HoundofShadow said: 1000 HP is about $9. The rest are basically $0.99.As for people getting pissed off with this "unethical" or "predatory" technique, I wonder how they think about other companies using these psychological pricing as well. When I'm out of my home, I can easily see more than 100 companies using these "dirty" techniques to increase revenues in a day. I guess revenues will magically increase without using psychological pricing. I find it strange that since the dev is made up of such an unethical and manipulative team, I wonder why some who despise them are still playing MPQ. People who take real action will simply stop playing MPQ, instead of contributing to their statistics and data.
Painmonger said: tiomono said: Maybe not price gouging but it's definitely predatory. We get 450 shards through playing the two 12 day events to completion. That got us 1 spiderham cover plus 50 leftover shards. Then a $10 dollar deal to let you use those 50 leftover shards to get 2 more covers. Why not let the deal be 800 shards? Because they are "preying" on the customer that doesnt want 50 "wasted" shards sitting on a limited character. The problem with this line of thinking is that it also applies to the other 150+ characters that have shards. In fact, it's a built in flaw with a per character shard system, but that's the whole system, not this particular deal. The 12 hour cycle of 20 shards for HP would still cost way more & caps at 1 cover.I'm guessing most people are sitting on 1,000s of "loose" shards on their roster since everything changed. What makes this deal worse than all those other characters? Being Limited? Being a fraction of the cost for the others? By nearly any metric this is an objectively better offer than any other sharded character, or any other cover offer for that matter.I don't like shards. I've quit plenty of other games that use them, and even after 2000+ days it made me consider quitting MPQ, too. Losing other champ rewards to make room for them instead of consolidating iso or HP was far more upsetting than a reasonably priced offer that I'm still not inclined to buy.
tiomono said: Maybe not price gouging but it's definitely predatory. We get 450 shards through playing the two 12 day events to completion. That got us 1 spiderham cover plus 50 leftover shards. Then a $10 dollar deal to let you use those 50 leftover shards to get 2 more covers. Why not let the deal be 800 shards? Because they are "preying" on the customer that doesnt want 50 "wasted" shards sitting on a limited character.
HoundofShadow said: As for people getting pissed off with this "unethical" or "predatory" technique, I wonder how they think about other companies using these psychological pricing as well. When I'm out of my home, I can easily see more than 100 companies using these "dirty" techniques to increase revenues in a day. I guess revenues will magically increase without using psychological pricing.
HoundofShadow said: That's a good point, tiomono. But this isn't the first time and this won't be the last time they will be doing it. Tactics like these have been around for decades. To me, this is a norm. Pointing out things like this, to me, is like saying there are 24 hours in a day or the sky is blue. In reality, any business which wants to be competitive needs to use different psychological/marketing (pricing) tricks.[snip]
HoundofShadow said: As for shards rollout, the rollout has not been completed yet. The dev usually roll things out in stages. Given the recent Shardmas saga where they were forced to do a second rollout of Shards, I won't be surprised if they decided to push back part 2 of shards implementation...Also, what you mentioned seems more to be a symptom of OCD. No one is being forced to use that extra 50 shards....
HoundofShadow said: If it's not OCD, then it has to be the need for instant gratification. In this case, it's the need for a full cover now, instead of in the future. Extra 50 shards are useless now, but over time, they add up.
bluewolf said: There was some other Ham bundle that has been offered where (I think) it was 3 covers for something like $24.99.
Omegased said: HoundofShadow said: If it's not OCD, then it has to be the need for instant gratification. In this case, it's the need for a full cover now, instead of in the future. Extra 50 shards are useless now, but over time, they add up. Except it's not. we can't earn shards for him.Do you honestly not see this as somewhat shady? "here's your login gift! Merry Christmas!! oh, you want to use that gift? well... pay me $10."for the third time, I feel like they should have made this 800 shards, and never given a login gift that is useless.