Gold Use Needs Balancing

I agree. There are so many pay to win people out there and they just kill everything because they the sheer number of troops they have. Those people don't use any strategy at all. They just slaughter everyone within a few days. Also, Bytro labs wants to encourage gold use by making everything more expensive without raising the gold prices.

@redredrover: You are not alone in your opinion. Like you, I am an adult who understands the need for a significant income stream to support the development, operation and maintenance of the game software. Like the old military cliche said, "No bucks, no Buck Rogers."

It is ironic in the extreme that we (including Bytro Labs representatives) so often talk about the need for "balancing" and "re-balancing," but the biggest imbalances in the game as it exists are those that result from unlimited gold use, such as mass rocket-spamming. That's what the new upkeep costs for rockets were meant to address, but it remains to be seen whether it will simply reduce the ridiculously large rocket inventories some players were creating (more than 1,000 in some documented examples), but lead to more instant rocket-spamming when the rockets are actually needed and used.

I could easily devise a new reformed gold-spending system that emphasized accelerated unit research and the greater availability of a wider variety of unit types, but Bytro's brain trust is apparently convinced that a large, if not overwhelming percentage of gold expenditures are for the "instant armies" you described above (and they should know, since they have the ability to generate the statistics). That's the real sticking point. Unless and until Bytro is willing to consider a different model of gold-spending -- perhaps including per-game limits, per-hour limits, gold-free games with up-front buy-ins, gold games with upfront buy-ins, greater emphasis on gold-bought intelligence, etc. -- it is going to remain a point of controversy. My comments here are not a plea to do away with gold, but to reform its in-game uses, and to channel those uses in ways that add value to the game and add additional dollars and euros to Bytro Labs' bottom line. I enjoy Bytro's game, and I want Bytro to make money from it, preferably grotesque amounts of money which will incentivize them to maintain and improve the game indefinitely.

However, you and all subsequent commenters on this thread should BEWARE: anything that comes close to "denouncing gold," and/or commenting on players who use gold, WILL GET THIS THREAD SHUT DOWN AND DELETED by the forum moderators faster than lickety-split. If you cannot restrict your comments here to positive suggestions for maintaining and increasing gold purchases while reforming gold's in-game uses, please don't bother commenting at all. Whining will just get this thread deleted. Cheers.

@NukeRaider33: Please consider revising your comment above to remove references to "idiots," impugning the motives of Bytro Labs, etc. Such comments are why these "gold" threads usually get deleted so quickly. Thanks.

MontanaBB wrote:

gold-free games with up-front buy-ins

just like many others would also be willing to pay to have a game without gold usage..

It can definitely ruin the experience when you come across a very heavy gold user, albeit it is true , in most cases they have no strategy or any idea of game mechanics

DxC wrote:

"gold-free games with upfront buy-ins" . . . This is all that is needed. I've always argued for this option. I mean I'm spending a relatively huge chunk of my life playing one game. I'm willing to throw down a bit of cash to play a good game on an even playing field.

Well, if everyone had the same amount of gold to use it would still be even but would change the game so I don't see the point unless it made the game better for some reason. In anycase, Bytro knows how much they make on an average game, they could just make a gold free option that gives them the same average profit.

DxC wrote:

Bytro knows how much they make on an average game, they could just make a gold free option that gives them the same average profit.

so am I, except that they should up the prices on using gold (in game) as they up the prices on everything else. Upping the in game gold prices would also make more money for Bytro Labs, so I don't see why they don't do it

For the rest of the regular games, my suggestion would be to limit what gold does, definitely should be an advantage to use, but nothing instantaneous.

For example, limit the reduction in time to 1/2 or so. So say whatever a building takes to complete, even if already in progress, you can spend gold to reduce the production time in half and the same for units.

I've seen many suggestions about improving Gold in other posts. This one is particularly interesting in that it offers some new ideas on what you can do with your Gold.

(Click the link below)

Help us identify Gold Usage

There were several other good ideas in this thread that I feel could be helpful. Some of the ideas included a cooling down period after each type of Gold use, not being able to rush-research past 75% of any tech, and one incredible idea to limit having a Gold-free match to just one at a time while all other matches would be unlimited Gold. The guy who had that awesome and well-composed post had his work posted here. He explains it so eloquently and really puts the cookies on the bottom shelf for the rest of us to fully comprehend his idea. BTW, please "like" that last post. The author calls for others to endorse his suggestion in order to call more attention to it and make the development team at Bytro pay attention. I've "liked" it and so should you!

toot toot

Level the playing field; make everyone have an equal spending for equal benefits.

Huh?

Take High Command. It's like a subscription, everyone that has it pays the same.

Now, this idea comes from a different browser game called Tribal Wars (TW). It has a free version, that most new players are using. The game is fully operational, and all features (building, moving, fighting, everything) is available. However, the game is about empire-building and getting hundreds of villages. The free version allows you to click every village, see what it's doing, and adjust it (like, build something).

When you have hundreds of villages, this becomes an awful job. You have no idea what is going on in your empire, the villages don't issue any kind of warning like "I finished something, and I am idle now."

This is where the subscription comes in. If you pay a monthly fee, several handy overviews become available. Like, a list of all villages, and what they're doing, how far they are with that, what their status is, etcetera. There are several more, but lets focus on this one. Because it sounds familiar, right?

CoW has a "Province Overview" that does exactly that. It is free for everyone. You don't really need it when you are just starting out (you just have 4 or 5 cities, and you know perfectly well what they are doing and when they're done); but when your empire grows, it becomes indispensible.

For TW this meant, that all players who "counted in the world" payed the subscription fee (iirc it was about € 20 a month); the free version was only used by new players, until their empire grew to a level where it wasn't feasible to handle it anymore (or dropped out of the game, of course). Company happy, players happy.

I can easily imagine a similar subscription for CoW. If the province feature isn't "enough" incentive to get people to pay (and on the smaller maps that is well possible), some more features could be disabled:

- Zooming the map;

- Filtering the World Herald;

- "Add destination" feature for unit movement;

- leaving this thread here will generate many more ideas in less than a day.

Of course, the non-paying players should often get a "free-for-a-few-days" version, so they can feel what they are missing when it is taken away again... and I'm pretty sure that many of them would decide that it's actually worth it.

In the end, TW became the only browser game I ever payed for. The "Unlimited Gold" system tastes very bad in my mouth, and I don't want "real" in-game advantages over my fellow players, because a win wouldn't feel like a win anymore. But a subscription with the ONLY advantage making the actual gameplay (and thus "my life") easier, yeah, I'd pay for that. And I'm pretty sure that goes for a huge number of the player base.

I cant say I am an adult, so I just want to play the game and get free gold, best way in my mind. Plus when you play for gold you know you are working hard for it, unlike when you just buy it online and risk your credit card number

I can see that it would be reasonable to pay a modest amount of gold to join a "gold free" or "gold limited" map some of the time. Like the entry fee for a map is 10,000 gold, and you can spend that 10,000 gold in that game. I think that would address the complaints of gold spammers ruining folks experiences.

I can't say that I have encountered a severe gold spammer. I am probably being accused of that in a current game where I fielded 12 stacks of 12 to 14 units each on day 20 to the surprise of the remaining humans on the map. I must confess that I did use 2500 gold to buy either oil or steel during the first week, so maybe I am a gold spammer. lol.

VorlonFCW wrote:

I must confess that I did use 2500 gold to buy either oil or steel during the first week . . . .

My primary use of gold is to accelerate unit research when necessary to be able to produce some of the more exotic units, like aircraft carriers, and I make no apology for that. I run research 24/7 from the git-go, and it is simply impossible to work certain units into the research cycle while also researching all of the basic ground and air units you need. Maintaining a full research cycle is absolutely key to having an in-game army at full strength.

MontanaBB wrote:

That's a trivial amount of gold. I assume you know that

VorlonFCW wrote:

. . . meanwhile they are building militia and strategic bombers.

MontanaBB wrote:

Well, now there's a new "winning" strategy.