game a new value, one that is more serious as before.
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I like to keep real money out of my gaming experience, I am just of a different opinion. Fact remains that, independent of their granularity, the selling of tokens for credits allows you to do some significant padding to your resource income on top of what you could otherwise produce yourself. While I do not think this is currently a big issue, it is there. My suggestion doesn't change anything here, I don't really understand Arch's response.
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Sorry perhaps my use of the word max CPU is confusing. I do not mean people should be able to go outside 300 CPU or whatever their GCL allows. I was only suggesting you could pick something in the middle between 20 and and your max potential. Say someone has a potential 120 CPU (from GCL) based on a long running 20 CPU colony, if they buy a token they can't suddenly use this extra 100 CPU effectively especially if it's short term. If you'd sell volumes of CPU he could choose to use it for say an extra 10 cpu for 240 hours instead of 24 hours. Otherwise you'd sell him 100 where he'd only be able to squeeze out 10.
Yes, I understood you correctly. You suggest to allow people to increase their CPU gradually (within their GCL limit), paying less when they want to have less CPU, and paying more when they want more. It's pay-to-have-more-benefit, or, in other words, pay-to-win.
Currently we have only two tiers, paid and unpaid players, but your suggestion is to create a wide variety of paid-less and paid-more players. Someone with GCL 28 will be able to pay for full limit and thus will gain more benefit than another player with GCL 28 who paid less.
Fact remains that, independent of their granularity, the selling of tokens for credits allows you to do some significant padding to your resource income on top of what you could otherwise produce yourself.
Totally. But the game administration is not involved here, it's player-to-player interaction. Benefits (credits) are not created from thin air, they're legitimately obtained in game.
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@artch said in Dev update 2020-03-08: new account resources:
Totally. But the game administration is not involved here, it's player-to-player interaction. Benefits (credits) are not created from thin air, they're legitimately obtained in game.
I don't agree with this reasoning. I drew my wallet and gained a competitive advantage; "administration" as you call it has made this possible by selling me a voucher I can convert to in-game credits. It's OK, it's pretty marginal currently, I am not objecting to the system, it is what it is though.
Selling CPU more granular would align directly with server hosting cost, anyhow it was just a suggestion, overcharged small players are probably paying for my large CPU footprint as a lifetime sub. I was just curious how this 24 hour thing would be beneficial for players. I think it's to be found mostly on the token trading side of things.
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@artch said in Dev update 2020-03-08: new account resources:
We're going to provide a fixed amount of all account resources on the in-game market by NPC orders as well.
This is something I'm curious about with your new scheme. Currently, you need to buy the tokens from you, Ok, that's perfectly reasonable. I believe they cost somewhere in the range of 17.50 USD each. That's between a pure month to month sub (9.95 USD) and the 41.00 USD for a 6 month sub. As I'm grandfathered in, I can always switch back to the 6 month sub.
Or, you can buy them from the Steam Market. Here's where it get a bit weird: There, they sell for less than 9 bucks (That's where I get mine.) That's even cheaper than a 6 month sub. So, it would already seem that there's a source of them that drives the "value" down (Preventing some from being bought from you.) Adding an easy to buy from the NPCs source on top of that would make them even cheaper. Now, I know where a lot of them could be coming from, "bug" awards and the like... but shouldn't THOSE tokens be non transferable?
Can you stop them from being sold on the Steam Market place? Your ability to be the sole source of them needs to be sacrosanct for them to be a good revenue stream. And by "good" I mean "legit."
Don't get me wrong, I support where you're going here. I just want to be sure you legitimately get your due revenue from the tokens. If it turns out that there are actually people buying them for 17.50 USD from you, then selling them to me for 8.50 USD... great.
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Steam Market is still a thing?
He does have a point there.
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We're perfectly fine with that, it is expected. The NPC supply will be limited and controlled.
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I'm really looking forward to seasons. I'd love to hear more about that.
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My gut feeling is that CPU tokens will underperform subscriptions in terms of revenue (and I have a fair amount of experience in this area).
It seems like the devs are replacing a simple elegant system with a fiddly complex one.
Is the goal to ultimately charge more per clock cycle? I.e. will running with CPU tokens 100% of the time cost more than a subscription? I wonder if the real fix is just to charge more for subscriptions if that is the case. We're all programmers. Our hourly billing rate is 30-50x the monthly subscription cost right now. We don't care what it costs, probably. I don't even know what it is.
I'm happy paying for my subscription right now even though I hardly play at all any more because I like supporting this weird indie game. However, I hardly ever participate in any game economy that involves microtransactions, and the mere presence of them in a "skill based" game for anything other than purely cosmetic stuff makes me not want to play the game any more. Maybe I am old and out of touch.
High level question: if Screeps were twice as good at converting free players to subscriptions would the devs be considering this change? If not, is the real problem actually somewhere else?
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@shedletsky Nobody likes subscriptions. A game item is way more easy to understand than some real-life financial relationships. And with 24-day tokens much more people will become involved in this, than with 30/60-days minimum commitment.
Also, the idea is not to increase revenue from CPU selling (we're fine if it will not), but to streamline the entire account resources system, make it more game-like and less service-like.
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@shedletsky your point of view is totally legit but lets face it, programmers are not the majority out there.
(Even so any sane person sees that software dominates our everyday life and we need way more of them)So if screeps wants to grow it needs to be appealing to new players (non programmers) and subscriptions are a BIG turn off for a lot of people, i.e. like me.
I f-ing hate subs, that is one of the major reasons why stopped playing EVE etc.
I really can't stand it if a game tells me what to do with my time. (I know silly, isn't it. But I'm just a dumb human)
Subs are "forcing a commitment" that a lot of people don't like, the 24h token are way more approachable and don't feel like a big commitment.
This "giving a choice" is a big part in the decision for newbies to continue to play the game and this is the goal.
Selling tokens lowers also the bar quite a lot for new players to get access to new resources and gameplay elements.It's like YT videos you have around 10 secs to gain the viewers attention, if you waste that with a stupid intro you will get skipped a lot.
Does it boil down to the same result at the end of the month? Yes it does!
But it does feel a heck of a lot different to a sub.Thinking about it, @artch I think you should rise the price of the lifetime sub to 150 bucks. Seems more appropriate with this change.
Also I wonder how granular will you sell the tokens?
By piece, packs, mass rebate?
It may also be interesting to hint to the steam market for low quantities so you don't have to deals with so many transactions.
Every transaction is something with the potential to go wrong.
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@mrfaul said in Dev update 2020-03-08: new account resources:
Also I wonder how granular will you sell the tokens?
The official store will sell it in bundles of 30, 60, and 90 tokens. But on the in-game market or Steam Community Market you can buy a single token as well.
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Do you plan on something like a starter pack with all 3 res in limited quantities but with a cheap entry price...
Uhhhh wait you can use the steam version for that
