And back to Top Drives.... for month now i have the feeling that the grumpy longtime playerbase looses value for Hutch. Just by looking at their responses or overalll communication here. In my theory its more about getting a constant stream of new spenders into the game, who might take a year before realizing what they got into (and sign up here to complain). The flood of low trophy whales shows us there is a new generation of them around, the stream of special CFs devalues former rare picks pretty fast (pe JPE last week). All while cutting down the free earnable income for the whole playerbase. Feels more and more unbalanced, Sinners post about his experiences with his sons account confirms my thoughts.
People will learn, P2W isn't that rewarding. Someday the micro transactions field for games will be so unpopular developers will move away. But it is up to the market to shift before they will react
Isnt this already starting? I heard something that Apple might start a new game platform, subscribtion based without any micro-transactions in any games. Not sure about details as i dont use ios.But coming from this company is a sign that the microtransaction market might be fed up soon. As much revenue as it creates, most publishers have to admit there is a lot of shady psychology involved.
They have started it, and it's great. Beautiful games, as they should be. Full and complete and robust. 4.99$ a month and you play all the games listed under the Arcade section.
The sooner 'micro' transactions eff off and die the better place the world will be.
I've always despised them and am of course a massive hypocrite for spending money on this game.
I should go back to spending my hours playing finely crafted games that sit in my Steam library that don't require an additional penny.
But such is the human psyche and until something radical happens, developers will continue to milk this gambling genre.
I'm not suggesting this of Hutch, but like the aforementioned Football publisher's disdain, it does make you wonder about humanity.
This. I miss the days of old. Company makes great product. Company sales product in it's final version for a single price. Company profits and customers are happy. Company uses product to provide an update. Otherwise known as expansion. OMG, company sales expansion and customers by it as it includes TONS new product. Company profits and customers are happy. The cycle continues. Each new car release could be an expansion with vast improvements. Customers buy it from app store. Company and customers happy.
I suggest that hutch charges ingame gold to use the forum . Just 10 gold to read per day and then 10 gold per coment . Mite reduce the negativity. Also I think some of the picture cards are to good ... maybe do em all black n white with a option of making ones colour for 100gold
Perhaps a good idea to ask people to sign up direct debit details where you can then hide the gold prices and simply charge them at the end of the month for what they owe that we you could maybe increase the value of things without people knowing but tell them sometimes the value will be cheeper lol they will believe it
How about a subscription based model where you can only finish T3 as F2P. T1 & T2 are reserved for season pass holders. Each season is just £10 and lasts for a whole 30 days.
Got this idea after reading about the thought off "autofill hands" function.
How about a subscription bot that logs in every 2,5h to play your tickets, collect rewards?! You get text messages if you pull epic or higher, bot buys ceramics once you reach 32,5k, all for just for 15k gold (incl 3xCF).
You could even offer different bots, the latejoin special for 5k gold gets a new bracket and +100pts premium advantage.
Got this idea after reading about the thought off "autofill hands" function.
How about a subscription bot that logs in every 2,5h to play your tickets, collect rewards?! You get text messages if you pull epic or higher, bot buys ceramics once you reach 32,5k, all for just for 15k gold (incl 3xCF).
You could even offer different bots, the latejoin special for 5k gold gets a new bracket and +100pts premium advantage.
Late-join bot sounds **** good considering that Hutch still refuses to address event end times...
Oh wait why the heck am I paying Hutch to address a problem they created?
I suggested a while ago an idea about hiring a 'car dealer' who auto-sells your cars from the holding pool before they expire.
You know that our cars are not even safe in our garages right? Basically we get to use/play for 5 years and then they are going to be auto sold or something.
I suggested a while ago an idea about hiring a 'car dealer' who auto-sells your cars from the holding pool before they expire.
You know that our cars are not even safe in our garages right? Basically we get to use/play for 5 years and then they are going to be auto sold or something.
With the way the game is going it‘ll never last for another 3 years lol
I suggested a while ago an idea about hiring a 'car dealer' who auto-sells your cars from the holding pool before they expire.
You know that our cars are not even safe in our garages right? Basically we get to use/play for 5 years and then they are going to be auto sold or something.
With the way the game is going it‘ll never last for another 3 years lol
Very recently I've started to genuinely believe this. Which is a great shame.
A poor company lucked into an amazing game idea.
I'm sure there are some good people in there but the immensely dominant level of greed is going to kill the game.
Fixes in the future won't save it once the decline is in freefall. Just my humble opinion.
Short version: the more that people get in the game for free, the less they have to buy. Keep doing that long enough and we stop being able to support the game.
Tim I understand that you guys need to make money... None of us here are employed for the fun of it, we all need to make money and everyone understands that. But regardless of whatever stats you throw at us we are all feeling the shift in the games balance - I can appreciate that balance is hard to find, and yes I agree that too much free stuff can disrupt the games balance. But the drastic changes in prize boards, CF offers and clubs introduction have shifted things dramatically. I'm F2P but have contributed very small sums, purely as a thank you to hutch, I felt they deserved something from me as I really enjoyed the game.
You may be making good money from a select few but what happens when the player base at large begin to loose interest and leave, do you think all these cashed up whales will continue to play in a drastically reduced player base? surely you have factored in the importance of the casual spender and F2P
I like some others on here have lost a lot of interest. I've now completely given up on clubs, I often last minute join events that dont interest me, I regularly miss out on ceramics due to lack of interest, I no longer upgrade cars for ceramic events.
I recently opened 1 IR Elite CF, 1 IR CF, and 1.2 mill in ceramics/italian ceramics. I got 4 UR from CFs and 4 from ceramics. It will take me a few months of grinding to recover that 1.2 Mill that I toiled to accumulate. I'm now sitting here contemplating the cost to my personal life and family given the additional time requirements for this game. Yesterday I played the game for a total of 30 mins, not because I didn't have the time, but because frankly the game was depressing me.
Short version: the more that people get in the game for free, the less they have to buy. Keep doing that long enough and we stop being able to support the game.
I wouldn't say we were silent on it as I wrote probably more words on this subject than I have on any other, back when it was first discussed! And nothing has substantially changed since then.
Still, it's good to have in one thread some of the key questions that remain, so I will answer here. First though I'll need a bit of time to calculate some things (what would be the impact if we just increased prize boards again right now without changing anything else; what is the trend in ticket buying; what is the trend in CF offers since I last looked; what is the trend on these "new kind of whales").
Usually I'd say nothing until I had all that ready to go, but I figured while I was here I should at least say I'm looking into it.
So... ´sup? Any updates on statistics or explanation? I think most players here can agree that the "if hutch gives more free stuff they will go broke" theory is hard to understand. Happy customer buy, the ability to earn motivates to play. If players see barely any progress,bugs and unbeatable competition they stay F2P. And its not that Hutch is giving away someting for free with prizeboards, players pay with their time spend on your game instead of any other, which benefits the company on several levels.
Short version: the more that people get in the game for free, the less they have to buy. Keep doing that long enough and we stop being able to support the game.
I wouldn't say we were silent on it as I wrote probably more words on this subject than I have on any other, back when it was first discussed! And nothing has substantially changed since then.
Still, it's good to have in one thread some of the key questions that remain, so I will answer here. First though I'll need a bit of time to calculate some things (what would be the impact if we just increased prize boards again right now without changing anything else; what is the trend in ticket buying; what is the trend in CF offers since I last looked; what is the trend on these "new kind of whales").
Usually I'd say nothing until I had all that ready to go, but I figured while I was here I should at least say I'm looking into it.
So... ´sup? Any updates on statistics or explanation? I think most players here can agree that the "if hutch gives more free stuff they will go broke" theory is hard to understand. Happy customer buy, the ability to earn motivates to play. If players see barely any progress,bugs and unbeatable competition they stay F2P. And its not that Hutch is giving away someting for free with prizeboards, players pay with their time spend on your game instead of any other, which benefits the company on several levels.
yes, pl 10.5 patch notes: - rare cars removed from prize boards - gold from one card reduced to 1 - Club rewards been reduced to 3500$ for MVP - To get MVP you have to win 50 races - CF pack now costs 2199 gold - Added 659 new cars with 120 legendaries - Bmw m5 competition now is low height - Pagani Huyara mra reduced to 75 - Dodge Charger hellcat mra reduced to 80 - game now loads 0.05 seconds faster - All premium packs now garantee only 1 them card - Pagani Zonda R mra increased to 220 - Audi quatro s1 tyres type changed to Perfomance, adjusted 0-60 time to 6.9s (evo tested) ("This car on paper is fast, but when I pushed on acceleration it felt like someone is just pushing my car from behind, instead of 3.0s it reached 60 only in 6.9s" (с) Some evo driver)
[wow, after a lot of editing I can't make these boxes go away... fine!]
Okay, I was getting all ready with my forum Hazmat suit, but there's actually some very reasonable discussion here. I'll get to the main economy points later, but first to tackle a few individual bits:
Offering ‘special’ Ceramic packs for a discounted price of 899?
Your other points will be addressed below, but this one particular I think is a misunderstanding? This refers to the one-and-only 'Time Travel' pack, which has the same minimum guarantee as a Ceramic (one Super-rare or better), but can give up to 5 Ultra-rares, or even 1 Ultra-rare and 4 Legendaries (very low odds, but technically possible). The pack description attempts to convey this, and we could certainly do a better job of making sure players know the odds of packs, but this is why it's priced differently. It does represent much more of a risk, and from what I've seen it's more risk than most players are happy to take with that much gold even when they know what it can give them. (I could probably have spared the gold in-game last time this came up but I didn't go for it myself either).
I’ve spent over 18 months building a reasonable garage, and yet I’m getting hammered in yesterday’s Final that wasn’t based on any of the recent updates, and included cars that have been available for months and years. By definition, I should have been able to compete strongly given the time I’ve spent building my hand. Not so any more, as the proliferation of CFs on sale negates any long term effort.
That was the UK 90's Final, right? I think that's one of the toughest Finals you're ever likely to see in Top Drives: - Cars have been available a long time, so the older players are likely to have strong garages, so competition is going to be strong (as you expected) - Very few cars are UK 90's, which means just by luck a few long-standing players will be very strong - you could have 30 Legendaries and no UK 90's Legendaries, or you could have got lucky and your only 2 S are UK 90's and you got a JPE from somewhere. Fewer cars in a final = wider distribution of lucky vs. unlucky players. - More importantly, relatively few qualifying cars means many more than usual weaker players couldn't enter to help dilute the competition. - You could indeed buy all 15 packs and on average get 1.5 JPEs out of them. Given the above though, for most players that won't have been enough for them to be competitive. This one was tough for everyone.
(Gsearch and I actually flagged that this would be an extremely tough Final once we saw it coming, but the number of Finals requirements that are less intense and don't use new cars is finite and not huge, and we'll be getting to them later in any case. Speaking personally I thought I might actually be alright for this one as I just happened to have a McLaren F1 LM and very recently pulled an XJR-15, but that still left me way down in T2, less competitive than I am in most other Finals events, such was the level of competition.)
The reduction in prize boards was of the main reasons I became FTP, after 2 years of spending. I really felt it was a middle finger to the player base.
You miss one thing: If I'm happy with the game, if it makes fun to play and if It's not stagnating -> I'm going to invest money If I'm not happy with the game, if it's no fun to play and if I see no progress as a F2P player -> I will abandon the game
the more that people get in the game for free, the less they have to buy. Keep doing that long enough and we stop being able to support the game.
By that logic, why give away anything at all? What is the reason for prizeboards, or daily gifts?
Yep, these are all fair responses to my extremely brief summary!
Free-to-play is of course not simple, and there isn't always an obvious relationship between in-game generosity and how much people then play the game (and how much they might be tempted to spend). Just earlier this year, in one of our un-launched games, we ran a 'generosity' test and found that players who were given more currency and could get further through the game more quickly actually turned out to be less likely to reach a certain early-game milestone. There was no challenge, so it wasn't interesting, so they quit. Of course, if you give too little, it's too hard, and people won't stick around either. Players also have radically different amounts of time, skill, and strategy, so balancing this out for everyone is always hard and rarely intuitive.
To elaborate more on my original point, wherever Top Drives was on the generosity scale at launch, if we add in more free stuff with every new feature/addition (challenge mode, daily reward, going from 3 (!) non-daily events/week at launch to 7, club events, and all future modes) at some point we're going to reach the point where adding features means we make less money, at which point management are likely to ask why we keep adding features. So when we added Club Events, we thought there was an opportunity to replace the Daily (and the money you made from it) with something more fun, and reduce the benefits of smarfing at the same time (as that's always easiest to do in the Daily). Player feedback told us (extremely emphatically!) that the Daily was too important to lose, and Club Events not fun enough to replace it, and that's why we ended up with this rebalance instead.
(This is all entirely relating to cash - average gold earned since the introduction of Club Events has increased by about 20% for players of all activity levels, as long as they at least log in to clubs to collect the seasonal rewards).
Short version: the more that people get in the game for free, the less they have to buy. Keep doing that long enough and we stop being able to support the game.
Is this also the reason we never get more events?! Because people would win something, which might keep them away from buying !?
I feel like I might be missing something on this one. Do you think there's, er, not enough to do in Top Drives now? It's really quite a lot if you try to do it all, although I guess if you don't play clubs ... (but I know that's not the case, I saw you out there yesterday!)
That said, I do personally like the idea of 24-hour-long lower-RQ events getting added in on those days when it's only the Daily event that's ending, even if it's for Premiums instead of Ceramics, and I'm lobbying for that one internally, for what it's worth.
My son has started his own account, I play with him as he's only 9, but he loves cars. We've finished the campaign and now progress has really ground to a halt.
Now what's caused this? Well it's not lack of knowledge on how to play the game as he has me helping him. His garage isn't half bad for rq117 ( hes pulled a W12 syncro and the yellow dodge charger lucky guy) and has lots of ultra rares. I put some money into his account for him and we've opened some of the offers.
So what is the problem? Well its simple. It's so hard to save enough cash to put some upgrades into a car it becomes such an uphill battle it's just not fun. He could have a great little garage if he could max some of his cars. He can't even smarf in the daily as you have to be RQ150.
I not sure I would have kept playing if the prize boards we structured as they are now when I first started. Looking at it now it seems an impossible task.
The reduction in prize boards hurts players right across the board.
Now this is a very interesting story. In some ways, there's a lot more to help you along than when many of us started (more events, challenge mode, daily login rewards), but I can see how the Daily Event would be missed. I assume Club Events are too difficult to enter, or don't look like good value for time? I think there could be a case for widening the Daily Event down from RQ149.
Rising Competition On to the biggest general point I see here. It looks like a lot of players attach the idea of inflation to their experience of increased competition. Whether that's blamed on 'baby whales', or lots of carbon fiber offers, or an inability to compete in events that aren't of lower RQ, I think it all comes back to the experience of finding it harder to compete.
Even with an unchanging economy, competition could change over time. If players with the strongest garages are much more likely to continue playing, then the game will become harder to compete in. I've double-checked a few things: - The impact of the carbon fiber offers (it's actually quite small) - The prevalance of 'baby whales' (this hasn't actually changed ever since we first introduced Tri-series) - Ticket buying at the end of events (it fluctuates by event, but has been stable for years doesn't look to be increasing)
This makes me think this rising competition idea might actually be the dominant factor at work. I think that's something we need to understand better, as currently I'm not certain how to measure it - there's a few ways you could.
What about the prize boards? I went back to the data to see if things had changed since last time I looked and shared results... and they haven't. But I did realise that last time I didn't actually talk about the relative amount that different player groups made from prize boards vs. end-of-event prizes, or the earnings of smarfers vs other players, which informed the idea of the rebalance.
When calculating their earnings, smarfers were reporting clearing 5-6 prize boards a day on the Daily Event. I smarf myself (still do), and I think that's very hard to achieve, so as a less intense definition I'm defining a Smarfer (capital S) as someone who clears at 4 prize boards a day (or more) on the Daily.
Comparing ratios How much should prize cards be worth in comparison to the cash prize you win at the end of an event, in a general sense? Averaging over all events (not just the daily), for the average RQ150 player before Clubs, prize cards made them 3.5x as much as the end-of-event cash. For the Smarfers, that figure was 9x. Intuitively, that doesn't seem like the right balance, if grinding is 9x as rewarding as placing.
The other question is: how much more should the most beneficial strategy be worth over an average player's earnings? Smarfers were making 4x as much as the average RQ150 player every day (and note that the 'average RQ150 player' is no slouch, playing every day, entering every event and actively competing in all of them). So every week that elapsed, in a way the Smarfers would be 4 weeks further ahead of the average player. That's quite a lot, and of course it builds more and more over time. The average Smarfer would also make 33% more than the 1% most active RQ150's that didn't smarf (in less time).
These sorts of figures are why we felt smarfing was too strong a strategy. It's hard to evaluate objectively what something "should" be when you're used to it being a certain way, but perhaps it would help to think: how good it would be for game balance if we went further the other way? What if event prizes were worth 20x as much as end-of-event prizes? What if Smarfers made 8x as much as the average player? That seems like it would be a move in the wrong direction.
If you were (or still are) a heavy smarfer, I can obviously see why you wouldn't like the change, but hopefully you can see where we were coming from.
Since the dust has settled after the rebalance and clubs, what has happened to the above metrics?
The average RQ150 player now makes 50% more from end-of-event prizes than they do from prize cards (reversing the ratio). The average 4-board smarfer now makes 2x as much from prize cards as they do from end-of-event prizes (down from 9x) - so that feels more balanced.
The average 4+board smarfer now makes 3x as much as the average RQ150 player (down from 4x as much). An advantage, but not as overwhelming. Interestingly the change is because the average 4+board-smarfer's earnings have stayed about the same, where the average RQ150 player is now making 50% more. (The Smarfers are also now making 20% more than the 1% most active RQ150's that don't smarf as much, down from 33%).
That looks like a generally successful rebalance. Smarfing is still advantageous, just not by as much.
Why isn't everyone happy then?! In terms of what was discussed above, about how generous a game is influencing how much you play a game, we've seen a positive effect across most players - they are making more money (mostly due to end-of-event prizes), so they stick with the game longer.
For the most active smarfers, especially those that don't like clubs, obviously things feel worse. Some of them play less, or play a bit more to make the same amount of cash. Lest anyone got the wrong idea, we certainly didn't expect those players to start spending more money instead - we know that you get used to how things are, getting less than that feels terrible, and you're not going to be more inclined to spend. This was the biggest cost of doing the rebalance, and we wouldn't stick with it if we didn't honestly think it was important to the long-term health of the game.
Disenchanted players will also get a compounding effect of the 'rising competition' hypothesis - if you gave up on smurfing and/or don't play Club events and/or are generally less active, you will find it harder to compete; if competition is also rising that effect will be even more noticeable.
Now what? The next question for me is how to assess the 'rising competition' factor. As I said, there's a few ways to measure it. One could look at how many CF's people who make T1 in a Final tend to buy, but that's going to vary a lot - in the RWD UK Final earlier this year, for example, I suspect T1 winners were overwhelmingly players that already had excellent hands already. How we measure it, and what we should do about, are what I'm going to be looking into next.
To elaborate more on my original point, wherever Top Drives was on the generosity scale at launch, if we add in more free stuff with every new feature/addition (challenge mode, daily reward, going from 3 (!) non-daily events/week at launch to 7, club events, and all future modes) at some point we're going to reach the point where adding features means we make less money, at which point management are likely to ask why we keep adding features.
.....
Do you think there's, er, not enough to do in Top Drives now? It's really quite a lot if you try to do it all, although I guess if you don't play clubs ... (but I know that's not the case, I saw you out there yesterday!)
........ Rising Competition On to the biggest general point I see here. It looks like a lot of players attach the idea of inflation to their experience of increased competition. Whether that's blamed on 'baby whales', or lots of carbon fiber offers, or an inability to compete in events that aren't of lower RQ, I think it all comes back to the experience of finding it harder to compete.
Even with an unchanging economy, competition could change over time. If players with the strongest garages are much more likely to continue playing, then the game will become harder to compete in. I've double-checked a few things: - The impact of the carbon fiber offers (it's actually quite small) - The prevalance of 'baby whales' (this hasn't actually changed ever since we first introduced Tri-series) - Ticket buying at the end of events (it fluctuates by event, but has been stable for years doesn't look to be increasing)
Thanks for the elaborate explanation, Tim. I think we all appreciate it. A few comments though:
1) Not that we should expect anything different, but that is the issue with capitalism - management always expects to make more money compared to the last quarter/fiscal year. Isn't there a point where enough is enough? When the game is profitable but does not necessarily increase its profitability every year?
2) I've been playing for over 2 years. I spend (I suspect) more than average time on the game - around 4-5 hours a day! And from my perspective, there is not a lot to do in the game. At my rank, it's stressful and competitive, but not fun. When I win, I win by 1 star and get rewarded $250 in game cash. It's very underwhelming. Five tickets net me (on average) less than $2000 in-game cash. Not enough for a single upgrade on a UR car.
3) Rising Competition - what do you mean by saying that the impact of the carbon fiber offers has been "quite small." What is the metric measured here? From a player perspective it sure doesn't seem that way. I play against people with way lower trophies than me (they are still at the 6000 range) and they have maxed Legendaries. I've played for two years consistently and I still am not there, despite my 23000 trophies (symbol that I do play a lot). Do I suck at playing? Is there some skill that I'm not aware of? Or did these newcomers simply buy their way really quickly (15cf offers every week...that's a lot of cars for food, and good chances for more legendaries). So, please elaborate on how the impact of carbon fiber
about clubs... they are not fun... will we see something change? Maybe re-work clubs, no fun in grinding all day, no fun to win few $$ for all time spent, no fun. i enter one time a day only for take rewards... played few tickets, most of times only one tickets for week!!
@Hutch_Tim Thanks for taking the time to reply in such detail. It is appreciated when you guys engage with us in this way.
I understand the logic of a lot of what you’re saying. I do still have an issue with the the smarfing point. The highest rewards in these events are only available to a handful of people in each bracket. Unless you have a Top 10, or better still Top 2 hand, the returns for playing an event normally are incredibly low. There is simply no incentive to upgrade cars for these individual events.
And smarfers do do still generate revenue - I would imagine that we watch more ads than any other player group!
If I can’t generate cash from smarfing then I can’t upgrade cars for Prize Car events either.
My simple question for you is this - what actual harm did it do to the game or other users when the prize boards were higher and smarfing more lucrative? I always think of it as being like the side missions in Far Cry - I might not want to have to hunt a bunch of animals to upgrade my ammo pouch, but I need more bullets if I’m going to finish the main missions. That’s what smarfing really is, and to that end I really still don’t see a problem with it.
Short version: the more that people get in the game for free, the less they have to buy. Keep doing that long enough and we stop being able to support the game.
Is this also the reason we never get more events?! Because people would win something, which might keep them away from buying !?
I feel like I might be missing something on this one. Do you think there's, er, not enough to do in Top Drives now? It's really quite a lot if you try to do it all, although I guess if you don't play clubs ... (but I know that's not the case, I saw you out there yesterday!)
That said, I do personally like the idea of 24-hour-long lower-RQ events getting added in on those days when it's only the Daily event that's ending, even if it's for Premiums instead of Ceramics, and I'm lobbying for that one internally, for what it's worth.
Hey Tim, thanks for taking your time to answer this topic.I just answer this point, as there sure will be some more comments about the rest. But shhh, now everyone knows i play clubs . Indeed i do especially when i need fast money to get upgrades going, but its just an emotionless grind, i dont even care if i enter winning or loosing events. Removing the negative scores might spice things up there. Any news on this one?
To answer your question... Yes, especially on tuesdays and saturdays it feels a bit empty with just the daily ending and you already answered how to solve this.I think a good portion of the players would welcome something like 24h events, and those who dont like low Rq events dont miss out on a 2 or 3 day long event.
Edit: some kind of steady weekend challenge would also be great, its fun to clear those. Even if you do just a small mainprize, like 3 slots maybe?!
What you (not Tim, but Hutch) did with Support policy is very stupid.
Every month I spent about 200-500€, that's not much yeah, but I think you get more money from small regular transactions than few big spenders. Now I'm done. I already sold half of my garage, I'm not playing in events. After few finals I maybe will sell all the rest cars.
yes, only me is not a big loss, but I'm. not alone. I can name many names of big players who already quit, shared their accounts or are about to quit.
But I guess it's still not a big loss for you, it's a natural flow of players coming/leaving, so you actually don't care. You will always have new vip players.
At the end I just want to curse all hutch employees who are responsible for that, you ruined excellent game, which could become even much better.
Sorry I just cant trust the stats being given out. The old adage that you can make stats say what you want to say applies here. X% this, X% that. There's no substance. Whilst I appreciate the effort Tim goes to in his posts, after that one I feel none the wiser.
There's quotes and statements from players and some very nice platitudes from Tim after, but I dont see any validation of the points being made. Maybe I'm missing his points, if so, that's on me.
I'm fairly certain in the past that it was mentioned that the heaviest of Smarfers were a vast minority of players. So why oh why single that style of play out for the nerfiest of nerfs. It's the proverbial sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Forget the megalodons, I'm not even on TimButs level of spending by any means but I have now spent at least £150, which is by far and away the most I have ever spent on any game on any platform.
It's been said a hundred times before but the FUN has gone from the game. Please stop focusing on the amount of freebies, the monetary value of rewards v prizeboards or how X% of X% now earn X% more than Whaley McWhaleyface etc. I loved this game, now it's a chore. My playtime has reduced since PL8 along with my enjoyment in the game. Do I still spend? Yes, despite my best intentions not to. However, if I was enjoying the game you can bet your **** I would spend a lot more.
And here we go again. It doesn't matter how much we criticize specific features of the game, it Doesnt matter which argument we bring up, how often we tell you that the fun is fading away, how badly the prize boards are after the nerf and many things more, seriously the list is really long.
At the end of the day, the only thing we get is a long wall of text, stating that we are wrong and that you are doing everything right.
My best explanation is, that you have your gameplan in mind, you know exactly how you want this game to be and as it seems that's not how we want it, but you just don't care. And that's fine, I get it now. And that's why I'm done spending any money.
PS. Of corse the latest support disaster is another huge factor, but I'm afraid it's not even allowed to say this publicly.
PPS. Thanks for the huge wall of text but honestly, I have never seen so much words without telling anything for real.
PPPS. My daily shitpost: SmUrFeRs are to strong, they make to much money, they are 4 weeks ahead of normal players. Yeah Tim, of course, I remember you saying what a big minority smurfers were and how insignificant they are. Now we are the biggest enemy. Of course...
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In my theory its more about getting a constant stream of new spenders into the game, who might take a year before realizing what they got into (and sign up here to complain). The flood of low trophy whales shows us there is a new generation of them around, the stream of special CFs devalues former rare picks pretty fast (pe JPE last week). All while cutting down the free earnable income for the whole playerbase.
Feels more and more unbalanced, Sinners post about his experiences with his sons account confirms my thoughts.
By that logic, why give away anything at all? What is the reason for prizeboards, or daily gifts?
I've always despised them and am of course a massive hypocrite for spending money on this game.
I should go back to spending my hours playing finely crafted games that sit in my Steam library that don't require an additional penny.
But such is the human psyche and until something radical happens, developers will continue to milk this gambling genre.
I'm not suggesting this of Hutch, but like the aforementioned Football publisher's disdain, it does make you wonder about humanity.
I've spent over £120 at least in the last 12 months on this mobile game.
Just 10 gold to read per day and then 10 gold per coment .
Mite reduce the negativity.
Also I think some of the picture cards are to good ... maybe do em all black n white with a option of making ones colour for 100gold
Perhaps a good idea to ask people to sign up direct debit details where you can then hide the gold prices and simply charge them at the end of the month for what they owe that we you could maybe increase the value of things without people knowing but tell them sometimes the value will be cheeper lol they will believe it
Oh wait why the heck am I paying Hutch to address a problem they created?
Very recently I've started to genuinely believe this. Which is a great shame.
A poor company lucked into an amazing game idea.
I'm sure there are some good people in there but the immensely dominant level of greed is going to kill the game.
Fixes in the future won't save it once the decline is in freefall. Just my humble opinion.
I hope you will get more money without me buying gold like always.
- rare cars removed from prize boards
- gold from one card reduced to 1
- Club rewards been reduced to 3500$ for MVP
- To get MVP you have to win 50 races
- CF pack now costs 2199 gold
- Added 659 new cars with 120 legendaries
- Bmw m5 competition now is low height
- Pagani Huyara mra reduced to 75
- Dodge Charger hellcat mra reduced to 80
- game now loads 0.05 seconds faster
- All premium packs now garantee only 1 them card
- Pagani Zonda R mra increased to 220
- Audi quatro s1 tyres type changed to Perfomance, adjusted 0-60 time to 6.9s (evo tested) ("This car on paper is fast, but when I pushed on acceleration it felt like someone is just pushing my car from behind, instead of 3.0s it reached 60 only in 6.9s" (с) Some evo driver)
Enjoy Aston Martin go get your credit cards
James_Pearce said:
- Cars have been available a long time, so the older players are likely to have strong garages, so competition is going to be strong (as you expected)
- Very few cars are UK 90's, which means just by luck a few long-standing players will be very strong - you could have 30 Legendaries and no UK 90's Legendaries, or you could have got lucky and your only 2 S are UK 90's and you got a JPE from somewhere. Fewer cars in a final = wider distribution of lucky vs. unlucky players.
- More importantly, relatively few qualifying cars means many more than usual weaker players couldn't enter to help dilute the competition.
- You could indeed buy all 15 packs and on average get 1.5 JPEs out of them. Given the above though, for most players that won't have been enough for them to be competitive. This one was tough for everyone.
(Gsearch and I actually flagged that this would be an extremely tough Final once we saw it coming, but the number of Finals requirements that are less intense and don't use new cars is finite and not huge, and we'll be getting to them later in any case. Speaking personally I thought I might actually be alright for this one as I just happened to have a McLaren F1 LM and very recently pulled an XJR-15, but that still left me way down in T2, less competitive than I am in most other Finals events, such was the level of competition.)
Yep, these are all fair responses to my extremely brief summary!
Free-to-play is of course not simple, and there isn't always an obvious relationship between in-game generosity and how much people then play the game (and how much they might be tempted to spend). Just earlier this year, in one of our un-launched games, we ran a 'generosity' test and found that players who were given more currency and could get further through the game more quickly actually turned out to be less likely to reach a certain early-game milestone. There was no challenge, so it wasn't interesting, so they quit. Of course, if you give too little, it's too hard, and people won't stick around either. Players also have radically different amounts of time, skill, and strategy, so balancing this out for everyone is always hard and rarely intuitive.
To elaborate more on my original point, wherever Top Drives was on the generosity scale at launch, if we add in more free stuff with every new feature/addition (challenge mode, daily reward, going from 3 (!) non-daily events/week at launch to 7, club events, and all future modes) at some point we're going to reach the point where adding features means we make less money, at which point management are likely to ask why we keep adding features. So when we added Club Events, we thought there was an opportunity to replace the Daily (and the money you made from it) with something more fun, and reduce the benefits of smarfing at the same time (as that's always easiest to do in the Daily). Player feedback told us (extremely emphatically!) that the Daily was too important to lose, and Club Events not fun enough to replace it, and that's why we ended up with this rebalance instead.
(This is all entirely relating to cash - average gold earned since the introduction of Club Events has increased by about 20% for players of all activity levels, as long as they at least log in to clubs to collect the seasonal rewards).
I feel like I might be missing something on this one. Do you think there's, er, not enough to do in Top Drives now? It's really quite a lot if you try to do it all, although I guess if you don't play clubs ... (but I know that's not the case, I saw you out there yesterday!)
That said, I do personally like the idea of 24-hour-long lower-RQ events getting added in on those days when it's only the Daily event that's ending, even if it's for Premiums instead of Ceramics, and I'm lobbying for that one internally, for what it's worth.
Now this is a very interesting story. In some ways, there's a lot more to help you along than when many of us started (more events, challenge mode, daily login rewards), but I can see how the Daily Event would be missed. I assume Club Events are too difficult to enter, or don't look like good value for time? I think there could be a case for widening the Daily Event down from RQ149.
Rising Competition
On to the biggest general point I see here. It looks like a lot of players attach the idea of inflation to their experience of increased competition. Whether that's blamed on 'baby whales', or lots of carbon fiber offers, or an inability to compete in events that aren't of lower RQ, I think it all comes back to the experience of finding it harder to compete.
Even with an unchanging economy, competition could change over time. If players with the strongest garages are much more likely to continue playing, then the game will become harder to compete in. I've double-checked a few things:
- The impact of the carbon fiber offers (it's actually quite small)
- The prevalance of 'baby whales' (this hasn't actually changed ever since we first introduced Tri-series)
- Ticket buying at the end of events (it fluctuates by event, but has been stable for years doesn't look to be increasing)
This makes me think this rising competition idea might actually be the dominant factor at work. I think that's something we need to understand better, as currently I'm not certain how to measure it - there's a few ways you could.
What about the prize boards?
I went back to the data to see if things had changed since last time I looked and shared results... and they haven't. But I did realise that last time I didn't actually talk about the relative amount that different player groups made from prize boards vs. end-of-event prizes, or the earnings of smarfers vs other players, which informed the idea of the rebalance.
When calculating their earnings, smarfers were reporting clearing 5-6 prize boards a day on the Daily Event. I smarf myself (still do), and I think that's very hard to achieve, so as a less intense definition I'm defining a Smarfer (capital S) as someone who clears at 4 prize boards a day (or more) on the Daily.
Comparing ratios
How much should prize cards be worth in comparison to the cash prize you win at the end of an event, in a general sense? Averaging over all events (not just the daily), for the average RQ150 player before Clubs, prize cards made them 3.5x as much as the end-of-event cash. For the Smarfers, that figure was 9x. Intuitively, that doesn't seem like the right balance, if grinding is 9x as rewarding as placing.
The other question is: how much more should the most beneficial strategy be worth over an average player's earnings? Smarfers were making 4x as much as the average RQ150 player every day (and note that the 'average RQ150 player' is no slouch, playing every day, entering every event and actively competing in all of them). So every week that elapsed, in a way the Smarfers would be 4 weeks further ahead of the average player. That's quite a lot, and of course it builds more and more over time. The average Smarfer would also make 33% more than the 1% most active RQ150's that didn't smarf (in less time).
These sorts of figures are why we felt smarfing was too strong a strategy. It's hard to evaluate objectively what something "should" be when you're used to it being a certain way, but perhaps it would help to think: how good it would be for game balance if we went further the other way? What if event prizes were worth 20x as much as end-of-event prizes? What if Smarfers made 8x as much as the average player? That seems like it would be a move in the wrong direction.
If you were (or still are) a heavy smarfer, I can obviously see why you wouldn't like the change, but hopefully you can see where we were coming from.
Since the dust has settled after the rebalance and clubs, what has happened to the above metrics?
The average RQ150 player now makes 50% more from end-of-event prizes than they do from prize cards (reversing the ratio). The average 4-board smarfer now makes 2x as much from prize cards as they do from end-of-event prizes (down from 9x) - so that feels more balanced.
The average 4+board smarfer now makes 3x as much as the average RQ150 player (down from 4x as much). An advantage, but not as overwhelming. Interestingly the change is because the average 4+board-smarfer's earnings have stayed about the same, where the average RQ150 player is now making 50% more. (The Smarfers are also now making 20% more than the 1% most active RQ150's that don't smarf as much, down from 33%).
That looks like a generally successful rebalance. Smarfing is still advantageous, just not by as much.
Why isn't everyone happy then?!
In terms of what was discussed above, about how generous a game is influencing how much you play a game, we've seen a positive effect across most players - they are making more money (mostly due to end-of-event prizes), so they stick with the game longer.
For the most active smarfers, especially those that don't like clubs, obviously things feel worse. Some of them play less, or play a bit more to make the same amount of cash. Lest anyone got the wrong idea, we certainly didn't expect those players to start spending more money instead - we know that you get used to how things are, getting less than that feels terrible, and you're not going to be more inclined to spend. This was the biggest cost of doing the rebalance, and we wouldn't stick with it if we didn't honestly think it was important to the long-term health of the game.
Disenchanted players will also get a compounding effect of the 'rising competition' hypothesis - if you gave up on smurfing and/or don't play Club events and/or are generally less active, you will find it harder to compete; if competition is also rising that effect will be even more noticeable.
Now what?
The next question for me is how to assess the 'rising competition' factor. As I said, there's a few ways to measure it. One could look at how many CF's people who make T1 in a Final tend to buy, but that's going to vary a lot - in the RWD UK Final earlier this year, for example, I suspect T1 winners were overwhelmingly players that already had excellent hands already. How we measure it, and what we should do about, are what I'm going to be looking into next.
I understand the logic of a lot of what you’re saying. I do still have an issue with the the smarfing point. The highest rewards in these events are only available to a handful of people in each bracket. Unless you have a Top 10, or better still Top 2 hand, the returns for playing an event normally are incredibly low. There is simply no incentive to upgrade cars for these individual events.
And smarfers do do still generate revenue - I would imagine that we watch more ads than any other player group!
If I can’t generate cash from smarfing then I can’t upgrade cars for Prize Car events either.
My simple question for you is this - what actual harm did it do to the game or other users when the prize boards were higher and smarfing more lucrative? I always think of it as being like the side missions in Far Cry - I might not want to have to hunt a bunch of animals to upgrade my ammo pouch, but I need more bullets if I’m going to finish the main missions. That’s what smarfing really is, and to that end I really still don’t see a problem with it.
What you (not Tim, but Hutch) did with Support policy is very stupid.
Every month I spent about 200-500€, that's not much yeah, but I think you get more money from small regular transactions than few big spenders. Now I'm done. I already sold half of my garage, I'm not playing in events. After few finals I maybe will sell all the rest cars.
yes, only me is not a big loss, but I'm. not alone. I can name many names of big players who already quit, shared their accounts or are about to quit.
But I guess it's still not a big loss for you, it's a natural flow of players coming/leaving, so you actually don't care. You will always have new vip players.
At the end I just want to curse all hutch employees who are responsible for that, you ruined excellent game, which could become even much better.
Bye.
There's quotes and statements from players and some very nice platitudes from Tim after, but I dont see any validation of the points being made. Maybe I'm missing his points, if so, that's on me.
I'm fairly certain in the past that it was mentioned that the heaviest of Smarfers were a vast minority of players. So why oh why single that style of play out for the nerfiest of nerfs. It's the proverbial sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Forget the megalodons, I'm not even on TimButs level of spending by any means but I have now spent at least £150, which is by far and away the most I have ever spent on any game on any platform.
It's been said a hundred times before but the FUN has gone from the game. Please stop focusing on the amount of freebies, the monetary value of rewards v prizeboards or how X% of X% now earn X% more than Whaley McWhaleyface etc. I loved this game, now it's a chore. My playtime has reduced since PL8 along with my enjoyment in the game. Do I still spend? Yes, despite my best intentions not to. However, if I was enjoying the game you can bet your **** I would spend a lot more.