Overdue rent = locked out of bases?
By
Alexio_DeAmore,
Posted on: 2005-12-20 13:44 in Base Construction
Rent just needs to go away!!!!!!!!!!
Its nothing but an annoyance.
I dont play games to pay bills. I had my fill of maintence costs playing SWG a few years ago. The rooms and objects in the room have enough front loaded costs as to make rent an unecessary mechanic.
Madscientist wrote
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If you can't enter the base, you can't pawn your stuff for rent money. This means you'll have to either have Prestige in reserve, or play a lot to get your teleporter running again instead of quickly deleting your studio. Is this fair?
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masked_Malard wrote:
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A better system would be that rent be based off of plot size and maybe power used.
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I think both of these are valid points. Our current rent is 26k every 2 weeks, that wasn't a problem when we were all level 20. But now, we are up to level 30-34 in the SG, and leave SG mode to be able to buy SO's. With no new members comming in, being a smaller SG, this rent issue is going to become a problem. It will become "character development" or "Base supplement." Sad choice either way. 
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I dont play games to pay bills.
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That's funny (meaning odd), because thinking about it I'm hard pressed to think of many games I play where I don't have some form of bills to pay in the game itself...
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I dont play games to pay bills.
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That's funny (meaning odd), because thinking about it I'm hard pressed to think of many games I play where I don't have some form of bills to pay in the game itself...
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i bet you stuck with E&B until they literally unplugged the servers
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i bet you stuck with E&B until they literally unplugged the servers
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Nahh, I just play a lot of sims.
Total Extreme Wrestling, finances are a key part of the game
Civ? Maintenance costs for units and cities
Tradewinds 2? Constant repair costs
EQ2? Rent
Raw vs Smackdown 2006? Even in a PS2 game the GM mode requires paying salaries!
Never heard of E&B
I believe the offical response goes something like this:
"It was never our original intent for Super Groups and Villain Groups to be able to avoid prestige grinding."
I suppose you have to have some way to tax us reliably. 
CatMan - some form on every server
Always here, there, and there again.
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As it stands, rent is somewhat, for lack of a better word, stupid.
What in the world do you purchase and then have to dump 10% (or whatever end of the sliding scale I'm on) of the purchase price into each week or two (I'm not sure which it is, the message seems to pop up at random).
What am I renting and from whom? Is the interdimensional transit authority taxing me? This sounds like an MMORPG design hold-over from some other game to me.
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Rent may have just been the wrong term. Really, it seems more like depreciation than rent...
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I would still maintain, whatever it's called, that 10% is pretty steep. The only thing I've had depreciate that severely is my car when I drove it off the lot 
The rent-thorn in my side was acceptable until a redname dropped by to redefine what was said in beta. Conveniently, we are unable to go back and find those posts but it seems many people invovled since closed beta (myself included) remember it the same way.
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Well to be honest, he did say the truth.
A: You do not lose items. Nothing disappears.
B: Nothing does change about your base.
C: Base rent does not incure past the 1st due (will not stack).
So all in all, what was said is true. Just not the whole truth. You are correct that they never stated that we could be locked out of our bases after soo much time.
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Exactly.
And Statesman (the living oxymoron) told us after i5 that "We are done making major changes to powers." Of course, he didn't SPECIFICALLY SAY that ENHANCEMENTS wouldn't get nerfed later! So, of course, he was just telling us the truth. Sure he was. But at least his later apology for the confusion made it all better. Sure it did.
Now, it seems, Recluse is feeding us the same load of double-talk and misinformation that we've all grown accustomed to. These guys ought to go work for the Bush Administration! 
And the devs wonder why they get so many angry customers.
Seriously, I never planned to NOT pay the base rent, but this latest bit just burns my oatmeal. I don't like the thought of base rent in the first place (too much RL for a game played to escape from RL, thank you.) Everything in the base costs either 100 or 1500000 with little in between. Hideously expensive plot sizes stifle any thought of creative layout design. I'm drowning in salvage that I can't use because after two months I still can't afford to place a medium-sized crafted item! (It costs 1.5 million to place, and if I had the prestige to buy it then it won't fit in the existing room, which would cost 450k to buy, and if I could afford that it would have to be fitted into a larger plot that costs 1.65 million to buy.)
And now Recluse has the gall to say that those of us complaining about the base lockout are just misremembering something he said.
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Oh yeah, and lets not forget: The devs are going to disregard this post and my legitimate complaints completely, simply because Im expressing my true feelings and not pulling punches.
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Yes, I remember it the same as well. It sucks that the Devs are actually human and can leave out information.
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No, it sucks that we didn't get the whole story during Beta when there would have been an opportunity to address it. Don't pretend that this is about bashing the Devs.
The "unlimited" supply of prestige in beta, as well as having a lot of the items already unlocked, didn't help in some regards either...
Eh, let's face it. Beta was a poor test for bases, and it's not the devs fault. It was an artificial situation. At least now on live, they can see how a LOT of people are actually dealing with things.
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And Statesman (the living oxymoron) told us after i5 that "We are done making major changes to powers." Of course, he didn't SPECIFICALLY SAY that ENHANCEMENTS wouldn't get nerfed later! So, of course, he was just telling us the truth. Sure he was. But at least his later apology for the confusion made it all better. Sure it did.
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Show me a link to where he said that.
He said power sets which is a very different term than powers but, as Statesman himself pointed out:
"I love it when people quote every third of my words and then try to interpret what I mean. Cmon people Im just sitting here at the computer making a post."
Actually, it's part of the disconnect between the developers of a system and the users. The developer, who sees the code, modules and hardware which creates the final system, thinks of it in individual parts, whereas the user sees only the final system, and generally thinks of it as one entity.
The problem is that statements which come from inside the black box, which are technically truths from the developer's standpoint, are often difficult to understand from the user's standpoint, where we see only the surface of the black box. The "we're done with power changes" fiasco was just the most glaring example of this problem as applied to CoH; it's a communications issue which affects almost any system, anywhere, unless someone is put to the task of reconciling the view from inside and outside.
@Mindshadow
Maybe if he wern't so darn cryptic at times (heh) we wouldn't feel the need to read between the lines so much.
I believe I mentioned during test that at the rate we were getting prestige vs. salvage that prestige is far and away the bottleneck to building the base.
I'm still hoping (it is only hope, no word at all about something like this) that the devs released the bases with "super conservative" settings just to avoid problems if people found a quick way to earn prestige and maxed out the bases before the devs realized it. I mean the prestige difference from a single kill to the cheapest possible room is four orders of magnitude. That's just crazy. After they're confident they've got the bugs worked out and there's no farmable exploit, they can bump the earn rate up to something sane. People would cry bloody murder if they found something to farm and suffered through some terrible grind for weeks only to have their work taken away from them later. Think about the crying over the powersets, but only much much worse.
Of course it means that the current bases are puny and most SGs can't even afford a minimally functional base, but turning up the rate later is much better than having to roll people back because they've found the new way to herd wolves or something. You can't deny that the existing base system still has plenty of bugs to work out too.
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I believe I mentioned during test that at the rate we were getting prestige vs. salvage that prestige is far and away the bottleneck to building the base.
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A very keen insight, save for the absolute rarest salvage items.
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I'm still hoping (it is only hope, no word at all about something like this) that the devs released the bases with "super conservative" settings just to avoid problems if people found a quick way to earn prestige and maxed out the bases before the devs realized it.
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I also think they had to be concerned that the large CoH SGs who potentially had billions in stored influence would convert it all to prestige and gain a huge headstart on the villain groups.
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I also think they had to be concerned that the large CoH SGs who potentially had billions in stored influence would convert it all to prestige and gain a huge headstart on the villain groups.
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[censored] would you let that go!
Do you seriously think that most players will turn over their saved prestige to their SG.
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Do you seriously think that most players will turn over their saved prestige to their SG.
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I'm guessing you meant INF?
Yes. I've seen uber guild mentality at work in other places.
Heck, I nearly cashed in a million the other night on a viurtually inactive hero SG just because I had no other use for it and it would have been enough to add one more item to the fledgling base I'm working on. That's on a toon with 2 million Influence in total. Now, imagine someone with a billion+
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The "we're done with power changes" fiasco was just the most glaring example of this problem as applied to CoH; it's a communications issue which affects almost any system, anywhere, unless someone is put to the task of reconciling the view from inside and outside.
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Here's the thing:
On the one hand I like the fact that we get SOME information.
On the other hand, bad information is nearly useless.
I would rather "no" information then bad information.
Honestly I like CuppaJo, but I'm starting to wonder if they need to pay her more and give her more authority to speak for the company in exchange for some accountability stuff.
If she says it, then they make it happen, but that also means we hear "no comment" from her more often.
I also re-iterate, they need to get some players more involved in their communication process. While many of us can say in hindsight we see how State's and Recluse's carefully chosen words were mis-read, let's face it, most of us would have said "er.. uh huh?" before these things blew up. As said it's a matter of perspective as to which side of the box we are.
I suggested once a player/developer summit and I think this whole rent thing is a great example of why we need to do them. Get some players to sit down and have a verbal dialogue, person to person with the developers rather then relying on the boards and PM's to figure out what the H is going on.
Mr. O
I agree the the Devs were being "super conservative" in their approach to bases. Erring on the side of caution is preferable to setting the bar too low & then having to raise it later. Additionally, I think the Devs are quite content to keep the pace of base-building slow while they work out of the bugs in the system. The beta-testing of bases was sorely inadequate & I doubt base-building would have gone Live when it did - except for the fact that the Devs wanted to include base-building as a selling point for CoV. High base prices & non-availability of the IoP trial are ways for the Devs to buy time to fix problems with base-building & base raiding before those problems can affect a large portion of the playerbase.
Liberty
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I suggested once a player/developer summit and I think this whole rent thing is a great example of why we need to do them. Get some players to sit down and have a verbal dialogue, person to person with the developers rather then relying on the boards and PM's to figure out what the H is going on.
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Or hold a few focus groups, they really aren't that expensive and can be conducted online these days, especially with an online savvy consumer base.
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I suggested once a player/developer summit and I think this whole rent thing is a great example of why we need to do them. Get some players to sit down and have a verbal dialogue, person to person with the developers rather then relying on the boards and PM's to figure out what the H is going on.
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Or hold a few focus groups, they really aren't that expensive and can be conducted online these days, especially with an online savvy consumer base.
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Yes and no.
If they asked me I'd rather spend part of my own money to sit down with Jack and Crew face to face to talk rather then rely on getting my opinion right in online surveys and chats.
A chance to say "Here's what we're doing" "do you mean A?" "No.. not quite A... more like B" "Wait, but isn't B like C?" "No, no.. more like A". "A?". "Yeah"
Bottom line is that despite the instant communication available through the internet, our skills at communicating are deteriorating at an alarming rate. We just can't put into writing the same ideas any more.
And the ability to ask questions, clarify, consider, suggest, ammend. These are all reasons that businesses still have real meetings rather then conducting all business over email.
It's overdue and I for one am tired of getting another "you misunderstood us" from the developers.
Something has to change.
Mr. O
I didn't understand your Post.
but even so I agree with what you say.
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^.^
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If they asked me I'd rather spend part of my own money to sit down with Jack and Crew face to face to talk rather then rely on getting my opinion right in online surveys and chats.
A chance to say "Here's what we're doing" "do you mean A?" "No.. not quite A... more like B" "Wait, but isn't B like C?" "No, no.. more like A". "A?". "Yeah"
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A focus group is not an online survey. It's a meeting between a small number of people specifically recruited to meet a pre-defined range of demographics and/or psychographics. It can be done live, or in an online chatroom type environment. The meeting itself is conducted by a neutral moderator with an agenda of items to discuss. It allows the free and open exchange of ideas you seek without the developers being stuck in a position of having to defend themselves OR the people involved being potentially intimidated in their presence.
Focus groups are often a good way to help refine questions for a survey to be conducted later but they are in no way the same thing.
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It's overdue and I for one am tired of getting another "you misunderstood us" from the developers.
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What I find eye-gougingly infuriating about a lot of these instances is that they're the kind of thing that could be sorted out with a few back and forth emails to the tune of "no, seriously - is that the only effect of X?" or "you realize that your definition of Y and the definition used by the entire player base are completely different, right?"
I'm in that situation a lot at my company and it's a giant pain in the rear constantly getting added on email threads like "hey, we found this thing... is it a feature... we're not really sure what's going on here... w-t-f?" It's a pain, but it's necessary to keep everyone on the same page.
@Mindshadow
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Yes, I remember it the same as well. It sucks that the Devs are actually human and can leave out information. What we need is robots who come in here and give out conned information so everything that people might assume on their own accord would be clear to begin with.
Since it was the players themselves who came up with the idea that the base would still be usable and no Dev actually came out and said it, seems like it is the players' fault everyone is upset. But players' (myself included) obviously can't be blamed for giving themselves misinformation even though that is what happened.
So Boo you Devs for being human again. Boo I say.
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Oh, come off it.
The normal excuse of free content updates doesn't apply to CoV - and bases. This was an expansion we paid for. For a not inconsequential number of people, the only reason they bought CoV was to participate in base functionality. People deserve to have as complete a set of information as possible on the products they are paying money for. To not merely leave it undocumented, but knowingly allow players and game information sites to misinterpret comments, when that misinterpretation is likely to sway more people into buying your product, is simply wrong.
I don't expect full documentation on random patches or free content updates. I mean, after all, they're free.
I DO expect full and ACCURATE documentation on features listed right on the box as a selling point of something that I'm PAYING FOR.
@Mindshadow