The whole point of post is suggesting the paradox classes initial release to be limited to; the top tier seasonal supporter pack and exclusive to legacy.
Everything past this point is just me explaining my reasons and my thought process of this suggestion. And there is no need to read past here if you don’t care about my thought process.
The first reason is related to the reason for monetization to keep game alive. So I have no idea how paradox classes will roll out but; I believe it will be financially more beneficial to include this in the supporter pack. This stems from the thought of you could choose to sell it for (x) dollars and get “ideally” more people purchasing an “affordable” paid content. Or you could include it inside of a larger purchase to attract more people to buy the ultimate seasonal supporter packs. And ideally cause more cash flow for the game devs.
The second point of limiting it to legacy is aimed at preemptive attempts to quash the pay to win comments/mindset.
If you look at the portion of the winning and think of what could be considered winning, I have a few areas winning could be classified as.
First winning condition relates to the leaderboards. If the class on release creates the strongest possible class or team up in the arena, and is locked behind a paywall. You can see how it becomes pay to win if the players consider ranking top of the seasonal leaderboards. As legacy has no leaderboards anymore this issue won’t arise there.
The next way a player could see p2w comes from the market. If a situation happens with paradox class on release being the “best” for farming, you may see players complaining that the only way to be competive is to spend money. Now traditionally the legacy players either have every item possible and/or don’t need to buy anything or have so much money the market becomes irrelevant. Or just the “general legacy player” mindset of the markets a mess and just stick to CoF. I believe with the legacy exclusive it will ideally help prevent some of that mindset of p2w market.
The last winning condition I’ll bring up is race’s. This topic I feel is less important, as the importance for most races comes from third parties. Such as streamers (x) 1st to 100 race for prize (y). Two options one is just have the race ban the “p2w” class from being able to receive the prize. Second option stems from traditionally races taking place from fresh start seasons. If the paradox class is legacy only it preemptively prevents the issue before it starts out.
I’ll conclude with if it’s a case of FOMO or lack of money, I’m sorry I have no ways to address these issues. I do believe it hasn’t been said if the class will be released for free at a later date. If not already stated this could just be a case of content early access connected to money. To me this is no different than the mindset of content being locked behind playing seasons. Of which generally the player mindset is cool with that and it’s not an issue of certain players potentially wont be able to play it but more so the fact that certain people can’t afford it. I understand this is a loaded topic so I’ll stop here.
That would maked it solely a timed functional payment and create massive FOMO. Hence fully against it. I’m already not happy with supporter packs being phased out and the MTX not being separately available afterwards in some way.
And Legacy has no P2W? You wouldn’t do better then your peers at the same stuff if it’s powerful?
It’s solely about the position for you compared to others. And we got still MG which would make it a ‘winning situation’ directly rather then only in perception (which would be bad enough).
Just shifts stuff around, is no solution.
That’s a complete bogus argument.
If that were the case there would be no market at all. Everything at minimum Gold listed since nobody needs anything. hence untrue.
FOMO is solely based on timed offers. Hence something which is gone after and hence ‘you missed out’.
So make it not phase out, that solves this aspect. Like the battlepasses from Helldivers 2. They’re top-tier integration of content.
So I’m not trying to get in a fight but one comment I had issue with. For original post I did my best to not use absolute statements and did my best to make general statements and was said from my experience and opinion.
So you said
(That’s a complete bogus argument.
If that were the case there would be no market at all. Everything at minimum Gold listed since nobody needs anything. hence untrue.)
So currently on legacy there exists a quad exalt tier 7/7/7/7 body armour that a few people have. This exists for multiple people because of me. I got the original quad 7 body to drop and I have imprinted it and shared it with others who want it and are willing to play with me long enough to get an obsidian res. I’ve never played MG only COF and it dropped in a corruption 200 echo completion reward chest. I’ve never charged anyone or tried to intentionally benefit from sharing the wealth. If people want to be MG and play an economy simulator that’s a ok with me, but for the people who I have interacted with in global chat we all just share loot (when possible) and have a good go at it.
I agree with not bundling a class with a supporter pack, but PoE’s been phasing out old supporter packs since the very beginning, it’s industry standard.
No, but it’s legacy, nobody cares, that’s the entire point of legacy.
Which is absolutely fine to share and do that. All the power to you!
But you also gotta realize that it’s a really really low sub-group and the overall situation simply doesn’t represent it.
You can do it… but it’s not commonly done.
Also congratulations on a quad T7 drop, that’s massive!
Not a fan of that either, Standard or not.
I don’t solely look at what the industry standards are but instead of what would provide the best customer experience overall. And that’s simply not in line currently.
Anyone playing Legacy simply because they don’t wanna restart would argue that this is not the case.
In PoE we see for example 10% of the playerbase playing Standard… which with the absolutely atrocious support there is a surprisingly high amount.
And they all definitely care.
But P2W wouldn’t apply to legacy though. The main case for P2W in legacy you could make is getting the new items and place them on MG sooner. But people in legacy already have level 100 full endgame geared builds ready to farm said content.
Buying a new class, then leveling/gearing it up all the way to endgame isn’t an advantage in this case, because when you finally reach the point of farming for that content there are already dozens of people farming it to exhaustion.
You still got a market, a market is based on supply versus demand.
And it also scales in Legacy accordingly. So when your build is not good then you’ll need magnitudes more time comparably, and it starts to show at very small differences already.
You can even see this in PoE clearly happening. People which can farm for example Alva temples for Gold (magic mob farming) which is a low-end strat for Gold versus those which cannot handle this method since their build isn’t up to snuff make several times more in the same timeframe.
Why? Because with the value they acquire this way they can scale it up faster and hence get even better options for it.
The same - in a less severe manner - happens in LE, and we’ll be able to expect it becoming more obvious with every bit of content added.
Today it might be a small issue… in a few years if the game doesn’t dismantle itself fully finally it means it becomes a actual viable issue and in a short time after it’s a serious problem.
I don’t know how to link a comment on iPhone but I want to agree with your comment of essentially not following other games or doing what they did just because they are a similar game. If that’s essentially what you’re saying I can’t agree more. I hope LE does not just become a clone of every other arpg. I’m not saying they can’t do something just because a case of “simpsons did it” (South Park ref).
An example is seasons, I like how LE does not force a set time per season and they decide when they want to push content. I get it sucks waiting for new stuff but I’m a low percentile player group.
Consistency is key, always.
Quality comes secondary to consistency actually, surprisingly so even.
And yeah, LE shouldn’t become a copy of other games, that’s the major issue they’re struggling with. But some core gameplay loops are basically mandatory, the recipe on how engagement works has been very much refined over the years, and the ‘ethical’ methods of doing so are very very narrow and clear-cut actually.
I mean… we only need to look at which games do well long-term and why. We either got the creative games which are hence ‘forever games’ through that. (Prime example with Minecraft and the whole genre there), we got competitive games in the form of RTS, FPS, Moba (albeit RTS is relatively dead because every company in existence ran them into the ground by now, needs extremely tight balance on top, hard to create). And then we got the progression games. Stardew Valley where you need hundreds of hours to optimize a farm, Abiotic Factor which has a massive progression-line overall, PoE which leans into long-term step-by-step upgrades.
The core rule there is ‘Always have something improving just around the corner’ in some way.
That’s the major issue which LE struggles with. They need either very dense content (they don’t even remotely have that, that’s 5-10 years away at their pace) or they need a good solid foundation of progression.
Everything else is relatively open. The type of mechanics, the split between bosses versus hoard-killing… the specific ways of progression. But the utmost rule is ‘always have some upgrade at your fingertips’.
thats a very distilled summary of FOMO. but its not necessarily accurate. for example. killing uber abby. we technically have no time limit to do it. but some people just rely on guides to make powerful builds in order to kill him. why do people do that? they want to kill abby, they dont want to miss out.
maybe because they dont want to miss out on killing abby? may be they dont want to miss out on his exclusive loot?
that is also FOMO. when talking a bout time based FOMO mechanics, what you’re actually referring to a way people abuse FOMO. which people commonly refer to simply as FOMO mechanic/marketing. the same way people refer to paying for advantage as p2w. winning usually implies a competition. but older gen people see completing the game as winning. so winning isnt even a correct term. paying for advantage is much more accurate but we accept p2w as its understandable and fits better with other terms such as p2p and f2p.
Yeah, but it’s a different ‘flavor’ of FOMO, the type which is unavoidable and comes from social standing in a group environment.
What I tend to talk about with FOMO is solely ‘functional’ FOMO. Hence ‘it is not permanent’.
Because the social one is based on other people even with a permanent state of the thing existing.
You get FOMO when your friends go to a indoor pool together (which is open year round and every year) but you got to make a choice between them and something else you might need to do. You hence ‘fear missing out spending time with them’ despite the venue being permanent, could re-do it anytime after all! But that ‘moment’ is gone.
What the argumentation from my side is is always the ‘FOMO mechanics’. That means anything which causes inherent urgency.
‘It’s only available for 3 months and never again!’
or
‘Buy now for 20% off, this is a one-time discount!’
That is the dangerous type for which our brain was not built for. It is built for the social situations and hence take opportunistic actions for a more stable environment around you. The functional one on the other hand abuses this psychological mechanic we have to warp it into a means to cause us to not have extra stability and loose in reality nothing if we don’t have it… but it definitely does cost us something to acquire at that moment.
I just would like some clarity and be clear on something I should have said in original post, but I didn’t as I’ve gotten feedback that I ramble and say too much and make unnecessary comments.
So far the only info we have from official sources about new paradox classes is; the name is “paradox class”, it’s a future content addition with no set date, it is planned as at the very least to initially be paid content, and the “blanket” reason for monetizing is to fund LE’s growth and continuation.
Is this correct?, I’m no longer in the LE official discord or active in forums/ things like Reddit (I wasn’t kicked or banned, I left for personal reasons not because of something bad I did).
For clarity i realized that I “ suggested ” what I did under some self assumptions, which I now realize was a mistake. I assumed that the monetization gate keeping the content (paradox classes) wasn’t permanent. And more of a form to encourage people to continue supporting the game over time. I assumed the initial monetization was to gage the players interest in the content. If the new class was a “flop” or received too much negative feedback it wouldn’t be added to the core content of the game. And if the class was a “ success “ it would become core content. Kind of like paying for early access to content or temporary content depending on the outcome. And that way if the content “flops” the cost of the “experiment “ wouldn’t be wasted and could pay for dedicating devs to potentially unused effort.
So with the assumption that the content was potentially only for a limited time is why I said what I said. Linking it to the seasonal bundles was because it may only be around while the season is there, which to me made sense. And the legacy only was because “traditionally” players care less about legacy than standard. And I’m saying that as a legacy only player, I believe the majority of the players care about seasons and can be competitive there. And if locked originally to legacy if the class was a “flop” it would in my mind have the least negative impact on the community as a whole.
That wouldn’t make any sense in terms of monetization. With this “model” there are basically only 2 options and other than a few outlier exceptions, the majority of players would react this way:
1- Class is crap, won’t be added to core. “Why would I pay for a crappy class that won’t even be around after I pay for it?”
2- Class is great and it will be added to core. “Why would I pay for a class that will be free in 3 months time?”.
So a normal player would look at a new class being added and decide not to buy it. Because it will either be a failure (and they would even lose what they paid for) or it will be good and will make it to core.
Which means that only a very small minority would even be interested in buying it in the first place. So that wouldn’t be a good monetization model.
It only works on TLI because the game is already P2W anyway (so different mindset of playerbase) and because they always make it to core (and are usually OP in their first season).
A paid class would only work in terms of monetization if it’s not underpowered (otherwise people won’t buy it), if it offers some gameplay that others don’t have and if it remains as a paid DLC (otherwise most people don’t buy it and just wait for it to become free).
And the best way to incentivize players buying the paid class is to make it strong, which is the P2W fear players are having now.
IMO they need to stop updating the game and just cancel all future plans. Make it like a Single player game which doesnt have seasons.
Then make a new Game and sell that, that will always work better financially for them and then they also do not have to deal with the player base complaining
They could add 2 mini acts worth 30 minutes of gameplay to deliver the promised conclusion and add missing skills and the game would be finished. Wolcen Did so as well and they make a second game .
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