You mean after 100 persistent kills a $XXX Tier backer can start with the existing bomber mesh/skin? I’m not sure how negatively that could impact gameplay. And what if we have to change it, and now we’re not delivering a KS promised reward?
I mean you offer a $XXX Bomber that will be in the game in any case as a tier reward, person that pledges on that level can start the match with that $XXX Bomber from his first game. A base player opens up the $XXX Bomber as his starting ship after 100 (persistent) kills or whatever other criteria/requirement you wish to make it.
I thought Cray made this approach pretty clear…
If they do that I’m out of here.
4 Likes
I don’t think I’d like that. We’d be giving gameplay benefits in stone before any alpha testing/balancing.
Right, but neither of those games – and Elite Dangerous in particular – are competitive team-based games, whereas arena shooters are.
I have nothing, in principle, against gamers paying for short-cuts. I don’t really want to play with, nor especially play against, those people, but freemium games have both shown us how to do it, and how not to do it. So long as the game itself isn’t abusing the players, I have no issues.
But competitive games are usually built around metriological rather than plutological systems, especially since competitive gamers tend to have some rather significant egos (as most competitive people do).
How about people that spend extra $$$ only play people who spent extra $$$. That way the balance is kept.
Here’s a suggestion:
Ages ago I suggested that all players have a rating that is an indication of their performance - this would just be a little insignia next to their name or something. - Minimal art required.
A player’s rating would go up and down depending on their performance over time, eg it could update after each match.
Higher ratings don’t have any in-game advantage, no special access to ships or anything. It’s just a prestige thing and means other players can see… “oh that Cybercritic guy is a good pilot, if I fly with him he might save my ass when we get in a fight” (and then it turns out he’s rated highly because he just mines an enormous amount of resources 
)
In my original idea everyone starts at the bottom, however, someone who pledges for a certain tier could start with a high rating.
Over time their rating would decrease/increase to reflect their actual performance, and this would have to be stated clearly on the KS page.
The rating could be calculated from a number of factors like kill/death ratio, points earned (if there are such things in Battlescape), resources contributed to the team, etc etc.
1 Like
This is more in line with what I was thinking.
No expensive art involved though. 
This is so far from truth. If anything, beginning on the same starting line is the core principle of democracy. I won’t digress about capitalism, socialism and communism because that would take a whole new thread.
This being said, let me remind you that pay-to-win are not the best economic model, nor the most appealing. I’m absolutely against a p2w game and will not support anything that ressembles that.
Previous posters have made more vivid examples than the ones I currently have in mind.
The rationnal and logical distinction is as following: as long as the hardware meets the game’s requirement, players have almost the same starting point (provided the line of sight is not too short because of RAM, culling good enough, etc.).
Probably the best comparaison with a p2w game would be school education. Let’s suppose there is no public schools and everyone’s got to pay for private schools. Rich kids will get the best education, while the poorest one can’t get anything even if he’s 20 times smartest than the rich kid. The rich kid may go anywhere just because he has bought diploma, though he’s dumb as shit, and the poor will have to grind his daily life, watching the rich one ask to vote for him.
Now suppose there’s no private schools and only public schools. Of course, the rich kid can always buy tons of books (hardware in your case) and try to learn… but the smartest kid will also have his chance to get the diploma, because there was no huge entry fee.
The same goes for gaming. If I’m a fresh newbie that gets constantly destroyed by a fat cat just because he bought that 100$ ship that one-shots beginner ships, I won’t get any fun out of it. Nor will I buy that 100$ ship.
The example is extreme but is here to best illustrate my explanation. Not every paid functionnality are game breaking, but some hurt enough to make players go away. This is up to the devs to decide if and what can be paid.
Don’t import all the real-life things in the game. It is already cruel as it is.
I think @INovaeKeith introduction post sums up pretty much many of the vanity fair aspects. Special skins for ships? Check. Special effects for weapons? Check. Hell, you can even get your own billboard if you can afford it
In another thread also talking about this, some people suggested badges or special color for in-game tchat. Could also be the ability to fire flares that look like fireworks. Or a special hologram with a spacial insignia (don’t really know how difficult to implement those would be though).
1 Like
Custom ship decals is fairly low art impact as well. Not sure about dev side though.
That’s a fairly fine line you’re drawing and I can’t help feeling this argument is as weak as the “bad sportsmanship” analogy. Whether those games are as competitive as an arena shooter is for each player to decide for themselves. I’d imagine that a large number of the players that have paid $$$ for ships in Star Citizen have done so to get a competitive advantage in the game.
There are also many examples of arena based shooters that successfully manage to allow the player to buy extra equipment, some of which is subjectively better than the stuff that comes for free.
I do respect the fact that you have a distaste for the idea that people should be able to purchase an advantage in a game. However nothing you or anybody else has said has detracted from my core argument which is that these types of rewards would net I-Novae more money in their Kickstarter campaign.
I don’t like this suggestion. I feel that if something is going to be a reward that people pledge money it should grant a permanent reward, not one that can be lost if I don’t play the game, or play badly for some time.
I also dislike the idea as it feels like a ladder system. In my experience these create division in the player base and disincentivise casual gamers from playing by making them feel useless in comparison to other players. Its the old problem that if you rank your players it becomes very obvious to half of them that they are below average. It doesn’t seem like a cool thing to do to make half your player base feel inadequate.
Just the idea….
Don’t beat me 
someone said brainstorming so……
This is what I would actually like.
However I have no idea about game mechanics that will be in game so it might be completely off if you already want in make similar mechanic in base game for everyone.
I know one thing, people don’t crave advantage as much as they want the ability to customize.
They might feel like it is advantage but there is always a trade off.
Blend of visual reward and advantage …. somehow:
One use only (use it wisely) ability to customize/tune one of ship hull to your liking.
-Lets say you have 3 standard class ships of comparable size/weight in game:
Interceptor (fast, nimble, little armour, weak weapon, good sensors)
Fighter (average speed, agility, weapons, armour,sensors)
Bomber (slow, sluggish, strong weapon, heavy armour, weak sensors)
Player likes the look of Interceptor, but want it to perform as a fighter.
Give him three/four/* codependent sliders and let him tune the statistics of chosen hull but only once or twice and that is it.
Look at it as energy distribution, but permanent. Like in every space game - you know how it works.
Of course it has to be only to a certain degree……lets be realistic…. Sounds weird considering circumstances
And it would have to be balanced.
So all in all your only job is to balance it nothing else. Ship hull can look same for all i care.
It wouldn’t go down if you didn’t play, only if you played badly.
If it were permanent then it would be useless as an indicator of that player’s performance.
People who bought ships for SC after November 26th, 2012 can permanently lose ships that they’ve paid for.
The ones bought before then have lifetime insurance.
That’s a fair point. However, when I have had bad stats I’ve seen it as an additional incentive to improve.
I did allude the idea that there are markets for both pay to win and competetive shooters. It’s my subjective opinion that there are many games that are extremely effective at filling player’s needs to pay for advantages, even within space arena shooters we have fractured space and star conflict, both fairly recently releases. Especially considering that once someone buys into a game and gets an advantage, they are very unlikely to want to change games and reinvest for their pay to win advantage. I believe the market for them is already saturated, while the market for single-purchase arena shooters with round based economies, bases and such is completely nonexistant currently. In other words, the market for paytowin is absolutely saturated while there is nothing that follows the competetive model. Given inovae’s small team and likely quite low compared to SC’s funding targets, it makes sense to go with the competetive route too, because you dont need a huge amount of funding to make tons of ships to sell to people or other things. Indie games rarely have microtransactions compared to AAA after all.
Even star citizen backers who have spend hundreds will likely laugh at an attempt at i-novae to sell $200 ships. But they will be willing to spend a single sum of money to get into a competent and fun arena shooter. This has been demonstrated in part with the Transverse campaign, while that also had other reasons it didnt succeede, it essentially copied the star citizen funding formula exactly (as well as some ship designs even) and never even got above 1% of it’s funding goal, much to the mockery of the space sim community around the net. Thats my argument for why trying to go the SC route with battlescape wouldn’t get more money.
3 Likes
It’s also possible that there is a good reason why one is saturated and the other is non-existent. Profitable niches don’t usually stay empty for long and the best business models often appear already saturated. It takes a game with a strong unique selling point (or a big marketing spend) to break into a saturated market. But if you have such a game you’re in tried and tested, low risk territory.
To back this this up, I have a game that broke into a market sector that appeared saturated because it has a strong USP. That game is doing very well and has been for three years now. Practical business savvy and marketing experience counts for something.
In the spirit of Titanium golf clubs and high-tech sneakers, how about things like HUD packages that are nothing but a refinement of some visuals? The standard HUD has a simple boresight, but the sportsman HUD has two pixel mil marks. The elite HUD has one pixel mil marks. And so on. Make the basic HUD look like something pretty basic, and allow players to purchase advanced HUDs.
From there, don’t ever duplicate those HUDs in game as an achievement. There can be improvements in HUDs, but not in the same way that the basic HUDs work.
Follow that pattern for other things in the game, for players who want the upgraded version of most everything that a player can get their hands on, but without giving any real competitive advantage. Not a faster ship, but perhaps one that can change throttle settings faster, with convenience detents ever 10% on the throttle. And so on.
I can imagine all sorts of HUD upgrades and effects. In short, the experience of flying an upgraded ship is a bit different from the experience of flying a basic ship. If there are animations, they can be tweaked to suggest a crisper, more efficient ship.
This is still artwork stuff and would require real work, but it’s probably within the realm of stuff that INS can implement.
It may be that every little tweak and change that the team can come up with becomes the Advanced package or some such thing, making it an attractive tier for folks who like to have LEDs in their PC case.
Ooo. Extra lights on the ship as part of the package.
Now running with that, come up with a set of tasks for which players might want to customize the game. If one of the common roles is scout, then change up the art, sounds and animations for the Pro Scout. Or if interceptor, do the same for the Advanced Interceptor package. You could definitely make money selling stuff like that.
2 Likes
Maybe do Something like Valve did with the new Counter Strike.
It complies with competitive gameplay while at the same time having a huge ammount of monetary activity with its weapon texture market, which Valve directly profits by selling keys for, essentially, a somewhat slot machine and by fees from transactions between players. They also to the grading thing mentioned by someone. And even thougj it only applies to official servers, people still pour hundreds of hours into the game just to get to a better rank, and that better ranking doesn’t give any reward to the player but prestige, tough ot would’t make sense to sell a higher rank as it is verry unlikely someone is allready good at the game when it launches and would loose it fast, what Inovae could do is sell a custom set of rank symbols that just visually look the different, but are essentially the same.
1 Like
This is, in a way, already planned in the form of the Texture and Gamemode Marketplace. It is not viable for a Kickstarter incentive.
Well, I suppose you could put in a “marketplace season pass” tier and just write the terms and conditions so that it wouldn’t cost you anything, but that might cause significant issues getting anyone to make anything for it. Even if only a small percentage of players were viable to get everything you made for free, it’s perception that counts.
Maybe something like:
20 Market Coupons