I agree something needs to be done. I’ve already been playing the game MUCH less than i used to.

I’m fine with players using some gold and I know it helps support the game. Having friends in the field I also know most times 90% of income comes from 1% of people.

Developers just keep in mind. Eventually you’ll hemorrhage players when they get sick of going against heavy gold players. And those gold players will get bored not having quality players to battle.

You could get creative and offer more game options like
1 - no gold limit. Maybe These games have a higher gold payout. Maybe make it a % of the gold spent in that game. Getting heavy gold users to battle. Maybe get a bonus if it’s the highest gold used game.

2 - limit gold. Have games that limit different amounts of gold that can be used by an individual player. You could limit this as a total per game or a total per game day. Maybe based on this limit for this particular game it affects the gold paid out to the winner

3 - incremental gold charge games. Like mentioned above. Maybe every 5000 gold use it then cost an extra 500. There would be no limit then but it would simply cost increasingly more.

4 - no gold games. Self-explanatory but maybe then they pay no or very little gold to winners

This could really expand the number of options for people so they can find the kind of game that works best for them. This will keep more players interested longer. And I would think that should be pretty simple to implement.

You can write a thousand threads about this subject; Bytro will just not change their policy about this. There have been hundreds of ideas and suggestions over the years, often with a keen eye on the income stream for them as well; yet the company doesn't even bother to respond to any of them. Such a pity really; it is the ONE thing that will forever keep this game from being considered "serious" in the broader gaming community.

Well let me care to respond to this thread then. Usually we don't respond to these threads because there were indeed too many over the years and it becomes tiresome to answer them nearly every week. I will answer both on the suggestion to put in a gold limit as well as the suggestion to change the business model in order to monetize differently (e.g. unit skins or upfront gold costs for entering rounds).

- We won't change the business model of Call of War anytime soon.
- We know about the advantages and disadvantages of the business model. It has all been taken into account.
- Call of War runs with this model for over 5 years now and has its best year since release. The same is true for our older game Supremacy 1914. There is no reason to believe that the current model is not working or sustainable (at least in the foreseeable future).
- If for some reason the current model shows it is not sustainable anymore (due to rapid market changes etc.) we of course would have to act. But that is not the case yet and also not foreseeable yet.
- Changing a well working and proven model for an existing game, which is the core pillar of the companies income, is a very risky thing to do. No sensible company would do that because it puts the livelyhood of the company, its employees and families at stake.
- Putting limits and breaks into the current model will just make it work less good. I won't go into detailed calculations here (we ran them) but most often the assumptions that we would make more money in the long run if we introduced such limits is not true or not provable without considerable risk.
- what may work for other games might very well not work for our games, since our games have a different target audience and are pretty much a niche setting (meaning scaling does not work as well as with the most popular free2play games)
- We also have to take company size and efficiency into account: Games which monetize via content or visuals have to put out alot more updates and content, requiring alot of effort in acquiring new know-how and bigger team sizes. Our current office wouldn't even support so many employees. Games with our monetization model on the other hand can be run very lean with smaller teams, because the game basically does not need new purchasable content every few weeks.
- Still we may want to explore additional revenue streams or monetization methods in the future, but for existing games like CoW those most likely will be additions to the existing model and not replacements, while for new games we would have a bit more leeway in experimenting.
- from a player perspective we understand the frustration that this may trigger in certain situations. We hope you still have fun with the game and as many players showed us already you can perfectly win alot of maps without paying anything.
- We also have to consider other player types who are actually ok with this model and make use of it (they are also part of our community). Those players actually make it possible that the majority of players can play this game completely for free.

Please note that I won't have time to hold long discussions with you about this, so hopefully this 1 post will suffice. I hope I was able to answer some questions, and I hope you appreciate this honest approach without any PR statements. This is an answer more from a business perspective. I didn't want to sound like I have no empathy or something, I can totally understand your opinions on this matter from a player's perspective. But as with many things there are different viewpoints to consider. After all Bytro needs to have success as a business in order to keep supporting this game for years to come. And we will do that so we all can have a good time playing Call of War

Feel free to link to this post when these discussions come up again.

Hey Freezy,

first, let me thank you for the response.

But I must say, it seems as though you haven't listened to the many suggestion threads which have popped up over the years. I can't recall a SINGLE one that suggested you should try making money on skins; I immediatly agree that the player base is way too small for that and wouldn't justify the associated cost.

Instead, most threads have suggested introducing flat-fee games, where ALL players would pay a one-time participation amount, while the remainder of the game would be gold-free. A level playing field, where players could compete on equal terms, without the risk of meeting a whale which ruins their game after investing their time and effort to build a position for a few days, before realizing a the whale was present and would be unbeatable.

Also, no one (as far as I remember) ever suggested making ALL games flat-fee. I understand very well how valuable the whales are to you, and by proxy, to us as well (they allow the "free" players the chance to play AT ALL). Let them keep their crooked and tilted games, and generate their money to you; in fact, these would probably remain the bulk of the game.

Right now, you basically have two types of players: the whales, and the free players (and I'm counting the one-time-ten-bucks players among those for now). The whales amount to (I'm guessing here) 1% of the amount of players, and the free players are 99%; yet they generate 99% of the turnover while the "free" players generate 1%. This means that the whales spend a disproportional amount of money (hundreds of euro's?) to win their games. Spending mere TENS of euro's against them is useless, so the "recreational spender" in the middle doesn't participate because he gets muscled out by the whale anyway, which is not really a nice way to spend your (small) money.

But that means that you're missing out on a category of players who would like to pay SOME money for their game, but don't want to participate in an open-ended pissing contest against whales with unknown wallet sizes. They don't spend ANY money, because spending SOME money is not a serious option - you STILL risk meeting the whale and get pissed out.

Flat-fee games would give them that reassurance, though. Everyone pays 5 euro or something like that (that's STILL E.500 for you for a 100p map - do the whales make you that on every map?), for the assurance that it will be a fair and competitve game.

And that's not even all. Here are some more advantages of these games:
- drop-out rates would be lower; people wouldn't as easily jump to the next game at the first gust of wind against them, because they actually invested to participate;
- for the no-gold but quality players, it would be GREAT that they can't be accused of "coining" anymore, and that losers would have to admit they were beaten "fairly";
- Bytro provides an alternative for player who now run off in disgust after meeting an excessive whale, and keeps him invested in the game.

I really, really understand the need to generate money for the company, its employees, their families, and their pets... and I realize this post was written from a player perspective. I don't have the necessary statistical data to do otherwise (for example, how much gold is spent on the average map?); Bytro is treating that as "vital, sensitive and secret data" which I can understand to a point. Yet I really don't understand how you could make a "calculation" like you claim has been made in your post? You haven't tried it, and you have no idea how much it would generate... and the ONLY way it would NOT work is because the flat-fee games would somehow "eat" the regular games as they are played right now. I really don't see how that could happen, if there are still plenty of "completely free" players who wouldn't want to participate in the flat-fee games, and function as prey for the whales to keep them happy and paying. That doesn't sound "risky" at all; it sounds like an opportunity to raise MORE money rather than taking a chance on the present income stream! Experimenting with this (making 10% of the new games flat-fee or something like that ) surely isn't a "substantial risk"?

This is my third - and last, game. Absolutely need to put a cap on gold usage.

LMK when you do

How about have games with different levels of gold