Pathfinder Adventures Dev Blog: Changes to Chests

[Aarik D]

Hey everyone,

 

Pathfinder Adventures Dev blog is now live. Check out the changes coming to chests in the next patch.

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/blog/8/entry-195-changes-coming-to-chests/

 

Thanks!

[nsr]

Well this isn't good.  So for the people who paid for the full game, the gold earned is now less useful.

[ryanmrich]

So Daily gold..... nearly worthless

[Jasta]

Hmm... the whole gold thing never really made sense to me.

Buying extra characters, adventures and chests directly with real money makes sense... gold seemed kind of tacked on.

 

What would be great would be in-game stores that sell things via gold - one of those things being a chest would be fine. If the shop had a selection of chest cards each week you could directly buy for gold? (maybe give it straight to a character for a considerable fee?)

[Bajie]

So i just have to buy Chest multiple times instead of bulk and not got freebie chest. Ouch..

 

I wonder why not make both options available..gold and realmoney for buying chest?

[Ethics Gradient]

So Daily gold..... nearly worthless

Not a colossal change really.  20,000 gold still buys 40 chests if you mash the button 40 times.  

 

The previous system was pretty generous to the F2P crowd.  Now they're just offering a cash discount to those who want to use real money to open chests a truckload at a time.  It would be nice if the option to use gold would stick around, but I can totally understand why they are focusing a little more on players who have expressed the concern of "Why does it require so much button pressing to give you my dollars!!!"

 

[Exhibit A]

Edited August 26, 2016 by Ethics Gradient

[nsr]

Actually 20,000 gold currently gets you 50 chests.  After the change, you'd only get 40.

[Ethics Gradient]

Actually 20,000 gold currently gets you 50 chests.  After the change, you'd only get 40.

Right.  I guess I meant to say that the current "bonus" will soon only apply to cash purchases.  40 chests for 20,000 was the original asking price back around launch, so the only thing that will really change is how many times you need to hit the "buy" button.

[nsr]

 

Actually 20,000 gold currently gets you 50 chests.  After the change, you'd only get 40.

Right.  I guess I meant to say that the current "bonus" will soon only apply to cash purchases.  40 chests for 20,000 was the original asking price back around launch, so the only thing that will really change is how many times you need to hit the "buy" button.

 

I had to look up the old patch notes, but it seems like the original asking price was for "40 + 10".

[TheSoulflame]

I think the change is fine.

Yeah the free gold is worth a bit less. On the other hand, you don't have to accumulate to 20,000 to get the most out of your gold.

Because that was what I was doing, and probably a lot more people: free stuff means people feel they miss out unless you go for the max discount (20k gold), but the grind is super long, so that might make people lose interest.

Even more; if you get a lot of duplicates, you are spending a long time after that purchase to clean it all up, then you probably have a long grind ahead again.

In short: the old system with discount created (for some people) a very long grindy experience, which is not good for a mobile game.

 

 

The change makes you cash in that gold a bit faster, getting you faster rewards, which you can then find and be happy about.

Yes you lose some free stuff, and you had the option to pay 500 per chest anyway (but you didn't do that, did you?)

So personally, I think I am happy with the change.

 

Sadly, I am still waiting the announcement of the iPad mini 5 (so the mini 4 drops in price), because since 2 patches or so ago, my Mini generation 1 doesn't cut it anymore and doesn't load any story/quest .

Hopefully in 1 more month I can get back to Pathfinder!

[Archangelrey]

My question is can you still use gold for add-on and new mission decks?

[da_mayor]

Yeah, this saps some joy out of accumulating gold if you have the Bundle.  Grinding for 20K is no longer going to be a thing.  I'm kinda sad to see it go.

[Slide87]

I think that gold could be used by something else,not counting treasure chests...like cards xD

[Aarik D]

My question is can you still use gold for add-on and new mission decks?

Yep!

[Archangelrey]

Thanks, Aarik!

[Pediatron]

Have to say I am disappointed to lose the 20 percent that we were getting by saving up 20,000 gold. It was really fun to spend 10 days earning 20,000, buy 50 chests, then spend the next 10 days opening 5 per day -- kinda felt like Christmas morning every day. Now it will take 20 percent longer. Very disappointing for me. Might just stop bothering with the chests or the daily gold that I used to help farm that 20,000.

[zarrick13]

So the issue I have with this is that it's being marketed as a positive change instead of as a necessary evil.  Taking away the gold option for chest bundles is not an improvement.  And it's not a reaction to requests.  I would be willing to bet there were literally no people saying 'gee I wish these didn't cost gold at all and only cost money so I could buy them in bulk'.  Gold AND/OR Money?  Sure.  That option should exist.  But making it more annoying to spend the free resource doesn't equal more money for you guys, and sure doesn't improve the game at all.

 

You want to change it, fine.  I'll accept that you don't want to hand out free chests to folks who already bought parts of your game and were using the gold they earned playing for bulk chest purchases.  It feels like a very petty move on your part, but it beats not letting you buy any chests at all for gold, which I am sure came up in some meeting or another. 

 

Just don't tout it as some kind of thing you added on for our benefit.  Nothing stinks worse than corporate spin.

[kurtalb1]

Considering anything that comes from chests is bonus material that isn't even in the actual board game and it can basically be gained for free, I have no problem with this minor change. When I payed for the full game on day one I really didn't even know what to expect from chests. They just became an added plus for me.

[Borissimo]

I'm with Zarrick on this one. If Obsidian had come out and said, "We're removing the bonus chests when you buy chests with gold because we want more players to buy chests with money," I'd have been okay with it. That would have been honest and forthcoming. Instead, they're blatantly reducing the value of gold while acting as if it's some kind of positive change for the player. Uh, making me hit the "buy" button 40 times instead of 1 time when I buy 20k gold worth of chests and robbing me of 10 chests in the process is not a positive, guys.

 

Hey, Obsidian. We're not idiots. You want to make more money, fine. But don't insult our intelligence in the process.

[Chris_R]

Nathan, we know you're no dummy and you'd have known this change wouldn't be the most popular thing ever, so thanks for outing with it now.

 

That said, I tend to agree with Zarrick as well. You guys have been pretty open that the pricing structure of the add-ons and so on is still beiing tweaked. By and large I think we're all big boys and girls and I feel you might have been better just saying 'the pricing structure isn't quite working as we want at the moment and we're going to make some changes we think might work better'. Personally, given the choice between getting chests a little more conveniently and cheaply, and Obsidian and Paizo being sufficiently happy with the game revenue that you get to carry on developing, I think after less than one second's thought, I'll opt for the latter, and I doubt I'm alone.

 

So I guess I have a simple question - do you anticipate that there might be more changes to the way gold/purchases in the future? (just interested I guess).

Edited August 27, 2016 by Chris_R

[Bajie]

Maybe they'll revert it back in future patch? *fingers crossed*

 

I'm good with not getting bonus chests, those that pay should be given incentive. But this seems like a step forward, two steps backward thing in design when both options could be used.

 

More options, better for the game IMHO.

[PinkRose]

The part most posters are missing is that 50,000 downloads have been made and only 17 people have posted here caring at all.

Forums are notorious for sounding like the whole gaming community when in actuality, we are a small, small piece.

Obsidian knows what they are doing.

[Borissimo]

But Pink, the blog post IS for the 17 of us who are online, posting and caring, so calling out Obsidian for treating us like dunces is pretty fair.

[PinkRose]

Blog posts and forum posts don't reach the same crowd in my opinion.

[Chris_R]

The part most posters are missing is that 50,000 downloads have been made and only 17 people have posted here caring at all.

Forums are notorious for sounding like the whole gaming community when in actuality, we are a small, small piece.

Obsidian knows what they are doing.

 

That's true PinkRose, and important to bear in mind whenever you think you're speaking for anyone other than yourself online.

 

That said, I think there's a larger point to be made. Permit me to digress slightly.

 

When Paizo announced the PACG app - and developed by Obsidian to boot! - my first thought (after 'Wow!') was 'Day 1 buy', and so I did, and I have not regretted it one second or one penny.

 

My second thought was when I read that this was Obsidian's first mobile app and it was 'Hmm, do they really know what they're getting into?' Obsidian specialise in really, really good cRPGS, we all know that. PACG has some of the complexity of a cRPG with the many, many dependencies and interactions of the cards, but as it's a mobile app, the pricing structure is completely different.

 

I felt for Obsidian at launch as we know the app got a reputation for being excellent, but buggy (and unfortunately that's the rep Obsidian have for their games - they try to push the envelope when they produce a game and the envelope often pushes back). It'll feature in all the mobile GoTY lists for 2016, as it should, but all the reviews will mention bugs.

 

With that in mind, Obsidian quite rightly want those end of year reviews to say 'it launched with bugs but they're all squashed now and development continues and you should get this game because it is awesome and it is not a 3.8 game (the current score on the Play store, which makes me sad when I see it and I didn't even work on the game)'. And that is almost certainly a good reason why AD4 is delayed. And another good reason is probably that the game is just complex. It's very complicated for a mobile app and they can't charge $50 a go for it like they do for the cRPG to make the dev costs back more easily. I have got a great deal more out of it than I have from many oher electronic buys - only the Sentinels of the Multiverse app and Inkle's amazing stable of adventure games (GO AND PLAY 80 DAYS AND THE SORCERY SERIES NOW) have provided anything like the value PACG has on mobile, but the market is the market and they can only price as the market demands.

 

So, we get that the chest pricing structure needs tweaking as it's not working as optimally as hoped. We get that AD4 is going to be a bit late because it's important to get all of it right so we can hopefully see more PACG development. I want Skull and Shackles. I want Wrath of the Righteous. The confines of the English language make it hard to overstate how much I want the goblin Class Decks.

 

And I think it might work if Obsidian felt they could talk to us a little more as if they felt we were all part of a community and not as if we're about to leap down their throat every time they changed things.

Edited August 28, 2016 by Chris_R