His is more than just a power though, since his duration is directly tied to his health.

Stalk, bubble, or Hypnotism etc. having a small guage that's black and white and not really in your line of sight aren't gonna kill you and everyone near you when they run out. Beast gauge does.

Makes sense with the massive Hp that Aliens have.

But having high gold costs doesn't somehow make the company more money. Are there that many players (or any) actually buying mercury points to unlock raiders? I don't have data, but I assume most people with Ginebra had bought Founders, not spent $80 to unlock that one character. I get that's the con here, to offer a real money option to reduce grind, but I'm not really seeing any support for people going that route, players are often pretty opposed to such mechanics.

60-100 would be fair, tbh. Kuzman was not terrible to unluck, but the length of time it took between getting him and getting Mikah did take a while.... but not unreasonable.

Ginebra is 3 times that cost and thus 3 times the length of time to get, but there's still Hive and June which are also expensive...

If gold was easy to come by then there would be no reason to pay for their currency except for cosmetics and let's be real, people care way more about cool new characters than they do skins. I love this game, I do. But there will always be a part of me that's bitter that they made it so grindy and so that gold is so enticing to buy.

I will never patronize a mechnaic that exists solely to relive the player of the stress of a grind. It's literally the definition of racketeering.... create an artificial situation where a person is enticed to pay money for a service that is meant to fix the problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.

Progression and gold collection is so slow, so MS points are put in as a way for someone to pay money to trade for gold. If gold came at a reasonable rate, you're right, there would be no reason to trade for gold except for the most impatient of players.

And I would definitely pay for reasonably priced skins, I love looking different and cool in any game with character customization. But I'm still waiting on changes that make in-game progression reasonable before I buy any points, and some of the skins are still a joke of a price. And I have seen more than 1 occasion where the devs respond by saying "it's just cosmetic so the price won't change". Which is a BS argument, as I explained at length in my first post on the forums (and was the whole reason I signed up here).

I have no problem spending money on plat for Warframe because that game does not have an agonizing grind that gives pay2play as a relief option.... so, I'm enticed to pay because it's a good product that feels worthwhile to buy. Should I spend $80 on ONE GINEBRA skin, or $80 on prime access which gives me a tooooooooooon of stuff? Plat is offered if you want it, MS points are offered to make your misery go away. People say warframe is a grind, but it also has a massive amount of content, so you grind a little to get something but there's like 1000 things to build. Raiders has very little content, with a huge grind to get any of it. I don't mind the lack of content on a game in its infancy, but the idea that you need to play hundreds of hours to get 6 characters is still mind-boggling. Do they test play their own game with the same handicaps as a regular player??

To answer your question succinctly, Overwatch is huge because it was made by Blizzard. To slightly elaborate, no way on god's green earth would 'that' game do as well had it 'not' been made by a company as well known and revered. Side note, it also in stark contrast to Raiders of the Broken Planet has the largest and fasting growing 'fan-made' NSFW content ever seen since Frozen. In closing, never ever compare anything to Overwatch because it's a sad mess of an argument to do so.

It's definitely a relevant counter to your claim that "people will stop playing if they have a variety of characters to pick from! We have to keep their costs high to make players work to play a character!" Your entire post here is moving the goalposts of the argument all over the place.

Claim: Having easy access to different methods of gameplay will not hold interest
Counter-claim: Overwatch gives every character instantly
Your rebuttal: Well Overwatch has porn and Blizzard so the actual gameplay mechanics don't matter



Oh and I just farmed enough to get Mikah and really not liking her so far..... as others have said, and to go back to the original point of having lower character costs: It's totally awesome to spend tons of hours farming gold just to waste it on something you may not even like because there's no way to try it and it's locked behind a huge paywall.

So the exploit makes sense to be fixed, but his beast time appears to have been nerfed *hard*.... I blew up due to the unexpected timer UI change and incredibly short time, he only gets a few seconds now?

Invitations are indeed *incredibly* clunky as a console player. I have an extreme dislike for adding random players that I have 1 game with and have never met before, but that is exactly what must be done to find team mates or even get to use the invitations in Raiders. Additionally, this prevents same-console-but-different-region invites from being possible. It would be good to look at an avenue of in-game message systems so that in-game invites would be possible. I have never played another game that actually encourages player interaction but prevents any in-game way of doing so. This isn't Dark Souls where everyone is supposed to be silent phantoms.

My assumption is this is how the game is able to check and see if a player has paid for a DLC pack so the invite knows how to function, but again.... surely that can be put into the game client itself? I don't know the logistics but all I keep hearing from the dev side is that multi-platform or even multi-region invites are impossible, but matchmaking works, and that response feels like a "it's never gonna change" but put into different words. 

Also seconded about loadouts, the current "pay MS points for them" is rather absurd. It's crazy especially because there's no real logistical reason to have loadouts in this game AT ALL. We have a couple of options to change up, at best, on each character. We just need to pick a faction card, character card, maybe a weapon if we have any, and maybe a skin if we have any. That's it. And no matter if 3,000,000 cards are added into the game, there's only 5 on the table at any given time. We're not drowning in character customization to where we need a quick-select loadout. Character select timer is already very long, just let us pick our stuff in that time and be done with the "loadout" concept.

still keep the wheel it adds a competitive edge.

Noooooooooo.... the blueprint coin flip is literally the worst mechanic in this, or any other game, that I have ever played in my life. I nearly deleted the game for good after losing one of those as my *very first* mission reward ever. It showed me that you can spend 20-30 minutes playing and winning to get ZERO rewards. I have also lost 90% of them that I have to compete for, and it just makes people hate their team mates.

Don't see how it adds "competition" to vie for a blueprint vs. nothing on a reward screen that is picked completely randomly with no player input or possibility of pushing the odds in your favor.

Only time I saw Smoking Daisy appear was in a game of all Lv0's and everyone jumped on it. Nice to play that mission 100 times, see the BP you want, and lose it to someone that's played the mission once. Tooootally competitive