Non-time-limited buy-in option

I realize that you may have an excellent business model, but could you pretty please do a survey before the expansion / sequel, to get some idea about how many of us would love to send you money, if it was possible to unlock _everything_ in the game until the next expansion / sequel for a fixed price?

Even if the survey may be slightly skewered by people who say one thing and do another when the time comes, I really do feel that there are MANY of us who seriously want to send you money and unlock the full game experience, but who simply cannot make ourselves do so given the current options.

If you are reading this and agree, feel free to /sign this post to get a survey and hopefully a fixed price option for future expansions / sequals to Cardhunter.

 

I too am curious as to what the full game experience entails. This sort of CCG style game design, by default, is centered around two pillars: collecting/trading, and matches. If you could pay to get a full playset of cards (ala Starcitygames for Magic), the collecting bit becomes a bit bunk, and then it all hinges on matches as the entire play experience. However, the competitive scene doesn't seem to be very robust as yet in terms of player numbers and the metagame - devs are busy collecting data on dominant strategies and tuning to fix degenerate strategies, I hope. Hence my curiosity as to what constitutes a full game experience for other players.

 

The basic edition at 25$ offers the 11 treasure hunts, 1 month club membership, 9 extra figures (cardboard and 100 pizza slices. The time limit on the club membership turns it into a pay-to-win game in multiplayer, and just a thorn in the side in general, for anyone with enough economic sense to realize that paying ~10$ a month in addition to the $25 for the basic edition, is a crazy amount of money for something that is nowhere near a full fledged MMO in terms of production-cost (which have equivalent pricing models and price tags). 25 + 11 x 10 = 135$ per year, and you still don't have access to all figures, and whatever other merchandizing gimmicks Blue Manchu comes up with during the year. And who says the sequal / expansion is ready in just 1 year?

Please don't argue that you can get a marginally cheaper deal by buying 3800 pizza for just 99$. For all any of us knows, that could turn out to be a really bad deal, if we stop playing the game before the club membership is out (360 days (not even 365) for 2900 pizza).

If I played a popular MMO with a monthly subscription, there is no locked content or characters (models).

All that said, I understand that it is very much in Blue Manchu's interest to use a payment model that let's each customer pay the maximum amount that he is willing to pay, and that indirectly that is also in my interest, as it will likely fund further development of the game (in addition to putting roofs over the heads of the devs). I am not asking that we change anything right now (because that won't happen). I am asking that Blue Manchu does a survey before the sequal / expansion, and based on the result, consider carefully if they should offer a payment option that appeals to the segment of customers that I belong to; those who really badly want to support developers like Blue Manchu, but are too economically responsible to pay more than 30-50$ for a game, or pay way more for a game than the production-cost can ever justify.

It's a great game for sure. Perhaps the best browser game of all time? But saying that CCGs are money scams by definition, hence you should just accept that, would be very disappointing to me, and I for one would be -1 paying customer.

 

The question, of course, is "what is to be considered an expansion"? One advantage of the current model is that they can expand incrementally. There may not be anything describable as "an original release" and "the expansion".

From my point of view, a traditional model of sell-the-game, sell-the-0occasional-expansion would have suited me better AND made me pay more. But the fact is, that's not the way they are going.

 

I haven't read any dev diary or anything like that, but as far as I know, it is no fact that they will not make an expansion and raise the level cap as part of that expansion. That is what I expect they will do.

Sure, they are making some new cards for the current level range right now, and some changes to MP maps, and adding a couple of player-made SP scenarios, but to me that is more like consolidating after the initial release than incremental expansion.

 

Non-time-limited buy-in option??

Buy the treasure hunts. Then Done!