Shop items
Alright, with the newest update going for the removal of QC(which I don't really care that much as long as they make the kinetic system better) we've got yet another gameplay affecting item coming to the shop. On one hand, they're going to remove one way of infi farms but on the other a lot of folks who have enough money to spend can just buy a ton of all that stuff in anyway. Which is a lovely pay-to-win dillema. I get that there's a need for funds that they need for running servers etc., But there is a lot of stuff that the community has been asking for, for a looong while now, that could be added.
Instead of having a ton of gameplay items ready to buy in shops they could easily go for the cosmetics, with so many options, give people more customisation of things like UI and sound effects. And all of these things are client sided too, so none of it would add more stress on the server side of things.
From previous versions themes, sound effects to choosing different colors to specific UI aspects, XM colors, portals, fields, links, different map layout themes, so forth. The amount of individual items and packs they could make with this could be fairly big. And I'm pretty certain a lot of people would go into that fulheartedly.
Thoughts?
Comments
XM colours is one thing I’ve wanted for a while, but apparently that’s a server side change when we have Pride etc., which is a shame as I’d love differently coloured XM that I could change whenever.
A voice pack is an interesting one, to change it from ADA. Maybe some celebrity voice actors? Imagine John DiMaggio (Bender) yelling “Hypercube disengaged, meatbag!” at you.
I like the different avatars we can get such as Toast, but add more. Easy ones like a Portal Shield etc. that already have the assets in the game. Holiday ones, let me buy a Pumpkin at Halloween, that I can then keep on forever.
With all the money they have coming in now you would think they would spend some of it on advertising the game to encourage new players. Without players the game is pretty dull.
or fix the ongoing lag would be nice⚡
If everyone quits the lag fixes itself
I would pay to never see pride or Halloween or whatever xm again. Leave it alone.
Kinetic Capsules should have been a "purchase only" item from the start, and not hackable. They're a premium item. Making them hackable just undervalued them.
Instead of having a ton of gameplay items ready to buy in shops they could easily go for the cosmetics, with so many options, give people more customisation of things like UI and sound effects. And all of these things are client sided too, so none of it would add more stress on the server side of things.
This needs to be made clear.
"One off purchase" is not a good business model alone. Cosmetics are only relevant if they need to be purchased repeatedly. One purchase will be a high dev cost for a low uptake and revenue.
One good example of a cosmetic however, is the color swatches for Rare capsules. E.g. buy a "green swatch" and apply it to a capsule and that capsule then appears green in the inventory and that's your Keys for an operation. And buy a pink one for a different capsule that holds the VRLA you've been holding for years.
While I get that one-off purchases don't bring as much revenue in, if they wanted to get rid of infinite grinds with QCs with this update and making portal farms more popular again, as some other people have suggested in these forums, allowing unlimited purchases of so many items for currency kinda defeats that goal. At the very least they should put a limit on how much you can get at a time, but imo there should also be less gameplay affecting things in general in there.
It's already hard enough defending ever since the sync problems showed up with prime, if you're a casual player, knowing that the attackers can probably just buy more on the spot to keep attacking is pretty demoralising.
The color swatches idea would be really useful too. Kinda how you can buy diff colored key lockers already. Heck, you can make those a one usage per capsule purchase "paint" or whatever too.
If they were to add more customisation options in that direction, they could probably make it a toggle option, if you want your XM to change during events or not as well, I suppose.
We tried to get more avatars for last Christmas and Halloween.
I got the impression from Thia that they are too busy with new features, eg Machina, that cosmetics aren't on the list of things to do.
Voice packs would require the game to use a text-to-speech engine. Some of the voice effects, I personally prefer the voice actress that did them. How would a text-to-speech engine work in tandem with existing voice clips?
I've put forth the idea for the text-to-speech engine a number of times. It would certainly help non-English and non-Japanese speaking players
Currency is far harder to acquire than extra accounts and some quantums, and quantums don't bring in any revenue, so while I doubt the QC removal is to encourage purchases (it's to reduce computing cost and thus expenses) the comparison is a false equivalence.
Machina has now at least launched, so I guess they have a little bit of extra time/resources to do something extra.
It is a part of a bigger plan.
The only way for the Ingress team to finish their plans, and finish a lot of other half finished projects, and also add cosmetics is to hire more team members.
And that requires $$$