Ideas for a no-gold world and how to make it happen.

[LargerPizza]

I believe a no-gold world could be quite cool. There are problems with that approach such as how would the world earn money for the devs? I was hoping you could help me with ideas for this.

I have some ideas and one of them is a pay-to-enter system where the players pay to play on the world in order to substitute for the gold. What such a number should be is a question for the devs. Perhaps they could take an average money spent per player and have that as it's entry fee. Ideas?

 

[Viktor The Great]

that won't happen.. how much do you think it would have to cost to enter that world to cover the costs and of course make some money for INNO?

 

[LargerPizza]

Depends, don't you think players'll flock to such a server? Why not try? What if the server gets thousands of players? What if they create a server just to gauge the interest atleast?

 

[Viktor The Great]

There are a lot of "ifs" in this question.. Inno certainly won't start a server and work pro bono lol

 

[VIRTUALSELF]

It would be so nice if i could go into Lidl and take whatever i want without paying

If you spend 2-10hours ingame a day on a game, how are you so cheap you can't even support them with a dime? They even give you the opportunity to play f2p and gold trade

 

[Lethal-Bacon]

real opportunity for inno to test this was back in 2016-2018 era when they have introduced this atrocious instant buy golding feature, to see if majority of the community(still in thousands per world) wanted to rather pay 5-15$ to enter a world and play without gold BS or if they want to gold trade and suffer with instant buy.

these days there are so few players left that even if each player(600-1200) pays 5-15$ to enter it would not make any difference and inno would still decide to continue as things currently go..

as VS said above, if you want to play this game your best bet is to trade gold for 2-4 worlds then join one you want to play with 100-250k gold and have fun, would you rather spend 600-1500$ on gold or trade in a couple of worlds and then play...

no gold world would be fun and entertaining to see how most of currently considered "best" players are actually pretty much trash when you take out their bank account

 

[VIRTUALSELF]

For sure it would be funny i don't doubt that, the problem is that people forget there is a company owning the game, and you are their customer.

 

[Viktor The Great]

no gold world would be fun and entertaining to see how most of currently considered "best" players are actually pretty much trash when you take out their bank account

yup..100% true

 

[LargerPizza]

Perhaps I am to late :/ could've been cool though. Don't you think the players that left did so because of gold abuse? I mean, they could atleast do market assessment and depending on which way it goes make a decision no?

 

[Darkfyre]

Pay per world isn't enoughs. Now, payz per world per month, likes streaming, likes adobe an avid with their different programzez, likes every other subscription service, now thats will makes them money money. Everybody owes everybody pays. Way more money that way than the minority of golders who pay a bunch now. What's betterz? 50 playerzez paying a few hundred each with a small number of smaller golders or 1000 players paying $30-50 each? If the game iz the truly fair an everybody payz equalwize, more will WANT to play instead of smaller golders an free play all mad cauze they can't keep up? Monthly subscriptions are the PROVEN modern business model. Micropurchasing, i.e. current gold model iz the soooo early 2000s.

 

[Darkfyre]

An I thinks even the super-golderzez will playz a total fair subscription world cauze pride. They sayz theyz the best, right? They'll wanna PROVE IT. Cauze if they doesn't, then EEEEVERYBODY else gonna call them out as the fake.

 

[Darkfyre]

An doezn tries to sayz not enough peoplez will payz. The whole reazon most people quit iz cauze they waz spending but otherz waz spending morez. It wazn the free playerz who hated it the most. People willing to spend but not to breaks the bank may even comes back if iz total fair. An I says who cares about free players anyways? A game iz a business after allz. Some will wants to start paying soze they can keeps playing an the rest can take a walk off the pier.

 

[Lethal-Bacon]

Pay per world isn't enoughs. Now, payz per world per month, likes streaming, likes adobe an avid with their different programzez, likes every other subscription service, now thats will makes them money money. Everybody owes everybody pays. Way more money that way than the minority of golders who pay a bunch now. What's betterz? 50 playerzez paying a few hundred each with a small number of smaller golders or 1000 players paying $30-50 each? If the game iz the truly fair an everybody payz equalwize, more will WANT to play instead of smaller golders an free play all mad cauze they can't keep up? Monthly subscriptions are the PROVEN modern business model. Micropurchasing, i.e. current gold model iz the soooo early 2000s.

in theory yes, but you gotta remember that more than 80% of the grepo community these days are exlusively trading gold, maybe that number is even higher these days, so there is only a small minority that actually spends money to buy gold, and that 1% of heavy spenders makes game "viable" for inno to keep the servers turned on for now at least, so im fairly sure that if it was pay per month vast majority would not even want to join the world making the experiement/test unfortuantely a waste of their time..
its a numbers game.. back when there were 5-10-15k active players that were genuinely invested into playing getting half of them to pay 5-15$ a month for a no gold world would be doable, right now even if half of the current players opt in for that kind of arrangement it will still be significantly less $ per world than compared to what that 1% of heavy golders spend during only 1 world...

 

[Lethal-Bacon]

Perhaps I am to late :/ could've been cool though. Don't you think the players that left did so because of gold abuse? I mean, they could atleast do market assessment and depending on which way it goes make a decision no?

I think there is a noticable drop of from when they introduced Grepolis 2.0 back in the ~2016 era.. more intense farming making you spend way more time in the game and with introduction of instant buy for buildings and gold, many casual players simply quit the game, and not only them.. i know a lot of really good teams that simply did not want to play in that new era, so you can see a drop of from like 10-15k people in a world to like 4-5 and then 2-3 and now at 1k active more less...

as for the market assesment i no longer have any contacts in the Inno HQ to ask around but i think this kind of idea has been attempted/suggested so many times over past 3-4 years that they probably did an internal assesment accross most popular markets to see if something like this even makes sense to try out and came to a realization that it did not, hence why we never officially heard any kind of response either from the community managers or Grepo Devs, even the idea of bringing markets together to have big worlds with a lot of people has fallen onto deaf ears so take it how you want..

 

[VIRTUALSELF]

Grepolis is by no means in the extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to pay 2 win elements, as you can still be top 10.. top 5.. top 3 being completely F2P. The game dying isnt only because of the introduced P2W elements, 99% of all browser games either have died or is 0,1% of the playerbase the games used to be. It's just a dying genre in general, the audience moved on to idle games on phones etc.

Now, i'm not defending insta-buy by any means, the game would 100% be more enjoyable and balanced if this didnt exist.

Also, i'm sorry to break the news for you, but the people who are suggesting gold-free servers etc. all the time would still be miles away from the top dogs.

 

[Darkfyre]

Youz wrong. Ize seen massive exoduses of playerz specifically BECAUSE of supergolderz. They spent, they just didn't spendz enough to keep up. Grepo still haz contact info of old playerz. If they did say a speriment.. keeps their normal worldz but haz an extra world each timez with subscription based rulezez, where gold waz a mine jus like other 'sourcez an packagez of all sorts (gold, build, army) were limited numberz available on a pick an choose, i.e. strategy base rather than money base to ALL players, THEN invited ALL the old an recent players who left (whose info they of course still haz) to play on this new kinda world which obviously can beez the advertized az a fix for the gold problem, I guaranteez after enough worldz, the player base will explodez in numberzez. They would also BARELY hasta change the programming this wayz.

 

[Darkfyre]

I think there is a noticable drop of from when they introduced Grepolis 2.0 back in the ~2016 era.. more intense farming making you spend way more time in the game and with introduction of instant buy for buildings and gold, many casual players simply quit the game, and not only them.. i know a lot of really good teams that simply did not want to play in that new era, so you can see a drop of from like 10-15k people in a world to like 4-5 and then 2-3 and now at 1k active more less...

as for the market assesment i no longer have any contacts in the Inno HQ to ask around but i think this kind of idea has been attempted/suggested so many times over past 3-4 years that they probably did an internal assesment accross most popular markets to see if something like this even makes sense to try out and came to a realization that it did not, hence why we never officially heard any kind of response either from the community managers or Grepo Devs, even the idea of bringing markets together to have big worlds with a lot of people has fallen onto deaf ears so take it how you want..

they doezn change cauze they SCARED of change. Theyz in denial, telling themselvez it still works, it still works, scared to doez anything new. an if they doezn evolve, they will surely diez... like the dinosaur.

 

[Darkfyre]

in theory yes, but you gotta remember that more than 80% of the grepo community these days are exlusively trading gold, maybe that number is even higher these days, so there is only a small minority that actually spends money to buy gold, and that 1% of heavy spenders makes game "viable" for inno to keep the servers turned on for now at least, so im fairly sure that if it was pay per month vast majority would not even want to join the world making the experiement/test unfortuantely a waste of their time..
its a numbers game.. back when there were 5-10-15k active players that were genuinely invested into playing getting half of them to pay 5-15$ a month for a no gold world would be doable, right now even if half of the current players opt in for that kind of arrangement it will still be significantly less $ per world than compared to what that 1% of heavy golders spend during only 1 world...

Didn't sayz $5-15 a month. That's streaming service money. Grepolis iz the MASSIVE program. Massive program companies like Adobe, Avid, etc. charge more like the $30-50 a month I mentionz.

 

[Darkfyre]

Seez this? The average gamer. AVERAGE. Not big spenderzez. Not free playerz. AVERAGE. They could doez the subscription worldz. $30-50 a month, like I sayz. Theyz jus scared.

 

[Lethal-Bacon]

Didn't sayz $5-15 a month. That's streaming service money. Grepolis iz the MASSIVE program. Massive program companies like Adobe, Avid, etc. charge more like the $30-50 a month I mentionz.

well in that case world would have like 50 people max lol