Poll - Would you pay more for a bigger expansion?

[TheNurgle.4825]

Big expansions are terrible idea. Imagine you work on something for several years use huge amount of resources and you have no feedback before release. So it can be hit or miss with huge stakes also getting content once in few years is not good for any MMO.

I believe that SOTO is good way to go since it cost almost nothing like 2 euro per month for 1 year. Also content every 3 months. This model have only one big issue and that is that ppl want everything "right now" so ppl will be disappointed with quarterly releases all the time.

[notebene.3190]

Time is something.

I'm still intrigued to see where it goes and if they can keep to it. I think I might like a mini-expansion every year-ish with quarterly-ish updates, and end up with 3 of them, rather than waiting 3 years for a bigger update that is less than the sum of the other parts.

I feel like I've been playing all out since this all started compared to how I used to play. Granted, some of that is wanting to work towards the legendary armor. In the before times, I'd play hard for a little bit, then I'd go back to my daily boss rotation, piddle around dreaming up things to do, and mostly playing other games.

My friends who do not play this game have to ping me really hard to get my attention these days. 😊

[Lucius.2140]

15 minutes ago, TheNurgle.4825 said:

Big expansions are terrible idea. Imagine you work on something for several years use huge amount of resources and you have no feedback before release. So it can be hit or miss with huge stakes also getting content once in few years is not good for any MMO.

I believe that SOTO is good way to go since it cost almost nothing like 2 euro per month for 1 year. Also content every 3 months. This model have only one big issue and that is that ppl want everything "right now" so ppl will be disappointed with quarterly releases all the time.

A bigger team can do more in the same time.

[TheNurgle.4825]

15 minutes ago, Lucius.2140 said:

A bigger team can do more in the same time.

Sadly no. Sometimes bigger teams do a lot less than smaller teams. In general size of dev team or teams is important to certain amount of ppl. Like you can not have one or two ppl doing everything even if they can do a lot. Major issue is management of the product or/and teams.

In my work I had pointless discussion about small features on mid and low management levels for weeks and after that devs just finished that feature in hours or days sometimes it also included all testing.

[Lucy.3728]

I don't need bigger, I want complete at release.

(And fyi I paid somewhat between 70-80 € for the last two expansions... each; with SotO I regret it, with EoD I was pleased)

Edited November 14, 2023 by Lucy.3728

[Fueki.4753]

I might pay 30€ for an expansion with the quality and quantity PoF.

But I don't think we'll get that again in GW2.

 

Edited November 14, 2023 by Fueki.4753

[Gerebos.1065]

In my opinion the issue is not with the price nor the quantity of the content.

The issue is the same repetitive Story/Skills/Animations/Scenarios/etc

You have your girl,you like it you love it but you want some more excitement in your private lifes specific part,you can dress your girl as Nurse or Teacher or however you want the same girl will be under the clothes.Not the best possible example but the simplest for understanding 😉

[Holmindeboks.3490]

HoT and PoF where worth the 100 euro to me. But i want more. It would be more fair if they make gems cheaper. So you can HAVE more for the same money. Sure they want money. But sales wont work, because. Last time they had a sale for 25% off the gold to gems price increased by exactly 25%. That means. There is no sale, except for ppl who buy gems with cash. Or ppl who already had gems. Or rich players with lots of gold. 
 

I have an good idea. Now, for 2k gems you pay 25 euro and dont get much for it. 1 mount skin and a bag slot. And your 25 euro is gone. 
they better tweak prices. EVERYTHING IRL gets expensive. So if anet is smart they give more gems for your money. 
 

if they would give me 5000 gems for 25 euro, 2500 gems for 15 euro, 8000 for 35 euro and 12000 for 50 euro. i am sure ppl are going to buy more gems. Then its actually worth it and fair. Then you can get some nice upgrades and skins. And anet earns more money. This is better then a sale because a sale is not for everyone. And then it end up by ppl pay nothing because its too expensive for what you get. 
 

and ingame gems would get cheaper for those who dont have money irl. AND PLAYERS WHO HAVE MUCH GOLD should be unable to pay gems with gold. This would also be a good idea. To make the game fair for everyone. Players with a high account value and a huge wallet should not be able to buy much gems. Just a cap of 2k gems a week or something. This is more fair because its the poor ppl that keep anet alive. Rich ppl with lots of gold never have to use their wallet. Only for expansions. BUT everyone wants a healthy game. So why must only the poor players spend money on the game? Unfair to me. 
 

thats what i think. The current prices are crazy and ridiculous. Just for virtual items. Imagine a bag slot. 5 EURO each. a character slot. 10 euro each. 
 

sure you can stick with old prices and see how it goes. But sometimes things change. The prices in the world changed, so why not ingame. Ppl have prioritys to spend their money on. (Only the very rich or the very addicted ppl will accept the prices) And food is better then virtual items. So imo it would be a smart move to GIVE more for the same money. You have nothing to lose. Its already created the virtual skins. I would say. Test it out.  

Edited November 14, 2023 by Holmindeboks.3490

[Tuna Bandit.3786]

Twice a Soto expansion for double the money would also take longer to develop, which in the long run would likely result in same price per year.

So I rather see cheaper smaller expansions more regularly, than the content drought we would otherwise experience. Now we have stuff to look forward too pretty regularly

[Lucius.2140]

3 hours ago, TheNurgle.4825 said:

Sadly no. Sometimes bigger teams do a lot less than smaller teams. In general size of dev team or teams is important to certain amount of ppl. Like you can not have one or two ppl doing everything even if they can do a lot. Major issue is management of the product or/and teams.

In my work I had pointless discussion about small features on mid and low management levels for weeks and after that devs just finished that feature in hours or days sometimes it also included all testing.

If i want to render 3 models and have 1 guy that does it in 1 day, he will take 3 days; 3 guys will take 1 day.

I understand your point, but if a company bottle neck their devs job to the point nobody isnt working in anything when the managers are discussing ideas, then thats crazyness.

Generally a bigger team, well managed, will mean more production.

 

[TheQuickFox.3826]

It's not that paying more will yield more content. To get more content ANet will need to structurally be a larger studio. For that they need to have the confidence that they will make enough revenue with the franchise. Not just once but in the long run. Perhaps the large influx of new players with the Steam release has helped this more than any price increase of the expansions would have.

[Cernoch.8524]

I would pay more for more content but it would not be more frequient content. Anet does not have enough people to make more concent so if we have to pay 25 euros a year or 50 every 2 years does not make any difference. 

If it means getting more people to make double the content every year then yes, I wouldnt mind paying 50-60 euros every year

[DeanBB.4268]

This is a weird question | poll. If a larger expansion were released, it would cost more. What is the point of this? Or did I miss the "can I pay less for more" option?

[Puck.3697]

On 11/13/2023 at 9:36 PM, TexZero.7910 said:

SoTo hasn't been worth what it was priced at to begin with so no.

?? 

You beleive £20 goes further then it really does lol. No SoTo I'd argue is still underpriced ironically. 

£20 quite litterally the value of a take away. That will last 20 minutes of enjoyment. It wont get u through the doors of any decent cinema, 

I'm sorry but 20 pounds isn't even worth a month's content. Lmfao.

My good god 😂😂 I've never seen a playerbase put so much weight on a £20 investment. It's absolutely nothing in todays pricing 😂

Am I the only one living in 2023? Did everyone djssapear back to 1996?  Like litterally everything went up in price 😂😂

Edited November 14, 2023 by Puck.3697

[roederich.2716]

cant judge this. soto is not 100% ingame yet.

[Puck.3697]

5 minutes ago, roederich.2716 said:

cant judge this. soto is not 100% ingame yet.

Tbh we know soto is gonna be small. And tbh by rights it should be, like the games priced to compete with a god kitten McDonald's meal. Lmfao. 

It was a joke the moment they stated the price tag. Because once again, we know the budgets minimal, they cant afford to give the game a real budget on a £20 game. Pricing something this cheap is basically self-defeat. 

Price dictates quality. And if you price your game beneath everything else on the market you ain't got alot of faith in your product. 

This game could be £100 a expansion, and it'd still be cheaper then WoW FFXIV and ESO. And tbh that's nuts. To think how much cheaper gw2 is to every other larger title in the genre is honestly baffling. 

We eat like Kings for what we pay. Its that simple realistically. 

Edited November 14, 2023 by Puck.3697

[TexZero.7910]

1 hour ago, Puck.3697 said:

?? 

You beleive £20 goes further then it really does lol. No SoTo I'd argue is still underpriced ironically. 

£20 quite litterally the value of a take away. That will last 20 minutes of enjoyment. It wont get u through the doors of any decent cinema, 

I'm sorry but 20 pounds isn't even worth a month's content. Lmfao.

My good god 😂😂 I've never seen a playerbase put so much weight on a £20 investment. It's absolutely nothing in todays pricing 😂

Am I the only one living in 2023? Did everyone djssapear back to 1996?  Like litterally everything went up in price 😂😂

We're literally paying for half, no one fourth of IBS.
At least when i payed for PoF and got all of it up front with LS and IBS for free after the expansion,  it was worth the value. You can sit there and try and throw a punch but i'm sorry if you're ability to undestand value is about as good as your ability to find decent food at an affordable cost.

[Nimbuliss.1324]

I wouldn't mind paying some more of we got new races, classes ect.. All the last few expansions all seem to be the same really. Alot of other games release expansions but there are usually a new race or class to play, not all the time but well you know what I mean 

[b k.1648]

You need a longer production schedule to make a bigger expansion. ANet might not be capable of delivering a larger expansion regularly, regardless of price.

[Danikat.8537]

16 hours ago, Lucius.2140 said:

A bigger team can do more in the same time.

There's a saying in tech that goes "9 women cannot make a baby in 1 month". It's a silly example of course, but the same principle applies to other things: you can't necessarily do a job faster (or do more in the same time) just by adding more people.

Some jobs are better done by 1 person. If you want a drawing of a character for example it's unlikely asking 1 person to draw the head and torso while another draws the limbs will achieve anything useful. You could ask a second person to draw something else, because there's a limit to how much 1 person can do in a day so adding a second person means they can work on 2 things at once, but it also means they need to periodically stop what they're doing to check in with each other to make sure what they're each doing will work together when it's done. As you add more people the amount of coordination needed and the time required for that scales up.

Sooner or later you need people whose entire job is to coordinate the people actually doing the work, and a whole bunch of other jobs start to be needed like someone to do all the accounting and make sure everyone gets paid, and those people need to be paid as well so the cost goes up without directly adding to the amount of work getting done. It's a balancing act, because if you don't hire people to do all those additional tasks they still need to be done so someone would have to take time out of their work to do it. Governments don't tend to accept "we're just a small company, we don't have anyone to do the accounting or pay the taxes". But it's not a linear relationship between number of employees and total production.

That's one reason big game studios typically work on multiple games at a time, even if they're sure one of those is The One that will be their next big hit, get rave review, win awards and sell millions of copies. They probably do want to get it out as fast as possible, but they know throwing everyone into the one project isn't actually going to achieve that and it's better to have enough people working on that and other people working on other things (especially if they can scale release times to have more consistent income).

[Lucius.2140]

3 hours ago, Danikat.8537 said:

There's a saying in tech that goes "9 women cannot make a baby in 1 month". It's a silly example of course, but the same principle applies to other things: you can't necessarily do a job faster (or do more in the same time) just by adding more people.

Some jobs are better done by 1 person. If you want a drawing of a character for example it's unlikely asking 1 person to draw the head and torso while another draws the limbs will achieve anything useful. You could ask a second person to draw something else, because there's a limit to how much 1 person can do in a day so adding a second person means they can work on 2 things at once, but it also means they need to periodically stop what they're doing to check in with each other to make sure what they're each doing will work together when it's done. As you add more people the amount of coordination needed and the time required for that scales up.

Sooner or later you need people whose entire job is to coordinate the people actually doing the work, and a whole bunch of other jobs start to be needed like someone to do all the accounting and make sure everyone gets paid, and those people need to be paid as well so the cost goes up without directly adding to the amount of work getting done. It's a balancing act, because if you don't hire people to do all those additional tasks they still need to be done so someone would have to take time out of their work to do it. Governments don't tend to accept "we're just a small company, we don't have anyone to do the accounting or pay the taxes". But it's not a linear relationship between number of employees and total production.

I know that for sure, but theres no neutral relationship between people and production. I cant say how much production could have decreasing returns (which is why im putting a simpler system, specially if theres other costs out there). Another part to take account there is the asset reuse, once i do for example kryptis assets i use them in several maps, quests, etc.; i may need to do more models, but will not need to duplicate; so theres several places where i can get economies of scale (the contrary of decreasing returns- take in account the book definition is a little different but the concept works here).

The limb example is an strech if i have 100 concept arts to do i will divide them between artists and good planning will reduce enormously that coordination.

More so because teams tend to have coordination around  5 people and the coordinator also contribute to the product generally, by both normal work and doing more of the planning himself.

Edited November 15, 2023 by Lucius.2140

[Ashantara.8731]

On 11/14/2023 at 6:07 PM, TheNurgle.4825 said:

Big expansions are terrible idea. Imagine you work on something for several years use huge amount of resources and you have no feedback before release. So it can be hit or miss [...]

Do you really believe that feedback is helping with the current model? You can safely assume that, by the time something is being released and receives feedback, it'll be too late to apply changes to the next update. It's already set in stone, so feedback is irrelevant in a three-months release cadence.

Edited November 15, 2023 by Ashantara.8731

[Zera.9435]

On 11/13/2023 at 1:36 PM, TexZero.7910 said:

SoTo hasn't been worth what it was priced at to begin with so no.

I view it as $25 for what will eventually be a full-priced expansion.

[Cronospere.8143]

Weird poll.. because i can relate to multiple answers. It depends on the time between releases. If i need to pay 75. I probably wont buy the ultimate edition, like i usually do. 

If i pay more with more content: Will it be rushed and Will it at least have the same quality? 

My answer is simple. 

I will pay for what i think is worth it at that moment.

[Ashen.2907]

19 hours ago, Puck.3697 said:

?? 

You beleive £20 goes further then it really does lol. No SoTo I'd argue is still underpriced ironically. 

£20 quite litterally the value of a take away. That will last 20 minutes of enjoyment. It wont get u through the doors of any decent cinema, 

I'm sorry but 20 pounds isn't even worth a month's content. Lmfao.

My good god 😂😂 I've never seen a playerbase put so much weight on a £20 investment. It's absolutely nothing in todays pricing 😂

Am I the only one living in 2023? Did everyone djssapear back to 1996?  Like litterally everything went up in price 😂😂

I live in one of the most expensive regions in the world and $20 will indeed get you a movie ticket.

As to whether SotO was overpriced? $25 for something that has provided essentially zero positive while reducing the game experience for me seems like it might qualify as overpriced.  I am someone who spent as much as a thousand dollars per month at the height of my spending on GW2, $25 is a pittance but even $1 for a bad experience is an overspend.