The Problem with Repeatable Boosters

Mess Room
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yeah, did I say something that indicated I didn’t? I understand if you didn’t read the essay I wrote up top, but I’d settle for skimming it.

They’re not mutually exclusive. A game can be fair and balanced, and earn money. There’s plenty of examples of how a well balanced game, or a game where balance is constantly evaluated and corrected, keep earning for literal decades, and an absolute mountain of cash-grab pay to win games in the trash heap. I know which one I want this game to be, and trying to shame me for that opinion isn’t gonna win you any points.

That’s a solid reason for participating in Pay to Progress monetization. I have no problem with this.

I get that logic. I consider money spent on games wasted if I don’t get 1hr entertainment per $1 spent. Enlisted is doing well so far for me.

You wouldn’t. I might, I’ve already admitted the temptation. Some people already have, and more will. The problem is, right now, doing so can and does afford an unfair advantage in mechanical gameplay, not just time saved.

Again, spending the money isn’t what’s unfair, it’s the gameplay advantage currently afforded by doing so. If the game were closer to perfectly balanced, I’d have no problem with any of this at all. And again, there’s no reason that games should be as unfair as life is, regardless of monetization strategy. It doesn’t have to be, therefore IMHO it shouldn’t be.

Why the fuck would I or anyone else do that? You haven’t read most of what I’ve written, I assume, or you’d have noticed where I explicitly stated that I have no problem with people having money or how they spend it. Life isn’t fair, I’ve never said otherwise. This game isn’t and shouldn’t be representative of life.

Who’s words did I twist and how, exactly? This is an ad hominem fallacy, do better.

Gaijin and Darkflow are privately owned companies, Enlisted is a product.

No, they have the right to decide what they’re selling, and the customers have the right to decide if what they’re offering is worth the price. At the moment, it’s sliding towards “absolutely fucking not” if they keep screwing the metaphorical pooch on balance issues.

Good for you! I’d never tell a person how to run their own business or affairs, but even you have to admit you’d be pretty stupid if you ignored customer complaints and feedback for the sake of profit. Your customers would leave to do business with your competition, and your revenue would disappear. I’m not moralizing shit, I don’t care if the monetization of this game is ethical, but I do care that it’s Pay to Win because that will drive players away, slowly killing this game which I enjoy.

Do me a favor. If you’re going to keep arguing, attack my points with reason and logic instead of bad comparisons and logical fallacies.

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When devs implemented battle pass there was list that showed price increase. Cant remember exact value but its in patch notes if someone want check it

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I might dig around for that later, thanks for letting me know where to look

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Just checked and it was not in update where battle pass was added. Devs clearly said levels was NOT purchasable at begining so its some later patch

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The OP did the match out of (righteous) concern that uncontrolled boosters stacking / abusing could eventually lead to the company taking a(nother) Draconian decision and drastically nerf or outright remove them, worsening everyone’s experience. This is a sound and legit concern.

However, I think boosters stacking are much less of a “threat”, both to Darkflow/Gaijin’s finances and secondarily to us, than lobbies abusing.

It can be assumed as a fact that the financial guys are keeping their eyes on revenue and average players’ progression curves at all times. If any of said lines takes a sudden deviation, they are guaranteed to notice and react in a very short time. As we just saw with custom lobbies, whose bots removal is a contingency damage control measure.

So, in the end, since the only current way to stack high amounts of boosters is with gold anyway, we can reasonably expect that no drastic measure such as removing boosters altogether should be necessary.

If ever, the company could easily manage any “gold shortcut” by either putting a cap to how many boosters can be active at once (say, in example, +1000% bonus) and/or making the cost increase for purchasing multiple BP levels in a row steeper.

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This is sound, but I just want to make a couple clarifications, one of my own and one pointed out earlier.

This exploit of massive stacks of XP boosters is entirely possible in PVP matches. Bot lobby exploits were a problem, but this doesn’t depend on them.

Honestly, I can see them just making them sequential instead of stackable, essentially stacking how many battles that 100% boost is good for instead of the percentage itself. Neatly solves the problem without taking anything away, and forces people who buy the repeatable levels to play many more matches to achieve the same results. Edit, because I forgot: Apparently the cost per level does increase, from 45 to 75 after you purchase x levels, but I haven’t yet managed to track down patch notes that mention details.

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Who are you to decide what is logical or reasonable?
Don’t pretend that you are intellectually superior to me or anyone else because your endless blah blah blah tends to demonstrate otherwise. You seem to be a person of a million words, most of which could be reduced down to “Vote for me, I’m running for the president of the F2P base on a platform of It’s not fair if the players that pay to support the game have an advantage in progression. You come off as someone not very experienced in how things actually work. I hope that you are happy existing in your little bubble of self-righteousness and supreme ignorance mr. president.

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In the current state, maxing out a campaign by spamming boosters may be cheaper than straight up buying each single level, but it is still costly nonetheless. Spending the same as an AAA game or more for a single faction of a single campaign is, imho, enough to step into “whale” territory, although maybe not that extreme.

Since we’re talking about a videogame, I wouldn’t make distinctions between “rich” and “poor” players, but rather between “willing to spend” and “unwilling to spend”.

The whole business model of a F2P is built on the pillar that players willing to spend will get the best toys faster than those who do not.
Actual pay to win is (thankfully) currently negligible in Enlisted, or at the very least far from being toxic yet. Therefore, I see little point in calling injustice about a mechanic whose only actual impact on the game from players’ perspective is to lower the bar of pay to progress accessibility.

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My point there was that, unlike a mechanics abuse allowing unlimited free farming, an abuse involving the use of gold doesn’t require game mechanics to be changed, it can easily be dealt with by altering the pricing accordingly.

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I don’t. Logic and reason are logic and reason, and you’ve employed little of either.

I don’t care if I’m smarter than you or not, and fail to see how a well-written argument would indicate I might be less.

Yeah, that’s me, sitting here with nothing to show for decades of work and two tours in helmand province.

Oh, I am.

This entire reply from you is a series of ad hominem arguments. For the undereducated or less intelligent among us (/sarcasm), an ad hominem fallacy is an argument directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining. Attack me all you want, you’re not refuting my point or effectively disagreeing with my opinion, you’re just doing your best to be louder in the hope that I’ll shut up. Spoiler: I won’t if you don’t, unless I manage to get some sleep soon.

I see what you’re saying, but maintain that imbalances in the game lead to this being Pay to Win right now, maybe borderline, but it’s there. Normandy and Tunisia specifically are so incredibly unbalanced it’s almost funny, IMHO. Once they fix the balance issues, you’ll find me in agreement.

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@Squidocide unfortunately I do not have the time to reply right now, just wanted to let you know, I really appreciate your long answer and it seems like I have misunderstood you in your initial post (I have read your essay). Thanks!

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Yeah man. I know it was long, thanks for taking the time to read and understand

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I fail to see how whaling one’s way to max level by stacking boosters should be any more p2w than whaling the same way by purchasing campaign levels, which could be done since day 1.

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Ah, I see. I hold that they’re equally pay to win, just one way is cheaper. The imbalance in the cost between the methods isn’t pay to win, the in-game benefits as a result are right now, if only in Tunisia and Normandy. Edit: The two gold methods are equally pay to win, of course bot farming wasn’t, though it was plainly a problem. Shit, edit 2: I’ve been playing since alpha, before we had this many campaign levels, before Panther and Jumbo etc, and things were more balanced back then, or not as poorly balanced and in different ways. The power creep has lead to greater imbalance, and therefore moved the game from pay to progress into pay to win territory, in my opinion. I can argue it all day, but it’s still just my opinion.

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I don’t think that buying your way to top levels is by itself pay to win (disclaimer: I didn’t), but that’s just my opinion.

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An excerpt to explain my stance here, and then I’m going to make a serious attempt at sleep:

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I won’t sabotage your attempt at sleeping; I’ll just mention that in p2w / “X OP” discussions the TLDR of my reasoning is that imo the edge given by endgame weaponry isn’t that big. I played my way through all Normandy on both sides and as soon as I had access to semiautos I felt I had enough firepower to compete even against top tier on reasonably even terms.

Yes, the recently arisen problem of silver orders scarcity CAN create a p2w issue, but that’s a parallel problem not strictly related to campaign progression.

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Honestly, I do belief that there is big misconception between OP stuff and “skill”/“experience”.

Yes, sure high tier stuff is often better. Sometimes it only is preference. For me, I absolutely loved the FNAB-43 and I used it mainly until the Mp43/1 came … while having several max star MP-40’s, Beretta M1918’s. I used some MP35/1, because of the higher base dmg. But still FNAB-43 was just “my SMG”.
Same in Berlin, to some extend, I got the Gewehr 43 unlocked, but I still love and use the VG2.
Or the MP40 on Moscow, I use the way of playing it, I learned with the MP43/1 in Normandy and now for me it is the baby-StuG (sure the MP40 can not reach out as far as the MP43/1 can).

Sorry got a little sidetracked there.
Point is, one could say that I am only in the top 3 because of my OP equipment (FG 42 and MP 43/1) but than how does it come that I am usually in the top 3 in Tunisia, Moscow and Berlin as well? With starter equipment? With no backpacks. With no prefect five-star soldiers (I have one squad full of +15% sprint, +60% crouch/prone move, +30% vitality, +8% weapon reload and increased chance of only getting downed if deadly hit and many other squads that are almost there in Normandy).

Sure you can buy better equipment (p2w) but you can’t buy the experience to actually use it effectively. So it is “balanced”. Pretty much every weapon is a two hit kill anyways. The difference are neglectable.

Sure the russian SMG in Moscow are a pain, but well than use the superior accuracy of the MP40 at range. Everything has strengths and weaknesses. Part of the fun to me, is to figure them out and than play “smart”.

The other day I killed a Grant I with an AB 41, without knowing its weak-spots. I never fought an Grant I before. And it was the second or third time that I use the AB 41. Do you think a pay to winner would have done that? No because he lacks the experience. Sure he might have a better tank because he paid for it, but after all that more or less evens the odds. Maybe the Grant I player was a p2w player that bought this tank. Only to get killed by the starter vehicle by an experienced player … .

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1 level of repeatable BP costs 175 gold. So it’s arounf 17 500 gold.

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At the end of the day, I don’t see much difference in what this player (payer) is doing than what goes on in WT. He’s just choosing to spend his $$ to buy his way to end game …

I’m personally fine with it … He will soon get tired of his purchased advantage and be gone to spend $$ somewhere else. Thanks for helping to fund the game for the rest of us…

I’m sure the devs thank him too…