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Lol. League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm do not have the same business model at all. As Kupon pointed out you could buy all 40 launch heroes for $20, plus you had ten free heroes each week if you didn't. With Heroes it costs about $200 to buy all the heroes, and you only get 5 per week; two of which are gated.
So, for a new player you get less than half the content upfront (3 heroes to start with instead of 10) and you have to pay ten times as much for the same end result.
Is Diamond working for Blizzard's marketing team now or something? It's shocking that someone who is so invested in the game could understand so little about it.
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WoW is basically living proof that simply copying the business model of the most sucessful game isnt always a good idea. Completelly diferent arguments on why other MMOs couldn't do it, but that statement in a vaccum is bullshit.
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You cant switch to a superior money generating model until you actually have a market position that allows you to do so.
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The model is weird for any reasonable person. Most LoL players are already invested into the game, they had spent enough time to get runes and enough champions to get variety. When we started, IP was even easier to get and the average cost from champions was much lower. Once you have an stablished fanbase, your product has a higher value, where the pricing of your heroes per time spent may be worth it, specially for anyone who had invested time into it.
But heroes is a new game, nobody has invested anything into it yet, the player base is very low, the attention it gets is still very low, and most players who enjoy MOBAs, are already stablished on their MOBAs of preference, where they are already attached because of the time spent unlocking stuff, friends etc. It kinda reminds me of WoW and WoW clones. That it worked once, doesn't make it solid, just that it was there at the right place at the right time.
And if we add that in heroes takes much longer than in a game that already takes quite some time (LoL) just by taking for granted that your product has that value "because it is about Blizzard's franchises"...
So, imho, what they are gambling with this is on how much are Blizzard's franchises worth. And we will see, i don't expect this game going any close to DOTA or LoL levels, and i will be honest, i don't play either of them anymore, buy if you want to place me in some group, i would be more of a LoL player.
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On October 18 2014 06:18 Kupon3ss wrote: LoL's model was actually quite reasonable at the beginning, all of the initial champs were very cheap and one could buy the entirety in a pack for around $20. Its only after the game built up momentum and fanbase that it was able to switch to the more ridiculous model wheras blizzard is trying to put the chicken before the egg and sending people into a brick wall here.
It was $40 for the game when it was on a CD before it went full F2P and changed the original into a pack. They've rolled back on their pricing model for champions over the past year and a half when they started keeping roughly the same number of 6300 champions by knocking old ones down as new ones come out. I'm not sure they've done that with the last 3 champions, but assuming they do, it's a fine model.
Add to it that a ton of heroes played at high competitive levels are very cheap IP wise.
RP wise, a lot of the stuff in the Riot store is actually as or more expensive than heroes, simply because they use RP to obfuscate just how much money you're spending on something. The issue with heroes is that their gold gain model is just fucked. While daily quests are all well and good, ~150 IP for a win is ~2.4% of the most expensive champion. 30g for a win is 0.3% of the most expensive champion. That's roughly 1/8 what a LoL win is worth if you directly compare it. Regardless of how the math turns out with daily quests, that certainly FEELS awful.
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Also no one bought that LoL box, which is why they sat around forever and Riot does not do them anymore. Also why Black Alistar is worth stupid amounts of $ before the cleared the codes.
But I think we can all agree gold generation is a big problem in the end. That shit sucks.
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Gold generation is the crux of the entire business model. Saying that is sucks is tantamount to saying the business model sucks.
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I personally hope blizz doubles or triples the gold cost of everything.
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On October 18 2014 06:41 Diamond wrote: Also no one bought that LoL box, which is why they sat around forever and Riot does not do them anymore. If the box, is the thing i think it is (a pack with a lot of heroes), speak for yourself, because i certainly did.
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On October 18 2014 06:46 Godwrath wrote:Show nested quote +On October 18 2014 06:41 Diamond wrote: Also no one bought that LoL box, which is why they sat around forever and Riot does not do them anymore. If the box, is the thing i think it is (a pack with a lot of heroes), speak for yourself, because i certainly did.
No, there was an actual, physical, retail box with a CD and everything in it that contained all the heroes.
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On October 18 2014 06:37 deth2munkies wrote:Show nested quote +On October 18 2014 06:18 Kupon3ss wrote: LoL's model was actually quite reasonable at the beginning, all of the initial champs were very cheap and one could buy the entirety in a pack for around $20. Its only after the game built up momentum and fanbase that it was able to switch to the more ridiculous model wheras blizzard is trying to put the chicken before the egg and sending people into a brick wall here. It was $40 for the game when it was on a CD before it went full F2P and changed the original into a pack.
It was actually $29.99 and came with $10 in Riot points, plus if you bought it at Best Buy you got a $10 gift card. Then about three months after release the price dropped to $19.99.
Not sure why people think it didn't sell well, either. I had to drive an hour away to pick mine up about a week after it was out because all the Best Buys, Targets, Gamestops, and Walmarts in a 50 mile radius had sold out.
Pre-orders were a different story; there weren't many of those. I was able to walk into Gamestop and get about 30 of the pre-order skin codes a month after release.
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It's a shame to hear that Blizzard has tied micro-transactions to the core gameplay of yet another title. Why not just charge $60 for the release and call it a day?
I guess we already know the answer - they have to pitch the game as "f2p" to gamers in order to compete with DotA and LoL. Sadly, they could easily follow DotA's lead and base the microtransactions on cosmetics and other details not related to the core game (aka the heroes). Anecdotal evidence suggests that Valve has made an absolute killing off of their micro-transaction model.
I'm pretty skeptical that what works for a card game will work for a MOBA (or whatever label you want to give it), as even more forgiving MOBAs like LoL cater to a pretty hardcore, competitive audience who takes issues like perceived or potential P2W very seriously.
Big misstep imho.
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They have 11 heroes in the 2000-4000 gold range. Gazlowe is 4k on the next page (not shown).
As they add new heroes, I'm fairly sure they will cut the prices on the older ones, or bundle them up.
Say you do your daily and play 4 versus games averaging 25 gold per win. You can net 300g per day. So you are making 2100gold per week fairly easily. That will get you a bunch of the heroes.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/WQvFkR3.jpg)
I think the gold won't change much, but the hero prices will be cut as new ones are added. Where they will make money is in stuff like the Halloween skins they just released.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/KG781MY.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/d2A8UFX.jpg)
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I really like the Skelethur one, wish I played Abathur to use it!
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On October 18 2014 08:10 RCMDVA wrote: They have 11 heroes in the 2000-4000 gold range. Gazlowe is 4k on the next page (not shown).
As they add new heroes, I'm fairly sure they will cut the prices on the older ones, or bundle them up.
Say you do your daily and play 4 versus games averaging 25 gold per win. You can net 300g per day. So you are making 2100gold per week fairly easily. That will get you a bunch of the heroes.
I think the gold won't change much, but the hero prices will be cut as new ones are added. Where they will make money is in stuff like the Halloween skins they just released.
Step back and think about what you just said in context:
2100 a week means it takes 5 weeks to unlock 1 10,000g hero.
5 weeks, 1 hero.
5 weeks.
That's over a month.
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Yeah but I'm saying (guessing) that over time that 10k hero will drop down to the 4k-2k range as they open up newer heroes.
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On October 18 2014 10:45 RCMDVA wrote: Yeah but I'm saying (guessing) that over time that 10k hero will drop down to the 4k-2k range as they open up newer heroes.
The number of 10k heroes won't decrease, though. If they release 10k heroes that are very, very good, it will take a long time for people to get them.
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United Kingdom20275 Posts
On October 17 2014 23:44 Serejai wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2014 23:01 Cyro wrote:and more recently the $10 price increase of the latest World of Warcraft expansion (even though the expansion itself has less content than previous ones). I have not bought MOP, but the price for MOP+WOD together - after multiple free 10 day trial handouts - is £39.99 - i paid at least £30 for TBC and WOTLK (i believe £30 exactly, each), so it looks like that price increase is only in the US. + Show Spoiler +Strongly considering the jump over after skipping MOP, but i'm invested in Wildstar ATM and the raiding scene there looks surprisingly good, at least for a while longer. hyped for this stuff! That's a 40 man miniboss. I think you're looking at something wrong. The price for WoD in Europe is 44.99, whereas the price for previous expansions has always been 34.99. Both NA and EU had a $10 price increase for WoD. https://eu.battle.net/shop/en-us/product/world-of-warcraft-warlords-of-draenorThe price you're talking about (39.99) would be for the base game and all expansions up to MoP, but not including WoD. They also jacked up subscription costs by 10% in EU and China (and soon to be NA), so you have to factor that in as well. Point being, it's not just Heroes that Blizzard is making a cash grab in.
No, i'm quoting GBP, with a pound sign :D
TBC and WOTLK was £29.99.
The combined price for MOP and WOD was £39.99 - but i just looked and went to take a screenshot for that, and they actually just gave me MOP for free. WOD is £34.99 now, but that's £5 less than i was going to pay.
£29.99 in 2007 is aparantly equal to ~£37-38 now accounting for inflation.. so technically it's a price drop relative to the first expansion - you have to take that into account, i first got this game HALF OF MY LIFE AGO, literally, it's long enough for inflation to make an impact. If it was the same price, it would have been effectively much cheaper.
I find it quite hard to be mad at blizzard taking that into account, and the fact that they just gave me an expansion for free, literally without me even having to claim it. They obviously -really- want players like me in their game, who played 2005 through ~2012 and dropped the last expansion.
As for Heroes performance, i played some with Thalandros. Looks pretty good. With a 970 i can run at 4k and 144hz with downsampling on GPU side, and i have two impressions there: Firstly, the cursor seems to be rendered independantly of framerate, which is fucking amazing and thank you blizzard. Beautiful 144hz low latency smooth cursor even when game is at 40-50% of that framerate and it really shows - the game defaulted to 60hz when i changed resolution once, and the mouse cursor lag drove me crazy for about 5-10 minutes, i thought i had broken something else or had very low FPS (fraps was benchmarking so i couldn't see the counter) but i could just flick it back and then it worked beautifully. UI scaling at 4k is fucking beautiful and you wouldn't even notice that you was at 4k if not for the lack of aliasing, better details and a few things like the blizzard FPS counter being tiny lol
Performance: Bad. I'm running a 4770k at 4.5ghz 24/7 right now, and my CPU often has my FPS down around 80. However with the frame pacing in this game, that means a quarter to a third of frames are taking ~1/40'th of a second, so the experience is like having 40fps - and this is the fastest cpu on the planet for this engine. If somebody has half of my FPS, which is completely reasonable! Then they will suffer badly. Not just their comfort, but their ability to play the game properly will be harmed. It could be much better. I hope they fix the few major issues relating to frame pacing, because that's the biggest problem with the game that sticks out to me by far and it's one that this game has inherited from the 2010 Starcraft 2 release; no other high profile game that i know of, even the forks from warcraft 3 engine (i'm not 100% sure if sc2 is one of those) has those issues; it's just this one engine in particular that's used for sc2 and heroes
We should make a storm about this issue while we can, while it's in alpha. Let blizzard know, mainly, that there is an issue with frame pacing (some frames take far longer than others in sequence, which creates a constant and unavoidable microstutter and feeling of playing at way lower FPS than you're actually getting) - and that we'd like it fixed for both Heroes, and for Starcraft 2. It would help everyone - from the lowest end to the highest end hardware, and i'm confident that even somebody usually blind to microstutter and such issues could easily see the difference with a side by side comparison, the type of difference that could be made here
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God I hate hopping into a thread and alienating myself... But honestly I think Diamond has a point.
I want a successful Blizzard Moba. The most successful moba (financially) is LoL, so I'm fine with Blizzard using their business model. I'm not one to pay money for microtransactions but obviously many people do, and if Blizzard can make a quick buck off of them I'm all for it. Another player in the competition for best MOBA means competition which leads to a better player/spectator experience. If they fuck up, people will play LoL or DoTA and it's no big deal for us as consumers.
That's my stance anyway.
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I think the gold generation will go up, as soon as they find a way to create a good gold sink. This is how this model works. They need good enough gold sink to encourage you to buy heroes with money and other things with gold. The model is proven and it works perfectly. Considering the amount of effort they put into the game(4 years for bare bones alpha)... They will be on the green side really quickly. I'd rather see something like Smite's ultimate god pack, but who am I to tell how a private company should run its business.
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