Celerysteve Posted:

Well I’m glad you guys like making donations. I didn’t know it was a donation.

I was under the impression that we were to believe we were being offered something of corresponding monetary value in exchange for money. Of course most of us know better, but the intent was for us to believe that’s what we were getting. Log in to see images!

I agree with this.

If you want to make a donation, you can make a donation, and not get anything in exchange for it. But if CZ really “appreciates” our donations, we should be getting more value for our “donations.”

It’s like the stuff you get from organizations for making contributions. Say you get a keychain for donating 5; that’s the equivalent of a few pranks, an avatar change, or an additional alt. Worthless, but kind of neat. Now for donating 36 dollars, you get a life time supply of keychains. That is even more worthless, because while you might use five or so of those keychains, the rest are just lying there. Sure, you could try and sell those unused keychains on eBay, but in the long run, the net gain is minimal. While the donation you made might make you feel good, you’re probably not going to be donating 36 dollars again anytime soon.


Now, I don’t want to claim I know a lot about economics, but I think the problem here is if CZ wants to be making money, they need to change the costs of things all together.

Disabling ads costs only 30bp; that’s $3. Not to mention, you can disable community ads as well, which just so happens to be another product that they’re trying to sell. They’re allowing users to buy out the best source of revenue for any f2p game, as well as reduce consumer incentive to buy community ads.

Furthermore, the actual gaming enhancements are cheaper than the interface enhancement. Ep3 actually does have a certain amount of replay value, but an alt that could take you quite a while to get to level 69 is cheaper than 3 months of Forumwarz Orange.


But those are just words. Let’s do a little math, shall we?



Suppose you have already bought all three episode, and played through them without paying much attention to anything that was going on. Instead of trying out forumbuildr or incit, you decide you want to carefully replay the whole game as quickly as possible, and with an ending with all three different alignments (I do know there are more than three endings, but those are three that the average gamer would bumume exist). To do this, you need at least three alts, each of which should have the extra forum visits and the insta-kill enhancements.

Create a New Character = 45 BP
Shoot Your Wad (69 visits) = 40 BP
GameDolphin (destroys any thread instantly) = 35 BP

Added up, that’s 120 BP per character, and for all three characters, that’s 360BP


Obviously, you’re not going to be able to beat the game in a day, simply because much of the game requires a rollover before you can continue with the plot. At most, this gives you a month of enjoyment.

tl;dr: An eternity of Forumwarz Orange is the same price as getting instant gratification from the game itself.

Shishu edited this message on 02/18/2010 7:08PM