See, I love the suggestions, and like Lyrian, I’m not trying to pick on you or say your ideas are dumb. They’re not. They’re great suggestions and it would be awesome if they were implemented.
Here’s the thing, though.
F2p prospers through addiction, FOMO, and any mixture of the two. They want you to become addicted (I’m not saying individuals such as Salty want this - the company as a whole uses business schemes in order to get you to play as much as possible. I don’t think this in and of itself is immoral - it’s a business, after all - but it can unfortunately lead to addiction, and companies like IP2 don’t mind that). They want people who buy the pass because they will fall behind if they don’t. They don’t have to like campaign.
I get your points about how making features more player-friendly would be more lucrative for the company, but in reality, I don’t believe it works this way. We’ve frequently seen from IP2 how things are purposefully designed to waste your time (clicks in campaign, explore, etc). Annoying tasks, specifically ones that take multiple days, are not some glitch or poor design. They are meant to be annoying and waste your time so that you’re more likely to pay gems to skip.
While in a perfect world, happy customers make frequent buyers, that’s not how the real world works, from what I’ve seen. The goal is addiction and FOMO, not content customers. Addicted/FOMO customers are far more likely to buy than happy customers. That’s why the f2p genre is how it is.
I don’t want to discourage giving feedback, but as most of us have come to realize, QoL and happy players are far from the top priority. Shop adjustments, flash offers, annoying tasks, and exclamation points constantly in your face are what get sales.
As a previously addicted player, I disagree. The one way to make me get over my playing addiction real fast is to piss me off. How can you piss me off? Let me count the ways…
Indeed: and it causes many of us that went through it to actively try to warn others, thus proving to be a model that constantly requires new v̶i̶c̶t̶i̶m̶s̶ customers.
On the other hand (one consistently unexplored by this company), when an event is fast and easy enough (i.e. neither grindy nor RNG-based), our guildies tend to buy more tiers than usual, and in doing so encourage others to do the same: the two most notable examples that come to mind are the event that released Norbert’s Turnip, and the Blade Dancer OTK event a month or so ago.
Both the ‘pay because of having fun’ model and the ‘pay to reduce grind’ model can generate revenue, but only one of them keeps a company on customers’ good side (with the corresponding domino effect) in the long term.
Nothing indicates that this company will switch to the win-win model, so we are left with modulating expectations. #GoWphilosophy
^ I agree wholeheartedly with this. I definitely spend more gems when I’m enjoying things than I do when I’m not.
But moving on to address this:
Bottom line is whether the game makes money. I’m not a businessman so will defer to others for their expertise. But I’d argue the following:
If addiction and FOMO are the main tactics to incentivize F2P spending, wouldn’t a game that has those AND an enjoyable experience be a better experience? Especially when many of those improvements should take moments out of their time to fix?
I’m no fool to think that the list in OP is sacrosanct and will be implemented verbatim (puts thesaurus back on shelf) but if we don’t voice our opinions then nothing will change. It can fall of deaf ears and things remain the same. It could fall on ears filled with ill-intent, which could lead to 5-day adventure boards (shudders). But it could also fall on ears that go “Oh, sure, I can just change this text here and that value there and poof, happy customers.”
FOMO and addiction will not change, nor do I expect them to, after all, the campaign mythic is locked behind a grind and many of us are still trying to get HoR and anxiously waiting for the Duskbringer parts to come around when their kingdoms show up.
Side note: I don’t care for GoW but I can only imagine the outcry if this was GoW week with time-gated tasks.
