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Xendran -> RE: =ED= April 20th, 2016 - EpicDuel State of the Game Report (4/26/2016 8:47:22)
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@Digi X: Heavy moderation of steam forums will get a game basically blacklisted by the internet.
I don't think AE should even touch the steam forums, because if they try to enforce policies anywhere even remotely close to as strict as they are here they will generate immense amounts of bad PR.
Also, when you guys do try to go on steam remember that steam reviews have a very drastic effect on a game's potential for success. If you guys don't do this properly, or don't fix the gameplay mechanics, expect to get destroyed by reviews.
Considering the general image that most gamers have of AE, this is going to have to be done well if any new market is to be reached.
You don't want to be known on steam for being the guys who made "That bad port of some broken flash game that had ridiculous prices on everything" and sitting there with your review score at Mostly Negative.
I want this game to be able to succeed, especially after following it for so long and knowing where and why it failed and I just hope they don't make the same mistakes again, only this time in a marketplace that is not a walled garden the way AE currently is.
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NOTE: The below looks like a rant complaining about Pay2Win, it's not really. It's more explaining WHY Pay2Win is hated, why Pay2Win was mostly phased out of EpicDuel and to help people see why if ED comes back on steam to not expect any Pay2Win (and if there is pay2win, for them to not expect the game to see any benefit from getting onto steam).
Fair warning, you're going to get eviscerated on steam if you put this game, a PVP game, on steam while still containing the 1-Year Varium exclusivity model.
I'm serious, your reviews will get absolutely slaughtered if you try to carry this over, and you can bet you'll see the front page of /r/games.
To some of the younger or less experienced people here, me saying that about /r/games sounds absurd and like something that doesn't matter at all. However, to anyone who knows the power of social media, how quickly it proliferates, the strength of the internet hate machine, and the history (especially recent history) of games, their market, and their journalism, you will understand why it's a very rash action to launch a port of a flash game onto steam if it has a business model that people on steam and reddit have shown time and time again to completely and utterly despise.
I'm not sure if a lot of people on this forum are aware of this, but games with business models like the old epicduel are the reason that Free2Play is a stigmatized term now. People assume less of F2P, assume P2W will be present (or some sort of barrier that makes not paying non-viable if you want to play the game as intended and in an enjoyable way). People assume they are out to get their money. Why?
Because they were and are. Epicduel is absolutely nowhere near at the level it used to be, but back in its prime there was often not more than 2 months (often 1) without a new best in slot piece of equipment (or other straight-upgrade super expensive options like Enhancements) being released.
These are just direct pay walls. You could not ever compete on the same level as paying players. Having the capability of defeating them does not mean it was in any way a fair fight whatsoever.
This heavily encourages you to buy into a gear set. This seems fine initially, you're level capped, armour doesnt change that much anyway so what could possibly go wrong.
Not much later, and we're getting updates that require you to pay $50 every 1-3 months in order to be able to keep competing at the same level you just paid for.
This is like a subscription, because if you do not have competitive gear, you are literally not playing the same game. The ability to compete being 100% locked behind a repeated paywall in a non subscription game is acceptable only in card games, and is inherent to their nature. In order to offset this, the makers of the most successful TCG and CCGs time their expansions in a way that wealthy players will not constantly and vastly outpace people who cannot pay (or can pay less) before having ample time to catch up. Non TCG and CCG games that wish to add expansions of gear will either make that gear available without cash, or will split their PVP pool into expansion and non-expansion. Also, generally the expansion is a bit more content than a $50 sword.
EpicDuel back in the day was the perfect example of this. You absolutely had to be well off or be living with well off parents to be able to afford to keep up with this game at a competitive level. As we transitioned from Beta to Gamma, this got worse and worse, with better and better gear being released so fast (remember that this is a PVP game) that 95% of the other gear of the same level in the game was totally obsolete.
Except here's the kicker, it's a hidden subscription that hooks you in with Free to Play. And now, you've just had your ability to play the game at the same level taken away from you after 1 month, and can only be obtained with real money. One of the nasty parts about this is it directly hits you with the sunk cost fallacy. You've already invested so much into your character, but now it's garbage so you pay the $50 becuase you've already put so much into the character it would be a waste to let it get outdated (and if you quit you feel like you "wasted" that money). The real nasty part and one of the biggest fuels on the hate fire of that kind of strictly-Pay2win business model: It targets young children and addicts, the most vulnerable and least responsible people out there. In this case, they are even more vulnerable than the elderly for a number of reasons (Although the elderly are certainly not spared of the lure of these tactics either). These are some very good reasons that EpicDuel moved away from this model, however there is also a valid and unfortunate reason that they were not able to fully abandon it (which honestly i think they wish they were able to have done instead of the necessary half-measure).
In all honesty, I fully believe the developers understand the situation they are in with regards to Varium. Convincing the existing playerbase to go along with a model that offers absolutely no PVP benefits, but purely cosmetic and convenience ones, that may be their biggest challenge because they absolutely need those initial people in there to help bolster a release in order to pull fresh players.
In the end my main concern is the number of people that will try to justify to themselves with various little nuances and minute details about specific builds and matches and counters as to why this or that year-exclusive varium item being cash only for a year isn't pay2win.
Even if you can justify it to yourself though, the fact that you have to stretch this far in order to *maybe* start to convince a person intimately familiar with the details of epicduel as to why it's not pay2win, using those details as reasoning, that is not going to matter at all to the new player who knows nothing about this game and just sees a cool turn based pvp game on steam. They just see that the game sells powerful cash items that you can only get with cash for a year. People HATE that, and they don't have all the info about the details and balance and the meta to make the decision as to it not being Pay2Win. The default (and correct) mindset here is to assume it is indeed pay2win. Many people will simply log off a game and never try it if they see this, including me. Sounds funny to say this considering who I am in regards to this game, but the Xendran of 2016 would have never even given EpicDuel a chance purely based on the business model alone, let alone actually play it like the Xendran of 2010 did so eagerly.
The number of people in the general gaming community that would see "1 year cash exclusive" and then just immediately log off of their character before doing their first battle would be devastating.
I really hope this point gets through to a lot of people here, because while I really don't want to sound disrespectful when I say this, but this community is very much a walled garden, and a disproportionately large number of the opinions on these forums are in extreme contrast with those held by the general gaming population. I know a lot of this has to do with age, because the very young people with us don't delve into the mindsets of behind why things are the way they are in a game, they don't fully concept the grasp of a game company being a business, the priorities of running a business, existing studies about business practices that have been done. They generally don't have the pool of tertiary knowledge (especially on important relevant and applicable concepts like the Sunk Cost Fallacy, Strawman arguments and other logical fallacies, and the Skinner Box, etc.) and life experience to pull from, and thus will unknowingly defend something because the power they get from it makes them feel good, and they are generally either not in charge of the money that was spent and do not have a real concept of how much money they are or aren't spending.
This is not to say anything negative about the young people here, they just simply aren't equipped (and are not far enough in life to have any reason to be yet) to see the bigger picture on a subject like this, especially when it comes to the real-world impact of angering an amalgamation of users like steam and/or reddit.(for the most part. There are some exceptions created by extreme circumstances, or extremely good parenting in regards to teaching your children budgeting and value of both products and time) and aren't far enough in life to have any incentive to be equipped to understand why
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