Friday, October 19, 2012

League Of MechWarriors: Part 2


First of all, let me start off by saying I am sorry for the delay of writing this. Between work becoming busy unexpectedly, and my lack of good data about comparisons between the real life conversion rates of the two games, I decided to push this off until I could do it right. In the end the data not only supports my theory, but more so than I even predicted.

In part one I compared MW:O’s virtual currency economy with that of League of Legends’ (henceforth known as LoL). My evaluation was that based on average results in both games, the reward you receive per hour is roughly equal, if your goal is to get new unlocks as fast as they come out (although admittedly the climb through the backlog is currently much greater for LoL!)

Today I will look at the currency exchange between real life money and the game money, to calculate exactly how much your time is worth in each game. First of all I made a thing:



The MC cost for each mech type is the same across its variants (which should be a warning flag that things are going to be a bit wonky). To compensate for that, I took the average of each type for math purposes. The CBills per MC row calculates how much your MC is worth in the various types. For example, if you buy an Atlas with MC you are actually getting a higher CBill/Dollar value then if you were buying a Jenner. This almost makes sense; however the Raven and Centurion are the two most inefficient purchases, in spite of the fact that they are not the cheapest mechs. In a lot of ways the ratio seems arbitrary, almost sloppy. It would be nice if the ratios lined up, or at least valued bigger purchases (although, the Atlas is the most efficient).

Dollars per mech is the cost it would take if you bought this in MC. For the purposes of all MC calculations I decided to go for the $30 bundle, because I am guessing it will be the most popular (it is the earliest one that you can get an Atlas with). Because as of right now you must own three mechs to get elite with any of the types, I also included the cost to unlock the ability to get elite with just MC (three times the Dollars per Mech Column).

Finally I calculated the average dollars per hour. For this estimation I decided a player received, on average, 100k CBills per match, and managed to get five matches in an hour for a total of 500k CBills per hour YMMV. As you can, the time you spend working towards the least efficient mech is worth about $0.69 and the most efficient is worth just under a dollar an hour.
You may think that this is very small, but actually this is very good returns for your in-game time compared to other video games. Compare League of Legends below.



This calculation was much easier. In LoL, you earn about 2.3 IP a minute for a win (it caps after just over an hour), with a small bonus at the end. For this chart I assumed a match took 30 minutes (for easy math, sorry). Based on this calculation you are earning about $0.21/hour while winning, and $0.14/hour while losing. This is not only less then MW:O, but it is FOUR TIMES less. Which means your time in MW:O is worth four times as much as your time in LoL.

What is the implication of this? An optimist could say that MW:O is good because it rewards your play, however a pessimist would say that the dollar is devalued in MW:O. It certainly seems to me that it is a game that wants you to earn things through in game (read: free) means rather than paid means. I don’t have to explain how this might seem bad from a business perspective. It is entirely possible that right now the high price of mechs is actually driving their sales down, making it far more efficient to just get the CBills for the purchases. The standard F2P model right now is to give the combat items for cheap, but to charge out the guns for the cosmetic items. At this rate we may be looking at $60 monocles skins again, and that won’t end up good for anyone.

2 comments:

  1. MC$ cost is determined by weight of mech for some reason, C-bill is determined by some number that takes into account the cost posted on sarna i think, (not sure). All in all, good posts, I have enjoyed them.

    StainlessSR

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Either way, they changed it to streamline the MC and make the dollar worth a bit more. Maybe someone reads my blog?

      Delete