The Elephant In the Room

To whom it may concern,

I am a 36 year old, educated, hard working pc gaming enthusiast. I have bought, installed, and subsequently uninstalled over 200 games in just the past couple years. I love your video game. I pulled an all nighter last night, and I have not done that for a very long time. Thank you.

The game might be buggy, not optimized, and suffer some balance issues, but in the middle of a large firefight, I just don't care. Besides, bugs can be worked out, code can be tweaked, and balance is an ever shifting dance.....

The problem is the over-the-top money grab approach. It's borderline disgusting. It's obvious to ANYONE playing the game for more than 15 minutes that there are two separate entities involved in the thought processes for this game. The people at Sony Online Entertainment that make the decisions regarding billing and item costs obviously have very little communication with the actual game developers.

If I was on the development team, I would consider the billing/financial team the biggest threat to my job.

I could almost look past the fact that I have to unlock the SAME THING on a different character, I could even understand why server transfers do not exist... it's obvious how these two things work together to net more cash for SOE. I can turn a blind eye to the fact that respeccing won't be in the game. I get it. I want people to get paid, I want to reward a company involved in making this ridiculously entertaining game.

However, I believe the community deserves very simple answers to very simple questions. These are inexcusable, and coupled with the above money grabs, combine to an almost sinister quality:

1. Why do 'lateral' upgrade weapons have such differing costs? 250 through 700.... Why? The pricing is an obvious retail marketing model of "Good, Better, Best". I don't follow.

2. Why is there not a preview available for all of the gear/vehicle upgrades? I do not think it is a responsible decision to ask 7 dollars for something that I (probably) will not like. Also, see number 3.

3. No refunds. See number 2. One of these two HAS TO BE FIXED. Why are there no refunds, even on a very short timer?

4. Infiltrator "sniper rifles" with iron scopes and 4x zoom scope max certifications? You should issue a large warning that says, "WARNING: You are about to spend 7 bucks on a worthless weapon (TSAR-42 SNIPER RIFLE) that you will never ever use. Ever." On that point, what's with the forward grip certifications for bolt action rifles? A lot of these certifications are not effective (flashlight attachment for sniper rifle?) and just flat out embarrassing.

5. The certification gain rate, even with subscription and boost bonus', is laughably slow. I could not imagine trying to unlock certifications at the 'normal' rate. This encourages large zerg fights with 50% of the combatants dropping ammo packs in tight little piles trying to rack up meager xp scraps. I really do think this rewards ineffective gameplay. Our outfit doesn't care about xp, we're having a blast playing tactically, but we're fed up with the pub ammo spam. It should reward a more natural approach to an objective based fps game.

6. Finally, the cert point cost for unlocking a weapon or vehicle is intentionally unrealistic. Who would spend 1000 certification points on a gun? Absolutely no one, and you know it.


To the game devs, I sincerely appreciate the vision and countless hours you put forth that will produce 500x more money for Sony than they paid you. That's capitalism, baby. I know only a fraction of a fraction of what I spend goes to you, but you guys have really delivered. To the executives in charge of billing, tone it down. In the current climate of F2P debacles, a little generosity to your playerbase would go a VERY LONG WAY. I won't even mention the atrocity that was recently committed against the active SWTOR playerbase. Let's try not to kill this game with short term money grabs. Please. I enjoy it way too much.

Thanks.

THIS^

I agree completely with that, it's ridiculous.

Great post.
I think the F2P is a relatively new business model to the industry, and it is still learning how to be successful. It is going to take some time for the people in charge of the business end to find the best balance. We all want the same thing, for the game to be successful, and its about finding ways to make it viable without losing the F2P guys and to still have enough people willing to spend a few bucks here or there for the lions share of the dev money. I also feel like the cert costs may be a bit high, but time will tell. They did make some adjustments to cert gain and costs very recently, and I'm positive its on their minds, they don't want to drive too many people away any more than we want to see them leave as players.

You mean... the semi-autos? They're not meant for long range, obviously

An elephant in the room refers to something that is obvious and that no one is discussing. People discussing cert costs have been around for a while now.

I'd like to make a rebuttal to two of your points:
Firstly, #4 -

I like both my Stalker and my Shadow scout rifles. My sniper rifle is great for long distance, my semi-auto (can't ever remember which one is which) works well when I'm approaching something I'll attack (mid-range) and the full-auto goes wonderfully with CQC as I vanish in and out of camo.

Secondly, #5
Cert gain rate - In the first three days I aquired over 100 cert points playing roughly an hour or two each night. How is that slow? If we got 1000 cert points in a week we'd all have every unlock within a month and then we'd get people complaining that they have nothing to do...


Try and enjoy the game for what it is. Certing up doesn't matter; I spent a lot of time in beta without any proper upgrades and I still had fun.

You mean this? The only thing that you can't preview are things that you can't buy with SC

Here's the scenario:

A normal player is shopping sniper rifles for his infiltrator. Said player checks the sniper rifle box and starts comparing stats of the sniper rifles. The player decides that he likes the TSAR-42 sniper rifle. It's bolt action and has a very long range, like all sniper rifles do.

Buys it, equips it, and is looking down iron sights...... No problem! I'll just buy a long range scope using these hard earned cert points!
Nope.

Exactly what Mibeshu said .

People seem to be forgetting that the weapons you start with ( except the Lib and maybe galaxy ) are perfectly capable of doing the job , even if your not really that skilled .
99.9% of the weapons are sidegrades - and are NOT required to play the game .

Everyone has to earn the actually upgrade certs - ie grip / ammo increase etc etc , as you can not buy those items with Station Cash .
Yes , that weapon i have may doa bit better in cqc than yours , but i can bet you mine is worse at range than the one your holding ( unless using the same gun of course ) .
That tank with his AP gun on may kill other armour faster , but d.amn does he get owned fast by infantry because he can't kill them efficiently enough ....
Etc Etc etc .

Good points by the OP! Especially the points 2, 3, and 4! I do believe they will increase cert gain rate in some kind of way. They are probably waiting to see how XP progression works when they add more continents with better global meta-game. Most likely taking into consideration what is being said currently by people who are experiencing it.

I played for 3 hours..hopping bases and turning stuff blue w/ a decent squad. Got about 60 certs.

Then.. I went no squad, dropped ammo and deployed a sunderer. And just ran around flanking pockets of vanu. Got over 150-200 certs in one session.. about 1-2 hours.

That's a problem. At least for me.

I think he meant the Scout Rifles, which are SMG's

I mean decals, camo, helmets..... Aesthetic upgrades that make your character/vehicle look better.

No sir, I meant the 2 sniper rifles that are not sniper rifles. The TSAR-42 and the KSR-35.

I am not referring to scout rifles.

The OP is right.

There are various weapons where it is not adequately or in some cases accurately explained what how they differ from other weapons.

Especially lame is that the most important stat of all - bloom - is not listed.

I have also discovered that forward grips and compensators do...... nothing.

Try it out. Horizontal recoil is the same with a forward grip as it is without.


I'd post a video, but you guys can do it yourselves.

It's quite simple actually. If you think the cash shop away you get a decent Battlefield 3 "clone" with larger scale. This would also be fine with a subscription model, like PS1. Game design wise it's a mostly solid product (leaving start bugs for a MMO aside, they all need 3 months past release to get stable).

Truth is, however, that one would subscribe for a big Battlefield 3 these days and aside from selling PS2 as boxed full-price game in a market where BF, CoD, Crysis and many others are serious competition F2P is a new trend that is easily embraced and attractive to milk something quickly.
Investors like quick returns and not long-term investements as long-term always means "someting else could come out and be better and then the investment turns to ****".

So the cash shop got forced into a game that would be entirely fine and fun without it. I doubt PS2 got planned as F2P/cash shop game from the very start as so little consideration has gone into this aspect.
They even offer the "old" model of subscriptions on the side and the rewards do not seem overly good when you get ganked for over 1 month by rocketpod users you can not touch before getting the StationCash from your 2nd subscribed month.

The interface for the shop is awkward, the comparision of weapons very vague, so ar the tooltips. The costs are assigned randomly (which also has a market research aspect as they want to see how far they can bend the will to spend by overpricing useless items. Many new F2P games do this as well so the companies learn from it. Assuming SoE had access to a F2P pricing expert it might even be deliberate because expensive stuff does sell. Could be a "Gun is expensive, has to be good" thing, you can read entire books about this ****).

As such the game developers (in the sense of producers, coders, artists, etc.) did a solid job but the guy(s) in charge of monetization and its design lacked the vision to make it an awesome experience.
That is by the way something the Playstation Store for the PlayStation3 also suffers from, it does not generate as much money as it should, considering the amount and income of PlayStation3 owners when compared to Xbox 360 ones (interesting subject to read about btw, enjoying usenet discussions about it a lot).

Can tell you one thing though - the release hype draws in many players who then get ganked in laggy sieges and consider spending 5 bucks to get a new weapon or two. It's likely they will make more profit from PS2 in the first month of the game than they do in the next quarter afterwards. Once the hype dies down and people leave in frustration they will have to adjust the shop's concept and pricing a bit but that's a thing of the future.


Well, wrote a ton but just wanted to say "tl;dr: OP has valid points". :3

I don't feel that the prices for the weapons are particularly unreasonable. You have to remember that a lot of people got a lot of cheap station cash stored up in the months heading up to PS2's release. I would guess that the prices will come down once peoples "reserves" start to dwindle and they are more frugal with their SC. I bought all my SC on a 3x SC day so (rightly or wrongly) I think in my head "That gun cost $2.50" not $7.50.
I do feel that the prices for the cosmetic upgrades are hilariously ridiculous. See 750SC internet hubcaps for your sunderer.

I'll agree with this. I was attempting to find a decent camo to use on Esamir and bought the Snow Aspen one, and it literally looks like black and white dots. While it might be passable for actually camouflaging myself, it still looks like complete crap. I immediately regretted it, and the lack of a preview, and the lack of a refund so I could look for a different camo. Highly annoying.

You do realize that most people who play planetside wherent in beta right?