DOTA 2 is one of my favorite F2P games to date and i regularly spend $20-30 on average, $5-15 on low months and $25-45+ on event months. why is this important? well personally i love it and am will to support it constantly. why should you think it is important https://www.dota2.com/international/compendium/ they have made $45 million in a couple months in a F2P model vastly different then yours. some things that you can benefit from that you don’t do:
1)when ever a new character comes out every one can play them. for the life of me i do not Know why you don’t make it easy for players to get one cover of each color for the new heroes. i would spend $ to cover some of my favorite heroes.
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Make your purchases worthwhile for players, your prices are ridiculous for almost everything in your store even during a sale it seems pretty steep for the value of HP when a 3* costs 1200HP (1/13 of a hero) i hardly regret any purchases i made in dota 2, however here some still haunt my dreams( xforce covers).
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remove things players hate (roster slots). In the beginning of dota 2 treasure chest would randomly drop with neat items in it, however no keys would drop you would have to buy them for $2.50. many players didn’t like to play the odds for specific items and treasures would fill up the inventory of most players. they eventually moved on from that and just dropped the items while the treasures morphed in to sets developed by the community. these sets were grouped in 7-10 per treasure like a mini vault. the price stayed around 2.00 but the player got more bang for you buck. i myself have bought out treasures to get the specific set. i have even continued to finish out the vault sometimes because i have one of the characters remaining with nothing to wear and some time the completionist part of me kicks in.
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community trading. alliance trading of 3* prizes. sometimes with the treasures, only one thing in the set looks appealing and i don’t want to buy out the entire set for it. so i got to the market and look for it. sometimes @ price sometimes more or less. but it allows me to get what i want for a reasonable price easily with community members and myself both benefiting. one thing they do to entice players into purchasing is adding chances for rare drops in addition to the normal vault prizes. something you can do is add chance to get something rare in your purchase, maybe you can add an item that fits in the boost slot call “Oh no you didn’t” that has the option to active after the 3rd chain of an enemy cascade that nullifies the rest of it damage and AP generation and consumes the boost. obviously only one can be used in a match(maybe 1 per day?)
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DoTA 2 is constantly monitoring metrics for heroes and how they are played and how that ties to win rates with them. if they are winning too much they would slightly tweak them that keeps the way they are played mostly the same but would give them a deficiency in a different area, like items commonly used buy that hero, to constantly adjust the meta. in addition, they buff the characters that seem to have low win rates. In this game there are many heroes left behind in terms of balance or that don’t measure up to some of the newer heroes. don’t leave them behind, show them some love too.
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reward whales by making other players appreciate them more. In dota 2 some events are triggered by the purchase of some $$ items in normal game play. adding addition goals that players can go for in the match that benefits the team with good item/set drops if they pulled it off in addition to winning normally. this can translate to opening up additional story lines/maps with iso/HP nodes rewards for alliance mates, due to one the purchases you made, and for a chance at the end for 3* rewards, additional taco tokens, or maybe 4* if the purchase was large enough. this can be extended to other alliance of your choosing or perhaps a few random alliances with a pop up saying " additional map/story unlocked by XXXXXX’s support of MPQ"
There are more lessons i could pull out, but i donated more time then i wanted to for this post. feel free to post about some good experiences you had in other games that MPQ can benefit from.
