AK140 wrote:

Well, I wrote about this in another thread before, but to recap: this is a political economic problem that is beyond just the game.

I think there used to be a community-run tournaments where gold use was prohibited, but I'm not sure whether that's still around or is it even regular nowadays. But if it's no longer around today, then that's to be expected by the business model of any competitive online games under capitalism.

So here's the thing: the gold problem will keep happening for as long as we live under capitalism. Gold is an instant leisure commodified for the few who can afford them, because profit is above the needs and leisure of all under capitalism. This isn't because game industries like Bytro is inherently greedy, but because they need profit to stay afloat from the competition; they're forced to act greedy by the system.

To abolish capitalism is the only logical choice whether you're a gamer who just want to play for fun; a game developer who needs to pay for your rent, food, and take of your family; or a CEO who is forced only to care for the profit of the company lest it go backrunpt.

freezy wrote:

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.

6thDragon wrote:

Another idea would be to publish in the newspaper a daily total of how much each player used the previous day. It won’t be a serious deterrent for those that want to do it, but it will give an indication of how much an opponent is willing to spend.

They could even add text related to the gold standard and countries selling their reserves as that was a thing in the decades preceding WW II.

just a thought.

DoctorDR1 wrote:

Here’s what freezy’s very detailed response was: