I envy the Whales

tizian2015

revskip wrote:

carrion pigeons wrote:

Enough money that you could pay a mortgage with it, but not so much that a well-off person couldn't casually destroy the integrity of a game without really sacrificing anything.

This made me giggle.

The whales are not destroying the integrity of the game they are actually making it possible for the rest of us who don't whale to play the game. The smallish group of whales (relative to the total player base) bring in the vast majority of the money that the publisher makes, which in turn pays for the servers and developers and coders salaries as well as making money for the publisher. In a free to pay market game the whales are the integrity of the game.

Now arguments could be made that spending that kind of bread on a mobile game might not be healthy, and in fact in many ways these types of games encourage people with a serious addiction problem to hit bottom making them inherently dangerous for some people, but it certainly doesn't destroy the integrity of the game.

No. The wales are the easiest way to make money. The art is to design a game where many people willing to spend some money and not few people spend more than alot.

I spent 120 euro and even with that i am stranded in no ones land. Good 3*roster but 4* in pvp are not reachable and in pve its a burnout-work to get 25cp for a shot for more and more covers.

If people like me have the feeling, spending some more money, the game does not has any needs for whales. And thats the problem, the game is far beyond the point where spending some money makes any sense. Its not even the drop of water on a hot stone. The offers are ridicoulous.

And when(not if!) the whales leave the game dies as other fremiums did.

tizian2015

acescracked wrote:

carrion pigeons wrote:

You clearly agree that the designer works for the company. And that the company wants profit.

So why "blame the designer" for the issues?

I'm not really clear what you're asking, but let me back up here.

Do you ever think of ways the game could be better? Every single day on these forms we get some guy posting a thread with a legitimately worthwhile idea that wouldn't be particularly hard to implement, and every single time the reason why it doesn't get any attention at all is because it would affect the buying habits of whales. I could stack up enough ideas to make a skyscraper that have been offered up on these forums that would make this game objectively better, and the main thing standing in the way is whales.

So please, tell me again how the integrity of the game is not damaged by whales.

Please supply links, documents, financials any ounce of evidence to support your claim that this game makes a majority of it's income from large multiple purchases from a small percentage (compared to active daily users) of whales. I highly doubt you would be making such a claim without knowing d3's financials, so give us some more details.

I do know that the general free to play mobile money making model is to get many small purchases from as many players as they can. This is an old article but it highlights d3's intial goals.

http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/08/marve ... au-part-1/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/24/marve ... alliances/
"we’ve been furiously optimizing the game, chasing the mythical $1 ARPDAU (Average Revenue Per Daily Active User)."

Think about what is buyable for $1 a day and if it does make any sense to buy it to get REAL progress and you have the coclusion that some people buy for hundreds and thousands stuff from the shop and the rest nothing.

Piro_plock

acescracked wrote:

I do know that the general free to play mobile money making model is to get many small purchases from as many players as they can. This is an old article but it highlights d3's intial goals.

http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/08/marve ... au-part-1/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/24/marve ... alliances/
"we’ve been furiously optimizing the game, chasing the mythical $1 ARPDAU (Average Revenue Per Daily Active User)."

Those articles are back from 2014. As you might have noticed, a lot changed since then. Introducing command points and making them purchasable was a clear paradigm shift. I am willing to bet nowadays whales (thanks to buy clubs) are much bigger source of revenue than they used to be.

Megdar

Yes the game cather to the 1$ per day.

With the roster slot. That is the only reason for "normal" buyer to put money in the game. At 1000HP for one slot, it is hard to get all the HP, from only the event reward.

And this is the problem right there. If you play a hell of a lot, you don't need to put money in the game. So the more dedicated player do not need to pay. The less dedicated will pay but for slot only. Anything else is totaly insane. The price of a 40 pack is not worth what it give.

And because the Iso is so pricey, even whale don't buy them. At the same time, you have to wonder why they did not increase it 10 time to attract buyer... if the Mother Lode is never increase, then people buy them. They would not keep something in the game for two years with no one ever buying it. But seriously the price ratio of iso is the worst thing I have ever seen in my life, not only in game but everything real life or not. I left the game for 8 months 1 years ago because of the Iso shortage and I'm close to leaving again. Everything is held back because of Iso shortage. I put 2 hours per day in this game and I don't make any progress on my roster anymore. I champ 1 3* each week, and I don't even see the day when I'll start leveling 4*... My Hulkbuster is at 12 cover rotting at level 70 because I don't see the point of wasting Iso when everything else work perfectly fine on my 3* roster for Story mode.

bluewolf

Back when the change was made so that HP could no longer buy covers, the Devs said it was to extend gameplay and (paraphrasing) remove shortcuts for developing characters. Which did remove one main avenue for spending that made sense for the average player. I assume that they did not anticipate that some very few people would spend the huge amounts of cash to earn enough CP to draw enough cards to max out 5's, as much as the Devs wanted to incentivize purchases a little more. I have seen posts suggesting some have spent $50,000 on this game. Ummmmmmm.....I can't fathom how much disposable income you have to even begin to consider that a good use of money.
Back in reality, I myself am almost finished champing every 3* because I don't know what to do otherwise. My best 4* has 10 covers (Falcap, unfortunately) and character dilution makes it absolutely impossible to guess which might hit 13 first. I consider spending what I think is a lot on a mobile game - $100 in a shot - to try to move my roster along but it is impossible to find a worthwhile place to do it. The game either supports very small purchases (roster slots at about $20 every month or two unless you play a lot) or astronomical purchases.

It is worth pointing out the whales seem to be the main source of revenue for many FTP games across the industry. Not unique to MPQ.

dsds

I think the mega whales are ruining the game too. I don't think their money is needed. It is definitely a bonus for the developers. But I don't think their business plan had included people who would spend 10s of thousands of the dollars on the game. probably lots of people spending only $100 to 1000$ a month was their goal

The unintended consequence of mega whales is that they have made the game much harder for everyone else. Progression gets harder and harder as you get higher in levels. The reason why they don't give out more rewards is because they know whales will pay for them while everyone else will just play hard to try to reach the goal. They have to do this for the megawhales. This is the thinking... If someone were to spend $10,000, how would it be justified, if they only had small advantage over the regular players. Obviously you would need to show and make them feel important compared to the masses. How do you do that. Create characters that can only be whaled.

It's the same with every other luxury item. Create an illusion that the masses cannot get this and you will be able the charge insane amounts of money for the item even though it costs a little bit more to manufacture and in many cases, it costs same (they just pay more marketing costs).

BraneDedDev

ClydeFrog76 wrote:

notamutant wrote:

I take the opposite opinion. Because the whales spend so much money on **** that we don't really want (more characters), the developers have no incentive to create new features or better gameplay. If the whales boycotted 5 stars by not spending money anymore, for example, the devs might've actually got rid of this RNG hell. I blame both whales and the devs for the current state of the game, which in my opinion, has been going downhill for over a year now.

Totally agree.

"You can't whale 5*s!", said the devs.

"Just watch us!", said the whales.

"OH CRIMINY, LOOK AT ALL DAT COIN!", said the devs.

And thus we are here, with no new real content and a continuing parade of 5*s pandering to the addicted.

It's depressing.

Exactly. Get your harpoon guns... kill all whales.

DaSal

For the record, I recently came across a player with a fully covered Bruce Banner AND a fully covered Black Bolt! How long did that take, a week?

eMaRDi

If you have look at the recent events or new characters introduced, it seems to me that MPQ is to a certain part advertisement to several Marvel franchises (for several medias).
I dare to say that to some extent R&D might even be paid by Marvel (even if it is a small portion).

I do not think that some guys are constantly watching top 50 "buyers" in MPQ for their behaviour and align their future developments accordingly. Think of about a playerbase of some Thousands.
I guess R&D simply changes some minor things and accounting checks what difference it does. At least that's what I would at this scale of players playing a game almost 24/7.

Regarding the original post: Do I envy "Whales"? I do spend some money here andd there myself, but as the way progrssion is currently rewarded, I don't think "more money" equals "more benefit" (or more fun in playing the game).

You have some collectors who wants all covers for all characters for completetions sake; but as I know from other games (and even e.g. PC hardware) such endeavours are always pricey.

Regarding ISO-8, I really don't think even "richer" players dump their money into that pit in particular. Once a day I get a Heroic token for 50% which seems to be the best offer within this game. This even leads to the odd behaviour that I do not "buy" event tokens if these are 200 instead of 100.
ISO-8 is a prices are so much off the chart I only once was tempted to use the "+50%" offer.

However: I have championed all but one 2* lately within, say 3 months and each costs... hmm... about 75.000 ISO-8 each to just reach level 94?
Granted, I "helped" in some cases to cover the last 10.000 ISO-8, but overall buying ISO-8 seems simply insane.

Then again: I think spending about 100 € to buy a vault's content with almost no real discount (compared to 50% once a day for Heroic Tokens / certain event tokens) doesn't appeal at least to me...

Wjohnson992

This game is whale only soon so yup, I envy them

GurlBYE

They're enviable because they get to actually experience the advertised game.

Take this sponsored piece on marvel.com about this game.

http://marvel.com/news/video_games/2663 ... ider-woman

made to entice potential players who may potentially want to check out how she is in this game, how the game plays and all the other cool marvel characters.

How does the 4 star transition work at the moment?

It either costs a few thousand dollars or about 2 years worth of your time.

Where in the article does it mention that?

nowhere.

When people see black suit spidey, black bolt, phoenix ? it's even worse.

They've started to make the game built around the whales instead of just letting the whales get where they want faster.

optimus2861

The thing that puzzles me is why haven't they done anything to greatly speed up the transition process for new players? If you're hyping new 4* characters every couple of weeks these days, then why isn't it possible for a new player to jump on board and very quickly get a chance to play with the new shiny?

(Heck why isn't it possible for a nearly 2-year vet to get a real chance to play with new shinies without hours of grind or big buy-ins? )

Future Fight, by contrast, now gives new players a 6* hero selector almost right off the bat. They've recognized that new players have to get a fast jump into the game or they just won't stick with it long enough to get anywhere (6* is no longer the end game anyway, it's now one step below that).

MPQ is straining very heavily under its structure these days. I've greatly scaled back, now that I've got all 40 3* champs, and I don't see anything that would lure me back in very deep. New 4* or 5* sure as heck don't do it.