Atm when we sell a ship/addon, we only get credits. I'd like to also get crystals because it takes crystals to purchase ships. It can be less crystals say 50-60% of what is in the purchase cost but it'd be nice to receive crystals after selling stuff.

Would you get crystals only for ships/addons that you have purchased? If you get them from any item, it would allow you to ask a friend to drop them, so you could sell them back for free crystals. This would require no effort in farming and probably would bypass the daily limit.

Perhaps add a log that logs all purchases.... Game does have something like this because it knows what cargo I purchased & what I just got dropped. I've noticed while farming voys. It does it for addons too

The point of Crystal is to generate real-world financial revenue for Guild Software.

Anything like this would have a negative impact on that potential revenue, basically diminishing the "crystal sink". Particularly, it could present a long-term problem with future, larger-item purchases that might be a lot of crystal.

I understand the desire here, from a user perspective; but the reality is that the current balance of crystal is already "pretty bad" (for its intended purpose of revenue), in that it does not drive sufficient monetization. This suggestion would make that even worse.

I also know this isn't the most popular subject, as freemium games have a history of being extremely aggressive about monetization, and using a lot of questionable gacha mechanics to maximize their revenue (randomized purchasable "loot crates", pay-to-spin "wheel-of-fortune" options; we do none of that stuff).

However, at the same time, building a stable freemium revenue model, where the average income per player is sufficient to offset one's marketing costs to acquire that user.. that's still a very difficult problem to solve. Especially in the face of escalating marketing costs, with limited options for developers and major ad-tech players manipulating ad bid systems to essentially scam developers out of their capital.

My point here being, asking for crystals to be more plentiful, or be returned on item sales, or be cheaper to acquire, or have a higher daily cap, or anything else.. is no different than asking that subscriptions be considerably cheaper. I'm never against pricing discussions or anything, but please understand that that is what you're asking for: this isn't really a gameplay discussion.

The only difference between discussing subs and crystal is that there's fairly simple math to determine "subscription revenue-vs-cost", where "secondary currencies" like crystal have to be digested through complex game mechanics and human psychology, which makes the outcome of tweaking crystal a lot more difficult to predict.

(Also.. before someone jumps in and says "but if only you sold X, you'd get more sales", that isn't the point. There's always the potential for increased revenue due to more products or more driving-force for sales. Regardless, the crystal itself still has to bring with it a degree of basic monetization across the entire game population, at any given "level", or it isn't serving the intended purpose).

TL;DR: If the functionality to detect whether something's been purchased with crystal isn't already there fuck it - Don't mind the post.

As annoying as crystal can be in it's current state it's in the perfect sweet spot of not being too much of a pain to acquire and not completely gimping the character like the previous license limit of 4/4/4/4/4 imposed on lite/freemium subs

Getting crystal from item sales is too much of an easy loophole since players since credits in vo come cheap and dropping a stack of whatever is pretty trivial for most vets.

That said if the game had functionality to know if the player purchased the item/ship with crystal a small reimbursement of one crystal per doohickey wouldn't hurt; at the end of the day it's impossible to know if this would have a positive/negative impact on revenue but yeah it wouldn't hurt; accidental purchases happen type of deal so giving that little bit of extra flexibility wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing at least when it comes to retaining broke newbs who're just trying the game out and don't feel like busting out the credit card.

Offsetting this wouldn't be too hard; increasing the crystal cost of higher end addons/ships would do the trick essentially helping out newbs that misclick get a bit of their hard earned crystal back when they mess up and buy flechette cannons and penalizing the vets that play the game entirely on crystal which if you ask me wouldn't be a bad thing, not to mention it would slightly lessen the feasibility of using multiple freemium alts to do shenanigans.

The current VO monetization scheme is extremely generous compared to pretty much every reference I can think of so yeah; not really an issue in my books.

If the functionality to detect whether something's been purchased with crystal isn't already there

It isn't. Otherwise, we wouldn't have the current loophole where people "stock up" on huge numbers of ships/items during a single brief sub (or Friend Key or whatever), and then play for the next N months on Freemium, minimizing their need for crystal.

Or, by the same token, veteran subbed players buying huge amounts of "stuff' for newer freemium players (or alts) and dropping it in space.

This has been a complex problem to try and fix, without breaking other aspects of the game; this is why we haven't fixed it yet, and it was disappointing that it became so popular. It's definitely caused a downturn in player monetization, particularly of active veterans.

a small reimbursement of one crystal per doohickey wouldn't hurt; at the end of the day it's impossible to know if this would have a positive/negative impact on revenue but yeah it wouldn't hurt

I mean, the probability that it will further decrease monetization is very high (it would almost certainly "hurt"). As you say, if the reimbursement were small, that would be a more limited decline, but it would still be a negative impact. Measured in aggregate, that could be considerable.

However.. "saving newbies from accidental purchases" was never the goal of this particular Suggestion? As far as I can tell, the thrust of TJ's post was for veteran players, not new users. Plus..

when it comes to retaining broke newbs who're just trying the game out and don't feel like busting out the credit card.

Newbies aren't lacking in crystal. Most early content is completely free of any crystal requirements, and then we give them crystal, just for passing early-game milestones and levels. They never have to worry about crystal for at least their first couple of levels. So.. I don't see this "newbie mis-purchase" thing being a real issue?

Here are some real-data analytics, showing Average and Max values for crystal stored across accounts that have logged in over the last 30 days, based on the total number of hours of play on the given account:

Hours .............. Max ............... Avg
----------------------------------------------
500plus ............ ~25K ............. 4.20 K
200to500 .......... ~12K ............. 979
100to200 .......... ~3K ............... 524
50to100 ............ ~2.8K ............ 402
20to50 .............. ~2.5K ............ 364
10to20 .............. 975 ................ 216
9to10 ................ 520 ................ 117
8to9 .................. 290 ................ 98
7to8 .................. 362 ................ 97
6to7 .................. 492 ................ 87
5to6 .................. 344 ................ 77
4to5 .................. 320 ................ 60
3to4 .................. 417 ................ 59
2to3 .................. 214 ................ 43
1to2 .................. 242 ................ 32
0to1 .................. 120 ................ 18

To put it bluntly, people are not running low on crystal (especially vets). The newbies show "low" crystal numbers, by veteran standards, but those newbies have very-low or near-zero requirements for crystal at the time as well, which is why their average quantity continues to increase (they accrue faster than they need to spend).

(Remember, it takes "real" newbies quite awhile to climb through the first few levels, unlike vets rolling alts, so they spend a lot of time in the lower-crystal-requirement levels).

While TJ and other specific vets might occasionally deplete themselves on major PvP events, these are extreme rarities when measured across the game population in aggregate.

Basically, people have plenty of crystal, that quantity of crystal only increases with play time, and with relatively rare exceptions people are not buying any crystal.

Offsetting this wouldn't be too hard; increasing the crystal cost of higher end addons/ships would do the trick

I mean, I certainly support doing that, just because we have a serious problem with crystal monetization already.

But, I'm not entirely convinced on the necessity or merit of adding crystal-refunds with item sales? The small "symbolic" refund you're suggesting probably wouldn't help TJ very much, and isn't likely his goal. And I'm not convinced that the newbies actually need that either.

And, in the end, it further reduces the "crystal sink" that is clearly already a problem. Again, impacts that may "seem small" on an individual basis, can have a big impact (on us) when measured as a whole.

not to mention it would slightly lessen the feasibility of using multiple freemium alts to do shenanigans.

Which shenanigans do you mean, exactly?

The current VO monetization scheme is extremely generous compared to pretty much every reference I can think of so yeah; not really an issue in my books.

I appreciate that. Hopefully others feel similarly, because I'm going to have to make changes to the system before long, to generate more revenue. The current situation is not sustainable, especially if we cannot offset a burn-rate on marketing costs.

> I understand the desire here, from a user perspective; but the reality is that the current balance of crystal is already "pretty bad" (for its intended purpose of revenue), in that it does not drive sufficient monetization. This suggestion would make that even worse.

I understand. The whole idea came up with a message I read in 100 by someone & because I have this bad habit of wasting crystals while traveling around, I thought this idea would be just perfect. Didn't think it through from all perspectives....

I'll try to change this habit specially because I'm not really actively earning crystals.