Dimensional Ink has the power: Now give us fair time capsules

Discussion in 'Gotham City (General Gameplay)' started by dresserball, Feb 21, 2020.

  1. Wildcat Committed Player

  2. PolishEagle Dedicated Player

    Problem is I dont think they would give us the option to individually open TC with stabilizers...they would force you to buy it. I am so against this as I have everything besides the neon and only spend 40-60 a year at holiday sale time. Usually its 40 but this year I went a little crazy and wanted to take advantage of the inflated broker. Everything else I got from lucky RNG (Billy's Backpack and Captain Atom dossier are the only rare items, I ever got to drop). The rest is hard work of grinding other things that broker. What you are suggesting would be a flat pay to win and would screw up the broker even more. Someone pays 70 and gets everything. Now they open their tc with stabilizers and broker every single item. However, they dont need to buy any collections as they have them from the $70 purchase. So they are able to hoard money real quick. If rare op collections ever come back, they now can create a market that makes those even less obtainable on the broker. Keep in mind 6 weeks ago, I had nearly 2 billion on all my toons, but because I had to buy the ink stone and speed force collector I am now less than 200 million. I believe it's better for the economy in general that I have 200 million and not 2 billion.
  3. Brit Loyal Player



    You don't have to think that it's worth it. I personally do not think that they are worth that. But the game generates X amount of money from the items through the Time Capsule sales. Why on Earth would they ever put them for direct sale in the Marketplace for a cheaper price than that? That's like going to McDonalds and saying "You know, even though Bacon Double Quarter Pounders With Cheese normally and consistently sell at $5, I think you should put them on the dollar menu. Take this thing that is currently selling, and then slash your profit margin to make it more affordable for the customer, with no compensation in it for you at all."

    My math was based on the actual numbers if you wanted to buy these items in the Marketplace without the need for RNG: buying Source Marks, converting Source Marks to Quarks, and then buying the items off of the Quarks vendor. Zero RNG. But the prices are ridiculously outrageous. I wouldn't pay that. I don't know many people who would. And that was exactly my point.

    Players claiming these items should be put directly into the Marketplace without the need for RNG have a misguided idea that the prices would also be only a small fraction of what the current expense is. They seem to believe these items will be dirt cheap, and they can grab them all while spending very little. A assert that even if the RNG element was removed, Daybreak would not simply cut their profit margin so that they lose 90%, just because the customers asked for it. And if the prices were to stay consistent with what the prices are currently, they would be those huge, bloated, ridiculous costs for items that most of us probably don't think are worth it.

    With the RNG in place, we pay a lot less for the items... and the majority of the time we don't actually get them. But when we do get one, it gives the impression that it cost a lot less than what it actually does.
  4. Akaiko Well-Known Player

    That's the only way they get money from me. I have purchased amormies, character slots, inventory space, Atlantean lair style, Tech lair style, butterfly wings, & goth leggings (among other things) because they are/were for individual purchase. There are several things I've seen over the years that I would have purchased if they were offered on their own instead of in "it's a chance" boxes. I refuse to purchase TCs or Booster Bundles for those reasons regardless if I like what I might get from them as it's not a guarantee. If they would sell everything individually, I'd personally spend more.

    I do sometimes get things from TCs only due to the stabilizer duo (and the fact that they've given stabilizers as a perk with some membership renewals at times). If they stopped that, then I would treat TCs the same way I treat Booster Bundles--ignore them completely.
  5. Illumin411 Loyal Player

    As an entrepreneur and business owner, I'm familiar with different pricing models and I do believe they could generate the same revenue with a low price, high volume model. Virtually all digital IP products follow some form of lower price higher volume pricing model due to production and distribution costs being next to nothing. The only caveat would be that products would have to be offered with more customization (tintable) and/or variants. My guess is the movement mode styles were an experiment in marketplace non-variable pricing and judging by the fact they haven't done or added anything like that since, they must no have been pleased with the results. However I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that had those styles been offered in more colors or were simply a "tintable lightstream", "tintable smoke" etc, they would have seen significantly higher revenue. I can't imagine the added production cost to release a digital item in 10 colors vs 1-3 is anything significant so they only shoot themselves in the foot by not doing so.
  6. Brit Loyal Player



    I've suspected something similar, just looking at the evidence. Specifically to tintables, I suspect the reason why they released them in locked colors was an effort to get players to buy multiples (IE: I need red, green, and white). By making them tintable, they reduce the sale volume opportunity, so theoretically price increases.

    Personally, I think the most telling bit of evidence though is the direct purchase items that were removed from the Marketplace. Items like the Fishnet Leggins or the Rhino Head. It costs nothing to keep them in the store, and unlike something like the BvS Swagbag where they were forced to remove it, these were ones they just decided for themselves to remove, and players still ask about buying some of these removed items, particularly the fishnets.

    Clearly they wouldn't just pass on ongoing revenue for something when the work is already done. I suspect the total number of purchases, even for desireable items, weren't pulling nearly as much revenue as they had hoped. In contrast, random packs were pulling an overall higher profit margin than trying to move bulk of low price items. The metrics suggesting that the Time Capsules make more money would be supported by the fact they pulled so harshly away from their original Marketplace Style direct sale model and embraced this one so wholeheartedly.

    And since the direct sales were happening at a time the population was much higher, the potential for a higher volume of sales was greater then. With a smaller playerbase now, direct sales have to pull an even larger overall percentage of the population to break even with where the sales previously were, and there's certainly evidence to suggest that would still be less than what the Time Capsules bring in.

    Direct sales seem like they become increasingly viable as the population increases, but with DCUO in it's current state, a change in the marketplace model seems as though it would either be a huge loss of revenue, or involve individualized pricing to be far more pricey than people would expect in order to balance what is currently being moved in time capsules.
    • Like x 2
  7. Proxystar #Perception

    With respect Brit, I think you're a little out of touch with industry norms and standards. I'm going to show you an example from another MMO's marketplace, namely, Star Wars the Old Republic ('SWTOR')

    Now bear in mind SWTOR is an EA game and they're notorious for microtransactions and the like so the similarities here should be telling for you.

    It is perfectly possible for the company and the players to have their cake and eat it too, and the SWTOR marketplace is a good example of this, bear in mind SWTOR is also PC exclusive and the population is arguably actually lower than DCUO overall.

    [IMG]

    You'll see in the above screenshot, they run "Flash Sales and promotions", they're very time limited and this is what I was saying all along about doing similar things in DCUO by following a similar vein and putting say the "Void Mat" up for $10 for 24 hours... you do it with items that are more dated than the newer stuff.

    [IMG]

    The screenshot above shows you EA's equivelent to the time capsule "the cartel pack", they're either $2 per box or they're $54 for 30 boxes - they're expensive and the newest flashest stuff goes in there.

    [IMG]

    The other stuff they do is then move cosmetics out of the older loot boxes and into direct purchases and sell them for $5-25

    The currency for SWTOR is $1 per 100 so 1,000 on their market is $10 (basically exactly the same as DBC by and large)

    This is an example imo of a much more functional and fair marketplace for your customers, there's much more transparency and there's much more fairness and that's a massive compliment when the company I'm talking about is "EA Games" of all companies.

    So your position that it would have to be $100 - 250 for a marketplace cosmetic, simply isn't true. SWTOR also has tiered systems in place for their subscriptions, exactly the same as DCUO

    So quite where you're plucking these "fictitious figures" from is rather weird, balls in your court now ;)
    • Like x 4
  8. HurricaneErrl Dedicated Player

    They've most likely been working on this TC and upcoming episode first a while now. As garbage as these TCs are and as little as my expectations for the new episode might be....and as much as I believe nothing has really changed but the name... I'm willing to wait until something comes out that was completely thought out and made under the supposedly "new and free from daybreak" studio. Only then can we really judge them to be honest. My hopes obviously aren't high lol
    • Like x 1
  9. KHALONofOGUN 10000 Post Club

    Well.....this could ONLY be true if they made every purchase on a per character basis instead of account redeemable. With account redeemable a $5-10-20 purchase is a one time thing, and while we speculate just how high or low the population is, you can't tell me we have enough players to make up high volume purchases with items being account redeemable. All of that and you still have to account for how many people would actually purchase any of these items directly.

    There's a reason why the RNG/FOMO/Feat Point formula with Time Capsules is working for them. When people complained about the "high price" for the Batman cowl, people didn't just pay lip service...they spoke with their wallets. Meanwhile, people consistently have been complaining about time capsules since its inception...yet here they still are.

    I'm personally in the camp that thinks the prices for cosmetic items in the Marketplace have been more than fair (most especially when you take account redeemable into consideration). And I would love it if they put more items directly in the marketplace instead of gamble boxes. But since the majority wants things to be dirt cheap, this is the way we have to play.
  10. TheAnticipated Well-Known Player

    Just want to clarify that anything new they add is also added for direct purchase and not exclusive to those cartel packs - the packs are just a way to pay less for a chance at the item you want.
  11. Proxystar #Perception

    They're not always direct, but yes you are correct, they're also on many occassions, also direct at the same time.
  12. Illumin411 Loyal Player

    You may be correct. Different product types perform differently within multiple fixed option or variable custom option offerings. One typically results in fewer POS sales but higher units per sale and the other the opposite. An established business should know it's metrics and know which results in higher revenue. It all comes down to a business knowing it's market and the value propositions it's customers want most.

    I would tend to agree although those examples are products that have a very narrow appeal vs things like auras, materials and the movement styles. It still doesn't make sense to remove them when the work is already done but I would have certainly predicted low sales for items like fishnets or a rhinos head vs a lightstream movement style in a color of ones choosing.

    When the movement styles were released, I did think it was very odd to release them in limited fixed colors. At the time I assumed more colors would roll out as time went on but we know now that didn't happen. I've heard many people say, myself included, that they would have purchased one or more movement styles had they been offered in another color. Now my coding knowledge is very basic and my graphic design experience, while extensive, is all in 2D, but I can't imagine it taking hardly any time at all to make six or more additional color variants of each movement style. I know I could take any of the digital media products I've created and create and upload 10 different color variations in under an hour. Granted, 3D is more complex than 2D and a video game is much moe complex than the mediums my products have been intended for, but still, it's gotta be hella basic. But I digress...
  13. SugarHoneyIcedTeaMix Well-Known Player


    Said it better than I could ty
    [IMG]
  14. redwolfyogi Well-Known Player

    But we all know why the Time Capsules work.... They locked Feats behind them. Feats that link to SP. If they were purely cosmetic, like Booster Bundles, then the population of people spending extra money on these would drop overnight.

    I personally am not a fan of the Oracle TC's contents, and if it were a BB model with no feats i would not spend any money on it all because i don't desire any of the items. Am i going to spend a lot on this TC, no, however i might buy a pack of stabilizers just to pop the open 15 feat and call it grand.

    Feats should not be locked behind monetary RNG.
    • Like x 3
  15. Darth_Andrea Well-Known Player

    This is basically what Star Trek Online does, They sell "Premium" Ships in that game. Going from T1 (level 10) to T6 (Level 60+) price goes up per tier with T6 ships being in the range of $30 each, bundles of 3 ships being around $90, and their large bundles being $200 or more. And honestly I think it's a fairer system. They do also have lootboxes but ship drop rates in those are 0.01%

    luckily the ships from the lootboxes are tradable and can be sold on the games broker. Though some are insanely priced. A rare Tier 6 version of the Star Trek Discovery, Enterprise for example runs around 1.5 Billion credits in the game. And it can take a very long time to save that kind of money even playing the games Broker for all it's worth.

    I would prefer all their ships just be in their marketplace but they won't do it for the same reason that you won't find Daybreak changing their TC's or how Artifacts work because both make them insane amounts of cash compared to everything else in the marketplace. If they had any sense of decency they would, they would drop the lootboxes all together and never look back. However they make too much money and the studio apparently can't survive on just what they put in the marketplace as is. And let's face it they haven't updated the items in the marketplace in a LONG time except for changing opened TC's and maybe placing a Booster Bundle active for a week or two. It's not making them the money so they don't put the time and energy into it to actually have things in it that will make them money beyond the gambling items. And Artifacts are Gambling items because of the chance of failure on a upgrade and they even sell you the solution to that problem which they made themselves.

    Which is the way of most "Live Service" games. Invent a problem for the player, then sell them the solution. It's the nature of the beast. You don't like it, I don't like it, but we are stuck with it if we want to keep playing the game. Because if their revenues drop the game closes. They won't change it, they will just close it and move on to something else that makes them money.
    • Like x 2
  16. SsLinkzsS1324 New Player

    You guys want to put a set price for these things... that's never going to happen, you guys mentioning $70 bundles but you guys forgot the ppl wasting $500 on time capsules and still not getting everything lol... yea they make more money this way, I hate it you guys hate it but nothing will change ‍♂️
    • Like x 1
  17. SekretVillain Loyal Player

    Wake up, jackster is the 1 who created capsules, so what makes you think he will up the drops in favor to players? Keep dreaming
  18. Brit Loyal Player


    Takes the ball.

    I entirely respect that that is how Marketplace Transactions work in Star Wars the Old Republic. I've got multiple characters at endgame raiding level, so I am acquainted with how the system works. I would just humbly suggest that SWTOR... isn't DCUO. The games are different games, made by different developers, with different budgets, different sized development teams, and different player populations. All of those things can affect the way the game does business.

    So rather than trying to compare apples to oranges, and try to take what other games do and then debate whether or not those decisions would work here, I prefer to focus our discussion specifically on DCUO. It seems like the more accurate way to find the information more relevant to the discussion.

    As I previously explained, I will only and exclusively pull my numbers from actual numbers that exist in DCUO right now, facts in the game today.

    Contents from Time Capsules are currently being sold outside of the Time Capsules as a la carte purchases through the Qwarks vendor. Daybreak set a series of varying prices on these items, specifically denoting which ones they wanted to cost more than others, depending directly on rarity. You can locate these values in game by accessing Booster Gold and the Last Chance Vending Machine. I will pull the cost of two particular items to use as an example.

    Void Material: 5750 Qwarks
    High Density Tactical Gloves: 50 Qwarks

    While Qwarks themselves cannot be directly purchased through the Marketplace, they can be indirectly purchased. Source Marks are available for sale on the Marketplace. Source Marks can then be used through the Vendor to purchase Qwarks. The actual, factual sale prices in the game right now, that you can check for yourself and verify, are as follows.

    200 Source Marks = 2500 Daybreak Currency
    100 Source Marks = 25 Qwarks

    Using these 100% concrete prices in the game, we can math out exactly what Daybreak has individually priced these items at.

    High Density Tactical Gloves cost 50 Qwarks. 50 Qwarks = 200 Source Marks. 200 Source Marks = 2500 Daybreak Currency. 2500 Daybreak Currency = $25 USD.

    Daybreak has a pair of non-enhanced gloves priced at $25.

    Void Material costs 5750 Qwarks. 5750 Qwarks = 23,000 Source Marks. 23,000 Source Marks = 287,500 Daybreak Currency. 287,500 Daybreak Currency = $2460 USD.

    Daybreak has priced all their materials at significantly over two grand a piece.

    These are the prices in the game right now. These aren't my opinions. These aren't numbers "fictious figures". These aren't things from other games that I'm trying to transpose into DCUO. This is the reality of DCUO, 100% indisputable facts, in the game right now in a way that you can open the game and see the numbers for yourself.

    Do I like these numbers? Of course not. I am not saying these items are worth these sort of ridiculous costs. I have been quite outspoken about how I feel the Qwarks vendor pricing fails in it's goal of monetizing these otherwise unavailable styles. I do not believe there is anybody out there who is going to look at the Void Material or the Wings of Sin and say "Yeah. I'll spend $2500 on that." And since these styles have been removed from the random packs, the Last Chance vendor actually is the only way these items are being monetized. Essentially, Daybreak has priced them so massively high that they would rather the items not sell at all than sell them at a cheaper price.

    Not my opinion. Not "fictious figures". Not pulled from nowhere. Indisputable facts in DCUO right this very moment.

    We can speculate about the why? of this decision. Perhaps they feel that, if the Qwarks vendor was more affordable, fewer people would bother buying the packs, preferring instead to just buy the items directly a la carte. That would also explain why they force an extended waiting period before the items are placed on the Last Chance vendor, rather than making them available immediately (as a way of continuing to market the RNG sales through their Ressurgence Packs). That would also explain why these items are made account bound so players cannot circumvent paying that money by using the broker or ToS-breaking third party gold sites. And further that would be in line with why no Time Capsule styles have ever been made available for style unlocking, because they want to pressure those transactions to have to occur multiple times. But that is just speculation and is off-topic.

    The point is, Daybreak has already made their decision as to the price on these items. They have measured the revenue generated by Time Capsules, and they have measured the revenue generated by direct sale items, and they have moved to a heavily RNG focused sales plan. It is fair to say that they did not make this move because it was more popular with their players, therefore it certainly suggests that this move was made because it was more profitable for the company.

    While asking to remove these items from Time Capsules and put them up for direct sale is not an unreasonable request, there is an unspoken portion of this request that many players are trying intentionally not to see.

    "Please take these items out of the Time Capsules and put them up for direct sale and sell them substantially cheaper than what the Time Capsules would otherwise cost us so that we spend less money and you make less money."

    Even ignoring other games, we look in the DCUO Marketplace and we see style sets like the Bandido set priced at $10 and we try to translate that this means we could put Batman Who Laughs on the marketplace for a similar $10. But that is not the case. Those individual sale items failed to make enough money to support the game; that's why they stopped with them. Time Capsules are more profitable. So if we are going to put these new styles up as direct purchases, and if it's Daybreak's intentions not to just eat a massive loss of revenue, then it's going to be at the prices that have already been set in the game.

    I really truly doubt players are going to want to spend that much money on singular style items. And I have seen absolutely no evidence that Dimensional Ink has a goal in place to change their monetization into a method which will reduce their income.

    Comparing different games can give players a different impression, but it's not an accurate comparison. Every variable changes the equation. While SWTOR, to use your own example, markets many of their direct sales far cheaper, they also have hundreds of direct sales that are able to be produced for minimal expense, for example, the dozens of slightly different color variations on otherwise identical mounts. In DCUO, our packs do not contained recycled older styles with a different color; we actually control our colors freely and Daybreak is unable to double (and decadouble) dip on being paid for work that was already done. In fact, SWTOR's own monetization also includes one of their biggest sellers, which is the essentially free-to-code Dye Packs, which are consumables players have to buy multiple times, throttled by mandatory 2 color combinations, so they can create artificial rarity and charge more for something as simple as a color customization that DCUO offers to every single player for free. Ask the SWTOR players when they need their Black/Black dye for their robes and see what they paid just to recolor their figure, versus a DCUO player changing their styles every day. SWTOR players are also expected to pay real-life currency for features like changing their skin color, hair color, or hairstyle, while DCUO players are allowed to change their appearance between millions of saved styles entirely for free.

    Since SWTOR monetizes lots of things that DCUO offers for free, and DCUO monetizes things that SWTOR does not offer at all (IE: power changes versus SWTOR's inability to offer a Class Change token), both games have entirely different incomes from drastically different sources. It is not and cannot be a direct correlation. You can't pull the transmission out of a pick-up and drop it into a sedan and expect them to run the same.

    I don't think anybody here thinks that the direct marketplace transactions would be worth a changeover to a more SWTOR based system where we get charged a couple of bucks every time we change our color pallet, AND we can't select our colors individually, but have to go with these horrible pre-fab combinations.

    If you have any factual information that you feel is more relevant to DCUO than my actual numbers pulled straight from DCUO, I am more than willing to listen to them.

    Passes the ball back.
    • Like x 3
  19. coldchilln88 Loyal Player

    Oh my
  20. Proxystar #Perception

    We're all working with hypotheticals here, so it's quite appropriate to start looking at industry comparisons, what we're talking about here aren't really fundamental game changes to the game itself, they're about the sale of "cosmetics" so although there are some variables constituting apples and oranges, it's not unreasonable to make comparisons when they're about the sale of cosmetics while discussing what may or may not work. What this game, in fact not just this game really but many games in the entire industry need to have transparent marketplaces

    I'm not even going to hypotheisze really what the player populations are, other than to say, I don't think SWTOR would have more than DCUO, given it's PC exclusive, nor am I going to start talking about their budgets and the like as neither of us know.

    With respect, this part here is completely incorrect, you don't get quarks off the marketplace by buying source marks and converting them you get them by buying stabilizers and directly obtaining them.

    You receive a minimum of 10 quarks from a capsule and can take another 10 from the menu, there are some other ways to speed it up randomly, based on choice of capsules to open and RNG on quark drops but at a minimum, you'll get 10 per capsule open.

    That means for the conversion rate is $1 for 20 quarks so a 5,200 material (cause there's a discount), actually costs $260USD, not $2,460USD, because the way you're going about it is incorrect. So your proposition that materials and the like should cost $250USD is actually already the reality, perhaps you did not know that because of your error?

    That's the thing too, by the time they go on the quark vendor they're already quite old, so part of the problem is that they're selling them for such high prices with that in mind...

    wrong figures, see above

    I'm not sure this part really needs a response at this time, other than to say, putting more items on the marketplace might result in less money, but perhaps this can be offset in other ways, for example I'd actually quite happily pay for individual materials rather than account bound ones, if that had to happen to make the money, they could focus on quantity of items, make sure newer stuff is on there more frequently, push sales, push marketing, push subscriptions, re work subscription bonuses to push subscriber money.

    This is actually the part of your argument I'll acknowledge has the most merit, because SWTOR do heavily monetize many other customization aspects of their game to be fair, but there are also numerous free variants of these things as well, the other thing I'd say as well is that DCUO most certainly does have recycled color variants, numerous materials and auras are simply color variant reskins, it happens here too.

    You mean apart from the fact your numbers are wrong :p
    • Like x 1