Zodai Wow, props to the dedication. 13 Pages is nothing to scoff at and you'd be hard pressed to find people who write that much for a school paper, let alone for a game they happen to play. If you ever want a fellow long-winded individual to chat with, do pm me.
That being said, while I do favor some of Zodai's suggestions (particularly the monthly subscription bonuses and adjusting the EP costs for lower level zones), I'm against strongly changing the current Energy system as it stands. I only support changes that at worst result in a net benefit across all users (Kaldor-Hicks improvement) and any major alterations of the system will result in the opposite. Frankly, I don't care if people stop reading at this point and proceed to flame, down-vote, and meme me. But I'd rather have this system that is inconvenient for me in order to protect most players and retain game integrity.
Any game designed with a energy system in mind is not designed to intentionally screw people out of their gaming time but rather balance how they want content to be progressed healthily for the players and for the game as a whole. Particularly, energy relates to inflation. Every game is going to have inflation; that's just a consequence of player progression and how higher level areas naturally give more in-game currency than low level areas. The game is designed with cash sinks (a prominent example is enhancing, as well as market fees) so that inflation progresses at an okay and healthy rate. Having some inflation is okay; past the starting days of a game the market normally levels out and prices remain pretty constant until major updates. You know what is problematic though? Hyperinflation. What causes hyperinflation? Botting.
Now, botters don't just sit down randomly and decide "I'm going to infest this game with my bot army muahahahaha- *cough." Botters also have a limited amount of resources at their disposal to make money with; most prominently are time, in-game currency generation, and probability of detection. Energy helps to mitigate all three of these variables. With limited energy, not only do the botters have higher initial setup costs (getting their bots to cap), they have to do more manual work (swapping bots out when they hit max energy as opposed to leaving one online all day), they're also more likely to be caught before major payout (as a consequence of the longer time to cap). Now, I don't have any clue how good Gameforge's bot detection system is, but let's be generous in our hypothetical and say 2 weeks on average to catch and remove a bot. Without energy, the botter can set up the bot, get it to max in 1 day, and get 13 days worth of max-level revenue before it gets banned. With energy, the botter has to spend longer to get to max level, let's say a week, and then they'll get 7 days of max-level revenue before it gets banned. The worse Gameforge's bot detection the less this matters, but nevertheless, being gated by energy represents a real cost for botters.
So then, you may be wondering how hyperinflation would actually kill off the game and not just be an extreme annoyance to people who want to hoard their DZ. Consumer demand for in-game currency hinges on two different things; their risk of being caught and the cost of buying the in-game currency with real money. Last time I saw one of those gold selling websites (yesterday night), they were selling DZ at approximately 1mil=5USD. You know how much hair colors are selling for on the market right now? 2.5mil. You know how much hair colors cost in the shop right now? Approximately 5USD. Thus, if you're a player with income, you're going to buy premium items from the premium shop and sell them in-game as opposed to buying gold from a botter. One scenario means that the publisher gets money and premium items are more available to free players while the other results in money going to third-parties and the game going down. Regardless of whether or not you agree with being able to sell premium items is up for debate, but it is objectively better for the game health than the alternative scenario. Additionally, once gold-buying becomes cheaper and the underground economy becomes settled, the risk from buying illegally becomes less and less. If you think it's pay to win now, it'll be worse then and your gold drops from dungeons will be entirely negligible. There have been many examples of NA ports of energy based games with some type of unhinged energy usage and they've experienced hyperinflation resulting in some shutting down. Where did all the hyperinflation come from? The rich players buying gold from botters to circumvent the intended effect of cash sinks thus driving up demand for additional botters and creating a compounding cycle.
Now, onto the topic of the impact of the Energy system on the typical player. No, the fact that you have a bunch of threads on the forum is not indicative that the typical player despises energy. Even the fact that there's a poll where more people want uncapped energy than no change lends no further support to this. There's already two stages of bias present here: 1) you're population is biased because you're assuming that all people use the forum equally, when having free time and having strong opinions and the need to share these opinions predisposes people to going onto the forums, especially those who are extremely unsatisfied since they have the most to gain as opposed to those extremely satisfied and 2) the people taking the poll are biased due to voluntary response bias and the fact that it's an open survey. Here's where numbers come into play. Zodai assumes the casual, thus at most average, gamer plays 2-2.5 hours a day and would like to play 3-3.5 hours a day, while literature and closed surveys assume that the typical gamer spends 1-2 hours a day playing games, across all of the games they play. The only research I came across while scouring papers that suggests between 2-3 hours of play a day on average come from subscription games, but those are inclined to be higher than non-subscription based games due to human psychology on sunk costs. Thus, with nearly no information on player demographics of this game, it's better to assume it's closer matched to the typical player demographic. This means your typical player most likely isn't going to be hindered by energy costs. The fact that the naturally biased poll showed a meaningful number of people who don't care about the system or simply want a larger cap should be telling that you don't need an overhaul.
Which leads to why so many threads are popping up about Energy. You can naturally split the population into 4 segments based on time and money spent: More-active and less-active and willing-to-purchase and not willing-to-purchase. The less-active people generally don't run into issue with Energy and the more-active, willing-to-purchase can purchase enough energy to feasibly satisfy their extra playtime (whether or not this is acceptable for Gameforge to sell energy is another topic in itself that warrants discussion elsewhere). So who's getting shafted? The more-active, not willing-to-pay people, who are the people you say raising the issue on the forums, since they have the most to gain from the change. And of course, one cannot fault people for acting in self-interest. However, unless you produce a representative sample from random sampling (minimal bias), or bring forth a petition that has at minimum 1,000 signatures (theoretical floor for 10% of population), you can't justifiably claim that a statistically significant portion of the population is affected. Do you know who provides the majority of the income to Gameforge for this game? The whales provide on average, from market reports, 80% of the revenue and they generally fall into the more-active, willing-to-purchase category. The remainder is provided by one-time purchasers and small, consistent spenders, generally in the less-active, willing-to-pay category. So you know what uncapping energy does to the company and consumer groups? In the short-run, both less-active groups see negligible additional benefits, while the more-active groups see realized benefits since they are no longer capped and the buying group no longer pays and the company loses money since they can't sell vitamins. However, in the long-run, you're screwing over both of your less-active groups since they can't keep within reasonable distance of the more-active ones and thus the less-active, willing-to-pay is far less inclined to spend money. You're also screwing over all but the most-active in the more-active, not willing-to-pay category since the gap created from gold-buying is going to mean more hours need to be invested to get the same gold for free. The more-active, willing-to-pay group is least affected since they are just going to switch over to gold buying for everything except gachas and the like, since there's no incentive to buy premiums to sell on market. And you know what happens when you lose an entire consumer base and a good proportion of the revenue from the other? You either get less resources spent on the game since it's not as profitable and at worst, shutdown.
Gameforge has to look out for the integrity of the entire game, and there are always going to be people unhappy with the situation in every case. In this case, the unhappy people are the vocal ones who've taken to the forum to try to get changes. I too am a person with loads of free time between school and writing essays, and would love to do nothing more than play as much as I want of this game before I inevitably end up dropping the game in 3 months if I did so. To all the anecdotes of people who claim they've played games for many hours a day nonstop over many years, good for you but the fact is burnout is real. The typical person experiences decreasing returns to scale, which means they're getting less enjoyment from the game, heightened if they consume it in mass. Which means a lot of people who want the change will most likely not stick around after the change. What this change will do is allow a small number of non-paying individuals with lots of free time and dedication to compete with the largest spenders while the majority of people are set extremely behind, as opposed to non-paying customers being gated behind largest spenders, but by a much less smaller margin. And what's wrong with that, that's their prerogative as a substantial financial contributor. No matter what you happen to be doing, an individual dropping $1000 a month is helping Gameforge much more than you are, especially if you're spending long hours grinding each day to remain relevant. And that's how it works in real life too; the largest financial contributors are normally voting stakeholders, while the typical consumers matters very little. I don't care about being neck and neck with some whale when our server population is almost gone; I'd rather be behind but able to do comparable content with a healthy population.
Thus, if anything I'd like to see some adjustments for Rocco and Candus, or perhaps newly created characters get sent 100fp packs for the first 3 days following creation. It's my belief that characters should be able to get through Candus in around 2 days and then the game should slow down a bit past then. People are generally most excited when first playing the game and then it begins to taper off. Better to let them get through what basically is the essentials before they're set off to work towards end game. I also thinks it's cool for Gameforge to give out the EP pots and Mats during OBT and think they should continue this into release. People generally are very excited at this point and want to play more, so now would be the best time to give them out. However, they should limit this, and things like the current half EP thing going on, to major updates and events. You want additional energy to be available to people when the majority is happy and excited it use it. Not when there's downtime where only a few people are using it effectively and it's susceptible to abuse.
Tl; dr The Energy system is more constricting to some players more than others but as a whole it is necessary to ensure that this game remains healthy in the long-term for the populace overall. Also, since this opinion seems to be unpopular on the boards, I don't mind if you bash me, call me a white-knight defender of justice for Gameforge, or a crazy heretic that needs to be pitchforked and burned at the stake.
