A look at the premium exchange

[mattcurr]

I think for this post a small introduction is needed. Generally every world I start I pick an aspect of tribalwars that is misunderstood, I purposefully do something to prove a point then in a Socratic style I try to bring awareness to the issue. In the past Ive discussed, how you can keep up in the top 10 farming 1/10th the top player, ive discussed how having less troops due to a 27 hq is a net benefit over a 25 hq fulling your farm faster.

My goal this world was to take a look at the premium exchange market that many believed to be over powered. I had dealt with the premium exchange in the past once, I was able to net profit 10,000 pp while maintaining a top 20 account. It was my presumption that I could enter this world, farm, and show that while it provides an advantage it is not broken, with a coplayed account, you could easily keep up via understanding of the game.

Well for the first time in I've set to do such a thing I found that I was wrong, extremely wrong. I am including this sentence to explain why I drew this conclusion from the prospective I bring, I am not doing this as a method of advancing my own image, this thread is a total void of my normal persona, it is simply written as a long time fan of the game. I have been ranked within the top 5 of about 20-25% of every start ever on .net. I know when I make mistakes, when I land in an area that will hold me back, I understand the mechanics and how the changes in the early build times would change the start up. So when I see that a player using some premium features(I discounted some buildings during lc rush and traded clay for iron to maintain lc ques) in a good enough area cant break the top 200 despite farming within the top 5 of the world something is very wrong with the system. If a player whose account would normally be easily primed as rank 1 or 2 at this point in a non p2w world is rank 200-500, what would an average account without massive spending look like?

I want to be really clear, I believe that eventually I would climb to a top rank, but an average player placed near anyone spending a good amount of pp would likely be unable to defend, backtime, or do anything in order save their account, and would be forced out from a situation that no possible action they could have taken could have altered the outcome.

I would have to imagine that even my account had it been placed next to the guy who had built lc within 4 hours would have been inevitably cleared as soon as bp dropped.

I have no issue with the people using these features spending money, I believe that there can be a place for pay to win features, my issue is with the implementation and the affect it has on the player base. The PP system was always able to be abused by the top level players, now it can be and is abused by nearly anyone, especially for the first week, the price points of resources is so low that you can purchase a 600 point village in the first day and have 500-600 lc before BP drops, when any average player exiting bp would have maybe 20-100. The entire system has become broken. There is no limit whatsoever to the income is the major issue, when buying res you can purchase infinite constantly incoming with 0 downtime. Just link it to merchants please so you cant purchase an income of 50,000 res the first hour of game play, because if what would normally be a top 5 account is 200, what can an average player really do without PP abuse

 

[DeletedUser120876]

thaths true but tribalwars change, witout these features thath make noobs in the top 25, most off players will not play = TW DEAD cause no cash to maintain servers

 

[DeletedUser107086]

thaths true but tribalwars change, witout these features thath make noobs in the top 25, most off players will not play = TW DEAD cause no cash to maintain servers

https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/14/a...acquires-eight-roads-ventures-stake-for-100m/
"MTG (Modern Times Group), the Swedish digital entertainment company, has acquired a 35% stake in the company for an estimated $100 million, valuing the company at $287 million."
"Davor Hebel, partner in Eight Roads, told TechCrunch the games company is on a tear, continuing on a path towards €1bn of revenue."
Servers can cost as low as 500 per month for a browser game. How does 500 a month compare to 1 billion of revenue?

"Inno games is poor and needs our money"

 

[mattcurr]

That's not going to be an accurate estimate of costs for maintenance of the ip and development. But as I said I'm not against the p2w features, they're just entirely misbalanced, they need to either make premium cost significantly more in the beginning and step it down via a tax or just upping the algorithm or stop premium market during BP, long term people aren't going to want to play a game where they can exit beginners protection and be so far behind that their choices and skills are irrelevant.

 

[DeletedUser107086]

That's not going to be an accurate estimate of costs for maintenance of the ip and development.

Still, there's no arguing that InnoGames's profits are only increasing. They have sold some of their shares for millions of dollars, the article mentions their users and profits are increasing and big companies are starting to become interested in working with InnoGames and buying their shares. Yet, as their profit increases all we get is: more premium features (first only some servers had PP features, then all servers, then the PP exchange/market was added) and a recent increase in PP prices. Clearly all InnoGames cares about is maximizing their profits; they don't care at all about their players or their game quality. So I believe no matter what you say, mattcurr, or no matter how much others complain on the forums, all these PP features are here to stay so long as Innogames is making money from them.

Sorry to drag this slightly off topic, back OT now:
All of those are good ideas. They could limit the PP market in startup by linking it to merchants, by setting a max resource amount you can buy per day (like limited hauls, but limited spending), or by increasing the price of resources relative to PP a lot in startup. They could also remove the PP market in the first few weeks of the game. They could compensate for this loss of profits with ad revenue or by creating more things players can spend PP on (maybe more tools like FA and AM or cosmetic changes like graphical packages). They're all great ideas, but as I said above I doubt InnoGames really cares because they're making a lot of money from the premium exchange and it won't matter how much us poor players rant.

 

[mattcurr]

I don't know, the wheel in events was a balancing issue they fixed at the loss of money, an inno tax during BP would increase profits and balance the game. I honestly don't see a negative for them, obviously the demand supply curve is broken for the first week or two, they'd likely make more money with less spending on res during BP.

When I say a tax I mean litterally apply a pp tax on purchasing during BP to the price of res. You could even do a graduated model. Like a modern progressive income tax, it also would then serve as a sink in the economy to control pp inflation.

 

[sidd 271]

I think for this post a small introduction is needed. Generally every world I start I pick an aspect of tribalwars that is misunderstood, I purposefully do something to prove a point then in a Socratic style I try to bring awareness to the issue. In the past Ive discussed, how you can keep up in the top 10 farming 1/10th the top player, ive discussed how having less troops due to a 27 hq is a net benefit over a 25 hq fulling your farm faster.

My goal this world was to take a look at the premium exchange market that many believed to be over powered. I had dealt with the premium exchange in the past once, I was able to net profit 10,000 pp while maintaining a top 20 account. It was my presumption that I could enter this world, farm, and show that while it provides an advantage it is not broken, with a coplayed account, you could easily keep up via understanding of the game.

Well for the first time in I've set to do such a thing I found that I was wrong, extremely wrong. I am including this sentence to explain why I drew this conclusion from the prospective I bring, I am not doing this as a method of advancing my own image, this thread is a total void of my normal persona, it is simply written as a long time fan of the game. I have been ranked within the top 5 of about 20-25% of every start ever on .net. I know when I make mistakes, when I land in an area that will hold me back, I understand the mechanics and how the changes in the early build times would change the start up. So when I see that a player using some premium features(I discounted some buildings during lc rush and traded clay for iron to maintain lc ques) in a good enough area cant break the top 200 despite farming within the top 5 of the world something is very wrong with the system. If a player whose account would normally be easily primed as rank 1 or 2 at this point in a non p2w world is rank 200-500, what would an average account without massive spending look like?

I want to be really clear, I believe that eventually I would climb to a top rank, but an average player placed near anyone spending a good amount of pp would likely be unable to defend, backtime, or do anything in order save their account, and would be forced out from a situation that no possible action they could have taken could have altered the outcome.

I would have to imagine that even my account had it been placed next to the guy who had built lc within 4 hours would have been inevitably cleared as soon as bp dropped.

I have no issue with the people using these features spending money, I believe that there can be a place for pay to win features, my issue is with the implementation and the affect it has on the player base. The PP system was always able to be abused by the top level players, now it can be and is abused by nearly anyone, especially for the first week, the price points of resources is so low that you can purchase a 600 point village in the first day and have 500-600 lc before BP drops, when any average player exiting bp would have maybe 20-100. The entire system has become broken. There is no limit whatsoever to the income is the major issue, when buying res you can purchase infinite constantly incoming with 0 downtime. Just link it to merchants please so you cant purchase an income of 50,000 res the first hour of game play, because if what would normally be a top 5 account is 200, what can an average player really do without PP abuse

Very well written.
I do agree start ups are really dull in this P2P world's.

 

[DeletedUser120740]

The only way to beat early game pay to win is to adress the pp spender as a tribe.

Be it heavy spikes or backtimes as a tribe
We did just that. It took 4 of us to stomp him out. With multiple back times, stacking and eventually cating his village

Individually he'd have eventually crushed us No chance

 

[DeletedUser117534]

Very good point Matt.

Just one comment, I usually enter every world with few thousand pp but its not easy at all to spend it before BP ends, unless you start very late into the core K the exchange feels like a playground for vultures. Once I took 10 hours of sitting and refreshing the exchange and managed to get only few thousand of each resources (day 4 of the world 90). I know I'm not the fastest with mouse and keyboard but still I felt like it's not worth my time.

I've heard people are using scripts to help with sniping the exchange, I think those players are the real problem here. Otherwise it would be fair game.

My advice to you is to pp farm prior to entering a world and then to start with a longer delay, the rim is best for farming and growth, and if you want to stay away from heavy pp abusers start outside of the core K.

Another way of tacking those pp spenders is joining their tribes or starting in a premade that is attractive enough to recruit them.

PP loses importance in mid game and usually those pp spenders don't make it that far. No PP will buy you skills and experience.

Nest

 

[mattcurr]

My advice to you is to pp farm prior to entering a world and then to start with a longer delay, the rim is best for farming and growth, and if you want to stay away from heavy pp abusers start outside of the core K.

I tried to make it clear but you're missing my point, I imagine with 2 or 3k pp I could easily get selling it would guarantee myself rank 1 in any world with basically 0 effort. But what does this all mean for an average player, someone who isn't farming pp from other worlds who isn't particularly good. They just log in and end up in a situation that's litterally unwinnable. Even if you want to say the key is farming pp elsewhere first that's hardly a tenable situation, come play my game but well not a new world at your first go but you'll have to play one new world just sell your resources for a while then the next new world play. It isn't good design

 

[DeletedUser117534]

I imagine with 2 or 3k pp I could easily get selling it would guarantee myself rank 1 in any world with basically 0 effort.

I can't believe you just made that statement. How can you say you could become rank 1 with no effort by having 3k pp?! It is not that easy these days so either you you haven't played the game at 100% commitment in a while or you are quite simply overconfident. (Reaching rank 1 for fed days doesn't count)

As I said, for any player frustrated at P2W system and pp abusers I would first advise to avoid the core K for better farming and less chance of spawning near those PP spenders. But most importantly those players should then try to become something more than just average. Skills, experience and understanding of the game mechanics are so much more important than any amount of PP.

But you are right, it is not an easy task for someone new who doesn't want to spend money on the game to survive the startup. And existence of the exchange is definitely adding to the issue making people quit TW.

Nest

 

[mattcurr]

I can't believe you just made that statement. How can you say you could become rank 1 with no effort by having 3k pp?! It is not that easy these days so either you you haven't played the game at 100% commitment in a while or you are quite simply overconfident. (Reaching rank 1 for fed days doesn't count)

Simply put I saw what the top spenders were spending on, I know exactly how much a few of them spent and if you simply couple that with a slight amount of logic to spend intelligently and proper farming techniques you'll likely end up a fair bit ahead. Notice how they all stall out at the nobling stage now, it's unrealistic to buy coins in quantity they squandered pp on halving time down and never built an economy. If you would like I could explain it all to you in detail how I would alter their actions. But I don't think this is the place for that. 0 effort was obviously hyperbolic, you'll need to farm correctly and understand farming applied with the rediculous jump you'd get from pp in the earliest stages I imagine you'd in W95 already be far past the people spending pp like morons. Just look at rank 1 16k points alright no farming awards he's gotten like 10k and 100 runs sent. He's not moving because he can't get the coins he's limited by the ultimate res sink nobles. Just apply a decent farmer to an account that size and he'd be farming 1-2 million a day. He's not buying that much likely most can't that's hundreds of dollars worth of res a day. Sprint ahead with a few thousand and apply a little understanding and you'd runaway with the world

 

[DeletedUser105718]

There's still old players playing the game?

Why? Things been boring for the past couple years now.