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Post by Pion on Sept 6, 2011 10:34:25 GMT -5
No, you're not purchasing the Force powerset when you buy an Impulse. You're purchasing the ability to make an AT that utilizes SOME of the powers in that set but you're not getting the whole set. How exactly is this nit-picking? The premise for your argument is absolutely false. Also the idea that people purchasing individual powersets in a sort of mini-freeform model does affect lifers in that their already devalued purchase loses even more value. Sure the deed is done and they've paid the $300 to get everything for the life of the game but how is it possibly viewed as fair from a business standpoint if Cryptic starts selling the ability to make "mini-lifetime" slots? Bottom line is if you want access to a powerset for far less than $300, then either subscribe monthly or get lucky and find physical copies for next to nothing. Mathematically your best value by far is to throw down the lump sum. I'm sorry, you make no sense. How does buying freeform on one slot compete with 16 slots of freeform +1 every time you get a toon to 40th level? Plus all the other goodies gold and lifetime members get. Paying a lesser amount for one freeform slot is a perfectly fair business model. You paid $300 for 16++ slots, much higher gold cap, power tinting, ~16 costume sets (or whatever it is), a bunch of travel powers, all the new content (just APs so far), etc... for the lifetime of the game. Heaven forbid that one freeform slot cost 1/16th of 16++ slots + a bunch of other stuff. You're right, that makes no sense whatsoever. :Rolleyes: Because most people didn't pay for the 16++ bonus slots, gold cap, power tinting etc, nor was it advertised as such. Most of that stuff was standard, and what was not was an added bonus. What most people paid $200 for the first round was lifetime access to CO (as they knew it) and all it's future updates/content. At that time the main draw of CO was it's complete customization including its character creator and complete mix and match of any powers; it wasn't the IP, nor was it the extreme HD graphics. What most people paid $300 for the second round was lifetime access to CO as a freeform and all it's future updates/content. Add to that the fact that more and more the only differentiation between Silver and Gold is customization - costumes, powers, and tinting. You say "3 APs so far," except that it's "3 APs total," and that took a year and a half. That's all we're getting for the foreseeable future. Comic Series are intended to replace APs, this was very clearly laid out in an Ask Cryptic, and they are entirely free. On top of that, even the APs are being given away for free periodically. And even powers are being sold in the store; new travel power skins need to be bought even by gold, while entirely new powers are being included into ATs. Consider this - if Freeforms were found to be gamebreaking today and come next week were removed entirely from the game, do you believe the majority of the Gold players would say to themselves "Well, I still have my bank slots and power tinting," even if they had free access to all future ATs. And then, do you believe that the majority of LT subers would not only not riot, but be completely ok with this decision? Do you think anyone would continue paying if Freeforms were no longer offered for Gold? Because not only do I think people would stop paying, I think people would straight up leave and never come back. And whether you believe it or not, whether you agree or not, most LTSers would find their purchases highly devalued. Myself, I almost asked for a refund and quit Champs when after a year of asking that the LTS be brought back it was for $300 and I bought one, only to find out a month later that it was on sale for $250 with no warning. After a year of loyal customers asking for the sub to be brought back to support the game they were duped into paying a much higher price. It's just business, but that's a crappy thing to do to your customers, particularly when you rely on repeat business. edit: to clarify, the point of my LTS story is that I love this game, I enjoy it a great deal and every time I play it get's a little better in subtle ways. I love my characters and adventures and the many things it lets me do, and back when I first bought my LTS I was just as in love with it if not more, but being treated in a way I considered to be very poor by the company that created the game was almost enough to cause me to quit and demand a refund for fear and frustration of future underhanded tactics. No matter how much one loves the game, *censored*ty behaviour will drive away customers, and purchasable Freeforms for what you believe to be a fair price would be most certainly viewed as *censored*ty behaviour by a lot of Cryptics customers. /edit. The moment Freeforms become purchasable for less than an LTS an LTS will lose all its value; this will create a lot of ill will from Cryptic's customer base. Maybe by that point the profit margin will be so great that it would be worth the hit, and maybe it's a logical choice to make, but simply put, LTSes and Gold subs can not and will not coexist with purchasable Freeforms. Seems my sarcasm was too deeply embedded in my last statement. tl;dr No Honestly I think it was, I'm not really sure which direction you were going with that one.
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Post by squirrelloid on Sept 6, 2011 16:36:56 GMT -5
Pion, the fact remains that your LTS comes with 16 character slots +1 every time you get a character to 40th, plus a whole bunch of other things. To buy everything that could be bought of that in the c-store costs vastly more than the LTS did even at $300, and that's not even counting freeform characters, power tinting, or the increased gold cap, none of which you can buy.
Selling a single freeform slot option (to go with a slot you already own) for 1/16 the value of an LTS would still be more expensive *relative to what you receive* than the LTS is.
Why do LTS owners get offended when just one part of what they own becomes available for purchase at a price in excess of what they paid for the same thing? Its like saying selling a donut for $1 isn't ok if they're selling 13 for $12, because the people who got 13 for $12 would feel their purchase was devalued. Its nonsense.
Honorguard No, I got your sarcasm, but playing the straight man felt like the appropriate response, because your criticism applied equally to an LTS as it did to a single freeform slot. Ie, if you think LTSes are good business sense, your objection is in fact nonsense.
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Post by KenpoJuJitsu3 on Sept 6, 2011 21:36:27 GMT -5
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Post by squirrelloid on Sept 6, 2011 22:03:19 GMT -5
That is in fact quite relevant, i think i agree (mostly). I also think i like pure cash shop better than pure subscription of the two options. I might also point out that a 'lifetime subscription' is more like a cash shop purchase than a subscription. You are buying to own rather than renting. I think a lot of the feeling that subs and LTS is being devalued is because gold members have to pay for most new stuff in the cash shop. I will certainly support the notion that subscribers should get *everything* for free, or available with in-game resources. Making people subscribing to the game pay for stuff in addition to that is ridiculous - they *did* pay for that already. I think a joint model can work *fairly* if and only if the cash shop is a pure alternative to the subscription (which gets everything, but rents it).
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Post by greendragoon on Sept 7, 2011 14:15:18 GMT -5
I think a joint model can work *fairly* if and only if the cash shop is a pure alternative to the subscription (which gets everything, but rents it). A man can dream... a man can dream...
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Post by Pion on Sept 7, 2011 16:08:34 GMT -5
Pion, the fact remains that your LTS comes with 16 character slots +1 every time you get a character to 40th, plus a whole bunch of other things. To buy everything that could be bought of that in the c-store costs vastly more than the LTS did even at $300, and that's not even counting freeform characters, power tinting, or the increased gold cap, none of which you can buy. Selling a single freeform slot option (to go with a slot you already own) for 1/16 the value of an LTS would still be more expensive *relative to what you receive* than the LTS is. Why do LTS owners get offended when just one part of what they own becomes available for purchase at a price in excess of what they paid for the same thing? Its like saying selling a donut for $1 isn't ok if they're selling 13 for $12, because the people who got 13 for $12 would feel their purchase was devalued. Its nonsense. That's my point tho, I don't care if its more expensive piecemeal, but it has to be more expensive piecemeal. This is where we disagree. To you the 16 slots, costume pieces, bag slots, gold cap, etc is the LTS/Gold sub. To me the LTS/Gold sub is Freeform. It doesn't matter what came with it, Freeform is what I paid for - life time access to Gold. This is an important distinction because the 8 extra slots, costumes, etc were specifically included and offered as extras, not as a part of the cost. This is also important because it's not so much a subjective value as the established cost. They were the toy in the Happy Meal, the air freshner in the new car you bought, the $10 gift card for spending $100 at Bust Buy. The free gift with purchase. As the game continues to progress Freeform will become objectively worth less and less as more AT's etc will be added to the game, as well as any other free bits and pieces given to Gold players. But realistically, complete character customization is why some of us play this game and is why we paid what we did. It's just a decision which brings in more money. Eventually selling Freeforms will probably be it.
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Post by KenpoJuJitsu3 on Sept 7, 2011 16:23:11 GMT -5
I think a lot of the feeling that subs and LTS is being devalued is because gold members have to pay for most new stuff in the cash shop. I will certainly support the notion that subscribers should get *everything* for free, or available with in-game resources. Making people subscribing to the game pay for stuff in addition to that is ridiculous - they *did* pay for that already. I think a joint model can work *fairly* if and only if the cash shop is a pure alternative to the subscription (which gets everything, but rents it). I can agree with much of this. Eventually I believe the game will get to this point if it remains under PWI.
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Post by squirrelloid on Sept 7, 2011 16:26:48 GMT -5
Pion, the fact remains that your LTS comes with 16 character slots +1 every time you get a character to 40th, plus a whole bunch of other things. To buy everything that could be bought of that in the c-store costs vastly more than the LTS did even at $300, and that's not even counting freeform characters, power tinting, or the increased gold cap, none of which you can buy. Selling a single freeform slot option (to go with a slot you already own) for 1/16 the value of an LTS would still be more expensive *relative to what you receive* than the LTS is. Why do LTS owners get offended when just one part of what they own becomes available for purchase at a price in excess of what they paid for the same thing? Its like saying selling a donut for $1 isn't ok if they're selling 13 for $12, because the people who got 13 for $12 would feel their purchase was devalued. Its nonsense. That's my point tho, I don't care if its more expensive piecemeal, but it has to be more expensive piecemeal. This is where we disagree. To you the 16 slots, costume pieces, bag slots, gold cap, etc is the LTS/Gold sub. To me the LTS/Gold sub is Freeform. It doesn't matter what came with it, Freeform is what I paid for - life time access to Gold. This is an important distinction because the 8 extra slots, costumes, etc were specifically included and offered as extras, not as a part of the cost. This is also important because it's not so much a subjective value as the established cost. They were the toy in the Happy Meal, the air freshner in the new car you bought, the $10 gift card for spending $100 at Bust Buy. The free gift with purchase. As the game continues to progress Freeform will become objectively worth less and less as more AT's etc will be added to the game, as well as any other free bits and pieces given to Gold players. But realistically, complete character customization is why some of us play this game and is why we paid what we did. It's just a decision which brings in more money. Eventually selling Freeforms will probably be it. So you bought 13 donuts because you got to glaze them how you wanted. You still got 13 donuts. Why is it unfair to sell someone else one donut, glazed how they want it, at a lesser price? I'm totally ignoring all the other features (which are by no means negligible here), 16 slots is 16 slots. 1 slot is 1 slot. If that one slot cost, say, 1/10 what 16 slots did, buying 16 slots is still a great deal. It boggles my mind that you have a problem with Cryptic selling a single freeform slot in the c-store at a price that's strictly worse than the establish price per freeform slot computed with generous assumptions that nothing else about the LTS matters.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 7, 2011 17:59:58 GMT -5
I might also point out that a 'lifetime subscription' is more like a cash shop purchase than a subscription. You are buying to own rather than renting. Oh wow seriously? How long have you been playing this game?
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Post by squirrelloid on Sept 7, 2011 19:18:57 GMT -5
I might also point out that a 'lifetime subscription' is more like a cash shop purchase than a subscription. You are buying to own rather than renting. Oh wow seriously? How long have you been playing this game? Ad hominem attacks + implied argument from authority, lovely. Not that I know what kind of authority playing for a long time is supposed to give you about the nature of a one time purchase, but its definitely the intended implication.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 7, 2011 21:55:42 GMT -5
Oh wow seriously? How long have you been playing this game? Ad hominem attacks + implied argument from authority, lovely. Not that I know what kind of authority playing for a long time is supposed to give you about the nature of a one time purchase, but its definitely the intended implication. ಠ_ಠ Break it down however you like although you're sadly mistaken if you think that was a personal attack. However, people viewed LTS differently when they were originally offered and the game was entirely sub based. It was WAY more of a value when the game started and nobody viewed it as merely a cash shop purchase. My point is that the long standing members will be very hard pressed to see things from the point of view that they bought a very expensive item in the cash shop. Mileage may vary.
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Post by KenpoJuJitsu3 on Sept 8, 2011 9:03:49 GMT -5
There have been some interesting points in this thread from both sides but one thing I'm rather baffled by is the insistence of people who don't have a LTS and who were not here when they were first offered telling people who do have an LTS and who were here when they were first offered what the LTS was originally created for, what value the LTS originally had and what value the LTS has now.
That singular subsection of this discussion has me scratching my head which is why I've since minimized my contribution to the discussion.
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Post by squirrelloid on Sept 8, 2011 9:47:02 GMT -5
There have been some interesting points in this thread from both sides but one thing I'm rather baffled by is the insistence of people who don't have a LTS and who were not here when they were first offered telling people who do have an LTS and who were here when they were first offered what the LTS was originally created for, what value the LTS originally had and what value the LTS has now. That singular subsection of this discussion has me scratching my head which is why I've since minimized my contribution to the discussion. I'm equally baffled that people call foul at the obvious apples to apples comparison. LTSes are still offered, they include a set of known features, and thus give a reasonable basis for assessing the value of those features. One doesn't have to have been playing since launch to be able to say a freeform-capable slot is a freeform capable slot (law of identity ftw), and that at most a freeform capable slot owned in perpetuity contributes 1/16 the value to an LTS. I agree a stand alone freeform slot should cost more (buying in bulk is cheaper), but the existence of the LTS has already demonstrated that selling a freeform slot to own rather than to rent is something that is part of the business model. At which point its just haggling over price. To take offense to the very notion of selling freeform slots when they're *already doing it* with LTSes is the height of hypocrisy. Whatever the 'impressions' and 'intentions' of the intitial LTS purchasers, those are subjective and not very relevant compared to the obvious objective reality that is the ongoing sale of LTSes. Its not like someone who buys a high quality luxury car with bundled features that aren't available otherwise has a right to complain when a year or two later they start offering those features with other car models for a price. Finally, if you actually care about the financial health of Cryptic and CO specifically, you should want them to sell freeform slots under such a model. A single freeform slot does not carry the same liability an LTS does going forward (ie, the stipend you get every month that they see absolutely no money for, since we've already conceeded all the value was encompassed in the freeform slots alone, not to mention any hypothetical future content that you might receive for free which a non-subscriber would have to pay for, if there is to be any).
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Post by KenpoJuJitsu3 on Sept 8, 2011 11:04:36 GMT -5
Simply put, you cannot with any reasonable degree of credibility tell someone who has bought something what the subjective value of said purchase is when they have bought it and you have not which is something you have done repeatedly to the point of telling people the value of something they actually own as they perceive it is wrong.
You also cannot tell anyone that was actually there what the original value or purpose of something that was created before you came into the picture was with any credibility unless you do the leg work of going back and fact checking to catch up on what they already experienced. This is something which several of your erroneous statements have blatantly pointed out to several in this thread that you have as of yet not done which is why some people have pointed them out to you.
Then there's the frequent attempts to minimize the points you have no means to stand on (such as subjective value when the value of anything in this game is entirely subjective by nature) coupled with the adding of personal assumptions (see your last paragraph) and flatly telling people what they "should want" as though you are an authority while earlier calling someone else out on what you perceived as an argument from authority...
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Post by squirrelloid on Sept 8, 2011 12:58:38 GMT -5
Simply put, you cannot with any reasonable degree of credibility tell someone who has bought something what the subjective value of said purchase is when they have bought it and you have not which is something you have done repeatedly to the point of telling people the value of something they actually own as they perceive it is wrong. I have no interest in the subjective value of an LTS. Its objective value is obvious. It can be counted and deconstructed. I could feel that the value of a penny is 5 pounds sterling. Its still worth $0.01 and thus a little more than half a pence at present time, and that's true no matter what i believe. Are 13 donuts worth less because someone else can buy just 1 (and at a higher per donut cost at that)? Your statement is, however, ridiculous on face. I currently have a gold account. To surmise that I cannot extrapolate the value of an LTS from a gold account beggars belief. Of course, you're likely going to come back with 'the value to them is different than the value to me', but at which point, why would it matter if i had or had not done so? Even if i bought an LTS, even if i had done so at launch, the subjective value for them would still be different than the subjective value for me. So either your point is hopeless sophistry and we can never have a rational discussion of the value of an LTS (which is patently absurd), or its clearly not something i have to experience with perfect fidelity to understand what it would be like. (Unless you would seriously claim the few bonus lifetime perks which even the posters declaim as worthless are so experience changing as to make an LTS fundamentally incomparable to a gold account. I think we can reject that out of hand). Lets be honest, anyone who groks what freeform is can understand the value of 16 slots of it, owned for the lifetime of the game. BTW, this was a nice case of Special Pleading arising from Argument from Authority. Because clearly only the haves could have any appreciation of the value of what they had purchased. And to put the last nail in this ridiculous coffin, an LTS has an objective value. We can enumerate and argue division of value for all the features that it has. This objective value can be compared to other services, real and imagined. It has a subjective value as well to everyone who has or has not purchased it. That subjective value was clearly high enough to warrant its purchase for those who did. That has no bearing on a discussion of its relative value with other offerings in the marketplace, only on its relative value to the person with that particular subjective valuation. Clearly LTS subscribers aren't going to buy any freeform slots, much less any ATs, so the subjective value of any of those offerings to them is 0. That doesn't make the real, dollar denominated valuation zero. Nor do any of those potential offerings effect the real value of the LTS. I think my point was that the original perceived value or purpose was irrelevant. See my car analogy. Or my donut analogy. We're talking about 'real' (digital) property. It has objective existence, and objective dollar denominated value. (Of course, no one has bothered to respond to either, because they make it incredibly obvious that there's no basis for complaint). If subjective value was to be considered, I might point out that the arguments against my position, the arguments you claim i don't understand, have been of the nature of 'I feel my item would be devalued because of what other people might be able to do or acquire'. Similarly the Queen in the story of Snow White subjectively feels that her beauty has been devalued by the flowering of Snow White's beauty, and unlike the proposed inferior single freeform slot option, in this case the latecomer Snow White does strictly surpass the Queen in beauty. What buyers of an LTS thought then has no bearing on what it is worth now or what reasonable business decisions by Cryptic are. People who purchased an LTS thought it was worthwhile at the time, and those who did so at launch have *already gotten their money's worth and more*, which makes the attitude especially mind-boggling. I mean, seriously, you act as if the _emotional value_ (!!!) of an LTS was set in stone at launch and needs to be enforced by cryptic! (Because as we all know, the value of things never changes and is always a fixed and invariate thing...) And again there's this assumption that personal experience of the history of owning an LTS is necessary to value it now. They're still selling LTSes, and anyone buying one now is assigning value to it now, not 2 years ago. But of course, anyone without the authority of actually being an LTS subscriber couldn't possibly comment on the value of it... ridiculous. I make no argument from authority. I give an if - then statement. _If_ you care about Cryptics financial health. If you don't, whatever, good for you. I then give a reason to support the causal connection to the then clause, namely that lifetime subs incur a substantial ongoing liability for which no further income is associated. (That some lifetime subscribers do continue to spend money beyond that liability does not change the fact of the ongoing liability). No special authority is claimed whatsoever, and I'm not sure what kind of authority you think I'd be trying to assert anyway, since I give no credentials or otherwise to claim a position of authority. This is no different than saying something like 'if you want to have a sandwich, you should go and make one'. The should implies what you should do if you want the if-statement to be true. It certainly isn't commanding anyone to go and make a sandwich. If-then statements are inherently arguments. If you don't understand what future liabilities are, and thus didn't understand the warrant for the claimed cause and effect, I'd be happy to explain it.
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