if the trading were purely within the poxnora system (like a trade post run by DoG), that would be ok. Something that allowed you trade rune for rune, or use a credit based system. But as long as you have player to player trades, youre going to have profiteering. The only reason player to player trading was ever needed is because the system for getting runes from the actual company is so poor. Fix that (the way hearthstone and diablo did) and you no longer have the NEED to trade. That is the lesson of hearthstone. without trading you can make your f2p system robust enough to allow payers and f2p'ers to both enjoy the game. Pox needs more players. Trading wont get us that. it didn't before, it wont now. A generous f2p system will get us that. Once you have a large enough playerbase playing the game again, the match making system and the TG will work as intended and the addiction can set in. That's what turns an f2p'er into a payer. you simply can not have a generous f2p system and player to player trading at the same time. pox seems to be choosing the wrong one, and this thread will most likely amount to more 'I told you so' fodder down the road (unless they change forums for the 4 th or 5th time). But I would rather have the game thrive than be able to say 'I told you so' (yet again), so im giving this effort more than just the one-liner approach my detractors seem to enjoy.
Vice versa of course ... With a good f2p system you don't need trading, not without trading you can do f2p. Learn 2 cause and effect.
I agree with you premise Ragic but I believe in a different solution. It's ok to trade a rune and get a little more than value for it. The idea of you want it, I have it but don't need to trade it, make it worth my time..is fine. We don't need to destroy trading. It's ok for some people to be collectors and want to trade up until they have x2 of every rune. That alone attracts an extra type of player to your game which is fine. Pox doesn't need to be a f2p game. TG as f2p is awesome, it attracts people to the game, and lets them learn how things work in a safe environment. The concept of selling booster packs to make money is also sound. TCG style is addicting in that you open packs and hope for a cool card. The only thing we are missing is the jumping off point towards owning your own collection. Selling pre-made decks doesn't work. Asking players to grind games to earn boxes doesn't work because there are too many runes = you can buy tons of boxes and not be able to make your dwarf bg the way you want it. We need faction sets, sold with x2 of a whole bunch of runes so players can create and customize their BGs right away. $40 per faction seems nice and cheap, gets people to spend. Then if you have one you are gonna want 2. Some people are gonna want all 8 and spend $320. The only thing standing in the way is people who want to sell runes for cash. If they protect LEG cash value and don't include them in the cheap packs then new players are going to say "P2W, I don't have LEG, they are OP/Broken...etc etc etc" And it leaves a sour taste in people's mouths, so they quit right away. Sell the new expansion content, sell packs by making players try to fill holes that are created by leaving a few key runes out of the cheap packs. But don't try to sell Poxnora 2006 through Poxnora 2014 by telling players they have to buy packs @ $1.95 and boxes @ $17.55 until they have enough runes to enjoy the same game that myself and every other veteran is currently enjoying.
its all about what group your marketing to. pox has always intentionally niched itself. if it can limp along with the group you describe then I suppose it will. but something tells me the forums a year from now will look and sound a hell of lot like they did a year ago, and the playerbase wont be any bigger. but be ready, because that group will ***** and whine and the revamp will amount to nothing more than a powercreep reset and the SOE era will start all over again. if that's what defines success for these devs and the handful they are making the game for, then theres not much else to say.
Just an FYI, hearthstone and League operate on a similar or worse time frame. U play for 8-10 hours to get a lower/mid priced hero, or u play 30 WINS in hearthstone (which is like 10 hours at 20 min a game if you win them ALL) for 1 pack. ONE PACK. So this business model does work, and it works in way more instances than i'm listing. Why is that do you suppose? Its because its got millions of people, even if they don't play the game, know about it. No one knows about this game comparatively. Due to that large pool of players though, even if 10% of those players spend money, they are making money hand over foot while still allowing their product to have "value." So it does work. The problem lies in the amount of people that know about the game and decided to invest time in it enough to get a feel for it. All that really needs to be done is get the word out to MILLIONS of players, and eventually you will end up with a few hundred thousand playing. This game isn't for everyone, but no game is. I laughed out loud after i read this. All we need is an audience of millions, but its true. Hearthstone is played by tons of guys in my World of Warcraft guild, and none of them have even played anything like that b4, but their friends are playing it. Its fun to match up against and play with friends. I got some of them to play Pox back when SOE owned it. They couldn't really even grasp what exactly the point was. I think they played 2 whole games before they figured out what fonts were. Bad tutorial and so on. Desert Owls I think are on top of it though. They know that you need a polished game before you can even think about any of this. So that is what they are doing. Will making legendaries available to craft and sell back help? I generally agree that if its f2p, there should at least be the possibility to obtain everything for free. Does that have anything to do with trading? Nope, other than the fact that it helps players obtain some of those unobtainable things that way. Does cheaper shard prices or faster gold gain have anything to do with trading? Nope. Hearthstone has no trading and its 1000 times slower gain, yet immensely popular. Does anything in this poll other than Ragics opinion even touch on trading and its evils? Nope. So why are they included in the poll at all? The answer to that is in every response Ragic has made. No logical reason at all, but 50+ nonsensical reasons. A sixth grader with a stick could poke holes in it. I'm all for making the game better. Being able to talk my friends into playing this game would be amazing, but again, trading has nothing to do with it. None of them quit saying, "Man that trading really pissed me off." They were pissed about the bugs, and the 30 dollars a box, and the 1000 abilities to learn, all while trying to battle meta players with the burning tree deck. Fix those, don't fix what is not broken. "Fixing" (removing) an optional system that doesn't negatively impact anyone that doesn't want to use it is a waste of time. Once they fix up the new revamp, i really hope they look at making separate leagues, like a 4 exo/leg league and so on, as well as the single player "dungeon" idea. Those would do more for the game then giving away cheap stuff. Put in neat things and make people earn it. Don't give it away. THAT is how you keep people.
The grass is always greener. There are huge posts on the forums of hearthstone and diablo about being able to trade and use the AH. They did it for a simple reason, they were going to have millions of players, and Chinese farmers have not done great things for their game economies, so they fixed it.
Something that gets overlooked in these arguments is the revamp that is coming up. The reason there is so much profiteering and ripping-off is that runes are so different is playability, and thus worth. Post - revamp, when champions are on more of a level playing field, there will not be so much huge discrepancy in values, so if you are trading your legendary for another legendary, or rare for another rare, you will very likely be in very close proximity value wise. The reason the trader sucks right now is becausew 90% of the people on it are not using it to trade for what they need, they are using it as a tool to increase the value of their collection. People will always do this, however post revamp, with values being a much narrow spread, people will start accepting auctions for minimal profit instead of demanding top-tier runes for everything. This will cause an influx of people able to use the trader for their legitimate trading needs because it becomes a much more level playing field.
sadly, rune prices are a function of rarity as much as playability. So while the revamp may normalize prices to some extent, there will still always be the legendaries that have to be got from other players, and those players will still expect profit. no trading still winning
