900% bonus on ISO Sale

Vhailorx

KGB, the only way to have an iso debt is to have more characters than you have iso. and characters require covers and roster slots. So iso is only a significant constraint on those who already play/pay enough to have lots of other stuff.

60 hours may be what it takes you to grind 780k iso, but you would be foolish to think that iso is the ONLY thing you get in those 60 hours.

Even at 10x the value, iso remains a pretty meh deal imo.

Kingart813

I bought all of them, champed a 5, and 4 fours of most had 25+ saves covers.  Definitely worth it, than having to reach that amount in probably months...

bluewolf

Kingart813 said:

I bought all of them, champed a 5, and 4 fours of most had 25+ saves covers.  Definitely worth it, than having to reach that amount in probably months...

Your alliance must have been happy.....

Dragon_Nexus

OzarkBoatswain said:

Still not worth it

Right? $100 to max a 5* with a little left over.

Thing is, the base price of in-game currency is designed to look like a bad deal so the deals they offer later look much better by comparison.

shap328

bluewolf said:

Vhailorx said:

KGB said:

A stark nets you 780K ISO!

Not that I'm buying it (I'm essentially post ISO), but at least at this bonus level it's somewhat of a realistic purchase.

Guessing D3 is finally figuring out that no one is buying ISO. Of course the cynic in me also says that D3 figured that now's the time to hit the players with a deal like this right after they are all flush with covers from the shard bonanza

KGB

The sad truth is that if no one was buying iso, demi would have fiddled with the price more over the years.  Someone must be buying the stuff.

What I wonder is whether, even at 1/10th the cost, it is ever worth buying iso?  They have done a lot to ease the pain of expiring covers.  So is there ever a scenario where spending $50 to champ a 5* (or multiple 4*s) *right now* is worth it!

Also, it really does say something about the cost of iso that Demi is offering 10x the standard quantity and none of the vets seem particularly enthusiastic.

I assume someone buying iso occasionally, because it's still for sale in a mobile game, where you want to optimize your UI and limited space.

But the fact is that the devs are very, very predictable in all sorts of ways.  Some are saying shards are "agile development" but the fact is that they hit on some price point for a bundle and just do that for a very long time.

They honestly should have been tweaking the iso amounts in the store up on a continual basis.  I estimate that the normal prices have been the same for about 5 years, which is basically before 5's existed and when there were maybe a couple 4's in the game.  When the top characters were 3's, 78 K for $99.99 was maybe a reasonable amount?  Maybe?  But they added a lot of iso to rewards and it's been laughable for years, and now you want to champ 4's and 5's where 78K is a fraction of the needed amount.

If they were better at/more willing to tweak things on an ongoing basis, you would think they would have been inflating the iso amounts all along.  The bare minimum iso you should be getting for a Mother lode should be enough to champ a 4 at this point.  

Or just stop selling iso in the store and put more in the game since the HP/slot and cover hurdles already represent the major pain points in the game.  Newer people become "post-iso" when they can't get enough covers for 4's (thanks to dilution) to champ them as it is.

The point of agile is to implement something in phases so we at least get started using it, and then it gets optimized with time. That's what they are doing with shards. Setting a price point is a part of that development (they need to make money, after all). And yes, they will continue to try to sell shards for a long time. They aren't mutually exclusive points.

Regarding ISO - this was probably never high on their backlog because either a) people were buying it outside of the 1% of the base here, or b) there were other higher profit/priority items. Again, not mutually exclusive to shards or any other development.

My guess is that they are attempting to tackle this ISO starvation issue with this as a first step, seeing what price point they can get for people to buy ISO, and then work backwards from there to tweak the rewards for people that won't buy it. 

There is a process here, whether we like it or not.

bluewolf

I apologize for not understanding the term "agile development" properly.

The point is that iso costs have been a massive joke to the community for years and years.  It's just not a good look to have a resource for sale that most informed players consider horribly overpriced, even when they had a "sale".

Leaving it alone for - at minimum - 4/6 of the game's life makes no sense given some of the periods when it seemed like very little was happening in terms of game improvements etc.

I know, behind the scenes, small team etc but it's not that hard to sit down and think you should tweak the iso economy which probably requires (relatively) little work to adjust.  Make a plan like "increase it by 10% every 4 months until we see people spending" or whatever makes sense.

Vhailorx

Enh, the cynic in me thinks that the main point of agile development these days is so that business consultants can sell courses on establishing an optimal kanban, running the best scrums, and maxmizing the use of other buzzwords. ("Don't you worry about Planet Express.  Let me worry about [blank]!")

(And yes, agile development has some good ideas about iteration and flexibility, as opposed to 'traditional' waterfall development.  But at this point, the 'consultification' of agile has overtaken a lot of the underlying innovations.  Disclaimer, I am more software-developmemt-adjacent than an actual developer, so take my opinion fwiw. . .)

As for how that affects mpq, demi has been agile for basically the whole time I think.  and fiven that the release schedule is every 2 weeks, I have always assumed that Demi uses two week sprints.  What I am less clear on is the division of dev team labor. It seems likely that they have at least two character design teams (unless they design characters in batches, or do everything in just two weeks).  But do they have an additional standing team working on systems development at all times, or do they shut down character development when they work on a big new system roll out like shards or supports?  I dunno.

But whatever methods they use, iso has always been overpriced, and the fact that Demi would consent to a 10x cut in iso pricing is pretty good evidence that the community is finally recognizomg the terrible value of real $ iso pricing and sales are dropping off.

shap328

bluewolf said:

I apologize for not understanding the term "agile development" properly.

The point is that iso costs have been a massive joke to the community for years and years.  It's just not a good look to have a resource for sale that most informed players consider horribly overpriced, even when they had a "sale".

Leaving it alone for - at minimum - 4/6 of the game's life makes no sense given some of the periods when it seemed like very little was happening in terms of game improvements etc.

I know, behind the scenes, small team etc but it's not that hard to sit down and think you should tweak the iso economy which probably requires (relatively) little work to adjust.  Make a plan like "increase it by 10% every 4 months until we see people spending" or whatever makes sense.

Understood. I'm a project manager so it's a little easier for me to identify what they are doing.

The ISO stuff is probably their next "big fix," at least that's the way I'm seeing that sale. The ISO crunch is real and is the biggest slow down for people in 4* land. There's probably a market for people to buy ISO to speed up 4* land, especially when someone like Worth Cap or Juggs comes through and changes the meta. People want to champ them ASAP. I see this 900% sale as a first step in figuring a price point that people will pay for ISO, kind of like what they did with the shards purchase for Kitty.

Dragon_Nexus

bluewolf said:

I apologize for not understanding the term "agile development" properly.

The point is that iso costs have been a massive joke to the community for years and years.  It's just not a good look to have a resource for sale that most informed players consider horribly overpriced, even when they had a "sale".

Leaving it alone for - at minimum - 4/6 of the game's life makes no sense given some of the periods when it seemed like very little was happening in terms of game improvements etc.

I know, behind the scenes, small team etc but it's not that hard to sit down and think you should tweak the iso economy which probably requires (relatively) little work to adjust.  Make a plan like "increase it by 10% every 4 months until we see people spending" or whatever makes sense.

Again, the point isn't to get people to buy it. It's good if they do, sure, but it's to establish a baseline for a price.

So, for example, if 1,000 hero points cost £50, that sounds like a hell of a lot of money. But then you put a timed special offer out there that's 3,000 hero points for £30. Suddenly, that sounds like a GREAT deal! And there's only so much time to buy it too...I'd better get it before the offer goes away and I miss my chance. Boy will I feel like an idiot if I miss out on this great deal. And even better, all my alliance mates will know I bought it too, thus making it a more socially acceptable way to play.

If they bought it, well that makes it okay, right? Monkey see monkey do!

bluewolf

@Dragon_Nexus

I totally recognize the various pressures they place on players to make a digital commodity seem like a good/better purchase.  I'm just saying if they have a goal of making "buying iso" something that someone might consider, they need to radically adjust the pricing, but have been leaving it exactly the same while adding huge numbers of potential iso need by basically only offering 4's and 5's which add either (about) 375K or 575K every two weeks to your possible needs (assuming full coverage).

I'd rather see them ramp up the iso you get in game or something, although that just would make post iso feel even sillier as their pool climbed faster.  But it would definitely help newer people.

It would be interesting if they set up an event where you had to choose up front to get some more iso vs some more tokens or 3* covers or something at the end.  So maybe a post-iso person would pick the tokens and someone else would choose more iso. 

Or maybe have an event where all you get is iso, so some people might just skip it while others might grind it out.  Not a long event , something like a Gwen Prix or whatever where you could get 20K iso for playing for 5 days.  (I realize LRs are like that but they are focused in the middle of the week and not everyone can catch the seeds, etc.)