I bought the Privateer pack because I wanted a cool looking pirate ship. I bought the Sawtooth and Blood Tormentor because I wanted more cool looking pirate ships. Not because I felt they were necessary to progression; they just looked cool.
I don’t care how cool more Secret Project ships will look or how long it takes to grind for them. I’m not spending any more money on this game because it doesn’t feel rewarding. It feels like an obligation; like I’m being guilt-tripped into spending more money because expecting to be able to earn everything else in the game for free is “selfish and entitled”.
Well news flash. I supported this game sixty dollars worth. And I did it gladly because I liked the gameplay. I liked the design. But that doesn’t seem to be enough. Now the game continually bombards players with requests for money and drops horrid grind and pay gates in their path if the player doesn’t pay up. It’s like the pan-handlers down at the street corners, constantly begging for cash at every opportunity.
Make a good game, and players will willingly pay. Try to force players to pay, and you’ll lose them to a game that is less interested in their wallet.
P.S. For the record, this is the first Free to Play title I ever invested money in. Sadly, this will probably also be the last Free to Play I ever invest money into.
I love free to play games. The feeling of grinding your way through things without spending money is just wonderful - can’t get that anywhere else. It’s like a tingling in the back of the head. So, y’know, I’ve probably invested about 2000 hours into the various free to play games I have. Not a single one has gotten any of my money - except for Star Conflict.
The thing is, there’s supposed to be a good balance of grind, content, and investment.
Perhaps a good thing to start with would be the bad F2P games. Y’know, those iDevice deals or Facebook games. Candy Crush, Zynga poker, the like. You know what I mean. They provide a minimum of content, slowly adding in so that even the most devoted can’t reach the end of the grind. They do microtransactions for little 99 cent things, like an extra life, or a few more turns to finish the game. It’s fun, in the way that playing one player Yahtzee is fun. It’s mind numbing, honestly. Which isn’t a bad thing. It’s just never going to get any money from anyone who knows that good games exist.
TF2, on the other hand, is well known for being a successful F2P game. It’s fun, grind is very small to non-existant, and investments are all small, and have small effects on the game ranging from different build styles to just cosmetic. It gets people to pay by being fun, not by demanding money from them. Now, I didn’t pay anything because I’m one of those weird folks that likes grinding away without paying, and one of those guys that doesn’t particularly think that cosmetics are important.
And now on the subject of Star Conflict. A few months ago, I purchased the Soldier of Fortune DLC and Galaxy Explorer DLC, because I thought they were worth it while 50% off. It would make grind a teeny bit shorter, which was really nice, but more importantly, it was going to a good game that I really liked. A respectable grind that could be done in a reasonable time frame without paying, a huge amount of content, and a good price. But now…
But now, what? Secret projects cost about 400 monocrystals each, which would take a month and a half each of doing every mission every day with a license, equivalent to about two months and a bit without a license, or about half a year per ship if you never change stations. More if you miss missions. Furthermore, you can’t even change stations without losing your contract progress, meaning you either have to be extremely smart about how you play, or just choose one over the other. Past that, the cost to change stations is now 200k credits, which sounds rather reasonable for about 10 minutes of time, but y’know. Yea, but that I have tasted of the forbidden fruit: and its name was the convenience of 40k credit station changes. I’m trying to grind through T4 right now, and hell if I don’t need to stay in a single station for a month to get a weapon upgrade. Credits are scarce - I have about 100k as of writing this, I think. I could tier down to T3 and play, since grind is easier down there, and I could still get vouchers and monocrystals there. But then I’d be lacking in synergy, and wouldn’t be flying the ships that I’ve been eying for a bit less than a year now. If I try to get some in PvE, half the time I queue in without a squad, I get destroyed. Given, I’m bad at the game, especially in T4/5, but it still seems like the game is shouting at me much like Candy Crush shouts, “Just 99 cents for another life!” Then the question of crews comes up. I mean, seriously? A tiny edge is still an edge. And hell if the introduction wasn’t full of bugs. I can barely fly any of my ships now, because afterburners are a thing of the past without energy stability. And even then, not really worth it, given that adaptives got a super ninja nerf/were bugged out. The old question of if the devs play the damn update before pushing it to the servers comes up.
The Star Conflict of 0.x is distinctly different from 1.0, it seems. No longer do we have a reasonable grind, where everything is accessible given a reasonable time frame. No longer can we hold off that old Candy Crush temptation of microtransactions and Facebook integration. No, no. Now we’ve got a released game, and now we can’t try to monetize in that old fashioned, off in the sidelines way, can we? No, indeed. No, we cannot.
