I apologize for the Wall of Text you’re about to encounter. I have some suggestions at the bottom if you’d like to skip to that.
Which I agree, with renting items was a really scummy thing I suffered through back in Gunbound forever ago.
I don’t think high prices should ever have really been an alternative.
How would anyone “buy” power anyway?
That’s the reason??? Honestly, I’d say having a timer lockout would be a better alternative, like if you leave a game while alive, you’re locked for 15m. A second time the same day and it’s 30m, then an hour (times are examples, but it keeps going up each time you do it, resets daily). Why is that not an alternative? I’m sorry Xblade, but that’s a really flimsy reason for adding the court fees. Or better yet, have the fees for people who leave while alive, like you have to pay a fine for leaving in the middle of a match (of “court”).
Yes, but you’re still losing at least 50g per match compared to pre-patch when honestly I think it’s unneeded. Stuff’s already decently expensive (gold-wise I mean) and pumping out more things (especially stuff like death note colors and nice cosmetics) will keep people wanting more.
Trust me, despite being gone for quite awhile, nothing would hurt me more than seeing ToL die, which is why I did even throw down 2 $20 purchases awhile back and bought a handful of keys for friends. I totally get and understand that, but I think adding more stuff rather than sapping gold would greatly incentivize people to buy more. I personally don’t care to have every armor and weapon, so I’m set on that and I only hold out for death note colors (or any other new and exciting potential cosmetics on the way). Still saving up for the Beta Scorned avatar I helped push through!
Which I totally understand and do recognize, and am glad you’re working hard on the game, I still just don’t think taking away gold is the right call here. Incentivizing people with more stuff to get rather than limiting their ability to buy stuff seems more sensible to me. Especially with AAAs pulling that crap on top of Pay2Win stuff, I always vilify people who pull that stuff, and it’s generally why I avoid games like that. By no means am I saying court fees are up there with that, I just think it doesn’t feel great to know you’re losing gold every match, and I really do feel that losses that aren’t your fault will cause significantly more toxicity and cause the community to degrade (which is really bad) because without getting an MVP vote, you’re literally stagnating. Making 0 progress towards a thing after 20 minutes of your time feels awful. At least some level of progression should happen, even if it’s like 15g (a loss should at least give your court fee back and then some, or again, just make the court fees be for people who leave).
On top of that, I don’t think people who wish to play with a stream or have a private match should be penalized in any way, especially not at the cost of 500g (equivalent to 10 losses, assuming you voted 3x MVPs each game).
To give a more structured suggestion, I propose to do something like this:
- Court fees changed, now costs 50g if you leave a public match while alive (leaving a fully private match does not incur this penalty). Staying in a match completely incurs no fee to pay. This penalty of 50g increases each time you leave a match while alive. It can-and-will get extremely expensive if you’re a scumbag.
- Wins now give ~50, Losses give ~25, MVP votes still give 5 each. MVP rewards about the same (adjust slightly if needed)
- Fully private matches (16/16 private) only reward 5gp for winning and nothing for losses. MVP is just for fun. Reason for this is private matches are meant to just be for fun and you could easily speed games up quickly by having a fully private group target someone specifically to shower with MVP and gold, plus all the dead people will make tons of gold off predictions as well since that can also be gamed. That said, there’s no 500gp cost for the host, it’s free just like public matches.
Note: If you want, you can also make private match rewards scale with how many people are private, e.g., if it’s 8/16, the 8 private players only get 50% of the usual gold for everything [public players still get the full 100% they were supposed to get]. Your call on that though. The incentive is to not generally play private matches unless you really want to just for fun, as you’ll get virtually no gold, rather than the host losing 500. - Small price adjustments if needed, but stuff coming in the future will generally cost more (and hopefully be even cooler than stuff we’ve had? <3 Needs more Beta Scorned feels, lol)
- A suggestion to add the scroll system from Town of Salem as a nice gold dump. Maybe like 500gp per scroll? In case someone doesn’t know the scroll system, it’s a temporary item that greatly increases your chance to get the class listed on the scroll, and is not used until you actually get the class the scroll was increasing your odds of (because it’s not guaranteed, just greatly boosts your chances)
This will make sure you’re always progressing towards that next purchase unless you’re constantly leaving games because you didn’t get a class you didn’t like, while also having a non-P2W consumable that keeps gold infinitely useful. Honestly, the addition of the scroll system alone would make me really value gold, especially when I have nothing I really want left to buy.
In the end though, Xblade, it’s your game and obviously you will do what you think is best. I just really hope you know for sure that this is the best way to go about it. I’m just saying, as a player, that losing my gold through no fault of my own (i.e., not being a scumbag and leaving games while alive) feels awful and will often demotivate me from caring about it. I’m just giving my own personal experience as a gamer of nearly 3 decades. Regression is one of the worst things you can feel and even though it’s statistically unlikely, the fact that it technically still happens before you get to the results screen doesn’t feel good at all.
otherwise you can @ ping me for breaking bugs [that are not memes lol].