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The Legacy Credit Sink: Good thinking or poor business?


Legendoom

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I'm not here to complain. Let's get that out of the way right now.

 

But I am here to question why Bioware has made a seemingly quite poor decision to tie legacy rewards to both legacy levels and credits. From what I read, with the legacy system, Bioware was trying to encourage players to level alts, build their legacy, and create their lineage, no? The legacy level idea was a good thought, and I agree with that. However, they totally lost me when they added these huge credit costs to these rewards. After all, if you want to make a vault full of credits, leveling alts is most certainly NOT the way to go, even if you don't pick up crew skills, buy companion gifts, buy orange gear, etc. For example: For me, it takes about 3 weeks to hit 50. My first 3 50's, I bought rank 1 and 2 speeders, no companion gifts, no crew skills, and no GTN stuff, except for the odd color crystal. Now, in total, I wound up with about 250k credits on each of them when I finished their class stories. 3 weeks of work for a measly 250,000? You can make that in a few days if you do dailies on Ilum, Belsavis and Corellia.

 

So why, if Bioware was trying to encourage people to get off their mains and make more alts, did they introduce a massive credit sink when it's pretty clear that leveling produces a sub-par salary for the relatively large time investment? Before you shout at me, I know that this game is full of crafters and grinders who can make a million in a couple of days, even while watching TV and having one eye closed, and that they needed someplace to dump all of their cash. But a lot of us cannot do that. I could go run out, do the dailes on those planets, and probably afford my ship droid inside of a week, but it's repetitive, and I enjoy leveling a lot more then dailies. It seems like quite a mystifying and poorly thought-out choice on Bioware's part.

 

If they really wanted to get the people off of their 50's and start new characters, it doesn't take much thinking to understand how. For example, drop the credit cost, but reduce the legacy level experience you get by a factor of four. For instance, I'm legacy level 30, and if they had cut down the exp I got, I would be legacy level 7.5. But with that, I'd still have the ship droid, the species unlocks, the companion dances, and one of the just-for-kicks attacks. If you wanted to make a system like that, obviously you'd have to drop the higher-level requirements like the GTN or the rocket boosts down to... say, 15 and 10, respectively. That would be a whole lot of leveling, and even though you could grind it, I'd be willing to bet that many dailies would get to someone pretty quick, and that most would be making new alts inside of a month.

 

It's a very perplexing decision Bioware, one that could be easily remedied. Discuss.

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I'm confused.

 

If you choose the path of leveling alts, you can eventually get most of the legacy rewards for free. Your argument that leveling is not a good cash/time investment to pay for legacy perks is lost on me because of that.

 

As a general rule, I don't play into voluntary game cash sinks. Making ingame currency hard to keep might keep a treadmill going for a short amount of time; however, players will quickly come to feel that the game has become a job, thus it's unfun, and will quit.

 

I never could figure out why BioWare implemented such a harsh series of credit sinks in the game. They made credits easy-ish to get but relatively hard to keep. This seems to me to be a plan that plays directly into currency sellers hands. They can make the credits easily and if they don't pay for the credit sinks, they can sell the credits to people who will.

 

Then again, as time goes on, I understand less and less about why BioWare does things the way they do. They refuse to put features into the game that are out there in most of the competition, when they get around to admitting they need the features, they are insanely slow to implement, and even then they seem like they want to charge for services their latest competition will give away just for buying the game.

 

I don't see a winning model in any of that.

 

Hopefully for the game's fans, the developers, and EA shareholders, the developers are a lot smarter than I.

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I'm confused.

 

If you choose the path of leveling alts, you can eventually get most of the legacy rewards for free. Your argument that leveling is not a good cash/time investment to pay for legacy perks is lost on me because of that.

 

You're right about that. But I'm not talking about the species unlocks, the class unlocks, the companion reputation unlocks, and stuff like that. Primarily what I'm talking about is the ship perks and convenience perks, the ones which are massive credit sinks and impossible to get otherwise. The light/dark ones aren't hard to get, I have the Dark V one thanks to my crazy evil Sith Warrior, but even the social and valor ones aren't terribly easy to get. It's a lot of work to even get to social II.

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It's a good thing because they are completely optional yet offers a way for people to blow their mountains of credits. If it's too much work to make say 2mil to buy stuff then don't, once you enter a group environment, the legacy stuff means nothing, it's perfect. The fact that you would want them even if you don't have the credits is even better, it's a personal goal for you if you choose it to be. If not, it doesn't affect your performance in a negative way.
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It's a good thing because they are completely optional yet offers a way for people to blow their mountains of credits. If it's too much work to make say 2mil to buy stuff then don't, once you enter a group environment, the legacy stuff means nothing, it's perfect. The fact that you would want them even if you don't have the credits is even better, it's a personal goal for you if you choose it to be. If not, it doesn't affect your performance in a negative way.

 

That's a broken argument. What's not to want in the legacy system? Everyone would like a mailbox or a GTN on their ship, or a quick boost of speed while packing the dirt. But Bioware has blocked off at least 40% of all these bonuses to people who just don't want to play a certain way. I know that argument could be used in reverse for those who don't like to level alts, but that's the very thing that the legacy system is supposed to encourage, and besides, everyone has to level at least one character to 50.

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I'm confused.

 

If you choose the path of leveling alts, you can eventually get most of the legacy rewards for free. Your argument that leveling is not a good cash/time investment to pay for legacy perks is lost on me because of that.

 

As a general rule, I don't play into voluntary game cash sinks. Making ingame currency hard to keep might keep a treadmill going for a short amount of time; however, players will quickly come to feel that the game has become a job, thus it's unfun, and will quit.

 

I never could figure out why BioWare implemented such a harsh series of credit sinks in the game. They made credits easy-ish to get but relatively hard to keep. This seems to me to be a plan that plays directly into currency sellers hands. They can make the credits easily and if they don't pay for the credit sinks, they can sell the credits to people who will.

 

Then again, as time goes on, I understand less and less about why BioWare does things the way they do. They refuse to put features into the game that are out there in most of the competition, when they get around to admitting they need the features, they are insanely slow to implement, and even then they seem like they want to charge for services their latest competition will give away just for buying the game.

 

I don't see a winning model in any of that.

 

Hopefully for the game's fans, the developers, and EA shareholders, the developers are a lot smarter than I.

 

Leveling alts would really only get you one type of legacy reward for free, and that's racial unlocks. Everything else has to be paid for.

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It's a good thing because they are completely optional yet offers a way for people to blow their mountains of credits. If it's too much work to make say 2mil to buy stuff then don't, once you enter a group environment, the legacy stuff means nothing, it's perfect. The fact that you would want them even if you don't have the credits is even better, it's a personal goal for you if you choose it to be. If not, it doesn't affect your performance in a negative way.

 

This is kind of the stance I take on features like this normally. Except that the time they took in even implementing it was essentially wasted. I was excited about the whole legacy thing until it was actually released. Now it just seems like a really tacked on "feature" that wasted dev time.

 

I'd much rather have an LFG tool and server mergers last month.

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I think the OP makes some good points. I personally find the legacy rewards rather boring so far. I haven't spent much money on the rewards because they aren't worth it to me. I'm one of those players that doesn't grind....period. So once I get bored of doing dailies, I just stop doing them. In other words, I don't have 3 million sitting in the bank.

 

I'm disappointed overall in the Legacy patch. Almost all the content is either inaccessible to me or I have no interest in grinding money to unlock it.

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I wouldn't mind the cost if the bonus was worth it. As it is now, the price for the unlocks is waaaaaaay too high for the paltry benefit/convenience that most of them provide.

 

GTN on the ship? That would be AMAZING and worth the cost! Neutral GTN on the ship? Why did you bother?

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As a casual player, ie; a person who doesnt raid or participate overly much in end game content, I can see me being able to afford the Legacy perks like NEVER. I really wouldnt mind if that is how it was supposed to be, but that isnt what I was told. They said that they would be purchasable with Legacy OR credits. They also said that a large percentage (82% to be exact) had less than a million credits. What that says to me is that they never truly intended people like me to get them.

Sorry but grinding out the credits required to buy that stuff is not "casual" to me. Ill never do it. Its just one more part of the game I wont be able to enjoy. Less elements that I can play and enjoy = less months of sub I will be paying for. As I do in any game I will play the parts I DO like as many times as I can stand to do it then Im out. With the repetitive leveling content added to the Legacy pricing i dont see me here for "years".

Dont get me wrong. I like the game. A lot. But the issues it has seem to effect people like me pretty badly. Im not complaining. Like I said, Ill play as long as it is fun then I wont anymore. No biggie to me Ive played a ton of games and will most likely play a ton more. It is what it is.

 

M

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