Credits for Cash

[Alex]

Current redemption price for credits is $1,000,000 each, but they average around $1.5-2m on the market. 

 

However, less and less people are buying credits each month, a large portion of people are using their credits for VIP and player advertisements, which are both good things, but unfortunately that's not everyone, and a small chunk of usual sales.

 

I thought that spending more money on advertising to bring in more players would ultimately lead to more credit purchases, but that doesn't appear to be the case either. I'm trying to come up with ways that we can increase the number of credits that are purchased, which ultimately stems from the value of the credits.

 

What can we do to increase the value? With the amount of money that alliance banks have stored these days, it doesn't seem that anyone really needs to buy extra money. One thought I have is increasing their infrastructure value from 50 to 100. Yes, that would mean large players could build even larger cities, but extra infra only does so much. Extra slots aren't really needed for large players, and we see stagnant growth in cities due to infra costs. If we could make it easier for larger nations to get infra at high levels, we might see bigger cities (more damage to do in your wars ) and an increase in demand for credits.

 

The other option is to simply increase the amount of money they can be redeemed for. Again, I don't want a pay to win game, but it's kind of a necessary evil of the monetary inflation in-game.

 

I guess my question for everyone is, at what monetary benefit ($1,000,000? $1,500,000? $2,000,000? $3,000,000? $5,000,000?) would you be willing to spend money to buy a credit? I think we're below the equilibrium point currently and have a shortage of demand, so I'm trying to figure out how to change that.

[Nadir Aminu]

If the credit is risen to 5 million, I would buy so much if I had the money.

[Croc]

100 infra in a large fully developed nation works out to around 25k a day in income, if I remember correctly.

[Dan77]

I've already mentioned customer service in a previous thread, so I won't go over old ground repeating it in detail but it is a key issue for people who are spending money on things.

 

Make the game more interesting.  Encourage more war.  I know quite a few people who are just going through the motions at the moment, unsure whether they will continue to play.  The game discourages war and the alliances also discourage war.  Find a way to blow the treaty web to pieces or make it less of an issue.

 

With more war and less treaty web, people will be forced into holding a standing army.  There are a great many people with hardly any army who know they can militarise just ahead of an alliance war.  In the meantime, just being a member of their alliance means they are safe.  People don't need the money from credits when there isn't much war and they aren't having to pay upkeep.  1 credit might be half a days revenue.  Reducing those people's revenue somehow would probably be more effective than raising the value of credits.

 

Here's a few ideas:

• Remove the additional upkeep costs during war.
• Make a proportion of the slots military only (perhaps base on the 10% military score recommendation).
• Bring treaties in game and charge for them (do away with optional pacts because they are meaningless).
• Limit treaties to 2 per alliance.  Make them decide what's really important to them rather than being like Pokemon (gotta catch 'em all).
• Automatically boot people from alliances when they hit 7 days inactive (unless they are on vacation mode).
• Add missions which encourage war.  This one would probably need another thread for itself.  Loads of possibilities here.
• Bring in conditions where opponents can be prevented from firing missiles/nukes.  At the moment, if you go to war with a nuke nation, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose money, even if you are hammering them in conventional warfare.
• Increase military upkeep costs for every week without a battle.

Those are just a few quick ideas.  I'm sure some of them won't be popular.

 

There are a lot of people with the means to pay for credits who simply don't want to because they don't think it's worth it.  Raising the value of credits would perhaps make everyone else at a larger disadvantage which isn't great for growing the game.  Not everyone has the means to invest money monthly in an online game but they still make a contribution to the overall health and appeal of the game, so shouldn't be disadvantaged too much.

Edited October 12, 2015 by Dan77

[Dark Specter]

(Remove the additional upkeep costs during war.)----- if this means reducing the cost of military units during war by making them cheaper to purchase then I agree.

 

(Make a proportion of the slots military only (perhaps base on the 10% military score recommendation.)---- I'm not sure what you mean by this?

 

(Bring treaties in game and charge for them (do away with optional pacts because they are meaningless.)--- keep treaties out of in game and putting a tag on treaties is just terrible. People will go around this by doing what is being done now with treaties which is talking on irc and on alliance forums and then working out a treaty and posting it on the owf.

 

(Limit treaties to 2 per alliance. Make them decide what's really important to them rather than being like Pokemon (gotta catch 'em all).---- alliances shouldn't be hindered on how many treaties they can have. If you don't like them having a lot of treaties then grow some balls and dow them or find a way to cause the relationship between alliances to collapse forcing them to end the treaty that they have.

 

(Automatically boot people from alliances when they hit 7 days inactive (unless they are on vacation mode). Just no

 

(Add missions which encourage war. This one would probably need another thread for itself. Loads of possibilities here.) I can agree with this.

 

(Bring in conditions where opponents can be prevented from firing missiles/nukes. At the moment, if you go to war with a nuke nation, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose money, even if you are hammering them in conventional warfare.) just plain no. There shouldn't be conditions that will prevent someone from firing a missile or nuke. These are powerful weapons that can cause great damage to enemies which is the goal of a war.

 

(Increase military upkeep costs for every week without a battle.) no, if this gets implemented then everyone can just sell off their militaries to avoid the increasing upkeep and only mobilize when they get wind of war.

 

(1 credit might be half a days revenue. Reducing those people's revenue somehow would probably be more effective than raising the value of credits.)----- this is a very bad idea, reducing players revenue just to make them buy credits will only anger them and cause them to leave.

[Ekejen Luish]

How about you just eat pizzacake

[Dwemyrn]

If you're gonna raise the infra redemption, I'd like to prance around the idea again of making credits redeemable for land, custom currency, being able to redeem credits for one specific resource, the lottery thing you and I had discussed on irc, make vip exclusives, but vip exclusives not so shitty i.e. national background...yeah anyway so there's those ideas out in the open again.

[Moreau]

Give us shiny gems and tons of gold.

[TellUrGrlThx]

I like the kick inactives but I'd say 14 days instead of 7 days. It would save me the time of doing it myself for my alliance.

[Wayne]

Only thing I can think of is a resource boost. Double production for a week for a credit or something.  Pretty much nothing you could offer that I would buy though to be honest.

[Dwemyrn]

Oh also I blame lack of credit purchases on princess bubblegum. They need to purchase more trump ads to continue to plague the game...

[Nadir Aminu]

I bought one....

[Ayayay]

Raising infra to 100 is just pay to win at the worst (we're talking nearly $4 million worth of infra in the top tiers).

 

Ironically, I think credits are over saturated. Most people have a stockpile of credits that they are just sitting on until they need it (rebuilding for example) and due to the limit of redemption means that they don't really need more than 16 credits at any one point (8 credits can be redeemed at once but since it resets into the next month regardless of when you redeem it you could end up redeeming two months worth in just a few days time) A really big war could put a dent in the credit stockpiles bringing out more donations but until then I doubt there's really anything you can do to bring out more donations.

[Alex]

Some good points being made in this thread, and plenty of things to consider.

[Avruch]

I don't think the value of credits is the primary driver of change in how many are purchased or redeemed. The less stable and reliable the game, the less people are going to invest. There has been some turbulence recently, and a (hopefully short term) reduction in investment is a natural reaction. Stability over the long-term should result in a steady upward trend. 

 

But if you really need to increase credit sales, I would stay far away from cannibalizing your non-paying userbase by diving into p2w. The best revenue-generating non p2w schemes that I've seen rely on largely cosmetic options - badges, awards, access to stats or non-critical UX features, etc. Anything that can add to "perceived status" or give people something interesting to mess around with that doesn't affect the game is a good idea. 

 

Another thing is creating events where credits are required for entry (either individually or for teams). One example: Set up a war tournament on a separate server, allow people to pay a credit to enter themselves and/or their team, build template nations with identical starting points, and then set it to live. Award trophies in the real game to teams that win the tournament. That will encourage them to use the war features without fear of destroying their pixels, and get people involved in a part of the game that is rarely accessed otherwise. Obviously arena features are a popular game element throughout the online gaming industry, so no need to reinvent the wheel here. 

Edited October 12, 2015 by Avruch

[Dimitri Valko]

I think the most credits are being spent on alliances, so perhaps more options for alliances to use credits, like...

1 credit per link to the P&W Wiki...

1 credit per month auto-kick with a custom timer for when it kicks inactives...

and more stuff like that.

[Atzuya]

How about that one idea where 1 credit would increase your gross income by a certain percentage or a number for an entire month? I couldn't find the thread, but I think it's quite a good idea to get older nations to start using credits for some actual ingame benefit.

[Lu Xun]

Atzuya basically has it right; scaling credits with account strength is a good option, but at the same time, what this will eventually result in is credit trading, i.e, everyone routes credits to the largest nations that need them, and a percent will be returned back to the original buyer.

 

This will result in large nations being able to play essentially for free, or be able to inconvenience smaller nations based on being able to obtain multiplier bonuses from credit-fueled growth, so what would make sense would be both a scaling and anti-scaling factor; i.e, a nation that makes 200,000 a day would receive more than a nation that makes 100,000 a day, but it wouldn't be by a factor of 1.

[Alex]

Lots of good stuff in here, thanks to everyone who's shared their thoughts.

[ELPINCHAZO]

I think I've said things like this before but Alliance level things like credits for...

 

• special stats/dashboards.
• Allow an AA to set taxes by member level
• More customization of member levels and permissions
• Custom inactive autokick
• AA account direct access to the market
• allow AAs to award custom ribbons/medals/awards to members

After that anything that just isn't entirely cosmetic is probably going to start going down the pay-to-play path because its just going to be bonuses that effect game-play directly.

 

I think you're tapping out what you're likely going to get for credits without completely unbalancing the game.

[Avruch]

Or: pay 10 credits per 50 people to protect your alliance from infra damage for a month. 

[Moon Man]

maybe divide the credit. Make it so that the credit as it is today is worth 10 credits, but divide the benefits as well. People would be more willing to spend smaller amounts of money at a time, but it would add up to more money invested in the game overall. Also, maybe allowing you to upgrade an improvement with a credit. Upgraded improvements would be slightly more effective than non-upgraded improvements (maybe 10% increase in effectiveness), but would not take up another resource slot. Allow people to upgrade improvements with in game cash, but have it be very expensive, and it scales with the more upgrades. Using a credit would upgrade it one up regardless of improvement level

[Peace and War]

Stop allowing players to sell credits?

[Dan77]

Stop allowing players to sell credits?

 

That's actually quite a good (and simple) idea.  That way everyone who wants VIP or to put an advert up, etc has to buy credits.  At the moment they can simply buy them off the market without really missing the cash too much.

 

Maybe the value of them would then need to be doubled?  Either way it would help.

[Dwemyrn]

I think the most credits are being spent on alliances, so perhaps more options for alliances to use credits, like...

1 credit per link to the P&W Wiki...

1 credit per month auto-kick with a custom timer for when it kicks inactives...

and more stuff like that.

I am for anything to customize my nation or my alliance. The more options I have, the more likely I am to donate. I've donated for just about everything there is now so the only real thing keeping me on a donation, is renewing VIP once a month.

 

How about that one idea where 1 credit would increase your gross income by a certain percentage or a number for an entire month? I couldn't find the thread, but I think it's quite a good idea to get older nations to start using credits for some actual ingame benefit.

1 credit = 1% income bonus would probably be the best way to go about it, but you'd want to do it in the same way credits are capped on redemption for cash or market selling. So right now 8 credits could get you an 8% revenue bonus, if your nation was a democracy this would be able to give you a 9% total bonus or does that sound too op?