Free 2 Play solution to onboard millions of players

[crystal grail]

Contributors
@tame glacier & @crystal grail

Purpose
The current free-to-play version of Illuvium is lacking a comprehensive and engaging experience to effectively onboard players, encourage prolonged engagement, and increase the likelihood of converting them into paying users. The purpose of this document is to propose a solution that addresses these issues, enhancing the overall player experience and retention.

Idea
The idea is to allow players to experience Stages 0 through 3 completely for free, providing them with a comprehensive view of the game. Players will be able to acquire Illuvials, items, and consumables during this free experience, but with certain limitations:

1. Marketplace Restrictions: Assets acquired during the free experience will be account bound and be non-nfts. They cannot be sold or traded on the marketplace.
2. Usage Limitations: Illuvials and assets obtained for free cannot be used in Leviathan modes of the Arena or in our other games.
3. Cosmetic Exclusions: These assets will not offer any cosmetic bonuses in any of our games.

The primary purpose of this implementation is to allow users to experience the full game, fostering a desire to own their assets in the paid version. In the paid version, players will benefit from:

• The ability to sell and trade assets on the marketplace.
• Full access to the entire ecosystem across all our games.
• Enjoyment of cosmetic bonuses unavailable to free-to-play players.

Benefits

• Highlighting Paid Experience Advantages: Free-to-play players will sense a lost opportunity when their rare Illuvials or items are soul-bound and non-tradable, emphasising the benefits of the paid experience.
• Enhanced NFT Value: The controlled supply of real Illuvium NFTs will enhance their perceived value among players due to the soul-bound nature of the free-to-play experience.
• Comprehensive Game Access: Players can experience all that Illuvium has to offer without restrictions, allowing them to fully immerse themselves in the game.
• Budget-Friendly Participation: Players can opt into the free-to-play experience once they have reached their daily or monthly budget, ensuring they can continue participating in our games without hitting a paywall.
• Increased Player Engagement: Allowing players to spend countless hours in the game without spending will familiarize them with the IP, characters, and lore, increasing the likelihood of them getting hooked on the game.

**Please check full proposal here: **
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RhczUzN3eXInlrJnHyubgXBTpAkJSRuFXr4jmdtRaVI/edit

Potential Push Back

Players & Existing Community Push Back

1. "Free players will devalue the game by flooding it with non-NFT assets."
   Non-NFT assets from free players are account-bound and cannot be traded or sold, preventing market devaluation. This structure ensures that only paid players contribute to the NFT market, maintaining the value of tradable assets.

2. “Free players will have access to the same game content without paying, which feels unfair.”
   While free players can access core content, their experience is limited by restrictions on trading, use in competitive modes, and cosmetic bonuses. These limitations create a clear distinction between free and paid experiences, maintaining fairness and incentivizing upgrades to paid versions.

3. "The limitations on free assets might frustrate players, leading to negative feedback and reduced engagement."
   The limitations are designed to encourage players to transition to the paid version by showcasing the value of full access. Any initial frustration will be outweighed by the sense of achievement and satisfaction when players unlock the full potential of their assets in the paid version, leading to positive long-term engagement.

4. "Free players might exploit the system, creating multiple accounts to farm non-tradable assets."
   Strict account monitoring and anti-cheat measures can be implemented to prevent exploitation. Additionally, since non-tradable assets do not impact the marketplace or competitive modes, the potential for abuse is minimized.

Investor Push Back

5. “Free access might reduce the number of paying users and, consequently, revenue.”
   The free access serves as an extensive trial, allowing players to get invested in the game. Experiencing the game for free with limitations will drive players to pay for the full benefits, thus potentially increasing conversion rates and overall revenue.

6. “The free-to-play model could lead to increased server and maintenance costs without guaranteed revenue.”
   Increased player engagement from free access will drive community growth and visibility. The potential for higher conversion rates to the paid version and subsequent purchases will offset maintenance costs, leading to long-term revenue gains.

7. "Free-to-play users might never convert to paying users, leading to a large base of non-paying players."
   The structured limitations on free players are designed to create a strong incentive for conversion. By providing a taste of the full game and highlighting the benefits of the paid version, the likelihood of conversion is increased. Moreover, a larger player base, even if initially non-paying, can lead to greater community engagement and word-of-mouth promotion, ultimately driving more conversions.

8. "Offering too much content for free might reduce the perceived value of the paid version."
   The free content is carefully curated to provide a compelling yet limited experience, acting as a gateway to the paid version. The significant benefits and enhancements in the paid version ensure it remains highly attractive and valuable.

9. "The free-to-play model could dilute the brand's premium image."
   The free-to-play model is designed to complement, not dilute, the premium image. By showcasing a portion of the game and driving players toward the paid experience, the model highlights the game's value and reinforces its premium status. The controlled supply and exclusivity of NFTs further maintain the brand's premium perception.

[left crow]

I definitely agree that the current system would benefit with being more accessible to a wider audience. I personally think there should be a cost to enter and capture the premium illuvials. Let’s say for example pay $5 dollars to unlock permanent tier 1 travels to collect account bound non nft illuvials,armor and weapons. Pay $15 dollars for tier 2 travels and $30 for tier 3. A bundle could be for $40 for all three. A disclaimer should clearly let the player know they are buying access to non blockchain items.

[queen raft]

Speaking from my side personally and not from the team, I absolutely love this idea!

You’ve stated the objectives and rationale clearly and I do believe it will achieve what it’s set out to.

[queen raft]

I think the current system stands. This proposal is to adjust the free to play experience.

Paid players will continue to experience what is currently and F2P players can experience that too, for free but without the benefits of a paid player

[wild granite]

Why not allow a subset of each tier for free under your conditions? This allows you to capture many for free. Get hooked. And then progress into the rest.

[queen raft]

Interesting.

What would be the objective, benefit and rationale behind this?

So we can properly analysis your option

[severe ridge]

I agree that monetization/on boarding needs to change but I don't think this can work on its own because the current monetization is too complicated.
So, point 7 is my concern. A web2 player would play OW as long as it is fun and don't care about the nft "advantages" because these players don't care about selling anything. They just want fun. Also, arena isn't a driving factor in its current state. Only a few people would care about arena and even fewer would be willing to pay for three different sorts of fuel. But I guess it would work well if it is combined with a subscription model for nft-content.

[wild granite]

Objective is right now a free player is gated to tier 1. They don’t necessarily know what they’re missing in higher ones. With this mechanism, they get to experience the game at a deeper level, but not complete the free illuvidex without buying in at some level.

[queen raft]

But what is the benefit of them not being able to complete the free collection?

[wild granite]

Better conversion

[queen raft]

I personally disagree, but happy to see what others say on this

[carmine plank]

Wouldn’t this destroy the feeling of ”gotta catch them all”? I mean you catch all the non-NFT characters on F2P, and you may never proceed to the NFT version of the game. Which will affect the economy ofc.

[left crow]

To be clear I don’t suggest removing the current economy I just think allowing players to access the higher tier illuvials without paying anything devalues them a bit for the paid players. Even if the f2p versions don’t have blockchain utility. Possibly just allow players to only use account bound nfts in OW and not arena.

[queen raft]

Maybe I misread, isn’t the “devaluation” and “restricting arena” stated in the document?

[severe ridge]

I commented on the current system quite a lot already but I wanted to bring one point I haven't seen this far:
Let's say fuel one day hits a perfect spot of for example 1$ for 1350 fuel.
People think this is reasonable and OW is on the verge of mass adoption.
The fuel price rises to 3$ for 1350 very fast because production can't keep up anymore.
It will take the DAO time to react by selling more land or increasing the output.
Meanwhile fuel reached 6$ for 1350.
Maybe that sounds good at first but 6$ for 1350 will scare a lot of players. These players will never enter the eco-system and we are missing out on mass adoption because thousands/millions now think Illuvium is way to expensive. The HYPE goes down. Mass adoption failed because of sudden spikes in fuel costs/supply
A constant reasonable price would just be so much better and less complicated.

[zinc sluice]

I feel like tier 0 is plenty of free gameplay to understand the game and know if you like it or not and would be willing to spend $2 to travel to t1 and so on. We just need debit cards added to buy fuel to help with onboarding not this.

[left crow]

That definitely might be in the document I’m just thinking f2p access to a ramphyre for example might not be the best idea either. A possible middle ground is what I’d suggest. You can always go f2p down the road if middle ground doesn’t suffice

[wild granite]

Maybe the issue is that the reasons to convert to ownership in this model aren’t compelling enough in the current state to me. I pay now, because I must. But under this model, I might just free to play.

[severe ridge]

also can I just use my non-nft-team to grind the nft version of stage 3? Would take away the build up time.
Or can I use stage 3 consumables from my none nft run?

[stoic berry]

Great idea not sure where I stand on it though. I tend to lean towards waiting for

1. better onboard process (payments ect)
2. fuel price dropping
3. other features like combat and multiplayer to be added
4. ascendant and gauntlet mode incentives and polish

[left crow]

Palworld and Pokémon games are not free to play I think illuvium could take similar pricing approach imho (keep current economy but charge for access to account bound creatures armor weapons)

[queen raft]

My assumption would be no. But but happy to have @crystal grail and @tame glacier confirm their thoughts on this.

It would make sense that F2P can only be used in the F2P experience

[honest nest]

Exactly what I feel. F2P players getting a “free” Rhamphyre, doesn’t feel good. I’ll need to re-read the proposal as maybe I misunderstood some points, but apart from restrictions to Arena, maybe the “free” Rhamphyre can’t be used for any combat in OW to help catch other illuvials? F2P players cannot add the “free” Rhamphyre onto the board, not even in the ethereal form. Also the “free” Rhamphyre cannot be saved for future runs. The F2P player will have to catch it again in every run.

[severe ridge]

so, a f2p player would basically hit a restart button to start over in the paid version just to be able to play arena. I don't think arena can be a driving force like that. It always will be kinda elite and niche.

[crystal grail]

I would disagree, as real ownership would drive people to want to catch them all.

[tame glacier]

I really like where your head is at. But you can throw as many disclaimers as you want, its gonna be confusing for a large amount of people and potentially cause more of a headache to Illuvium than otherwise.

[tame glacier]

I believe consumables would permanently become a free item. But your non nft illuvials would not be usable in paid runs is what I thought. Does sound confusing now that you ask it out aloud

[tame glacier]

Ive seen some comments surrounding an 'inventory' type thing which could maybe work. Say your account can only hold 20 F2P non-nft Illuvials. At that stage u can play everything but you cant build up a collection or try multiple teams easily

[left crow]

I feel illuvials are such high quality and so much effort was put into their design and implementation even to collect them for account bound scenarios should have a cost

[tame glacier]

If, without destroying gameplay you could restrict 'gotta catch em all' I think you have a winner. Then you can also work in @left crow 's ideas of payment and have people pay for extra inventory space. That or they can acquire NFTs instead

Maybe the NFT (or soul bound nft) they buy to explore is a 'bag' item

Which is your $15 payment to buy the game in a certain sense. You can also pay to level it up and add more space.

[open stag]

If I may, not so long time ago, as someone who used to play web2 games casually, I hoped for adding trading and exchange features that aren’t available in traditional games. However, some web3 games surprised me with annoying ‘early access’ purchases, leaving a negative impression. It really does.

In the past, crypto/nft games rushed to onboard players for quick ROI, yet they also quickly faded away. Maybe developing blockchain games can also be overwhelming for devs, as they tend to prioritize ROI and token value over game quality.

But things are changing. As web3 gaming is gradually changing its course. More and more games are being develop in highest-quality, which is really really good. Quality web3 games now attract players who love to pay for quality, regardless of the blockchain aspect.

Although some devs still rely on paywalls, but a few brave ones offer free-to-play mode while keeping blockchain features intact. If game devs embrace this idea, real players will come over time. In the first place, for what the game is for? And for how long?

Bottomline: I agree to almost of the ideas of both scoriox and sam. If I may suggest, let Stage 0 regions (all regions) accessible to combat all Illuvials, and collect 'em all (from Tier 0-5). And the only restriction is the trading/exchange power - 'cos this feature is what makes a game a web3 game.

Anyway, there's a lot of opportunities for marketing:

• Sell only seasonal skins (special skins but not too expensive, so any level of players can purchase them if they want to) - Only which, Illuvium can generate them and offer in the main dex. (Somewhat similar to cod's seasonal battle pass)
• Or rather, sell anything for aesthetic sake (just those rare stuff that anyone can be proud of, and flex them anywhere in their social media, even in sanctum mesa lobby)
• Just don't make things too expensive, so almost everyone can afford them. The more buyers, the more purchasing power. Unlike if it's too expensive, only few people can buy, and the rest left unhappy.

Illuvidex remains for free market price. Though people are insanely offers unimaginable price, they're free to do so.

And so on.

[tame glacier]

For Stage 0 regions you are saying allow anyone to collect NFT or non-NFT Illuvials?

[left crow]

I think gauntlet and tier 0 will give people enough of a taste to want to dive into the paid versions I proposed. Possibly when fuel costs decrease the barrier to entry will naturally decrease eliminating the need for the “middle road” solution.

[open stag]

Stage 0 = Collect all Illuvials (non-nft, non-tradeable). Experience all regions in stage 0.

[limber narwhal]

I didn't bother to read all these comments, but this is a pretty fuckin slick idea... I would love to try out stage three runs with no cost, and no reward, just to see what it's like.

[queen raft]

I can’t share too much just yet. But based on results of our web2 campaign. Your assumption doesn’t align with the reality of it unfortunately.

Which is why I’m personally a fan of this idea

[limber narwhal]

Kickass idea, I am on board!

[tame glacier]

Hmmmm and how do we then do Tier 0? They just so happen to be NFTs if you catch them? I do like how it gets simplified this way

[open stag]

Illuvium could have web2 feel and web3 competitive feel at the same time

[queen raft]

It makes more sense to allow S0-3 to be a F2P experience. Avoid any additional complication.

[open stag]

Cos you guys mentioned All illuvials. So you might wanna let the f2p players catch them all, Illuvials from T0-T5 = but this all are non-nfts cannot be trade

[stoic berry]

I think trying stage 3 for free is different to what is proposed here right?

[tame glacier]

I agree with this, but myself and Sam figured this topic needs its own proposal, thread etc at a different time.

[queen raft]

Doesn’t this idea propose S0-3 to be accessed in a F2P manner?

[tame glacier]

This is basically the proposal hahaha. That would be the idea 🙂

[open stag]

Cos there's a missing feel when you only capture alsmot half of the illuvials. Just break boundaries and let f2p catch them all. The only restriction will be the trading factor.

[left crow]

Another solution could be to allow a tier 1 ftp travel and the only way to get stage 2 and 3 illuvials would to have to collect and fuse and pay to do so.

[tame glacier]

YOu basically just summed up the proposal yep 🙂

Play for free and cant trade

[stoic berry]

I think this proposes f2p and non NFTs. I think going to stage 3 for free to try/test it (and not catching or mine anything) is different

[tame glacier]

Why would anyone go to stage 3 and do nothing of consequence? I am not sure I understand

[open stag]

Yeah, just same ideas and what I got before, that's why I'm pushing it forward lol

[tame glacier]

Thank you SUPAH, love ur content btw

[crystal grail]

Just to be clear the idea of this is to get the conversation started and open for any adjustments that would make sense ☺️

[stoic berry]

he said he would love to go there and see what its like with no reward. Id love to go see how my team does in stage 3 for free. Maybe i misinterpreted him

[queen raft]

Oh I agree with having access to S3 in its entirety, just off chain.

[radiant forum]

Personally I think Illuvium is giving away too much free already. To me illuvials are a precious resource and should not be given away. It should cost you to acquire illuvials. Just my opinion.

[crystal grail]

Remember the free to play version would be non NFTs and soul bound

[left crow]

I love the idea personally for new player acquisition. I am considering all avenues investors/players/core contributors as well. I personally think I would not feel the need to pay for anything in the game as I would have the full gameplay experience without paying. Thus for those that think as I do would not provide any revenue to the project.

[queen raft]

Would you still feel this way, if you start seeing paid players finding and selling illuvials worth hundreds or thousands of dollars?

And not being able to compete for large prize pool tournaments?

[crystal grail]

How would you feel about seeing players around you trading and being apart of an economy and your missing out?
Also, imagine you come across a high teir illuvial with amazing stats and knowing if you paid for that run that you would have ownership of it and could of been worth 'x' amount.

Do these sceneries give you fomo and feel like you want to take the next step in the ecosystem?

[limber narwhal]

Oh, I have no idea wtf they're talking about. Been day drinking, but I think they are on to something.

Definitely something has to change to draw new people in that aren't rich....

[languid leaf]

Basically something like Practice Mode for Overworld (includes all stages)

[limber narwhal]

This seems like a cool feasible idea for that.

[left crow]

I see the allure for sure. I would want to play the game for financial benefit reasons. I’m afraid there are many gamers that just want a fun experience and they will get the fun factor without paying to do so is my worry. Hell I played Axie certainly not for fun reasons lol.

[limber narwhal]

I just had this idea where you could hop into a stage three run for free, just to see what it's like but only have like 50 Ergon, with no rifts, just to see if you could win the fights. But then they would have to somehow prevent you from farming it for xp

[stark fable]

Providing full game experience in free to play will be lead to players focusing on collecting illuvials to not bother about owing tradeable versions of nfts. They will be content with the soulbound illuvials, as long as they complete the collection. I do not think this is the right direction.

[tame glacier]

I think players can benefit the project beyond just revenues in itself. If a game has millions of players it attracts new free and paying players. Simply having the game be 'popular' has its advantages

[crystal grail]

hahah Axie 🙂

I think I look at it like all games have paying as an option to spend but you can still enjoy a lot of the game. Yet , people still spend.

and if we add ownership well that takes it to a whole other level

[tame glacier]

Those individuals arent playing the game right now for the reasons you described.

So would you rather they never join, or join for this version of the game?

But I see this goes into your pay for the game idea and its a good reason

[left crow]

Oh definitely, battle royales are great and converting f2p players. Possibly a battle pass like system to encourage people to spend money

[limber narwhal]

I feel like the whole gameplay loop needs a drastic change. I can't convince anyone to play this when shooting rocks costs money.

And failing big shard captures? Fuck no.

[crystal grail]

Also note:

3% of people in the world a 'impulse buyers'. They will purchase straight away without thinking to much about it.
BUT
The other 90+% take time to warm up to the idea and on average it takes a person 20+ days before they even think about spending in a game..
This solves this issue and gives them time to become attached to the IP

[queen raft]

This is aligned with the data we’ve got from our web2 campaign

[left crow]

“Battle Pass” tiers could give access to a paid run per day. Maybe entice some F2P peeps to spend and experience the full nft experience

[tame glacier]

I agree there are some other things to discuss. But we decided to leave that for future discussions/proposals

[crystal grail]

Would a battle pass be free?

[tribal nova]

What made Axie great is that you can play it on mobile and its 'scholarship program.' People who had money spent it to gather players who couldn't afford to pay the ridiculous cost to buy one Axie.

[left crow]

No it could be a 3 month type purchase where you get a certain amount of fuel per day to complete runs and capture illuvials. F2P can still be as you proposed but have a BP system in place to entice them to make a purchase that they are familiar with in traditional web 2 F2P games

[tribal nova]

I like @crystal grail @tame glacier the idea because we aren't forcing players to play but instead teasing them with the 'If,' like 'If this was an NFT, I could have earned from this,' etc. Then they will start to educate themselves on how to do it.

[analog wadi]

I do like these ideas. Perhaps also the FTP Illuvial caught could be of a noticeable visual quality downgrade (say that translucent version you see them in the OW) that once FTP players eventually in time grow attached to them now want the real deal!

[crystal grail]

Yes this could be an idea for sure..

[crystal grail]

We thought of something similar and just left it out of the proposal for now ☺️

[cunning ore]

I think illuvium needs a truly immersive game, I’m not saying the overworld isn’t fun or battling illuvials isn’t fun.. but I can see a game something mixed between “Tom
Clancy’s divison” maybe the other half of rangers became bad and took the overworld and good rangers need to rebuild the economy back for your illuvials. where they have a home where they can live and eat peacefully, Mixed with like a “ Dark Souls” where the game is pretty difficult and challenging to get threw and the illuvials are intelligent, mixed with “Call of Duty” as far as weapons and attachments so you can have scopes and silencers maybe different ammo types and weapons for different regions.. I personally think illuvium needs that game that’s really going to set them apart from web 2 games. I enjoy the game but it gets kinda repetitive tbh. I know they are working on more upgrades… but I do think the overworld to collect illuvials should be the cost of admission to any of the other games that I would assume would be free to play… but In theory you really can’t play much without collecting illuvials in the overworld to help your campaign. The onboarding process does need to be easier for mainstream gamers to comprehend. I don’t mind the ideal of giving F2P users a more inclusive experience, but I think the context of the game matters a lot… Just something I been holding onto In my mind so I set it in here…

[crystal grail]

Thank you for sharing.

A lot of 'purpose' is coming with questing and lore and in regards to onboarding over time that will just get easier and easier.. 🙂

[limber narwhal]

29 days to make or break a habit

[tribal nova]

What I see as the downside of this is that we don't know how long it will take for players to 'convert,' so the runway should be secured. Also, the devs should provide new content every three months or so to keep players engaged, such as adding new illuvials, quests, lore, etc.

[supple valley]

This is something on my mind also! I myself sometimes feels like i just want to experience the full game with my current comp without having to ”gain” anything from it and without having to think about money at all! I do think we miss this, in some form or way we need this i think!

[sour edge]

Great idea lads, it's like crack first illuvials are on the house

[glossy inlet]

I like the idea of exploring F2P features to make it more robust for new players. My main question though, is the F2P experience even a problem right now? I think we need to know internal numbers of how many players only play F2P and quit once they hit the paywall. If there is only a thousand of them, this seems low on the priority list of what the team should be focusing on. I also think that allowing players to catch them all (sans NFT token, but web2 players don't seem to care) might be a mistake. Catching them all is one of the only incentives beyond the paywall right now.

The bottom line in my view is that there is not enough use cases and incentive for someone to purchase beyond the paywall. Whether we keep it as is, or expand the F2P experience, I don't think this will drive a significant amount of more users in. Illuvial combat, our auto-battler games overhaul, and more fun games with the NFTs as the ticket is where all the focus should be.

[open stag]

Bottomline. As simple as possible. (concept only)

[fossil compass]

what is this Web2 campaign?

[crystal grail]

I think I love you hahaha 🙂

[open stag]

Thanks Sam. This topic just captured my interest. I hope you guys push your initial ideas forward.

[random kelp]

I like this idea. The more players we can attract the better. Non paying players will become paying players if they fall in love with the IP.

More story mode, more access and fun gameplay. That’s how we grow the player base. The competitive scene will naturally grow with more players as well

[thick coyote]

I'm wondering how the free land is suppose to play into this equation. As right now you can only sell fuel from land you own, so what is the fuel on the free land going to be used for? They say soon that they will make a bridge so that you can move fuel from land to your passport account, but I don't think you will be able to do the other way around. This makes it so the fuel on the free land can never be sold but can maybe be used for free players.

I'm hoping that this is the case, as then F2P players can have access to fuel but wouldn't be able to sell it and destroy that economy.

Maybe reset the free land to Tier 2 land for everyone, so that there is kind of a max fuel that free players can get. What does a tier 2 land max out at? Probably gives you enough to do a single stage 3 run per day, or a few of the other runs. Honestly it would be a very slow process but hopefully after a week they could do stage 1, and get them into the game.

[zinc timber]

I like the idea but if we can't get people to stick around playing with just the T0 illuvials and regions, I don't see how offering the full experience for free is gonna keep them longer. Our F2P has a problem in that it is really a grind to try and level the s1 and s2 t0 illuvials enough to fuse them. If we could figure out a more enjoyable experience for this first I think that would be a major step forward.

[zinc timber]

F2P land fuel is only there to progress the land itself. F2P land atm is a t1.5 land, in that it has t1 3 element sites and t2 3 fuel sites.

[thick coyote]

Sure but they could change that so that F2P players could grind and get into the game

And reset all the lands so that they can only make so much. But this wouldn't require a total overhaul of the game. It's basically taking components that they already have.

[zinc timber]

People would just multi-account for free fuel

[thick coyote]

Except that fuel could only be transferred to a single account, and then not be sold

So each account could only have a maximum amount they make. You could also reset the land per season, so those who max out land, it's not forever fuel

A key component of this, which is already the case is that fuel on your account cannot be sold or transferred.

[elfin helm]

Tell the devs to link the F2P players back to the testnet to experience everything FREE

no need to merge the mainnet

[thick coyote]

Just thinking of a new idea, you could also set a maximum amount that free players could transfer from free lands, make it enough to do a stage 2 run, fuse one thing and make a few shards. After that you couldn't transfer anymore fuel from free land. For multi accounts they could start over, but it would take a long time for them from a fresh land to get any amount of fuel

[elfin helm]

just re-package TESTNET into the F2P version

[fossil compass]

Have played hundreds of hours of OW on Test net and now Open beta. I find the game experience no different between S1 to S3. Open slather does not feel right to me, as we can only judge on feelings currently. The IP is 'key'. Edgy Anime series ASAP.

[fossil compass]

that is Blockchain.

[elfin helm]

exactly

[fossil compass]

give them a smooth experience.

they wound need metamask, find a facuet for test Eth etc.

[elfin helm]

yee what they are proposing is basically testnet wrapped as F2P.. just need to market it as that

[fleet sphinx]

Overall a great proposal.

Im wondering if we should allow account bound items to become tradable via a sufficiently large fee.
This could be an ILV sink. Pay ILV to turn an item to a tradable one.

Would require good wording how we call the account bound items and the tradable ones.

Thoughts @crystal grail ?

[silver edge]

I think this proposal is good. I wrote something in the past, “ethereal illuviums”, I will repost it and If you want to take any of it go ahead, but basically instead of free forever non-nft, add “consumable” illuviums and other Stuff.

1- Add Illuvium Dust: that would work as a coin for non-nft things (like buying ethereal
shards). You will get this dust in every action (when you Level Up, win battles, get a
great rank etc)

2- Add ethereal shards: with this, free-to-play-players world be able to catch illuviums without spending BUT they would only be able to use them in 1 OW run or 1 arena battle, and they are gone after it. Those illuviums would be treated as Non-NFT.

3- Add exclusive ILV rewards in high rank arena for NFT holders based on Energy spent: Each nft illuvium will have, for example, 3 energy every day. And you will spend 1 energy by playing in a ranked arena match with it. If you win, you will get a reward (ILV) based on your rank and quantity of energy spent in the match (ex 10 NFTs = 10 energy in that match).

4- Add the possibility of getting fuel resources from free land and Arena wins at a certain rank (like Axie gives SLP, we would give fuel for high rank free players). - you cant exploit this if you need the player to be in a high rank to participate (and probably He Will only reach that By spending at least a Little)

5- Dust bet feature in gauntlet mode: you can bet each match and the winner gets it all

Reasons:

We want the game to be fun for a lot of people and right now it is not (all the free players are playing only for the airdrop). Remember that each free player is a possible consumer in the future if he likes the game.
.
With this system people would play the game but the paid assets would get more rewards and exposure

[agile surge]

In my opinion the only thing missing for more Adoption is that people can't slide their credit/gift cards for buying Stuff on dex and fex.

• Those who just wana pay in that way will likely not be onboarded into nfts even if you give all content for free for experiencing everything.
• those who are willing to pay and do all the crypto Stuff to get balance will Start paying as soon as they feel it is cheap enough, and prices of fuel really just Start decreasing, and could go down to 1c for a s3 Run. I guess nobody would care to pay 1 Cent for every s3 run

[silver edge]

@crystal grail and @tardy hatch

Please take a look and see What you guys think

[dense lodge]

Web 2 gamers avoid anything with the word NFT like it is herpes. "Owned Assets" is best.

[open stag]

Agree. But somehow, NFT needs to be great again. Illuvium might make that happen. Hope so.

If no other web3 can, Illuvium can. If the f2p project successfuly executed.

[sterile solar]

@crystal grail put that picture on the top of the topic ! :). amazing resume

[solemn osprey]

How does this proposal address the current 250,000+ NFTs currently on the marketplace? They stay as is?

[queen raft]

We did a web2 campaign with over 50 tft creators on launch week

[verbal terrace]

I highly agree with this proposal as well and I dont see many downsides

[crystal grail]

Ill be honest I'm not sure how to do this...

[restive fractal]

1. I like this concept, but am concerned about how to communicate this. Illuvium is incredibly complicated. One of my best friends has been watching Viper every night to understand what I'm so invested in and until I explained some things to him, he totally didn't understand Illuvium.
   now we have:

• Free to play Overworld
• Web 3 Overworld
• Training Survival
• Competitive Survival
• Arena
• Leviathan Arena
• Gauntlet
• Leviathan Gauntlet
• Illuvium Zero
• Illuvium Beyond
  How will we explain this to a web2 audience?

2. What happens in raids and in Sanctum Mesa? Will a web 2 player be able to flaunt their free Ramphyre in Sanctum Mesa and bring them into Leviathan raids?

[hidden nexus]

I'm 👎 this for the following reasons.

While expanding the F2P model might provide access to more content, it doesn't change the fun and engagement of the game nor does it help to convert from F2P to P2P. The focus should be on enhancing the game's intrinsic appeal, ensuring players find it enjoyable and compelling, which will naturally drive the desire to go capture to the paid regions.

Fun and Engagement
The core issue lies in the game's current level of fun and engagement. IMO extending the F2P model to include all stages won't address the underlying problem of the game not being enjoyable enough. The primary focus should be on improving the game's mechanics, storyline, and overall player experience to make it inherently more enjoyable. Without these improvements, offering more free content won't necessarily attract or retain millions of players.

Conversion from Free to Paid
While allowing players to experience more stages for free might give them a better view of the game, it doesn't inherently create a strong incentive to transition from F2P to P2P. The limitations placed on free assets might not be compelling enough to make players want to pay for the full version, especially if they don't find the game engaging in the first place. IMO what distinguishes Illuvium right now it's the ownership factor.

Marketplace Dynamics
The value of NFTs and other marketplace assets is driven by demand and perceived value. If a significant portion of the player base is content with the F2P version and doesn't see a strong reason to convert to P2P, the demand for paid assets might not increase as expected. Players need to perceive real value in the paid assets, which comes from the game's inherent appeal and the benefits of owning tradable and usable assets.

With all this being said, my suggestion would be to make S0 runs into 3 stages of T0, which would make them much more interesting and challenging. Right now, S0 is boring as hell and has very little appeal.

[crystal grail]

I see where your heading with this idea but imo it is a little complicated and hard to market that..

I would love to find a happy medium were the game can be packaged up and easy to market to a web2 audience as currently I believe it comes across complicated.

[silver edge]

It is indeed kind of complicated 😂

I was thinking a way to simplify it.

I believe we could take your idea, but make the non-NFTs something that would not last forever. (So if you want something that lasts, buy a NFT one). I am not sure yet, but what is certain is that we need SOMETHING implemented for next season before we lose the hype. Right now the game is probably boring for free2play players or web2 people.

[fair hazel]

I really don't like the thought of free2play players being able to capture the same assets in a free mode (this will definately dilute the scarcity aspect). Owerworld is and should be an exciting way to open packs of NFTs. Should rather keep building a game which increases demand for illuvials and in that way get more people to become paying players (like a multiplayer BR style game within overworld maps + possibility for skins). Gauntlet can be the free to play mode, but overworld runs should be limited to only tier 0 illuvials. Multiplayer should also be introduced (both in Sanctum Mesa and in overworld), need more interaction with other players, being able to show off a bit.

[cursive salmon]

Take away fusing and go with a free to play version of the whole world. Ftp players will run into a progression ceiling relatively fast while being able to enjoy a decent amount of the game play. Only when we are still using the auto battler system. Don't know how this would work if we are transitioned to combat.

[cursive salmon]

They won't be able to win that many fights to catch s2 or s3 illuvial

[safe flume]

I think it's important that all Illuvials can be caught. When I look at my son, who plays Illuvium every day, I also see him constantly checking how much value each Illuvial has on Illuvidex. Assuming he plays for free and sees, "Wow, a Ramphy costs so and so much!", isn't it likely that the barrier to spending a few $ to catch a real Ramphy, which he could then sell if necessary, will go down?
You have to get into the heads of normal web2 players. These people are not familiar with the concept that they could own something. They need to be led there first. And the best way to get them to realize that is to show them that with the same effort they put in when they play for free, they can own something and maybe even earn something if they are willing to spend a few $.

[vivid lily]

I would purely find the non NFT/NFT thing to be very confusing.

You would end up using your F2P Axodon team to catch a paid axodon, and then you only have a single axodon that you can trade. "But i used one to catch one" would be my immediate response.

Keeping track of your paid assets would become a nightmare, and the team would have to do crazy UI management to make it intuitive in any way.

How many reports would we get with: I caught a rhamphyre but it is not tradable! Only to then have to tell the person that it was a non-NFT as he forgot to press "play for cash". Or the other way around where people would mess up in other ways as you create a mirror world inside the already fairly complex overworld.

Would you be using the ethereal illuvials instead? Using only ethereals inside the game? I think that wouldnt increase the fun, as the coloring and fur are key aspects of the illuvials themselves. Seeing them in ethereal is like seeing ghosts and you dont want to use a ghost team in a vibrant environment like the regions of Illuvium.

So, i dont dislike the idea. I just dont see how you would want this implemented without making a mess of the game.

[open stag]

that's why community events, tournaments and other special missions will come into play.

[open stag]

when combat arrives, i think things will change. who knows how it turns out in the overworld. as i recall, you won't get to battle in the autobattle board anymore. when you see the illuvial, that's the illuvial you'll gonna combat. BUT, i'm still not sure.

[humble aspen]

Just in case it has not been said:

1. Free access just 1 or 2 regions from stage 0 to 3.
2. Free access is time bound; e.g. 1 month only. No reset.
3. Must create a new account to access the full game/paid game.

[vivid lily]

They will not remove the battleboards.

[open stag]

I guess an option.. I'm not sure. I'll just wait for it Hahahah

[iron lagoon]

I'm not a fan of this idea. I've been saying the current model is too pay2winish for 3 years and everyone disagreed, now we are trying to figure it out after launch, but I don't believe this is the way.

Most competitive games, and especially esports start with their main game and mode for several years, before expanding further.

In my opinion OW is very far away from being a stand alone game that can pull numbers by itself, until then the main drive force is arena.

Right now we already have 4 modes - gauntlet, ascendant and the leviathan versions which means 4 different queues.

To me it doesn't make sense for this free to play model, to be put against paid model competitively, even if it's non leviathan modes. It is gonna feel bad losing to a free to play guy if you spent 500$ yourself. Solution would be to separate the f2p and paid players in different queues, but that makes the before mentioned dilution even worse.

In my opinion it's better to expand the free decks by 2 more, and also introduce a weekly rotation of 5-10 illuvials that can compliment these free to play decks. If the player is hooked to the game, he will eventually get bored from the free decks and will want to branch out to ow or buy from the dex and thus starting his paid cycle.

[sour bolt]

In general I like the idea. But could we instead just increase the spawn rates of tier 0 higher stage / tier illuvials? Thereby keeping the f2p as f2p, without changing too much of the overlying structure?

And what to do with the rocks / crafting / consumables - it gets very complicated at some point and would need to be simplified for the average Joe as much as possible

[iron lagoon]

Indeed it further complicates an already complicated model

[sour bolt]

Wish we could just pay once per month, and have an all you can eat model, that would be easier for onboarding I'm sure 🤣

[iron lagoon]

Need to change the revdis model for that or have a substantial playerbase

[tawny sandal]

I love these suggestions, very well thought out.

[low crescent]

I'm 1000% for this idea! Just to add a detail to the narrative, perhaps an NPC (the one next to the obelisk) could explain the difference between the 0 free to play" stage and the paid runs by saying that the free to play is a kind of simulation created by G4udi to allow rangers to train before venturing into the real and dangerous OW.
In any case, this free-to-play idea is excellent, as it would maintain the interest of a much larger mass of players during the months/years the dev team will need to release future modes that will enable us to hook millions of players, such as Battle Royal or Arena mobile.

[gentle fossil]

I think this is a fantastic idea

[vernal mason]

Yep the game direly needs something like this implemented. The current model has no chance of mainstream adoption but something like this would be great. If it goes to an IIP I'll definitely vote for it

[kindred crag]

Isn't the same as going to a TCG store and have all the booster packs for free? Why do i will be inclined to pay for them if they are giving me? Idk, i think is kill all the points of having paid for having something rarer and collect. This will just drastically drecase the value of normal illuvials and maybe only holos/dark holos would worth something.

[fleet prism]

Not bad but I prefer my Solution as it's less devtime needed and includes Zero.

#1266791019534618684 message

But I've been auto-downvoted ofc cause f2p bad

[steep goblet]

The idea is terrible, people need a F2P mode that allows them to play long term, not a test. That many people can play the game is what can make it successful, what can make it popular. League Of Legends at the time was not the best game of its genre, it was successful thanks to its F2P format that allowed everyone to play it. Letting people try the overworld mode is not going to change anything, that can already be done even if the experience is worse, just as the player can play zero with the free land, just as he can try the arena mode, and even then there are Few people playing it and those people don't have a good experience, and most of the F2P people who play It's probably here because of the airdrop. Capturing illuvial that you will not be able to use for anything will only make people feel like they have wasted their time, What the F2P player needs is to be able to actually participate in the game, to enter the complete cycle of the game, that can play long term without affecting the economy.

[tardy hatch]

Hey mLLL, I do completely agree when you say that we want the game to be fun for a lot of people and right not its somewhat now because they farm airdrop

Of course the games needs bug fixes, polishment and have multiple key feature coming soon that will help but the main reasons for this in my opinion is simply because we dont have the full ecosystem loop in place ( incentivize end up playing arena with you assets)

The current airdrop incentivize people to farm T0 runs on multiple accounts & survival (free mode). They arent experiencing the game and thats why its not fun and doesnt make sense to them

That being said i think you idea suggestion complicates thing without truly solving the problem here

1. Gets our ecosystem more complicated and would require a great amount of dev work

2. Same

3. That would greatly incentivize pay-to-win, i dont think thats the way to go to make the game accessible and competitive

4. Landowners were promised fuel exclusivity, it would be extremely negative for the project to change this at this point

5. Any sort of betting is not possible due to legal concerns

[tardy hatch]

As for the original post itself, i think its a marvelous idea @crystal grail @tame glacier . Just like ilz, people could play for free without having things as NFT

I would also specify in the proposal that those captures wouldnt affect the bonding curve

Edited down below

[dawn elbow]

This is such a bad idea.

NFTs are a technology that is used to build a game. You cannot monetize a game by selling a technology as a premium feature.
You monetize a game by selling new gameplay features. NFTs are not needed for this game at all. It could have been build entirely without NFTs. Lots of games have a working economy and no NFTs at all. Saying we should implement a non NFT solution is a slap in the face and would show that Illuvium has totally failed.
The suggestion to limit gameplay features by NFTs will show every web2 player that NFTs are indeed a scam. Because such a limitation makes no sense from a gameplay perspective. It's only purpose is to charge money from players.

[hidden nexus]

the amount of support this is getting is scary. Why are you all in such a rush to destroy the game?

[dawn elbow]

It might look easy to implement this solution for OW now. But OW will become a game on it's own with lots of new features, quests and stories. So a F2P player in OW will have no need to convert any of his Illuvials into NFTs if he wants to enjoy OW only. Atm arena is the only purpose of catching Illuvials in OW. But as soon as OW is more complex and complete many players might not be interested in arena at all and will have no motivation to ever convert there free Illuvials into NFTs.

It is also a mess in the inventory. A player will enter OW and see all his items in the inventory. How will that NFT conversion work? A mixed inventory of NFT and non NFT Illuvials? A 2. inventory? A player coming into OW and playing it for free will have little to no motivation to capture everything again just to do some arena battles because arena has free rotation decks and the main mode will be gauntlet where you don't need any Illuvials at all. So why should a player even have interest into NFTs? The only thing a player will see is that he plays that beautiful game and if he wants NFTs he has to pay by piece. This will have such a bad look to players and won't give NFTs mass adoption. It will even push us back and just prove to every player out there that they have been right hating NFTs

[dawn elbow]

the amount of support this is getting by OG Illuvium community members is even more scary

Has the bear market really hit so hard that this community has no faith in the vision of the game anymore and wants to completely reverse what the team has been working for the last 3 years?

NFTs are dead and nobody is talking about them anymore. All the hate and crazy speculation has almost been forgotten. Now Illuvium has a new beginning and can show what NFTs are really made for. But if the game itself doesn't believe that NFTs can work how should we ever show normal players the power of NFTs?

[stoic berry]

I think people are voting on the idea that players will be onboarded and than spend money on the real thing. Not really thinking much past that (not everyone just saying thats maybe why its got more upvotes)

[dawn elbow]

Getting this proposal to the team after all they have achieved is such a disrespectful act that indeed could kill the whole project. As you can see in the NFT space and in the web 3 gaming space building with NFTs is not easy. Nobody has yet build a successful game. Every technical implementation has been new and you could not copy a working solution or just implement a third party software because they don't exist. The team proved that they solved alot of technical hurdles and released a working product. We see some room for improvement. But that was to be expected.
But why do you think we had delay after delay in our game? It was probably that some Blockchain stuff did not work as expected, had to be redone or there have been security issues that had to be resolved. And the team achieved all of that. Only to see that the community comes up and says that we changed our mind and don't want NFTs anymore. This is a slap in the face

[fleet prism]

We need a fun casual gameplay loop to onboard millions.

Neither just collecting nor arena is a gameplay loop that onboards millions.

We gotta get 300k per game, Arena Zero & Overworld to hit 1mio.

For that each game needs its own loops that in itself are satisfying.

I guess a little f2p like being sble to grind a Buy1Get1Free T1 run as well as raids would help out the active player count by a big margin.

[open stag]

[OW] So you guys want to have a f2p that only captures the basic lineage of T0 Dokas, Fliishes etc which is currently the gameplay right now, and it's good enough for you? ...I don't think so.

The idea is simply enable all players from any level to have a full Illuvium experience. It’s like offering a free taste before enjoying the whole pie. And I think, Illuvium could generously implement this F2P feature, even for players who may initially be skeptical about NFTs or aren’t typically drawn to this type of game.

[tardy hatch]

I am rectifying my stance on the subject. I initially replied right after reading the proposal but now reading the comments and thinking more about it i have some concerns

Do pack opening and casino simulators onboard people to pay for the real experience? Im not sure at all, the free2play version would be a cheap way to experience the lesser side of it but still getting some dopamine hits

The value of our ecosystem is indeed in owning the assets and truly capturing real illuvials

Someone that is reluctant to spend might end up going for a paid run here and there just to get that real experience feeling. If he can get the lesser experience infinitely he might not

The core intent is good, it would be nice for people to know what its like but it still has to be less than the real experience

I like filow proposition of making different stages of T0 runs. You could have more greater and exalted T0 the higher you go and you could end up with a team of 8 against a team of 8-10 in the T0S3 run

[modest isle]

10 days in guys. How about we see how ow combat and multiplayer go before changing the entire vision of the game. It's way too early for this.

[stoic berry]

id also add that we have 5 different versions of arena already. Getting a little out of hand how many versions of games we would have haha

[stoic berry]

yep and fuel price reduction

[open stag]

The mainnet is surely the real test. And so it begins.

Maybe 3-5 months top, and let's see the real progress of the games.

After that, I hope Illuvium games enlighten us of what Web3 is really all about. Hopefully, many players would play from any level of game skills and knowledge.

[dawn elbow]

But with this solution you don't get a free taste you get the whole pie for free. There is 0 incentive for F2P players to pay for the game if they don't care about NFTs. This means there is no incentive to convert web2 players into paying customers. The only players paying will be web3 players and we might even lose some of them when they see that you can get everything for free. There is a reason that other games offer solo self-found gamemodes. There is a demand from players enjoying games on there own and excluding trading. This would be the equivalent here. Every player that enjoys SSF can play for free. The only benefit if you pay is that you can trade. That's all. Arena and Gauntlet are free too.

Yes the current F2P experience is bad. So we should focus in improving that and add new features there. But if you make everything F2P you can never go back and start removing features.

[warm pier]

Then the second problem would be to make nfts that they can earn from. Illuvials don't justify the travel cost, shards and maybe consumables used.

[open stag]

There's still a room for innovation. Illuvium can incentives the f2p. Might be small but goes along the way. Some players are happy to get rewarded by in-game currency. How much more if that currency are converted to ILV or something. Hence, the incentive for F2P not necessarily huge.

Web2 gamers are happy when they get free skins, free credits etc (which you cannot even convert them real currency). That's the life of a gamer in web2. Even for hardcore grinders and streamers, some of them are rewarded with in-game currency. How much more if f2p in illuvium can come up with more juicy perks but not too expensive.

I can speak well about the experience in web2, cos i'm a heavy web2 gamer and streamer in the past.

but that's just my testimony. lol

[limber narwhal]

Wow, that was a lot of words to read through when first waking up. What if the free to play nfts had like a 48 hours usage limit or something and then were just deleted? Not really awake yet... Hmm I'll go find some coffee

[cerulean tulip]

I think there’s some good ideas here, my biggest concern/hesitation is that it’s just too early to be looking at drastic changes to the model. I’d like to gather more data and get some of the obvious QoL stuff handled (fiat pay for fuel) before going too far down the rabbit hole.

That said it’s obviously good to air out ideas with the community so nothing wrong with this being here, I just personally think it’s premature to go to vote/Labs.

[modest isle]

Why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free? They just need to make tier zero more compelling so that it's a kick-ass mini version of the game. Combat and multiplayer along with other improvements should do that. This proposal seems like a hail Mary and something that you wouldn't introduce until at least 6 to 8 months from now.

[limber narwhal]

I suppose it is too early to be making changes like this without being able to see the current player data... But what happens if there isn't anyone even left playing after the airdrop ends?

[open stag]

The mainnet is the real test of time, loyalty / retention and quality of the game. If there will be tons of ideas, feedbacks, I think this is the right and earliest moment to implement them. Because tokens are already involved.

[limber narwhal]

Like, I can't convince anyone to even try it out, with 30k tokens per month being given away. It's just far too expensive of a model for anyone I know to even consider trying. People are used to paying ten or twenty bucks a month for stuff, now it's twenty bucks an hour?! There's just no way.

[west locust]

@crystal grail why would you not allow f2p to buy cosmetics ?

Isn’t it the whole point for many f2p games to be financed by such buys ?

Why not rework the whole system.

Give a fix cost, the price of a game, and access a tiers of travelling for free. Everything. Just not on blockchain.

But if I were you, I would rework the whole experience and vision.

The team made assumptions, and reoriented multiple time the target. Everyone, then web 2, then it didn’t stick so let’s go web3, but we are not tailored web3 so it does stick too, then now we need web2. Being not here nor there will not work.

We’ve something in between, unfinished. Time to get an experience oriented full web3 and full web2.

F2P

• tiers 0 is ok
• cosmetics $
• f2p tournaments + web2

Web2

• 50$ game for full
• cosmetics $
• dlc
• tournament access for f2p + web2

web3

• keep current fuel system and 3 tiers travel
• gold illuvial giving staking allowance, expensive ones
• silver
• bronze
• platinum
• tournament with rewards

Everyone

• companion app for roster bragging
• top players achievements for bragging also
• etc

Influencer system is good but no one is steaming the game.

Where is the marketing ? We waiting 4 years and the launch is so under the radar. Pathetic.

The team have 10 months at current 1.6m$ burn rate, + few months to bankrupt the company and pay tax, lawyers, employee.

Only things to build must attract players is a mandatory rules to set, everything else is dreams and should be kept for one day once the project are success.

You’ll continue to get brun if the community keep trusting the founders. Because they burn trough 80m$ and are making 500k per month as of now.

Time to be realist.

[open stag]

The past playtests, are not even the real deal. The real deal is now, in mainnet. So gather up all your worries, concerns, ideas and feedbacks, to carry out at early as possible. So in upcoming months, there will be less and less issues. And more and more improvements

[cerulean tulip]

I believe that is a somewhat self-correcting issue. If there is low demand post-airdrop for paying players because they think it’s too expensive to travel and participate in the eco, then land owners will sell their fuel for cheaper and make the cost of travel lower. This is the nature of the free market, there’s no bottom rail for the fuel price.

If we think that even if the cost of fuel was much lower that people still wouldn’t want to play it, then we’ve failed in making a fun game worth playing for free too.

With our CURRENT player demand etc. I personally think fuel is several multipliers overpriced. So take concerns of the current cost of travel and throw it out the window imo. As soon as land owners are producing enough (should be soon) to suppress the market I think we see fuel costs drop substantially (+ convenient fiat purchases for fuel). Then we’ll really be able to assess how willing people are to pay to play.

The average person def doesn’t want to pay $11 to do a stage 3 run, our demand just isn’t there yet. Will they pay $1 for a stage 3 run? Idk, but I’d say let’s wait and find out where the demand meets the supply before overhauling the entire system. Still good to have these conversations obviously so we’re prepared for whatever happens.

[open stag]

I think you misunderstood me on pie. The free taste is the F2P version (untradeable assets), and the whole pie is the Web3 version where you can trade up your owned assets.

Anyway, hopefully Illuvium will take us "there".

[dawn elbow]

Yes, depends a little bit on your perspective. Many players might be happy to get all gameplay features (except trading) for free and might consider this as the whole pie. Especially if they come from web2 and are not used to NFTs. This proposal would not help in getting NFTs to the masses and might not promote the whole Illuvium ecosystem enough to get players involved.
From our perspective it makes sense to unlock the NFTs. But that might not be the case for lots of other players

[open stag]

I agree that Illuvium not might get all the players in the world. BUT the right ones. I'm a web2 player, not an investor but I get attracted by Illuvium's IP and other thousand players that are playing now. We're only a thousand but soon enough we will all get "there".

[sterile solar]

why not a proposal to hire a very good Game economist ?
Would be better no ? ^^

[open stag]

..and my energy is now getting low.. lol anyway, interesting topic! made me chatty this far. Gonna charge first. Til then

[sterile solar]

IIP69: Hire an Economist and STFU DAO ^^

[open stag]

It's a bittersweet being in the decentralized setup where everyone is welcome with their opinion. Things like this is inevitable. Unlike in web2, everything is internal. Listening to their community is just avenue for feedbacks to get their game better.

[sterile solar]

i'm joking, although on this point, I think that professionals should look into it

[open stag]

I know. I still got small energy. Alrighty, wahahaha have a nice evening everyone

[pseudo lynx]

The question is would those f2p assets count towards mission completion?
However (as a f2p player) I think that implementing a f2p higher tier illuvials would impact negatively the desire for capturing them for money (as that desire would be satisfied with those f2p account bound illuvials)
From my perspective rn I'm not investing any $ and staying on Stage 0 runs and f2p content because the runs are too expensive atm to complete missions and acquire points. Also not knowing the structure of rewards for leaderboard doesn't help, especially that there's such a big competition in Illuvium
Situation may change when there will be Leviathan tournaments with prizes or any other tournaments based on NFTs collections

[crystal grail]

F2P players can definitely buy cosmetics.

Good to see a bunch of feedback coming in for this idea but let me clear a couple things up:

I believe this shouldn't be implemented straight away (it's just an idea). I wanted to see the communities thoughts on this.

Also, I want to see the team get data in over the coming days/weeks before any drastic changes are made.

The team should focus on what they are already focused on.

I would love to see bugs, wallet issues, fuel stabilised, Gauntlet leviathan, multiplayer and raiding come in as this is what's top of my list.

With this idea we can always tweak things that would feel right.☺️

I'm a BIG believer in let the team do what they do best, as we are investing in them and they have all the data.

[modest isle]

Also this is a massive change from the original vision. Aaron and Kieran have said we need to implement the updates like ow combat and multiplayer along with eventual reduction in fuel costs to really gauge how the game economy performs. I'm afraid this type of broad sweeping proposal with so much enthusiasm behind it will effect the team's moral. We need to let their vision play out before introducing something so radical. I like the idea only if we see little traction after ALL upgrades have been made. Then we can reevaluate. Until then let's take a deep breath and relax.

[charred quarry]

But pokemon and palworld is just a one time pay and just additional for extra in game content. This one is continuous

[sour bolt]

When for us 1 time pay (even monthly ffs)

[scenic pumice]

I think one of the key points to this proposal that I agree with is that there needs to be more of the overworld game to enjoy for F2P. Yes adjusted fuel price may compensate for this, but that first transaction someone is going to make is the huge barrier here. Setting up the account etc. Its not about whether its $0.24 or $1.00, its about whether a player feels invested enough in the game to make the purchase. For the middle of the bell curve web2 gamer they will be skeptical of the crypto element of the game and would want to sink 5-10 hours in the free version before committing (thats just a blind guess based on my experience). So this proposal is aimed at making that 5-10 hours very addicting. Right now, tier 0 runs aren't that addicting. I was kind of hooked to try and get my boost/jetpack/visor leveled up, but now that i'm done with that the grind of T0 runs are not nearly rewarding enough and I think F2P will feel that and just leave rather than spending money on fuel. Maybe the other features of multiplayer etc help there, but I think even with those things you need a fundamental change to how much of the game a F2P person can get, which is why i support this proposal. But agree that it might make sense to give it some time for the team to test this all out and see the changes, but I'm confident this will be necessary even with very low fuel prices, and some extra game modes. The core element of the game is being able to catch cool illuvials, and right now those players don't get a chance to see that possibility. They just see a bunch of crappy lesser flishes.

[mild imp]

I think we need to give the team more time, let them first complete and flesh our our current games. they dont need a massive new workload. so much work to do in our game.
We all want this, but i don't think we should do it with the current game and content.
We have not even finished the version of our web3 game, i think its way to soon to come with this idea.
we can always take this step later down the line, when our current product is more in line of what we all want it to be.
lets win over the web3 audience before we move on, we cant keep expending, we need to finish what we started first.
and in the long run we will come up with a smart way of doing this.
we need to chill.

Its key that we first have a fun game, working out the details to retain and make sure the community loves the game before we are even able to move on to web2.

[hidden nexus]

since there's 50 likes but no one was able to counter-argument what I said here #1269137697939652659 message

I'll just sum it up here again by saying that for now the only thing we need to give is a better F2P experience, not turn the entire economy upside down.

My suggestion would be to make S0 runs into 3 stages of T0, which would make them much more interesting and challenging. Right now, S0 is boring as hell and has very little appeal.

Give players the capability to progress within the F2P world as well. Where they can experience hard battles in stage 3 T0 runs against a team of exalted flishes and exalted grokkos frontlining for example.

Just because F2P players don't spend money doesn't mean we should neglect their gameplay experience.

[fleet prism]

I like dis

[mild imp]

Its a bad idea, it will not attract new people into web3, it will create a even bigger barrier to enter.
we should not do it, we need to do it when the time is right, adoption is still far far away.

[hidden nexus]

please do tell how does it really create an even bigger barrier to enter?

[mild imp]

Not having acces to all functions of the game, without having to interact with crypto will just create a bigger wedge instead of pulling the 2 sides together.
i think we should only do this, when we can create a interoperable illuvidex, with 1 side being fiat, and 1 side being blockchain.
Or we find a seamless payment provider that can facilitate this for us.

we are just not ready for this, the current infrastructure is not ready for this, we should do this right, or not do it at all.

[left crow]

It would diminish the desire to pay to collect the same illuvials is the counter argument. If illuvial values skyrocket in web3 version that might be enough to convert some f2p players. That’s a bit risky but the team has the data in front of them to see if the risk is worth the reward

[worn herald]

https://tenor.com/view/comendo-mastigando-gif-11079610887514586452

Just found this

Lots of reading

I tend to agree with the folks saying we are still very early and it feels like this is changing a lot with a small data set saying it “needs to be changed”

[mild imp]

i think a big part of this, is just waiting for the right solution to be developed.
Once there is interoperable solutions for this problem, we should really avoid it.
just release a free to play demo game without any monetization incentives, to get the name out.

There is a few projects that are working on exactly these issues, Quant for example is one that i know off.
Maybe look into what it takes for us to use there service once they are ready, and we are ready.

[hidden nexus]

I get your point of wanting to increase the push for web2 audience when everything is set but I think we should do small steps at a time. Right now what I was talking about was the quality of F2P gameplay. Have you played S0 regions? They're intentionally made to feel bad and lackluster so ppl go to the higher stages. IMO we should instead give a great F2P experience to get players hooked in the game and then they'll want to spend in it.

[mild imp]

Ye listen, its not that i dont want this, it would be amazing.
But i think any self custodial steps, or interaction with blockchain is already to much to ever reach web2.
It has to be like using steam store, then we have a chance.
im scared if we do it now, the general public is just not ready for it, it will ruin the name because crypto and nft and bla bla.
The real adoption will only come once the big solutions have been created.
the average person will use blockchain without even knowing they do, thats when we can shine and claim our spot.
For now, its just key we do our absolute best to create a sustainable and fun game within web3.

Url: quant.network is exactly what could make this connection, and its not far from being deployed.

[scenic pumice]

can't dissagree there. The debate or dicussion is really around what the best way to "hook" F2P players. We can all agree the current state of the game isn't there. But i think we all agree the team deserves some time to figure it out and really assess the state of the current version and implement the established ideas we all support to see how that feels

[mild imp]

The real problem is just that people dont want to have the responsibility to be self accountable. People in the crypto space already had troubles getting onto IMX.
Its not that we cannot provide a web2 experience, its just that the infrastructure is not ready for it.
i dont want us to overplay our hand to soon, if we go to deep towards web2 we can damage our name and brand, not by our wrong doing, but just by general sentiment around crypto games.
i think it brings way more value if we stay patient, and wait for a seamless solution from web2 to web3.

[scenic pumice]

yeah agreed. We are def too early to be pitching to non crypto gamers from my own personal experience. This is my first exposure to web3 gaming myself, and I'm a pretty hard skeptic. And as I try to tell friends about it they are hyper skeptical and if the onboarding is difficult it will just be an immediate no. I've been tracking this project for over a year and still have to ask questions in discord to figure a lot of stuff out

[mild imp]

i would like to devote all our development power to making our web3 experience pristine.
make the game fun, make it all work flawlessly, add great features.
if we add this entire workload onto the team, before they even had a chance to fully develop the initial project, we are just shooting down our own progress.

[jolly crow]

I get the idea...but I feel like this just adds another level of complexity and confusion to an already super complex and confusing game...for the web2 gamers

[crystal grail]

Let me get back to this in the morning..

Also I feel like people don’t read very well 🤣🤣

Again, people we are not saying do this right away let’s wait for some data back from the team but we wanted to get the conversation started.. 🙂

[plain maple]

I tend to agree with the latter part of the comments here. It's a good idea, but it's too early to make drastic changes. Personally, I love this concept that has been pioneered and proven to work in the space by Parallel, but I would not want to ape in, or rather ape out, after less than two weeks following the game's release. It's a good thing to start talking about early, though!

[mild imp]

I think parallel is the prime example that it does not work.

[plain maple]

Please elaborate on why you think it does not work in Parallel.

[mild imp]

well
seeing the amount of publicity this game has had from pretty big influencers.
The conversion rate seems to be non existent.
I think for once we need to chose our own path, and not follow anyone else's footsteps in this space.
Stop copying, and just do what we think is best for us.
its what got us this far in the first place.

[viral sleet]

This is one of the best proposals I've read and definitely very positive for the whole Illuvium ecossystem and community. The game should've never been limited this way. Everyone should experience the game fully for free and as this proposal mentioned, differentiating and adding certain limitations between paid players and free players.

[hidden nexus]

it's not about doing this now or in the future. It's a bad idea. Period.

[mild imp]

we could do it, once we have acces to infrastructure that just makes the web2 and web3 side of the game equal in use.

[crystal grail]

This is your opinion and you’re entitled to it..

I will check wat ideas you have come up with tomorrow 🙂

[hidden nexus]

look man again with that talk. Yesterday web2 players are today's web3. Stop separating both markets and just focus on making a great game.

[mild imp]

Yes, well they just become the same market really.
If there is no difference in use, besides the currency used, its where we have a real chance.

[plain maple]

Copying is one of the backbones of game development. Creating a new genre or forging a new path is good but very risky. Illuvium is constantly reinventing the space in some areas, but in other areas, we also have to walk well-trodden paths to succeed. Palworld is a great example, as it took the best elements out of 5+ different highly successful games.

I am speaking from my player experience in Parallel. It's straightforward, and everybody can play the game fully free-to-play, and if they want to, they can opt into the paid/earning side of things. I like that, and people I've talked to that have played the game agree strongly.

The main point I like about the idea is that it will give Illuvium the best chance of having the player base it deserves. But again, this is something for way down the line.

[mild imp]

well, name any web3 game that has made the slightest impact into web2? imo there is none, therefor i want us to stay close to ourselfs.
and fight our own path forwards. there is no steps to follow into the unknown.
and make a move when we are ready. not when a iip is proposed to do it.
its very premature, in development and in adoption. its a bad idea.

[viral sleet]

I might have missed some info but how will the team differentiate between a paid player and a f2p? Didn't read this anywhere.. @crystal grail . Would land owners automatically get access to the game as being a non f2p player? Will there be some sort of pass to activate to become a paid player? This is the only thing that wasn't very clear when I read your proposal

[hidden nexus]

we're not that far from palword's DAU numbers so not sure it's such a good example

they went from 2 million to 50k. We're going from 5k to 5 million. Pin this

[mild imp]

I just think its waisted time and resources to make this happen.
we are way better off to poslish our game, as we all agree its not even close to finished.
conquer web3 before we move on.

[plain maple]

Yeah you are right that Palworld is a bad example for long-term success. I chose this example for its viral short-term success; the game was clearly not built for long-term retention.

[hidden nexus]

agreed, let's polish our games as much as we can before we do crazy changes. There's still so much left to do. Let's cater to the web3 players for now and slowly but surely web2 players will come.

[mild imp]

we should just put our free to play content out on display.
let people play arena, and gauntlet like we played it for the entire test phase.

we can collect data on how that evolves.
and we get our name out, showcase our development with updates.
imo its a waiting game.
we will need 1. mass adoption 2. seamless infrastructure to connect your bank account with blockchain.

[plain maple]

I agree, and now we have come full circle with the conclusion that we need more time to get Gauntlet, Ascendant, and Leviathan ready for the big stage—esports, tournaments, PvP, etc. Then we will really see what's up.

[west locust]

We need a strategy and a plan for the next 12 months though ...

[mild imp]

yes, and for real, i think these things should not be decided by us through a IIP.
we all know this is the end goal, for us AND for the team.
we cannot decide when we are ready for this, the team knows the underlaying problems that need to be fixed. we dont.

[mild imp]

the answer for now is not web2 tho.
we just need to polish what we have, make it fun.

[plain maple]

I'm pretty sure Illuvium Labs is not freestyling day by day but actually has a solid plan for the next 12 months.

[west locust]

Where will you get fresh cash ?

[mild imp]

dunno

[west locust]

I'm sure too. But as investors isn't it in our right to ask for details ?

As council isn't in your responsibilities to challenge the team and not hope and belive them without challenging and questionning what's going on and what's the direction ?

[west locust]

Hope, prayers and dreams are for the weak.

Strategy and plan to execute step by step is what's needed to not deviate and deliver.

[mild imp]

well, i think a few key changes are in iip discussions right now.
altho there is a sense of urgency to get them live asap.

[hidden nexus]

after IIP-39 I don't know what to think of IIPs anymore

[hidden nexus]

100%!
If we don't have a strategy, the strategy is to fail.

[left crow]

Thanks for being forward thinking and innovative, we have to adapt to what players want if we envision the game greatly expanding its playerbase

[scenic pumice]

Its funny for me cause I've been an ILV staker for years and land owner, but I've been checked out for most of the debates up until main net launch so don't know about any of these previous changes or drama. Can't see what was so dramatic about IIP 39

[hidden nexus]

"IIP-39 specifies that fuel parameters must be defined in an initial state prior to open beta launch."
did you approve the initial values? Cause I didn't.

[plain maple]

Of course, you can ask. That being said, asking the team to post a 12-month plan and strategy just 10 days after release seems very ambitious.

[gritty delta]

This is a very cool idea on its surface, but I think could cause problems. I feel like if this style of free to play where to be implemented, the free to play account bound version of the game would need limited inventory space for the free to play illuvials or else many players won't switch over.

A good incentive might be that they can capture up to 100 total illuvials at a time. If they capture more than that, they will need to start deleting the extras, or minting them into NFTs. This of course means that if anyone wants to catch them all, they must move to the paid version of the game to do so.

I can tell you I would probably have been able to onboard my friends I tell about Illuvium under this model, better for mass adoption for sure.

That said, if fuel prices fall low enough, then mass adoption might be a lot easier then too. But I do think adoption is much easier if someone can access ALL the content for free in a limited manner, and convert to a paying customer at a later date to receive the full benefits.

[dense lodge]

It is WAYYY too early to be thinking about a full revamp on the f2p etc.
Look, in a few weeks, a t3 run will be 2-3$ at most as many of us are now maxing out our lands.

This means Illuvial prices are going to be dirt cheap. As in 10$ Rhamphyres etc.

The barrier to entry will be magnitudes lower. All the team needs to do right now is make OW more interesting, and find a use case for Illuvials.

If we add in the new features and still have no demand, it means the game is shit, and we should just let it go.

[gritty delta]

Maybe T0 don't take up inventory space?

[plain maple]

But hey, I'm all for a roadmap as soon as possible, as is everyone else here, I assume. I'll try to get some estimates on when we can expect that.

[gritty delta]

I sincerely doubt rhamphyes will be $10, even if a T3 run is $3--takes fusing multiple T5S1, many runs to level the illuvials, premium gems, essenses, etc. If T3 run is $3, I'd expect T5S3 illuvials to still be over $50 still. I have done hundreds of runs at this point and have not found a single T5S3 in the wild.

[elfin helm]

I mean the team already did this before… it was called testnet…

This proposal TLDR is just saying to rebrand testnet with the updated current features to attract new users the same way.

How effective is it to do it again? How effective is it without providing incentives? Will this same method achieve mass adoption? Not sure how effective the conversion rate is.

[dense lodge]

It is a slight exaggeration, but look at the prices. The majority of Illuvials are way under the prices necessary to create them. T5 S1 for 4.00$?

[gritty delta]

Bad stats T5S1 should be under the price to catch. That said, I bet it still costs less than $4 for some one to catch a T5S1 if they are using epic shards, bought fuel with SILV2, and are selling the other items from the T3 run as well.

All that said, you can't sell something if there isn't enough demand. PvP arena players is where the demand will come from imo, but you got to onboard them as a first priority.

[dense lodge]

Build it and they will come. I agree with this. There is no demand because there is no use case. This should be top priority.

[warm pier]

What if we do a free rotation?
Playing arena? This team is free for this week. This way you get a taste of the illuvials and f2p might want to buy from the market or even invest in fuel if they like one illuvial.
If we make ow more rpg-ish, and we get a companion, maybe f2p players can get a free rotating companion every week. And if they feel a good synergy with one of them, they would buy it.

[gritty delta]

We have free decks already? with free item/illuvial rotations

[tame glacier]

This is the right take for sure. It's a conversation that needs to be had but there's no rush

[swift anchor]

I don't really like this.
What are the games and activities that are compelling enough to keep playing?
As a free player what is my end game? .
Run around catching things I can never use?
I believe the system is fine as is.
I don't agree with taking away the ability for people to sell T0 and use the economy to climb up.

[tame glacier]

I agree that this change is not worth as much without new exciting gameplay features such as Overworld combat. But overworld combat won't fix the onboarding issues overworld has and so it needs both in some form or another

[swift anchor]

I personally think a simple battle pass is all that's needed.
This proposal seems really punishing to the player and I'm not really sure why so many people support it.
Are people putting themselves in the shoes of the F2P player?

[swift anchor]

Why though? What to gain by using this model?

[swift anchor]

Agreed, I cannot see anyone actually spending their time doing this atm.

@tame glacier can you explain why you believe people would be motivated to play the F2P mode .
What are they able to do with the non NFTs.
I'm struggling to see why people would spend hours of their time catching Illuvials, when they can't participate in the economy.

I actually think this is a deterrent to playing.

I catch all the illuvials- I can't use them- I pay to do something I've already done - excitement gone.

[scenic pumice]

Not directed at me but my opinion is that you don’t get to see enough of the full spectrum of illuvials in the overworld to get you hooked currently. I personally don’t think you need access to everything, but just seeing a metric 💩 ton of the same 5 crappy ones before you have to pay seems like not enough of a hook.

Maybe the other game modes provide the hook. I think most of us agree we for sure need to wait to see how those features do, and whether or not you need fuel to participate in those to a sufficient level to get you hooked on the game

[mild imp]

if this is the take, then the only thing stopping us is infrastructure for seamless interaction from web2 to web3.
any step that requires blockchain interaction or self custody is just to much for the average person.
we should only do this once we have a solution for absolutely the same experience as we have in web3, just using a different currency.

[tame glacier]

Hmmmm I mean 99% of players who play Pokemon don't get involved with the competitive scene.

What needs to be considered is there are benefits beyond conversion for a large playerbase. For example if U had 100k+ players playing for free they all can tell their friends. Creators take notice etc that could encourage new users that are only interested in the NFT side of things.

[tame glacier]

I agree there are other things to resolve but there is no harm in having this conversation as well, both are necessary

[swift anchor]

But why?

[tame glacier]

I think 'I pay to do something I've already done' is a valid concern though and something we should consider. Maybe only stage 1 or stage 2 runs have a F2P version or something idk

[tame glacier]

I don't understand the question

[swift anchor]

I'm still not getting it.
Illuvum does not have the IP power of Pokemon.

What do you see as the motivation, beyond what you have already written to play the whole game for free, yet be completely restricted?

[swift anchor]

Yes we are talking hours of game play.

[tame glacier]

Simply that most people don't care about NFTs

This is the sentiment I saw immediately when the game launched. They simply just want to play Illuvium.

Without that access we can't get anyone talking on the timeline about how much fun they have with Illuvium

[mild imp]

I don’t think it’s necessary, a solution where traditional banking and blockchain get connected will solve all problems by itself.
I’ve tried to link the team solutions and there is projects who legitimately already offer these services, or are very close to having them.

[swift anchor]

And what else? That is not enough for me to support this.
Also I think it goes against the premise of the whole idea of the game.

Allow time, allow the economy to start working..

Would you play the mode you are suggesting.

[tame glacier]

Who has these solutions? Do they solve the charge back issue?

[swift anchor]

Do they really though?

[tame glacier]

I guess that's the point. It's not for you or for me. We love web 3 and web 3 elements. But we also need people who don't care about those elements

[mild imp]

I have no idea, that’s detail i don’t know anything about.

[swift anchor]

I'm not buying they would want it.

[tame glacier]

Well that's the 1 detail that's stopping the team.

Imagine if someone asks their credit card company for a refund. Illuvium can't take the ethereum back from them

[mild imp]

I know quant network if offering interoperability between traditional banking and blockchain with there overledger.

[tame glacier]

When you really think about it. Integrating fiat rails is extremely difficult. It's no surprise moonpay barely works

[tame glacier]

That doesn't sound uncomplicated for the average user tho does it? Even with my CEX I need to do 1 billion KYC things before I can deposit or move crypto

[mild imp]

Well the chargeback is a problem with the banks and regulations right, not something we control

[swift anchor]

I think it's more, people don't know they care yet.

[tame glacier]

And so everyone is asking us to solve something that's basically out of our control. So we need to find alternatives until that's an option

[mild imp]

The client side will never know it’s using blockchain if used correctly

[tame glacier]

And we can't force them to care early. We can let them capture a Rhamphyre and then have it expire?

Then we can tell them theres an alternative.

But it's hard until they capture that Free Rhamphyre

[tame glacier]

Can't really happen. They have to be told it's blockchain cause no refunds.

Kinda like when U buy a game from GameStop cause it's a code that U could use

[swift anchor]

Find ways to balance rewarding F2P players to access higher levels, then you might see more people caring.

[swift anchor]

Again, what for?
How would a free player use it?
Once the experience is over then what?

[mild imp]

Well sure, u can still lay out the rules and explain to them that the systems behind the front are blockchain, but atleast u can maybe offer a seamless experience.

[slender zodiac]

Some things in life we accept that there is no refund. When we go watch a movie at the theater, we don't usually expect to be able to walk to the front and and ask for a refund. Or buying computer software in a DVD, there are many cases where a refund cannot be given if opened. We accept all of this...

[mild imp]

The regulations and infrastructure has to change first, adoption must evolve systems must be developed to make this possible in a good way

[tame glacier]

I agree. If U have a possible solution I'm eager to hear it ❤️. I've been trying to rack my brain for one for quite some time

[mild imp]

The solution is, don’t force it and break our neck to try reach web2 to much stigma around crypto games to even try.
Wait for the space to evolve, and for web2 to interact with blockchain in a centralized way.

Instead polish our game flesh it out to a proper flagship game. And just make it as good as we can.
We can still use arena and gauntlet as f2p standalone, or rotate our games as has been suggested.

[swift anchor]

What Furbar said.
Let the idea okay out. Philosophically speaking this also would lead to a wide gap between web2 vs web3 instead of integrating everyone together.
I also do not have unlimited funds to play all tiers.
Battle passes have been mentioned, I believe this is the best way.

[tame glacier]

I have no issues with this. My only thing is that even web 3 natives are against the fact that U have to pay often to play the game.

I'd still like to rectify that since it scares away even the most web 3 obsessed and that's not good

[slender zodiac]

100 percent. It's a slippery slope when you start tweaking things. I watched a couple games basically suicided themselves by making little changes. Two years after playing, games were unrecognizable and had lost their initial premise. I agree, take things slow and wait til the dust settles to make any changes at all. Need wayyy more data

[swift anchor]

This is true, yet illuvum also has a vastly different ecosystem to the web3 games that exist today.

[mild imp]

Ye, we need to work out what’s acceptable. And tune and tweak towards our user base for sure.
But I’ve been watching viper play ow for the past few days, once u put a bit of brainpower and effort into a strategy, even his most unlucky and bad loot runs, pay 80% of costs back.
If u still play like testnet ye then everything is extremely expensive.

I think it’s been a pretty big shock, test to main net.
I think efficiency will come over time as people share and come up with strategies.
Once competitive modes are here, value of assets will increase with it.

[slender zodiac]

The main issue I see is that we are trying to fit Illuvium into a box. But Illuvium is an outside of the box concept.

This narrow mindset of thinking we NEED to focus on f2p and web2 is never going to let us grow into something new.

Web3 is supposed to be a paradigm shift, but instead we want to try to follow the old web2 playbook... I really don't get it

[tame glacier]

Very fair take 🙂

[thick coyote]

You can’t change the entire ecosystem, but do need an avenue for F2P to get involved that wouldn’t allow the bots to take over. Not sure if this idea would work but we already have a system where you can burn shards for fragments and make master shards. What if you had a different kind of fragment that gave you a pass to play a higher stage. You could burn anything you wanted and they would all be certain fragments. Gems worth almost nothing to illuvial worth more. This would also decrease supply which might help the marketplace. To decrease bots you could make different level pass that can only be burned from the next tier. Such as tier 0 items only get you access to stage 1 fragments. Tier 1 and 2 items can get you access to stage 2 fragments. Tier 3/4/5 can get you access to stage 3 fragments. Adjust the amount of fragments as needed, to keep the bots away but allow someone who wants to grind and try a stage 1 and see if it’s worth their time.

[scarlet bloom]

I think the Mistake here is thinking we WANT NEED or EVEN DESIRE free to play players to play the game. And let me clear there is a diffrent between having a cost effective On Ramp for players so we are not asking them to pay 500 usd just to start playing. I think making starter packs of shards, gas , and things together (bought from the open market and sold to players as starter decks) is a good idead but if players aren't willing to spend 15 to 20uds to try our game they really aren't our target audience, We should be targeting the Hobby Gammer who is used to paying For MTG cards, War Hammer Minis and the like and just don't have time to go to the gamer store. Hordes of people who might only put 5 usd in every once and a while are not good for us as i would guess the maitnence cost on the servers and support are greater than they generate in revenue in the game.

(I'm sorry if that offends anyone but its important for a game to target their audience and i feel like Illvium already has MORE than enough stuff that can be played 100% for free they there is no reason at all to expand that beyond what it is now )

If i had to take a stab in the dark i would say the target is to have each player doing maybe 4 or 5 base runs a week so your looking at a player thaat is willing to put in 20 UDS a month ( about a old school wow sub ) and thats saying 240 USD a year of INPUTS , thats not near a Free to play players spending habbits

[slender zodiac]

Couldn't agree more. If this is a collecting game, you can't collect anything valuable for free. It just doesn't work. If we focus too much on free to play, it's going to hurt this game. It seems inevitable

[tribal nova]

This was posted by @valid pilot. Then I realized we need a flagship game for mobile, PC, or both, or a viral moment that will make the web 2 community turn their heads and say, "Wow, that looks fun." After reading through this thread, I think we need a budget that will last us for the next 2 to 3 years.

[near epoch]

This is great and i am here for it.

But even with this the biggest hurdle, or was/ and sometime still a hurdle, to buy. I want to spend money but have to through through a maze to do it, and/or could lose my money is an awefule first impression. If it takes longer than 1min to get funds into a wallet and buy and item, not including sign up time(different but same issue), this is a negative consumer experience. Which is bad PR

[scarlet bloom]

Yes this should be handle QUICKLY , we need to be able to buy fuel in USD value with a credit card or debit card. Let the company handle converting that USD back into ILV let the DAO hold USD until its time to buy REV Shares or whatever but Fuel IS NOT a crypto so it can be sold for USD value with no restrictions . Having this setup Now would mean one could join the community play all teh games and Never even know they are on a crypto game

[west locust]

Team have 12 month to either continue milking web3, or convert web3 people to enjoying a game, or attract web2 people.

At least the old playbook is working with hundreds of successful games.

Why make the life of the project more miserable with new mechanics and not only work on getting players like the game, but also adapt to whole new systems?

Why not make it easy for them, but still build new for the future.

I don’t get this idea of “we are crypto, we are different, we are better” and then in 12 months, no more $, need a raise, need to sell token.

PS @crystal grail you won’t onboard millions without multi languages capability. Simply won’t happen with Chinese, Korean and Japanese for example.

So when you put all restriction together on the population you target. Why looking at the 0.05% of gamers only under the theme “we must be different because we are crypto” ?

I’d prefer to expand the reach, rather than milking the few.

[crystal grail]

Agree with this, multi language needs to come.

What do you mean by restriction on the population? As in from the language barrier?

I've said this a couple times but let me re iterate in one post:

I believe the game isn't quite their to market to the masses. Everything is good within the game but it needs a little more time. Waiting for easier onboarding, more features and so on. My estimate for this would be 1-3 months.
At this point I think this is when it would be best to do a full marketing strategy.

In regards to this post I beleive we need a better F2P experiance. I'm sure the team is working on multiple things at once and just wanted to put this idea forward to get the conversation started just incase these ideas wern't thought of

[slender zodiac]

Couldn't agree more with this. Game isn't there to market to masses.

[slender zodiac]

I see where you're coming from

[swift anchor]

@tame glacier and @crystal grail
Despite my opinions on your idea, I appreciate the effort, you both have made and are putting in.
For me there is usually some kind of end goal for playing for free. I do a thing, to achieve a thing, so I can do a thing. I don't see that loop here.
Which may be due to perspective bias.

I do see the correlation between something like the free Pokemon game Scoriox mentioned and the flow on effects of being compelled to buy merch or whatever else it is they are offering, so in that way it makes sense to me.

However I feel that's already covered. We see the other Illuvials and experience them, to a greater extent, within the Arena system. We can watch YouTube clips and live play. I think what exists now and what's to come shortly, is already enough.

[swift anchor]

I agree with you regarding a better FTP experience, I think the proposal creates division within the ecosystem.

I think working towards ways a F2P player can use the system to advance in the game overall would be most beneficial.

I think people need to move past the idea that the ability to advance in this way would devalue the market. Players that pay will always have the advantage.

I'll try to find the chat about battle passes I saw awhile ago.

[open stag]

A. What the current F2P only offers to the players.
B. F2P could have offer more Illuvium experience.

The proposal is really simple if we take a moment and visualize it. I dunno why stopping it from offering some more Illuvium experience on F2P version (although, untradeable assets). It's as if the players are just playing for free like in web2 (genshin impact, breath of the wild and other open world web2 games). Illuvium could incentives the F2P with in-game aesthetic assets, only to enjoy in Stage 0 region. Or could be something to earn (maybe fuel) so they can try to jump over the web3 mode.

In any case, I'm delighted that the community is wholeheartedly contributing to making Illuvium a fantastic game for the future. Although it's not my usual genre, I'm thoroughly enjoying it, especially the captivating graphics and characters. If my gaming budget runs low in Web3 version, I can always switch back to the F2P version. This what makes Illuvium flexible at any aspect.

I'm really looking forward to Combat and Multiplayer. In the meantime, playing Zero to fuel up my travel in OW. 🤣

[slender zodiac]

Have to agree with this take

[open stag]

Speaking of incentivize. There could be a mission in F2P to earn fuel. So if ever I ranout of fuel in my ow/zero (only games i'm playing at the moment), I could participate in F2P and do some fuel missions hahaha

[scarlet bloom]

My only though is the team will clearly see this proposal as beyond the pal . Your asking them to give the FULL gameplay over for free to the web 2 players they are targeting WHO DO NOT Care about owning the assest only playing the game. This is counter productive to the game.

[slender zodiac]

Conquer Web3 before we move on

Amen brother

[scarlet bloom]

My sugestion add control Support handle the Passport Account on the back end, selling fuel packs for credit cards and put the game on XBOX Game Pass

[slender zodiac]

Well said

[scarlet bloom]

Two diffrent markets i say go for the Big Fish thats Web 2 and let the little fish web 3 people tag along for the proftis. But the web 3 space is way smaller and generally 90% recycles money. Where the web2 is fresh new money and thats what we need

[west locust]

I mean, take a MECE approach.

Right now, what’s the population we can attract, and what are the limitation to attract more segments of the whole, and what do the project need to do.

If you can reach out to 2% more spending 1 month of ressources, it’s better than 3 months to reach 0.5%.

Again, the team can always hope that what they are building is working. How did that deliver until now ? Or you can take a systematic approach based on data.

Teams know best, isn’t a good approach.

I personally don’t care about who we target. I don’t care about the war web3 vs web2 bla-bla-bla

I want to reach out the most people for the minimum investment.

And to go back to the topic here

• F2P is an easy target. Agnostic web2/web3/web69.
• New languages is an easy target. Same.

Time to take a business approach to this project…

[limber narwhal]

That's exactly what most of us have been doing... For months

[swift anchor]

Yes, I agree I'm the same. For years. I'm not sure about how the work involved warrants this.
What are your thoughts?

[limber narwhal]

Uh... I dunno. I have only been here a couple of months.

In that time I have tried to hire children to shoot rocks, and convince adult friends to at least try out a jetpack... It unfortunately wasn't tribes 2 enough movement to convince them.

I'm not sure what you are asking, but I guarantee you that nobody I know can afford to play this game the way it is now. So, either that will change somehow, or whoever sticks around with their land, can duke it out over the next few years and, celebrate?

[gritty delta]

The problem with this is endless account switch spamming...

[hidden nexus]

Imagine a game revolving around ownership without having ownership. Brilliant idea!

I can already see the turmoil in gamers' pee brain on how there are NFT illuvials and non-NFT illuvials.

Not to mention all the scams coming over with players having to sell their accounts on shady black markets because they have a full collection of non-NFT illuvials.

But yeah this idea is the pinnacle of what we should be discussing...

What fixes the on-boarding process is having a kick 4ss game and a seamless crypto integration. It's that simple.

[gritty delta]

I believe the idea is that they get hooked on the game and decided to switch to the paid version at some point to be able to participate in the full version. This would especially be true if we limited inventory space to say 50 illuvials or something.

[open stag]

I'll just leave it to the expert on how to battle out spamming.

[gritty delta]

It's a huge problem in the current airdrop system imo.

[open stag]

I guess, all new ideas could carry out after the airdrop campaign. Anyway, I leave it to Illuvium team on how they execute everything. I'm just here pouring my thoughts on this interesting topic.

[tame glacier]

I like this viewpoint. How do you suggest targeting them though? Getting most people to even try crypto is difficult enough as it is

[iron lagoon]

I don't know what's all this brainstorming within multiple threads on this, when it's so simple.

Trying to onboard f2p players through ow is a bad idea, the game is a pack opener for now. Until ow can be a stand alone game, arena will be the main driving factor.

We already have a decent f2p there, just expand the available teams, add a few more variables to the weekly rotation, finish the arena modes and start market them to a broader audience. Once we have the competitive scene rolling, we will see how it goes and what further adjustments are needed. But without fully functioning arena modes and competitive scene, the ow is pretty pointless by itself for the time being. So focusing on onboarding new players through that is just a bad idea in my opinion.

Not sure how much work that's gonna take, but releasing a second client, oriented mainly towards f2p and arena players, that has no overworld in it can help with the confusion. Players install it to play our pvp modes, if they are hooked they can upgrade to the full client with overworld and start playing. Not sure how doable that is short term but I think it will help alot.

[mystic swan]

I have been saying the exact thing for over a year now. Let people play on free land (obviously produce less fuel than T1 land) to obtain bound fuel which they can use for free runs with everything you get there being account bound. This way they'll experience the whole thing but just at a slower pace and with their assets account bound. Eventually they'll buy fuel to complete their team faster

[mystic swan]

It will be really slow to get enough fuel for many runs and the assets are account bound so not really a benefit to bot if you can't sell them anyways

[hidden nexus]

ah yes that idea works with these non-NFT account bound assets indeed.

[gritty delta]

I really think its a bad idea to offer the entire game as FTP without ownership (I mean being able to acquire the whole collection). I think limiting the FTP inventory to something small (50) would hinder the idea of being able to get them all, because you literally can't get even 20% of them without entering the paid side version. I get where you are coming from though. I will say T0 ownership does not feel that special as it is since they are dirt cheap to buy. More players in general will help drive demand, especially if these players are collect them all types of players, like myself + if they plan to PvP with them, like I intend to do.

[hidden nexus]

T0's were always meant to be dirt cheap. My problem is how the game feels for some1 new trying the game for free. There's ZERO progression without paying for higher stages.

Right now S0 corresponds roughly to a S1 region but with T0's. You capture only 1, battles are small and rarely do you see higher stage T0's.

I don't think we should be neglecting the F2P experience this much. Give them some challenge, give them some sort of progression even if it isn't worth much $ wise, they'll still get the feeling of accomplishment, cause they didn't go to the market place and straight up bought the assets.

[gritty delta]

I really thinkg the T0 fights need 3-7 illuvials in them. Make them more challenging and a place you can get some XP. Get like no XP at all from T0 battles, so they can't even make T0 stage 2 or 3 at all

[mild solar]

I like the idea, it's not perfect, but it's the best one yet. One big thing is when there's multiplayer in Sanctum Mesa, and you can have 1 illuvial walk around with you.. only NFT illuvials can do this, and we need many similar ideas like this, so even if you have all the non-NFT illuvials you can't show off your hard work. We need constant incentive for them to buy an illuvial off the marketplace or start paying for runs.

[hidden nexus]

S0's should give XP only to T0 illuvials. That way we don't break the game loop and we can create a progression system within the F2P stages.

[mild solar]

Overall, we definitely need a more compelling F2P. Gauntlet has a chance in the future but it's too early right now. Overworld is the clear answer but capturing just stage 0 isn't enough to get them hooked on the IP IMO.

I really want to hear what the team think. At the end of the day they have all the stats and can see where the ship is heading before any of us.

Do we need to change things @grim pewter and @uncut tangle or is cheaper fuel 'enough'?

[gritty delta]

Well, as a paying player, who wants to keep making leveling progress on all of my iluvials, I hate doing T0 captures since there is like barely any XP at all. I want there to be at least some leveling xp, and I want the fights to be more interesting. They should challenge the FTP players to not lose. Right now, the fight is laughably easy.

Which is not good for player engagement.

[hidden nexus]

if you're paying then you don't wanna go to S0 to level up illuvials...

[kindred crag]

I always felt that overall initial experience is that drive people to be inclined to keep playing the game or leaving it. Rn, there is no much you can do on overworld (in terms of experience) as F2P. You enter a T0 run, you caught weak creatures and fight are too easy, as you said. Trying to build a more engange experience for PVE that would increase difficult and have more challenges would feel much better. Maybe dynamic survival could be this hook that we are looking for.

[hidden nexus]

• "Maybe dynamic survival could be this hook that we are looking for."
  doubt it...

[gritty delta]

But the airdrops incentivize me to go capture there. And I am supposed to catch them all, T0 illuvials will still see play in competitive play, and we all need to capture them. Don't make the experience miserable and boring by putting only a single illuvial in the fight. Make it challenging with more exotic illuvials that they player will be curious about--that's a better way to onboard players.

Make them curious about which illuvial kicked their butt. Make them use the scan to see if they can win the fight. Make them think stragetically on the battleboard.

[mild imp]

Why not wait for the world to adopt and focus on improving first.

[lilac marsh]

I will quote the post i'm anwering to as the starting point of my post about why it's not a good idea to split F2p/P2p and will add some others. Sorry in advance if some point have already being adressed.

First i'm not an economist lol but i could see the consequence of a divised intragame economy because it's what separating F2p and P2p ecosystem mean. Only 1 will be successfull, the other will inevitably fall. OBV the paid ecosystem will be the succesfull one, just because better incentive to play it. Or at least, you will prefer this POV : One of the 2 will be more sucessfull, guess who again, so people will tend to the most succesfull one that's inevitable and the other will slowly die.
We can also prosper together separately without harming each other or even better helping each others grow up in an ideal world, but i'm not an utopian anymore.

Second, having a multitude of different type of players with as much as end goal possibility is very beneficial for the global ecosystem itself. Differences, that's what make us stronger, it will build the ecosystem in the healthier way possible. i have no doubt.
Imagine having all the same goal to play fire rogue in ascendant mode. Who's buying your nature/water illuvial. Yes nobody.

Last one, you can't rely only on whales because money is not infinite and positive ROI it's not something guaranteed afaik.
Plus if there is f2p player it also mean sometimes they just don't have the money to spend on this, so don't expect them to find some even if you make a whole new brand game P2P. And they are definitly not bugs as i've read it many times, respect before everything guys.

We evolved in a way since Fornite vibe that's make F2P matter. like really matter. League of legend, CS GO, Rocket league are others great example of f2p successfull model.
They are obv others models who are making benefice but not at the same scale trust me.
If we want to succeed, we know the best model to follow. At least we can say that the f2p path is clear so better embrace it straight from the start.
Anyway we have probably only 1 or 2 shoot to change an entire ecosystem without destroying it, don't mess it because when we are all the way down to the bottom the road upward is almost yet to be seen in web3 games.

Another topic should be adressed if you really care about bringing new users/liquidity is to focus on capturing the most of the ILV reward pool back into the games, just saying.

[fleet prism]

If you ignore the pay2win heavy arena as a budget player, then there isn't much to grind for.

At the moment I feel like Illuvium's not the promised NFT game, but a beautified NFT mint System.

The GameLoop in Overworld is lacking the Final Piece to actually make it a game, and that piece can't be another p2w or p2play piece of content.

It's needs some casual f2p content. Outside of what we currently provide.

Not a new game, not overthrowing the complete economics, not arena tournaments.

Something like Raids or Illuvium Combat (whatever thats supposed to mean).

• F2P (hardest stages need meta teams)
• Multiplayer
• Fun
• Rewarding (free consumables, small chance to win a T1 Entry Ticket or Shard, exp for Illuviums)
• Limited to 3 runs a day, Jackpot Rewards limited to once a week per account.

The DAO refined the economics finely, but I feel like y'all had tunnel vision in the past. Cause you forget people play games to relax and have fun in the first place.

[slender zodiac]

Thank you. Agree

[slender zodiac]

Can't agree more to this. The illuvial encounters in t0 definitely could use a revamp. Put in some ethereal tier 1-5 illuvials so these so-called f2p players can at least see them in action. Not to be able to be caught, but just have them in encounter (just to clarify)

[warm pier]

I always like your opinions. I share your mentality, but you always put your words to make a point. I agree with you 💯

[left crow]

I think the F2P experience can be enhanced without giving full access to t1-3 travels. A solution could be to have a small chance for all illuvials to show up in the OW Tier 0. They would be account bound only but give incentive to grind T0.

[near epoch]

Counter argument is valid. It took me 3 hours, 2 to migrate and 1 to learn how to bridge, to want to spend money. Consumer experience > $ in the beginning. PR and first impressions are everything.

Crypto, at least for me and people I know, is hard for us to want to spend money and the scammers will eat people up with fake account that have illuvials that are not NFTs. Its horrible now with non scammers where i seen in the discord chats where people put their money/crypto into the immutable xYzm or whatever and no one had a way to help them get it out.

This should be issue #1 in my opinion: Easy of payment system and Sign up.

[hidden nexus]

Hence why I said we need a " seamless crypto integration".

Even for us crypto bros it's hard sometimes I can only imagine the nightmare it must be for the normies...

But this will come in due time, we're still very early. This is what comes from being an early adopter.

[kindred crag]

#Vote4Filow

[ruby rune]

Im a bit late to the discussion, seems like a great way to onboard players, but it does feel like if you can play everything for free, and compete in tournaments with your free decks, the market for the "real thing" will die. And the real market will be outside of our system, where people sell accounts with all the captured illuvials, or atleast that risk is there.

I do have a problem seeing any revenue though

[stuck lance]

Also a bit late to this(haven't managed to read through all the comments) but here's my 2 cents:

Firstly I think it's early to think at this radical solution. The game is only 10 days out and we're already considering changing the entire idea that was built on for 3 years?
I say let's have a bit of patience and see how we do in 1-2 months when we'll have more polish/bugs solved/better Gauntlet etc

Secondly what i don't like about this idea is the fact that it just erases the 'gotta get em all' feeling. I'm afraid that people will play the game, catch most of the illuvials, craft whatever equipment and weapons and just leave ... as there's not much of an end game that we have at the moment.

[azure niche]

each day, the ideas are getting closer to a Full F2P ILV and only sell cosmetics.
another benefit of doing F2P is we can list on steam

[hidden nexus]

I live by the sword and I'll die by the sword. That idea of full F2P is absurd to me and not what attracted me to Illuvium.

My only question to you all is this... Why are you not playing the game?

Am I the only one that's having a blast playing?

[azure niche]

im waiting for cheaper fuel price

[drifting bough]

yes, same. I would love to play arena or gauntlet but i cant spend hundrets of euros for fun only so i wait for cheaper illuvials or cheaper fuel

[azure niche]

doesnt feel appropriate to pay this much while market is in deep red

[hidden nexus]

what does the market have to do with any of this? 🤔

[azure niche]

when market is down, u dnt feel like spending

when market is green, you feel richer on paper, thus spend more

[hidden nexus]

I might be crazy but I think we're near price bottoms at least for the more common stuff. Cause the majority right now is playing on fuel crates and sILV2. But who am I...

[hidden nexus]

who cares if the market is down... We're in our little bubble here.

[azure niche]

bottom so far, we are yet to see the fuel exchange working

as intended

[hidden nexus]

the time for arena and gauntlet will come, it is still early. Now the ball is in the OW.

[kindred crag]

Can i ask a sincere question (i hope i don't get banned for this): why everyone have this "influencer" tag but only a small minority of you actually stream and produce content? Are you promoting a product or using it?

[hidden nexus]

what's an influencer tag? 🤔

and I don't think asking questions gets you banned yet

[kindred crag]

jaga is busy trying to burn my airdrop pool to less then 15/85 (he would prefer a 5/95, i know)

[azure niche]

and soon after, they start selling illuvials skins

[hidden nexus]

which will start burning illuvials and make prices increase even more 🤣

[stuck lance]

People are already selling skins - problem is that it doesn't require an Illuvial to be burnt in the process as it should when you create the skin (hope this gets solved fast as it's a much needed burn mechanic) - @hidden nexus 😄 i was just saying

[hidden nexus]

those are just the blueprints from private beta

[stuck lance]

Yes but still you should burn an illuvial when you create a skin - doesn't matter where the blueprints come from (btw i can't see my alpha BPs in the forge)

[agile surge]

Be prepared for another Big drop as soon as they implement the secondary wallet Support feature + 2-4 weeks.
I don't know exact numbers, but i guess there are just Like 30% Max landplots being played and likely most of them are low tiers

[agile surge]

Me neither it's bugged for many it seems.
Make sure to send a Bug Report ingame.

[swift anchor]

Yes, mainly because its hard for humans to see what we don't know yet, so we always fall.back on what has been before,
There hasn't been enough time to see it all play out.

I will also strongly object to it. Agree with @hidden nexus not why I'm here.

[swift anchor]

Ohhhh that's what's happening... I was wondering why I couldn't make one yet.
Hmm maybe that's a thank you to the land holders so we don't have to spend money making them.

Why isn't this channel showing down votes?
It only shows positive.
A bit misleading when you jump in.

25 down vote.

[stuck lance]

I'd wish for it to be a bonus 🙂 ... but i'm afraid it's just something that doesn't work as a lot of people can't access their Alpha BPs

[fiery quest]

We already had this effect to an extent. Prices are too high to start because apparently just inflating value rather than choosing a more appropriate starting price and letting secondary market and time value factors decide it is the right way to go. Plenty of complaints have come already and sure prices are falling now, however, it just leaves a bitter taste in peoples mouths that paid the premium and then it can get worse once we hit the sweet spot just for it to rebound again. The system deters player spending by not presenting a reasonable consistent pricing. With secondary there should be some reactionary elements to fuel prices I think, however, more laggy so as not to overreact to quick swings one way or the other. That's just a personal opinion though and not like a demanding this changes or else everything is doomed.

[fiery quest]

There's nothing wrong imo with being able to go to all stages for free and fight tougher battles against a larger variety of illuvials while not being able to catch them or collect resources(aside from consumables since those shouldn't cost anything to get to begin with. I think it should have been set up this way from the start to help make the game more enticing to players even though I also think the overworld experience is lacking in fun factors atm so it wouldn't have made a huge difference.

[mystic swan]

The main problem for f2p atm is that there's no storyline/missions except for the intro and tutorial, once you finished those and did a couple of t0 runs, it feels like you've completed the game

[queen raft]

Pretty sure that this idea proposed opening up a F2P version of each stage

[scarlet bloom]

THe Main Problem for F2P is there is 0 point to spend money to develop for them , you offer them a taste of the game if they aren't willing to come in for more there is no point in it? Like seriously i don't understand why anyone thinks we need F2P players.

[meager bridge]

I have a few points, which i may or may not extract into their own thread.

1. It's impossible for the layman to get to the bottom of this conversation. 400+ comments. This format is not made to make sense of such feedback and ideas. I can't read all this, yet there are many good points made. I want a way to make sense of the idea and read most relevant comments without spending hours reading everyone's two cents (including mine). I can sure scroll to upvotes but time/eye consuming. Unnefficient.

2. Blockchain is confusing. NFTs are confusing. Games can be confusing. Illuvium is a rich, diverse universe that can be confusing. Stages are confusing. Adding non-NFT to a web3 game makes little sense, is out of the Vision, and is confusing. I want less confusion for everyone ! Don't make things confusing.

3. Hence, give ownership to everyone. Keep that. This is the tech, as someone pointed out, don't prune it out ! But maybe you don't get all NFTs for free easily. It's a free "pack opening". Your chances of getting a nice thing are close to very, very low. You can grind some ―we love some good free grinding ― but not everything, and way slow.

[scarlet bloom]

Increasing Access to the game beyond what it is now 1) Increase Dev Cost 2) Increase Server and Support COst , 3) Makes it LESS likley those players spend money if the F2P option allows them full play and they don't care to buy assest they will NEVER coverty and coverting a player at 20 to 30 dollars a Year is not a Target and valuable player to the eco system

[meager bridge]

4. Premium content. Of course ! But not stages as they are right now. (By the way, how are stages lore-justified ? Is it another dimension or something ?). I would propose stages are kind of "buy fuel to augment your chances" of stumbling into more powerful, rare Illuvials and consumables. Otherwise it's a free draw, but it doesn't mean you can't win the jackpot if you never pay. You can, but chances are... very slim.
   And maybe there is only a few of the rarest illuvials/ressources (ok that's what rare means) that can be caught/harvested every cycle (see #5), which is on par with the idea of enforcable scarcity of said items, and of collections not limited by the number of lucky players who catch them during X timeframe, but by actual limited quantity of items in said collection (fine, it's kinda the same). So you might want to augment your chances ($) of getting them before the species/ressource has dissapeared for a while.

And you still have to play to open this pack, which takes time.

And you still have to get good quality shards (from slow grinding and/or from illuvidex) to make the most of your chances; and get good quality gear (from slow grinding and/or from illuvidex) to get to the places where those have higher chances of being; and get a good quality team (from slow grinding and/or from illuvidex) to actually get to the shard-throwing.

So augment your chances to actually get better things by buying illuvials, gear, consumable, and fuel, crafted by (mostly paying) players who sell them. Or grind your life out of this game to get some of them and flex that you never paid.

And of course, paid cosmetics. That's like chapter one of the F2P playbook. Cosmetics crafted by mostly paying players, if i have to mention again.

And paid extensions to free cycles.

5. Cycles/rotation; this is obvious to me ! Get free temporary higher chances of finding some Illuvials only if already caught by other, paying players or some Ore (there is like a magnetic storm incoming that makes an Ore point its nose, idk). Get a temporary skin, item. Try them all ! Then, maybe, buy. Or keep hop(p)ing.

This is what i could flesh out in a pinch. I have other thoughts. But like i said, this doesn't feel like the place for it. For one thing, i love seeing how passionate the community and team is, and that conforts me in these dire times ✨

[swift anchor]

Ohh. Well that's crappy.

[swift anchor]

I just don't see the point.
To me it's a colossal waste of time. The current system allows a player to level up T0 and sell as strong cheap units.
To me this is actually punishing frp.
Take yourself through the process.
Imagine what it's going to be like doing everything for free then again yet paying.

Anyone that's tested the game over the years ought to have a fair understanding of what that feels like.

More will be added over time, it's barely started. To me this is reactionary and changed the system to much.

Unless you have absolutely no money. Which is unlikely considering a person needs a pc anyway. Illuvium is aiming for something big. Let it happen. Don't take the little opportunity F2p players have to actually become part of the whole system.

[fiery quest]

idk what exactly i wrote and am just responding real quick but i didn't mean to say let's go full f2p, just if you want some more variety in encounters without having to pay. In fact I really don't care that much for it either after thinking about it because overworld combat is hopefully coming within a few months and I'll never have to play a mostly dull overworld experience again. though when combat comes i sure hope i don't have to pay everytime i want to fight and can fight whatever i want even if I'm not spending

if the game asks me to spend money/fuel in too many more places I'll start to think I'm at a casino

[mystic swan]

Yea getting a taste of all stages is 1 thing, but not being able to progress is another 😅 in most popular games you can progress to the "end game" for free but just by putting in much more work than people spending $$

[swift anchor]

Exactly, there is always a reward.
A feeling of satisfaction for completing a hard dungeon, grinding and selling within the game shops to work up enough credits to swap for in game coin and purchase a DLC, make the cool thing then go defeat something to get the cool gear.
Always something.

[scarlet bloom]

Those are sell time games thats a diffrent game model you can't do that here it just doesn't work with an asset driven game like it wouldn't work with warhammer or mtg, or yu-gi-oh, when owning assest IS part of the game the Free to play Premium model doesn't work

[swift anchor]

The economy is interesting, definitely balancing some of the amount of fuel or resources needed, is warranted, however once the economy starts to become healthy and functional a player ought to be able to use it to keep playing .I think it's still too early, there is a lot the team wanted to go in that wasn't able to make it.

[scarlet bloom]

I think there are improvements that could help the economy ( removing the scan featuer for one ) , getting wallet support up so more lands are being used and lower gas prices. But gas prices are high becuase people are paying that for gas they are starting to come down but the demand is there for gas at its current price thats why gas is its current price

[swift anchor]

Agreed, the worst game i've ever played for this is Neverwinter, constantly grinding the same instance, the same battles, for so little the reward was unachievable unless you grinded 12 hours a day.

[fiery quest]

Fuel is what it is because it basically started there. Total spending isn’t crazy so it’s not like we can say hundreds of thousands of players are paying at these prices. It’s a few hundred to thousand at most rn i think

[swift anchor]

Isn't gas a system wise issue? Like nothing illuvum can control.
Just wait for it to lower.

[swift anchor]

Yeah. I'm way behind in my fuel generation, so can't say I'm contributing to lowering those prices yet.

[scarlet bloom]

Well i mean having the lands need less fuel themselves to upgrade would have been good, must lands need a ton of their own resources to reach max for tier one lands that will be another 4 weeks or more before they start really selling lands

[mystic swan]

It does tho, I played an MMORPG for over 12 years, it was p2w.. but I grinded harder and did spend a bit and was able to compete with people who spend 100x what I spend

[scarlet bloom]

Ok but that Does NOT help us here, you spending a bit in Illuvium is BAD for the whole eco system, There are server cost and maintence cost to the game and support cost Illvium is not a game that works wlel with a bunch of people spending 5 dollars a month or here and there it pratically needs players willing to spend a full on subscription fee close to 20 dollars a month or more so players who aren't in the 200 to 300 usd a Year are not our TARGET players. Yeah we hope for whales who dump 10k or more and its ok to have a few people who scrap by and try to make it off playing the economy but the title of this (On-BOARD MILLIONS of F2P Playeres ) would actually proably Sink this game

[mystic swan]

I think it's better to have alot of players who spend a few $ a month than have not so many players who spend alot 😅

[scarlet bloom]

Yeah thats not how math works in Game support

Average player needs to generate something like 20 cents a day of revenue or its costing the game money on a basic bandwith cost + support model

[fiery quest]

It clearly doesn’t work for genshin or honkai and wuthering to have 10’s of millions of f2p so ofc it won’t work here. Oh wait, it actually does because you only get whales by having lots of players who spend little or nothing to admire and be jealous of them

[scarlet bloom]

Apples to Oranges my friend

[fiery quest]

Both are fruits, this discussion might be meaningless but so is your argument.

[scarlet bloom]

Ok if i can print infinite goodies bags and sell things in a gatch game mechanic and limit player transactions from being p2p sure we can turn illvium into a f2p piece of crap but hats not the kind of game it is

[swift anchor]

I understand this perspective yet disagree.
I see many different types of players, we need them all.
Long term, spend all the time and, long term spend occasionally, churn players, occasional high spenders. They all work as part of a larger system.
Again regarding more access to Tiers, Aaron has responded with support to battle passes. This would suit a lot of the player base.

[scarlet bloom]

One of us has clearly calculated server cost for a large game before and one of us hasn't so lets just stop pretending illvium can be a F2P game and move on

[fiery quest]

And neither of us have the solution to make this game popular so I guess we’ll just have to wait for the devs to do something.

[scarlet bloom]

The stats or that are pretty darn clear F2P does not convert to whales they convert to partial time gamers that drop a few bucks can't keep up and disengage and churn. Its not a good mechanic for a long running game where any assest they get will be trashed on the market the second they get them

[west locust]

Better do something in the next 10 months or we dead 😄

[fiery quest]

How about this, we watch the market for the next week or two, if eth drops below 1500 convert half the treasury to it and maybe btc and see if the DAO can last long enough to ride it up for a 5-10x

[scarlet bloom]

They devs are STILL BUILDING IT, give them freaking time , they have clearly laid out that this is a collectible Asset game that will lead to high level competive E-sport and community play in OverWorld. We just moved from test net to main net and are still In the BETA , and people posting they need to change the whole game economy becuase they can't have ramparts on week 2 is just silly and annoying and as someone who has been in their shoes i'm insulted for them

[swift anchor]

Genshin impact is a great model.
It also has an incredibly deep lore, many quests and multiple different game modes on every device, that all support each other to progress in the game.
Yet applying to Web3 would need tweaks.

[fiery quest]

If they had never hyped this game up so much people wouldn’t be complaining so much tbh, however, it’s been like watching a presidential campaign. They start off telling you how great things will be and then they become president and all a sudden things aren’t the same or it takes time to set up policy and 4 years later nothing has improved.

Ignoring that though, I agree in general to let the devs dev, however, this launch is not even close to what people envisioned for the past few years and are rightfully panicking about their investments.

[west locust]

Its ok

Game is making $423,158 per month right now.

We just need to find a way to get an addtionnal $10,199,547 to have a sustainable project.

Do we think web3 and current community can spend more to help the project survive more than 10-12 months ?

That's a lot of spending for 15297 players ....

We just need 700$ per month per player ...

woops... I didn't updated eth price... - OK done -

[fiery quest]

Lmao, didn’t even think about that. That’s a tough break for us tbh

[swift anchor]

I think you are missing the point.

1. Illuvum isn't a fell game yet in any of the modes.
2. The whales didn't even buy first editions so I don't think they matter yet as much as you say.
3. Churn leads to money always coming in, daily active user base, passive marketing, the amount generated usually outweighs the amount that doesn't stay.
4. Casual players are still a source of income, yet it's taken over time, better to have a steady income over the years, than rely on a small section of the market. Casual players are likely to spend more than churn player's over the lifetime they play.
5. Long term, consitant spend.
   I think this category is the most important.
6. Whales, I think whales will spend intermittently and inject Large amounts according to particular parameters.
   Yes need yet depends on too many factors to be something that's relied upon.

Yes this game requires money.
For me not enough time has passed to determine if the system is working or not.

[swift anchor]

I agree with you on most of your points.
I would prefer the game stay as is for the moment.

[swift anchor]

I agree here, I feel the community needs to be informed in future about the style of launch. To me the current one has been a soft launch. A lot of people made large financial decisions based on previous information. It may have contributed to flooding the market and the low prices.?

I think people would have made different decisions.

[scarlet bloom]

if this game needs to make 11 million a month its got a bad back end problem ?

[fiery quest]

It needs 11 mil a month because revenue share is stupidly set up from outdated expectations of tens to hundreds of millions being spent monthly

[azure niche]

it was setup during axie bull peak

[scarlet bloom]

1. I Love all the game Modes 2 ) Whales should add money to the economy not the revenue line, creating a economy where players can buy and sell by adding more liquidity into the market we need to focus on putting the whales spending on the marketplace where we make it back in fees every time items sell, 3) churn does not lead to money coming in in a crypto game church leads to money going out into other projects 4 ) casual consitent players that are willing to drop 10 to 15 dollars a week are our goal and target , 5) Yes this is what where saying people willing to buy a few runs a week 6) whales spending should be on hording things we should try to keep things as fair and balance time wise in the game forcing whales to get their advantages playing the markets ,

[scarlet bloom]

Someone get this game on xbox game pass with fuel micro transactions fast 🙂 lol

that all said then the last thing we need is MORE f2p then right now , and developing towards F2P would be a bad spend, gotta get people in who will spend team seems like they have a vision push Gauntlet Levithan as the Headliner E-Sport get some people in here and keep driving spending

[gritty delta]

The playerbase is growing, just got to keep on rolling more players into the game--keep the economy moving the right direction, and I think great things can happen with this model still, especially as the game improves and more features are put into the game. Got to give it time.

[west locust]

Yep capturing more players.

Get the word of mouth out...

[gritty delta]

I would like to review the marketing strategy if I could, so I could give feedback and possibly suggestions. Not sure if they are using target advertising well enough or not.

This isn't really the thread to talk about this though.

[slender zodiac]

You think land will drop more..?

[slender zodiac]

Agree with you and @hidden nexus
Adamantly against f2p

Maybe this is why DAOs can't work. The best companies in the world were created by innovators that went against what everyone thought was possible. They were in charge so they were able to make these radical decisions. I feel we need to sit back and let the team build Illuvium. Instead, the community thinks it should shape its future under their belief that a DAO is a better way to govern a game. I'm starting to not believe in DAOs the more I watch this play out

Maybe someone should create a proposal that doesn't allow the community to drastically change the structure of the game.

[lilac marsh]

fundamentals of DAO are great, yet not very succesfull you are right. Capitalism probably kill most of them.

[near epoch]

https://tenor.com/view/viva-la-revolution-gif-11760395
I want this to be such a success that Illuviums main problem will not be supply and demand but fighting off Google/Microsoft and other tech companies who mine our data, sell it or get hacked, and we do not get anything for it. And they do not plan at all to give anything back.

Data ownership revolution begins with ILLUVIUM!

[fiery quest]

It’s like marriage, you only do it for the tax purposes

[fiery quest]

We have protocols iirc to stop crazy changes by the DAO which this could be classified under if they felt it was necessary

[molten hamlet]

It's important to remember that changes go through our proposal process. We speak about every proposal with Labs before voting, to ensure that the community's wishes align with practical considerations and best practices.

I get that it's scary to see some of the ideas that would fundamentally change the systems and structure that has been built, but we're set up pretty well to not make hasty changes without considering all the implications.

For now, this is just an idea, and there's no harm in people putting forward ideas. I'm not personally in favour of this particular idea, but we do follow along on ALL the feedback in these posts to see where the community is at, and to better understand the concerns and underlying issues people are identifying when they put these kinds of ideas forward.

There is one core element of this idea I think could have merit.

The F2P experience doesn't allow players to experience enough gameplay to get invested in Illuvium and become paying customers.

There are multiple ways to solve that issue, and this idea is only one of them. Before taking any action, we need to compare against data to ensure the hypothesis is true. From there, we can evaluate options with more precision. It could easily be the case that we just need to somewhat expand the F2P Overworld experience to increase retention, for example. It could be the case that we need to put the use cases for Illuvials more directly in front of players. If a player is asking themselves "Why am I buying this?", that's a solvable problem, through game systems and the way players are directed to play.

At any rate, the TL;DR here is that there's a good reason we have multiple stages of review for ideas that become proposals, and we consult with Labs prior to taking action. But there's really no harm in the community putting ideas out there.

[digital cypress]

I think the core problem is that arena and OW shouldn't be two separate games. Arena should be part of the OW storyline and live inside sactum mesa. Why do we want to fight others? what are we fighting for? Things like that.

There are too many variables and so this idea is far to risky.

[slender zodiac]

Great response. Thank you 🔥

[west locust]

As F2P let me access the 3 level of travel and give me a way to battle the other t1-t5 illuvials.

I need to see those in action to be willing to pay to capture them or buy on the market.

Current t0 travel is flat

[azure niche]

the data

it doesnt mean this idea is the approriate way to turn this around, but something need to change

[azure niche]

i disagree.
feedbacks have been helping this project tremendously.
so many examples to argue against your statement, but let me start with the most recent one.
do u think the current P2A missions and milestones are good? thats what happen when we "sit back and let the team build illuvium"

do you think arena ascendant is good? does it reflect "the best companies in the world were created by innovators"?
ascendant had 200 players and retention was low. then we ended up doing a TFT-clone, because of feedbacks

so no, we will not sit back.
our community has the greatest minds in web3, we have millions of hours of gaming combined.

[lilac marsh]

What's concerning sir ? Data show hypest point is at launch, nothing new lmao + very low timeframe, can't make conclusion out of it .
If it's because of volume you should not and also too early. Let the market dry more then you could be at some point. Then we will see who's buying,( 'whales' or budget/ ex f2p player) and we will be able to say more precisly who's really driving the market/economy.

volume being in $ and not in ETH do'est help too if your following the crypto market closely.

[hidden nexus]

https://tenor.com/view/girl-eyeglasses-myopia-myodisc-glasses-gif-24739533

[azure niche]

usually launch hype last longer looking at big time, pixels and parallel. ours last for a week

[lilac marsh]

need to see active user/overtime to say so, unique owners don"t show much

[azure niche]

lower eth price and lower fuel price should mean more volume, but it hasnt happen yet

[fleet prism]

Well we had 0 marketing and thats good cause theres still too many IMX issues.

[azure niche]

yea imx is dissapointing at best

[lilac marsh]

low+low = high ? you got it wrong.

[azure niche]

we do need to retention, but idk if team will publish that yet.
A good flywheel need inflow of new players to absorb supply tho

[azure niche]

ideally, lower entry price should mean more people playing the game, people who are priced out should enter now if the game is appealing

im personally quit after 2 days of launch and starting to play again today

[lilac marsh]

Sure,time will tell

[azure niche]

we need buyers to step in to break the downward trend

[slender zodiac]

Same bro. Haven't touched 1 to 3 region yet. Just doing tier 0

As far as your response to DAOs. Yea, I see your point. I've been in favor of them since the start. I think they're great. I do disagree that the crowd is smarter than the innovators.. Apple is great because of Steve Jobs. Tesla and SpaceX is great because of Elon Musk. The crowd usually can't see the future, they only know how to copy the past. This is not innovation. It's the same regurgitated ideas.

That being said, you listed some solid examples of why DAOs have been great so far. I hope your right in the end and we don't become a web2 game. That would be the end of Illuvium

[azure niche]

lets hope so.
i believe in the dao system

[tribal nova]

We should have created our own. lol

[azure niche]

yes ILV zkEVM

[spark smelt]

This!

[ashen solar]

Honestly I think its a bit early to implement full f2p features right now. We need to have more things to do in OW, complete competitive aspect in Arena, complete lore/single player story and npcs. Its just feels an incomplete experience right now at least in OW. We dont want web2 players to leave a negative review over that, no?
I think having free rotation of illuvials in arena, f2p gauntlet, tier 0 regions and f2p plots in zero is enough for now.
Hoping we get leaderboard rewards in arena, including gauntlet the soonest as I think it will drive increase in player base including web2 players. And of course being able to play gauntlet on our mobile phones.

I believe even if we have this kind of f2p features now, I doubt we will have substantial increase in paying players because of fuel prices and the current state of the market.

Nonetheless this is a good idea and should definitely be considered in the future.

[digital cypress]

https://tenor.com/view/damn-damn-damn-damn-damn-right-dame-time-gif-18029769

[fiery quest]

If fuel prices keep dropping then spending costs wont be an issue and it’s just up to quality of updates and new modes to make people want to join in

[valid pilot]

10 months is not enough time to go from a 90% loss to a profit in any universe that I know of.

[fiery quest]

hypothetically, would people be open to extending free 2 play to the point of being able to catch all these non tradable acct bound illuvials, but having it set up such that as soon as they die in arena, maybe overworld raids in the future, etc, they are gone for good, returned to the ether, and you have to go back out and spend time to catch and train them up again. Maybe give them a few lives but on a 1 week cd or something before they really go kapoot, or do the one time/once a seaon $10-20 upfront fee like buying a normal game. one time option straightforward endless loop for them to play and seasonal do it so everything is wiped each seson and ofc there would be a league they can participate in using a portion of the fee.

[azure niche]

yea its a good idea.
S0 is not that interesting to play

[south valve]

Seems like I came a little late to the party, but I read very interesting things on both sides. The core take is that we need more players and free stuff attracts more people. I personally don't like this idea specifically because it seems that it would take a lot of dev time and goes against of the ownership of assets. If we want to expand the F2P experience let's start with improving gauntlet with easier to reach S3 illuvials, custom matchmaking, spectator mode to name a few.

Instead of fancy new ways and features I would like to see time and resources this year into polishing what we already have to make the playing experience way smoother such as making the market place more efficient and in-game, one click money onboarding, fiat payments, minting delays...etc.

I know it's off topic but I agree with @west locust, expanding the language option could be a cost-efficient way to reach more people, Chat GPT pro and 1 native editor, can have it done cheap and fast, no need to dub voices just subtitle it. I don't know how complex it would be from the implementation side but we could ask the team.

[fleet prism]

But Kieran said we'll split the Team in two didn't he? One for QoL one for new Stuff.
I do see those Gauntlet updates more as QoL.

Meanwhile I think it is of high importance, what the actual next Content Update will be. And in my Opinion the next Banger should be Raids. We have the numbers, Overworld is by far attracting the most players isn't it?

Finishing that experience up with Raids as F2P repeatable content, where you can actually use your grinded/bought Team to participate sounds like the smartest move imho. With the right Rewards it's almost guaranteed to become successful.

Arena is and will be for quite some time, too sweaty for any non-whaling player.

Doesn't need to be perfect, can totally be released as alpha test version.

We already have:
Matchmaking
Arena
Illuvials
Mini-Bosses (XXL versions of current illuvials)

Need:
Endbosses
Bigger Battleboard for Endbosses (make it epic)
Maybe some Artwork to make the Boss's side of the Battleboard be unique. As bosses don't have to be placed and can be stationary, the designers can be quite creative here (makes rouges a little useless as they jump to the other side of the players board, but that's okay).

Simple rule-set.
Every 3rd fight is a miniboss, in any fight other than Endbosses the 4 Players can place 2 Illuvials. In Endboss fights they can place 4. Endboss would be perhaps the 10th fight/wave. 1 Augment per player after each miniboss.

I don't see how that wouldn't be awesome casual content for anyone that's already here. Also nice way to flex your units to your friends. Also nice for marketing to non-arena audience.

But I'm just a casual pleb with his opinion on things.

Maybe better rewards if you use solon? Another sinkhole >_>

[south valve]

This sounds good and could be it's own idea, I don't know how feasible it is dev wise. I'm sure leviathans are going to play a role as some sort of End Bosses.

[fleet prism]

Did post a Feedback-Idea I think, but it's kind hard to gain traction in the channel if you ain't have the followers on social media. Or your personal Army of Airdrop-Grinders to upvote it

Anyways, I literally spammed this in various Threads. Maybe someone up there has seen it and took a liking.

[west locust]

I’ll vote for any council members challenging the team on languages and getting a resources and time quotation.

[south valve]

I'm finally back home and my plan for today is to write a game improvement idea that has been on my mind for a while, but I will also do one for this. As an interesting side note the team hired a couple of years ago official translators for the WP in Spanish when I asked them to (I proofread it), they have that data.

[west locust]

I think a few years back I asked and they jumped on the fact the UI have to be adapted depending on text size.

I say we don’t care to iterate fast and release. Then later they can improve UI and solve lengths issues.

At least it allow everyone to play.

But I’m biased, I believe the only way to survive is to bring more players, then more spenders. I don’t believe in get things perfect.

[ebon loom]

you speak very well very precisely 💯

[near epoch]

I didn't want to create a new topic because I think this should go here to keep everything together for now.

Title:
I'd love to see a completely different type of T0 world, where the stage 1-3+ runs remain unchanged.

Body:
T0 could be a place where we land and remain permanently, without the need for travel like in stages 1-3, but with a region-based approach. Players start in one region and grind to get bases for each region, eventually unlocking all of them to play in. Players could simply walk out and start catching illuvials, transforming it into more of an MMO, community builder, or even a creative builder like Decentralized Land, where all land is connected. Players could build gyms and other structures visible on the map, complete with stats, etc. People could then fly or teleport to these locations to use the buildings for a set cost. I played Decentralized Land a few times for some POAP events and found it really cool how everyone could travel across lands bought by owners, build on them like in Minecraft or Palworld, and add unique creative aspects to each plot. It reminded me of the first online games from the 90s, with their simple graphics. Illuvium would be next level on that alone.

We can maintain the energy aspect, where it decreases as players move away from the base range to mine and catch illuvials. Perhaps each plot could be a certain distance from the next, with open terrain in between for catching and mining. "The lands in between" has a nice ring to it. If this could be integrated into an MMO environment where people can freely interact, use emotes, etc., with the main story unfolding here, all for free, it would be absolutely incredible to see and be involved in. Travel could then be used to reach higher stages for better items or illuvials people want as it currently is.

Above TLDR:

• Permanent T0 World:

  • • Players remain in T0 without travel needs, similar to stages 1-3, but instead region based.
  • • Region-based gameplay where players unlock bases in different regions over time more than likely as the story unfolds.
  • • Can make this where people can just buy all the regions unlocked instead of playing the story too.

• MMO and Community Building:

  • • Players catch illuvials and build structures like gyms.
  • • Land is connected, similar to Decentralized Land where we can walk/teleport to different plots but in between each plot is the illuval catching/mining world where people can PVE/PVP.
  • • Structures, like gyms, guildes/etc are visible on the map and can be accessed for a set cost. These can be build on ZERO but show up in the OW game. So land owner will have to make choices on what they want on there land even more.

• Influence from Decentralized Land:

  • • Inspired by experiences with Decentralized Land and POAP events.
  • • Players can build and create unique aspects on their plots, illuvial based though not as such an open creative aspect. Isntead we can chosse from a set of illuvium buildings.

• Energy and Gameplay Mechanics:

  • • Energy decreases as players move away from bases/plots in-between other plots as we catch or mine, etc.
  • • Open terrain between plots for catching and mining.
  • • Some how would need to recharge energy. Return to bases, use of items?

• Free MMO Environment:

  • • Players can interact, use emotes, and experience the main story for free.
  • • Travel is used to access higher stages for better items and illuvials as it is now and remains unchanged.
  • • the goal is to bring everyone together in a place where the free version can be an experience of using of emotes/avatar dancing, maybe live pvp battles where ppl can challenge each other and others can watch, team building for x event, raids, guides, etc. in the open world.

[dense geode]

I can get rid of this post if not allowed
Free play idea
the essential proposal would be something to help maybe everyone that’s a free to play player and maybe even payed players to especially free to play player’s. Also this could help get people to play more game modes other than just one and also could help market.

New game mode: Tier 0 acendent mode
it would be essentially ranked acendent but only tier 0 allowed in the builder and maybe they could give them a free lynx to add to the mix for like the main they build around. On top of this mode there would be a leaderboard that hopefully could implement a way for top players in leaderboard to earn some fuel then they can eventually move on to the payed version and also adds more of a progress loop to the free to play side

Reason: this could benefit
in my experience as someone who mainly plays free to play games and don’t really spend money on a game unless I enjoy it I only spent probs a handful compared to a majority. Also trying to get a start and a foot hold to play the other modes that’s not survival which gets repetitive or gauntlet which needs works I’m left either with acendent which is hard without a team which you can’t get without illuvials or overworld which I can only run tier 0 runs which again get boring because no real reason other than to just get a good enough team to snowball once you pay which is where maybe being able to play in a leaderboard on a tier 0 only acendent would have me

1. Playing arena more
2. Having incentive to have a good tier 0 with maybe one lynx that you can pick for free with deck
3. after maybe a few weeks earn enough to play some higher stage runs and then make me wanna spend money. Because that’s where I’m sitting is I feel scared to spend more money because if I wanna play more I would have to rather find a method to sell things to keep a float to keep playing

Would love thoughts on this was a rough draft btw but would love opinions so on or even tweaks

[slender zodiac]

Anything is possible in Clown World

[valid pilot]

Wen clown world hoodie

[lavish acorn]

I like the direction this goes in. That said I find it hard to accept the thought of keeping soul bound Illuvials not harming the paid economy. What if from a lore perspective, this run is a simulation and therefore you don't keep anything. But you get to experience borrowing interesting Illuvials and catching interesting Illuvials. There could be some score system to make it more interesting, like Survival Arena, etc

[severe ridge]

I think we could avoid this problem and find a kinda easy to implement compromise between the current kinda expensive OW system and a cheaper web2 solution as I described several month ago. #🎮〕illuvium-overworld message
This wouldn't be f2p but could be as close to f2p as we want it to be and we could keep our current nft prices by utilizing fusion factors. This system wouldn't damage early OW players too much and we could start seeing OW as a complete game and monetize it as such. In my eyes the mindset that OW is a pack opening is damaging in regards of developing OW as a game.

People who played OW now would just have gotten their nfts with less grinding

[severe ridge]

Because people don't like to get linked to another post, this is what I wrote in January last year:

Since it seems OW on its own is supposed to be more and more a game instead of a pack opening.
Therefore, it will be difficult to cater to web2 and web3 audience alike since these audiences look at prices pretty differently.
In short for web3 a 2$ T1 run might be "ok" because they see value in the assets and value the option to sale these assets, but web2 will just see 2$ for 30 minutes playtime which will be evaluated as crazy. So, for web2 users 0.20$ per run would be way more reasonable.
So, the question is how can we increase the playtime per $ without reducing the value of assets.
I think we could implement that the Illuvials we capture aren't nfts when we catch them but we can fuse 10 Illuvials of one kind into an nft. With that you can have way more runs to play the grind game like gathering, leveling up Illuvials and discover in OW. From here on a user can decide if he wants to "only" play all the amazing stuff OW has to offer or if he wants to fuse Illuvials to generate an asset to be able to play arena, all the other games or to sell it.That way OW can be grindy, vast and a game on its own because we degenerated/uncoupled the cost for playing OW and gaining assets. So, playtime per $ increased while keeping the value of NFTs.

Idea is obv. nothing new but maybe this is an option to address both audiences.
I also know we have a decay mechanism on currencies which is supposed to adept prices to customers but I think at the start we will have quite a big percentage of web3 users who will outprice interested web2 users. Bottom line this would lower the entry barrier for web2 users.

If wanted this can be implemented later when OW is more of a game on its own to increase the playtime and accessibility for web2 users.

[tame glacier]

I like this idea but there's a few things that need to be resolved.

Firstly the Illuvium Overworld in its current form isn't exactly the best gaming experience ever, it gains a lot of its enjoyment from the blockchain elements and so I am unsure if it could attract web 2 users regardless.

I really love your fuse 10 non nfts into and NFT and all that but your entire solution as a whole could definitely overcomplicate the game. When U click to enter a stage there would be varying prices, stages and everything in-between and it's a lot to explain to any individual

[severe ridge]

I am not too sure regarding your first point. OW has already a lot of decent basic gameplay to offer. During beta we saw a high retention. User numbers like that aren't only airdrop farmers. A lot of them must have been somewhat interested in the capture them all element.
That being said OW is still basic and needs improvement but this improvement will undoubtedly arrive in the near future and I think we should start clearing the path for "OW the game".

Regarding the 2nd point I would say that it doesn't make it too much more complicated because people could just start playing OW as they do now. Later down the road they will notice that they need 10 Illuvials of one kind to enter the arena but at that point they already learnt about everything else and are somewhat invested (Also they already paid for these runs).
You can't explain everything at once if somebody starts a new a game. The big problem with OW is that mistakes for new players are extremely expensive. Just recently we had a lot of questions from a new player regarding OW teams. That person did not know how to build a team because that person barely knew how affinites work. Now, you can tell that person "be careful and do a lot of research because every mistake is expensive" OR "don't worry it just costs a few cents. You will learn it while having fun"

Especially your first argument makes me very sad because we aren't giving OW a real chance as a game with the monetization it has now. For OW to be seen as a real good game in the eyes of web2 it would need to be so cheap that web3 would lose interest.

Another point occurred to me yesterday as viper said that OW can't be too challenging because it is a gameified packopening. This alone shows that we don't see and develop the game that targets the biggest market as a game. OW is a game that could be interesting for people of all age around the world. In the end the nfts for arena wouldn't cost less but people would pay for them in smaller portions.

[tame glacier]

I have a lot of ideas for ways to add to the Overworld to make it a more interesting gaming experience and I agree that we haven't really doubled down on it.

However I'd say that the current Overworld is the building blocks, we now have plenty of capability to either build brand new experiences or build upon it using the same assets and tech.

As for your other feedback it's really compelling, and thank you. I will continue giving it more thought

[severe ridge]

Sounds good 🙂
I hope to hear from you. Maybe, there is an argument that I can't see at the moment which prevents the implementation of this system.
I guess I will open a post on this to gather some sentiment from the community in the mean time.

[tame glacier]

I think there are simpler solutions than fusing 10 non nfts into an NFT. But besides that I think the idea has merit

[severe ridge]

a solution that combines the interests of web2 and web3 in terms of pricing without damaging early OW players? Sounds great! Would love to hear more about that

I know that the price will adjust itself but I don't a reasonable price for both audiences.

one audience will say every t3 run below 1 $ shows that the project is a failure and the other will say 20 minutes playtime for 1$ is waay too much and totally crazy.

[tame glacier]

Not that the solution doesn't have it's merit. Just the complexities you are adding to the gameplay, it still needs to be fun and somewhat straight forward

[agile surge]

OW is a supply game and shouldn't be measured as "i should be able to play 24/7 for 1$"
If you Like pokemon, heartstone or magic card game you also do not spend 100% of your "play time" with Opening Packs of cards.

You can for sure expand overworld into other experience, but the paid asset gather Runs are simply not what one will play 24/7 except he's pro and does it for a living. The average bob won't.

[severe ridge]

well, this reads like OW development isn't important because it is just a pack opening.

I will post something longer in a thread in a few minutes which explains my position regarding this in detail. Give me a minute.

[severe ridge]

hmm, there isn't addition complexity added to the gameplay? fusing 10 Illuvials into 1 isn't complicated at all (gameplay wise).

[agile surge]

No, not at all.
But focus should definetly be on improving demand Games

[severe ridge]

which OW can be or even already is.

[agile surge]

Can be for sure.
Not at the Moment, as Long as there are only paid Runs to do to create assets, it's a supply game 🙂
If everyone just plays the supply game, assets never will really have value and soon nobody playes the supply game. We need demand game(s) to shine, so people actually buy assets and not just create them.

[severe ridge]

hmm, I am sorry to ask this but did you start reading here #1269137697939652659 message

[agile surge]

No, i just a anwered the one Post you did 🙂

[severe ridge]

yeah, felt that way. That one post out of context isn't a good one, I agree on that 😄

[tame glacier]

Well you need to explain why capturing an Illuvial doesn't allow U to use it in ascendant and all of that. I've read enough questions in this discord to re evaluate what complex truly means. Just going to have to trust me on this but it's more about the point of the gameplay

[severe ridge]

yeah, I can see that that would cause some irritations, which could be reduced with proper info screens at the right places, but never completely nullified, but this counts for every feature, doesn't it?
Even with this downside I would still say that the advantages are bigger than this additional irritation.

[tame glacier]

It counts for every feature to some degree but it's the overlap. Currently in the game fusion is used a lot in the process of evolution. Typically in game design you try to not overlap mechanics like that. Fusion shouldn't be used for 2 separate things

Maybe U have an item that. Converts. Atlas into an NFT. Or a special gem. There are just other options is all 🙂

[severe ridge]

we could call it ascension 😄 but yeah, I get your point. Especially regarding stats some decision have to be made.

[severe ridge]

ok, yeah, can see that as well but it would be more on the side of shooting rocks instead of the Illuvial fighting side, right?

[tame glacier]

Yeah I get where the Illuvials side of it is more exciting. Just gotta get creative hhahahh we can think of something I'm sure

[severe ridge]

Just continued to think on the fusion/ascension stuff. I would see it this way:
Ascension: Combining 10 Illuvials of the same Illuvials into 1 nft of that Illuvial with stats randomly selected. (This could even increase the value of good nfts because it would be hard to get 10 good Illuvials)
Fusion: Evolving 3 Illuvials to a Illuvial of the next higher stage

Pretty sure that will lead to some confusion but this mechanic is also known in other games

[severe ridge]

yeah, open for other solutions that allow us to offer two target prices for the two audiences web2 and web3. In the end my main point is that I don't see one price that works for both audiences, so, we need two prices.

[tame glacier]

I think it also needs 2 pricing systems more than just 2 prices. Web 2 gamers are used.to.things like singular payments. Battle passes or subscriptions. That's why I prefer that route than the exact same structure but cheaper

[lavish acorn]

As mentioned in the potential pushback, "Free access might reduce the number of paying users and, consequently, revenue.” I can say as someone who is pretty heavily invested that if there was a free version as outlined here, I would be one of the less paying users. It substantially devalues the game and makes me feel less good about my NFT Illuvials. So I downvoted the proposal as it's outlined, but I think the problem statement of onboarding more players is one of the most important challenges Illuvium will face.

[near epoch]

web 2 minds sets vs web 3 is so different lol.
I am honestly more focus on webs two because the market share is higher there. web two has 159.3 billion as of 2020 while web 3 has around 23-25billion? I want those web 2 peoples to cross over.

The post is just ideas and things that i think are cool. May be worthless to some but if it sparks one good idea its a win I say.

[dense geode]

I still feel like just adding a tier 0 arena mode giving free to play players some use for their feee to play illuvials and then earning fuel bundles crates so on if you are top on the leaderboard seems like it wouldn’t change the price of anything or make it to where people are catching illuvials that aren’t nfts wouldn’t change the game just add a arena mode for free to play players and gives them incentive to play for free cuz they can earn fuel or it might make them wanna spend money for more fuel to go to the higher tier acendent arena

If we can just give free to play a better gameplay loop other than catching some illuvials then just rather grinding to sell some free to play stuff for like one or 2 stage one runs they could grind for the pvp side and then play there get ranked for the leaderboard and top players earn fuel not sure how that fuel distribution would be but would add a gameplay loop that most I feel would stick around and try. Would love feedback on this idea I posted a more in depth breakdown of this idea earlier this week

[dense geode]

^

[agile surge]

giving out fuel crates is almost the same as $ value, people start immediately calculating if it is worth their time.

It will just be about money, nothing fun in looking doka armies fighting each other, you have just way to less variation/possibilities with building decks with just f2p.
Fun should always be highest priority in all modes/games imo.

Starting leaderboard for gauntlet with some fuel crates/nfts or whatever could be a nice way to lure people in though.
You can just start to play it without farming or building a team.

[dense geode]

That’s fair also why in my previous breakdown of this idea I said they would be able to have one free lynx to build there tier 0 army around to add a little more flare to it also I like having it be earnable
In the already free to play game modes for sure like a gauntlet leaderboard so on and I could see how people see it as value and would only play if it makes sense this is why a free to play player would see getting 300 crypton from just getting top 5 on leaderboard would be huge because that’s 2 stage 1 runs but someone like me and others that don’t mind buying 300 fuel wouldn’t even bother with that so then people aren’t just going in there and manipulating the leaderboard to get thousands of fuel it’s just and idea tho super up for it to get tweaked and well rounded so that it would make sense if it don’t make sense then it’s not the best idea

[placid raven]

So I'm super late to this party, but let me share some perspective as one of these so-called "web2 gamers". I'm relatively new to blockchain stuff in general, and blockchain gaming in particular. What really drew me to Illuvium was the vision - a whole universe made up of interconnected games. I've been in love with that idea ever since I encountered the old Quest for Glory series ages ago, but few studios have implemented even progression across sequels, much less full interoperability. But NFTs are not required for that, all you need is a shared database.

I also play games primarily to have fun. I'm not in it to get-rich-quick or grind endlessly, I want a game with a fully-built world, deep lore, and engaging story. If a game is not fun, I'll drop it and move along to something else. NFTs and the whole blockchain ecosystem are just an extra layer of complication that I, as a player, simply don't care about. I think I played Skyrim for like a full year after I bought it, for example, just because there was so much to do. And don't even ask me how many hours I've put into, say, the Pathfinder games.

And thirdly, I'll admit I'm incredibly cheap. The majority of the games in my library come either from deep discounts on Steam sales or from Humble Bundles. When it comes to in-app purchases on mobile games, I don't think I've ever paid a dime. I'm a middle-aged dad; I've got more important things to spend my time and money on, so I have to be very selective when it comes to the fun-per-dollar ratio.

So, that said, I don't actually play OW very much, and Arena even less. In its current state, it's just not my kind of game. Once there's more to do besides just endlessly grind Illuvials, then I'll be more interested. (And yes, there is some good stuff coming...) Now, when all that awesome content is there, if I could have access to it for free, I'd be all over it. BUT! If the only difference between F2P and paid is minting NFTs, I would never convert because as I said, NFTs are practically invisible to me. I don't expect that I'll ever make any profit off this game (other than what I'm being paid to build it, of course 🙂 ) So either it's fun and I stick around, or it's boring and I leave, but either way I'm not paying for it.

(puts on developer hat)
Now, the problem with players like me is that it costs money to run an online game, and those costs tend to scale with the player base. If you have a majority of people consuming resources but contributing nothing, then you've set up a death spiral. More costs for maintenance means less money available for content creation, which means even the paying players will eventually get bored and leave. So either you need a strong hook to convert me (and "yay NFTs!" is not a strong hook), or you need me to lose interest and go away so you're not subsidising my gaming time. Either way, it should be something that happens quickly. Allowing people to access the whole game for free doesn't achieve either of those goals.

The only game I've ever paid a subscription to is SWTOR, because they had a good set of introductory free content combined with caps for F2P payers, and a whole lot more paid content after that. Been a long time since I ended that subscription though, so I don't even know the state of that game these days

[agile surge]

you never played wow?

[placid raven]

nope, I was too busy with Guild Wars back then 🙂 Primarily because it was a fixed up-front cost and didn't have a subscription

[agile surge]

https://tenor.com/view/warcraft-lich-king-sword-game-gif-16170117

[azure niche]

https://tenor.com/view/sandsten-world-of-warcraft-casting-couch-casting-couch-gif-20197999

[open stag]

Even in the web 2 era, Call of Duty provides a free-to-play experience. Apart from its pay-to-play title, Modern Warfare, the game attracts players through Warzone. Whether they choose to purchase the Battle Pass or seasonal skin bundles is entirely up to the players.

I came from intense graphics shooting games (genre), which I find to be one of the most captivating genres in both PC and mobile gaming. There are many high-quality games set to be released, and they will be available as free-to-play titles. While Illuvium isn’t my preferred genre, I appreciate the team’s dedication in creating mesmerizing graphics, not only in the trailer but also within the game itself (wysiwyg). Yet, there's still something missing... Despite that, I'm still looking forward for Illuvium.

Triple-A games (Web3 free-to-play) are on the horizon, some of which have been kept somewhat secretive.

I still have faith in Illuvium. Can't wait what COMBAT looks like in the field.

[iron lagoon]

It sounds like you personally don't like spending alot on games, but it hardly represents all web2 players. People, myself included spend thousands on skins, loot boxes, subscriptions and so on. For example, the most expensive item sold in diablo 3 action house, while it lasted, was around 40k, and a few patches later that item was completely useless. My point is, there are plenty of paying players in web2, we just need a portion of them.

[azure niche]

we need waifu ranger skins

[fleet prism]

#1273591945989591164 message

I'd like to ask y'all to take a minute to evaluate my Idea

[kindred crag]

https://tenor.com/view/credit-card-smacking-credit-card-on-table-gif-21340324

[fleet prism]

#1273591945989591164 message

Not directly related to this topic, but inspired by it and also trying to onboard more players and keeping them.

[placid raven]

My point is that NFTs are a gimmick. People pay for content, so giving away all the content for free and asking money for a gimmick is not going to convert most people. Rather, you hook people with teaser content, get them invested in it, and then pull them through the paywall for more content. (Several of the games I have are because it looked interesting, I played a demo, and got to a certain point where the game says "Ok, demo's over, now you've gotta pay up") Right now the only content we have is Illuvials and crafting, you get some of that for free (T0) and then you have to pay for the rest. Maybe that's not enough investment - I spend hours grinding T0 Illuvials, where's the compulsion to stat paying to grind the others, other than the "Gotta catch 'em all" mentality?
But there's more coming - lore, quests, factions, etc. IMO, this is the real hook. Maybe the first few storyline and faction quests can be completed in S0, so the player is now emotionally invested in the story and character progression. Then the next quest objective comes up and you have to go to to an S1 region. You know what, I've come this far, I can spare $1 to keep going... and once I've spent that $1 it's a lot easier to spend the next, and so on.
So I'll echo what others have said - the game isn't even finished yet, so it's a little premature to be making drastic changes to the revenue model

[iron lagoon]

Totally agree there are a few pieces missing, but the main draw currently and since the project started is arena, and the 2 modes we have right now are incomplete, so the overall feel is incomplete, there is little point to farm ow besides for collecting purposes. Once the arena modes are finished and competitive leaderboards running, it should have a better feel to it.

Once we have that going, we can further assess the situation, but I feel until then any drastic changes would be premature and rushed. Ow was never supposed to be a stand alone game pulling numbers by itself (as is the case currently). If the team and community want to change that and turn it to the flag game it can be done but will take a huge amount of time as it lacks alot of features for that.

[fiery quest]

It doesn’t have to be the flagship but overworld is a horrible anti player and honestly anti spend game mode rn. It’s somehow less fun than mining in runescape was and more time consuming too. If it doesn’t change then we really should just go the gacha route and open card packs to speed things up and get a spending model people are already used to and largely acceptant of.

[fresh iris]

This is a really interesting idea but I'm not a fan on excluding these f2p players from the leviathan modes. I'd prefer to see all players in together to keep search times short and lobbies full

Instead I would keep OW as is and give all players free access to all illuvials for all modes in Arena. The catch is that these Illuvials are not NFTs, can't be used in the OW, capped at level 1 and have no boosted stats. This gives all players the opportunity to dive straight into PvP, test all comps and once they've found a play style they like they can begin to build that comp in the OW.

This would also allow people that have unfinished comps to still play their desired team.

With this change I'd also consider removing both ascendant and base gauntlet. Just have all PvP leviathan and perhaps save ascendant rules for tournaments only.

Oh and have PvP rewards similar to gods unchained. Play 10 matches over a weekend and depending on you rank and how well you do you'll get some ILV.

[fleet prism]

Disagree, I totally puked when we had godmode in the Team Builder.

Learning curve is so high already, being overwhelmed by having the whole Repositry doesn't help.

I got back into Yugioh in Masterduel with a copy-pasted meta deck which I had to use up my free ressources for.

To gain new ressources for new cards(withou payin) I had to grind ranked.

"Forced" me to understand the weaknesses and strenghts of that deck, and make the best out of it.

Resulted in me being deeply into yugioh again.
Now having multiple online and offline decks. Understanding most rulings (insiders know the weight of that sentence).

We could achieve something similiar, if we were to nerf those f2p teams. All plebs would be somewhere down the ladder with weird team-comps slowly understanding and grinding higher. While expanding their own Box.

Maybe even upping their game by swirching to actual meta units once they're hooked.

Instead we have Arena where 80% play Hot Fish, from 0-1000 point range all the same games. No variety, no inspiration you can steal.
It's all about: how do I counter this damn all green f2p team.

Super lame if you ask me.

[fresh iris]

Ha I get that though this isn't a problem unique to illuvium. Try playing TFT for the first time and you'll be just as overwhelmed. That's where third part sites come in. Offering detailed explanations/guides plus meta comps to get a new player on the right track. Then it's just a case of practice

[slender zodiac]

The big issue I see is that there are two TOTALLY different perspectives.

Group One wants Illuvium to be very easy to understand, very user-friendly, free, and attract 1 billion players.

Group Two wants Illuvium to be challenging, take time and dedication to learn the game, cost money to find, earn, and collect the assets, and target a smaller crypto native audience.

My take: I would say that at the moment, this is a crypto native game. Trying to change its identity to a free to play game is a really tough uphill battle and will ultimately lead to a non-crypto game. That seems like the end goal for those that heavily advocate for free to play.

Perhaps if we could look at Illuvium Overworld as the foundation for everything to come, and the games in the future will be for those "normie" players that just want to play an easy game and not learn or spend any money, and avoid crypto and NFTs

Just my two cents

[fiery quest]

I feel like marketing hasn’t hit people or in general the team hasn’t made it clear enough whether these illuvials and weapons we pay a seemingly large amount of money for at times are the gateway to everything to come. Maybe it’s not apparent enough that you’re paying upfront for all the future content to come. Granted this doesn’t feel the case as much as I used to expect. I feel like there isn’t clarity on whether I’ll be paying even more in the future or if my thousand dollars now has me covered for 10 years and more to come of gaming experiences. If that even remotely makes sense

[fleet prism]

need a community for that first tho, no clicks no vids. Videos quickly outdated due to changes too.

[fleet prism]

Nah, I'm in neither group.

I love Yugiohs complexity, but if you're hit by that complexity as well as the pay2progress mechanics both at once, well then it's hard to onboard ppl (even me as an Illuvium fan since 2021).

That's why I'd like Ranked Arena to be more focusing on ppl's own assets, while providing a more classic "grind your rank up" environment.

Not the current, here's three f2p endgame teams, either like them or whale the game to use your own assets.
There's pretty much no in-between in the current ranked arena.

Ranked should be a grindgame, where ppl do enjoy spending time and feel like, well yeah, grinding (aka making progress).
Even if it's just ranks.

But the current grind begins with endgame teams, either f2p or whaled. We skipping like 80% of the grind

[slender zodiac]

I'd love this idea too about ranked arena and using our own assets. That makes so much sense to me, working up a leaderboard.

Wonder why they haven't considered this seriously...have they?

[ebon sigil]

Now when we got an update about the stages illuvial droprates.. to be easier, there shoulnt even be any t1,t2,t3 .. why is it there anyway, its confusing for newcomers and just to grab cash from richer people.. there should be just one stage, where you can get everything, it just needed to be very rare to get a tier 5, but there would be t1 t2 and so on with every stage so there would really be a lot of different illuvials to catch, ores would be different not just green and white, but some rarer for example, damn its just to expensive for any web2 player .. (but of course we got a problem with bots and hackers for the cheaper stages, that should be fixed first somehow..)

... all OW stages look the same, its really you about the cash

[tulip marsh]

I agree with the notion of how unfriendly this system is to non-whales. There have been other systems that made it much easier to onboard f2p while also allowing for whales to open their wallet. I particularly am more partial to how Guild of Guardians decided to handle NFT minting over this current system in Illuvium. Basically, whatever characters you initially acquire is account bound and non-NFT. However, to gain access to a second tier of upgrades, you can mint your characters by paying with a particular in-game currency called "ascension tokens" to give you an advantage. The cost of minting with ascension tokens changes depending on the number of NFTs minted or are currently listed in the marketplace. So if you have a ton of one particular character minted or a lack of, the price is stabilized by increasing or decreasing the cost to mint, therefore controlling the supply in the market. It's pretty smart and I've watched it after 2 to 3 months, the market has reached proper equilibrium and looks sustainable. I feel this is much better than minting every god damn Illuvial we capture and flooding the market with worthless NFTs.

I really wish the Illuvium team considered an option like this instead of putting up paywalls everywhere.

[scenic widget]

So can someone explain why we don't want to just add scholarships or some form of sponsorships? It would remove F2P barrier and it obviously worked well for Axie. I get that we don't necessarily want to follow their footsteps, but our gameplay and repeatability of our game is already leagues better.

[azure niche]

afaik polemos is working on that

[scenic widget]

I'm aware, but even if they get it sorted out it still won't be an inherent feature of the game. Could we not implement something in-game so people don't have to know about Polemos?

I mean obviously there's a balance with effort/difficulty of implementation, but also I think it's valuable enough to consider some simple ways it could be implemented

The more frictionless the experience for the end user, especially F2P players, the more we'd retain players and increase engagement. I think the amount of people who would sponsor other players if they could is heavily underestimated, especially if there's an easy to use in-game feature.

[tulip marsh]

Completely agree. Solutions for these problems should be based on an organicly integrated system rather than by direct intervention, otherwise the underlying problem doesn't actually get solved

[scenic widget]

Yeah, it needs to be integrated into the existing ecosystem, and not partitioned off as a separate and disjointed ecosystem (e.g. Polemos Discord/Website)

[tulip marsh]

The gacha game model is what I've seen to address this dichotomy best. Content is free, but gated by time. You can spend money to make the progression faster. It's a tried and tested model but as it stands, I'm not sure changing to this kind of model is garnering enough support in this community. Other web3 games have addressed the NFT part by giving an extra layer of progression when you mint an NFT. So as an f2p, you can get access to account-bound, non-NFT versions of Illuvials, but minting that Illuvial as an NFT unlocks bonus stats or skills.

[fiery quest]

Idk if its gacha itself that I’m getting tired of or the lame progression systems usually involved with them. They are so poorly made compared to say a true rpg with deep progression systems. Though ilv has even less progression than a gacha game rn so there’s that…

[tulip marsh]

I like to compare gacha systems from games like Genshin Impact and their other IPs for having the nice balance of being f2p friendly, non-pay gated content, but widely successful. With the other typical gachas I can agree they are usually just cash grabs with minimal effort.

[fiery quest]

even those honestly the progression system is not very good, it just takes a long time because of daily restrictions on most content and you aren't really expanding your skillsets, just buffing stats and abilities effects unless you get dupes. It could do with some more work though since they're constantly releasing new characters it's somewhat understandable they aren't making 30 different attack animations for each one. Regardless Ilv has lots of work to do in that regard at least depending on how overworld combat rolls out here whenever or if they still do it.

[warm pier]

I tried to introduce a coworker to the game.
He tried it after i told him you could earn a little money by playing.
He said that the graphics look nice, but the game is boring af.
So not even the airdrop made him stay.
So if you want to onboard new players, this is the answer
Do what you want with the information

[scarlet bloom]

So We DON't Want to Onboard Millions of F2P Players why would we want Millions of People Leeching of the system? We want to onboard 10,000's of Paying Players who build into the system. That means focusing on game modes and Fun ways to play with OWNING assets that actually matter not giving away what we want and our Airdrop points to people who don't contribute to the game economy

[warm pier]

Even though they are free players, they contribite to the popularity of the game
When the game is in a good state -> onboard all the players we can get -> game becomes popular -> people spend money on it
That's how i see it, but i am no expert

[tulip marsh]

We aren't going to get anywhere by gate keeping the gaming community like that. We need to realize we have lots of much better and well established F2P or cheaper games out there other than Illuvium. If this game and ecosystem is not better than those other options out there, don't expect ANYONE to get on-boarded. We're all here because of SPECULATION and POTENTIAL. We aren't even close to competing to other web2 options yet.

We already see the fallout of Concord happen in front of our eyes. They clearly missed the mark by not supporting the right communities, not catering to the right audiences, and not making a game that was better or more interesting than what was already available.

There are plenty of f2p systems out there that have accomplished both being widely successful in popularity and being a highly profitable business. It would be foolish to undermine that feat and to say we're above that.

[scarlet bloom]

Yeah thats not how gaming works, You can make the game as popular as the moon but it has to have revenue streams. and For an Asset based game to have value and be worth playing the assets have to hold value. Turning the game into a f2p model ils just not even really possible becuase you would Lose all the people you've sold on assets. That be like Magic the Gathering turning their game to a Print at Home game. They do all the work to make the cards but you don't have to pay them anymoney. Games can only use the F2P model when they have no value on the assets and they can sell gatcha boxes to players. Thats not what a web3 game with assets is. They company depens on its fees from the market place and the fuel for funds removing all the income and trying to sell cosmetics? is not a valid busniessmodel for THIS game.

[tulip marsh]

And how is doing paid stage runs not a gacha already? We're already experiencing half of what you're claiming games modelled on an f2p system are doing except without the other half, which is a f2p game that draws in a new player base. So far, the people who reported their experience telling others about Illuvium has illustrated exactly this point. If the game isn't attractive enough to play compared to its cost to play, we won't get anywhere.

That's why I understand the sentiment for people who want to come up with f2p solutions in this thread, especially if all we have to go on is the current state of Illuvium in Open Beta. That can all change when we get to full release when new features are added, but the points are still valid.

[silver edge]

I think a good idea would be the possibility to get more rewards by using nfts, but you would still be able to play the game without them.

I proposed this once, but basically, if you want to get 100% of the pass rewards points (that will unlock drone and character skins etc) and 100% of the possible reward available after a win, you need a 100% nft team. If you have a 10% nft team, you get 1% of the reward (it's an exponential curve) and so it goes.

Of course, here I am assuming we have a “pass” and “reward after win” system (which We don’t have at this moment).

[azure niche]

i heard parallel is doing well with their nft and non nft system.

[scarlet bloom]

You can't change game types , A paid run is meant to be like "Opening A Pack" that means the things inside have Value, you can't sell a TON of packs and then say No we don't want those things to have value you would litterally open yourself up to lawsuits adn of course destroy all trust with your player base

[scarlet bloom]

That was their game design and thats got a complelty diffrent structure not trying to support something as massive. as overworld

[tulip marsh]

Where are you getting the idea that implementing f2p systems will strip the value from Illuvials? I don't think anyone has it in their mind to start allowing the current pool of Illuvials or NFTs to be offered for free; I certainly don't. At best, I would push for anything non-NFT Illuvial related to be on the next release of Illuvials, not on this current set. I think this current set of Illuvials should remain intact as a "founder" set to avoid the exact problem you specified. But that shouldn't stop important changes to be made down the road to make this game more accessible to a larger player base and incorporate strategies to hook and convert f2p players over to paying ones. There have been plenty of web3 games that have done exactly this and have surpassed milestones Illuvium can't even touch right now. Some people have mentioned Parallel as an example, I've mentioned Guild of Guardians. If you check out these web3 competitors in depth, you'll find that they basically have done in essence what OP has suggested and made it work well, and you can't say it won't work because it's a different game either as Guild of Guardians is basically an auto-battler, too, just a bit more stripped down for mobile gaming and not like TFT. The fundamentals of their systems are still translatable to Illuvium.

But again, this is all just speculation right now as we have no idea what the devs are cooking up. Maybe they got this problem covered and we just have to wait, maybe they don't and we have to let them know that their competitors do.

[fiery quest]

aren't illuvials actually starting to get pretty cheap admittedly from low demand anyways so people aren't being repelled by being priced out so much as the game just needs good updates now?

[plain maple]

the t0-t3 is pretty cheap now, and a budget competitive deck for ascendant arena you can prolly aquire for 20$ or something. but once we talk about t4 and t5 illuvials it gets quite expensive, specially if u wanna play leviathan and consider good stats. i see a perfect stat t5s3 illuvial worth thousands maybe tens of thousands.

[pale scroll]

I don't agree this. This is Just out of ILV Eco system and each Games. Or if I don't understand let me know.

Even now . Stage 0 OW can make money. when good stats illvial or great DH.

[scarlet bloom]

Illuvium Already has TO MUCH F2P , take for example the last air drop players who invested thousands of dollars + got or recieved very little compared to players who could 100% F2P could easily have earned near 100 USD, THE PROBLEM with f2p in a Crypto Games is Bots and Automation. Becuase if you give anything of value for free it will be destryoed by 1 MILLION bots doing it. Secondly if you do not require people to spend money they wont. This is NOT the style of game that can make it on cosmetics along becuase the market is suppose to be between players. Please Stop being silly this thread should just be deleted becuase Illuvium CAN NEVER go this way and if you don't undestand the diffrent game models go take a game design class before you guys keep talking about stuff you don't understand

[warm pier]

My best guess, and correct me if i'm wrong, the best solution is to have a system similarly to lol. I believe there are alot of players that would play for free, but pay for cosmetics, or improvements of the gameplay.
If you put a full pay to play system, you attract verry few players.
You have to let them experiment some game for free to get hooked, and then offer them a way to improve their experience

[iron lagoon]

Guys these concerns have been voiced many times over the years, not having enough f2p back then, it was explained that including more f2p decks or expanding them for ascendant will break the economic model. This was the teams explanation for several years. Then out of nowhere, we build the gauntlet mode, where everything is basically free. Make it make sense.

From what it seems we are waiting for the bull to fix all our issues, many of which could have been avoided to begin with.

[tulip marsh]

Ok, so let's convert all our games to pay-to-play except for our demo modes. We now have a price tag to play.

Do you think that solves the problem where gamers won't even touch Illuvium with a 10 foot pole even with all the free game modes we have now?

And on a personal note, the airdrop system was a terrible idea for onboarding players in the first place. We're basically trying to pay players just to play Illuvium because they won't play it for free. That's not a game; that's called work.

[iron lagoon]

Airdrop wasn't such a bad idea, just not implemented properly. We were trying to force players to spend instead of enjoying the game and spend on their own desire.

We should have finished the gauntlet and ascendant and then do the massive airdrop marketing around competitive play and leaderboards, instead we were shooting muskitos and shit. If I'm a new player and I'm presented a game where I have to pay money to shoot flies, I would be disappointed too.

Seems like we are doing it right for season 3, let's see how it goes.

[tulip marsh]

Yes, to that I agree. Airdrop rewards can certainly work if it's structured around competitive play instead of daily tasks, and also if there are enough players involved in the competition.

It just makes more sense if we got our games completed first before implementing the airdrops is my point, though... Not that airdrops are a bad idea in every scenario

[iron lagoon]

That I can 💯 agree with, still no idea who pushed to launch the games in such a yolo manner, was it the team, was it the previous IMC, what was the reasoning behind it no one knows

And another problem currently, what is to be incentivized for the season 3 airdrop and moving forward, is it leviathan modes competition or non leviathan?

Cause for non leviathan modes, gauntlet is f2p, and you can build a competitive ascendant deck for like 50-100$. This seems like the obvious choice for onboarding a ton of players.

But let's say we get 10k new players spending 100$, that's just 1 mil of revenue, and we need like 7-8x that on a monthly basis.

So if we want to achieve that, we should focus the onboarding through leviathan modes for the stats and high quality illuvials. But then that's out of budget for 99% of players.

So what do we do to achieve massive revenue on a monthly basis? Besides onboarding 20-30k new players consistently each month?

As we gather more and more players, high stat illuvials will become more affordable, unless demand outpaces the asset inflation (would be great, but unlikely) so leviathan might end up being more affordable for a larger portion of players.

Definitely tough decisions ahead for the guys

[tulip marsh]

Illuvial combat coming in clutch? 😇

[grizzled cipher]

Do you want the game to be more pay to win?

[scarlet bloom]

No i want the Game to be Pay to Play like Must TCG / Asset Driven Games so thtat the assets own value . I don't want them to add ANY more f2p elements there is more than en ough for people to try the game to see if they like it now

[tulip marsh]

But people have tried the game as it is now and we haven't seen growth in our player base. What should we do about that?

[scarlet bloom]

Advertise to the proper player base. This has happen loads of times in gaming history you make one game and you try to sell it to the wrong player base. This is an Asset Driven game you have to sell it to asset driven game players. That means you need your Trading card game players. your war machine type players. You need players who play games that require them to collect champions ( Even gatcha gamers). F2P's litterally do nothing but increase the cost of the game and add no value to the economy of the game. Thisis not a cosmetic micro transaction game like TFT or other gamesl ike that. TFT only works becuase its sponsored by league that has 5 times the player base buying champions.

[tulip marsh]

So your idea is to market to collectors who want to own assets.

I can see TCG games like Magic: The Gathering succeed because the cards people collect are useful in the game itself. Magic has a complete system with rules and RNG that keeps the game fresh and fun. I also can see that their cost of production and upkeep is rather low because they're basically just printing cards with ink on them, but the value of the card has mostly been in its utility.

Magic is successful because the game is fun and interesting. The cards have value because they're useful in the game. Do you think with the current state of Illuvium that it is a fun, interesting, and complete enough of a game that people will want to pay for Illuvials to use in this ecosystem?

[scarlet bloom]

@tulip marsh The idea is to market your game to people who like those kinds of Games. Its that Simple Illuvium is a Assest driven system. Transistioning to a F2P Module would be like Wizards turning MTG into a F2P game and trying to make money off of Sleeves and Playmats? The key thing about mtg is the company doesn't set the value of the cards the community does by what gets played. The big diffrence here is that illuvium actually gets a cut of all the secondary market trades and sells. We need to foucs our game development and our advertising to those people. ( Gauntlet also needs to be changed to function like ascedanat) ie. the ranked mode needs to basically require you own each illuviual or you get a lvl1 version ( even outside of levithan) . If we focus on competive play leaderboards and tournaments. Our community will grow. But bringing people in without requiring them to invest into the game would be the same as warhammer or magic just giving their product away for free. NOT a BUSNIESS model.

Not to be offesnive to you guys but i have over 20 years development experince i've worked for Blizzard, and Hi-Rez Studios. We are BEYOND the point of rebranding and restructing the game as a F2P model. In Fact we probably have to much f2p stuff as tier 0 is 100% free to play and does have value in the game. I would not support adding ANY more f2p elements to the game.

[iron lagoon]

I don't agree 100%, there is definitely a place for f2p features if implemented properly. To say that f2p players add nothing to an economy or eco system is just plain wrong. F2p means free to play, not I won't spend anything on the game. Almost no one buys LoL champions with money, everyone grinds them through the game and yet it still makes a ton of money. I can go on all day about what advantages a f2p model or features bring, from a more healthy playerbase and competition, to higher viewer count for streaming and better exposure for the IP and then everything in between.

You said you worked for blizzard and hi Rez, which both of them have f2p games. I don't like comparisons to MTG, Pokemon TFT and so on. These are all established IPs which were ground breaking at the time they were released which helped them get to where they are. If we just copy everyone else we will never find our own identity.

[lavish acorn]

F2P doesn't matter if the game isn't "fun." For a lot of people, Illuvium right now just isn't. The team knows what they need to improve and are adding critical new features including new multiplayer modes.

Marketing right now before there's really solid game loops and an actual effective Web2 onboarding system would be a disaster if you want Illuvium to succeed.

Y'all need to chill and let the team cook.

[tulip marsh]

I agree with you about the competitive aspect and we should play with Illuvials that we own. I have spent quite a lot of money on games like this and generally don't take issue with that. I've spent over a few hundred to sometimes over a thousand just for 1 character without batting an eye because I felt the game was fun enough and the character gave me enough utility to warrant the purchase. I can certainly say I'm part of that player base.

However, I've felt with this whole Illuvium ecosystem, there is not enough of a game for me to invest in Illuvials except for speculation. Just to put it into another perspective, we gave players the option to play Arena for free with fully built decks, the option to play with stage 0 Illuvials, yet no one is playing. On top of that, the games I HAVE invested and played in ALWAYS had a strong f2p component to it and was fun even for an f2p experience. It's usually how I get hooked on the game. The current web3 game I actively play now is like this, where they offer f2p players the chance to collect the characters, but with a reduced stat multiplier unless minted on the blockchain. It's a fair tradeoff, and because it was fun and the game had a solid foundation, I spent the extra money.

What you're proposing in terms of pay2play requires the game to have enough content and substance to warrant the price tag. Illuvium looks like it can contend in that regard, but we all know we are nowhere near that.

Illuvium can certainly go the way of f2p and still be widely successful. It's a model that is tried, tested, and works. It gives the most benefit with the fewest cons and is why we should adopt it.

[scarlet bloom]

You missed the whole point of my comment, I didn't say f2p games aren't possible. ITs a diffrent Model and NO most people do not grind out champions in lol. Also theres a diffrence of WHEN you make a f2p game. RIOT generates 1.5 BILLION dollars a year its ok for them to sink money into a f2p game model and make money on cosmetics. And alot of the games you THINK aren't really f2p they are free to try. IF the grind system in a game makes it nearly impossible to compete without spending money its just free to try. I would argue thats what we already have you can GRIND tier 0 until you get some Dark Holo or perfect stated tier 0's sell them and then go to higher levels. You can farm tier 0 weapons and armor and sell those things to get fuel to go higher. So we already have a free to try system. a Full Free to play system like orginally suggested here that then just seperates the diffrence between making nfts and just having diital copys on your account WOULD KILL this game. You can't do it end of story.

[scarlet bloom]

One Lots of People are playing ARENA ? Not sure why people keep acting like Arena isn't heavily playerd. I wish i could see the numbers behind the scene but i never have to wait longer than 1 minute to get a game of Arena. ( And there isn't really even any rewards for it) WHich i Agree is what we need the game modes need to be FUN. At the end of the day this is a GAME. If its fun people will want to play it for the FUN factor alone. if it becomes a JOB or a CHORE the game will die no matter how much rewards you through at it. People buy mtg packs to play magic only a small fraction will ever make it to play in a Pro tour and must don't care. Focus on Increasing the FUN factor in the game. They can' use Advertisement dollars or reveune dollars once the game is going good to sell discount fule packs or something to help morep layers get started. But we NEVER want to set the idea that illuvium is FREE

[tulip marsh]

Fair enough. Maybe we actually agree on more than initial impressions let on. I think the issue comes more from the use of f2play and f2try terminology. As a consumer, I don't generally perceive games as f2try (even if they are) unless there's a hard ceiling like in Illuvium or SWTOR. Most times, these game are marketed as "f2p", and the user experiences as a "f2p" player feels like you get the whole game minus perks you'd otherwise get from paying (usually in speeding up account progression).

In saying this, it really comes down to how well the team can make this game fun enough to warrant marketing this game as f2try. To do so requires that the game has got all the features and systems locked down and is just so good that there's no way the Illuvium team should "market this game as free." This is where I'm not sure this game can reach soon enough (can we accomplish that much in a year?), especially since the expectation between a successful f2try is more black and white, while the expectation for a successful "f2play" game is set lower and would allow more grace from the consumer market.

I personally believe that if, from the player perspective, I get enough game content that feels like it's a full, fun game and that I got this entire experience for free, that's when my wallet starts suddenly opening by itself.

[tulip marsh]

I'm also not sure about the degree of separation from NFT and in-game only killing the game as you stated. Many games are doing this and seem to be operating just fine.

[iron lagoon]

I don't believe I missed anything, I just think it was not correct.

I've played LoL for 15 years before I quit, made hundreds of friends, I literally don't know a single one who bought champions with money. I'm not saying there are none, but it's definitely not a high percentage compared to those who grind them. Riot may be generating 1.5billi now, but back in 2009 when they first mentioned going with a f2p model, everyone was laughing and ridiculing them. Up to that time gamers were mostly the elitist type and to them this f2p model was a total joke. But Riot stuck with their ideas despite everything and it turned out to become the most profitable and popular model nowadays thanks to them.

There are many popular and long lasting IPs where you can play for free and compete on the same level, do you want examples? There's alot.

The talking point of being able to grind t0 to sell for fuel in order to progress further into the paid runs is null and void too. It will require hundreds of hours spent on OW which in it's current state will feel more tedious than an actual job.

For the record I'm not advocating for this proposal or that the game needs to be fully free to play, just pointing out things I didn't agree with your comment.

[tulip marsh]

Anecdotally, I also never bought a champion with money on LoL. I never had to with the amount of time I spent playing.

[iron lagoon]

Yeah some people were spending on rune pages in the early seasons, but those were still a relatively small % compared to those who just grinded them. Most of the revenue came from skins and battle passes (their version of it)