It depends. I am playing only with destroyers. Sometimes 8-12 kills in a match is not enough if You team loses.
Biggest problem is that T3 ships compared to T4 are bad if You are new a player and You don't know how to properly use Your ship and which modules to choose (again new players problems).

To say it bluntly - If You are a good player and You know Your ships strengths You can do very good in veteran even with T3 ships. But You have to get kills and Your team has to win.

For new players - yes, You feel like You are a child and after every match You are given a candy and after one lick - they take it away.

Just slug in the recruit and don't rush for the T3 ships, because You will be destroyed in first 10 matches. And after You have gained experience and credits - go back to veteran. This is how I did and this worked fine so far.

If You are doing great in veteran - You are earning more than in the recruit. PERIOD.
If You are in the middle of the scoreboard - You should not be earning much, because that indicates, that You are doing something wrong.

Jawayne,
That quote is helpful; thanks for clearing that up.

As a new tier-3 player myself, I have to agree that the maintenance costs are discouraging. And the tier 3/4 grind is even more discouraging (yes, it does make me consider just playing in tier 1 & 2 exclusively). Hopefully the new adjustment to costs will help encourage new players like me to continue leveling up through tier 3 and 4.

NOTE: Looks like the change is being made as we speak. Server is down for maintanence with message;

      ***"Captains, our game server will be down for 30 minutes while we correct pricing changes.
      TY for your patience and understanding."***

This is encouraging.

Thanks for clearing that up Jawayne.

As a new tier-3 player myself, I must admit that the maintenance cost is discouraging. And the grind for tier 3,4,5 looks even more discouraging (yes, I even considered just playing tier 1 and 2 exclusively).

Hopefully these new changes to costs will help encourage players like me to continue leveling up through tier 3 and 4. As it stands now, I don’t have weeks to spend or hundreds of dollars to invest just to obtain one tier-4 ship. I know of no other free-to-play game that requires this much investment just to obtain a single feature or special weapon. So this will be a welcomed change. Everything else about the game is great though. Its just this one area.

NOTE: it looks like the change is being made as we speak. Servers are down with an annoucment to cost changes.
.
.

Thanks for clearing that up Jawayne.

As a new tier-3 player myself, I must admit that the maintenance costs are discouraging. And the grind for tier 3,4,5 looks even more discouraging (to the point where I even considered just playing tier 1 and 2 exclusively).

Hopefully the new adjustments will encourage players like me to continue leveling up through tier 3 and 4. As it stands now, I don’t have weeks to spend or hundreds of dollars to invest just to obtain one tier-4 ship. I know of no other free-to-play game that requires this much investment just to obtain a single feature or special weapon (it should be no surprise why the game is not drawing in more revenue). So this will be a welcomed change. Everything else about the game is great though. Its just this one area.

Maybe take cues from other free-to-play franchises, like Planetside 2? Sony raked in millions on this game (and continues to this day). And they did so successfully by incentive, not by punishing players for poor play. Not everyone has the same reaction time, dexterity, depth perception, etc.

-N03

Get elite-status and you will always make more creds than you lose with maint with a T3 fleet, the base payout is 600 creds, the elite-bonus 50%, max T3 maint is 900 creds. So even with 0 score on your side and a loss, you will not lose money.

Jawayne#8001 posted (#post-114404)

Get elite-status and you will always make more creds than you lose with maint with a T3 fleet, the base payout is 600 creds, the elite-bonus 50%, max T3 maint is 900 creds. So even with 0 score on your side and a loss, you will not lose money.

Thanks Jawayne. That's good to know.

While I do have Elite status, I wasn't planning on continuing it, as I wasn't entirely sure it brought enough return on investment. For an average player like me (maybe 4 kills per game on a good day), 100k credits for a tier-4 ship is almost unobtainable even with elite status (If I only average a few hundred credits per game, that means I need to play about 250 games to obtain 100k credits. I just don't have that kind of time).

But maybe with the new pricing changes in the pipeline, purchasing the Elite bonus will offer more value for the investment. Until then, well, there's always Mass Effect I suppose.

Jawayne#8001 posted (#post-114395)

ManiaCCC#0403 posted (#post-114390)

well Jawayne, if this is their stance, I think most people will say just bye bye to Dreadnought. Their design philosophy is just wrong.

The game is a freemium-game, you can play it without paying, but it will take a lot longer to progress and you may not be able to play legendary all the time. You can circumvent this however with their subscription they call "Elite-Status".

I think it is a nice compromise between a subscription based and a free-to-play game. Although I would have liked a more honest way of advertising this. But I am a fan of subs, so I might be the wrong to ask/can be seen as a fanboy.

There is just too much freemium games around for this concept to stick and be successful. You don't get it. I don't care much about grind, many people don't It is not the point, point is, you can't force people to pay for what they "need". People will pay for what they want. if you put something basic like progression in the game behind soft pay wall (even devs confirmed it), people wont pay bucks for xp exchange, they will quit. However, freemium model is awesome if you do it right..

what they really need is to make sure, player even after one or two games per day feel some sense of progression towards some goal..and no, ship XP is not that, if you don't have money to buy and enjoy new modules and ship. Lower rewards if needed but never ever punish players for bad matches. Honestly, I don't even understand why we have this discussion, this is so BASIC fundamental rule of game design especially in freemium games for years already. We were quite a big group of friends enjoying this game, now, noone is playing, everyone quit out of pure frustration, me included..and I paid for this game...

BTW: I have elite status, several tier 4 ships and basically every loss is 99% of time loss of credits. So I really really tried my best to understand and embrace this system. It doesn't work. And never will.

Rebellion#8023 posted (#post-114396)

It depends. I am playing only with destroyers. Sometimes 8-12 kills in a match is not enough if You team loses.
Biggest problem is that T3 ships compared to T4 are bad if You are new a player and You don't know how to properly use Your ship and which modules to choose (again new players problems).

To say it bluntly - If You are a good player and You know Your ships strengths You can do very good in veteran even with T3 ships. But You have to get kills and Your team has to win.

For new players - yes, You feel like You are a child and after every match You are given a candy and after one lick - they take it away.

Just slug in the recruit and don't rush for the T3 ships, because You will be destroyed in first 10 matches. And after You have gained experience and credits - go back to veteran. This is how I did and this worked fine so far.

If You are doing great in veteran - You are earning more than in the recruit. PERIOD.
If You are in the middle of the scoreboard - You should not be earning much, because that indicates, that You are doing something wrong.

The problem here is that this game's definition of 'good' isn't even the top 1/3 of players. The only people who get to enjoy regular play are probably the top 5%-10%, the guys with 2.0+ W/L (66%+ win ratio). That's a really stupid baseline standard. It's stupid because making the game utterly horrid for 90% of the player base is not a solid way of retaining players. I don't know where you pull this middle of the score board = bad BS from, but those are often the tanks and the healers and they're the one's who win games We can't all be zipping around in Artys and Vettes being the Rambo hero of the match: and I say that as an Arty/Vet pilot with a 70% win rate. In fact, I wouldn't even say bottom of the score board = bad because in 90% of the games I see the bottom dudes are just the poor saps who got shoved into a vet game with their TII/TI recruit fleet and i'm sorry I don't care how skilled the guy is, his TII vs my TIV is a hopeless fight I don't even have to play well, I just have to play and ride the power curve to victory.

I would like maint to be tweaked so middling players aren't getting punished for trying to play in veteran. I'm not against bottom list players losing credits, but perhaps it could be adjusted down some more?

I still stand by my opinion that the game would feel far more fair if there was a T2/T3 tier that would make T3s feel more rewarding to play for lower skilled players. That doesn't have a chance of being a thing until we get a bunch more players though.

I'd rather pay my 10~15 / months istead of going through this god awfull grind.
even if you have elite status a well equipped T IV still requires at least 200 games (if you're a genius at this game with a miraculous win loss ratio).

T V is gonna take at least another 400 hours by their current xp progression model and that was ONE ship.

600* 15 = ?

9000 games !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WITH ELITE

this is a realistic estimate. you may calculate the hours you are going t need to play yourself from that.

call me lazy cuz I hate grinding but In my entire lifetime I have played over 4000 games in LoL. But I never had to grind a single hour of it cause at all times the game felt fair and fairly competitive and balanced to me so these proudly invested roughly 3000 hours of my life I played and payed for fun not for achievements - money well spent.

100% not the case for Dreadnought. Monetization or not this is the very definition of a flawed design strategy - the game is quite literately unfair and feels more like work than recreation - hence that fun coefficient currently is quite low. In fact LoL proves it is even a sub par design strategy in order to monetize and until they change their philosophy I'm not going to spend even a single $
Robocraft at first thought they had to incentivise their players to spend money and underwent a very painful almost bankruptcy until they completely threw that idea over board and decided equal power on the battlefield for everyone - guess who's spent all his allowance on the game suddenly...