I logged on to Clan Lord briefly, to see how much money my mining team is raking in. Now, this may be old news to everyone else, so forgive me if you already knew this:

24 (ooc) hours in the mines = 1c.

That's just ridiculous. If I don't play for a month, I'll come back to whopping 30c. Now if I put a character in the free library for 30 days, would you value that experience at 30 coins? I think 30c for 30 days library training is a seriously undervalued amount. It makes putting a character in the copper mines utterly pointless. Even with my six characters slaving away, in one month I'll get 180c. I can make 180c in two hours of soloing with Worf. Six characters times 30 days should not equal 2 hours of online time. Now Worf is a strong character, trained for solo hunting, so someone might say this isn't a good comparison. Assume a more typical character might take 10 hours to earn 180c. So 10 hours in the lands earns as much coins as 4,300 (30 days * 24 hours * 6 characters) hours spent in the mines.

I'm sure DT had concerns about someone doing exactly what I'm doing: leveraging real dollars (extra accounts and characters) into game currency. If the mines paid 4 or 5 coins a day, what's to stop someone from ordering 10 characters on a serial number and dumping them into the mines? Sure, that's $100 to set up, and $10 month, but so what? In one month that person would have turned $110 into 2,000 coins. In 3 months, it would be 6,000 coins for $130. The return on investment gets better the longer you do it.

What to do? DT applied the same solution they always do. If 2% of the players on the extreme edge of the curve can yield an excessive benefit, just ramp the payout down across the board. Of course, this means if you're somewhere in the middle of the curve, you get can expect virtually no benefit anymore. But those players in the 2% who anchor one extreme edge of the player population curve now can't "unbalance" the game. DT is happy because the game is balanced. Whether it's coins, or experience, it's the same solution. If someone can pay for a bunch of characters and serial numbers, or if someone has the time to play for 100 hours a month, they define the boundries of the game.

And this, my friends, is why the vast majority of people playing Clan Lord feel like they are going nowhere. A few people in the game, who sink 80 to 100 hours a month playing, keep pushing the ceiling higher. So DT twiddles some knobs to "add challenge." Problem is, that challenge ceiling tracks the 80 to 100 hour a month players, not the average person who plays for a few hours a week.

Welcome to the treadmill that is Clan Lord.
posted 2:26 PM | link |