No
We do not need to follow the “3 use and 2 use” rule, that limits design space for no reason
Lemme make sure I have these court fees understood:
- For no reason at all, we’re now losing 50gp per public match.
- 500gp for hosting a private match.
- Losses grant only 35gp, causing a net LOSS for playing of 15gp.
What happens if you buy something and repeatedly start losing all your matches? Or heck, what if you buy something and it uses all of your GP to buy it? I see it says we can’t buy something with a GP reserve for court fees, but what if it goes further under than 50gp?
Wins are now a net worth of +20gp and losses are actually a net LOSS of 15gp. You don’t think this is going to cause more toxicity when people do dumb things like throw or cause problems? Also only 20gp for winning (after your court fee) sounds dreadful.
I understand the need to go F2P, but as a decently longtime veteran of the game coming back excitedly to seeing patch 4.0 and then seeing that gold is now harder to get, AND you start losing gold for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON, I can’t help but wonder what’s going on here, and I’m pretty upset by it.
Now, this is all under the assumption that everything I just said-and-assumed is true, which I really hope I’m just reading something wrong. I did just wake up recently, so if I misunderstood something, by all means, please do correct me, but this court fee thing sounds nearly predatory, and it kinda spits in the face of anyone who supported you guys and originally bought the game with money.
TL;DR: There is no positive benefit from stealing player gold and now causing regression on losses, other then forcing a rather hostile F2P mechanic on players.
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This can be made up for by voting three people for MVP (which supposedly gives you 15 gp)
Fair enough, and I’ve been gone away from the game long enough to totally forget that, but I still feel like a net gain of 0/35 is still pretty lousy, and if you forget to MVP/don’t at all, you’re still regressing and losing gold.
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Court fees were carefully chosen since bad things were alternatives, such as renting items instead of owning (Gunbound style), having stupidly high prices on all items and only have items in updates (other games you know), or pay2win, loot boxes, etc.
All alternatives were really eh. However, if we just do this and barely change other things, we can have a near-premium experience.
With court fee, there will be less players leaving alive. With private court fee (for FULL private games: you can merge into public with 15 without this), all guests are free - then this encourages public queues so queue time is lowered with more new faces seen for different experiences each match.
Since you get coin at the end of each room (essentially punished for leaving early , which was already reportable and now has coin loss) +and possibilities for bonuses (dead bets, vote mvp x3, win 1 of 3 mvp, brilders, win bonus, upcoming login promos, and other promo features absolutely coming since f2p needs this kinda stuff)… Statistics are on your side.
If it wasn’t court fee, it’d be something else: Remember, I work full time in Throne: I’m giving up a paycheck to solely and 100 percent rely on folks buying gold for aesthetics to survive. Without a gold sink, you won’t have an active dev. The court fee essentially hires me to update the game as a live service 
not to mention more players means wayyy more server fees id need to cover.
It’s just any indie f2p model, but better. Go to “other games” and all updates focus on bloaty and expensive store items. It’s a f2p patch and I still did balance and bug fixes. Because of our model, I can keep concentrating on what’s important instead of trying to shove items in your face with 0 true updates. Compare us and you’ll see why we went with court fees.
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I think now is a really good time to make drastic changes like these.
Indie dev companies; hell, even indie musicians are becoming mainstream because the pandemic poses larger companies too high a risk to attempt to make profits. At least I think that’s why it is.
Either way, larger game companies right now aren’t bringing out particularly exciting games and people may look at indie games to play instead.
F2P is definitely going to make them more likely to try it.
I’ve not played with the court fee yet and would rather experience it in practice rather than make a judgement based on paper.
I believe that the court fee may have a few problems, but is not too bad. My main concern is the 500gp fee for private matches. This is an insane amount for one person. Maybe have a system where different people can contribute different amounts? Maybe just have everyone pay 50? Idk, but 500 is still a huge amount, especially in F2P.
Cult trollboxes 
Apostle is already my favorite cultist, now it’s my … favorite-favorite cultist.
Scorned Mark should persist, until a new target is marked at night.
Heck yea!
All these changes are amazing!
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.
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I’m not sure about the court fee system, but I’d like to see it in practice before I make any judgements.
I am concerned, though-- if a player enters a match with 50 gold, loses, and doesn’t MVP anyone, are they just locked out of the game until they buy gold? Or is there something I’m missing here?
as far as I know, this seems to be the case?
While people are saying “oh yeah it’s almost never going to happen,” I can absolutely see multiple people coming in complaining about how they can’t play the game anymore
not sure if i agree on self-stonewall, self-protection is fine
every other balance change is right on the money tho
court fee system definitely is something ill need to play with to gauge but the pros probably outweigh the cons, although i think its not perfectly implemented at a glance
Seeker can now see who was jailed one more time?? THIS IS INCREDIBLE. SEEKER WAS TOO BUFFED. I demand another nerf. /s
I also like a lot of these changes jokes aside and I can’t wait to see how apostle/illu trollbox will work.
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Also, I agree with what other players have been saying about this being too much. Subtracting gold for leaving is fine, but I don’t think requiring gold to start is a good choice.
I agree that more incentive to buy would be better than punishing people for playing. Here are a few other suggestions:
- Faction/class type scrolls. Basically work the same as normal scrolls do, but for a specific faction/class type instead of a class
- anti-scrolls. They’re basically scrolls that lower your chances of getting a specific class
- Saveable deathnotes
- Text-based deathnotes
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This will likely be attention seekers that did it on purpose ;p We have tons of things to prevent this, unless they leave every game. You can’t even buy a 3k item unless you have 3050, for example.
Once we have more promo stuff implemented (achievements, login bonuses, etc), there will be even more ways to earn gold.
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For a premium game? I’d agree with your words. However, for f2p? This is a bit of an absurd way to word it, as the game is free, so there must be a gold sink in some form – it’s not punishing to play, it’s how folks get to play it for free (and even then, you start with 500gp and get gold whether you win or lose). In 1 way or another, it’d be a sink, whether it’s hidden in store prices and dominantly in patch updates (or no updates at all).
Trust me, it’d be way easier for me to just jack up the store prices and focus on store items instead of content (f2p model for numerous games) – but with court fees, there’s enough gold sink where we only have to make minor adjustments and still have patches focus on non-store. This is the “freemium-feels-premium” alternative.
We could do Valorant style where every skin is $20 USD, or ToS style where every decent item is about 1 month of grind – however, even then, store is finite, so our updates would all be aesthetics.
We’ve compared a ton, and if you compare too (and remember we’re not a paid game, anymore), you’ll see why we chose this. We’re not $10 anymore, and servers fees are expected to triple. This is the best way to keep it free (there has to be a source of flow), and keep the updates relevant to you instead of earning money.
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