forgrim wrote: the only thing i'm going to comment on your post is about his poor forum support when in fact, he's the only 'support' from the devs we seem to have. and there's alot of us, so he can't get to all of us all the time, or he'd spent all day on the forums. really poor to attack our community manager, in essence.
bingoclamshell wrote: IceIX, getting back to my note at the begginging of the post, my goal here is not to target you, but you are essentially the "face of customer service" for your company, and I am very dissatisfied with your customer service. I don't frequent the board as much as others, but I have noticed that you run it pretty much single-handedly. Even with that in mind, I am disappointed that you did not respond to the correct post. If you had explained the "price increases" on cover slots in a way I could have understood 2 days ago, I would have bought the cover slots two days ago. Now, even if I do understand and agree to whatever explanation you may give me, I now still have to suffer a price increase because of your poor forum support.
Spoit wrote: Wouldn't people in his situation, with the time pressure to buy slots, also skew the data higher than would be otherwise expected though?
IceIX wrote: I'm not even sure how to respond to that. Post for post, I'm outposting any of the mods on most major game forums, and doing it in several different arenas. If I'm providing poor service, I apologize.
IceIX wrote: For the cover slot increase, I completely understand where you're coming from in that regard. However, announcing price changes is very much a double edged sword for precisely the reason you state. In changing the price, we want to see what the user reaction is. Do players still buy the item when the price is increased or do they stop at a certain point? Is that point before or after the old one? When we figure out the break points, we can figure out the point at which the most customers are still satisfied while still providing the item or service in question.
IceIX wrote: If we announce the change in pricing ahead of time: Users will see the upcoming change and purchase any "required" items to stock up before the change goes Live. We'll get a momentary spike in activity, but those users who are precisely the ones that we're targeting in respects to the change will no longer be in the pool of users that we will receive data from. Thus, the data we'd receive is either slower, less complete, or both. If enough users jump ahead of time it can even be outright wrong as users *could* have been OK with the change but the new data shows otherwise since no one needs to buy the item at the new price anymore, so they don't. The advantage of course, is that we make those particular players happier, which is unquantifiable but always a good thing.
But, unless I missed something (I started playing in October), early adopters of your game have essentially been given nothing for playing the live beta ("preview edition") of your game, even if they have given you their money.
Blue Shoes wrote: I don't want to start anything, but you are looking at your advantage. The devs may decide the current prices aren't working out, or they might not. If they do keep it the way it is, people who have been playing since October get the advantage of the cheeper prices before they were changed. They also got to take advantage of the R40 patch change. Plus, people starting early have been able to build up their characters. If anything, it makes it more difficult to newer players.
Blue Shoes wrote: Personally, I am a collecter. I would buy new spots even if I didn't want the character just to have them all (except modern Haweye ). I won't be doing that anymore. I think if they keep adding characters, this wall may become too high to climb, but it's the dev's job to monitor this and make changes. I doubt they are going to squeeze their player base until there is nothing left. These are long term decisions for a game that's going to last a long time. Short term reactions are expected. That's fine. It was obvious the IceIX knew this backlash was coming. If you don't like their decisions, vote with your wallet. While the devs are people and care about the players (I'm pretty sure they do), the cash flow is going to decide what's working and what's not. You absolutely have a right to your opinion and to express it, but that is not what is going to instigate changes in the game.
Blue Shoes wrote: That said, how much is it going to cost to get Venom's level 5 Snare to produce 2 web tiles.