Exactly. Also spending 25€ for 3k SC and not spending 50€ for 8k is dumb, since with 50€ you pretty much get a "free" - so to say - 2k to buy an outfit with that. I'm pretty happy about the rates in EU, I mean it's not bad at all.
Posts by Silent
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It's entertainable.. everyone craved it, basically sent messages to Gameforge for weeks on weeks. No matter how early the game was, they wanted PvP ASAP. And now people be like "Uhmm, a little early.. Much buggs probably..And it's a high risk."
That's what I don't get either. I feel like if they had chosen Golden Citadel over PvP, people would be like "Hell yeah let's go!" and then after a couple weeks they'd be back at "We don't have CONTENT". PvP is highly likely the only type of content that can hypothetically last for as long as you'd like and you can swtich it up with different modes so I guess that while it is a very bold and risky choice because you can encounter major technical difficulties, it's also the best possible way to keep the giveusmorecontent-side of the community at bay.
Then if there's any actual issue with classes being unbalanced, I can't wait for people to cry over it instead of actually:
- Sparring and practicing
- Gearing up correctly
- Learning matchups
- Get familiar with PvP
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PvP is pretty buggy itself with iframes not being very accurate at times and 0 packet loss, imagine how stressful it would be for the publishers to deploy a PvP mode in which people just end up crying due to lag, crashes, and other kinds of things that may occur. If you give players the feeling of the "not official/beta" they won't complain/suffer as much as they would if they were to officially deploy a PvP mode.
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Then you're dead wrong about who will, and will not spend money on a game. There's plenty of casual players, that due to being casual feel they NEED to spend money on a game, just to keep up with other players to some degree. This would be in the form of getting boosters, or in a game like this, buying sought after cash shop items, like costumes, selling them to players for the in-game currency, then using that to get equipment, and such. At the same time, there's plenty of hardcore, no-lifers in online games that proudly state they've never spent a single cent playing the game.
If the casual players you refer to are casual enough to feel the need to catch up to other players, they're not casuals anymore. They're dedicated players. You can be more or less dedicated depending on how much time you play the game. In this context, "casuals" should indeed be the ones who hop into the boat and see what's up, casual players in general are irregular, not-permanent players who don't spend the money on the game because they play every once in a while and if you do continue playing the game then you're not casually playing the game. Doesn't matter whether you play 2 hours a day or 10 hours a day but if you do play regularly you're not a casual player, you're a dedicated player with just less time at your disposal. Furthermore, even if the new player hopping into the game has a lot of money in his pocket and wants to throw that 50€ bill at the game, it may be just a one time top-up and thus shouldn't even be taken into consideration when talking about income.
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Great to see we have an expert in F2P games market! Me myself I don't claim such merits, however I have been playing pretty much all types of games (single player,multiplayer, on both PC and consoles) for more than 20 years now while paying close attention to the gaming industry as a whole. And no, I haven't been born 21 years ago :< But, to keep it short as well:
I've been playing since I was 10, my dad and uncle were KR RPGs addicts who got me hooked as well ever since I was a kid. I started spending a lot of money and investing a lot of time during my teenage years and in 13+ years I've spent more than 15,000€, most definitely. Regardless, this is not a battle between experience on the matter, this is a discussion and thus opinions should be shared. That being said, I don't claim to be an expert, but I'm definitely an heavy and avid consumer, which is fairly important considering I tend not to buy anything unworthy of its price; I'm also being very objective when I say understanding a company's Business Plan is very important. Game Forge sucks, pretty much, you could say it's common knowledge, but the actual pricing of Premium Content in Soul Worker is not bad by all means if you take into account inflation on the actual Game Market due to Premium Content resellers
- F2P market generates revenue from "Whales" and "Casual players". If the "semi-hardcore" and "hardcore" player categories start having concerns, then Casuals are already in danger. Will whales be able to sustain the game indefinitely? Time will tell.
That's the point you don't need to sustain the game indefinitely. You need to feed those whales for as long as you can until you have new food to give them so they don't get tired of what you've been giving them, but this is also an entirely different topic since those who do spend money on the game and have absolutely zero issues with the prices are going to purchase non-stop. What I've been trying to say instead is that if you compare the 20€ outfits in SW to the 35€ ones in Black Desert, then GameForge is just utterly scamming people if you just judge by numbers and models, BUT if you take into account that a lot of people would start reselling those items, then the price is sort of justified. A lot of Gold Sellers would start investing into reselling Premium Content and would start manipulating the market prices in a way that favors their change rates.
As long as there is the option of crafting your own fashion stuff and that some basic fashion items are given out for free, then the entire talk about Cash Shop prices is just a huge helpless fuss in my opinion. Also, if you think the free items are bad, well, either you should complain with the Devs and the actual designers or with Game Forge for picking bad starting outfits (I'm unsure of what KR/JP have and if they have it at all), but even in that case, why would they ever provide better looking items for free? That's so against their own business.
Also I'd like to add that unlike PhoenixShi said:
Although in C9, outside of maybe the odd exception, all costume sets have a cost of just shy of $7 US, as opposed to the about $20-$50 US price tag here, with most being in the around $30-$50 US range
European players like myself actually have very different rates because some costumes are sitting on a 12€ prize (14$~) whilst the most expensive ones are around 20€.
- Last thing: Players who reach max level have a considerable chance to return on new content release. Players who don't? Not very likely. And this is a proven thing in online communities.
In fact, you don't consider players not reaching end game content dedicated players, you call them casual players and casual players provide absolutely ZERO income.
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Hey Everyone,
Let's start this on a positive note. First of all, thanks to Gameforge for bringing Soulworker to EU & NA - without them we would not be able to experience this game in our territories
Also, congratulations on the live launch! While for us (the players) this doesn't mean anything new in terms of content, it's a form of reassurement that GF is able to start working on delivering the eagerly awaited content - there's a lot of awesome stuff to come, and well... rookie raids just don't cut it anymore.This is not intended as a "suggestion" thread - there are many of you who made wonderful suggestions over there, and I hope we will see some of those improvements in the game at some point. Instead I want this to be focused on 2 very important aspects of the game so far (leaving content aside which everybody including GF knows it’s direly needed).
#1 - EXP rates
The adopted version for EU/NA is one of the early Korean ones. It is widely known that Korean games are based on grinding (doing the same thing over and over until your soul starts screaming at yourself). That may be fine for them, but we’re a different audience.
I wasn’t there at the EU/NA open beta start, but it is said that the EXP rates in the start were ok, actually double than now. After a few days or a week, Gameforge took the liberty of halving the EXP rates. Reasons behind it? I can only think of two:
- Limit player progression, as currently there is not much endgame content
- Introduce XP Battle books which increase your XP gain, purchasable with real money
While I can somehow understand the first part, the second one is a terrible decision in my opinion.
“BUT THEY NEED TO MAKE SOME MONEY OUT OF THE GAME, RIGHT ?” – Sure they do. But not by providing you with a miserable experience just to feel *forced* to buy it. Besides those XP Battlebooks are very inefficient:
- Buff duration is 1 hour and only applies on monster kills
- You can only pause the buffs by logging out (in case you want to take a break or something happens)
- Just by logging back in, you lose at least ~30 seconds of the buff (using SSD, but buff starts running again from the moment you click “start” for your character). Let’s not mention if you need to run around to deliver quests or even loading screens on a slower computer.
So every second that you’re not actively killing monsters is time lost on your buff. Not a good deal if you ask me. You should not be pressured this much. And well, you aren’t, if you’re willing to throw a lot of money out of the window.
Before anyone jumps with snappy remarks like “leveling should be hard, you should spend 7-8 months of your life just to reach maximum level like in Lineage 2” – please don’t – unnecessary grinding and time wasting is just a lame excuse from the developers for not being able to create meaningful content. Go back to the 2000’s or move to Korea if you feel the need to waste hundreds of hours of your life for something with so little meaning. I don’t mind grinding, I just don’t like wasting double the time on something or be forced to pay myself out.
*Most* people saying “current XP rates are fine” are the ones that:
- Spend a lot of hours per day on the game (5-10 +)
- Didn’t spend a dime on the game, and most likely don’t plan to
- Are mainly playing one character. As someone who’d like to level up all characters (and that’s just leveling up, without farming endgame for gear which will take a whole lot more) I wouldn’t enjoy spending dozens of hours just to do that.
But the Rank buff will help your alts! Very true, let’s see how long it will take to do that once you reach 55 with some basic math. These are the rank requirements (our version is based on Korea so numbers are the same so far):
Rank
Korea:
next rank
total points
rank bonus
Beginner D
1,304,818,075
0
5% exp
Beginner C
1,423,437,900
1,304,818,075
10% exp
Beginner B
1,542,057,725
2,728,255,975
20% exp
Beginner A
1,660,677,550
4,270,313,700
40% exp
Assuming you have some decent 55 gear and are able to farm 5 million XP / 10 mins (or 30 mill/hour) which is a nice average if you are *speed farming with good rank results and some xp gear*, it would take you:
- 43.4 hours to reach Rank Novice C
- 47.4 hours to reach Rank Novice B
- 51.4 hours to reach Rank Novice A
Total to reach Rank Novice A - ~142 hours of farming getting the above XP/hour (don't forget the daily energy limitation). Getting less XP per hour will result in significantly increased time to achieve this.
In order to halve this time, you would need to buy at least 71 battlebooks with 100%xp gain (valued at around 3 euros/dollars each) which you bring you at a cost of 213 euros/dollars.
And this is just to get 40% bonus buff for leveling your alts. While there doesn’t seem to be any more useful rewards above this rank, and might be just cosmetic I’ll just leave this here:
*Highest Rank, Master A will need 45B XP to reach, so around 10 times more than Novice A. But that’s not too important, it’s just a mark for someone who invested farming 1.5k hours in the game. We might get more XP gains later on, sure, but well this is how it is right now.
#2 Cosmetic Prices
Leaving aside the mobile “energy based model”, by locking the hairstyles and costumes to individual characters the game is designed to either:
- Make you spend huge amounts of real money
- Make you want to contact the friendly dzenai farmers in Rucco Town
- Just feel bad that you’ll be stuck wearing shitty costumes/hairstyles on your characters and move to a different game.
My point here, is that this is a major rip-off. This is the same mistake Blade&Soul did before finally making changes to how costumes work.
My thoughts:
- Costumes at their current prices (20 $ each) should be account wide. Paying 120$ to get the same costume for all your 6 characters is a major spit in the face. How many costumes are in the game? Dozens? And this is without purchasing things like VIP/special packs/other items from the store.
- Further appearance customization for your characters is absurd. 4$ haircut, 4$ hair color, 4$skin color, 4$ eye color – that’s 16$ just for some appearance tweaks for ONE character, that you can’t even preview (for some reason Gameforge provides tiny pics in their shop while Korea offers fully fledged 3D character previewer). I know they’ve just reduced prices on these, but the value is still pretty bad. Good luck getting them in the ingame market, where there are barely some of them sold.
So feel free to comment on how you feel about these – just think well so you don’t regret it later on.
And if you managed to read everything – congratz -> ***You are awesome!!!***
Thanks for reading and keeping up a constructive discussion.
Hey look, I could probably spend countless hours just talking about Cash Shops in general, Free to Play games and all things of sorts, but I do feel like that you kind of need to draw a line the moment you realize we're in 2018 and some people still don't fully understand Business Models around the genre and can't cope with what they're offered, so I'll try to keep it as simple as I can.
First of all, when you talk about XP Rates, you're basically saying that those who don't invest enough time or money into the game feel underwhelmingly unrewarded and unable to progress with ease because it feels slow, the party system is clunky and playing solo is not worth the hassle so you long for an XP rework in order to have a more enjoyable experience.
All things considered, getting more XP is dope, you progress much faster and that's cool, but that's not healthy for the current state of the game. Mechanically speaking, Soul Worker allows different manouvers around XP bonuses so that you can progress faster and that's:
- - XP % Bonus Boost on Books ($)
- - XP % Bonus Boost on Gear
- - XP % Bonus Boost on Titles
- - XP % Bonus Boost on Parties
- - XP % Bonus Boost on stacking 55s
If it weren't for these, then I'd say you're 100% right about what you're saying; But you said you've played 200+ hours so I'm assuming you know your fair share and that you're accustomed to the leveling methodology in Soul Worker, thus I can go straight to the point. On the early patches of Western ports of Eastern RPGs, especially for Dungeon Crawlers, keeping as much distance as possible from the Cap is the best way to have a much better scenario in future patches where progressing will eventually feel much smoother and more rewarding. You want to avoid having people blasting their way through new dungeons because they've had enough time in their hands to completely get the best of their characters at 100%. You want them to go slowly to keep things fresh and that's just how it is. Right now, the game is literally castrated and you have to bear with it until future patches will heal the uneasiness you feel when you're hit with boredom trying to get all your characters in a good spot. Trust me, it's sadder to see people hitting the end game and quitting the game until new content is released, than seeing people struggle with low XP Rates.
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I don't want to go too deep into the Cash Shop thing, but I can tell you that the reason I said you don't get the BM right is because you don't see it at 360°. For example, you haven't talked about the fact that people can actually sell Premium Outfits in the Market. Do you have any idea what would happen if those outfits would cost any less? Either you'd have to forbid the players from selling Premium content into the shop and lowering the prices, or you'd have to get even HIGHER prices and deal with an unavoidable bad inflation which would damage those who don't spend any money on the game, who also tend to be the most dedicated bunch. Atleast, this is my 2 cents on the entire post.
Further appearance customization for your characters is absurd. 4$ haircut, 4$ hair color, 4$skin color, 4$ eye color – that’s 16$ just for some appearance tweaks for ONE character, that you can’t even preview
I've honestly seen worse that these prices, and to be completely fair, again, take into account what would happen in the in-game market if those prices were to be any lower.
#2 Cosmetic Prices
Leaving aside the mobile “energy based model”, by locking the hairstyles and costumes to individual characters the game is designed to either:
- Make you spend huge amounts of real money- Make you want to contact the friendly dzenai farmers in Rucco Town
- Just feel bad that you’ll be stuck wearing shitty costumes/hairstyles on your characters and move to a different game.
- Having character locked outfits makes sense the moment you have an in-built fashion crafting system.
- I honestly don't think the basic fashion items that you get are that bad, there are some great combinations you can play with, and it's coming from a designer who has a knack for these things.
- - XP % Bonus Boost on Books ($)
