obliviondoll#5677 posted (#post-114732)
Fair warning: The last 2 times they promised to fix the maintenance costs because of bugs or imbalances, the prices went UP instead of down. In both cases, they explicitly stated there were problems causing maintenance to be charged at higher rates than intended, and the solution was somehow to increase them even more.

If this is true, then I can't say I'm not a little concerned about the future of this game. I get the sense that there is a kind of internal schizophrenia going on within the company; the devs want to listen to the players, but the execs and publishers order them to do other things.

Thorbinator#2903 posted (#post-114333)

ARE YOU INTENTIONALLY DESIGNING A FRUSTRATING GAME?
Why Yes! Yes they are!

The point is to frustrate you to the point where you will spend money turning your Tier 1-2 XP into free XP for Tier 4-5.

People will start to catch on soon enough and will either start coughing up the dough or playing something not designed to rob you.

Quayjay#4843 posted (#post-115125)

Thorbinator#2903 posted (#post-114333)

ARE YOU INTENTIONALLY DESIGNING A FRUSTRATING GAME?

Why Yes! Yes they are!
The point is to frustrate you to the point where you will spend money turning your Tier 1-2 XP into free XP for Tier 4-5. People will start to catch on soon enough and will either start coughing up the dough or playing something not designed to rob you.

Theobald#3611 posted (#post-114967)

obliviondoll#5677 posted (#post-114625)

Theobald#3611 posted (#post-114622)

There's and always will be free players in recruit, and sometimes veteran in the end (by harvesting free xp and non-taxed money).

You just want to play elite gratuitously.

The only problem in the game is the lack of tuning options in the recruit tiers.

You're grossly overestimating the survivability of this game. If player retention is like a bucket of water, progression 2.0 carved the entire base of the bucket away. The game is a pipe through which players flow now, instead of having player retention, the devs are only sustaining it with player THROUGHPUT. Eventually, they'll run out of players who haven't seen enough and moved on.

The game in its previous state was good enough that I'm willing to stick around and keep trying (in spite of STILL not having any information about what was supposedly wrong about the post I'm still waiting on a reply about from the devs).

I'm not letting go because I've seen how good the game COULD be if they didn't keep forcing stupid "monetisation" decisions in spite of the evidence of the entire history of the free-to-play gaming market proving them to be bad ideas.

Yeah yeah yeah as always, you're acting like you now everything better than anyone, including the dev team, the market, the numbers about retention and such that you don't know and physically have no access to, the design goals, and game design as a whole as if it wasn't even a job in itself and was something anyone with a keyboard could make master classes of.

When at some days you keep playing with the same people over and over again for hours. That does in fact give a good estimate of size of The playerbase. I'm currently at a stage where I recognize player names and know which team will win or lose. SPLIN73R for example usually leaves matches with his TIV destro with a kdr of 13 or higher and I meet him a lot in Random solo queue. Another strong indicator of the size of The community. It takes neither an expert nor a professional nor the actual numbers to know that the player retention is bad.

Might I add that you are being quite rude? There are people genuinely being frustrated and you come across with this superior you know nothing attitude. Neither helpful nor likeable nor respectable and definitely not true either. They have played the game thus have firsthand experience which they are sharing. If you have had a different experience that's fine - but don't discredit other peoples opinions and feelings just because "you disagree as your individual experience has been a better one".

Quayjay#4843 posted (#post-115126)
Why Yes! Yes they are!
The point is to frustrate you to the point where you will spend money turning your Tier 1-2 XP into free XP for Tier 4-5. People will start to catch on soon enough and will either start coughing up the dough or playing something not designed to rob you.

As a tier 3 myself, I have been doing this occasionally; going back play tier 2 ships to earn some extra XP. It works. And I usually get top 3 rank. But the only problem with this, though, is it creates another imbalance and frustrates new players. If I'm getting 9 kills to the second place 3 kills, I'm not so sure this is a good system, because it encourages more experienced players to play against beginners just to farm XP.

Just the other day, I was getting repeated kills on a new player in an artillery cruiser. Next thing I know, he writes; "This game blows. I'm going back to...." I must have been frustrating the poor guy. Suffice it to say, I stopped doing this.

Kampfkraft#8374 posted (#post-114989)

With the last patch I get thrown even more often into halfway lost/won battles. Its extremly relaxing to wait 5+ mins to play 2 mins and get a maintenance-slap into the face. WTF?!

Whoa... you pay maintenance for joining a game in progress? That needs to be gone immediately. Backfilling should be rewarded. Not punished.

Adavanter#2016 posted (#post-115159)
Whoa... you pay maintenance for joining a game in progress? That needs to be gone immediately. Backfilling should be rewarded. Not punished.

This happened to me as well. I joined a match at the last 60 seconds or so. But even though we lost, and I lost 900 credits, I did get about 1300 XP/credits for doing basically nothing. So there may be an XP boost in place for joining late.

Ok, I finally got around to turning my maintenance auto pay off, and oofta. I now see what the fuss is about.

I'm now doing, what I think is fairly common, and running minimal non-recruit fleets. My credit gain is now keeping up with my XP gain. Which is awesome, but it feels stupid to have three empty fleet slots from necessity.

Here's a thought, what about creating an incentive to play a full fleet, like bonus credits/xp for having all five ship classes in a fleet? Or, discounting the maintenance cost of a fully diversified fleet? etc?

Someone else had a similar idea: That you don't advance to the next tier until you have a full fleet. Not sure how that would work though.

MasterFALE#0097 posted (#post-115183)

Here's a thought, what about creating an incentive to play a full fleet, like bonus credits/xp for having all five ship classes in a fleet? Or, discounting the maintenance cost of a fully diversified fleet? etc?

At least they should try something. It's ironic that they keep going on about their vision of people bringing diverse fleets (as justification for the grind and the loss of multiple loadouts) but then actually punish us for doing so.

Normandy03#6697 posted (#post-115194)

Someone else had a similar idea: That you don't advance to the next tier until you have a full fleet. Not sure how that would work though.

I don't think that'd change anything. You can get a full t2 fleet in a couple of hours (and then discard it again once you need to level your T3) and a full T4 fleet takes months to acquire, so T5 would be even more deserted than it is now.

Besides, it is always better to reward than to punish. Bringing fleets should be something you want to do, not something you have to do.