The Shrine

I downloaded Marvel Heroes 2015 and decided to check out the bundle and found that they're as usual, terrible deals found in F2P games. Would it really be that bad if you could actually pay for the price of roughly the typical box ($20-$60, depending on type of game) that gets you stuff that's, um, comparable to a boxed game? There's still the usual P2W stuff you can sell later. Sure people might be stupid, but 'all this junk for your SoJ' didn't work in Diablo 2 and it's probably not the best way to make money. If you got a whale he won't stop at buying your $50 special bundle, not to mention those are generally outright worse than just buying the most expensive package for premium currency which a whale definitely can afford. I did some quick math and I'm pretty sure for the price of Diablo 3, you can have a far inferior experience in MH2015 because that'd barely be enough to buy you stuff that'd make the game playable... or you can just get Diablo 3. Sure maybe you can argue the game gets better if you play more or spend more, but would it really be a bad idea if you get something roughly comparable to Diablo 3 after spending an amount of money equal to the cost of Diablo 3? After all, Diablo 3 seems to be doing pretty good in terms of sales and I think it's not even very good, but that doesn't mean 'charge more for even less stuff' is going to work.

I've been playing Marvel Heroes for a while and there is no P2W stuff let alone P2W items that you can sell later to other players. Even most boosts can be earned without giving them money. Their bundles are pretty shitty in terms of cost but everything is pretty easy to buy with stuff you earn in game so no one really seems to care.

But, yeah, anything you can equip is gated behind content or collectibles, that even with a massive amount of boosts you may see drop every 90 seconds as opposed to 120.

At its worst the game is way too grindy since collectibles tend to be gated behind time played (eternity slivers for example are what let you buy heroes, team ups, etc. and are set to drop every ~8 minutes as opposed to RNG).

Edit: Looking back, League of Legends was the only F2P game that I recall with a decent bundle. Back before its official release I bought some $30-50 bundle and received nearly every released hero up to that point.

Edit 2: If you want a properly made F2P game, Path of Exile is getting another free expansion today or tomorrow so it's a good time to jump in.

Maybe MH2015 isn't P2W but it sure is pretty limiting to have to collect 200 of those drops to try out a hero that you've no idea how he'll play. If it's supposed to drop one every 8 minutes then it figures out to 1600 minutes or close to 30 hours to get another hero. That's completely unacceptable and I checked the price for paying it's close to $10 per hero I think if you use the premium currency, which is unacceptable when you don't even know how any particular hero will play like. No you don't need all the heroes to play the game but you also can't just blindly buy one for $10 and hope it somehow works.

When the test realm is up you can essentially try them all out for free when they furnish you with their currency so you can buy out what they want you to test, but you don't really have to do that. Your account may have to have some age on it to get on the test realm, and I forget how much since I've never bothered learning much about it.

You can read about how well a character plays by going to their forum. The only one that's remotely unplayable is probably Ghost Rider although a few more rope you into certain builds to be effective. While going to a game's forums shouldn't be a necessary activity, I've never found it to be too big of a deal since the heroes cost so much time or cash to put a little research into it. Taking a lot of F2P games into account these prices aren't all that bad. You are coming from a lot of time put into MPQ. How many dozens of hours or $100s of dollars were people putting into those accounts full of three star characters? Presuming these people were getting at least one three star cover of each power and then maxing them out with HP, they were spending $80-$90 (and probably buying the $100 point pack). I don't even want to hazard a guess at how many dozens of hours it would take to raise 12000 HP, or how few people actually came by their covers through RNG and rewards. This game there's at least a ceiling on how much you'd ever actually have to give them in cash before you'd put enough hours into the game to essentially buy what you'd want from them using their dropped currency for the forseeable future.

And, god, I didn't even bother taking MPQ isotope into account for how much it costs for a hero to level up without putting in time and effort.

Also you get 200 eternity shards just for playing through the story, which helps things along. When you're starting out people actually recommend you buy random hero tokens (175 ES) until you have something like half of the heroes. Although my school of thought is that you save for the heroes you want first before wading into RNG territory.

A few of the hero packs are 50% off on Steam (and only on Steam) for the next few days so that's worth taking a gander at. All of the heroes they've put up except Cable (apparently Steam limits them to a handful of DLC listings because they're F2P) are in a strong place. They aren't a lot cheaper than in game (and in a way.. they're more expensive), but buying a hero's bundle gets you their hero specific stash (where you can put items bound to them or things that drop specifically for them (uniques, armor, weapons)), and some RNG HEAVY 'fortune cards', as well as a costume or two.

MPQ is a game you can easily deduce how powerful a hero is likely to be by just reading his base level stats, and the maxed out stats are easily available online. You can see that Nick Fury creates 7 traps that do 1500 damage each which is more than the HP of just about any character you have so he is pretty powerful, while Wolverine X Force does like 2500 + 3 rows of tile damage which is considerably less so he's probably not as good. Most of the money is spent by guys trying to max out Nick Fury overnight (which would probably be around $500) or a particularly overpowered character that was just released (Sentry, Daken). In those cases there was never any question those characters are way overpowered and in Sentry's case, you can see how powerful he is in his release event when you're loaned a level 90 version of him, while Daken was always known to be way overpowered. It's not like people are randomly leveling up a marginal character like Captain Marvel and found out she sucks. The only character I know of in MPQ people leveled up blindly was Deadpool, who apparently had some kind of fanatic following. It's actually pretty obvious from his skillset that he's merely average and certainly not worth dropping $200 to max out immediately.

A game like Diablo or MH2015 it's not sufficient to just read what a skill does in damage to figure out what works best because there's a lot more than that. You pretty much can never figure out how to build a character by just reading the skill description unless you had something like the original Firewall in Diablo 2 that just did a ridiculous amount of damage. For example Hydra's damage numbers are low but it fires fast to make up for that, and you're never given Hydra's rate of fire so the only way to tell is try it out, but at least in Diablo 3 you can respec for free.

And even if you don't care about who is strong, you don't even know how any of those characters play like. There are people who prefer a certain kind of style whether it's melee or ranged or summon minions, but you can't just ask people to plop down $10 to try some guy that can summon minions without knowing anything else about the said character.

Most people end up buying into characters after seeing other people play them and asking about the particulars in social chat. Basically the players are simultaneously their source of marketing and profit. I caught the players last week even remarking how little the developers seem to advertise the game and yet it still sees enough surges in population for them to have needed to add new servers a few days ago to accommodate the growing population.

My real point in comparing it to MPQ was that if you ever dropped $200 on Marvel Heroes, you would never really need to spend a dime on the game ever again. By the time you got through leveling up the 35-40 heroes $200 got you, you would have enough ES to buy the 5-10 heroes that came out on the mean time with some left over. Mean while, whenever MPQ releases someone new, people are dropping another $1-200 for one character that may be nerfed to uselessness in a week. At least with Marvel Heroes they have to dangle you on the line by doing their best to keep the characters you buy fun.

In the end, people are mostly buying characters because either they've seen them played by others and think they're awesome or they're fans from the comics/movies. This is something that can't really happen in MPQ. MPQ likely has a ton of people playing that know next to nothing about the Marvel characters, whereas if you aren't a fan then you'll probably find Marvel Heroes to be pretty shitty. It's the same with games like Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, and basically any other niche F2P game.

$200 is an awful a lot of money to spend on faith. Sure I know a lot of people do spend money like that but why would you have reason to believe MH2015 is going to be better than Diablo 3 at twice the cost (adding expansion)? And people absolutely did spent money on Psylocke and Deadpool just because of who they are, even though it's easy to deduce that they are both at best average character compared to the rest of the 3*. The difference is that you also had a good idea of what you're getting in Psylocke by looking at her abilities even if you were going to buy her anyway. I don't see how you can possibly deduce that from MH2015. Sure you can probably say the character ought to be playable, but that's not enough for me to spend $10 on something.

And I don't mean this to be just against MH2015. There are a whole mess of F2P games that require you to spend a large amount of money for something that's totally unproven and likely far worse than their boxed counterpart. Sure maybe some of them do turn out to be quite good but the vast majority of those suck.

I'm not saying you need to spend $200 to enjoy Marvel Heroes, I'm just saying that if someone spent a comparatively paltry amount of money on it compared to MPQ, you'd never have to spend a dime again, where in MPQ they're going to just come out with another ~2 characters a month for you to spend hundreds of dollars on.

Most players just don't need to do actual number crunching to buy a character. Marvel Heroes isn't a game people should play to play the best hero or crunch the highest numbers. It's about finding a hero you enjoy and having fun with that, not like other action RPGs where the playerbase is constantly having a shit fit over balance.

If you bought Psilocke in Marvel Heroes you'd expect her to fuck shit up with her psychic powers while cutting fools down with her katana that get too close. You'd be right. That's all there really is to buying and enjoying a hero in Marvel Heroes. If you like what someone does in the movies or comics, there's going to be a skill tree that mirrors that.

If the story, gameplay, and the promise of getting a non-starter hero that you actually like somewhere down the line isn't enough to hold you, then yeah, you're probably never going to like Marvel Heroes.

A lot of it has to do with supply and demand. The pricing models are geared toward the spending habits of spenders; which may include a large number who are willing to make $10 purchases on the products. If only a minimal number of people drop off from spending $10 on a hero vs $3, then the hero should cost $10.

That's just the theory about boiling a frog by slowly heating up the water, which isn't even true (the frog will eventually jump out if it's too hot). WoW recently announced they're raising the subscription price in UK by 1 pound per month. According to the F2P theory nobody would even care but there are a lot of complaining and it seems like people will actually quit over it. People notice stuff like an expansion that used to cost $30 now costs $40, and we're talking about games that are generally considered as much higher quality than what you can find in F2P. That is, we usually have reason to believe that an expansion from Blizzard is going to deliver fairly quality goods as opposed to another new cash shop item from a random F2P.

Maybe those model would work if you don't care about your reputation and only attempt to make money once, but even that is assuming people are unrealistically stupid. To use MPQ as an example, which seems to be played by exactly the same kind of guy that'd play MH2015 (fans of Marvel that happens to like games of that genre), Psylocke had a lot of following but there are very few maxed out Psylockes because she's just not competitive at the top tier. There was a huge spike in revenue according to the mobile trackers during the Deadpool release event but again, there aren't very many maxed out Deadpools, because he's not competitive against the top tier either. While it's likely easier to figure out who is strong in MPQ compared to MH2015 (though that's hard to say based on looking for the guys needing advice), it's certainly no harder to figure out than what class is powerful in a MMORPG which is figured out very quickly. The only way it'd work is if you've no reputation so you've a situation like 'haha you bought the useless guy for $10 thanks for the money' but I think even the greediest F2P aren't burning their bridges that quickly. There are plenty of statistics that show it's over 90% of the guys who never spend any money on the game in a F2P, so why would you ever assume people will impulsely buy way overpriced stuff? Yes the whales will buy whatever they want but you also need the game to be actually good, and I don't see how offering ridiculous deals on unproven games is supposed to get their attention.