Removal of pay to win option

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  • DoctorDR1 wrote:

    Remember, this is a free game. Bytro needs to make money somehow. The people who buy gold let everyone else play this great game for free.
    Perhaps Bytro could put the game on Steam or something and sell it for 5 or 10 bucks. I would be willing to buy it if it is only 5 or 10 bucks and there is no gold.
    "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." - Joseph Stalin

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  • There were many attempts

    RBoi200 wrote:


    Perhaps Bytro could put the game on Steam or something and sell it for 5 or 10 bucks. I would be willing to buy it if it is only 5 or 10 bucks and there is no gold.
    There were many proposals to make this game possible to play without gold, ranging from proposals to create "paid maps" that would have gold usage disabled, so the players could pay for the map creation and be sure they have a fair fight, to even asking the developers on how would they price the game itself, so the community could buy it out by crowdfounding. None of those proposals were met with any responce other than no, or silence.

  • laaaaaaaaga wrote:

    There were many attempts

    RBoi200 wrote:

    Perhaps Bytro could put the game on Steam or something and sell it for 5 or 10 bucks. I would be willing to buy it if it is only 5 or 10 bucks and there is no gold.
    There were many proposals to make this game possible to play without gold, ranging from proposals to create "paid maps" that would have gold usage disabled, so the players could pay for the map creation and be sure they have a fair fight, to even asking the developers on how would they price the game itself, so the community could buy it out by crowdfounding. None of those proposals were met with any responce other than no, or silence.
    Aye. The shortsightedness of the people who created a GREAT game like this is unbelievable in this respect.
    When the fake daddies are curtailed, we have failed. When their roller coaster tolerance is obliterated, their education funds are taken by Kazakhstani phishers, and their candy bars distributed between the Botswana youth gangs, we have succeeded.
    - BIG DADDY.

  • That is unfortunate as some of the ideas that have been mentioned previously may be gaining support as new players come into the game. I personally would support a buy in method for no gold rounds or to have a season pass type system. There are plenty of examples of games that earn money that are free to play ranging from in game skins or passes. The best type of games that profit do so without disrupting gameplay.

    That said, gold use doesn't break the game as much as some people think it does. To spam units is very expensive and good players who know what they are doing can definitely beat a player that doesn't understand the game but spams gold. Using gold is best used to gain short resources when establishing early game economy. Out of all of my games only 2 have been ruined by a spamming spree and had I been more experienced at the time I might have been able to beat them.

    The game also has quite a few ways to build up a gold stash for free. I have built up a 180k stash from achievements and wins. If you are a Free to play player I recommend farming up 22 player rounds to build experience, network with more players and to then join 100 player rounds with your loot.

  • whowh wrote:

    K.Rokossovski wrote:

    Aye. The shortsightedness of the people who created a GREAT game like this is unbelievable in this respect.
    Is it just me or do none of the Devs ever listen to this forum?
    We commented on threads like this in the past already. In one of the recent threads I made a long response post.

    Short answer to the initial question here is: No we can't do that. Implementing this suggestion would result in vastly less revenue made for the company, being unsustainable. But perhaps we will explore other monetization options in the future (this is no promise though).

    And yes we certainly read (nearly) everything.

  • Personally, I don't understand what you're all yapping about. "Pay to win"? lol

    I just won a game solo a couple days ago without using a single block of gold. It proves that gold usage doesn't really affect the outcome of the game, a crappy player who spams gold would still lose to a good player who doesn't use gold.

    My point is, good players are still good and bad players are still bad, and that's something no amount of gold can change. So, if you don't like golders, just ignore them. If you're a better player than them, you'll surely win.

  • freezy wrote:

    whowh wrote:

    K.Rokossovski wrote:

    Aye. The shortsightedness of the people who created a GREAT game like this is unbelievable in this respect.
    Is it just me or do none of the Devs ever listen to this forum?
    We commented on threads like this in the past already. In one of the recent threads I made a long response post.
    Yes you commented. But the comment was incredibly shortsighted; and you didn't discuss it further.

    I really understand your position, you know. You obviously don't like the policy either, yet you don't own the company and the money bosses think differently. I'd like you to know that this is not a personal attack on you, I really appreciate all the work you put into this game, and as I said, it is GREAT in many respects, and I realize very well that a strong part of that is your work personally, and I applaud you for that.

    All hail @freezy!
    When the fake daddies are curtailed, we have failed. When their roller coaster tolerance is obliterated, their education funds are taken by Kazakhstani phishers, and their candy bars distributed between the Botswana youth gangs, we have succeeded.
    - BIG DADDY.

  • K.Rokossovski wrote:

    Yes you commented. But the comment was incredibly shortsighted; and you didn't discuss it further.
    I really understand your position, you know. You obviously don't like the policy either, yet you don't own the company and the money bosses think differently. I'd like you to know that this is not a personal attack on you, I really appreciate all the work you put into this game, and as I said, it is GREAT in many respects, and I realize very well that a strong part of that is your work personally, and I applaud you for that.

    All hail @freezy!
    Well partly. You are right that in the end this is not my decision. But the other part is also that I can see why the current status quo is being upheld and there are very valid reasons for that. I know people think we are shortsighted in this regard but people also have to understand that there is a huge risk involved. Businesses do not just suddenly shift their entire business model around, if said business model has proven to be very successful for them and no sign showed up in the data that this is not going to work anymore anytime soon. To the contrary, our games have their best years (amount of active users, revenue etc.) since their inception.
    The problem is that discussing this topic with the community takes away a huge amount of time from my regular work. People will never be satisfied with the answers and want to continue discussing this to the bitter end. This then also involes a huge amount of assumptions and 'what if's without any clear data analytics behind that to back it up. And I can't back it up with concrete numbers either as I would have to disclose internal statistics and business intelligence, and I hope you can understand why I can't do that for a forum discussion. I think in the end discussions like this will be a frustrating endeavor and time killer either way for everyone involved.
    Speaking of that, I just had a lengthy discussion about exactly this topic several weeks ago in the Supremacy 1914 forums, and it was as frustrating for both sides (probably) as I just described. You can search for it over there if you are interested in my responses. I had to use up several hours of my spare time to keep answering and I am just not in the mood to do this again and again every time such a thread pops up (and just this week we had 5 threads like this here in the forums). I hope you can understand.

    I can only stress my optimism that at some point in the future we will be in a position where we can experiment more with alternative models, but right now and right here is not the time for that.

    Thanks for your kind words though, I always hope that the work that we (and I) put in is appreciated and delights our players.

  • At the risk of extending another "no one gets happy discussing this" topic:

    What I do NOT understand is that you (Bytro) feel there is such a big risk involved. I'm not suggesting to just kill the current system; I'm saying you should look into a second income stream. Sure, let the whales have their fun killing of freebie players as much as they want. Why would the whales leave if there are ALSO pay-to-play games running? Especially if you made only a small portion of them like that? Heck if people had to look on (say) thursday morning for a few of these games opening if they are eager to get into them, I'm sure the whales wouldn't even notice, or if they did, care. After all, normal-speed players are not bothered that there are speed events as well, right? As for the income from these games, just add up the average income from a normal game, divide by the amount of players, and you have your entrance fee.

    You can't catch me on the secret data mines that you have; because I'm sure you don't have them either on a subscription model. You never tried it, so you can't have data on it either.

    As it is, you're losing players who are disgusted over encountering a whale. You'll never get them back; they just think it is a stupid game because they got jumped by 100 heavy tanks on day 3. It isn't, but you can't convince them if you have a system like this in place. However, you could KEEP these players if you could point them to the pay-to-play alternative; and they might be long-term income sources for you.

    You may be interested to know that I did an experiment a while ago. As you probably know, I was a staff member here for a while and I earned gold during that period. I never touched that gold, and the balance was just under 2M for a long time. However, a few weeks ago I encountered a whale who was also personally quite repulsive, and I decided to fight him at his own ground, and delve into that gold reserve myself as well. Actually join the pissing contest, so to speak.

    What I noticed most, is that the game is completely thrown off-balance. Carefully designed mechanisms (for example, you can't do a deep rush supported by air because you need time to build airfields) suddenly go down the drain. Air bases would be secret places, operated for just a few times before they were destroyed by golden rockets, but then just popping up again next door. In fact, all provinces on the front where continuously building air bases to save a bit on gold. On the ground, losses didn't really matter (you just bought new stuff), it was all about taking territory; and you never needed to give up any city at all when you were online cause you just bought troops when the enemy was coming; so it all came down to designing techniques for night time territory gaining. I used paratroopers to take his capital jumping from Burma to Turkey in a few hours, then he gave up. And all of that was just two days and a few 100K gold. Really, a distorted and very uninteresting game to play.

    I understand that that's not the point, that you accept these disturbances and "ugly" games as money generating events for the (admittedly: vast majority) of "good" experiences for all the other gamers. Still it makes you think. Even if the mind of the whale is beyond the comprehension of normal people, they cannot really enjoy this "whale-to-whale" game either, right? If they pay to win, they WANT to win.

    There is just so many ways that gold corrupts this game. There's the obvious thing of huge stacks appearing out of nowhere; but also, if you are just a good player managing your game well without ever spending any gold, you get accused of being one anyway. The hidden nature of the (smaller) spending makes players suspicious of eachother.

    As I said elsewhere: the exclusivity of this P2W system will forever make this game not being taken seriously by the wider gaming community. I talked to a friend I hadn't seen for a few years, and told him I enjoyed CoW. He was really surprised, and said: "What, you fell for a P2W scheme? Didn't expect that of you!" We discussed it longer, and I tried to explain to him that the game itself was actually very good, but didn't get that message across. "But still, if someone decides to spend a few hundred euro's he just wins?" he asked, and I basically had to agree. And he's not the only one, may of my long-time game friends wouldn't touch it with a pole. Many of whom spend large sums of money on P2P games.

    And that really, really is a pity. AND something which can be solved. Just show some courage. It is not a revolution. You know how to launch things. Make it small, make it an experiment, just see how it goes, if you must. Coding it should just take a few days. What have you got to lose?
    When the fake daddies are curtailed, we have failed. When their roller coaster tolerance is obliterated, their education funds are taken by Kazakhstani phishers, and their candy bars distributed between the Botswana youth gangs, we have succeeded.
    - BIG DADDY.

  • I agree. WoWarcraft made a ton of money using a subscription service. I admit I bought gold myself, but won't be doing it again. You don't get enough gold, and it always runs out too quickly. It's way too expensive. Going to a subscription system and advertising that will allow them to keep many more players. It's a good game, but a good game ruined by gold spammers is not desirable to me. And as you say, whale vs. whale is just about who has more money. There's no competition there.

  • I only noticed this thread after posting a couple of hours ago about the problem of not being able to find a gameworld worth playing in.
    3 weeks I have been playing and find it a very good game but desperately being let down by those running it.
    My 2 100 players games started off with vile abuse in the newspaper, don't bother me but I fail to understand why those that take money from this game allow it to happen when they know young children can be playing.
    On the forum someone complained about an account called 'jew eradicator 'who was using a nazi flag, I can't believe they allow this to happen in the first place and of course the post soon got deleted.
    Games are ruined within 3 days by too many people leaving or a gold user prepared to spend over £100 to win £5 and now I read that that Bytro couldn't care less.
    It is always a shame to see people create something so good and then just care about the money and to hell with their customers views, they even have the nerve to get volunteers give up time to try to defend them on the forum.
    I'll give it a few more days but I don't see how it is worth given up time to play it.

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  • K.Rokossovski wrote:

    At the risk of extending another "no one gets happy discussing this" topic:

    What I do NOT understand is that you (Bytro) feel there is such a big risk involved. I'm not suggesting to just kill the current system; I'm saying you should look into a second income stream. Sure, let the whales have their fun killing of freebie players as much as they want. Why would the whales leave if there are ALSO pay-to-play games running? Especially if you made only a small portion of them like that? Heck if people had to look on (say) thursday morning for a few of these games opening if they are eager to get into them, I'm sure the whales wouldn't even notice, or if they did, care. After all, normal-speed players are not bothered that there are speed events as well, right? As for the income from these games, just add up the average income from a normal game, divide by the amount of players, and you have your entrance fee.

    You can't catch me on the secret data mines that you have; because I'm sure you don't have them either on a subscription model. You never tried it, so you can't have data on it either.

    As it is, you're losing players who are disgusted over encountering a whale. You'll never get them back; they just think it is a stupid game because they got jumped by 100 heavy tanks on day 3. It isn't, but you can't convince them if you have a system like this in place. However, you could KEEP these players if you could point them to the pay-to-play alternative; and they might be long-term income sources for you.

    You may be interested to know that I did an experiment a while ago. As you probably know, I was a staff member here for a while and I earned gold during that period. I never touched that gold, and the balance was just under 2M for a long time. However, a few weeks ago I encountered a whale who was also personally quite repulsive, and I decided to fight him at his own ground, and delve into that gold reserve myself as well. Actually join the pissing contest, so to speak.

    What I noticed most, is that the game is completely thrown off-balance. Carefully designed mechanisms (for example, you can't do a deep rush supported by air because you need time to build airfields) suddenly go down the drain. Air bases would be secret places, operated for just a few times before they were destroyed by golden rockets, but then just popping up again next door. In fact, all provinces on the front where continuously building air bases to save a bit on gold. On the ground, losses didn't really matter (you just bought new stuff), it was all about taking territory; and you never needed to give up any city at all when you were online cause you just bought troops when the enemy was coming; so it all came down to designing techniques for night time territory gaining. I used paratroopers to take his capital jumping from Burma to Turkey in a few hours, then he gave up. And all of that was just two days and a few 100K gold. Really, a distorted and very uninteresting game to play.

    I understand that that's not the point, that you accept these disturbances and "ugly" games as money generating events for the (admittedly: vast majority) of "good" experiences for all the other gamers. Still it makes you think. Even if the mind of the whale is beyond the comprehension of normal people, they cannot really enjoy this "whale-to-whale" game either, right? If they pay to win, they WANT to win.

    There is just so many ways that gold corrupts this game. There's the obvious thing of huge stacks appearing out of nowhere; but also, if you are just a good player managing your game well without ever spending any gold, you get accused of being one anyway. The hidden nature of the (smaller) spending makes players suspicious of eachother.

    As I said elsewhere: the exclusivity of this P2W system will forever make this game not being taken seriously by the wider gaming community. I talked to a friend I hadn't seen for a few years, and told him I enjoyed CoW. He was really surprised, and said: "What, you fell for a P2W scheme? Didn't expect that of you!" We discussed it longer, and I tried to explain to him that the game itself was actually very good, but didn't get that message across. "But still, if someone decides to spend a few hundred euro's he just wins?" he asked, and I basically had to agree. And he's not the only one, may of my long-time game friends wouldn't touch it with a pole. Many of whom spend large sums of money on P2P games.

    And that really, really is a pity. AND something which can be solved. Just show some courage. It is not a revolution. You know how to launch things. Make it small, make it an experiment, just see how it goes, if you must. Coding it should just take a few days. What have you got to lose?
    On the first paragraph I already answered in short in my other post. And I made lengthy posts about this topic in the aforementioned S1914 forum discussion, because the same points were discussed there. That's why I meant that I am not so eager to hold this discussion every time this topic comes up in the forums. But to give you at least something here:

    From a player perspective I understand all of your arguments and have nothing against them. There are more than 1 side to every argument of course. You are also right that also we don't have all the data to really prove how such a change would work out in our particular case, but at least we have more data than discussion participants from the community I would say so we can make some more assumptions.

    It is just not as simple as "use the average spendings per map as entry fee" though. Of course we don't wanna lose any potential revenue doing this. Even if it is optional: You will lock out alot of users who are not willing to spend anything at all (vast majority of our player base didn't spend anything), which in turn drives up the averages (and in turn the entry fee) a lot, because less users have to account for the revenue. Because of that in the end the entry fee might be so high that no one except regular pay users are interested in those rounds anymore, and then you have the risk that those users would play more of these rounds, spending less in total than they would have spent when playing free rounds (dont assume that pay users only want to play against noobs or freeloaders). This in turn again drives up the necessary entry fee if we dont want to lose any revenue by offering this, its like a vicious cycle.
    Additionally it may give pay users the impression that what they are doing is wrong or bad, that we actually believe ourselves that gold is bad. I mean why else add gold free rounds, right? While that is not necessarily true it might add that impression to certain players and this again could reduce revenues indirectly.
    Of course one could now count the potentially gained new (pay) users against this, which could lower the average / entry fees again. Sadly that's the harder part to figure out, how many paying users we truly lose because of the current business model and how many we would gain by offering this option.

    By the way, we tested optional "no gold" games with entry fee in the S1914 alliance league several years ago for roughly 1 year (2 seasons), so we at least have some data on this already. The entry fee was set super low (4000, which is far below the necessary average), and still the option was not used by many players (cos it seems people still prefer to play for free). Instead the whole league including this option stirred a lot of controversy and because of that reception it was decided back then to not deal with it anymore for the time being. Back then I certainly would have liked if the community rallied behind this option and supported it more, it might have opened some more doors.

    You are certainly right that a new test of this could give us more data, but it is still a risk after all. Even if its a small risk, no company actively seeks ways in which it might lose revenue. So there is alot of internal soul searching and convincing needed. And indeed we discuss this topic from time to time, and perhaps one day we will test this again if we finally decide "now is the time again". As I said, nothing is forever final, just that right now this topic is not in our focus. As I said, we are very successful with the current model, with our best year in company history. So maybe its understandable that no one here currently thinks "we have to do something about this topic or we are doomed". The data we have (and data which is shared with us from industry peers) does not suggest that the model itself is a problem in the near future. But it could become one later on, in which case we would certainly need to act.

    It is also possible that we soon experiment with other forms of alternative revenue streams. Cos there are more options than just gold entry fees. For example customization options or adding metagame elements on top. But nothing is set in stone here, I just wanted to mention that the future is open and possibilities are there, but don't expect anything in the short term.