Yep, just looking for an idea of what sorts of things our admin (who have to answer to Matt/Sarapis, ultimately, though, it does seem like the individual games do have a pretty high degree of autonomy), think they would be able to realistically consider (retiring a char and getting a liquid return to use on other chars, clearly "out" for example). Of course, this is also a negotiation to some degree, and that means we either try to push the bar towards what we want... or not.
It's a bit outside the scope of this thread, which is about faciliating circle swapping, but anything that involves transferring lessons or bound credits from one character to another, be it an existing or a new one, is a no-go.
What about some sort of "customer loyalty" discount on purchases for additional characters based on overall player purchase history (tallied in dollars, probably MUCH higher discount if you've bought Matt a used car or two). That would probably be easiest/simplest way to track. As for actual numbers... could vary wildly of course and I am not even going to throw any out at this point (note: I am not asking Garryn to say "yeah, let's do that tomorrow", just spitballing a slightly more concrete version of my wishes based on what he just said).
No offense, but Wys isn't admin... and admin hasn't said "hell no"... frankly, if they're at all interested, it's probably very doable. I mean, if they don't do it, it won't be because it's "impossible", it will be because they don't want to/think they can get more $$$ going another route. Basically, they will be saying "Jules, you're so funny, but we know we can get you to buy Matt another car in a couple years (instead of the ummm, I don't know, very fancy bicycle? I am suggesting)" . But seriously, I wouldn't count on it. You get to a certain point and you just go... welp, if this one ever gets old, I'll just stop playing for a few years and see if I want to come back at some point - in essence, the very thing everyone has a vested interest in avoiding if possible.
Make the ability to purchase 2 No Brainer packs per month be a perk of Iron Elite membership. Done.
Just talking about myself here, but I'm guessing this applies to many others.
A. I'm currently sitting on 5 unpurchased no-brainer packs across 3 characters. I'm terrified of buying and using them because once you do, theyre gone, so I worry about making the wrong decision and so I delay taking advantage of them.
B. They're so cheap that if I knew I could buy them every month, I'd start buying them just because. Smithing for my diabolist? Dooooont mind if I do.
I don't even think this will be a revenue loss. They'd be so popular that people would be buying them to do a whole bunch of stuff they wouldn't use credits for
While I love and fully support the idea of being able to activate the classes of whichever circle I'm in ( @Wysrias 's idea), I obviously don't know receptive the admin is to the idea until we get a response, so I have an alternative that builds on what @Ailish and others have said.
In addition to upping the number of times you can buy the No-Brainer to 2x per month granted by an Iron Elite membership, I'd like a way to straight up purchase classes through the website.
Having the flexibility of making a Frankensteinesque purchase would be great too. For example, I could put in 210 bound credits I have sitting around plus the two lessons packs I'm allowed to purchase at a time and the remainder in $ paid through PayPal or what have you.
Investment is probably not the right word to use regarding your monetary support of IRE. It's a little like Kickstarter backers believing their money to be an "investment" in the company they're backing. It's not. It's a straight up gift. You're playing a F2P game and buying mega coin packs. IRE is under zero obligation to make anything more affordable for the whales. In fact, keeping the whales spending big is part of their MO. To their credit, IRE seems to care quite a bit more about overall player satisfaction, since they have such a smaller pool of players than say Clash of Clans or any of the other mobile F2Ps. If I were a betting man, my money would be on increasing the availability of the No Brainer lesson package.
Investment is probably not the right word to use regarding your monetary support of IRE. It's a little like Kickstarter backers believing their money to be an "investment" in the company they're backing. It's not. It's a straight up gift. You're playing a F2P game and buying mega coin packs. IRE is under zero obligation to make anything more affordable for the whales. In fact, keeping the whales spending big is part of their MO. To their credit, IRE seems to care quite a bit more about overall player satisfaction, since they have such a smaller pool of players than say Clash of Clans or any of the other mobile F2Ps. If I were a betting man, my money would be on increasing the availability of the No Brainer lesson package.
Rasca, I agree, and I do understand IRE's model. It actually comes up quite a lot, and in short, IRE is almost utterly dependent on "whales" (i.e. us semi-crazy and legit insane people who spend thousands upon thousands of RL dollars on the game). "Whales" are so central to the model (which they don't really have much of a choice about, being such a niche within a niche) that their actual ability to offer more and more true micropurchases is somewhat limited, and is likely why they carefully consider each one. Because they know they simply can't support their games through micropurchases. The micropurchases are more of an incentive, and a way to help round out the game population by making more chars more viable, not an earner, though I do think Ailish's idea works just fine, for example, because of how those additional lessons would be used, which he sums up like this: "I'd start buying them just because. Smithing for my diabolist? Dooooont mind if I do". You're getting me to buy stuff I don't remotely "need" (and probably wouldn't bother buying otherwise, so it's just extra earnings). Anyway, what I am saying is that I do think we whales have something of a "cap" - and after so many years, and so many thousands, it might warrant having a look at what will actually keep that whale around and spending (perhaps not at quite the same obscene levels, but frankly, probably still a LOT more than most players, and more than a dormant whale for sure). That's all.
I'm exactly the sort of person who would use cheap lessons to Trans toxins because it sounds cool in theory then never actually use it because there's a shop in Caanae that sells 150 applications of any toxin for OMGWTF price of 3 gold
@Jules, I honestly don't understand how endless No Brainers doesn't address the circle switching problem even for whales. The true wasted cost of switching are just the lost lessons. The artifacts, even if they aren't directly useful in the new profession (and many are), just stick around for when you'll invariably switch back
Well, honestly, having this (and only this) as our preferred vehicle for taking our game play in a totally new direction kind of locks us into circle switching on the same char (which is already what most people do, because it overwhelmingly makes more financial sense already). Just watching the drama unfold with various people who have switched circles recently (or tried to), I would MUCH prefer to be able to alt and not have that be a stupidly expensive decision (not endless alts, but for Imperian, one char in each circle sounds ideal to me). The more I think about it, the more I like it a lot better than dragging Jules around at some point. It would also allow me to leave her "as is", so it I ever want to play AM again, I just wake her up (for example, I have no intention of actually taking Jules anywhere, or even playing any of the other circles at this point, because I just like the people in AM so much).
EDIT: basically it's what I said to Wysrias towards the beginning of the thread - all of the things you are suggesting DO address circle switching on the same char. It is absolutely one way to try to address some of the problems that prompted the thread in the first place, but there are other ways of trying to address both circle imbalances and player boredom/desire for change of scenery and those might be worth a look as well.
As someone who has changed circles as much as (if not more than) most people over the years, I'm going to skip the long rant about hating most experiences had with alts and the diatribe about how any reasonable person should have no problem switching freely between the game's organizations. Instead, here's some support for a good idea:
Increasing the availability of the No Brainer lesson packages as a solution for circle switching, both as the same character or through multiple, solves many cross-circling issues. Many of the things that a character can do are determined by possession or lack of certain skillsets. Artifacts are, have always been, and would remain perks for those willing to make that investment for extra benefits.
As @Jules pointed out, IRE's big spenders are often the lifeblood of their games and it is for this reason that a "shared investment" across multiple characters would be silly. However, these same people become much more likely to purchase artifacts for multiple characters when those characters have easy access to transcendent skills like Trueassess, Focusing, and the damage resistance skills. The Iron Elite gating of the packages would open this up further. For example, after three months of play, the spending personality thinks "Okay, I've transcended most of my skills, I have three hundred fifteen credits from my elite membership, and I have the hunter's belt I bought on day one. For about $70 I can upgrade to Girdle of the Titans! Done!"
Switching came up on ring recently, and, for example, one of the circles apparently has high fines and a fair amount of bureacracy to deal with, and... I'd just go dormant before bothering with that. I have almost zero patience for that kind of thing at this point. Short of admin taking an even greater role in running orgs, what do you do about that? So if there's a way to just avoid it entirely, I like that! I mean yes, if you are trying to come to Antioch right now, it's super easy unless you have done horrible horrible things as a player, but as far as I am concerned, present day Antioch is a unicorn.
Haaaaang on now
"one of the circles apparently has high fines and a fair amount of bureacracy to deal with"
To enter or leave?
Haha, I didn't think about it that way! Now that I do, all of the above!
EDIT: also, why are we so pro circle hopping (like, almost tunnel vision on it)? Because that's sort of what people have already been doing and it's what they know? Because we really do think admin won't consider anything else? Because of the sort of concern that Ozreas mentioned where sometimes people tend to think that most alts are horrible players who are so hated on their mains they had to start new ones? Or what?
Because it's the only reasonable thing. I have a demonic and Magick character with 5-6 trans skills and a surcoat. It's not a big investment but it is an investment. I'd love to go AM, and I actually have a AM alt too, but I don't want to spend on a third character to get him to that baseline level - I have two kids in private schools.
I'd much rather take my demonic character I never play and move it, but I don't feel like throwing 450 credits worth of lessons away in the process
Sure, and I've actually spoken up in favour of many of the ideas in this thread, so as far as I am concerned, you SHOULD be able to go that route (circle hopping), and I am fine with making it even more financially palatable, but for some reason a lot of responders seem determined to stop the discussion there and leave circle hopping as the only truly sensible option - even, and probably especially, for "whales". And you... you have a very different purchase profile than I do, for example (which is fine, but I think we probably have a very different set of considerations).
Because of the sort of concern that Ozreas mentioned where sometimes people tend to think that most alts are horrible players who are so hated on their mains they had to start new ones?
My wording was unclear - this is not my opinion. I dislike playing alts and prefer to build upon the character in whom I have the most investment and attachment, both monetarily and emotionally.
The things you have suggested involve man-hours on the part of IRE administration - scanning purchase history, calculating, re-pricing... Concocting an algorithm to scale with purchase history is a costly idea for a business this small.
That's where I disagree. Financially, we have the same considerations - the vaporization of $150 (or however many it is) worth of lessons. Everything else is social considerations, which presumably are different for us, especially since I came back to Imperian after being away for 8 years and am basically starting with a blank slate in terms of my interactions with various orgs, but that has nothing to do with financial outlay and shouldn't be based on it.
I'd have a ton of sympathy if you were saying that your financial outlay makes switching more expensive for you and that's unfair, but what you're actually saying is that your financial outlay should shield you from the social consequences of your choices and I don't think that's on
People are focusing on it because it's the only thing remotely likely to happen. Most of the other suggestions, including the hilariously poor suggestion of making subjective discount decisions based on players' purchasing histories, ignores the complexities surrounding the IRE business model and the finances of the individual games versus what is offered company-wide. I'm clearly 'not an admin', but it doesn't take one to see the writing on the wall.
EDIT: I was beaten by so many people in such a short time. 'It' here means making circle swaps easier.
Okay, so for you Iniar, you really do think it's more the "undoable" thing. Eh, I don't believe it for this. I truly don't, so yeah, we disagree there. Even a small business can buy/set up customer tracking and profiling these days (and usually has a vested interest in doing so, well beyond my little wish here).
Okay, so for you Iniar, you really do think it's more the "undoable" thing. Eh, I don't believe it for this. I truly don't, so yeah, we disagree there. Even a small business can buy/set up customer tracking and profiling these days (and usually has a vested interest in doing so, well beyond my little wish here).
And doing so would be an abysmal decision on IRE's end. Can you imagine the uproar if well-funded players were to receive discounts on their purchases, subject to the approval of administrators? They've run this company for over a decade, and I imagine they have no interest in plunging it into the ground at this point.
but what you're actually saying is that your financial outlay should shield you from the social consequences of your choices and I don't think that's on
No, definitely not (just to clarify since it may not have been clear). What I was saying is that many "normal" players who aren't on everyone's blacklist or anything seem to have plenty of trouble moving around. I have not had to move and am unlikely to need to anytime soon.
EDIT: and Ailish, yeah, what I am saying, is that for a player who has a huge investment in $$$, creating an alt is hugely unappealing in terms of outlay, basically (certainly after the novelty wears off and they start missing having a full kit). But alts would be nice just so you can leave your dormant char in its orgs until you might want to play it again - and so you don't have to deal with switching in general, which, again, Antioch seems to take almost everyone who isn't an absolute pig with open arms, but that seems to be a huge exception in MUD orgs. And I'm still willing to spend money on those alts. A lot of money even, but... full duplicate price? It's too much. What I am saying is "take my money (but give me a break man)".
Comments
I would definitely not count on these things being based on investment, or on a case by case basis.
Make the ability to purchase 2 No Brainer packs per month be a perk of Iron Elite membership. Done.
Just talking about myself here, but I'm guessing this applies to many others.
A. I'm currently sitting on 5 unpurchased no-brainer packs across 3 characters. I'm terrified of buying and using them because once you do, theyre gone, so I worry about making the wrong decision and so I delay taking advantage of them.
B. They're so cheap that if I knew I could buy them every month, I'd start buying them just because. Smithing for my diabolist? Dooooont mind if I do.
I don't even think this will be a revenue loss. They'd be so popular that people would be buying them to do a whole bunch of stuff they wouldn't use credits for
Which, to be clear, WOULD BE FREAKING AWESOME!
"one of the circles apparently has high fines and a fair amount of bureacracy to deal with"
To enter or leave?
I'd much rather take my demonic character I never play and move it, but I don't feel like throwing 450 credits worth of lessons away in the process
I'd have a ton of sympathy if you were saying that your financial outlay makes switching more expensive for you and that's unfair, but what you're actually saying is that your financial outlay should shield you from the social consequences of your choices and I don't think that's on
EDIT: I was beaten by so many people in such a short time. 'It' here means making circle swaps easier.